Susan Abulhawa

Israeli hypocrite Naftali Bennett: "There is no mercy for the
murderers of children. This is the time for action, not words."

The bodies of three Israeli settlers who went missing on June 12th were found in a hastily dug shallow grave in Halhul, north of Hebron.

Since the teens went missing from Gush Etzion, a Jewish-only colony in the West Bank, Israel has besieged the 4 million Palestinians who already live under its thumb, storming through towns, ransacking homes and civil institutions, conducting night raids on families, stealing property, kidnapping, injuring, and killing. Warplanes were dispatched to bomb Gaza, again and repeatedly, destroying more homes and institutions and carrying out extrajudicial executions. Thus far, over 570 Palestinians have been kidnapped and imprisoned, most notably a Samer Issawi, the Palestinian who went on a 266-day hunger strike in protest of a previous arbitrary detention. At least 10 Palestinians have been killed, including at least three children, a pregnant woman, and a mentally ill man. Hundreds have been injured, thousands terrorized. Universities and social welfare organizations were ransacked, shut down, their computers and equipment destroyed or stolen, and both private and public documents confiscated from civil institutions. This wonton thuggery is official state policy conducted by its military and does not include the violence to persons and properties perpetuated by paramilitary Israeli settlers, whose persistent attacks against Palestinian civilians have also escalated in the past weeks. And now that the settlers are confirmed dead, Israel has vowed to exact revenge. Naftali Bennet, Economy Minister said, "There is no mercy for the murderers of children. This is the time for action, not words."

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James Cogan

More of the same: out-and-out Talmudic terror against the Palestinians.
It's been like this ever since the ethnic cleansing in 1948, the Nakba.

Tens of thousands of people across Israel and internationally assembled yesterday to mourn the three teenagers whose bodies were discovered on Monday in a shallow grave not far from where they disappeared on June 12. Eyal Yifrah, 19, and Naftali Fraenkel and Gilad Shaer, both 16, were kidnapped and murdered as they hitchhiked back from a religious school in Kfar Etzion, one of the illegal Israeli settlements in the Gush Etzion region of the Palestinian West Bank territory.

The Israeli regime of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has seized on the tragic death of the young men as the pretext for escalating its aggression against the Palestinian people and strengthening Israel’s grip on the occupied territories. The Israeli government has declared that the Islamist party Hamas is responsible for the murders, without providing any evidence to substantiate the charge, which is denied by Hamas.

Early Tuesday, the West Bank homes of two Hamas members accused of involvement in the kidnapping were blown up by Israeli troops—the first such punitive demolitions since 2005. In Gaza, Palestinian sources said Israeli jets had carried out many as 40 air strikes since the bodies were found.

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Wayne Madsen

Like proverbial «bad pennies», many of the leading neo-conservative architects of America’s failed interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan are being hauled back in front of television news cameras to comment on the current predicament that Washington finds itself with a surging «Al Qaeda» spinoff attempting to seize control of eastern Syria and western and northern Iraq and transform the area into a radical Islamic «caliphate».

Although the neo-cons are identifiable by their religious-ethnic makeup – over 90 percent are strong Zionists of eastern and central European Jewish descent, the chief leader of their resurgence is former Vice President Dick Cheney, a privileged member of America’s formerly dominant white Anglo-Saxon Protestant elite. As unapologetic as ever over his failed policy of invading and occupying Iraq, Cheney went on the «fraudcast» airwaves of Fox News and the op-ed page of The Wall Street Journal to lambaste the Obama administration for its failure to prevent the overrunning of a large portion of Iraq by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), also called the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS). Cheney’s op-ed in the Journal was co-written by his daughter Elizabeth, a failed U.S. Senate candidate from Wyoming and a Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs during her father’s vice presidency.

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