The formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the rearmament of Germany confirmed that for the United States, the war in Europe was not entirely over. It still isn’t.
(Pixabay)By Diana Johnstone
in Paris
Special to Consortium News
The toolbox is empty. Russia knows this. Biden knows this. Blinken knows this. CNN knows this. The only ones who aren’t aware of this are the American people, says Scott Ritter.
3 April 2021 — The Electronic Intifada
Spokesperson Ned Price attempted this week to clarify the State Department’s muddled language on the Israeli occupation. Reuters
Last year, presidential candidate Joe Biden personally intervened to keep the word “occupation” out of the Democratic Party’s platform regarding Israel.
11 November 2020 — Black Agenda Report
Danny Haiphong, BAR Contributing Editor
The Biden-Harris administration is good news for corporations, cops, war profiteers and banks too big to fail, but offers nothing to save the people and planet from multiple rises.
2 November 2020 — Moon of Alabama
The recently revealed business deals of Hunter Biden will strongly influence politics after an eventual Joe Biden win in tomorrows election.
On October 15 the New York Post published a story on Hunter Biden based on data from a laptop Joe Biden’s son had left with a repair shop. The Biden family has not disputed that the laptop or the data on it is genuine. Next to the porn on the laptop there were thousand of emails which describe shady deals with a (now defunct) large Chinese energy company, CEFC.
2 March 2020 — The Electronic Intifada
Myles Holmes, an anti-Muslim and anti-gay pastor, will speak Monday at AIPAC just days after suggesting torture and death for Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg. (via Facebook)
Pastor Myles Holmes, an anti-Muslim and anti-gay bigot, is scheduled to speak about evangelical support for Israel at the conference of the powerful lobby group AIPAC on Monday.
18 December, 2019 — Strategic Culture Foundation
1 October 2019 — Club Orlov
When everything is routine, world leaders generally manage to remain poker-faced or (in the case of American politicians) grinning stupidly with a vacant-eyed stare. But when things get interesting all sorts of ticks and grimaces and strange gestures and postures start showing up. And when you see one of the “world leaders” (in quotes because I use the term facetiously) looking like his entire life is flashing before his eyes at a joint press conference, you can be sure that something very funky is going down. To wit: here is the Ukraine’s new, popularly elected president, Vladimir Zelensky, appearing next to Donald Trump and looking for all the world as if he really doesn’t want to be there. A bright seven-year-old will tell you that much (I checked) but we adults wish to know more. And so I will oblige and fill you in on some of the salient details.
2 July 2013 — RT
Caracas is ready to help NSA leaker Edward Snowden, but will “leave the decision to the people” when considering his request for asylum, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has told RT in an exclusive interview.
2 July 2013 — RT
Correa told The Guardian that Quito will not be involved in financing or organizing Snowden’s travel from Moscow, specifying that the fugitive leaker would have to reach Ecuadorian soil before the government considers protecting him from American law enforcement.
20 December, 2010 — creative-i.info
22 March, 2010 — Palestine Think Tank
It may well be that the citizens of the world, tired of hearing newscasts about Israel and the Palestinians, are not in the mood to hear it. Still, pressure in Palestine is building up quickly due to Israel’s continuing defiance of calls from around the world to halt settlement building in East Jerusalem and the other occupied territories. Simultaneously, we are hearing a clear increase in Palestinian calls for a Third Intifada, and it may well be that it is already underway. The failure of the international community to pressure Israel into abiding with international law, despite its astounding disrespect for human rights, its continuing territorial expansionism, and its flagrant violations of the Fourth Geneva Convention in every thinkable way, is threatening to yet again take its toll on the fate of the Palestinian people.
American loyalty or subservience?
Nablus - photo by ANSA
On March 22, Netanyahu declared before his trip to Washington: “As far as we are concerned, building in Jerusalem is like building in Tel Aviv, and we have made this clear to the Americans.” There has been much ado about the ‘crisis’ in US-Israeli relations, which the media tends to portray as one of the worst in decades, but it seems that most of the differences between the two have already been ironed out. There is obviously more truth in the repeated declarations of unflinching loyalty of US politicians to the Israeli agenda, such as Obama’s infamous statement that Jerusalem ‘will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided’, which he made in his speech to AIPAC the very morning after he secured the Democratic nomination as a presidential candidate in 2008.
This statement was hastily watered down in the following days, when it was answered by the Palestinians and foreign policy commentators with sharp denunciations. International law, after all, has it that East Jerusalem is illegally occupied territory. Despite this, the fact of the matter remains that Israel has been given a free hand in the Judaization of Arab East Jerusalem through the forced eviction of Palestinian residents from their homes, the ongoing excavations underneath the neighborhood of Silwan, the continuing isolation of East Jerusalem from its surrounding Palestinian hinterland, and the announcement of plans for the extensive construction of illegal settler buildings in East Jerusalem.
21 March, 2010 — http://spritzlerj.blogspot.com/2010/03/biden-vs-netanyahu-flap.html
The recent flap between America’s Vice President Joe Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu over Israel’s building 1600 new Jews-only housing units in East Jerusalem is, at its root, a disagreement about whether or not Israel should take the “new path” advocated by Israel’s previous Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert. I discussed Olmert’s “new path” in 2008 in my article, A New Path For Israel?, which noted that hours after resigning as prime minister of Israel on September 21, 2008, Olmert gave an interview to the Israeli newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth (excerpted in the New York Review of Books), in which he said,
“We must reach an agreement with the Palestinians, meaning a withdrawal from nearly all, if not all, of the [occupied] territories. Some percentage of these territories would remain in our hands, but we must give the Palestinians the same percentage [of territory elsewhere] without this, there will be no peace.” In answer to the interviewer asking, “Including Jerusalem?” Olmert replied, “Including Jerusalem with, I’d imagine, special arrangements made for the Temple Mount and the holy/historical sites.”
Indeed, prior to this, as reported in Ha’aretz November 29, 2007, Olmert explained exactly why the “two state solution” was necessary if the state of Israel was to persist as a Jewish state, in these words:
WASHINGTON – “If the day comes when the two-state solution collapses, and we face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights (also for the Palestinians in the territories), then, as soon as that happens, the State of Israel is finished,” Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told Haaretz Wednesday, the day the Annapolis conference ended in an agreement to try to reach a Mideast peace settlement by the end of 2008.
“The Jewish organizations, which were our power base in America, will be the first to come out against us,” Olmert said, “because they will say they cannot support a state that does not support democracy and equal voting rights for all its residents.”
It appears that Netanyahu disagrees with Olmert and does not believe the two state solution is necessary for Israel’s existence as a Jewish state (which Zionist leaders define to be a state with at least an 80% Jewish population, even if it takes ethnic cleansing to make it so.) There seems to be a real disagreement among these equally (!) hard-core mass-murdering racist camps within the Zionist elite. It also seems that, as I suggested in 2008, the U.S. ruling elite thinks Olmert, not Netanyahu, is right about what is best for the Zionist project of ethnic cleansing to remain secure.
Due to this disagreement, we may see the U.S. government apply real (not just the usual phony kind) pressure on Israel to follow Olmert’s path. We may see things like an arms embargo on provisions of U.S. arms to the Israeli government. Let us not confuse such pressure with opposition–even the slightest amount of opposition–to Zionism or the ethnic cleansing that is its defining goal.
The American ruling plutocracy views Zionist ethnic cleansing as strategically useful for controlling both the people in the Middle East and Americans. If we in the United States are going to have a government that does not support Zionist ethnic cleansing, it will require defeating the power of the plutocracy that, in actual fact, controls our government no matter who we elect. The plutocracy was never elected, and thus cannot be un-elected. Removing them from power will take a revolution–a revolution to win genuine democracy–which is exactly what we don’t have and should be working for, for the sake of ordinary Americans as well as all of the people in the world, like the Palestinians, who suffer grievously at the hands of our war mongering rulers.
8 July, 2009
The “Iranian people” have not spoken.
What’s happening in Iran today is a developing conflict between two forces that each represent millions of people. There are good people on both sides and the issues are complicated. So before U.S. progressives decide to weigh in, supporting one side and condemning the other, let’s take a little closer look.
Who Won the Election?
On June 12, 2009, nearly 40 million Iranians, some 85 percent of the electorate, cast votes for one of four presidential candidates. The following day, the government announced that the incumbent, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, had won 62.63 percent of the vote, enough to avoid a run-off with his leading rival, former Prime Minister Mir Hossein Mousavi, who was said to have received 33.75 percent of the vote (CNN, June 13, 2009).
“Before the vote count ended, Moussavi [sic] issued a sharply worded letter urging the counting to stop because of ‘blatant violations’ and lashed out at what he indicated was an unfair process” (CNN, June 13, 2009).
Mousavi denounced the results as a fraud and hundreds of thousands of his supporters poured into the streets of Tehran and other major cities to protest the election results.
6 July, 2009 | T r u t h o u t
“Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” – George Orwell
On July 4 in Baghdad, Vice President Joe Biden, who campaigned with Barack Obama on a platform of ending the occupation of Iraq, found himself in one of former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s lavish buildings, the Al-Faw Palace. While one of Saddam Hussein’s thrones sat on the side of the room, Biden presided over a swearing-in ceremony for 237 soldiers, who were becoming US citizens. Speaking of the ceremony, Biden said, “We did it in Saddam’s palace, and I can think of nothing better. That S.O.B. is rolling over in his grave right now.” Perhaps the irony of both the scene and his statement were lost to Biden. For if Saddam Hussein was rolling in his grave, the reason would have less to do with one of his palaces being used as a naturalization center for US soldiers, and more to do with the fact that the US government has no intention of withdrawing from Iraq anytime soon.
We have passed the June 30 deadline that, according to a Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) signed between US Ambassador Ryan Crocker and Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari on November 17, 2008, was the date all US forces were to have been withdrawn from all of Iraq’s cities. Today, however, there are at least 134,000 US soldiers in Iraq – a number barely lower than the number that were there in 2003. In addition, US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates testified on June 9 that the United States would maintain an average of at least 100,000 troops in Iraq through fiscal year 2010.
17 November, 2008
America’s having a new President remains the number one global news, but it is already time to put an end to the dreams of quite a few journalists, experts, and seemingly knowledgeable political scientists that Obama’s victory in the US presidential race is a prologue to an era free of confrontation and marked by cooperation between nations and peaceful coexistence.
In the US politics, the human factor is nowhere nearly as important as in the Russian one, in which a lot depends on who is at the helm. To understand what we should expect from the nearest future we should take a look at the potential members of the Administration of the 44th US President.
17 November, 2008
Rahm Israel Emanuel: Will Handle U.S. Domestic Policy for Israel
Dennis Ross: Will Handle U.S. Foreign Policy for Israel
“Right and wrong are the same in Palestine as anywhere else. What is peculiar about the Palestine conflict is that the world has listened to the party that committed the offence and has turned a deaf ear to the victims.”
– Prof. Arnold Toynbee, British Historian“The nation which indulges towards another—a habitual fondness is in some degree a slave. It is a slave to its animosity or to its affection, either of which is sufficient to lead it astray from its duty and its interest. ..a passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement or justification …Real patriots who may resist the intrigues of the favorite are liable to become suspected and odious, while its tools and dupes usurp the applause and confidence of the people, to surrender their interests.”
–President George Washington, Farewell Address, 1796
The New Dark Age 