Jerusalem Is Burning

Via: Palestine Monitor.

Rabbis for Human Rights (RHR) is one of several organisations working to bring the violations occurring in East Jerusalem to the attention of the world. Their Chief Executive, Rabbi Asherman reports, “I see Jerusalem in flames, and know than my words will not succeed in conveying the horror of what I see or the dread in my heart…”

RHR was formed in 1988 and though the work of the organisation is broad its current focus is on the situation in East Jerusalem, in particular the events unfurling in Sheikh Jarrah.

The struggle for justice in Sheikh Jarrah

Maya Wind is the RHR press officer and every week she has been coordinating demonstrations across Jerusalem to expose and protest the injustices occurring in Sheikh Jarrah.

Sheikh Jarrah is one of the most contentious neighbourhoods in East Jerusalem with 28 properties embroiled in a legal battle between fundamentalist Israeli settlers and the Palestinians who live there. Maya describes the atmosphere as “extremely, extremely explosive. There are constantly violent outbreaks (…) settlers are provocative on purpose.”

The silencing of protest

Israelis from Jerusalem and Tel Aviv gather in Sheikh Jarrah in support of the evicted Palestinian families
Photo: Brady Ng

The protest in Sheikh Jarrah has begun to build a self sustaining momentum, with regular crowds of hundreds turning out. Last week two coach loads of activists drove up from Tel Aviv: it was the largest demonstration yet in Sheikh Jarrah. But as the demonstrators grow in number and the media start to cover the event extensively, so do Israeli security forces attempts to shut the protest down.

Stealing Success Tel Aviv Style. By Philip Giraldi

Via: AntiWar.

A curious op-ed “The Tel Aviv Cluster” by the reliably neoconnish David Brooks appeared in the New York Times on January 12th.  Brooks enthused over the prowess of Israel’s high tech businesses, attributing their success in large part to Jewish exceptionalism and genius, which must have provided the ultimate feel good moment for Brooks, who is himself Jewish.  That Israel has a booming technology sector is undeniably true, but Brooks failed to mention other contributing factors such as the $101 billion dollars in US economic and military aid over the course of more than four decades, which does not include the additional $30 billion recently approved by President Barack Obama.  American assistance has financed and fueled Israel’s business growth while the open access and even “preferential treatment” afforded to Israeli exporters through the Israel Free Trade Implementation Act of 1985 has provided Israelis with the enormous US market to sell their products and services.  By act of Congress, Israeli businesses can even bid on most American Federal and State government contracts just as if they were US companies.

Brooks was characteristically undisturbed by the fact that American taxpayer subsidized development of Israeli enterprises combined with the free access to the US economy and government contracts eliminates jobs and damages competing companies on this side of the Atlantic. And there is another aspect of Israel’s growing high tech sector that he understandably chose to ignore because it is extremely sleazy.  That is the significant advantage that Israel has gained by systematically stealing American technology with both military and civilian applications.  The US developed technology is then reverse engineered and used by the Israelis to support their own exports with considerably reduced research and development costs, giving them a huge advantage against American companies.  Sometimes, when the technology is military in nature and winds up in the hands of a US adversary, the consequences can be serious.  Israel has sold advanced weapons systems to China that are believed to incorporate technology developed by American companies, including the Python-3 air-to-air missile and the Delilah cruise missile.  There is evidence that Israel has also stolen Patriot missile avionics to incorporate into its own Arrow system and that it used US technology obtained in its Lavi fighter development program, which was funded by the US taxpayer to the tune of $1.5 billion, to help the Chinese develop their own J-10 fighter.

Israel: Please, No More Bin Laden Tapes, Nobody Is Buying It! By Gordon Duff

Via: Veterans Today.
CHRISTMAS BOMBING AUDIO TAPE LAMEST YET

YOU WERE CAUGHT, ADMIT IT AND MOVE ON WITH LIFE

By Gordon Duff STAFF WRITER/Senior Editor

The new audio tape from “Osama bin Laden” taking responsibility for the idiotic and childish incident in Detroit where moronic Nigerian armed with a useless “bomb” is simply too much.  Now using audio tapes because, supposedly, nobody in Al Qaeda got a flash drive video recorder for Christmas is even more of a joke.  Please, with the hundreds of millions our Saudi allies have given to terrorists, a video camera the size of an Ipod might have been a nice touch.   Even funnier was releasing the audio, using algorithm software probably illegally downloaded off the internet, and giving it to Al Jazeera.

Pundit Debbie Schussell, former Mark Siljander (VT staff writer) staffer, has bitterly complained about the strong ties between Fox News and Al Jazeera.  Fox owner, Rupert Murdoch, is the most powerful “influencer” of the ultra-rightists in Israel.  Attempts by the press to present Al Jazeera of today as the “pro-terrorist” media it seemed like many years ago is an epic misrepresentation.

A further abuse, of course, is not only that we are no longer seeing the easily debunked bin Laden doubles whose video tapes were “mysteriously” released by SITE Intelligence, the Rita Katz/Israeli group that seems to find them in trash bins behind delicatessens.  The “new” audio tape itself contains statements claiming credit for 9/11 in direct contradiction to the real bin Laden videos, the only ones authenticated.  If you wondered why the FBI doesn’t list Osama bin Laden as a suspect in 9/11, I think you have your answer.  If they think the bin Laden “admissions” aren’t credibile, I wonder who the FBI is investigating or if they have simply been told to mind their own business.

Howard Zinn: “Largest Lie” Was US War On Terrorism. By Sherwood Ross

Via: The Public Record.

Photo/Wikimedia

The “largest lie,” wrote historian Howard Zinn who died yesterday at age 87, is that “everything the United States does is to be pardoned because we are engaged in a ‘war on terrorism.’”

“This ignores the fact that war is itself terrorism, that the barging into people’s homes and taking away family members and subjecting them to torture, that is terrorism, that invading and bombing other countries does not give us more security but less security.”

In an article published previously in “The Long Term View” magazine of the Massachusetts School of Law, Zinn said that in the Fallujah area of Iraq Knight Ridder reporters found there was no Ba’athist or Sunni conspiracy against the U.S., “only people ready to fight because their relatives had been hurt or killed, or they themselves had been humiliated by home searches and road stops.”

Zinn, popularly known as the people’s historian, pointed out that the U.S. may have liberated Iraq from the tyranny of Saddam Hussein but afterwards it became Iraq’s occupier. He noted this is the same fate that befell Cuba after the U.S. liberated it from Spain in 1898. In both nations, the U.S. established military bases and U.S. corporations moved in to profit from the upheaval.

Zinn recalled the words of then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld before the NATO ministers in Brussels in June, 2002, “the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence” of weapons of mass destruction. “That explains why this government, not knowing exactly where to find the criminals of September 11, will just go ahead and invade and bomb Afghanistan, killing thousands of people, driving hundreds of thousands from their homes, and still not know where the criminals are,” Zinn wrote.

Disasters are Big Business. By William Bowles

Via: Atlantic Free Press.

I am staggered. There are 10,000 ‘NGOs’ (Non-Governmental Organizations) in Haiti, one for every 900 inhabitants and each one of them has no doubt at least one Westerner working within, yet aside from the Cuban health workers, it seems they could do nothing until the gringos arrived with their Blackhawks and nuclear-tipped aircraft carrier and of course, the 82nd Airborne, paying yet another “visit” to this benighted and super-exploited land to ‘secure’ the place for the locust storm of aid to come (too late for too many).

Now I’ve never been a fan of ‘NGOs’ not only because my own experience with them has been less than edifying but because they are the direct result of ‘benign neglect’ on the part of the state. In other words they initially appeared to fill a void left when states washed their hands of the mess they”d left behind or they just ditched their responsibilities.

But unlike governments who are, in theory anyway, answerable to their electorate, ‘NGOs’ are answerable to no one. They are not elected, they are not representative. In their way they are more like neo-colonial ‘stand-ins” for the former colonizers, at least at the ‘social services’ end of things. Well, it seems many of the 10,000 have been tested and found wanting.

Now this is not say that there aren’t thousands, even tens of thousands of people who genuinely want to help (Brits have so far donated more than 30 million to Haiti Relief) but compare the role of the Cuban medical teams with most of the other ‘NGOs’ working in Haiti, all ten thousand of them. The Cubans have the direct backing of the Cuban state with all that that entails. Moreover, they were able to draw on their own experiences with disasters to which Cuba is no stranger and react immediately and effectively (not that you”d have seen it reported much on your TV screens but they were first on the scene).

Israel is NOT and Never was a Democracy. By Eileen Fleming

Via: Arabisto.

“President Barack Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the U.S. are fully committed to a comprehensive peace in the Middle East,” US special envoy to the Middle East George Mitchell told reporters following his latest meeting with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas while in the Jordanian capital of Amman.

Mitchell’s remarks come just a few days after President Obama said the U.S. administration had “overestimated” their ability to persuade the Israelis and Palestinians to resume “meaningful” peace talks.

On January 24, 2010, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, persisted in Israel’s policy of laying claim by establishing “facts on the ground” in the West Bank during a tree planting ceremony in the Gush Etzion colony/settlement bloc, “Our message is clear: We are planting here, we will stay here, we will build here, this place will be an inseparable part of the State of Israel for eternity.”[1]

In 1973, Ariel Sharon predicted,

“We’ll make a pastrami sandwich of them. We’ll insert a strip of Jewish settlement, right across the West Bank, so that in 25 years time, neither the United Nations, nor the United States, nobody, will be able to tear it apart.”

The 2003 peace “road map” obliged Israel to freeze “all settlement activity” and the World Court ruled that Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem are all illegal.

Jewish settlers claim a God-given right to the West Bank, which they call by the biblical names Judea and Samaria but they ignore what their Torah commands:

“From Moses to Jeremiah and Isaiah, the Prophets taught…that the Jewish claim on the land of Israel was totally contingent on the moral and spiritual life of the Jews who lived there, and that the land would, as the Torah tells us, ‘vomit you out’ if people did not live according to the highest moral vision of Torah. Over and over again, the Torah repeated its most frequently stated mitzvah [command]:

“When you enter your land, do not oppress the stranger; the other, the one who is an outsider of your society, the powerless one and then not only ‘you shall love your neighbor as yourself’ but also ‘you shall love the other.’” [2]

Wages, Prices and Profits. By John Reimann

Via: Daily Censored.

(Note: This title is borrowed from Karl Marx, who wrote a brilliant piece of this same title. Likewise for much of the content. I don’t think old Karl would mind. As the postal worker told the poet in the film “Il Postino”: “Poems don’t belong to those who write them; they belong to those who need them.”  The same is true for ideas in general.)

Many mainstream economists are predicting that if the economy picks up, there will be increased inflation. In fact, the signs are already present. For instance, the World Food Price index from March-December, 2009 shows prices up by 23%. Corn prices from September – January were up 24% and Oil per barrel from September – January was up 20%. Overall, in the US, the Consumer Price Index (CPI) is now at 2% (i.e. a 2% inflation rate) vs. -2% in the middle of last year. (It should be noted that these figures underestimate inflation by about 3%. In the 1990s, under Bill Clinton, they changed the way the CPI is figured, resulting in reducing it by about this amount. The figures for this can be seen at www.shadowstats.com.)

Inevitably, if inflation develops, a hue and cry will develop about pay raises causing inflation. When an employer has to pay increased wages, the argument goes, he or she compensates for this by raising prices. What could be more logical?

“Pricing Power”

In past years, however, even when the economy was expanding, prices increased only relatively slowly. In fact, the Wall St. Journal used to have regular articles explaining that one or another sector of industry was unable to raise prices because of “consumer resistance” and a lack of “pricing power” on the part of the sellers. What is the reality, then?

It is true that the capitalist – especially the smaller ones – at times may think that they simply add up all their costs, including labor costs, and then tack on a percentage for their profit. However, the process is more complex. Take construction (the industry in which I worked until I retired):

The Real Looters

Via: Workers World.

We’ve all seen the images so many times: a Black youth, or maybe it’s a Black mother, or a Black elder taking food, clothing, items to be sold “illegally” from a store.
This person is possibly hungry, undoubtedly poor and in some level of distress — whether it be from the ravages of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti; the combined devastation and racist neglect in the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005; or even the righteous anger, in response to police brutality, that leads to rebellions. The person has few, if any, options and, in all probability, hasn’t had any for a long time.

And yet when times get desperate, and this person is captured on camera securing necessities for his or her family, this person is demonized as a “looter.” When natural disasters occur in areas with a high concentration of people of color, the highest concern echoed on the TV networks and in the printed press is that of “security.”

It is the height of racism that allows government figures and their talking heads in the corporate media to even mention looting during such tumultuous events. It’s based on the old colonialist mentality that people of color are “savages” who need to be kept in line by the white man. And it’s reinforced by the one-dimensional images of people of color that are shown all the time — images that, fundamentally, refuse to take into account the legacy of pain and suffering, the will to survive or the right to resist.

What’s the theft of basic items of survival compared to the theft of whole lands and peoples? The very imperialists who raise charges of looting, if they had their way, would loot and exploit all the peoples of the world and the very environment we live in, until there’s nothing left. These imperialists employ every manner of violence — from starvation to guns and bombs — to get what they want.

While the threat of “looting” by the oppressed is in reality very minimal to the imperialists, they do face a real security issue. It’s the threat that those who have been oppressed for centuries will rise up, perhaps employing the same violence that they have always been subjected to. That is why the U.S. sends troops rather than aid to Haiti in its time of need.

The imperialists face a second threat, one that significantly augments the first. It’s that the oppressed have allies who will rise up with them, who realize they face the same oppressor, who are aware that their strength lies in unity. In an attempt to avoid this, they ply us with images of the dreaded “looters,” who are really our sisters and brothers in struggle.

Passing: Howard Zinn

Via: Pacific Free Press.
Howard Zinn 1922-2010 (a moment of silent appreciation)
by Mickey Z.

“The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.”
- Howard Zinn

---

Honduras: Obama’s new puppets on display. By Felipe Stuart Cournoyer

Via: LINKS.

The mass national resistance movement against the June 28 coup remains a viable and significant political force. Photo by James Rodriguez.

During the dubious Honduran election process leading up to voting day on November 27, 2009, the people would chant “Santos[1] de santo no tiene nada. Lobo de lobo lo tiene todo” ["(Elvin) Santos gets nothing from the saints; Lobo’s taken it all from the wolf.”]

On January 27 new puppets will take centre stage in the puppetry act Tegucigalpa, Honduras. Elected “president” Pepe Lobo (no doubt called “wolf, or little wolf” by his gringo controllers at the US embassy) will accept the strings of attachment to the invisible government and state power that continue to rule in Honduras. This obscure and menacing group is an unelected corps of representatives of the army high command and of the ten ruling oligarchic families. They meet under the informal moderation of the US ambassador of the day, and with the blessing of the ranking cleric of the Roman Catholic Church.

Lobo has agreed to offer a “safe conduct” visa to ousted President Mel Zelaya, who is still exiled in the Brazilian embassy along with supporters. The January 26 edition of the Tegucigalpa daily El Heraldo reported that Arturo Valenzuela (US Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs) and US ambassador Hugo Llorens, accompanied by a Canadian government diploflunky, will meet with outgoing (and ousted) President Mel Zelaya in the afternoon at the Brazilian embassy (see http://www.elheraldo.hn/Ediciones/2010/01/26/Noticias/Funcionarios-de-EE-UU-afinan-salida-de-Zelaya ). The photos that will certainly be taken of the encounter, and Zelaya’s subsequent helicopter trip to Toncontín airport, will offer a somewhat sublime (or obscene, depending on viewpoint) symbol of how this scene began, and how the curtain dropped.

Zelaya was kidnapped by armed soldier-thugs on June 28, 2009, and hustled out of the country to Costa Rica, with a brief stopover at the US-controlled Soto Cano (Palmerola) airforce base near the capital.

Peace & Justice for the Tamils. By Jake Lynch

Via: Sri Lanka Campaign.

“Peace is not the absence of war”, Martin Luther King told us: “it is the presence of justice”. King’s legacy transmitted itself directly into the mantra of African-American activists, outraged over the beating, by LA police officers, of the black motorist, Rodney King, in 1991: “No justice, no peace”, they chanted. It’s an important answer to a familiar question: what is peace? Of course, another, equally tricky question nestles within it, like matryoshka dolls: what is justice?

A Reverend Mpbambami told the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission a story about two friends, Peter and John, who fell out when Peter stole John’s bicycle. Later, Peter said to John: “Let’s talk about reconciliation”. John’s reply resonates still: “We cannot talk about reconciliation until my bicycle is back”.

It so happens that providing bicycles is the aim of a significant ‘people-to-people’ aid effort, now underway here in Sydney, to bring relief to the Tamil people of Sri Lanka, where they are used for the simple but vital job of transporting fish to market; but in Peter and John’s story, the machine is more important for its symbolic value, of course. It captures the sense of restitution that is a precursor to the willingness to live in peace.

In the Sri Lankan case, an unofficial court, set up in Dublin and conducted by the Milan-based Permanent People’s Tribunal, has just delivered its verdict: the Sri Lanka Government is guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity. The tribunal also concluded that the charge of genocide warrants further investigations. Eye-witnesses included several escapees from the final week of the Sri Lankan offensive in the Mullaitivu ‘No Fire Zone’, at the end of the civil war in May last year, where more than 20,000 Tamil civilians were allegedly slaughtered by Sri Lanka Army (SLA) using heavy weapons on them.

The Holocaust Backfires. By Gilad Atzmon

Via: Gilad Atzmon.
“Ynet reports:” Peres in Berlin, Netanyahu in Auschwitz, Lieberman in Budapest and Edelstein at the UN headquarters in New York all plan to attack the Goldstone report into the Gaza war on International Holocaust Day this Wednesday.

Israel’s political echelon will once again try to divert attention from the fact that the Israeli crime is beyond comparison.

Israeli Propaganda Minister Edelstein told Ynet before leaving for New York. “The connection between the Goldstone Report and the international Holocaust memorial day is not an easy thing”. He is indeed correct. The true interpretation of the Goldstone report is that Israelis are the Nazis of our time. “We must learn the lessons from what happened” Says Edelstein, “then too, those who yelled out were told that Hitler is a clown and that all the gloomy predictions of the 1930s were nonsense.”

Someone should advise the Israeli Propaganda man that by now no one regards mass murderer Barak, Nuclear enthusiast Peres, warmonger Livni or ultra racist Lieberman as clowns. We respect them for what they are. Yet, we prefer to see them locked behind bars.