Day: May 19, 2009

Hisham Zreiq’s film Sons of Eilaboun: introduction by Gilad Atzmon

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18 May, 2009 – Palestine Think Tank

The truth of the Nakba has been hidden for many decades. Not many except the Palestinians are aware of the scale of 1948 ethnic expulsions and even fewer are aware of the atrocities occasionally performed by the newly born IDF. As a young Israeli pupil I was taught to believe that the ‘Arabs’ (this is how we called them) just run for their lives. No one forced ‘them’ to do so, they were just a bunch of cowards, we were told. Similarly, we were preached that they were not as attached to the land as we, the Israelis, are. While they fled for their lives without fighting back, we, the chosens, schlepped all the way back to Zion after 2000 years to reclaim ‘our’ historic land.

The truth of hundreds of massacres of Palestinian villagers committed by a young and well-trained enthusiastic IDF was absolutely hidden. There wasn’t even a hint that such a thing took place. We knew of one massacre only, the one in Deir Yassin. We were aware of it just because it was there to serve the Israeli so-called ‘left’ leadership, as a means of vilifying their rightwing political rival, namely Menahem (who was directly responsible for this very massacre).

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Media Lens 18 May, 2009: Beholden To The Big Powers: Israel, Gaza And The UN

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18 May, 2009 – MEDIA LENS: Correcting for the distorted vision of the corporate media

On December 27, 2008, Israel launched Operation Cast Lead, a massive assault on Gaza. 22 days later, around 1,400 Palestinians, including over 300 children, and 13 Israelis were dead; about 5,000 Palestinians were wounded. Israeli forces bombed and shelled schools, medical centres, hospitals, ambulances, United Nations buildings (including UN schools), power plants, sewage plants, roads, bridges and civilian homes. This was described in much of the press as hitting “Hamas targets” (e.g. David Gardner, ‘U.S. accused of white phosphorus against Taliban’, Daily Mail, May 11, 2009).

Earlier this month, the UN announced the results of an inquiry into attacks on its buildings and personnel in Gaza. It concluded that the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) were:

“involved in varying degrees of negligence or recklessness with regard to United Nations premises and to the safety of United Nations staff and other civilians within those premises, with consequent deaths, injuries, and extensive physical damage and loss of property.” (Donald Macintyre, ‘UN retreats after Israel hits out at Gaza report’, Independent, May 6, 2009)

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Obama’s Animal Farm: Bigger, Bloodier Wars Equal Peace and Justice By Prof James Petras

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17 May, 2009 – Global Research

“The Deltas are psychos…You have to be a certified psychopath to join the Delta Force…”, a US Army colonel from Fort Bragg once told me back in the 1980’s. Now President Obama has elevated the most notorious of the psychopaths, General Stanley McChrystal, to head the US and NATO military command in Afghanistan. McChrystal’s rise to leadership is marked by his central role in directing special operations teams engaged in extrajudicial assassinations, systematic torture, bombing of civilian communities and search and destroy missions. He is the very embodiment of the brutality and gore that accompanies military-driven empire building. Between September 2003 and August 2008, McChrystal directed the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations (JSO) Command which operates special teams in overseas assassinations.

The point of the ‘Special Operations’ teams (SOT) is that they do not distinguish between civilian and military oppositions, between activists and their sympathizers and the armed resistance. The SOT specialize in establishing death squads and recruiting and training paramilitary forces to terrorize communities, neighborhoods and social movements opposing US client regimes. The SOT’s ‘counter-terrorism’ is terrorism in reverse, focusing on socio-political groups between US proxies and the armed resistance.

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M. Junaid Levesque-Alam, “Pakistan at the Precipice”

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14 May, 2009 – MRZine – Monthly Review
To watch my country of birth unravel has been a curious thing.

As the Taliban continues to sweep across vast swaths of northern Pakistan, American pundits and officials ask incredulously, ‘How can their government let this happen? How can their people let this happen?’ The United States looks on anxiously like a jolted passerby watching a train suddenly jump the tracks.

I was also initially shocked, but I found myself more surprised by my response than the calamitous events themselves. As the Taliban threat metastasized, my minimal sense of attachment to Pakistan began to intensify. While I had mostly kept my memories of Pakistan well out of my mind’s eye, I now began meticulously scanning these recollections, like fingers running across Braille in search of clues as to what went wrong.

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The A H1N1 Pandemic: Pig to Human Transmission of the Swine Flu? By Michel Chossudovsky

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15 May, 2009 – Global Research

The initial outbreak of the H1N1 swine virus is said to have occurred in Mexico. The emphasis, at the political level, has been on tracking the spread of the Mexican swine flu virus as well controlling and monitoring the movement of people in and out of Mexico. A global campaign of fear and insecurity was unleashed following the WHO April 28 announcement of a phase pandemic. The decision of the WHO, which was taken after consultations with Washington and Brussels, was based on unconfirmed and incomplete data regarding the spread of the swine flu and the numbers of cases.

What proves that Mexico was the epicentre of the WHO’s global swine flu pandemic?

There are several important issues underlying this question:

1. The official data pertaining to morbidity and mortality were, in numerous cases, both in Mexico, the US and around the World, not firmly corroborated by laboratory testing of the H1N1 virus.

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