Speaking out against injustice, disinformation and bigotry. By Paul J. Balles

Via: Redress.

Sometimes they tell me to shut up

”It’s my patriotic duty … to criticize my own country where there’s injustice, inhuman cruelty, bigotry, brainwashing or disinformation inadequately revealed in any major media.”

Born and raised in America, I learned that my country was built on outstanding principles propped up by a great constitution. When I saw those principles violated and the constitution ignored, I complained. At times, I was told to shut up.

The Vietnam War was well underway when I started teaching at a California university. I learned as much as I could about the war, believed it was wrong and joined the protesters. My untenured position was at risk for joining the peaceniks.

I also learned that Arabs and Israelis were more alike than different when expressing their antagonism toward each other. One of each happened to be in a class I was teaching. Each would sidle up to me, separately and at different times, to explain what was wrong with the other.

The Israeli told me how Arabs wanted to drive Israelis into the sea. The Arab explained how Arabs and Jews had lived in harmony for centuries in Palestine; and he couldn’t understand why the Israelis were stealing their land.

Assuring me that they were threatened, the Israeli reminded me of how six million Jews suffered the fate of a Holocaust in Germany. He even argued that Israel was under constant threat from millions of Arabs surrounding his people.

Telling me how groups called the Stern Gang and Irgun were terrorists who slaughtered both British and Palestinians, the Arab explained that thousands fled their lands after Israelis massacred hundreds of Palestinians in the village of Dair Yassin.

Thus, it has evolved for years, with most Israelis believing a myth that they have an absolute right to Palestine, and many Arabs under an illusion that America or Europe will put things right some day.

The Last Bastion of American Morality Is Under Assault. By Paul Craig Roberts

Via: Foreign Policy Journal.

The morality of the American people now resides, insecurely, in the Presbyterian Church. Every other institution of American society–the evangelical churches, the bought-and-paid-for American media, both houses of Congress, the executive branch, both political parties, the corporations, the financial sector, the universities–all support Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians. Only the Presbyterians dissent.

The genocide is cloaked behind the propaganda that no Palestinians lived in Palestine until after the Israelis arrived, that all Palestinians are terrorists who want to murder innocent peace-loving Israelis, and that the terrorist Palestinians are armed by the few remaining Muslim governments that so far have escaped becoming American puppet states.

Bulldozers manufactured by the U.S. corporation Caterpillar are used to illegally demolish Palestinian homes.

The solution, of course, is for the few remaining independent countries in the Middle East to be brought by force under US and Israeli hegemony.

The Presbyterian Church, as it is the only US organization that is not under the Israel Lobby’s suzerainty, is included among the independent institutions that must be brought to heel.

The Presbyterian Church, which alone in America has a moral conscience, has been disturbed for some time by the Israeli/American policy of Palestinian extermination. In violation of international law and under the protection of US diplomacy and America’s UN veto, Israel has evicted Palestinians from their homes and villages since the Israeli occupation of the West Bank in 1967 and even before. The remaining small parts of the West Bank in which Palestinians still reside have been turned by Israel into ghettos cut off from the rest of Palestine.

The Presbyterians, being meek Christians, have only mild criticisms of Israel which are packaged together in the church’s Middle East Study Committee’s report with the Presbyterians’ commitment to Israel’s continued existence and to “our American Jewish Friends.” The Presbyterian report even disavows divestment from Caterpillar, the US company that supplies Israel with the machines that destroy Palestinian homes, thus driving Palestinians from their lands so that Zionist settlers can confiscate their properties. It was a Caterpillar bulldozer that killed the American Rachel Corrie who was protesting Israel’s destruction of Palestinian homes.

Sirhan Sirhan: In His Own Words. By Stephen Lendman

Via: SteveLendmanBlog.

Shortly after midnight on June 5, 1968, Robert Kennedy was shot, The New York Times headlining:

“Kennedy is Dead, Victim of Assassin; Suspect, Arab Immigrant, Arraigned; Johnson Appoints Panel on Violence”

Sirhan Sirhan was the alleged assassin, convicted, and serving a life sentence at (no pun intended) Pleasant Valley State Prison, CA, despite convincing evidence of his innocence.

In his October 17, 2008 article “The Assassinations of the 1960s as ‘Deep Events,’ ” Peter Dale Scott discussed the killings of both Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King, saying:

“The more that I look at these deep events comparatively, ranging over the past five decades, the more similarities I see between them, and the more I understand them in the light of each other.”

With respect to both Kennedys and King, official accounts obscured the events, suppressed key facts, enough to question the guilt of the alleged suspects, concealing the real culprits and why men of this stature were assassinated – what Scott called “some continuing and hostile force within our society…”

In his June 13, 2010 article titled, “JFK and RFK: The Plots that Killed Them, The Patsies that Didn’t,” James Fetzer debunked the official accounts, saying:

“we are looking at staged events that fit into a recurrent pattern in US and world history where innocent individuals (or ‘patsies’) are baited and framed for cover-up purposes,” RFK’s killing “in part intended to prevent a reinvestigation into his brother’s death….The assassinations of RFK and JFK were both conspiracies. Both involved the destruction of evidence. Both involved the fabrication of evidence. Both involved framing their patsies. Both involved complicity by local officials. Both involved planning by the CIA. Both were used to deny the American people (their) right to be governed by leaders of their own choosing.” Both put a myth to the rule of law, judicial fairness, and democratic freedoms.

Both crimes and MLK’s assassination eliminated figures dark American forces wanted silenced, blaming innocent “patsies” for the killings, Sirhan Sirhan for RFK’s. Fetzer’s article explains numerous important facts:

• multiple shots targeted him, more “than could have come from Sirhan Sirhan’s gun;”
• “RFK was shot behind the right ear from about 1.5 inches, but Sirhan was never that close and always in front of him;”
• the coroner and LAPD reports were contradictory;
• LAPD “engaged in massive destruction of evidence from the pantry of the hotel because ‘it would not fit into a card file,’ ” as part of an official cover-up to blame Sirhan for a state-sponsored assassination, evidence suggesting CIA involvement in both Kennedy brothers and MLK killings;
• Sirhan’s gun was a “.22 caliber, eight-round revolver (serial number H-53725);”
• he “emptied his weapon from a location in front of Bobby Kennedy;”
• Dr. Thomas Hoguchi’s autopsy “showed RFK was hit by four bullets, all of which were fired from behind at upward angles;
• five others were wounded by separate shots;”
• as many as 13 shots were fired;
• Dr. Noguchi’s autopsy “did not point to Sirhan as the killer;”
• an eyewitness, DeWayne Wofler, “testified that the bullets fired at RFK had come from an entirely different gun,” not Sirhan’s;
• a security guard, Eugene Cesar, standing right behind RFK, had a drawn gun of the same caliber as the murder weapon; it was never examined nor was he charged; and
• “a woman in a polka dot dress” left the scene hurriedly, “shouting, “We shot him! We shot him! We shot Kennedy!”

In their book, “The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy,” Jonn Christian and William Turner made a convincing case “indicting Cesar for the crime,” concluding “that Sirhan may have been firing blanks.”

Fetzer’s article has detailed information on both JFK and RFK assassinations, accessed through the following link:

http://www.voltairenet.org/article165721.html

Below, Sirhan gives his own account of what happened that night and why he was at the Ambassador Hotel.

Gangsters, Politicians, Cocaine and Bankers. By Horace Campbell

Via: Pambazuka News.

Lessons from the saga of Dudus in Jamaica

The arrest of Christopher ‘Dudus’ Coke in a road block in Jamaica on Tuesday 22 June 2010 opens the possibility once and for all to reveal the full extent of the corruption of the politics of Jamaica and the Caribbean by the rulers in collaboration with the intelligence, commercial and banking infrastructures of the United States

From the streets of West Kingston to the hills of Port of Spain, Trinidad to Guyana and down to Brazil, gunmen (called warlords) allied and integrated into the international banking system had taken over communities and acted as do-gooders when the neo-liberal forces downgraded local government services.

From the garrison community of Tivoli gardens, Christopher Coke was hailed as a force more powerful than politicians. Such was power of Coke (called the ‘Pres’ by his supporters and the media) that the prime minister of Jamaica, Bruce Golding, tried to block his extradition to the United States. For a short period from August 2009 to May 2010, the Jamaican government protected Coke and hired a US law firm to lobby against his extradition. The US government intensified pressures against the Jamaican middle classes, threatening them with the withdrawal of their visas. This pressure and public opinion forced the government of Jamaica to issue a warrant for the arrest of Coke on 17 May 2010.

After the warrant was issued, the military and police forces entered the garrison stronghold of Coke to capture him. After the shooting stopped, 73 persons in Tivoli, three members of the occupation forces and ‘accountant’ Keith Clarke were killed and large numbers injured. Coke was in hiding because he feared ending up like his father, Jim Brown, who had been the don of Tivoli and had died mysteriously in a fire while he was incarcerated in Jamaica awaiting extradition to the United States.

Although the western media has spun this story to exclude the US intelligence agencies as well as Israeli mobsters, the tales of Christopher Coke reveal the reality that peace and reconstruction in the Caribbean is inseparable from demilitarisation and exposure of the US banking and intelligence services.

THE CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY (CIA), GUNMEN AND POLITICS IN JAMAICA

The arrest of Christopher ‘Dudus’ Coke in Kingston has reopened the issues of the use of thugs and gunmen to intimidate the poor in Caribbean. From Mexico to Guyana and from Brazil to Trinidad, gunmen and criminal elements integrated into the cocaine, guns, politics and banking business terrorise the poor and ensure that international capitalism thrives on the backs and bodies of the most oppressed. Dudus had inherited a criminal infrastructure from his father (also known as Jim Brown) that had been organised by politicians to coerce and intimidate the working poor.

At the height of his power, Dudus had taken over the community of Tivoli Gardens in West Kingston and was from a long line of political enforcers with names such as Claudie ‘Jack’ Massop, Bya Mitchell and Jim Brown. These enforcers had been active in the community of Tivoli Gardens established as a base for counter revolutionary violence by a sociologist-turned-politician named Edward Seaga.

War crimes suit filed against Barak, Livni in Belgium

Via: Ma’an/Agencies.

Two Belgian lawyers working on behalf of Palestinian filed suit against 14 Israeli leaders on allegations of war crimes committed during Operation Cast Lead, news agencies reported.

The respondents include Israeli opposition chairwoman Tzipi Livni for her role as foreign minister during the Gaza offensive between December 2008 and January 2009, former Israeli premier Ehud Olmert, Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilnai, and other Israeli army officials and Israel’s intelligence services, Israeli news site Yedioth Ahronoth wrote.

Much of the 70-page complaint is based on the Goldstone report, Agence France-Presse reported. Claimants include a Palestinian-Belgian national and 13 Gaza Strip residents.

The claim includes an attack on a mosque near the Jabaliya refugee camp during which 16 civilians, including children, were killed. The plaintiffs were either wounded or lost a relative in the attack, the news site wrote.

Lawyers reported estimated that Belgium’s attorney general will evaluate the case to determine whether it provides just cause to open a case against the senior Israeli officials “already by the end of August.”

Georges-Henri Beauthier and Alexis Deswaef, the two lawyers representing the claimants, said the current charges would be brought against the Israeli leaders using the principle of universal jurisdiction, Israeli daily Haaretz reported.

The claims follow the filing suit by French activists against Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak over the Israeli army’s conduct during its raid of the Freedom Flotilla which saw nine passengers killed by Israeli commandos in international waters on 31 May. The move forced Barak to cancel a Paris visit.

An arrest warrant was issued against Livni in the UK in December 2009 after British lawyers filed suit against the official on behalf of Palestinian respondents for her role in Operation Cast Lead.

Meanwhile, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu criticized the UN and other international institutions for condemning Israel’s acts on Wednesday, as he addressed the Knesset.

“They want to strip us of the natural right to defend ourselves. When we defend ourselves against rocket attack, we are accused of war crimes. We cannot board sea vessels when our soldiers are being attacked and fired upon, because that is a war crime,” Haaretz quoted him as saying.

Integrating Palestine into the US progressive left. By Noura Erakat

Via: The Electronic Intifada.

(2010 USSF)

Hardly an Arab or Palestinian living in the United States does not desire their fellow Americans to carry the banner of Palestinian justice and shift US policy toward the conflict. Even the revered Columbia Professor Edward Said who commanded respect and attention in a broad spectrum of fields echoed this sentiment. At a 2002 al-Awda rally in New York he called upon the impassioned throng to talk about Palestine everywhere, to everyone: at the supermarket, near the office water cooler, at the playground, with members of the Parent Teacher Association, on the bus, and at the bus stop — everywhere.

Yet despite this yearning to nurture American solidarity, there is a vast divide between the aspiration and the understanding required for its realization — that Palestinians, other nations, and millions of marginalized Americans contend with the same structural impediments standing between them and the full realization of their human dignity. The understanding of a common enemy and the affirmation of a common humanity is the linchpin of genuine solidarity.

Who then might constitute effective allies of Palestinians in the US? Who contends with institutionalized discrimination similar to that which renders Palestinians second-class citizens on their own land? Which communities in the US are racially profiled, systematically incarcerated, and rendered poor by a confluence of institutional factors, lack access to health care and employment and secure housing?

For progressive Arab and Palestinian Americans, these US counterparts are immigrant communities, the working poor, migrant workers, indigenous peoples, racial minorities, and other US communities considered expendable by a neoliberal economic framework that touts itself as colorblind, reveres individualism, disdains social and economic rights, and places corporate profits above people’s welfare. These economic policies have driven poor families out of their homes in the US, have led to the systematic incarceration of African-Americans in prisons for profit, have devastated labor’s ability to negotiate workers’ rights, have accelerated gentrification in urban centers, and have fueled the insidious attack against immigrants.

Like their counterparts, Palestinians and other nations endure the brunt of neoliberal prerogatives — foremost of which is the expansion of labor and consumer markets as well as resource extraction — by way of colonization and/or military domination.

Moral Debts and Ethical Deficits. By Frank Scott

Via: legalienate.

Our heads are filled with stories about the danger of trillions of dollars in debt and deficits , with little if any mention of the real problem they represent. It is not the debt but what we are indebted for that threatens the future of our nation . If we owed hundreds of trillions of dollars – which may soon be the case – and every American was employed, housed, educated, cared for without question in time of ill health or economic need and safe from warfare and violence from inside the nation or out, such debt would not be any problem at all.

Borrowing today and paying back tomorrow shouldn’t mean we lavishly spend most of the borrowed money on weapons, waste, cosmetics and pets, causing us to scrimp on health, education and social life while complaining that we have too much debt. We need to control our spending on things only a minority of us actually need or really want, and begin changing priorities to satisfy the shared needs and wants of the great majority. This can’t happen under the domain of forces that mislead us into social divisions by exaggerating differences and minimizing similarities to protect a commodity culture and a perverse political order that defines minority rule as democracy.

The present renewal of the drive to dismantle Social Security and turn it over to private profiteers is one among many of the lies and distortions offered as suggested solutions for our problems which will only make them much worse. Increasing budgets for war and decreasing budgets for social service only make sense to anti-social forces which profit from divide and conquer policies that reduce Americans, especially the working majority, to special interest and identity groups whose common cause is sacrificed to competition while ruling minorities practice a lucrative socialism at their expense.

Our common condition has been ignorance for much too long and it needs to become a common cause of democracy and transformation of our economy before we are transformed by it into a totally failed society.

Lieberman’s “Final Solution”

Palestinian refugees separated from their home by the "green line". 1948 UNRWA photo

Via: PIC.

The right wing extremist and Israeli foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, in an article entitled “my blue print for a resolution” and published in the Jerusalem Post on Wednesday called for the expulsion of the remaining Palestinians from the 1948 occupied Palestine.

In his article he rejected international calls for an Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 borders saying that UN resolution 242 “never called for a full withdrawal from the West Bank,” citing what the British and the American drafters of the resolution said about the 1967 borders.

He claims that the only recipe for peace is to create two states for two different people, a Jewish state for the Jews and a Palestinian state for the Palestinians, because as he puts it the dispute is not territorial.

To do that he suggest an “exchange of populated territories to create two largely homogeneous states.”

Most importantly he emphasises that “There will be no so-called Palestinian right of return.”

To make his proposed solution sound less drastic he says: “In most cases there is no physical population transfer or the demolition of houses, but creating a border where none existed, according to demographics.”

He does not go into the details of how to deal with the Palestinian population in Acre of Haifa for example, let alone the unrecognised villages in southern Palestine.

The Palestinian state will be “demilitarized and Israel will need to retain a presence on its borders to ensure no smuggling of arms.” [ie a concentration camp]

Ex-commissioner calls Congo’s colonial master a ‘visionary hero’. By Leigh Phillips

Via: EUobserver.

Louis Michel, the Belgian former EU development commissioner and current prominent Liberal MEP has shocked his home nation and its one-time central African subjects by calling King Leopold II, the Congo’s colonial master responsible for between 3 million and 10 million deaths, a “visionary hero.”

“Leopold II was a true visionary for his time, a hero,” he told P-Magazine, a local publication, in an interview on Tuesday. “And even if there were horrible events in the Congo, should we now condemn them?”

In the late 19th Century, the Belgian colony of the Congo Free State, effectively the personal property of Leopold II, became infamous for the enslavement and brutal treatment of the Congolese people.

Estimates of the number killed while the region was plundered for its rich resources vary substantially, but researchers believe between 5 million and 20 million died.

“Leopold II does not deserve these accusations,” continued Mr Michel, himself a descendent of the Belgian king and a “Knight, Officer and Commander” in the Order of Leopold, Belgium’s highest honour. Full Article.

Refugees in Lebanon: Righting a Perpetual Wrong. By Ramzy Baroud

Via: The Palestine Chronicle.

Finally, a parliamentary debate in Lebanon over the human rights of Palestinian refugees. What is unfortunate though, is that granting basic civil rights to over 400,000 Palestinians – 62 years after their expulsion from their historic homeland and the issuing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights – has been a topic of ‘debate’ in the first place. Equally regrettable is the fact that various ‘Christian’ Lebanese political forces are fiercely opposing granting Palestinians their rights.

Most Palestinian refugees in Lebanon are second and third generation refugees. Impoverished camps are the only homes they have ever known. In Palestine, their real home, their villages were destroyed, their fields were burnt down and their culture was eradicated. An ongoing attempt at erasing every aspect of the Palestinian Arab identity in today’s Israel continues unabated, strengthened by the rightwing government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, who is recognized in many political circles as ‘fascist’.

But what 62 years of dispossession, massacres and untold hardship failed to destroy – the memory and the belonging – will certainly not be eliminated now by some rightwing politicians and few parliamentary bills at the Israeli Knesset, including one that forbids Palestinians from commemorating their Nakba (Catastrophe of 1947-48).

The ongoing debate in the Lebanese parliament, however, is of a different nature. Lebanon is striving to settle many hanging political questions. Despite Israel’s devastating wars, a more confident Lebanese populace is emerging. This was largely empowered by the success of the Lebanese military resistance to Israel. A country of law and order is replacing that of chaos and turmoil, and a level of political independence is making some promising appearances after decades of total political dependency and proxy civil wars.

However, there are those who want Lebanon to remain a country divided on sectarian lines, a characteristic that defined Lebanese society for generations. Only such a division could guarantee their survival at the helm of dismal clan-based, sectarian hierarchy that has long degraded the image of the country, and allowed outsiders, notwithstanding Israel, to manipulate the fragile structure for their own benefit.

Did 9/11 Justify the War in Afghanistan? By Prof. David Ray Griffin

Via: Global Research.

Using the McChrystal Moment to Raise a Forbidden Question

There are many questions to ask about the war in Afghanistan. One that has been widely asked is whether it will turn out to be “Obama’s Vietnam.”1 This question implies another: Is this war winnable, or is it destined to be a quagmire, like Vietnam? These questions are motivated in part by the widespread agreement that the Afghan government, under Hamid Karzai, is at least as corrupt and incompetent as the government the United States tried to prop up in South Vietnam for 20 years.

Although there are many similarities between these two wars, there is also a big difference: This time, there is no draft. If there were a draft, so that college students and their friends back home were being sent to Afghanistan, there would be huge demonstrations against this war on campuses all across this country. If the sons and daughters of wealthy and middle-class parents were coming home in boxes, or with permanent injuries or post-traumatic stress syndrome, this war would have surely been stopped long ago. People have often asked: Did we learn any of the “lessons of Vietnam”? The US government learned one: If you’re going to fight unpopular wars, don’t have a draft –  hire mercenaries!

There are many other questions that have been, and should be, asked about this war, but in this essay, I focus on only one: Did the 9/11 attacks justify the war in Afghanistan?

This question has thus far been considered off-limits, not to be raised in polite company, and certainly not in the mainstream media. It has been permissible, to be sure, to ask whether the war during the past several years has been justified by those attacks so many years ago. But one has not been allowed to ask whether the original invasion was justified by the 9/11 attacks.

However, what can be designated the “McChrystal Moment” – the probably brief period during which the media are again focused on the war in Afghanistan in the wake of the Rolling Stone story about General Stanley McChrystal, the commander of US and NATO forces in Afghanistan, which led to his resignation – provides the best opportunity for some time to raise fundamental questions about this war. Various commentators have already been asking some pretty basic questions: about the effectiveness and affordability of the present “counterinsurgency strategy” and even whether American fighting forces should remain in Afghanistan at all. But I am interested in an even more fundamental question: Whether this war was ever really justified by the publicly given reason: the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

This question has two parts: First, did these attacks provide a legal justification for the invasion of Afghanistan? Second, if not, did they at least provide a moral justification?

Stock Markets will lead to the extinction of humans; the rich will escape to the moon. By Devinder Sharma

Via: Ground Reality.

An Australian scientist who helped in eradicating smallpox has sounded a death warning. Frank Fenner, emeritus professor of microbiology at the Australian National University, has claimed that human race will be unable to survive population explosion and unbridled consumption. ”Humans will become extinct, perhaps within 100 years, Fenner is quoted as saying. “A lot of other animals will, too.”

Fenner’s chilling prediction should not be taken as yet another sensational news. I think any sensible leader, and I am not talking of only political leadership, should be able to get the message straight and loud. If you remember, Mahatma Gandhi had said that the Earth has enough for man’s need, but not greed. Prince Charles had more recently warned of ‘monumental problems’ if the world’s population continues to rise at such a rapid pace. Probably what the Prince did not mention was the greed of the growing population through increased consumption will create the grave crisis.

Unbridled consumption is the foundations for the ‘growth economics’ that has become the Bible of the modern neoliberal economics. In reality, growth economics is nothing but violent economics. It unleashes violence against natural resources, against the climate, against the nature, and also against fellow human beings. It shifts natural, physical as well as financial resources from the hands of the poor into the pockets of the rich and elite. We have been often told that 20 per cent of the world’s population of haves controls and uses the resources of the 80 per cent of the have not. Globalisation further strengthens that monopoly control.

In fact, globalisation has simply brought together all the haves from each country. In simple terms, each country has a North and a South, the North depicting the percentage of the bold and beautiful population. Globalisation has brought the North together. They have joined hands to usurp the world’s resources, to snatch whatever lies in the hands of the South. Globalisation has actually brought the rich and the crooked together.

Blame it on the burgeoning population, but it is the 20 per cent elite that is destroying the world’s resources. In the quest for more wealth they have succeeded in very cleverly changing the rules of the game. They began by first co-opting the economists, and then spread their wings to include the media. The economists laid out the ground rules. They began by designing GDP as an indicator of growth. They crafted it so deftly that we accepted an indicator of personal wealth to be a pointer to national development. They made everything, including global climate, look like a commodity to be sold and exploited.

I am reminded of what the milkman of India, Dr Verghese Kurian, had once said. One species that should disappear from the face of the Earth, and the Earth will be a wonderful place to live in, are the economists.

I am in complete agreement.