Stephen Lendman

Israeli banks entrenched in settlement building: A billboard advertises
a special offer for a mortgage by Bank Leumi for constructing in Zufin
settlement. (Who Profits from the Occupation?) [Electronic Intifada]

Wall Street does it. Other Western banks do it. They all exploit markets, often ripping off customers illegally. Why not Israeli banks also in their own back yard, easily in expanding settlements.

The Coalition of Women for Peace (CWP) includes 10 feminist organizations and non-affiliated activist women in Israel. Founded in 2000, it advocates "radical social and political change," and is "a leading voice against the occupation, committed to feminist principles of organizing and Jewish-Palestinian partnership in a relentless struggle for a just peace."

In October, it released a report titled, "Financing the Israeli Occupation, The Direct Involvement of Israeli Banks in Illegal Settlement Activity and Control over the Palestinian Banking Market."

Besides stealing Palestinian land, economic interests play a large role in Israel's occupation, including resource control, labor exploitation, and commercial enterprises of all kinds, operating freely and illegally in settlements, banks among them.

Israeli banks profiteer several ways discussed below, but make no mistake. Like in the West, they're predators, especially in Occupied Palestine, permitted to steal and exploit because what say have occupied people. As a result, banks (construction companies, and other commercial enterprises) breach international law as participants in illegal projects, a lucrative profit center they freely exploit.

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Bill Van Auken
WSWS

The words of Broder and the Republicans, together with the actions of the Obama administration, underscore the threat of a new and far bloodier war that would carry with it the danger of a global conflagration.

Leading Republican Senator Lindsey Graham signaled a turn following the midterm elections toward an escalation of US threats against Iran, publicly calling for an all-out war that would “neuter” Tehran and leave it incapable of resistance.

Graham made the statement Saturday at a conference on international security in Halifax, Canada. “Containment is off the table,” he declared in relation to Iran’s nuclear program.

Washington and its allies have accused Tehran of developing its nuclear program for the purpose of building a weapon. The Iranian government has consistently denied this charge, insisting that its program is solely for peaceful, civilian purposes.

Employing the kind of total-war rhetoric that was heard from Germany in the 1930s, the South Carolina Republican vowed that a US attack would be carried out “not to just neutralize their nuclear program, but to sink their navy, destroy their air force and deliver a decisive blow to the Revolutionary Guard. In other words, neuter that regime. Destroy their ability to fight back.”

Graham added that, despite the Democrats’ defeat at the polls last week, if President Barack Obama “decides to be tough with Iran beyond sanctions, I think he is going to feel a lot of Republican support for the idea that we cannot let Iran develop a nuclear weapon.”

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Chris Floyd
Empire Burlesque

A tourist at a Gandhi museum in New Delhi. Though Gandhi is revered
here, modern India, with its rising economic and military aspirations,
does not always reflect his ideals. (Lynsey Addario for the NYT)

The Nobel Peace Laureate Barack Obama, who in his prize-claiming speech boldly claimed the mantle of Mahatma Gandhi, is now visiting India. And why has he made this pilgrimage to the homeland of his spiritual mentor? Has he come to drink more deeply of the wellsprings of satyagraha, to steep himself more thoroughly in the Gandhian principles of courageous, active, non-violent resistance to evil, to the Mahatma's ceaseless dedication to the poor and the outcast?

No: he has come to seal the deal on the sixth largest sale of war weapons in the history of the United States: $5 billion for the bristling, burgeoning Indian military, currently waging war on millions of its own people in Kashmir and the poverty-devastated state of central India, where the despair is so deep that suicide among the poor is epidemic.

Five billion dollars could have transformed the lives and futures of millions; instead it will go into the pockets of a few American war profiteers -- who will of course spread the wealth around to their favorite politicians ... such as Barack Obama, the leading recipient of war industry money in the 2008 campaign, outdoing even that old soldier and ardent militarist, John McCain.

And of course the Indian arms deal comes hot on the heels of the largest transaction of death-machinery in American history: Obama's $60 billion war-profiteering bonanza with Saudi Arabia, one of the most suffocatingly repressive and inhumane regimes on the face of the earth. But the Peace Laureate doesn't care about that. He knows what is truly important -- and it isn't the blighted lives of the Saudi people, or all those affected by the corruption and extremism that the Saudi royals have spread around the world (with the connivance, cooperation -- or at the command of -- the bipartisan American power structure). What matters most to the progressive paragon of peace is the sixty billion dollars stuffed into the coffers of his militarist backers.

If Obama wins re-election in 2012, it will not be because he "made a mid-course correction" or "learned the lessons" of the 2010 vote or "moved to the center" or any such witless expectoration of conventional wisdom. It will be because his militarist backers have judged his arms deals and Terror War operations sufficiently profitable to justify his retention. As is always the case with the War Machine that rules us, follow the money -- and the blood.

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David Michael Green
The Regressive Antidote

The Ship of Fools & The Rocks of Short-Term Economic Planning

I guess if you’re gonna go down, you might as well do it with style. And I guess if you can’t do it with style, you might as well do it with irony. Even if it is of the comedic sort. And even if the joke’s on you.

This country is imploding. It has been for thirty years, if not fifty. What happened Tuesday was egregious in every respect, but at the end of the day represents little more than just another data point on a secular trend line. Putting the tea party freaks in control of the world’s only superpower is hardly distinguishable, really, from giving those same governmental car keys to Ronald Reagan, Newt Gingrich, or George W. Bush. For that matter, it bears all too uncomfortable resemblance to having Lyndon Johnson or Bill Clinton or Barack Obama president (though at least in those latter cases, we mostly didn’t know beforehand what they’d turn out to be).

I want to say, before wallowing too much deeper into the despairing swamps of comedic irony, that there is some hope out there, at least in the longer term. Put bluntly, this country’s main problem is old white guys. If we can find a way to neutralize their destructive impact, there is a new generation of un-crazy people waiting to take control of the country, stop it from digging deeper down in the hole its in, and begin the repair process. The next generation is liberal, and will become even more liberal when it realizes the degree to which the state is necessary to solve problems and protect citizens from predatory actors (most of which are far more likely to be dressed in shiny business suits than Taliban get-ups). It is a generation that finds prejudice based on race, sex and sexual orientation not only stupid and repugnant, but something far better – just plain dismissively irrelevant. It is a generation willing to take the outrageous step of protecting the only planet we happen to have (what a concept!). It’s a generation that is largely unmoved by the institutionalized societal idiocy of organized religion. It is a generation that will be a lot more diverse than the regressive good ol’ white boy dinosaurs from the 1930s and 1940s still lumbering about the country, waiting for “Father Knows Best” to stage a resurgence.

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Wendy Kristianasen
Le Monde Diplomatique

Indonesia’s disasters – October’s tsunami and eruption, the killing of suspected terrorists in Sumatra – get more media attention than its democratic elections. Yet these marked the direct re-election of the president last year and a cautious step away from Islamising agendas, re-affirming the country’s historic balance of secularism with Islam.

The compromise almost didn’t happen. Just seven words in the preamble to the Indonesian constitution would have made Indonesia an Islamic state: “Muslims are bound to follow Islamic law”. They were withdrawn at the very last moment, on 18 August 1945. And Indonesia became the Pancasila state, based on five principles – belief in one God, humanitarianism, national unity, representative democracy, social justice – a historic compromise between secularism and Islam.

“Indonesia is the seat of a moderate, smiling Islam,” said Shafi Anwar, director of the International Centre for Islam and Pluralism. “But with 9/11, the spread of radicalisation and conservatism, and the 2002 Bali bombings, suddenly we were frowned upon. My purpose is to convey the message that democracy is compatible with Islam.”

The country’s democratic opening began in 1998 after two long periods of authoritarian rule, first under Sukarno, the founding president (1945-1967) who juggled the three great forces: nationalism, Islam and communism (Indonesia then had the world’s third biggest communist party). Then under Suharto (1967-1998) who seized power on the pretext of a communist threat. Half a million or more died (1) and the country remains traumatised by these events.

Indonesia is now the world’s third biggest democracy. “That’s something the West always overlooks,” said Anies Baswedan, rector of Jakarta’s Paramadina University. “They always refer to us as the world’s biggest Muslim population. We say we are a democracy full stop. We have a free press, a dynamic political process, a vibrant civil society. Yes, there is corruption, there always was, but now there’s transparency and it gets reported. The economy is resilient in this current world crisis, compared with that of our neighbours and with what is was 10 years ago.” The Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s hit Indonesia hard. “And yes, we have our Islamists and fundamentalists, but they have mostly been absorbed into the political process.”

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Sherwood Ross
Gloabal Research

Police refuse to search known CIA rendition plane
at Shannon.

[RE: Photo: The arrival of CIA torture rendition plane N475LC at Shannon at about 1.20 am this morning was witnessed by Edward Horgan, Conor Cregan, and Garda Pat Harte and Garda Karen Fitzgerald, who were watching Cregan and Horgan at the time. Immediate requests for this plane to be searched were immediatly refused. (IM)]

If the CIA routinely lies to the American people, maybe that's because its got so much to lie about, like killing millions of innocent human beings around the world. As far back as December, 1968, the CIA's own Covert Operations Study Group gave a secret report to president-elect Richard Nixon that conceded, “The impression of many Americans, especially in the intellectual community and among the youth, that the United States is engaging in 'dirty tricks' tends to alienate them from their government.” According to Time Weiner's book “Legacy of Ashes” (Anchor), the report went on to say,

“Our credibility and our effectiveness in this role is necessarily damaged to the extent that it becomes known that we are secretly intervening in what may be (or appear to be) the internal affairs of others.”

President Bill Clinton, who first gave the CIA the green light to launch its illegal “renditions” (kidnappings,) told the nation on the occasion of the Agency's 50th birthday (1997), “By necessity, the American people will never know the full story of your courage.” (Courage? For 22 agents to grab one Muslim cleric off the streets of Milan, Italy, and ship him abroad to be tortured?) Anyway, presidents who authorize criminal acts by the CIA, as virtually all have done since its founding in 1947, don't want the truth out, either, lest knowledge of those “dirty tricks” sicken and revolt the American people when they find out what crimes the Agency is perpetrating with their tax dollars. As former CIA agent Philip Agee once put it,

“The CIA is the President's secret army.” This point was underscored at a luncheon by President Gerald Ford himself, which he hosted for New York Times top editors on Jan. 16, 1975. According to Weiner, Ford told them the reputation of every President since Truman could be ruined if the secrets became public. Asked by an editor, like what? Ford replied “like assassinations.”

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Stephen Lendman

More than ever today, Muslims are public enemy number one. Post-9/11, they've been ruthlessly vilified and persecuted for their faith, ethnicity, prominence and activism. As a result, innocent men and women have been spuriously called terrorists, or charged with conspiracy to provide them material support.

No wonder as an earlier article explained. They've been unfairly portrayed as culturally inferior, dirty, lecherous, untrustworthy, religiously fanatical, violent, gun-toting terrorists. As a result, hundreds have been wrongfully arrested, charged, convicted and imprisoned, guilty only of being Muslims in America at the wrong time. Their treatment represents a clear indictment of US injustice, targeting innocent victims for political advantage.

A September 20 Congressional Research Service (CRS) report [.pdf] titled, "American Jihadist Terrorism: Combating a Complex Threat" explains more about America's scheme, naming names, "plots," and dates to highlight the "threat." It begins saying:

"Between May 2009 and August 2010 (alone), arrests were made for 19 'homegrown,' jihadist-inspired terrorist plots by American citizens or legal permanent residents of the United States." They were Muslims "susceptible to ideologies supporting a violent form of jihad, a term willfully misused. CRS suggests that jihad = violence, "jihadists,"....illegally supporting, plotting, or directly engaging in violent terrorist activity."

Post-9/11, CRS cited 40 homegrown "jihadist" plots, including attacks on America, likely reflecting Al Qaeda directed schemes, it said.

During America's "war on terror," terms like Al Qaeda, outside enemies, jihadists, and Islamic terrorists are interchangeably used to incite fear. Recruited by the CIA and Pakistan's ISI, Al Qaeda or Mujahideen were defenders of Muslim lands against the 1980s Soviet Afghan occupation. At the time, Reagan officials called them a "necessary response" against imperial communism.

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Bill Van Auken
WSWS

24 is an American television series starring Kiefer
Sutherland as federal agent Jack Bauer. Bauer a
highly proficient agent, but one taking an "ends
justify the means" approach regardless of the per-
ceived morality of some of his actions. WikiPedia

'Enhanced interrogation techniques.' -This phrase represented virtually a literal translation of the term used by the German Gestapo 60 years earlier, Verschärfte Vernehmung, also as a bureaucratic euphemism for torture. The US media fell dutifully into line with this attempt to deny torture with a terminological sleight of hand. This complicity in and indifference towards the crime of torture pervades all sections of the US ruling elite, its government, its political parties and its media.

In a memoir to be released next week, former US President George W. Bush boasts of having personally given the order to the CIA to employ the torture method of waterboarding.

The book, titled Decision Points, includes Bush’s recounting that when asked by the CIA whether it could subject Khalid Sheik Mohammed, an alleged leader in the September 11, 2001, terror plot, he gave the reply, “Damn right.” The former president added that he would do the same thing again to “save lives.”

The passage constitutes an even more explicit admission than Bush’s flip statement in a speech to an audience of businessmen in Grand Rapids, Michigan, last June. The ex-president then declared: “Yeah, we waterboarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. I’d do it again to save lives.”

The claim that suspects were being tortured in order to “save lives” is entirely self-serving. In reality, Mohammed and others were subjected to waterboarding and other torture methods by interrogators who were told to come up with evidence linking the 9/11 attacks to Iraq in order to provide a pretext for the war that the administration was determined to launch in pursuit of US strategic interests.

In a country governed by laws, international treaties and democratic principles, such admissions would provoke a public outcry, an intense political debate and the arrest and prosecution of George W. Bush.

In the United States of America of 2010, however, the former president’s bragging that he ordered his subordinates to carry out torture has been greeted within the political establishment and the corporate media with an audible yawn of indifference.

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Benjamin Dangl
Upside Down World

The following is an excerpt from the introduction to Benjamin Dangl’s new book Dancing with Dynamite: Social Movements and States in Latin America (October, 2010, AK Press).

Ben Dangl breaks the sound barrier, exploding many myths about Latin America that are all-too-often amplified by the corporate media in the United States. Read this much-needed book.”

The motorcycle thundered off the highway onto a jungle road of loose red dirt framed by trees, families lounging in front of their farmhouses, and small herds of disinterested cows. We pulled up to a dusty store to buy food for our stay in the rural community of Oñondivepá, Paraguay, and asked the woman behind the counter what was available. She nodded her head, picked up a saw, and began hacking away at a large slab of beef. We strapped the meat and a box of beer on to the back of the motorcycle and roared off down the road.

A volleyball game was going on when we arrived in the area where landless activist Pedro Caballero lived. His wife offered us fresh oranges while his children ran around in the dirt, playing with some wide-eyed kittens. The sun had set, so Caballero’s wife lifted a light bulb attached to a metal wire onto an exposed electric line above the house, casting light on our small gathering of neighbors. Suddenly, the dogs jumped to action, joining in a barking chorus, and lunged toward the edge of the woods. They had found a poisonous snake, a common cause of death in this small community far from hospitals.

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Rodrigue Tremblay
The New American Empire

"Under a paper money system, a determined government can always generate higher spending and hence positive inflation." ~ Ben Bernanke, future Fed Chairman (in 2002)

“My thesis here is that cooperation between the monetary and fiscal authorities in Japan could help solve the problems that each policymaker faces on its own. Consider for example a tax cut for households and businesses that is explicitly coupled with incremental BOJ purchases of government debt – so that the tax cut is in effect financed by money creation. Moreover, assume that the Bank of Japan has made a commitment, by announcing a price-level target, to reflate the economy, so that much or all of the increase in the money stock is viewed as permanent.” ~ Ben Bernanke, future Fed Chairman (in 2002)

“The Fed, in effect, is telling the markets not to worry about our fiscal deficits, it will be the buyer of first and perhaps last resort. There is no need - as with Charles Ponzi - to find an increasing amount of future gullibles, they will just write the check themselves. I ask you: Has there ever been a Ponzi scheme so brazen? There has not.” ~ Bill Gross, PIMCO's managing director

On Wednesday, November 3rd, the Bernanke Fed announced that it stands ready to resume money printing to stimulate the economy through quantitative money easing, an euphemism for printing more dollars. Indeed, it intends to buy $600-billion of longer-term Treasury securities until the end of the second quarter of 2011, plus some $300 billion of reinvestments, on top of the some $1.75 trillion of various types of securities, many of which were mortgage backed securities, that it has added in 2009 to its balance sheet, currently standing at a total of $2.3 trillion. There could even be additional increases in newly printed money as the Fed intends to

"regularly review and adjust the program as needed to best foster maximum employment and price stability."

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Stephen Lendman

Ahead of the November 11 - 12 G-20 meeting in Seoul, South Korea, the Fed announced QE II, another $600 billion between now and end of June 2011, a flexible figure to be raised or lowered freely, the Fed saying it will:

"....regularly review the pace of its securities purchases and the overall size of the asset-purchase program in light of incoming information and will adjust the program as needed to best foster maximum employment and price stability."

An additional $300 billion received from maturing securities will also be used. Easing, in fact, began around mid-year. Wall Street insiders knew it to take advantage, but not the public, QE being used to debauch the currency, harm the economy, and destroy, not create, jobs.

Market Ticker's Karl Denninger calls QE

"the largest tax ever imposed on the American people in the history of the nation. It is more than fourteen times the Bush tax cuts....Goldman Sachs believes that Bernanke will impose a total tax through (QE) of more than four trillion dollars over the next two years, or more than fifty-seven times the Bush tax cuts."

How so? Because credit created is going into asset markets (stocks, bonds, commodities, etc.), not the economy. QE I's tax, in fact, diluted stimulus funds, an offsetting tax "directly into the bankers' pockets" for speculation, big salaries and bonuses.

Add to that inflation. According to James Grant of Grant's Interest Rate Observer, QE will create unsustainable asset bubbles and debase the dollar, making products and services more expensive, ending "everyday low prices." Bernanke wants inflation, a hidden tax. Devaluation is being used to get it, no matter the serious consequences.

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David Walsh
WSWS

"The well-heeled liberal element [...] makes a profession of spreading illusions in the Democrats."

The outcome of the 2010 midterm elections is an indictment of the apologists for Barack Obama and the Democratic Party.

As a result of the November 2 elections, in which the Republican Party regained control of the House of Representatives and picked up seats in the Senate, the entire political system in the US has shifted farther to the right. The consequences for millions of working people will be severe, as the attack on social conditions and democratic rights is intensified and military violence is employed even more aggressively around the world.

Two years ago, a variety of “left” and liberal forces strove to convince those sections of the population over whom they had influence that the Obama campaign represented a watershed in American politics and that under his administration the policies of war, attacks on jobs and social programs, and the shredding of Constitutional rights would come to an end.

The Nation magazine and others painted Obama, a thoroughly conventional bourgeois politician with a track record of subservience to the Democratic Party machine in Illinois and to big business, as a “progressive” who would turn America around. This effort, which combined self-deception and deliberate falsification, helped generate illusions in Obama and lull the population to sleep.

What are the results? Obama, given a free hand by his left-liberal apologists, steered a right-wing, pro-big business course from his first day in office (and even before). In the face of the worst economic conditions since the Great Depression, the administration bailed out Wall Street while doing nothing for the millions of unemployed and impoverished workers and the legions of families facing the loss of their homes.

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William N. Grigg

State Terrorism: Sherman's Army of the West burns
Atlanta.

"The Vendee is no more, my republican comrades.... The streets are littered with corpses which sometimes are stacked in pyramids. Mass shootings are taking place in Savenay because there brigands keep turning up to surrender.... [P]ity is incompatible with the spirit of revolution."
~ General Fracois-Joseph Westermann, commander of the "infernal column" that slaughtered tens of thousands of Vendean secessionists during the French Revolution

"[F]or five days, ten thousand of our men worked hard and with a will, in that work of destruction, with axes, sledges, crowbars, clawbars, and with fire.... Meridian no longer exists."

~ Union General William T. Sherman, reporting on the federal destruction of Meridian, Mississippi in 1862

Westermann: Butcher of
La Vendee.

"We must kill three hundred thousand [as] I have told you so often, and the further they run the harder for us to get them...."

"I was satisfied, and have been all the time, that the problem of war consists in the awful fact that the present class of men who rule the South must be killed outright rather than in the conquest of territory...."

~ William T. Sherman, the Union Army's General Westermann, in separate letters to his wife Ellen and to General Philip Sheridan, as quoted in The Soul of Battle by Victor Davis Hanson

William Sherman's march to the sea, writes Victor Davis Hanson approvingly, was a war of "terror" intended to destroy an aristocratic Southern culture he hated because of its impudence in resisting the central government's authority.

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Stephen Lendman

Israeli settlements are illegal under international law, including Fourth Geneva's Article 49 stating:

"Individual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory to the territory of the Occupying Power or to that of any other country, occupied or not, are prohibited, regardless of the motive."

In addition, various UN resolutions (including 446, 452 and 465) condemned Israel's settlement building, declaring they have "no legal validity" to exist. However, they do and regularly expand, endangering all Palestinian communities, Sheikh Jarrah one of many and their longstanding residents.

A predominantly East Jerusalem Arab neighborhood, it's home to about 2,800 Palestinians as well as diplomatic missions and well-known landmarks. However, because of its strategic location, settlers want it, and have encroached for years. So far, over 60 Palestinian families have been dispossessed. Another 500 are at risk.

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) published an October report titled, "The Case of Sheikh Jarrah," explaining the growing threat, saying it's "of serious humanitarian concern." Settlers have used different methods to encroach, including:

(1) taking over land or property confiscated or expropriated by Israeli authorities, one way, among others, under the 1950 Absentee Property Law (ABL) defining absentees as:

n who, at any time during the period between (November 29, 1947) and (May 19, 1948) has ceased to exist (and no longer) was a legal owner of any property situated in the area of Israel...."

In other words, Palestinians fleeing for their lives became "absentees" with no legal right to land and property Israel wanted to steal.

(2) giving settlers land designated "public" or "state" for environmental, historic or religious reasons.

(3) using Israeli law (denied Palestinians) to pursue alleged Jewish ownership of land or property prior to 1948.

(4) buying land through intermediaries as well as through a process involving threats, deception, false depositions, or forged documentation, complicit courts cheating Palestinian owners.

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Stephen Lendman

Abu Abed, 84, returned recently to what remains of Hittin, the former Arab
village in northern Israel where he was born. He fled with his family in 1948.
(Rina Castelnuovo for The New York Times)

An earlier article reviewed the April Mossawa Advocacy Center for Arab Citizens in Israel report [.pdf] titled, "One Year for Israel's New Government and the Arab Minority in Israel," accessed through THIS link.

This article discusses a new Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) report titled, "Project Democracy - Fighting for the Ground Rules" for Israeli Arabs.

Israel's bogus democratic credentials are shameless and transparent, for growing numbers of Israeli Jews, but mainly for denying equal rights to minority Arabs, comprising 20% of the population. ACRI explained, saying:

"One of the most important principles in a democracy is to protect the minority against....tyranny. A democratic state is by nature pluralistic and respectful of diversity among its citizens, and enables each group within its population that so wishes to maintain all the components of its own identity, including its heritage, culture, and national identity."

Israel governs mirror opposite, disdaining anyone not Jewish, largely denying them any rights, while increasing harsh levels of persecution, especially against unwanted Arabs. As a result, today's reality is lawless discrimination, at times erupting in violence, injuries and deaths.

Arab citizens are increasingly persecuted because Israel won't "hesitate to employ lethal violence against" them on any pretext or none whatever. With no accountability or prosecutions, Muslims are unsafe, knowing their government is the enemy, not protector of their rights.

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Khalid Amayreh

The Israeli press on Wednesday, 3 November, reported that Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu deliberated a draft known as the "incitement index", measuring the levels of violence and anti-Israel sentiment among Palestinians.
The meter completely ignores the much more virulent and nearly daily incitement by Israeli political and religious leaders against Palestinians, Muslims and non-Jews in general.

In fact, Israeli-Jewish incitement and racism against gentiles in general exceeds in terms of wickedness and depravity anything ever uttered by the Palestinians, Israel's ultimate victims, by many light years.

In reality, while Palestinians do voice anti-Israeli attitudes, given the decades-long Israeli occupation of their country and brutalization of their people, Jewish racism as expressed in word and in deed, is more or less a built-in character and permanent pathological feature that is quite conspicuous in Zionist and even many Jewish religious circles. Ignoring or evading this real issue, e.g., for fear of being accused of anti-Semitism, is dishonest, immoral, and anti-academic.

For example, it is well known that some important Jewish sects, including mainstream sects, view gentiles as a whole as beasts created by the Almighty in a human shape. Thus, the lives of these beasts have no sanctity whatsoever. Other basic virtues such as dignity and honor never apply to the goyim.

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John Pilger
johnpilger.com

Rise like lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number.
Shake your chains to earth like dew.
Which in sleep has fallen on you.
Ye are many – they are few.

These days, the stirring lines of Percy Shelley’s The Mask of Anarchy may seem unattainable. I don’t think so. Shelley was both a Romantic and political truth-teller. His words resonate now because only one political course is left to those who are disenfranchised and whose ruin is announced on a government spread sheet.

Born of the "never again" spirit of 1945, social democracy in Britain has surrendered to an extreme political cult of money worship. This reached its apogee when £1 trillion of public money was handed unconditionally to corrupt banks by a Labour government whose leader, Gordon Brown, had previously described "financiers" as the nation’s "great example" and his personal "inspiration".

This is not to say Parliamentary politics is meaningless. They have one meaning now: the replacement of democracy by a business plan for every human activity, every dream, every decency, every hope, every child born. The old myths of British rectitude, imperial in origin, provided false comfort while the Blair gang, assisted by venal MPs, finished Thatcher’s work and built the foundation of the present "coalition". This is led by a former PR man for an asset stripper and by a bagman who will inherit his knighthood and the tax-avoided fortune of his father, the 17th Baronet of Ballentaylor. David Cameron and George Osborne are essentially fossilised spivs who, in colonial times, would have been sent by their daddies to claim foreign terrain and plunder.

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Siv O'Neall
Axis of Logic

“The interests behind the Bush Administration, such as the Council on Foreign Relations, The Trilateral Commission – founded by Brzezinski for David Rockefeller – and the Bilderberger Group, have prepared for and are now moving to implement open world dictatorship within the next five years. They are not fighting against terrorists. They are fighting against citizens.” ~ Dr. Johannes B. Koeppl (1)

Preparing for World Dominance

The planning for the days of the Unites States asserting itself comfortably as the lone global power, influencing trade, resources, and living conditions all over the world, is anything but recent history. Still, you often read words implying that the U.S. began its serious role as the Predator of other nations’ resources, altering their way of life and taking over the running of their economies, after the end of the old colonialist era. The arrogant U.S. takeover of nations became institutionalized with the PNAC(2) conspiracy, which made their openly imperial ambitions known to the whole world.

The underground mafia that began its devilish scheming during the reign of the Hollywood actor president with the friendly people’s smile, was doing its secret planning for the century to come. The man with the smile was the label man who was covering up the cold calculations of the think tank that was going to twist the world into obedience, with money or with bombs. What the U.S. couldn’t buy up or steer into their own galaxy, they figured they could always get at with military might.

The Project for A New American Century was certainly a clear signal to the world that ‘Here we come – throw away your hand plows. We are bringing you the real tools to dig up the goods and to teach you how to live the good life.’ That was the open message. What it actually stood for was just plain greed and determination to own the world. Nothing less.

After this presumptuous beginning of taking over the world had gotten under way – in modern times taking a good head start during the Reagan era – living conditions in the countries concerned just went down and down. Human rights as well as justice and equality in general deteriorated badly.

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Stephen Lendman

Orwell's Dreams (flickr)

An earlier article discussed America's violent culture, accessed through THIS link.

Its opening comments are expanded below:

What do you call a country that glorifies wars and violence in the name of peace. One that's been at war every year in its history against one or more adversaries. One that believes pacifism is sissy and unpatriotic. One that feels militarism is a higher form of civilization. One that threatens planetary life.

One corrupted by malfeasance. One with the world's largest prison population, a domestic gulag besides others abroad. One placing no value on human rights and life. One exploiting the many for the few. One empowering money over people, championing concentrated wealth. One calling fake elections real.

One practicing torture as official policy. One dripping with racism and hatemongering. One with the highest homicide rate of all western nations and a passion for guns. One where violent films, sports, and video games are most popular. One where authorities participate in illicit drugs trafficking, letting major banks launder revenues.

One where state-sponsored terrorism subverts democratic freedoms, targeting the weak and disadvantaged relentlessly. One recklessly out of control, harsh and inhumane on a fast track toward despotism. One where the rule of law is rhetoric, not policy, where dominance supersedes rights, where dissent is now criminal.

One also where authorities persecute residents for their race, faith, ethnicity, or immigration status. One where thousands targeted are arrested, charged, convicted, wrongfully imprisoned, and at times deported after weeks, months or even years of harsh incarceration.

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Stephen Lendman

Since the 1980s, neoliberalism dominated US politics under Democrats and Republicans. Bush I continued Reagan policies. Clinton hardened them. Bush II much more, and Obama so far matched Star Trek, going where no administration went before. Count the ways. They're manyfold, favoring business over popular interests, yet he's accused of being socialist.

On November 2, angry voters responded, shifting right despite favoring many left of center issues, a combination of outrage and angst overriding their best interests. Go figure because what they got will incense them more.

During hard times, election cycles repeat a common pattern. Angry voters throw out bums for new ones, discarding them next time around for still more, mindless of what an earlier article explained - that US democracy is fake. The criminal class in Washington is bipartisan. Mock elections pretend to be real. The process is mere kabuki theater run by political consultants and PR wizards, supported by major media misreporting, featuring horse race issues, not real ones.

Everything is pre-scripted. Secrecy and back room deals substitute for a free, fair and open process. Party bosses chose candidates. Big money owns them. Key outcomes are predetermined, and cheated voters get the best democracy money can buy, each time no different than others.

Recall November 2008. Promising change after eight George Bush/Republican dominated years, Obama won the most convincing non-incumbent victory in over 50 years, sweeping Democrats to large majorities in both houses.

On election night, the mood celebrated hope for progressive change, an end to imperial wars, and a new day for America. When word came around 10PM, expectant thousands in Chicago's Grant Park erupted with chants of "yes we can," hoping Obama would deliver at a time of deepening economic duress. Two years later, disappointment, disillusion, frustration, and anger erupted over promises made, then broken, once again betting new faces will govern better than old ones. Think again.

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