Day: April 5, 2009

Palestine: Shooting and Crying – Nothing New Since 1948 … Or is it? Anis Hamadeh

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4 April, 2009

With amazement the world public has noticed in recent weeks that war crimes had apparently been committed in Gaza. (1) Even Israeli soldiers and military staff now report about their own cruelties against the Palestinian population, cruelties that we do not even know from movies. (2) The stylish T-shirts, that promote the shooting of pregnant Palestinian women by indicating that in this way you can kill two human beings with one bullet, appeared strange to people abroad, too. (3) Moreover, the appointment of Avigdor Lieberman as Israeli foreign minister horrifies the public. (4) There would be further reasons to be disgusted, like the ongoing ethnic cleansing in Jerusalem, the plans for expanding the illegal settlements, some killings, the abduction of Gazan fishermen and so on, but these details do not enter the global discourse, because, well, because they never did. The question is: how genuine is the amazement about what happened in Gaza?

Did anything change in Israeli politics? Are those really completely new phenomena, suddenly coming up in the discourse, out of thin air? Or do we only witness the consequences of a continuing strategy that had begun more than sixty years ago? There are good arguments for the latter alternative, especially when you look at the facts. Let us, for example, revisit the year 1948 …

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COHA: The G20 and Latin America: A “Rendezvous With Destiny” or a False Start?

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  • Argentina, Mexico and Brazil represent their region at what could be a momentous summit
  • Calling for accountability from the developed world
  • Preparing the way for a new world order
  • Mexico’s Calderón calls for developing world to assume responsibilities

Today, world leaders will convene in London for the highly anticipated G20 summit. Without a doubt, the current global economic crisis has transformed the geopolitical landscape and is heralding profound shifts in the international distribution of power. No longer are such momentous gatherings restricted solely to the G8 industrialized nations.

The debilitating ramifications of the crisis are not geographically localized, and therefore, any solution requires a global response that includes not only the most developed nations, but also the emerging market economies of the world. In this respect, Latin America is an integral part of the equation. At today’s opening, Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico will represent the region’s interests, as President Obama initiates his study of Latin American realities. Although not dubbed as such, the area nations could play a pivotal role in London and the gathering could be looked back upon as an economic summit dominated by the developing world, with Latin America being an important constituent.

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William Blum: Anti-Empire Report, Number 68, 4 April, 2009 Some thoughts about socialism

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4 April, 2009

‘History is littered with post-crisis regulations. If there are undue restrictions on the operations of businesses, they may view it to be their job to get around them, and you sow the seeds of the next crisis.’ — Liz Ann Sonders, chief investment analyst, CharlesSchwab & Co., a leading US provider of investment services.[1]

And so it goes. Corporations, whether financial or not, strive to maximize profit as inevitably as water seeks its own level. We’ve been trying to ‘regulate’ them since the 19th century. Or is it the 18th? Nothing helps for long. You close one loophole and the slime oozes out of another hole. Wall Street has not only an army of lawyers and accountants, but a horde of mathematicians with advanced degrees searching for the perfect equations to separate people from their money. After all the stimulus money has come and gone, after all the speeches by our leaders condemning greed and swearing to reforms, after the last congressional hearing deploring the corporate executives to their faces, the boys of Wall Street, shrugging off a few bruises, will resume churning out their assortment of financial entities, documents, and packages that go by names like hedge funds, derivatives, collateralized debt obligations, index funds, credit default swaps, structured investment vehicles, subprime mortgages, and many other pieces of paper with exotic names, for which, it must be kept in mind, there had been no public need or strident demand. Speculation, bonuses, and scotch will flow again, and the boys will be all the wiser, perhaps shaken a bit that they’re so reviled, but knowing better now what to flaunt and what to disguise.

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‘Is anti-Zionism hate?’ By Stephen Lendman

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This article responds to a March 15 Los Angeles Times Judea Pearl one headlined: ‘Is anti-Zionism hate?’ Pearl teaches computer science at UCLA, is the father of slain journalist Daniel Pearl, and president of the Daniel Pearl Foundation. It was ‘formed….to continue Danny’s mission and to address the root causes of this tragedy in the spirit’ of the man it represents, including ‘uncompromised objectivity and integrity….and respect for people of all cultures….’

Pearl calls anti-Zionism ‘hate more dangerous than anti-Semitism, threatening lives and peace in the Middle East.’ Zionism is precisely the opposite as numerous Jewish writers, including this one, have addressed.

In his book ‘Overcoming Zionism,’ Joel Kovel explained how it fosters ‘imperialist expansion and militarism (with) signs of the fascist malignancy;’ that it turned Israel ‘into a machine for the manufacture of human rights abuses’ led by terrorists posing as democrats. Kovel’s book and his work got him fired from the Bard College faculty effective July 1 when his current contract expires – for daring to criticize Israel, its Zionist ideology, state-sponsored terror, and decades of lawlessness and egregious behavior.

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Active Thermitic Material Discovered in Dust from the 9/11 World Trade Center Catastrophe

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3 April, 2009 – Global Research

Below is the Abstract, Introduction and Conclusions of this important and carefully researched article

The complete article can be downloaded (pdf)

Active Thermitic Material Discovered in Dust from the 9/11 World Trade Center Catastrophe pp.7-31 (25)

Authors: Niels H. Harrit, Jeffrey Farrer, Steven E. Jones, Kevin R. Ryan, Frank M. Legge, Daniel Farnsworth, Gregg Roberts, James R. Gourley, Bradley R. Larsen

The Open Chemical Physics Journal

Volume 2
ISSN: 1874-4125
doi: 10.2174/1874412500902010007  

Abstract:

We have discovered distinctive red/gray chips in all the samples we have studied of the dust produced by the destruction of the World Trade Center. Examination of four of these samples, collected from separate sites, is reported in this paper. These red/gray chips show marked similarities in all four samples. One sample was collected by a Manhattan resident about ten minutes after the collapse of the second WTC Tower, two the next day, and a fourth about a week later. The properties of these chips were analyzed using optical microscopy, scanning electron microscopy (SEM), X-ray energy dispersive spectroscopy (XEDS), and differential scanning calorimetry (DSC). The red material contains grains approximately 100 nm across which are largely iron oxide, while aluminum is contained in tiny plate-like structures. Separation of components using methyl ethyl ketone demonstrated that elemental aluminum is present. The iron oxide and aluminum are intimately mixed in the red material. When ignited in a DSC device the chips exhibit large but narrow exotherms occurring at approximately 430 °C, far below the normal ignition temperature for conventional thermite. Numerous iron-rich spheres are clearly observed in the residue following the ignition of these peculiar red/gray chips. The red portion of these chips is found to be an unreacted thermitic material and highly energetic.

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