Month: January 2009

Zionists Imitate Hitler – an Aporrea Video

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By Aporrea Editors (“Imagine” by John Lennon)

Jan 30, 2009, 12:31 – In these times, the Zionist State of Israel repeats the same plans of racist terrorism and killing against the Palestinian people, thus surpassing its executioners, the Nazis. (The images shown in the video stem from an e-mail sent by a diplomat in Norway’s embassy to the kingdom of Saudi Arabia).

(translated by Axis of Logic from Aporrea)

Original in Spanish: “29 de enero 2009. – Hace tiempo que el Estado sionista de Israel repite los mismos esquemas de terrorismo racista y genocida contra el pueblo palestino superando así a sus verdugos los nazis.

Pd. Las imagenes mostradas en el video provienen de un correo electronico enviado por un diplomatico de la embajada noruega ante el reino de arabia saudita.”

 

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Source: Axis of Logic


Living (and dying) in the age of barbarism By William Bowles

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31 January 2009

Israeli Soldiers Play ‘Sophie’s Choice’ With Palestinian Mothers
“…Out of all the devastation I have seen so far, there is one story in particular that I think the world needs to hear. I met a mother who was at home with her ten children when Israeli soldiers entered the house. The soldiers told her she had to choose five of her children to “give as a gift to Israel.” As she screamed in horror they repeated the demand and told her she could choose or they would choose for her. Then these soldiers murdered five of her children in front of her…” www.uruknet.de/?p=51196[1]

“Let us waste no time in sterile litanies and nauseating mimicry. [Let us] Leave this Europe where they are never done talking of Man, yet murder men everywhere they find them, at the corner of every one of their own streets, in all the corners of the globe. For centuries they have stifled almost the whole of humanity in the name of a so-called spiritual experience. Look at them today swaying between atomic and spiritual disintegration…” Franz Fanon ‘The Wretched of the Earth’

It surely cannot have escaped your attention that our much vaunted ‘democracies’ are in fact barbarian states masquerading as civilized. And if you haven’t noticed then it’s time you did not only because they do their ‘civilizing’ in your name but when they’ve done ‘civilizing’ the brown and poor people of our planet, it’ll be your turn next to get ‘civilized’.

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Vittorio Arrigoni: The gases of the Israeli bombs in Gaza have spared no one

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I crossed the threshold of my house in Almina, facing Gaza City port, after several days of absence. Everything was exactly as I had left it – the gas cylinder still anorexic (feeding it is too expensive) and the electric current cut off by foreign shears. The once pleasant panorama outside my window has changed and no longer gladdens my spirits from the misery of living under siege. On the contrary, it now rubs salt in the wound, a trauma that won’t heal with its reminder of a massacre. Twenty metres from my front door, where the fire station once stood, a huge crater now gapes wide enough for children to mess around in, as if to expel their parents’ demon.

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Corporate Watch – Direct Action Against Israel

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On the second big Gaza solidarity march in London on 10th January, angry protesters smashed the front of a Starbucks store on Kensington High St, near the Israeli embassy, while other activists occupied the Ahava beauty shop in central London. Other actions in protest at the Israeli massacre in Gaza this month have included occupying the offices of the British Israel Communications and Research Centre (BICOM) in central London, ‘decommissioning’ the ITT/EDO arms factory in Brighton and university occupations across the country calling for divestment. So, who are these companies and why are they being targeted by protesters and campaigners? Corporate Watch takes a detailed look.

1. ARMS COMPANIES

Israel was the world’s 6th largest arms importer between 2003 and 2007, accounting for 3.80% of world deliveries, according to the SIPRI Arms Transfers Database. During that period, the US accounted for 94% of the exports of arms to Israel. France, Germany and the UK accounted for a big proportion of the rest. In 2007 alone, EU member states authorised the export of €200m worth of items on the EU Military List to Israel.

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Video: Prime minister Erdogan at Davos

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The World Economic Forum at Davos had an incredible moment of truth… After Shimon Peres was allowed to justify the wanton killing that the Jewish State engaged in over the territory they have strangled with their inhumane blockade, (and received applause for it by the men and women waiting for their champagne glasses to be filled after the dinner that of course was more important to them than hearing the words of the Prime Minister of the largest European State with a Muslim majority and one of the most strategic areas on the face of the earth), Tayyip Erdogan begins to respond to the barrage of filth poured out by Peres. — Palestine Think Tank

 

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Paul D’Amato: The tale of two apartheids

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Israeli leaders are usually loath to admit that Israel is an apartheid-style state. Yet there have been moments of candor.

‘Israel and [Apartheid] South Africa have one thing above all else in common: they are both situated in a predominantly hostile world inhabited by dark peoples.’

29 January, 2009

IN APRIL 1976, John Vorster, president of the then-racist apartheid regime of South Africa, paid an official state visit to Israel, where he was given the red-carpet treatment.

Israeli television showed him on his first day, visiting the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem. At an official state banquet held for Vorster, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin toasted the ‘ideals shared by Israel and South Africa.’

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Secret Israeli database reveals full extent of illegal settlement By Uri Blau

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Just four years ago, the defense establishment decided to carry out a seemingly elementary task: establish a comprehensive database on the settlements. Brigadier General (res.) Baruch Spiegel, aide to then defense minister Shaul Mofaz, was put in charge of the project. For over two years, Spiegel and his staff, who all signed a special confidentiality agreement, went about systematically collecting data, primarily from the Civil Administration.

One of the main reasons for this effort was the need to have credible and accessible information at the ready to contend with legal actions brought by Palestinian residents, human rights organizations and leftist movements challenging the legality of construction in the settlements and the use of private lands to establish or expand them. The painstakingly amassed data was labeled political dynamite.

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Higher Ground By William Bowles

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30 January 2009

manifestation-0011-150x150I am a third generation lefty, my parents and grandparents on both sides were lefties of one flavour or another, but I think I am the first one to actually write pretty much full time about events from left field.

Throughout my three-score and some on this planet it’s gone from bad to better to worse to downright disastrous, the process propelled by the insane ‘logic’ of capital.

Trying to chart the ebb and flow of it all is not easy, it’s complex and contradictory, just as we human beings are and sometimes I just get sick and tired of the whole damn thing and wonder why I even bother. There’s no money it, exposure to an awful lot of grief, misery and injustice that I have absolutely no control over, so why do it?

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Zionism and the road to Gaza’s killing fields

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George Anthony explains the murderous Israeli strategy

Joining the Young Communist League in Hackney during 1949 wasn’t too difficult: the Cold War, initiated by Truman and Churchill at Fulton in March 1946 hadn’t yet sunk into the Hackney psyche.

Indeed, there were 1,500 members of the Communist Party in the borough, and three Communist councillors on the Hackney Borough Council.

These impressive figures were due to the anti-fascist struggle waged against Mosley Fascism amongst the large Jewish community and led by the Communist Party.

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Francis A. Boyle: International Law and Israel`s War On Gaza

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Professor of International Law Francis A. Boyle presents an agenda for an international legal response to Israel’s war on Palestinians.

When the Oslo Document was originally presented by the Israeli government to the Palestinian Delegation to the Middle East Peace Negotiations in the Fall of 1992, it was rejected by the Delegation because it obviously constituted a bantustan. This document carried out Menachem Begin’s disingenuous misinterpretation of the Camp David Accords–expressly rejected by U.S. President Jimmy Carter–that all they called for was autonomy for the people and not for the land too.

Soon thereafter, unbeknownst to the Delegation and to almost everyone else, the Israeli government opened up a secret channel of negotiations in Norway. There the Israeli government re-presented the document that had already been rejected by the Palestinian Delegation in Washington, D.C. It was this document, with very minor modifications, that was later signed at the White House on 13 September 1993.

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Sarah Gillepsie: The BBC and the transformation of suffering into propaganda

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bbc-gaza.jpg

‘What impartiality requires is not that everyone receive equal treatment, but rather that everyone be treated as an equal.’ Ronald Dworkin Taking Rights Seriously. Harvard University Press. 1977, p. 227).

BBC director general Mark Thomson can not screen footage of Palestinian suffering in Gaza without compromising his cooperation’s impartiality. At the heart of his obfuscation lays a belief that Palestinian pain is not an objective reality. It is, at best, a subjective possibility, one loaded with the potential to burst into a subversive, destabilizing force.  

For activists and supporters who are frequently asked why they devote more energy to Palestine than Darfur or the Congo (the implication being of course that they are anti-Semites) Mark Thomson provides the most succinct answer. For Thomson has no problem whatsoever screening Disaster Emergency Committee films on behalf of Darfur and the Congo. The suffering endured by people in these regions is endorsed by the BBC as a universally acknowledged fact. Screening footage of the humanitarian disaster in Palestine though, sabotages Sky and the BBC’s obligation to be ‘balanced.’ If this was indeed a war, and not genocidal attack, then the BBC could counter their depictions of carnage in Gaza with images of the horrors endured in Sderot. But this is of course impossible. The visual impact of a damaged kitchen doesn’t quite cut it next to the apocalyptic hell hole that is Gaza.

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COHA: Mixed Results In Salvadoran Elections

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  • U.S. Embassy’s historically interventionist role
  • Ambassador Rose Likins, among others, had led campaign to block FMLN from winning the ballot
  • Tony Saca and his predecessors slavishly aspire to be Washington’s best friend in Latin America

A little over a week after polls closed in El Salvador’s municipal and legislative elections, the opposing parties began to prepare for yet another round of campaigning. Although the leftist Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) has lost the mayoral ballot in the capital city of San Salvador, it seems likely that, for the first time in twenty years of right-wing rule, the former guerrilla party has a good chance to win the upcoming presidential ballot in March. In the recently staged elections it was able to gain three seats in the legislative assembly, winning a total of 42.5 percent of the votes, trailed by the currently governing Nationalist Republican Alliance Party (ARENA), with 38.4 percent of the tally.

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The Final Solution is a No-State Solution By William Bowles

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27 January 2009

It was either in 1941 or maybe 1942 that the Nazis implemented the ‘Final Solution’, the extermination of all ‘non-Aryan’ peoples that included not only the Jews but also the Roma and the Serbs. So the term Holocaust is not copyright © the Jewish ‘race’ in spite of their appropriation of the Upper case.

The numbers are not important, let the historians and researchers argue over whether it was five or six million Jews or whether it was half-a-million or two million Roma who ‘went up the chimney’[1] (I don’t have a number for the Serbs, but perhaps a million died at the hands of the Croatian Ustase, the local Nazis in the then Yugoslavia, as well as at the hands of German Nazi occupiers).

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Gaza Aid Appeal BBC occupation success

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25 January 2009

Written by Stop the War Admin

BBC Scotland occupiers

bbc-glasgow-1.jpgImage: Gareth Harper

Over 100 people occupied BBC Scotland’s headquarters today, demanding that the BBC show the Disasters Emergency Committee Gaza appeal.

The occupation continued for almost four hours – despite the police threatening mass arrests to remove everyone within 15 minutes.

The action increased the pressure on the BBC with extensive national and international media coverage, including CNN, CBS and Al-Jazeera.

Tony Benn phoned the occupation to offer his support, saying ‘The decision to occupy the BBC in Glasgow must be understood as a plea for the people of Gaza, who are suffering so much and who need our help to help get the money through’

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Housmans Radical Books (London) Newsletter February 2009

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housmans-new.jpg

CONTENTS:

NEWS

1. Facebook group launched!

EVENTS

2. (talk/book signing)
‘Securing Our Survival (SOS) – The Case for a Nuclear Weapons Convention’ a talk by Bruce Kent
Saturday 7th February – 5pm

3. (talk)
‘Frantz Fanon and the continuing struggle against colonialism’ a talk by Ziauddin Sardar
Wednesday 11th February – 7pm

4. (talk and book launch)
War Resisters’ International launch their ‘Handbook for Nonviolent Campaigns’
Saturday 14th February – 6pm

5. (talk and book launch)
Campaign against Climate Change presents: ‘Too Little, Too Late: The Politics of Climate Change’ with Colin Challen MP
Wednesday 18th February – 7pm

6. (live music)
Trusty Chords Presents: Squab, Mega Games 2, PJ & Gaby
Saturday 21st February – 6-9pm

7. (talk/book signing)
The Freethought History Research Group presents: ‘Darwin, Marx and Aveling’ a talk by Terry Liddle
Saturday 28th February – 5pm

8. Forthcoming in March 2009

BOOKS

9. ‘The First Six Days: Abu Dis Memories of the Six-day War in 1967 – the Beginning of the Israeli Occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip’ by Nandita Dowson and Abdul Wahab Sabbah

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Move to End “Internet Neutrality”: Blow to Bloggers. “Ten Pin Strike against Political Freedom” By Sherwood Ross

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26 January, 2009 Global Research

If the cable and phone companies that transmit Internet data are allowed to charge higher rates to some producers for faster service the result will be “a ten pin strike against political freedom,” a prominent legal authority warns.

That’s because the change will enable the wealthy to “quickly take over the high speed transmissions (for their trash commercial content) just as they completely monopolize radio and TV, and just as their incredibly greedy profit-seeking has had a very deleterious effect on print journalism,” writes Lawrence Velvel, dean of the Massachusetts School of Law at Andover.

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IPS: Alarm Spreads Over Use of Lethal New Weapons By Erin Cunningham

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GAZA CITY, Jan 22 (IPS) – Eighteen-year-old Mona Al-Ashkar says she did not immediately know the first explosion at the United Nations (UN) school in Beit Lahiya had blown her left leg off. There was smoke, then chaos, then the pain and disbelief set in once she realised it was gone – completely severed by the weapon that hit her.

Mona is one of the many patients among the 5,500 injured that have international and Palestinian doctors baffled by the type of weaponry used in the Israeli operation. High-profile human rights organisations like Amnesty International are accusing Israel of war crimes.

Mona’s doctors at Gaza City’s Al-Shifa hospital found no shrapnel in her leg, and it looked as though it had been ‘sliced right off with a knife.’

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44 Years Later, LBJ’s Ghost Hovers Over the 44th President By Norman Solomon

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A few days after the inauguration, in a piece celebrating the arrival of the Obama administration, New York Times columnist Bob Herbert wrote that the new president has clearly signaled: “No more crazy wars.”

I wish.

Last week — and 44 years ago — there were many reasons to celebrate the inauguration of a president after the defeat of a right-wing Republican opponent. But in the midst of numerous delightful fragrances in the air, a bad political odor is apt to be almost ineffable.

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