DCI/Palestine "is a national section of the international non-government child rights organisation and movement (dedicated) to promoting and protecting the rights of Palestinian children," according to international law principles.

On December 28, it submitted a complaint [PDF] to several UN authorities titled, "The use of solitary confinement on Palestinian children held in Israeli detention." It's specifically for five children held at Al Jalame and Petah Tikva interrogation centers in Israel.

Their cases follow 29 others since February 2008. At both facilities, "solitary confinement is routinely used."

Though no universally agreed on definition exists, the Istanbul Statement on the Use and Effects of Solitary Confinement defines it as physically isolating prisoners in cells for 22 to 24 hours daily. Human contact is minimized, including quantitative and qualitative stimuli.

The harmful psychological and physical effects are well documented. They include:

• severe anxiety;
• panic attacks;
• lethargy;
• insomnia;
• nightmares;
• dizziness;
• irrational anger, at time uncontrollable;
• confusion;
• social withdrawal;
• memory loss;
• appetite loss;
• delusions and hallucinations;
• mutilations;
• profound despair and hopelessness;
• suicidal thoughts;
• paranoia; and
• for many, a totally dysfunctional state and inability ever to live normally outside of confinement.

As a result, UN Special Rapporteur on Torture Juan Mendez called for totally banning it for children. Calling it "torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment," he stopped short of demanding its prohibition against everyone.

In 2007, the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child urged the practice be "strictly forbidden."

Israel Spurns All International Laws with Impunity

Israel frequently isolates adults and children, notably Palestinians. Facilities most commonly used include Al Mascobiyya interrogation center in Jerusalem, Petah Tikva near Tel Aviv, and Al Jalame near Haifa.

Israel's Prison Service (IPS), Israel Security Agency (ISA), and Israeli police administer these facilities.

From February 2008 through November 2011, DCI/Palestine documented 34 child abuse cases. They endured "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, and in some cases, torture, in violation of the" Torture Convention, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and Fourth Geneva.

Israel spurns all international laws with impunity, including those pertaining to war, occupation, and fundamental humanitarian and human rights.

At Al Jalame, children are held in 2 x 3 meter cells. In 2009, one child endured 65 days of punishment. All of them sleep on concrete beds, or on the floor on thin, dirty, foul-smelling mattresses. Meals pass through door flaps, depriving them of human contact.

Al Jalame's "Cell No. 36 (like all isolation ones) has "sharp protrusions preventing the children from leaning against them for support." It's windowless with artificial light only coming from dim internal lighting kept on 24 hours a day.

As a result, "(s)ome children report suffering pain behind their eyes and adverse psychological effects."

Harsh treatment, including prolonged isolation, painful shackling, physical violence and torture are used to extract confessions.

Children at Al Jalame and other interrogation facilities are generally denied access to lawyers and family visits in violation of Fourth Geneva and other international laws.

DCI/Palestine submitted complaints for five Palestinian children. They were identified only by initials, age, gender, ID No., and place of origin.

On October 15, 2011, Israeli soldiers arrested OA at 2AM from home. He was blindfolded, painfully shackled, placed in a military vehicle, taken to Huwwara interrogation center in Palestine, forced to sit on the ground until dawn, and refused permission to use a toilet.

Later that morning he was taken to Petah Tikva interrogation center in Israel in violation of Fourth Geneva. He was stripped searched, and denied legal counsel. With his hands tied to a chair, he was interrogated by a man called "Morris."

Accused of throwing a Molotov cocktail at an Israeli jeep, he denied it. After two hours of interrogation, he was placed in isolation he described as follows:

"It was a very small cell with a mattress on the floor, a toilet and two concrete seats. It did not have any windows, just a vent for air conditioning. It was very cold because of the air conditioning. I could not sleep because there was a yellow light on 24 hours a day. I was detained in the cell for two days, before being transferred to Al Jalame."

There, he was isolated for five days. His detention was extended. He wasn't in court and doesn't know if counsel represented him. He was then sent back to Petah Tikva, held another nine days under identical conditions, and interrogated twice before confessing, saying:

"I was in a very bad psychological state, so I decided to confess. I confessed to throwing Molotov cocktails and stones at army jeeps," even though he was innocent.

Isolated for 16 days, he's now at Megiddo prison in Israel.

Others DCI/Palestine represented told similar stories. They were falsely charged, arrested, interrogated, isolated and harshly treated overall. Israel treats children like adults, some young as 10.

International laws were grievously violated, including the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). It's Article 37(b) states:

"The arrest, detention or imprisonment of a child...shall be used only as a measure of last resort and for the shortest appropriate period of time."

In fact, Palestinian children are routinely arrested at checkpoints, on streets, going to or coming from school, tending olive groves, at play, and (most commonly) at home in the middle of the night.

Usually it's from midnight to 4AM. Family members are threatened not to intervene. If they try, they're assaulted and forced onto streets in their nightclothes, regardless of weather, and given no explanation.

Typically, arrests are lawless and violent. Homes are broken into unannounced. Property is damaged or stolen. Children are blindfolded, shackled, often beaten, then thrust into jeeps, sometimes face down.

In interrogation centers, inhumane treatment continues, including beatings, verbal abuse and intimidation. Most often, lawyers aren't present until questioning ends with a signed Hebrew confession children can't read or understand. Once gotten, they're used to convict even though torture extracted evidence is inadmissible under international law.

Article 15 of the UN Convention Against Torture states:

"Each State Party shall ensure that any statement which is established to have been made as a result of torture shall not be invoked as evidence in any proceedings, except against a person accused of torture as evidence that the statement was made."

In custody, children endure:

• blindfolding and painful shackling;
• beatings;
• violent shaking;
• sleep deprivation;
• solitary confinement;
• other forms of sensory deprivation;
• no food and water for extended periods;
• poor quality or inedible food when gotten;
• no access to toilets, showers and clean clothes;
• exposure to extreme heat or cold;
• painful stress positions for extended periods;
• sexual abuse;
• threats, insults and cursing; and
• extremely loud noises.

Often parents and siblings are also arrested, beaten, detained, and their homes sometimes demolished.

Under Military Order 132, children aged 12 - 13 receive maximum six month sentences. Those aged 14 - 15 usually face 12 months, but can receive up to five years.

More serious offenders face no limits. Military Order 378 permits up to 20 years for stone-throwing (the most common offense charged). Moreover, children 16 or older are considered adults and treated no differently. Under international law, adulthood begins at age 18.

Under military occupation, Israel's system is rigged to convict and brutalize before and after incarceration, despite Fourth Geneva's Article 147 requiring fair trials, and holding those responsible for denying them criminally liable.

International law also forbids torture, other abuse and inhumane treatment at all times, under all conditions with no allowed exceptions. Israel ignores all international laws. It does what it please, including against children young as 10 no matter their innocence.

DCI/Palestine and other human rights organizations demand these crimes against humanity end and those responsible held accountable. So far it hasn't happened.

The use of solitary confinement on Palestinian children held in Israeli detention

* Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon.

Related posts:

• Israel Torture Palestinian Children by Electric-Shocking
• Israeli ill-treatment and torture of Palestinian children – a report
• Oppressing West Bank Palestinian Children

The dynamic of democratic, nationalist and class struggles throughout the Muslim world has set in motion a new constellation of alliances between the imperial West (US and European Union) and Islamist parties, leaders and regimes, dubbed "moderate" by US officials, propagandists and academics.

This essay analyzes the changing contemporary context of imperial domination, especially the demise of longstanding client regimes. It then examines the previous significant ties between western imperial powers and Islamist movements and regimes and the basis of 'historical collaboration'.

The third part of the paper will outline the political circumstances in which the imperial powers embrace "moderate" Islamists in government and utilize "armed fundamentalists" in opposition to secular regimes. We will critically analyze how "moderate" Islam is defined by the Western imperialist powers. Is this a tactical or strategic alliance? What are the political "trade-offs"? What do imperialism's neo-liberal clients and their new 'moderate' Muslim allies have in common and how do they differ?

In conclusion we will evaluate the viability of this alliance and its capacity to contain and deflect the popular democratic movements and repress the burgeoning class and national struggles, especially in regard to the 'obstacles' posed by the Israel-US-Zionist ties and the continued IMF policies which promise to worsen the crises in the Muslim countries.

The Transition from Neo-Liberal Client Rulers to Power-Sharing with Moderate Islamists

The key motivation in Washington's and the European imperial troika's (England, France and Germany) embrace of what their press and officialdom hail as "moderate" Islamist parties has been the collapse or weakening of their long-term client rulers. Faced with the ouster of Mubarak, in Egypt, Ali in Tunisia and Saleh in Yemen, mass protests in Morocco and Algeria, the US-EU turned to conservative Muslim leaders who were willing to work within the existing state institutional framework (including the army and state police), uphold the capitalist order and align with the empire against anti-imperial movements and states. In Egypt, the Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) (the political arm of the Muslim Brotherhood), in Tunisia the Renaissance Party, in Morocco the Justice and Development Party have all indicated their willingness to serve as reliable partners in blocking the pro-democracy movements that challenge the socio-economic status quo and the long-standing military-imperial linkages.

The Islamist collaborators are called "moderate and respectable" because they agree to participate in elections within the boundaries of the established political and economic order; they have dropped any criticism of imperial and colonial treaties and trade agreements signed by the previous client regions - including ones which collaborate with Israel's colonization of Palestine.

Equally important "moderate" means supporting imperial wars against nationalist and secular Arab republics, such as Syria and Libya, and isolating and/or repressing class based trade unions and secular-left parties.

"Moderate" Islamists have become the Empire's 'contraceptive of choice' against any chance the massive Arab peoples' revolt might give birth to substantive egalitarian social changes and bring those brutal pro- western officials, responsible for so many crimes against humanity, to justice.

The West and their client officials in the military and police have agreed to a kind of "power-sharing' with the moderate/respectable (read 'reactionary') Islamist parties. The Islamists would be responsible for imposing orthodox economic policies and re-establishing 'order' (i.e. bolstering the existing one) in partnership with pro-multinational bank economists and pro US-EU generals and security officials. In exchange the Islamists could take certain ministries, appoint their members, finance electoral clientele among the poor and push their 'moderate' religious, social and cultural agenda. Basically, the elected Islamists would replace the old corrupt dictatorial regimes in running the state and signing off on more free trade agreements with the EU. Their role would keep the leftists, nationalists and populists out of power and from gaining mass support. Their job would substitute spiritual solace and "inner worth" via Islam in place of redistributing land, income and power from the elite, including the foreign multi-nationals to the peasants, workers, unemployed and exploited low-paid employees.

Why the Empire Arms Fundamentalist Anti-Secular Muslims

While the US and EU have backed respectable "moderate Islam" in heading off a popular upheaval of the young and unemployed, in other contexts they have enlisted violent, fundamentalist Islamic terrorists to overthrow secular independent anti-imperialists regimes - like Libya, Syria - just as they had done earlier in Afghanistan and Yugoslavia. The US, Qatar and the European troika financed and armed Libyan fundamentalist militias and then engaged in a murderous eight months air and sea assault to ensure their client's 'victory' over the secular Gaddafi regime. Fresh from NATO's success, the US, the European 'Troika' and Turkey, with the backing of the League of Arab collaborator princes and emirs, have financed a violent Muslim Brotherhood insurrection in Syria, intent on destroying the nationalist economy and modern secular state.

The US and EU have openly unleashed their fundamentalists allies in order to destroy independent adversaries in the name of "democracy" and 'humanitarian intervention', a laughable claim in light of decade long colonial wars of occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan. All target regimes have one crime in common: Using their national resources to develop modern secular states - independent of imperial dictates.

NATO implements its campaigns through conservative 'moderate' or armed fundamentalist Islamist movements depending on the specific needs, circumstances and range of options in any given target nation. With the fall of pro-Empire 'secular dictatorships' in Egypt and Tunisia, pliable conservative Islamist leaders are the fall back "lesser evil". When the opportunity to overthrow an independent secular or nationalist regime arises, armed and violent fundamentalist mercenaries become the political vehicle of choice.

As with European empires in the past, the modern Western imperial countries have relied on retrograde religious parties and leaders to collaborate and serve their economic and military interests and to provide mercenaries for imperial armies to savage any anti-imperialist social revolutionaries. In that sense US and European rulers are neither 'pro nor anti' Islam, it all depends on their national and class position. Islamists who collaborate with Empire are "moderate" allies and if they attack an anti-imperialist regime, they become 'freedom fighters'. On the other hand, they become "terrorists" or "fundamentalists" when they oppose imperial occupation, pillage or colonial settlements.

Contemporary History of Islamist-Imperial Collaboration

The historical record of western imperial expansion reveals many instances of collaboration and cooptation as well as conflict with Islamist regimes, movements and parties. In the early 1960's the CIA backed a brutal military coup against the secular Indonesian nationalist regime of Sukarno, and encouraged their puppet dictator General Suharto to unleash Muslim militia in a veritable "holy war" exterminating nearly one million leftist trade unionists, school teachers, students, farmers, communists or suspected sympathizers and their family members. The horrific 'Jakarta Option' became a model for CIA operations elsewhere. In Yugoslavia the US and Europe promoted and financed fundamentalists Muslims in Bosnia, importing mujahedeen who would later form part of Al Qaida, and then backed the Kosovo Liberation Army, a known terrorist organization, in order to completely break-up and ethnically 'cleanse' a modern secular multi-national state - going so far as to have Americans and NATO bomb Belgrade for the first time since the Nazis in the Second World War.

During President Carter's administration, the CIA joined with Saudi Arabia's ruling royalty, providing billions of dollars in arms and military supplies to Afghan Muslim fundamentalists in their brutal but successful Jihad overthrowing a modern, secular nationalist regime backed by the USSR. The murderous fate of school teachers and educated women in the aftermath was quickly covered up.

Needless to say, wherever US imperialism faces leftists or secular, modernizing anti-imperialist regimes, Washington turns to retrograde Islamic leaders willing and able to destroy the progressive regime in return for imperialist support. Such coalitions are built mainly around fundamentalist and moderate Islamist opposition to secular, class- based politics allied with the Empire's hostility to any anti-imperialist challenge to its domination..

The same 'coalition' of Islamists and the Empire has been glaringly obvious during the NATO assault on Libya and continues against Syria: The Muslims provide the shock troops on the ground; NATO provides the aerial bombing, funds, arms, sanctions, embargoes and propaganda.

These Islamist-Imperialist coalitions are usually temporary, based on a common secular or nationalist enemy and not on any common strategic interest. After the defeat of a secular anti-imperialist regime, militant Muslims may find themselves attacked by the colonial neo-liberal regime most favored by the imperial west. This happened in Afghanistan and elsewhere after the overseas Islamist fighters (Afghan Arabs) returned to their own neo-colonized, collaborating home countries, like Saudi Arabia, Algeria and Egypt and elsewhere.

Contemporary History of Islamist-Imperial Conflict

The relation between Islamist regimes and imperialism is complex, changing and full of examples of bloody conflict.

The US backed the "modernizing" free market dictatorship of the Shah in Iran, overthrowing the nationalist Mosaddegh regime. They provided arms and intelligence for the Savak, the Shah's monstrous secret police as it hunted down and murdered tens of thousands of nationalist-Islamists and leftist resistance fighters and critics in Iran and abroad. The rise to power of the fundamentalist-anti-imperialist Khomeini regime fueled US armed attacks and provoked retaliatory moves: Iran backed and financed anti-colonial Islamist groups in Lebanon (Hezbollah), Palestine (Hamas) and Iraq (the Shia parties).

Subsequent to 9/11 the US invaded and overthrew the Islamist Taliban regime, re-colonized the country, establishing a puppet regime under US-European auspices. The Taliban and allied Islamist and nationalist resistance fighters organized and established a mass guerrilla army which has engaged in a decade long war with armed support from Pakistani Islamist forces responding to US military incursions.

In Palestine, Washington, under the overweening control of Israel's Zionist fifth column, has armed and financed Israel's war against the popularly elected Palestinian Islamist Hamas government in Gaza. Washington's total commitment to the Jewish state and its colonial expansion and usurpation of Palestinian (Muslim and Christian) lands and property in Jerusalem and elsewhere reflects the profound and pervasive influence of the Zionist power configuration throughout the US political system .They secure 90% votes in Congress, pledges of allegiance from the White House, and senior appointments in Treasury, State Department and the Pentagon.

What determines whether the US Empire will have a collaborative or conflict-ridden relation with Islam depends on the specific political context. The US allies with Islamists when faced with nationalist, leftist and secular democratic regimes and movements, especially where their optimal choice, a military-neo-liberal alternative is relatively weak. However, faced with a nationalist, anti-colonial Islamist regime (as is the case of the Islamic Republic of Iran), Washington will side with pro-western liberals, dissident Muslim clerics, pliable tribal chiefs, separatist ethnic minorities and pro-Western generals.

The key to US-Islamist relations from the White House perspective is based on the Islamists' attitude toward empire, class politics, NATO and the "free market" (private foreign investment).

Today's 'moderate' Islamist parties in Tunisia, Egypt, Turkey, Morocco (and elsewhere), which have offered their support to NATO and its wars against Libya and Syria, uphold 'private property' (i.e. foreign and imperialist client control of key industries) and repress independent working class and anti-imperialist parties: They are the Empire's "new partners" in the pillage of the resource-rich Middle East and North Africa.

The US-brokered counter-revolutionary alliance among moderate Islamists, the previous military rulers and Washington is fraught with tensions. The military demands total impunity and a continuation of its economic privileges; this includes a veto on any legislation addressing the previous regime's brutal crimes against its own people. On the other hand, the Islamist parties uphold their electoral victories and demand majority rule. Washington insists the alliance adhere to its policy toward Israel and abandon their support for the Palestinian national struggle. As these tensions and conflicts deepen, the alliance could collapse ushering in a new phase of conflict and instability.

Emblematic of "moderate Islamiist" collaboration with US-EU imperialism is the role of Qatar, home to the 'respectable' Arabic media giant, Al-Jazeera, and the demagogic Qatari "spiritual guide" Sheik Youssef al-Qaradawi. Sheik Youssef quotes the Koran and Islamic moral principles in defense of NATO's 8-month aerial bombing of Libya, which killed over 50,000 pro-regime Libyans (themselves Muslims). He calls for armed imperial intervention in Syria to overthrow the secular Assad regime, a position he shares comfortably with the state of Israel. He urges the "moderate Islamists" in Egypt and Tunisia to cease any criticism of the existing economic order, ( see "Spiritual guide steers Arabs to moderation", Financial Times, December 9, 2011 - p5). In a word, this respectable Muslim cleric is NATO's perfect Koran-quoting "moderate Islamist" partner - a dream come true.

The Strategic Utility of "Moderate" Islamist Parties

Islamist parties are approached by the Empire's policy elites only when they have a mass following and can therefore weaken any popular, nationalist insurgency. Mass-based Islamist parties serve the empire by providing "legitimacy", by winning elections and by giving a veneer of respectability to the pro-imperial military and police apparatus retained in place from the overthrown client state dictatorships.

The Islamist parties compete at the "grass roots" with the leftists. They build up a clientele of supporters among the poor in the countryside and urban slums through organized charity and basic social services administered at the mosques and humanitarian religious foundations. Because they reject class struggle and are intensely hostile to the left (with its secular, pro-feminist and working-class agenda), they have been 'half-tolerated' by the dictatorship, while the leftist activists are routinely murdered. Subsequently, with the overthrow of the dictatorship, the Islamists emerge intact with the strongest national organizational network as the country's 'natural leaders' from the religious-bazaar merchant political elite. Their leaders offer to serve the empire and its traditional native military collaborators in exchange for a 'slice of power', especially over morality, culture, religion and households (women), in other words, the "micro-society".

For their part, they offer to marginalize and undermine the left, anti-imperialist secular democrats in the streets. In the face of mass popular rebellion calling into question the imperial order, a 'moderate' Islamist-imperial partnership is a 'heavenly deal' praised in Washington, Paris or London (as well as Riyadh and Tel Aviv).

Conclusion: How Viable is the Imperial-Islamic Coalition?

Those who thought that the spontaneous pro-democracy movements spelled the end of the imperial order left out the role of organized "moderate" Islamist electoral parties as able collaborators of Empire. The brutally repressed mass mobilization of unemployed youth was no match for the well-funded grass roots community organization of the moderate Islamists. This is especially true when politics shifted from the street to the ballot box, a process that the Islamist parties facilitated. In the absence of a mass revolutionary party, seeking state power, the existing military-police state was able to work around the mass protesters and put together a power sharing agreement at least in the short-run.

In the November 2011 elections, the radical Egyptian Islamist party, Nour, gathered one-quarter of the vote in Cairo and Alexandria. Their showing was even higher among the urban poor districts, which promises even greater support among poor rural constituencies in the coming elections. Essentially a Salafist Islamist party, Nour, unlike the Muslim Brotherhood, combined denunciations of class abuses and elite corruption with mass appeals to a return to a mythic harmonious life. They used effective grass roots organizing around basic services in order to gain a greater proportion of the working class vote than all the leftist parties combined. Nour's message of "class retribution against the ...abuses of Egypt's elite fueled Nour's new found popularity", (Financial Times December 10, 2011 p6).

Despite the successes of the Islamist-Imperial partnership, the world economic crises and especially the growing unemployment and misery in the Arab countries will make it difficult for the 'respectable moderate' Islamists to stabilize their societies. They are inextricably constrained by their alliances to function within the confines of the 'orthodox neo-liberal framework' imposed by the Empire. For that reason, the "moderate" Islamists will try to co-opt some secular liberals, social democrats and even a few leftists as 'minority partners', so that they won't be held solely responsible for dashing the expectations of the poor in their countries.

The fact of the matter is that the pro-imperial Islamist parties have absolutely no answer to the current crises: Charities delivered from the mosque during the dictatorship won them mass support; now more austerity programs imposed from their ministerial posts will certainly alienate and infuriate their mass base. What will follow depends on who is best organized: Liberals are limited to media campaigns and tied to economic orthodoxy; the leftists have to advance from protest movements in the downtown squares to organized political units operating in popular neighborhoods, workplaces, markets, villages and slums. Otherwise radical fundamentalist, like the Salafists, will exploit the people's outrage with moderate Islamist betrayals and promote their own version of a closed clerical society, opposing the West while repressing the Left.

The US and EU may have 'temporarily' avoided revolution by accommodating electoral reforms and adapting to alliances with "moderate" Islamists, but their ongoing military interventions and their own growing economic crisis will simply postpone a more decisive conflict in the near future.

* James Petras is the author of more than 62 books published in 29 languages, and over 600 articles in professional journals. Petras' latest books, Global Depression and Regional Wars (Atlanta, Clarity Press, 2009) is the third in a series, including Zionism, Militarism and the Decline of US Power (Atlanta, Clarity Press 2008) and The Power of Israel in the United States (Atlanta, Clarity Press 2006), analyzing the influence of militarism and Zionism in American foreign policy.

Related posts:

• Empire or Republic. How the Empire Destroys its Own People
• America’s War on Islam
• Are you Extremist or Moderate?

By Clive Hambidge *

A military conquest

"... We shall use the ultimate force until the Palestinians come crawling to us on all fours ... When we have settled the land, all the Arabs will be able to do will be to scurry round like drugged roaches in a bottle." (Rafeal Eitan)

A 'moral articulation' by successive American administrations as to the primary reason for their unilateral support of 0.001% of the world's population, namely Israel, is not standing up to international law or American scrutiny. The perpetuated myth of an Israel surrounded by mortal enemies, battling heroically for its democratic rights against all odds fades as the world of right mindedness recognises in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip the daily abuse and horror for Palestinians under illegal occupation in Israel's 'battlefield' to test new weaponry. That abuse, brought into sharp focus by the U.S Department of State in early 2004, is systematic; perpetrated by Israel in 2011 and paid for by U.S tax payers' dollars in the form of indiscriminate, unwise and illegal aid according to America's own laws. The reason? Unquestioning support for Israel's militarised political continuum, where de jure occupation became de facto annexation, and where, according to Special Rapporteur Falk "the unbridled assault upon Palestinian rights" continues.

If one consciously moves in time backward and forward, that is in American/Israeli time, one finds the same pattern no matter the date. There is no change no progress. It is like watching a film, a play no matter where you cut, what montage you see, what curtain is lifted and what scene you view, it is the same film, the same play, the same day, from the same violent script. It is a continuum of brutal actions designed to oppress Palestinians enough to make them leave their own land. Pick a date at random and one finds the paradox of continuum. Israel is waiting for Godot

"Estragon: All the dead voices.
Vladimir: They make a noise like wings."

Matt Bowles, writing for the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, makes plain the facts: America for decades allowing Israel to place "US aid into its general fund, effectively eliminating any distinction between types of aid. [means] Therefore, U.S. tax-payers are helping to fund an illegal occupation, the expansion of colonial-settlements projects, and gross human rights violations against the Palestinian civilian population." Facts continually denied by Israel, as it ruthlessly pursue 'the doctrine of politics free from law'.

Israel's persistent but illusory claim that its 'international human rights treaty obligations do not apply in the OPT' has been, according to Amnesty International, 'rejected' by the U.N Human Rights Committee, the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination Against Women, the Committee Against Torture, the Committee on the Rights of the Child, the International Court of Justice', and every conscionable citizen on the planet.

So to February 2004, the U.S Department of State in its Country Reports on Human Rights Practices makes clear the egregious human rights violations and status of Israel in the OPT 2003, "The international community does not recognize Israel's Sovereignty over any part of the occupied territories." All accredited missions are to be found rightfully, and legally, in Tel Aviv. "Israel's overall human rights record in the occupied territories remained poor and worsened in the treatment of foreign human rights activists." These abuses came in a fiscal year 2003 where Israel received from the U.S "a foreign military financing grant of $3.1 billion and a $600 million grant for economic security." (Jewish Voice for Peace - JVP); U.S dollars used in the advancing of Israel's policy of 'continuum' namely the illegal colonisation of Palestinian lands, the tormenting of its people and those that would assist them. Lest we forget, it was in March 2003 that Rachel Corrie, an American citizen performing a fundamental rule of law principle by campaigning for human rights in the OPT, lost her life under the tracks of a caterpillar bulldozer: 'Made in the U.S.A'.

The U.S Department of State found in the bloody year of 2003 that amongst other violations of international law:

• "Israeli soldiers placed civilians in danger by ordering them [Palestinians] to facilitate military operations."
• "Israeli forces sometimes arbitrarily destroyed, damaged, or looted Palestinian property".
• "Israeli security forces often impeded the provision of medical assistance to Palestinian civilians."
• "Israeli security forces harassed and abused Palestinian pedestrians."
• "Israel conducted mass, arbitrary arrests in the West Bank during military operations, summoning and detaining males between the ages of 15 and 45"
• "Israel carried out policies of demolitions, strict curfews, and closures that directly punished innocent civilians ... Israel often demolished homes after suspects had already been killed or arrested."
• Israel "maintained" according to the Department of State "that such punishment of innocents would serve as a deterrent against future terrorist attacks."

These insidious patterns have been sustained by all Israeli administrations and represent a 'continuum': a calculated militaristic policy of intimidation and worse toward the innocent civilians of Palestine. This being so, I must add my concerns to the concerns of the Rachel Corrie Foundation that "the State Departments Country Reports on Human Rights systematically exclude the State Departments own analysis of Israel's failure to perform a credible investigation into the killing of Rachel Corrie," and further concerns that "reports generated by international NGOs such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, which noted a pattern of negligence in Israeli investigations into civilians killed by the IDF, were ignored in the creation of the Country Reports."

In recognition of the illegality of American Aid to Israel, the Rachel Corrie Foundation in its submission to the U.N Universal Periodic Review called upon the U.S to "enforce 22 U.S.C. 2304 (1994), protocol on Human Rights and Security Assistance, and the "Leahy Amendments" to the Foreign Operations Appropriations and Defence Appropriations Acts (e.g. P.L. 105-118 570), which prohibit the provision of security assistance to countries and military units that engage in a pattern of gross violations of human rights." Where, according to JVP, "Massive military aid promotes militarism, which has led to a reliance on military, rather than diplomatic means to work for a solution to this ongoing conflict.". The planned aim of 'continuum'.

The Continuum

"Zionism is a colonising adventure and therefore it stands or falls by the question of armed force. There is no other ethic" (Jabotinsky)

The U.N Mission Report (UNMR) on the Israeli operation in Gaza between December 27^th 2008 and 18^th January 2009 highlights that all Israel's operations must be viewed not as isolated moments in history where Israel feels threatened and then responds but, operation[s] that decidedly fit "into a continuum of policies aimed at pursuing Israel's political objectives with regard to Gaza and the Occupied Palestinian Territory as a whole." Reel back, fast forward, press hold, you find 'continuum': "After we become a strong force, as the result of the creation of a State, we shall abolish partition and expand to the whole of Palestine." (Ben Gurion)

"The continuum is evident most immediately with the policy of blockade that preceded the operations [i.e Cast Lead] and that in the Mission's view amounts to collective punishment intentionally inflicted by the Government of Israel on the people of the Gaza Strip." (UNMR). Further, the Mission found "An analysis of the modalities and impact of the December-January military operations [also] sets them, in the Mission's view, in a continuum with a number of other pre-existing Israel Policies with regard to the Occupied Palestinian Territories. The progressive isolation and separation of the Gaza Strip from the West Bank, a policy that began much earlier and which was consolidated in particular with the imposition of tight closures, restrictions on movement and eventually blockade, are among the most apparent." 'The plan that never changed' is the continuum that ever is, until God forbid "There is no more Palestine. Finished . . ." (Moshe Dayan)

Nothing has changed since 2004, nothing has changed since 1948. And nothing has changed in 2011. Pick a date between 1948 and 2011 and one finds systematic abuse, atrocities, and deaths of Palestinian civilians. One might pick Operation 'Defensive Shield' 2002, Operation 'Summer Rains' 2006 or 'Autumn Clouds' November 2006, I have picked December 2008/January 2009 and 'Cast Lead' from Israel's seasonal slaughter. Here's a U.N Report of 2009.

The 2009 Report of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict concluded, "The Mission found numerous instances of deliberate attacks on civilians and civilian objects (individuals, whole families, houses, mosques) in violation of the fundamental international humanitarian law principle of distinction, resulting in deaths and serious injuries. In these cases the Mission found that the protected status of civilians was not respected and the attacks intentional, in clear violation of customary law reflected in article 51 (2) and 75 of Additional Protocol 1, article 27 of the Four Geneva Convention and articles 6 and 7 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. In some cases the Mission additionally concluded that the attack was also launched with the intention of spreading terror among the civilian population."

In addition, the Mission found all of this was planned meticulously by Israel, "legal opinions and advice were given throughout the planning stages and at certain operational levels during the campaign. There were almost no mistakes according to the Government of Israel. It is in these circumstances that the Mission [concluded] that what occurred in just over three weeks at the end of 2008 and the beginning of 2009 was a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population, radically diminish its local economic capacity both to work and to provide for itself, and to force upon it an ever increasing sense of dependency and vulnerability."

One would remind Israel's planners of Article 7 of the Draft Code of Crimes Against the Peace and Security of Mankind (1996), "The official position of an individual who commits a crime against the peace and security of mankind, even if he acted as head of State or Government, does not relieve him of criminal responsibility or mitigate punishment." And of these compassionate words thundering through the centuries from Caliph Abu Bakr to "the first Moslem Arab Army invading Christian Syria:

Do not commit treachery, nor depart from the right path. You must not mutilate, neither kill a child or aged man or woman. Do not destroy a palm tree, nor burn it with fire and do not cut any fruitful tree." (634 A.D)

After Cast Lead, Adalah, The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, reported that "During and after "Operation Cast lead", human rights organizations asked the Attorney General (AG) to open an investigation based on prima-facie evidence of gross-violations of international law; the AG rejected our request. Previous requests to the Military Advocate General (MAG) to open investigations into numerous other cases were also denied." Adalah further found "petitions filed to the Supreme Court against the MAG and AG's policy of not opening criminal investigations into the killing of Palestinians remain pending years later. It also appears that the Supreme Court's inaction has resulted in a brake on the submission of petitions by human rights organizations."

"Israel cannot build a society based on the principles of democracy, human rights, and compliance with international law while brutally occupying another people and their land. The United States is currently paying for that occupation with its annual aid," (JVP, Statement on Peace, U.S Military Aid and Israel, 2004.) and further, "When Palestinian doctors remove bullets from the bodies of Palestinian children, the bullets are typically stamped. Made in the U.S.A." Nevertheless, and, in remorseless fashion the United States defies international opinion, its own law and international law in providing massive military aid to its client state Israel. America supplies the boots that fit the feet that press on the necks of Palestinians.

Massive military aid for continuum

"The Arabs will have to go, but one needs an opportune moment for making it happen, such as war" (Ben Gurion)

The Congressional Research Service Report (CRSR) of 16^th September 2010 U.S Foreign Aid to Israel reported, "Almost all U.S. bilateral aid to Israel is in the form of military assistance." The Bush Administration unsurprisingly sanctioned an increase of 6 billion dollars in U.S military assistance to Israel in August 2007. And the Obama Administration, also unsurprisingly, responded to the Bush Neo Con reverberation by requesting $3 billion U.S in Foreign Military Financing (FMF) to Israel for fiscal year of 2011. So, add those figures in your moral mind space to this cumulative 'conservative estimate' given by the U.S organisation 'If Americans Knew' of "total direct aid to Israel [1949 to 2008] of $113. 8554 Billion. Massive by any standards.

Decades of murder and mayhem began with a trade loan in 1949 of $100.000. God only knows when and how it will end. Today the billions of US taxpayers dollars that pour through the 'aid funnel' are used to buy arms and equipment such as caterpillar bulldozers made in the U.S; indeed a stipulation by the U.S is that Israel uses "75% of its military aid from the U.S. It funnels this money to more than 1,000 U.S arms suppliers, which in turn lobby for policies that benefit them at the expense of peace in the Middle East." (JVP).

According to the CRSR, by giving unconditional aid to Israel, America seeks to and "maintains ...[Israel's] qualitative military edge over potential threats, and prevent[s] a shift in the security balance of the region." in fact that aggressive 'military edge' keeps Palestinians locked down in interminable suffering and the region a tinderbox. And make no mistake the 'qualitative military edge' is not for Israel but for The United States of America and its continued hegemonic ambitions through its proxy, Israel.

U.S blood money was/is for "a militarized Israel that will serve the U.S. interest of controlling the Petroleum reserves of the Middle East ... policy debate in elite circles takes for granted, on all sides, the goal of maintaining U.S. control over Middle East petroleum resources and the flow of petrodollars." (Chomsky, Fateful Triangle). If we take a sordid trip down Israel's blood soaked memory lane we find U.S Aid increasing in direct proportion to Israel's military aggression, perceived success therefore usefulness to American interests. Israel's continuum is vital for American control over the oil reserves of the region.

Stephen Zunes, The Strategic Functions of U.S. AID to Israel, shows how U.S Aid shoots up after Israeli military successes and its long term strategic cooperation with America. From the "spectacular victory" in the 1967 war, through the Civil War in Jordan 1970-71 and the countering of 'attacking Arab armies' in 1973, to the "fall of the Shah, election of the right wing Likud, and the ratification of the Camp David Treaty in 1979", through the years 1983-84 "when the United States and Israel signed memoranda of understanding on strategic cooperation and military planning." U.S Aid kept rising 450%, 800%, increasing, sevenfold, quadrupling, as did Israel's aggression. America force feeding Israel with military aid through the 'aid funnel,' whilst Palestinian children can scarcely keep mind, spirit, and body together.

Then came Clinton, Bush, Obama, all maintaining Israel's 'qualitative edge', all maintaining Israel's brutal military occupation. All, letting down the Palestinians' lawful drive for legitimate Statehood. All U.S Aid equated with destruction, acquainted with death. The long suffering Palestinians sold out with 'no objections' from the 'liberal left of America.'

Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush Senior, Clinton, Bush "I'm doing it for my daddy" junior, and Obama, all preserving 'Continuity Of Government' (C.O.G.) indeed, all cogs in the all consuming gas guzzling American machine. It will all end in tears and it won't be Palestinian tears, for they have wept too much and for too long for their lost freedom and their lost children.

O Captain My Captain

"Our American friends offer us money, arms, and advice. We take the money, we take the arms, and we decline the advice." (Moshe Dayan)

Questions are being asked of Captain America from unlikely and likely quarters. Walter Pincus of the Washington Post, "The question for the Obama administration, Congress and, in the end perhaps the American public, is given present economic problems, should the United States supply the money to make up for the reductions the Israelis are making in their own defence budget." A financial question of course. A superior question, because a moral one, is if, the American public, who should be asked first, were informed of the extent, nature and illegality of U.S Aid to Israel, would the American public then sanction any military aid to Israel at all?

As Hassan Fouda of Northern California Friends of Sabeel reminds, "Congress is planning deep cuts in social security, unemployment compensation, educational grants and other programs that help vulnerable Americans. Transferring billions of taxpayer's money to Israel now is immoral. Americans need to speak up and be heard.

Valuing Human Rights

Special Rapporteur John Duggard stated, "It is pointless for the Special Rapporteur to recommend to the Government of Israel that it show respect for human rights and international humanitarian law ... in these circumstances, the Special Rapporteur can only appeal to the wider international community to concern itself with the plight of the Palestinian people." (2006). After the end of the Israeli military operation Cast Lead 2008-2009 in Gaza, John Ging the UNRWA Director of Operations recalled a discussion that he had with a teacher in Gaza about 'strengthening human rights education in schools'. One would assume that the teacher had for obvious reasons a sceptical view of such an undertaking. In fact, recounts Ging "the teacher unhesitantly supported the resumption of human rights education." She said, "This is a war of values, and we are not going to lose it."

* Clive Hambidge is Human Development Director at Facilitate Global. He can be contacted at: clive.hambidge@facilitateglobal.org

Related posts:

• Doron Zahavi (aka Captain George), a suspected Israeli torturer gets key police job in Jerusalem
• UPDATE: Captain ‘R’ is FREED
• Mahmoud Abbas and Barack Obama: tragic hero vs political prostitute

In advance of the formal burial of the Palestinian Authority's bid for state recognition at the UN, BBC Radio 4's flagship Today programme was on the right track. In his introduction to a quite revealing report, presenter John Humphrys said reporter Kevin Connolly had gone to Israel to find out "what hopes there are, if any, for the establishment of a Palestinian state."

Among those Connolly interviewed were Akiva Eldar, the Ha'aretz columnist who has been a constant critic of Israel's settlement policy. He said. "The settlers have won and Israel has lost... Israel must now live with the consequences."

As I have written from time to time in the past, the possible consequences include Israel tearing itself apart in a Jewish civil war; Israel going down and taking the whole region with it; and/or a final Zionist ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

If I take it as a given (I do) that Israel's leaders are not remotely interested in peace on terms that would satisfy even minimum Palestinian demands and needs for justice, and that as things are the major powers will continue to allow Zionism to go on calling the policy shots, the question arising is this: What can the Palestinians do themselves to advance their cause?

It's not for the gentile me to tell the Palestinians what to do but if I was a Palestinian the following is what I would want to happen.

The first and immediate priority - the dissolution of the PA, effectively making Israel fully and completely responsible and accountable for its occupation. Having to take complete responsibility would be quite costly for Israel financially and in terms of the additional call on its security resources. And in theory it ought to be less difficult (at present it's impossible) for the Palestinians, with the assistance of concerned and caring agencies and governments, to hold Israel accountable to international law for its occupation policies and actions.

Why should the PA be dissolved? Apart from the fact that it's corrupt and useless (has become just another Arab regime, some might say), the short answer is in two parts.

One is that under the leadership of Mahmoud Abbas and his Fatah cronies, the PA's main role has been to keep the Palestinians, Hamas supporters on the West Bank in particular, under control for Israel. In that context the PA has been more or less a quisling authority collaborating with Israel, and by so doing it has undermined the liberation struggle.

The other is that under Abbas's leadership the PA has subverted Palestinian democracy. He was elected as chairman in January 2005 for a term of four years which expired in January 2009. There should then have been new elections. In the absence of them Abbas and his PA are without legitimacy and thus any real mandate to represent the occupied and oppressed Palestinians.

Abbas's response to the statement by the Security Council's admissions committee that it had failed to reach agreement on the PA's bid for full membership and state recognition was to say that he would "keep on trying." He also ruled out the possibility of dissolving the PA.

I think it's not unreasonable to speculate that his prime concern is to preserve the good life and privileges he and his Fatah leadership colleagues enjoy. Arafat was never a member of the discredited Arab Leadership Club. Abbas is a fully paid up member. On reflection I also think his decision to seek UN recognition of a Palestinian state was entirely self-serving. He knew the bid could not succeed but he calculated, correctly, that it would focus global attention on the Palestinian cause in a way that would improve his low standing in the eyes on his people. It did but only briefly.

Obviously the dissolution of the PA will only happen if enough Palestinians demand it. But in my view it's not only the occupied and oppressed Palestinians who need to do the demanding. In my view it's time for Palestinians everywhere to become engaged by peaceful and democratic means in the struggle to end the Zionization of their homeland and secure their rights. Put another way, if the Zionist colonial project is to be contained and defeated, the incredible, almost superhuman steadfastness of the occupied and oppressed Palestinians must now be supplemented by practical, effective and co-ordinated Palestinian diaspora action. For what purpose?

Not only to bring about the dissolution of the PA but to have it replaced as soon as possible by a re-structured and re-invigorated PNC (Palestine National Council). Once upon a time this now side-lined, parliament-in-exile was the supreme decision-making body on the Palestinian side. Even Arafat was accountable to it. (It did, in fact, take him six long years to persuade a majority of PNC delegates representing Palestinians nearly everywhere to endorse his policy of politics and compromise with Israel. That happened towards the end of 1979. The PNC vote in favour of Arafat's policy - the two-state solution - was 296 for it and only four against. From then on the Palestinian door was open to peace on terms which any rational government in Israel would have accepted with relief).

For the PNC to be brought back to life re-structured and re-invigorated, there would have to be elections to it in communities/constituencies throughout the Palestinian diaspora. The following by country and numbers of Palestinians is the most recent available estimate of its composition that I am aware of.

The occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip - 4,200,000

Jordan - 2,900,000

Israel - 1,600,000

Syria - 800,000

Chile - 500,000

Lebanon - 490,000

Saudi Arabia - 280,245

Egypt - 270,245

United States - 270,000

Honduras - 250,000

Venezuela - 245,120

United Arab Emirates - 170,000

Germany -159,000

Mexico - 158,000

Qatar - 100,000

Kuwait - 70,000

El Salvador - 70,000

Brazil - 59,000

Iraq - 57,000

Yemen - 55,000

Canada - 50,975

Australia - 45,000

Libya - 44,000

Denmark - 32,152

United Kingdom - 30,000

Sweden - 25,500

Peru - 20,000

Columbia - 20,000

Spain - 12,000

Pakistan -10,500

Netherlands - 9,000

Greece - 7,500

Norway - 7,000

France - 5,000

Guatemala - 3,500

Austria - 3,000

Switzerland - 2,000

Turkey - 1,000

India - 300

That global spread of the original (1947/48) and subsequent (1967) Palestinian refugees and their descendants is an awesome tribute to the success of Zionist ethnic cleansing.

The prime task of a re-structured and re-invigorated PNC would be to debate and determine Palestinian policy and then represent it by speaking to power with one credible voice. That, I believe, would significantly improve the prospects for getting a real peace process going. By definition a real peace process is one that would require the major powers led by the U.S. to confront the Zionist monster.

The organizational effort required to bring the PNC back to life, re-structured and re-invigorated, is massive, but what might have taken years in the past could be done in months by making best and most effective use of the internet.

If diaspora Palestinians do not now make the effort and put their act together, I think it's possible, even probable, that future Palestinian historians will conclude that they betrayed their occupied and oppressed brothers and sisters as much as the regimes of an impotent, corrupt and repressive Arab Order did.

* Alan Hart is a former ITN and BBC Panorama foreign correspondent who covered wars and conflicts wherever they were taking place in the world and specialized in the Middle East. Author of Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews. He blogs on www.alanhart.net and tweets on www.twitter.com/alanauthor

Related posts:

• Think Again: Palestine
• Let Palestine be Palestine: Letter to President Obama
• The returning issue of Palestine’s refugees

Say this tongue twister quickly:

How much wood
could a wood chuck chuck
if a woodchuck
could chuck
wood?
As much wood
as a woodchuck could chuck
if a woodchuck
could chuck
wood!

That tongue twister doesn't do any damage, not even to the tongue.

"Another type of twister, a tornado," says Wikipedia "is a violent, dangerous, rotating column of air that is in contact with both the surface of the earth and a cumulonimbus cloud."

If you follow news from America, you'll see frequent reports of swirling cones of air turned violent across the country, especially in the mid-west.

Sometimes twisters or tornados are called cyclones, but none of the people who have witnessed their houses picked up into the cones much care what they're called.

In the first stanza of THE SECOND COMING, Irish poet W. B. Yeats described another type of twister:

"Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity."

The "widening gyre" offers another vision of the twister. Thus, not only is nature at times violent and destructive, but people falling into the conical pattern through anarchy.

Finally, those who twist the truth or distort facts--politicians, propagandists, snake-oil salesmen and major media outlets—are expert twisters.

Distorters have a cause to serve. Media has their owners and readers or viewers to satisfy. Rupert Murdoch outlets, like Fox News and News Corp pander to Murdoch's interests.

MSNBC yields to its liberal supporters, often critical of Fox and almost always opposed to Fox's political positions. If Fox News twists news and commentary to right wing politics, liberal media twist reporting to the left.

Politicians who gridlock parliamentary or congressional bodies serve special interests that support them financially. In short, they're bought by twisters who pay politicians to be twisters for a cause.

Outright propagandists like Abe Foxman, National Director of the Anti-Defamation League; David Harris, Executive Director of the American Jewish Committee; and Norman Podhoretz, Editor-at-Large , Commentary magazine consistently use the print media to attack anyone critical of Israel.

The technique used involves twisted argument aimed at anyone who fails to tow the line of their organization, including writers who attack those who fail to accept any political medicine they prescribe.

This ploy works mainly because readers don't take the time to dig into both sides of arguments and can't distinguish fact from twisted fiction.

In a rant against the New York Times for an editorial slightly critical of Benjamin Netanyahu, David Harris complained that Netanyahu had been the newspaper's "favourite whipping boy for the editorial writers..."

Master twister Harris tried to defend Netanyahu while demeaning the Times editor for his criticism of the prime minister.

The editorial actually expressed concern for Israel, but Harris completely ignored that while refusing to accept any criticism for anything Israeli. To Harris's (and other's) twisted thinking, Israel can do nothing wrong.

Then there are the underhanded tactics used by AIPAC, whose current president is Lee Rosenberg. AIPAC functions as an organization dedicated to influencing media, students and elected officials in America.

Nureddin Sabir, Editor of Redress, Information and Analysis, upon his return from Libya, commented on the challenge now facing Libyans as they embark on a path of freedom from a single Gaddafi prescribed opinion:

Libyans "will have to get used to the art of persuasion. They will have to learn that theirs is not the only opinion worth listening to and that nobody, whether Islamist or liberal, holds a monopoly over the truth."

That's something people everywhere should learn. The only way out of the morass of opinionated special interests is to become exposed to opposing interests. Learn to see how twisters work to deceive.

* Paul J. Balles is a retired American university professor and freelance writer who has lived in the Middle East for many years. He's a weekly Op-Ed columnist for the Gulf Daily News. Dr. Balles is also Editorial Consultant for Red House Marketing and a regular contributor to Bahrain This Month.

Related posts:

• The Israeli Lobby: Declassified Documents Expose Its Influence
• Declassified: Massive Israeli Manipulation of US Media Exposed
• Alison Weir – US Media and Israeli Military All in the Family

By Haneen Zoabi*

Without doubt, the prisoner exchange deal between Hamas and Israel is a huge achievement for the Palestinians. Ex-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said in 2006 that he would not give in to Hamas and would not release any Palestinian prisoners. The entire population of Gaza was then besieged by Israel in its efforts to find and free their soldier held captive in Gaza, Gilad Shalit; Israel wasn't prepared to give anything in return for their man. During the siege, of course, Israel bombed and invaded Gaza, killing 1,400 Palestinian civilians, one-third of them children. They could still not find and free Shalit. His freedom came when the deal suited the Palestinians and the Israeli government caved in to their demands.

Palestinians must beware of turning the national struggle into a political football.

Hence, while Israel didn't get Shalit free of charge, it did succeed on getting the whole Gaza Strip to pay the price. The inhumane blockade was endured in order to gain freedom for the Palestinian prisoners released as part of the exchange deal. It was besieged Gaza which liberated our prisoners, not the largesse of the Israeli government.

That such a deal could be negotiated while Gaza remains under siege illustrates how important the prisoner issue is to the people of Palestine. The national struggle is incomplete if the issues of our prisoners, Jerusalem and refugees do not form the core.

This was confirmed by our people everywhere in historic Palestine; the solidarity of our youth in Israel with the detainees' hunger strike was unprecedented. The strike showed that the prison walls do not imprison the will of the prisoners. The youths' solidarity with the detainees also sent the message that prison walls do not detach prisoners from their community. It also gave the young people inside Israel   in places like Nazareth, Umm al-Fahm and Haifa   evidence that the struggles of the Palestinian people are indivisible in their many forms, and that there is no meaning to "being part of the Palestinian people" if we are not part of the collective struggles and sacrifices.

However, within that context, although Hamas has said that it will not abandon those prisoners held by Israel who are Israeli citizens, the female detainees or any of the leaders, we were surprised, even shocked, when we knew that only five prisoners out of more than 160 from the 1948-occupied territories were freed. And that Ahmed Saadat and Marwan Barghouti were not part of the deal, and nor were the women prisoners from the 1948 territories: Worood, Khadija and Lina are still behind bars even though the information released claimed that all women prisoners would be set free.

It is not clear how or why Hamas appears to have given up on most of the detainees from the 1948-occupied territories and how or why it gave up on the leaders of other factions. This is at least one question for which Hamas is still to provide an answer to the people of Palestine.

Nevertheless, the solidarity with the prisoners across Palestine and the deal itself has ushered in a new stage of our struggle. This highlights the responsibility of the Palestinian Authority, the relationship between the two main factions, Fatah and Hamas, and the status of the detainees' issue in our national agenda.

Not unnaturally, there has been talk of Hamas scoring points against Fatah in the power struggle between the main factions. Palestinians must beware of turning the national struggle into a political football. While the people will reward those who bring about political change, they will also push for greater struggle and concern for the national interest.

The exchange agreement gives the Palestinian Authority a tricky task in maintaining the deal as a national achievement. This can be done by limiting or stopping security coordination with the Israelis, which will make it harder for them to arrest Palestinian activists; it simply makes no sense to celebrate the release of prisoners on one hand while helping Israel to round more up on the other. We must build on the momentum provided by the prisoner exchange deal on both sides of the Green Line, and return the issue of Palestinian prisoners still in Israeli jails to the core of the political struggle.

* Haneen Zoabi is a member of the Knesset representing the Balad party. She is a Palestinian Arab, who is also an Arab citizen of Israel. Elected in 2009, she is the first woman to be elected to the Knesset on an Arab party's list.

Related posts:

• Captured Prisoners: the Whole Story
• Gaza sewage plant designed to save lives, paid for by “Quartet” hit by Israel
• Israeli soldiers indicted for torturing Palestinian prisoners

Flight 175 Courtesy: www.questionsquestions.net

By Anthony Lawson* | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

Extract: ...it would be a remarkable irony, and quite possibly a unique circumstance in the annals of American jurisprudence, if the assumptions used as reasons for launching wars against two sovereign nations, as well as the more generalised 'War on Terror' would not stand up as evidence in either a criminal prosecution or a civil damages suit in an American court of law.

It is not a theory but a fact-one that is well known within the 9/11 truth movement-that the 9/11 Commission failed to ensure that at least one of the appropriate government agencies: the NTSB, the FBI or the FAA was commissioned to positively identify the aircraft which were allegedly involved in the murders of nearly 3,000 people, on September 11, 2001.

One does not need to be a Harvard Law School graduate to know that the first and most important requirement in any murder investigation is to determine the cause of death, which often leads to a requirement to identify, and trace to its origins, a murder weapon, or, in the case of 9/11: weapons. And there can be no doubt that each of the four planes which were allegedly hijacked on the morning 9/11 was posited as being a murder weapon, by the U.S. administration and the 9/11 Commission, yet there is absolutely nothing which firmly connects the four allegedly-hijacked planes to any of the 9/11 crash sites.

In fact it is not fanciful to suggest that if a lawyer, even of a far lower calibre than that of an Alan Dershowitz, were engaged to defend the airport security companies that allegedly allowed 19 box-cutter-carrying Arabs to get onto those planes, he would immediately call for the dismissal of such an action on the grounds that the planes which allegedly hit the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the one which crashed near Shanksville had never been forensically identified as the planes which, allegedly, had been hijacked that morning.

And such a motion could not possibly be denied, as I will explain.

The planes in question were alleged to have been: American Airlines flight 11 (Tail Number: N334AA), North Tower; United Airlines flight 175 (N612UA), South Tower; American Airlines flight 77 (N644AA), the Pentagon, and United Airlines flight 93 (N591UA), which supposedly crashed near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. But the truth is that they could well have been different planes that had arrived on the scenes from quite different locations, because the crash debris recovered from those four crash sites has never been forensically linked to the planes that allegedly took off from Logan International, Boston; Dulles International, Washington and Newark International, New Jersey, and which were, allegedly, hijacked shortly thereafter. Therefore they cannot possibly be linked, without a reasonable doubt, to breaches of security at those airports.

So, it would be a remarkable irony, and quite possibly a unique circumstance in the annals of American jurisprudence, if the assumptions used as reasons for launching wars against two sovereign nations, as well as the more generalised 'War on Terror' would not stand up as evidence in either a criminal prosecution or a civil damages suit in an American court of law.

Air-crash investigations in the United States are normally carried out by the NTSB's air accident investigation division, and there are several documentary television series featuring this government agency's painstaking approach when investigating the causes of air crashes. During many such investigations, serial numbers from recovered parts are cross checked with the airline-in-question's purchase and maintenance records, to try and identify the reason for an accident, when it is suspected that mechanical failure may have been the cause.

However the NTSB has confirmed that-apparently for the first time from its inception, in 1967, since when it has investigated more than 124,000 other aviation accidents-it took no part in investigating any of the air crashes which occurred on September 11, 2001. So the world has been asked to take it on faith and hearsay that the four planes involved were normal scheduled flights which were hijacked by Arab terrorists, some of whom, are, allegedly, still alive.

Even more disturbing is the fact that documentation exists, and is available on the Internet, which indicates that the FBI, backed up by a separate letter from the Justice Department has refused to release any information, under the Freedom of Information Act, about any debris recovered from the crash sites, including the serial number of the "Black Box" Cockpit Flight Data Recorder allegedly found near the alleged crash site of United Airlines Flight 93. It may be recalled that a transcript taken from this recorder formed the basis for several TV dramas and one Academy-Award winning feature film.

By no means finally, but just as disturbing, the core of a jet engine, which can been seen in several 9/11 videos falling out of the northern face of the WTC's South Tower, and which hit a building on its way down, and was photographed and videoed-in the presence of FBI personnel and at least one FBI vehicle-where it came to rest at the junction of Church and Murray streets, was later photographed, prior to its burial in a land fill on Staten Island. So much for what murder investigators are usually so concerned about: The chain of custody and preservation of important evidence, pending its identification.

The events of 9/11 had consequences far beyond the destruction of life and property in the United States; they were the reasons for the launching of three wars. Yet it is obvious that a leader writer of an influential newspaper, the Washington Post, could not spare the time to look into such a serious matter-one that people with far fewer resources than he or she has access to have managed to do-before launching a scathing attack on a member of the Japanese parliament and the world-wide 9/11 truth movement, in general.

Just because the 9/11 Commission did not do its job properly is no excuse for newspaper writers not to do theirs. Unless, of course, newspapers such as the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times are playing a conscious role in a conspiracy to prevent the truth about these events from surfacing. In which case their editors and owners would almost certainly be guilty of misprision of felony.

I would like to stress that the identity of the planes is not the only reason why the 9/11 Commission's findings should be regarded as invalid, and its members found guilty, at the very least, of gross oversights in the collection of the evidence which was used in the writing of its Final Report. Even a cursory look at the visual evidence of the collapsing World Trade Center's Twin Towers and WTC 7 should have instilled grave doubts about the findings of some of the experts from the National Institute of Standards and Technology, NIST.

But, for my money, the real smoking guns were, and still are, the four aircraft that were used as weapons on that terrible day, and for them not to have been identified breaks every rule in any book which seeks to teach the art of solving crimes.

* Anthony Lawson (known professionally as Tony Lawson) is a retired international-prize-winning commercials director, cameraman, ad agency creative director and voice over. He used to be known for shooting humorous commercials, but doesn’t find much to laugh about, with the way the world is going, these days.

From the author:

WTC7 -- This is an Orange

Video link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zv7BImVvEyk

Related posts:

• Hiring CRIMINALS to guard planes!
• Phones On Planes
• The 14 Israeli ‘Art Students’ Were Inside The WTC Towers Camping With Construction Passes

By Maidhc Ó Cathail* | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

This month marks the seventh anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. Despite the passage of time, there is still much confusion, some of it deliberate, about why America made that fateful decision. The following questions are intended to clarify who's to blame for the Iraq war.

1. Ahmed Chalabi, the source of much of the false "intelligence" about Iraqi WMD, was introduced to his biggest boosters Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz by their mentor, a University of Chicago professor who had known the Iraqi con man since the 1960s. Who was this influential Cold War hawk who has an American Enterprise Institute (AEI) conference centre named in his honour?

2. In 1982, "A Strategy for Israel in the 1980s" appeared in Kivunim, a journal published by the World Zionist Organization, which stated: "Iraq, rich in oil on the one hand and internally torn on the other, is guaranteed as a candidate for Israel's targets. Its dissolution is even more important for us than that of Syria. Iraq is stronger than Syria. In the short run it is Iraqi power which constitutes the greatest threat to Israel." Who wrote this seminal article?

3. "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm," a report prepared for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in 1996, recommended "removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq-an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right." Which then member of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board was the study group leader?

4. A November 1997 Weekly Standard editorial titled "Saddam Must Go" stated: "We know it seems unthinkable to propose another ground attack to take Baghdad. But it's time to start thinking the unthinkable." The following year, the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), an influential neoconservative think tank, published a letter to President Clinton urging war against Iraq and the removal of Saddam Hussein because he is a "hazard" to "a significant portion of the world's supply of oil." The co-founders of PNAC were also the authors of the "Saddam Must Go" editorial. Who are they?

5. In Tyranny's Ally: America's Failure to Defeat Saddam Hussein, published by AEI Press in 1999, he argued that Clinton policies in Iraq were failing to contain the country and proposed that the US use its military to redraw the map of the Middle East. Who was this Mideast adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney from 2003 to mid-2007?

6. On September 15, 2001 at Camp David, the Deputy Defense Secretary attempted to justify a US attack on Iraq rather than Afghanistan because it was "doable."
In the lead-up to the war, he said that it was "wildly off the mark" to think hundreds of thousands of troops would be needed to pacify a postwar Iraq; that the Iraqis "are going to welcome us as liberators"; and that "it is just wrong" to assume that the United States would have to fund the Iraq war. Who is this chief architect of the Iraq war?

7. On September 23, 2001, which US senator, who had pushed for the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998, told NBC's "Meet the Press" that there was evidence that "suggests Saddam Hussein may have had contact with bin Laden and the al-Qaeda network, perhaps [was] even involved in the September 11 attack"?

8. A November 12, 2001 New York Times editorial called an alleged meeting between Mohammed Atta and an Iraqi agent in Prague an "undisputed fact"? Who was the columnist, celebrated for his linguistic prowess, who was sloppy in his use of language here?

9. A November 20, 2001 Wall Street Journal op-ed argued that the US should continue to target regimes that sponsor terrorism, claiming, "Iraq is the obvious candidate, having not only helped al Qaeda, but attacked Americans directly (including an assassination attempt against the first President Bush) and developed weapons of mass destruction." Who is the professor of strategic studies at the Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University who made these spurious claims?

10. George W. Bush's January 2002 State of the Union address described Iraq as part of an "axis of evil." Who was Bush's Canadian-born speechwriter who coined the provocative phrase?

11. "Yet whether or not Iraq becomes the second front in the war against terrorism, one thing is certain: there can be no victory in this war if it ends with Saddam Hussein still in power"? Who is the longtime editor of Commentary magazine who made this assertion in a February 2002 article titled "How to win World War IV"?

12. Which Pentagon Defense Policy Board member and PNAC signatory wrote in the Washington Post on February 13, 2002, "I believe that demolishing Hussein's military power and liberating Iraq would be a cakewalk"?

13. "If we win the war, we are in control of Iraq, it is the single largest source of oil in the world. We will have a bonanza, a financial one, at the other end, if the war is successful." Who is the psychiatrist-turned- Washington Post columnist who tempted Americans with this illusory carrot on August 3, 2002?

14. In a September 20, 2002 Wall Street Journal op-ed titled "The Case of Toppling Saddam," which current national leader claimed that Saddam Hussein could be hiding nuclear material "in centrifuges the size of washing machines" throughout the country?

15. "Why would Iraq attack America or use nuclear weapons against us? I'll tell you what I think the real threat (is) and actually has been since 1990-it's the threat against Israel." Despite this candid admission to a foreign policy conference at the University of Virginia on September 10, 2002, he authored the National Security Strategy of September 2002, which provided the justification for a preemptive war against Iraq. Who was this member of President Bush's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board?

16. According to a December 7, 2002 New York Times article, during Secretary of State Powell's efforts to negotiate a resolution on Iraq at the United Nations, this Iran-Contra conspirator's role was "to make sure that Secretary Powell did not make too many concessions to the Europeans on the resolution's wording, pressing a hard-line view." Who was this senior director of Near East and North African affairs at the National Security Council during the George W. Bush administration?

17. Who was Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, until he was indicted for lying to federal investigators in the Valerie Plame case, who drafted Colin Powell's fraudulent February 5, 2003 UN speech?

18. According to Julian Borger's July 17, 2003 Guardian article titled "The spies who pushed for war," the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans (OSP) "forged close ties to a parallel, ad hoc intelligence operation inside Ariel Sharon's office in Israel" to provide the Bush administration with alarmist reports on Saddam's Iraq. Who was the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy who headed the OSP?

19. Which British-born professor emeritus of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University, whose 1990 essay "The Roots of Muslim Rage" introduced the dubious concept of a "Clash of Civilizations," has been called "perhaps the most significant intellectual influence behind the invasion of Iraq"?

20. Apart from their key role in taking America to war against Iraq, what do the answers to questions 1 to 19 all have in common?

Answers: 1. Albert Wohlstetter 2. Oded Yinon 3. Richard Perle 4. William Kristol and Robert Kagan 5. David Wurmser 6. Paul Wolfowitz 7. Joseph Lieberman 8. William Safire 9. Eliot Cohen 10. David Frum 11. Norman Podhoretz 12. Kenneth Adelman 13. Charles Krauthammer 14. Benjamin Netanyahu 15. Philip Zelikow 16. Elliott Abrams 17. Lewis "Scooter" Libby 18. Douglas Feith 19. Bernard Lewis 20. They are all Jewish Zionists.

* Maidhc Ó Cathail is a widely published writer based in Japan.

Source: Islam Times

Related posts:

• Maidhc Ó Cathail – The Chilcot Inquiry: Britain’s 9/11 Commission
• Maidhc Ó Cathail – A Wolfowitz in Sheep’s Clothing
• Maidhc Ó Cathail – Zionism Unmasked: Chutzpah, thy name is Zionism

By Michael Gillespie* | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

An ongoing investigation by the Dubai Police force into the assassination of a high-level Hamas official in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in January has drawn back the curtains of secrecy and deception to reveal yet again the contours of Israel's massive and ever-expanding espionage operations in the United States.

The murder of Mahmoud Al Mabhouh in his room at the Al Bustan Rotana, a 275-room five-star luxury hotel, in Dubai on January 19 has been widely perceived to be a Mossad operation involving, by the most recent count, 27 suspects traveling on fraudulently obtained and falsified European or Australian passports. In late February and early March, the plot thickened suddenly and significantly when major US media outlet reports connected the crime and many of those involved in it to the USA and to corporations based in the USA and Israel and revealed that some of the suspected assassins, apparently members of a Mossad kidon team, had entered the USA after leaving Dubai.

ABC News reported on February 24 that Dubai police had identified 15 new suspects as part of a ring that killed Al Mabhouh.

"Fourteen of the suspects purportedly used credit cards from META Bank, a regional American bank, to pay for hotel rooms and travel arrangements. ... Dubai police linked META Bank to a New York-based company called Payoneer, which provided prepaid MasterCard credit cards issued by META Bank. According to its Web site, Payoneer has a research and development center in Tel Aviv," reported ABC.

The TV network report noted that some of the additional suspects played a central role in the crime while others were accused of "'providing prior logistical support and preparations to facilitate,' making a series of trips to Dubai in advance" of the assassination.

The New York Times reported on March 1 that, "At least two suspects in the killing of a Hamas official in a hotel here in January traveled to the United States afterward, according to a person familiar with the investigation."

"One suspect traveling on a British passport arrived in the United States on Feb. 14; the other used an Irish passport and arrived on Jan. 21, said the person, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the case. He did not say where the men entered the country, and added that there was no known record of their leaving," wrote Robert F. Worth in a story filed from Dubai.

Worth's report noted that if the suspected assassins who entered the U.S. presented foreign passports, they would have been photographed and finger printed upon arrival.

The Wall Street Journal's Chip Cummins filed a similar report from Dubai on the same day attributing the information to "people familiar with the situation" and "records shared between international investigators." In many previous news reports from Dubai information about the investigation had been attributed to Dubai's Police Chief Lt. Gen. Dhahi Khalfan Tamim.

Neither report explored the rather remarkable news that the suspect carrying a British passport in the name Roy Allan Cannon was confident enough to travel on the falsified document more than three weeks after the assassination and to present it upon arrival in the USA, where passport controls are generally assumed to be most stringent.

"At one time it was possible to produce false identity documents with little or no regard for what is referred to as backstopping as data bases at national points of entry were unsophisticated and were generally unlinked to any central sources of information. That has all changed in the past eight years. European and American passports in particular can all be verified from central data bases that include information that is also drawn from other public record sources," wrote former CIA officer Philip Giraldi in a February 25 column for Antiwar.com.

On March 3, Al Jazeera TV reported that Tamim, "said he would ask the Dubai prosecutor to issue arrest warrants for [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu and the head of Mossad [Meir Degan]."

Tamim's investigation, which has been described by Interpol Secretary General Ronald Noble as "thorough," has seriously inconvenienced and embarrassed the Israeli government and its espionage organization.

The Money Trail

The Independent Monitor contacted MetaBank's corporate headquarters in Storm Lake, IA to ask why an Iowa bank would provide credit cards to 14 suspected members of a death squad.

MetaBank's Lisa Binder, Vice President for Investor Relations and Corporate Communications responded via telephone and e-mail with a statement saying, in part, "The Meta cards in question were issued in conjunction with a Meta Payment Systems program, not at a retail bank location. Meta Payment Systems, which has issued more than 150 million prepaid cards, markets its payroll cards through various Program Managers─in this case, Payoneer─to offer reputable US companies network branded payroll cards with which American companies can pay expatriates, employees and contractors of their company who live in the US and in foreign countries. The cards in question were 'loaded' by the companies using direct deposit for payroll, disbursements, and other compensation."

The Independent Monitor attempted to contact Payoneer offices at 410 Park Avenue in New York City but found that the only phone answered at Payoneer headquarters was a customer support line for Payoneer's Birthright Israel customers.

Birthright Israel provides first time educational trips to Israel for Jewish young adults ages 18 to 26. The program sends "thousands of young Jewish adults from all over the world to Israel as a gift in order to diminish the growing division between Israel and Jewish communities around the world; to strengthen the sense of solidarity among world Jewry; and to strengthen participants' personal Jewish identity and connection to the Jewish people," according to the organization's website.

Funding for Birthright Israel is "provided by our partners: private philanthropists through The Birthright Israel Foundation; the people of Israel through the Government of Israel; and Jewish communities around the world (North American Jewish Federations, Keren Hayesod and the Jewish Agency for Israel). ...

"Taglit-Birthright Israel requires that all participants pay their deposit through Payoneer. ... If you lose your Payoneer card while in Israel, it can be immediately blocked and will be replaced with a new card within 24 hours. ... You will not need to contact your bank back home or worry about making many calls. One call to our Customer Support center and you are all set," says the www.birthright.payoneer.com website.

Payoneer's Birthright customer support center declined to provide the Independent Monitor with contact information for Payoneer founder and CEO Yuval Tal or for Payoneer corporate communications/media relations personnel.

"Since the assassination, Tal has been shielded by a wall of public relations representatives and does not respond to media requests for comments. ... Tal's public relations representatives in New York have refused to comment on his past and relations with Israel's intelligence agency Mossad," wrote Abbas Al Lawati, a staff reporter for Gulf News.com on March 3.

"Tal is referred to by his associates in Israel as 'an outspoken Israeli patriot' despite having lived in New York for over ten years. In a 2006 Fox News interview about Israel's summer war on Lebanon, Tal was presented as a 'special ops commando' on Fox and Friends, and stated that 'this is a war Israel cannot (afford to) lose,'" wrote Al Lawati.

Payoneer's website proclaims that the company is "a registered MasterCard Merchant Service Provider (MSP), and partner with MetaBank or Choice Bank Limited to deliver our services. Privately held, our funding partners include Greylock Partners, Carmel Ventures, and Crossbar Capital."

The Independent Monitor found that all three of Payoneer's funding partners are venture capital firms that have offices in or strong connections to Israel.

Charlie Federman, Managing Partner of Crossbar Capital, previously co-founded BRM Capital in 1999, headed its New York office, and served as a Managing Director of the Israel and New York based fund until 2007. BRM Group, headquartered in Herzliya was founded by Nir Barkat, mayor of occupied Jerusalem.

Carmel Ventures is also headquartered Herzliya. Greylock Partners, founded in 1965, "operates in a number of global centers of innovation, including Boston, China (Beijing), India (Bangalore), Israel (Herzliya) and Silicon Valley. ... Current Greylock portfolio companies include Data Robotics, Digg, Facebook, Imperva, LinkedIn, Palo Alto Networks, Pandora, Picarro, Redfin, Workday and ZipCar," according to the firm's website. Greylock's investment activities in Israel were launched in 2002 by partner Moshe Mor, who "served six years in the Israeli Army as a Captain in the Military Intelligence branch."

Tal almost certainly possess information that could be of value to U.S. law enforcement and counter-intelligence investigators, but whether their political masters, many of whom have been effectively co-opted by Israel, will allow U.S. investigators to pursue any sort of meaningful investigation is an open question. Thus far there has been little to indicate that U.S. officials are seriously interested in investigating the funding of travel expenses and hotel accommodations of suspected Israeli assassins through U.S. corporations, despite the reported entry of at least two of the suspects into the U.S. on fraudulent, falsified passports.

When the Independent Monitor contacted the Department of State (DoS) for comment about the news reports, a DoS press officer declined to comment and referred questions to the Department of Justice (DoJ) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) press offices. A DoJ press officer also declined to comment and referred questions to a DHS press officer who has not responded to an e-mail message sent on March 5.

The Sayanim Network

Any substantive U.S. investigation of the suspected Dubai killers' connections to the USA would likely focus on members of the Mossad's worldwide network of sayanim, diaspora Jews who provide a wide variety of services to the Israeli intelligence and special operations agency. In his books, By Way of Deception (1990) and The Other Side of Deception (1994), former Mossad field officer or katsa Victor Ostrovsky described the sayanim network.

"Sayanim─assistants─must be 100 percent Jewish," wrote Ostrovsky in 1990.

The Mossad's helpers, chosen because they are well placed, willing, and able to provide valuable assistance to Israeli agents, are businessmen, doctors, lawyers, judges, prosecutors, police officers, intelligence officers, politicians, government bureaucrats, university professors and administrators, media professionals, information technology specialists, any occupation, profession, or position in which a sayan might prove useful in support of Israeli espionage operations.

Though they do not live in Israel, their first loyalty is to Israel. They do whatever Mossad officials, field officers, or assassins ask of them in behalf of Israel against the enemies of Israel or those who are seen as opposed to Israeli policies.

"Often the loyalty of sayanim is abused by katsas who take advantage of the available help for their own personal use. There is no way for the sayan to check this," wrote Ostrovsky.

"The one problem with the [sayanim] system is that the Mossad does not seem to care how devastating it could be to the status of the Jewish people in the diaspora if it was known. The answer you get if you ask is: 'So what's the worst that could happen to those Jews? They'd all come to Israel? Great,'" wrote Ostrovsky.

"A sayan will rent a car or pass money to a kidon with no questions asked," said Gordon Thomas, author of Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad (1999) in a report by Alun Palmer of the Mirror (UK) on February 18. Thomas, who has estimated that there are at least 20,000 sayanim in the US and Great Britain, writes that all Mossad assassinations are authorized by the office of the prime minister of Israel.

The illegal use of U.S. banks and credit card companies to fund the movements and other expenses of a Mossad death squad in the Middle East indicates an alarming expansion of Israeli espionage operations on US soil and reveals to an unprecedented extent the foreign intelligence agency's penetration of major U.S. financial institutions, developments that limn the breadth, depth, and success of the Mossad's desperate efforts to expand and consolidate Israel's malignant influence over the Washington foreign policy establishment and sway within a broad range of U.S. institutions, despite growing popular opposition to Israel's the brutal and patently illegal occupation of Palestine and the punishing siege of Gaza.

The Myth, Cult, and Culture of Redemptive Violence

The supposed clash of civilizations, the conflict between the putatively modern Western Judeo-Christian tradition and radical Islam, the Bush administration's Global War on Terrorism later rebranded by the Obama administration as Overseas Contingency Operations, and the suppurating wound that is Israel's long-running illegal occupation and systematic ethnic cleansing of Palestine are evidence of a retrograde social and political dynamic that now threatens the continued progress and future of human civilization. That dynamic is epitomized by the myth, cult, and culture of redemptive violence.

"The myth of redemptive violence defends the belief that violence saves, that war brings peace. It is one of the oldest stories in the world. It misappropriates the language, symbols and scriptures of Christianity. Its God is the tribal God worshipped as an idol. Its offer is not forgiveness but victory. Its good news is not unconditional love of enemies but their elimination. Its salvation is not a new heart but a successful foreign policy. It is blasphemous. It is idolatrous. And it is immensely popular," writes Dr. Walter Wink, Professor Emeritus of Biblical Interpretation at Auburn Theological Seminary in New York City.

Wink might have added that while Christian scripture is tainted by the myth of redemptive violence, the Hebrew Old Testament scriptures, attached at the spine of the Holy Bible to the New Testament, are Christianity's primary source of the pernicious mythology of redemptive violence. Only about 10 percent of the New Testament is devoted to Jesus' teachings about the brotherhood of man and the fatherhood of God, the kingdom of Heaven, the happiness of peacemakers, and forgiveness and mercy as moral and spiritual imperatives.

True religion opposes violence as a technique of social evolution, but many Christians have been and are today all too willing and ready to embrace Hebrew Old Testament teachings that glorify war and the wholesale slaughter of innocents and ascribe such acts to the commands of a wrathful God that is both vengeful and violent. The popularity of the myth of redemptive violence in the West and the attitudes and policies it engenders in political and economic spheres of activity severely undercuts the supposed moral superiority of Western modernity and culture in relation to other traditions and cultures.

U.S. leaders often attempt to justify their wars with self-serving declarations that they are fighting for peace.

"One day the Iraqi people will understand that we came in peace," averred Secretary of State Colin Powell in March 2003 as U.S. troops advanced on Baghdad after a devastating and enormously destructive "Shock and Awe" air assault on the city.

If the status of a civilization can be accurately gauged by the fairness of its courts and the integrity of its judges, resort by national leaders to extra-judicial killings conducted by intelligence agency death squads is emblematic of the West's glorification of war and ruinous reversion to militarism─autocratic, cruel, and savage. Rigidly ultranationalistic Israel, more an army and an espionage agency with a country than a country with an army and an espionage agency, clearly intends to be the West's model and instructor in this regard.

A feature article by Associated Press reporter Matti Friedman published in the Washington Post on March 4 quoted Jonna Mendez, who worked for the CIA for 27 years and became the agency's chief of disguise. Mendez "believes the Dubai perpetrators took the fallout into account, all of it: the TV footage, the blown aliases and the head shots. The agents, she said, clearly knew they were under surveillance─they had simply decided it was unavoidable and a price worth paying.

"'You can be sure they knew they were being surveilled. Likewise, they would assume that the documents they were using would be made available after the fact,' said Mendez. 'What does this mean? It means it didn't matter. The faces and the documents that were captured by the cameras will probably never be seen again.'

"The fact that the perpetrators had to take the identities of real people rather than simply invent false identities is a symptom of the new world facing modern-day spies, one of databases and traceable passport information, she said.

"The real agents likely don't resemble the faces in the photos, she said ... And if they do, plastic surgery, dental implants and hair grafts can ensure they are unrecognizable afterward.

"'Steal the identity, disguise the participants, be ready on the other side with another set of identities and documents, and embrace and conceal the protagonists on their return,' she said.

"'With that goal in mind this may, in fact, be the operation of the future,'" wrote Friedman.

Thinking Americans have an increasingly clear choice.

They can join the cult of redemptive violence, kneel before a Zionist tribal God of vengeance, and watch their country and its culture revert to the law of nature as militarism runs amok and Israeli spies and assassins, protected by corrupt and co-opted political leaders, roam America at will.

Or they can embrace and actively support not the savagery of assassins but the rule of law. They can cultivate the wisdom, insight, and foresight that are indispensable to the endurance of nations. They can persevere in their efforts to elect honest, wise, and progressive leaders. And they can continue to strive to live up and into the noblest ideals of their religions.

* Michael Gillespie, in addition to his regular freelance work for Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, is also a contributing editor and the Des Moines, IA correspondent for The Independent Monitor, the national newspaper of Arab Americans, published by Sami Mashney in Anaheim, CA.

Source: DV

Related posts:

• Under investigation
• Getting Away With Murder
• James Petras – Mossad Comes to America: Death Squads by Invitation

By Dr. Alan Sabrosky* | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu once remarked to a Likud gathering that "Israel is not like other countries." Oddly enough for him, that time he was telling the truth, and nowhere is that more evident than with Jewish nationalism, whether or not one pins the "Zionist" label on it.

Nationalism in most countries and cultures can have both positive and negative aspects, unifying a people and sometimes leading them against their neighbors. Extremism can emerge, and often has, at least in part in almost every nationalist/independence movement I can recall (e.g., the French nationalist movement had The Terror, Kenya's had the Mau Mau, etc.).

But whereas extremism in other nationalist movements is an aberration, extremism in Jewish nationalism is the norm, pitting Zionist Jews (secular or observant) against the goyim (everyone else), who are either possible predator or certain prey, if not both sequentially. This does not mean that all Jews or all Israelis feel and act this way, by any means. But it does mean that Israel today is what it cannot avoid being, and what it would be under any electable government (a point I'll develop in another article).

The differences between Jewish nationalism (Zionism) and that of other countries and cultures here I think are fourfold:

1. Zionism is a real witches' brew of xenophobia, racism, ultra-nationalism, and militarism that places it way outside of a "mere" nationalist context -- for example, when I was in Ireland (both parts) I saw no indication whatsoever that the PIRAs or anyone else pressing for a united Ireland had a shred of design on shoving Protestants into camps or out of the country, although there may well have been a handful who thought that way -- and goes far beyond the misery for others professed by the Nazis;

2. Zionism undermines civic loyalty among its adherents in other countries in a way that other nationalist movements (and even ultra-nationalist movements like Nazism) did not -- e.g., a large majority of American Jews, including those who are not openly dual citizens, espouse a form of political bigamy called "dual loyalty" (to Israel & the US) that is every bit as dishonest as marital bigamy, attempts to finesse the precedence they give to Israel over the US (lots of Rahm Emanuels out there who served in the IDF but NOT in the US armed forces), and has absolutely no parallel in the sense of national or cultural identity espoused by any other definable ethnic or racial group in America -- even the Nazi Bund in the US disappeared once Germany and the US went to war, with almost all of its members volunteering for the US armed forces;

3. The "enemy" of normal nationalist movements is the occupying power and perhaps its allies, and once independence is achieved, normal relations with the occupying power are truly the norm, but for Zionism almost everyone out there is an actual or potential enemy, differing only in proximity and placement on its very long list of enemies (which is now America's target list); and

4. Almost all nationalist movements (including the irredentist and secessionist variants) intend to create an independent state from a population in place or to reunite a separated people (like the Sudeten Germans in the 1930s) -- it is very rare for it to include the wholesale displacement of another indigenous population, which is far more common of successful colonialist movements as in the US -- and perhaps a reason why most Americans wouldn't care too much about what the Israelis are doing to the Palestinians even if they DID know about it, is because that is no different than what Europeans in North America did to the Indians/Native Americans here in a longer & more low-tech fashion.

The implications of this for Middle East peace prospects, and for other countries in thrall to their domestic Jewish lobbies or not, are chilling. The Book of Deuteronomy come to life in a state with a nuclear arsenal would be enough to give pause to anyone not bought or bribed into submission -- which these days encompasses the US Government, given Israel's affinity for throwing crap into the face of the Obama administration and Obama's visible affinity for accepting it with a smile, Bibi Netanyahu's own "Uncle Tom" come to Washington.

The late General Moshe Dayan, who -- Zionist or not -- remains an honored part of my own Pantheon of military heroes, allegedly observed that Israel's security depended on its being viewed by others as a mad dog. He may have been correct. But he neglected to note that the preferred response of everyone else is to kill that mad dog before it can decide to go berserk and bite. It is an option worth considering.

*Alan Sabrosky (Ph.D, University of Michigan) is a ten-year US Marine Corps veteran and a graduate of the US Army War College. He can be contacted at docbrosk@comcast.net

Related posts:

• Alan Hart – ZIONISM UNMASKED: A fairy tale that’s become a terrifying nightmare
• Jeff Gates – ZIONISM UNMASKED: End of Zionism = Peace
• Paul J. Balles – Zionism Unmasked: “Anti-Semitic” – the label that stops criticism

By Paul J. Balles* | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

The March to Freedom for Nought

Two things made those extremes almost bearable: the brutality always revealed – at least according to the media coverage – the viciousness of the enemy. It was therefore quite understandable when our "brave men and women" pulverized the enemy.

Films of Japanese torturing captive Americans somehow justified holding over 7,000 Japanese Americans in internment camps during World War II; and only a small percentage of Americans found the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki unreasonably vengeful at best, at worst, depraved.

The media giants in America portrayed the North Koreans as barbaric beasts with their captives, quite unlike their southern counterpoints – our allies during the Korean War. No one ever felt the need to explain how the South Koreans were a civilized breed while the North Koreans were absolute savages, at least according to the official line.

"... the most extremes – the real horrors – of this war come with the primitive killer mentality developed in our youth. I've now seen a half dozen documentary films and read eyewitness accounts that reveal troops or pilots gloating over the massacres of civilians who just happened to be available targets."

In Vietnam, our warriors justifiably (or so the media made us believe) dropped napalm on the North Vietnamese who had the gall to hide in villages and tunnels to ravage our invaders. At least it was accepted practice until some rogue photojournalist filmed a young girl screaming down a Vietnamese road in flames.

One of our lieutenants also got caught commanding his troops to open fire on an entire village of civilians – women and children. We had obviously – to some – gone too far. If those few torturous incidents hadn't been filmed, we might have carried on and won the war in Vietnam (or so the thinking goes) with our napalm and wanton village massacres.

Then, when the Iraqi troops ran (literally) fleeing Kuwait in 1991, our bloodthirsty aviators annihilated them on the road north, bombing their retreat to "melted glass" (as one Lockheed acquaintance put it). That feast for hungry slaughterers received little attention. The bombers and strafers felt no guilt after Saddam's troops had blown up Kuwait's oil wells.

The nagging memory of non-avenged defeat in Vietnam somehow allowed members of the clergy to ignore the devastating inhuman cost to children in Iraq during 10 years of sanctions. Only a few humanitarians among academics spoke out. Congress completely ignored it. The public didn't care. Why should they? Our leaders spoke of everything but the brutality of our enforcers.

We have now reached a stage where our extreme horrors of brutality and cruelty have exceeded our past records. We no longer have the rationale of moral righteousness of the earlier wars.

There were no excuses for Abu-Ghraib, but our interest in that inhuman travesty dried up and blew away. We have little concern about our violations of human rights in Guantanamo. We care less about ill-treatment of Arabs and Arab Americans in the USA.

But the most extremes – the real horrors – of this war come with the primitive killer mentality developed in our youth. I've now seen a half dozen documentary films and read eyewitness accounts that reveal troops or pilots gloating over the massacres of civilians who just happened to be available targets.

Without doubt, the US has not only become the world's major power, it has become the world's sickest warrior state. Neither conscience nor empathy for others defines the qualities of the sociopath.

It's past time for humanitarians to reject the double standards set by warmongers and supported by arms-makers and the mainstream media. The clergy needs to stop preaching sanctimonious sermons. Finally, educators should adopt and teach a zero tolerance policy for self-righteous warriors.

And yes, those who would dismiss my criticism as vitriolic should join a chorus with a conscience.

* Paul J. Balles is a retired American university professor and freelance writer who has lived in the Middle East for many years. For more information, see http://www.pballes.com.

Related posts:

• Paul J. Balles – Zionism Unmasked: “Anti-Semitic” – the label that stops criticism
• The Worlds Worst Prison State
• Weekend read: Biased Media, War Crimes, One-State Solution and ‘Right to Exist’

By Tariq Shadid* | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

Although people in our modern times have been educated to believe that having the 'right' ideas, methods or ideologies is what causes revolutions, history teaches us that drastic changes usually happen when the majority of the people rally behind a certain leader, more than behind an ideology. While Palestinian society continues to be torn apart by factional strife, and people increasingly see each other as adversaries based on differences of opinion or conviction, what they really need is not a new philosophy, but simply a truly charismatic leader.

We may idealize human intellect and enlightenment, but in practice, human social biology usually proves to be stronger than ideology. While most people today believe that their strength lies in the success of their perceived Utopian model of society, and that the ideas of a prominent persona are more important than his personal characteristics, their behavior is often indicative of the opposite. Being herd animals, changes usually happen when the majority of the human herd flocks behind a leader who is perceived as charismatic, strong, sympathetic and courageous.

The Effect of Charisma

In democratic societies, politicians seem to be very aware of this human behavioral phenomenon, especially during campaign time. A good example is the victory of Barack Obama in the American elections of 2008. We can all clearly see that the policies of the new administration, with its promises of 'change', barely show any significant differences - especially in foreign affairs - when compared to the much reviled Bush administration. To perceptive observers this has come as no surprise, since it was rather easy to read it between the lines of those 'historical' election campaigns. Still, people not only in the USA but even worldwide were under the spell of Obama's personal charm, eloquence and strong charisma, which consolidated his famous landslide electoral victory regardless of these simple facts.

Many people seem to believe that it was Gandhi's famous and impressive philosophy of non-violence (Satyagraha), which gave him the leverage to be able to rally the vast majority of the population of India behind him and make them take to the streets. They seem to forget that India's independence was immediately followed by war, strife and violence which still has not been resolved today. While one can easily maintain that India, Pakistan and Bangladesh owe their independence from British colonial rule to the persona of Gandhi, it is quite difficult to make the case that it was his ideology that won the victory. If this was indeed the case, then Satyagraha would have survived its charismatic founder, and would have been instated as the region's main philosophy. What we see instead, is that India and Pakistan have gone to war with each other three times since their independence, and can both boast nuclear destructive capability, not Satyagraha, as their source of power.

There is no doubt that Gandhi's non-violence was an incredibly effective strategy for liberation, but its success at the same time was entirely dependent on his leadership in that struggle. No wonder that this successful feat has not yet proven to be reproducible under the leadership of other activist figures in the world.

With the assassination of Malcolm X, who was able to inspire millions into taking action against overwhelming odds, his movement was effectively stopped in its tracks before it could be consolidated into a victory. His legacy now lives on as a powerful inspiration, rather than as an example of liberation. The Libyan struggle for independence under Omar El Mukhtar, who was able to mobilize the Libyan population against colonialism and oppression, was effectively maimed by the elimination of his inspiring leadership, when he was hanged at the gallows.

People Need Leaders, Not Ideologies

Almost every significant mobilization for change of a population in history has taken place under the charismatic leadership of a person. It is very difficult to find any examples in history of successful uprisings or revolutions that were not inspired by a leader who was considered to be a hero by the majority of the people. People need a leader, not an ideology.

Even the qualities that define these historical figures of change, are almost disappointingly simple. The leader needs to be someone of high intelligence, with deep strategic insights and communication skills which enable him (or her) to express the concerns of the people in a way that appeals to them. He needs to possess rhetorical qualities that can appeal to people of different levels of education and social background. He also needs to have personal traits that enable a majority of people to identify with him, instead of seeming alien or superimposed to them. His message needs to be simple and convincing, and contain a promise of change. Once this person has earned the love of the majority of the people, the awe-inspiring herd-behavior of the human race makes it easy for this leader to rally the people behind him, whether we are talking about national elections, a revolution or a popularity contest at a local school.

When we observe other herd animals, we can see that they always have some leading animals that are followed by the rest. In the savannas of Africa, we can see how these herd animals migrate in a splendidly concerted flow, without any confusion about the herd's direction, which can often be seen from an breathtaking aerial view in wildlife documentaries. In the skies of Europe, during the fall season, one can see the impeccable figures drawn in the skies by huge clouds of thousands of starlings, which seem almost surreal in their coordinated movements as they elegantly sway between the treetops. Since there seems to be no difference of opinion among them on whom to follow, these starlings never collide with one another. This requires an almost unfathomable level of coordination, but is mainly achieved by their complete acceptance of their leadership's commands.

The Fallacy of Negotiations

In the Palestinian situation there is little confusion about which stated principles have the potential to unite the majority of the people. Our common cause, which is liberation from oppression, is our common interest; this suffices as an ideology and is the common denominator of all existing Palestinian factions. Nevertheless the popular movement against Zionist occupation and persecution is chaotically torn into many shreds. There is an abundance of opinions and ideologies, which concern themselves with end goals and final solutions, and end up leading to people sometimes being fanatically opposed against one another. What Palestine lacks is not a 'one-state' or 'two-state' solution, and not a progressive or conservative movement, but simply a leader who has the trust of the majority of the people. Coming from such a loved leader, people would most likely be prepared to accept any solution he would present, as long as he would promise to lead their struggle for liberation with full dedication.

While a significant portion of the population has been led to believe that negotiations are the way forward out of their dire situation, it is a matter of realism to conclude that this can never be successful. Again, history is our teacher. No overwhelming military or economical superpower has ever gone against its own interests simply because its adversaries were such smart speakers. It is therefore rather simplistic to expect the US-Israeli-European axis of racist colonization to steer off its course of total domination of the region, based on the communication skills of some intelligent or eloquent Palestinians. In fact, as long as they are aware that the representatives they are negotiating with are not backed by a massive majority of the population, they cannot even be blamed for not taking their so-called Palestinian 'partner in peace' seriously.

In truth, if they were certain that a leader had such a massive popular backing, they would most likely start a campaign of vilification against him. They would contend that he is an 'impossible partner in peace', based on whatever argumentation they would deem useful to prove their point to the masses in the West. Eventually, they would aim to physically eliminate him, as they have done with many promising Palestinian leaders, from all existing resistance groups.

The Ineffectiveness of Moderation

One can be sure that a population is in a state of confusion when a significant proportion of it, despite living under harsh oppression, puts its hopes in a moderate leader. No oppressed people in history ever won their freedom by choosing a moderate leader to represent them; even Gandhi was a radical, although his unique method was non-violence. Changes come about when a leader is massively hated and reviled by the adversary, and equally overwhelmingly loved by his own people. Therefore, rallying behind a leader who is deemed acceptable to the enemy, is by definition a crucial waste of time and effort. He has no choice but to balance between serving the occupier's goals and keeping his own people appeased, since these maneuvers are his only guarantee to keep his undesirable position at the negotiating table intact. Undesirable, not for the personal ambitions of that leader, but for the Palestinian cause. These 'negotiations at gunpoint' merely create an illusion of progress, while consolidating the domination of the Zionist colonizer, day after day, even when negotiations are 'stalled', as has often been the case.

In Palestine, a leader with the necessary charisma is absent on the political stage. We have a variety of candidates; some of them are more interested in gaining popularity among Western politicians and masses, than among their own people, in the meantime deriving their position of power from the status and popular backing of their organizations. Others care so little about their public relations status towards the world community, that they lose the trust of a portion of their own people in terms of being representative to the outside world. None of them is massively feared or reviled in Israeli society on their personal merits, not in the way Ahmad Yasin and Yasser Arafat were. None of them is massively loved by an overwhelming majority of Palestinians, across the entire spectrum.

Palestine is Full of Heroes

Therefore, these painful and tragic decades have not really been spent waiting for a 'solution'. Palestine is waiting for her leader, who is radical, sincere, courageous, charismatic and not only speaks clearly in terms of the liberation of Palestine, but proves and displays his full dedication to achieving it. Once this leader emerges, only a minority of the people will still give priority to serving the goals of their factional leadership, party or even their ideology. Once this leader appears on the stage and unites the people, not even Barack Obama, Binyamin Netanyahu and the whole leadership of the European Union combined will be able to stop the Palestinians from claiming their freedom and turning it into a reality.

Are you disappointed by my view? Do you feel as if I have dashed all our hopes for the future, because no such leader exists? Then perhaps you have misunderstood me. The point I am trying to make contains a message of hope, despite all the cynicism. We just have to stop being impressed by people who wave around US dollars or Euros, or brag about their Western contacts, because these people ultimately represent nothing but a dead end street for the Palestinian cause. The leader who can really make a change, will have to be one who has the courage to be a truly independent Palestinian.

We need to start realizing that Palestine is full of selfless and charismatic heroes, although they are seldom seen on center stage, and are rarely revered by their surroundings, unless they have achieved the status of martyrdom - which effectively means they are not there to lead us anymore. We have to try and modify our cultural practice of celebrating heroes only when they are dead, and start embracing and supporting the powerless but dedicated and trustworthy Palestinian heroes who are still alive and kicking in every village and town.

Only then we will have started to prepare the ground for that rare person who will eventually grow to win all of our hearts, and whom we can trust to lead us towards our liberation. The 'Palestinian Gandhi' most likely already exists; all it takes is for us to start noticing him, and supporting him.

* Tariq Shadid is a Palestinian surgeon living in the Middle East, and has written numerous essays about the Palestinian issue over the years. Most of these were published by the Palestine Chronicle (www.palestinechronicle.com) and have been bundled in the book "Understanding Palestine", which is available through Amazon.com. He also runs a website of internationally oriented music dedicated to the Palestinian cause, which can be found at www.docjazz.com.

Source: Palestine Think Tank

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By James Petras* | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

The principle propaganda mouthpiece of the Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations (PMAJO), the Daily Alert (DA), has come out in full support for Israel's practice of extra-judicial, extra-territorial assassination.

In the face of world-wide governmental condemnation (except from the Zionist-occupied White House and US Congress), the PMAJO slavishly backs any brutal murder committed by the Israeli secret police anywhere in the world and at anytime. The recent assassination of Hamas leader, Mahmoud Mabhouh, in Dubai is a case in point. The PMAJO has defended all of Mossad's criminal actions leading up to the murder, including extensive identity theft and the stealing or falsification of passports and official documents from several European countries, presumably allied to the Zionist state. Among the Mossad agents who entered Dubai to kill Mabhouh, twelve agents used stolen or forged British passports, three Australian, three French, one German and six Irish. These agents assumed the identity of European citizens in order to commit murder in a sovereign nation.

Once again the PMAJO demonstrate that its first loyalty is to the Israeli secret police, even when they violate the sovereignty of major US allies. No doubt the PMAJO would readily support the Israeli Mossad, even if it were shown to have used U.S. documents to assassinate Mabhouh. In fact, two of the 26 Israeli assassins, carrying fake Irish and fake British passports, are known to have entered the United States after the killing and may still be here.

The position adopted by the Daily Alert and the PMAJO in defense of Israel's international terrorist act followed several lines of attack, which will be discussed below. These include: (1) blaming the victim, (2) claiming that extra-judicial, extra territorial murders are legal, (3) minimizing the murder of ‘one' individual, (4) deflecting attention from the Zionists by blaming ‘other Arab's, (5) favorably comparing Mossad assassinations to US killings in Afghanistan, (6) trivializing and relativizing world condemnation, (7) citing "self-defense", (8) praising the high tech ‘operational details' of the assassination and (9) discrediting the Dubai police investigators rather than the Israeli perpetrators.

Abridged articles, cited in the Daily Alert, have appeared in the op-ed pages of several US, UK, Canadian and Israeli newspapers, as well as in rightwing magazines like Forbes and Commentary. The mainline Zionist propaganda technique is to avoid any discussion of Israel's egregious crimes against sovereignty, due process, international law and the personal security of individuals. In doing so, the Daily Alert adopts the propaganda techniques common to all totalitarian regimes practicing state terrorism.

(1) Blaming the Victim

On February 22, the Daily Alert (DA) headlined two articles, which were entitled: "Killed Hamas Official betrayed by Associates says Dubai Police Chief" and "Hamas: Assassinated Operative put Himself at Risk". The DA forgot to mention that Israeli secret police had been tracking their prey for over a month (having failed to assassinate him on six previous attempts) and that the Dubai Police Chief was not blaming Hamas officials but was in the process of accumulating evidence, witness statements, videos and documents proving the Israeli identities of the assassins. Needless to say, if we were to accept the American Zionists' argument that any leading opponent of Israel, who travels without an army of bodyguards, is "putting himself at risk", then we must acknowledge that ours is a lawless world where Israeli hit squads are free to commit murder anywhere, any time.

(2) Extra-Judicial, Extra territorial Murder is "Legal" (At least if the killers are Mossad)

The February 22 and February 24 issues of the DA include two articles arguing that Israel's practice of extra-judicial, extra-territorial murder is legal. One article is entitled, "The Legality of Killing of Hamas Mahmoud al Mabhoud" and the other, "The Proportionate Killing of Mahmoud al Mabhoud". These avoid any reference to international law, which emphatically rejects cross-border, state-sponsored murders. Legality, for the PMAJO, is whatever the Israel's secret police apparatus deems expedient in pursuit of its goal of eliminating leaders who oppose its colonial occupation and expropriation of Palestinian lands. If Israel's extra-judicial, extra-territorial murder of an adversary in Dubai is legal, why not assassinate opponents in the US, Canada, England or any other country where they might travel, live, work or write? What if the critics and opponents of Israel decided that it was now "legal" to murder Israel's supporters wherever they lived citing the Daily Alert's definition of legality? We would then find ourselves in a lawless world of "legal" murder and totalitarian cross-border surveillance.

(3) Minimizing the Murder

The Feb 22, 24, and 25 issues of the Daily Alert deflect attention from the Mossad murder by making comparison to the hundreds of Afghan civilians killed by US drone attacks. The claim is that "targeting individuals" is less a crime than mass killings. The problem with this argument is that for decades Mossad has "targeted" scores of opponents overseas and killed thousands of Palestinians in the occupied territories (where they work with the domestic secret police, Shin Bet, and the military, IDF). Moreover, this argument linking Israel's extra judicial assassinations with US colonial killing of Afghans is hardly a defense of either. By implicating the US in its defense of state terror, Israel is holding up the worst aspects of American imperialism as a standard for its own political behavior. One state's crimes are no justification for another's.

(4) Blaming the Arabs: Deflecting Attention from Israel

The DA Feb. 22 article entitled "The Assassination Heard Around the World" insinuates that the murder was a "result of a Hamas power struggle" or by one of "many Arab groups who loathes the Islamist Hamas".

In other words, all the forged or stolen European passports of Israeli dual citizens, and the Dubai security videos of Mossad operatives in various costumes, not to mention the jubilant affirmation by top Israeli leaders of the killing, was in reality ‘Arab tricks'. This crude propaganda ploy by the most prominent Jewish American organization reveals their own descent into a fantasy land of self-delusion, possible only in the closed world of US Zionist politics.

(5) Technical Proficiency

The DA published several articles praising the technical details of the Mossad assassination in Dubai, an aspect of the operation, with which few Israel security experts would agree. The Feb. 24 DA article entitled, "Assassination Shows Skillful Planning" chastises Israel's critics for not recognizing the high quality of the "operational aspects" of the killings and recommends its "lessons for all intelligence services around the world". Like sociopaths and serial killers, US Zionists openly promote Israeli death squad techniques to all fellow state terrorists. In the DA, professional techniques of assassination are far more important than universal moral repugnance of political murders.

(6) Discrediting the Investigators While Defending the Perpetrators

The DA on Feb. 25 cited a long and tendentious attack on the Dubai police, published in Forbes Magazine, which ridiculed their meticulous investigations uncovering Mossad's roles in the murder. In this article, the Dubai authorities were condemned for uncovering Israeli involvement while not investigating the source of the murder victims' ... Iraqi passport! Instead of encouraging the Dubai police pursuit of justice, the Daily Alert published a long diatribe implicating Dubai in the attacks of 9/11/2001, its continued trade with Iran, its ‘involvement' in international terrorism etc. There was no mention of Dubai's relatively friendly position to Israel and Israelis prior to Mossad's blatant violation of its sovereignty.

Conclusion

The American Zionist propaganda campaign in defense of Israeli state terror and, specifically, Mossad's murder of a Hamas leader in Dubai, relies on lies, evasions and specious legal arguments. This "defense" violates all precepts of a civilized society as well as the most recent American federal laws prohibiting all forms of support for international terrorism. The PMAJO can pursue its defense of Mossad's acts of international terrorism with impunity in the US because of its power over the US Congress, the Obama White House and the American mass media. This ensures that only its version of events, its definition of legality and its lies will be heard by legislators, echoed by Zionist activists and embellished by its solemn defenders in academic and journalistic circles. To counter the American Zionist defense of Israel's practice of extra-territorial, extra-judicial executions by the Mossad, we need American writers and academics to step forward. It is time to expose their flimsy arguments, bold-face lies and audacious immorality. It is time to speak out against their impunity, before another Israeli secret police murder takes place, possibly inside the USA itself and with the shameless complicity of Zionist accomplices.

The authorities in Dubai have found clear evidence that the Mossad assassination team received support from European Zionists. The hotels, air tickets and expenses were paid with credit cards issued in the US. Two of the killers may be in the US now. Will a time come when American Zionists, who are unconditional public defenders of Mossad killings, cross the line between propaganda for the deed to become accomplices of the deed? The robust American Zionist defense of Mossad's overseas assassinations does not augur well for the security of Americans in the face of Israel's willing U.S. accomplices.

* James Petras is a retired Bartle Professor (Emeritus) of Sociology at Binghamton University, SUNY, New York, U.S., and adjunct professor at Saint Mary's University, Halifax, Nova Scotia. He is the author of 62 books and over 560 articles. He has published over 2000 articles in nonprofessional journals such as the New York Times, the Guardian, the Nation, Christian Science Monitor, Foreign Policy, New Left Review, Temps Moderne, Le Monde Diplomatique, and his commentary is widely carried on the internet. He is winner of a Life Time Career Award of the American Sociology Association, Marxist Section.

Note: James Petras' latest books, Global Depression and Regional Wars (Atlanta, Clarity Press, 2009) is the third in a series, including Zionism, Militarism and the Decline of US Power (Atlanta, Clarity Press 2008) and The Power of Israel in the United States (Atlanta, Clarity Press 2006), analyzing the influence of militarism and Zionism in American foreign policy.

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By Alison Weir* | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

Recent exposés revealing that Ethan Bronner, the New York Times Israel-Palestine bureau chief, has a son in the Israeli military have caused a storm of controversy that continues to swirl and generate further revelations.

Many people find such a sign of family partisanship in an editor covering a foreign conflict troubling – especially given the Times' record of Israel-centric journalism.

Times management at first refused to confirm Bronner's situation, then refused to comment on it. Finally, public outcry forced Times Public Editor Clark Hoyt to confront the problem in a February 7th column.

After bending over backwards to praise the institution that employs him, Hoyt ultimately opined that Bronner should be re-assigned to a different sphere of reporting to avoid the "appearance" of bias. Times Editor Bill Keller declined to do so, however, instead writing a column calling Bronner's connections to Israel valuable because they "supply a measure of sophistication about Israel and its adversaries that someone with no connections would lack."

If such "sophistication" is valuable, the Times' espoused commitment to the "impartiality and neutrality of the company's newsrooms" would seem to require it to have a balancing editor equally sophisticated about Palestine and its adversary, but Keller did not address that.

Bronner is far from alone

As it turns out, Bronner's ties to the Israeli military are not the rarity one might expect.

• A previous Times bureau chief, Joel Greenberg, before he was bureau chief but after he was already publishing in the Times from Israel, actually served in the Israeli army.
• Media pundit and Atlantic staffer Jeffrey Goldberg also served in the Israeli military; it's unclear when, how, or even if his military service ended.
• Richard Chesnoff, who has been covering Mideast events for more than 40 years, had a son serving in the Israeli military while Chesnoff covered Israel as US News & World Report's senior foreign correspondent.
• NPR's Linda Gradstein's husband was an Israeli sniper and may still be in the Israeli reserves. NPR refuses to disclose whether Gradstein herself is also an Israeli citizen, as are her children and husband.
• Mitch Weinstock, national editor for the San Diego Union-Tribune, served in the Israeli military.
• The New York Times' other correspondent from the region, Isabel Kershner, is an Israeli citizen. Israel has universal compulsory military service, which suggests that Kershner herself and/or family members may have military connections. The Times refuses to answer questions about whether she and/or family members have served or are currently serving in the Israeli military. Is it possible that Times Foreign Editor Susan Chira herself has such connections? The Times refuses to answer.
• Many Associated Press writers and editors are Israeli citizens or have Israeli families. AP will not reveal how many of the journalists in its control bureau for the region currently serve in the Israeli military, how many have served in the past, and how many have family members with this connection.
• Similarly, many TV correspondents such as Martin Fletcher have been Israeli citizens and/or have Israeli families. Do they have family connections to the Israeli military?
• Time Magazine's bureau chief several years ago became an Israeli citizen after he had assumed his post. Does he have relatives in the military?
• CNN's Wolf Blitzer, while not an Israeli citizen, was based in Israel for many years, wrote a book whitewashing Israeli spying on the US, and used to work for the Israel lobby in the US. None of this is divulged to CNN viewers.
• Tikkun's editor Michael Lerner has a son who served in the Israeli military. While Lerner has been a strong critic of many Israeli policies, in an interview with Jewish Week, Lerner explains:

"Having a son in the Israeli army was a manifestation of my love for Israel, and I assume that having a son in the Israeli army is a manifestation of Bronner's love of Israel."

Lerner goes on to make a fundamental point:

"...there is a difference in my emotional and spiritual connection to these two sides [Israelis and Palestinians]. On the one side is my family; on the other side are decent human beings. I want to support human beings all over the planet but I have a special connection to my family. I don't deny it."

For a great many of the reporters and editors determining what Americans learn about Israel-Palestine, Israel is family.

Jonathan Cook, a British journalist based in Nazareth, writes of a recent meeting with a Jerusalem based bureau chief, who explained: "... Bronner's situation is 'the rule, not the exception. I can think of a dozen foreign bureau chiefs, responsible for covering both Israel and the Palestinians, who have served in the Israeli army, and another dozen who like Bronner have kids in the Israeli army."

Cook writes that the bureau chief explained: "It is common to hear Western reporters boasting to one another about their Zionist credentials, their service in the Israeli army or the loyal service of their children."

Apparently, intimate ties to Israel are among the many open secrets in the region that are hidden from the American public. If, as the news media insist, these ties present no problem or even, as the Times' Keller insists, enhance the journalists' work, why do the news agencies consistently refuse to admit them?

The reason for media obfuscation

The answer is not complicated.

While Israel may be family for these journalists and editors, for the vast majority of Americans, Israel is a foreign country. In survey after survey, Americans say they don't wish to "take sides" on this conflict. In other words, the American public wants full, unfiltered, unslanted coverage.

Quite likely the news media refuse to answer questions about their journalists' affiliations because they suspect, accurately, that the public would be displeased to learn that the reporters and editors charged with supplying news on a foreign nation and conflict are, in fact, partisans.

While Keller claims that the New York Times is covering this conflict "even-handedly," studies indicate otherwise:

• The Times covers international reports documenting Israeli human rights abuses at a rate 19 times lower than it reports on the far smaller number of international reports documenting Palestinian human rights abuses.
• The Times covers Israeli children's deaths at rates seven times greater than they cover Palestinian children's deaths, even though there are vastly more of the latter and they occurred first.
• The Times fails to inform its readers that Israel's Jewish-only colonies on confiscated Palestinian Christian and Muslim land are illegal; that its collective punishment of 1.5 million men, women, and children in Gaza is not only cruel and ruthless, it is also illegal; and that its use of American weaponry is routinely in violation of American laws.
• The Times covers the one Israeli (a soldier) held by Palestinians at a rate incalculably higher than it reports on the Palestinian men, women, and children – the vast majority civilians – imprisoned by Israel (currently over 7,000).
• The Times neglects to report that hundreds of Israel's captives have never even been charged with a crime and that those who have were tried in Israeli military courts under an array of bizarre military statutes that make even the planting of onions without a permit a criminal offense – a legal system, if one can call it that, that changes at the whim of the current military governor ruling over a subject population; a system in which parents are without power to protect their children.
• The Times fails to inform its readers that 40 percent of Palestinian males have been imprisoned by Israel, a statistic that normally would be considered highly newsworthy, but that Bronner, Kershner, and Chira apparently feel is unimportant to report.

Americans, whose elected representatives give Israel uniquely gargantuan sums of our tax money (a situation also not covered by the media), want and need all the facts, not just those that Israel's family members decree reportable.

We're not getting them.

* Alison Weir is executive director of If Americans Knew. Photos and videos referenced in the article can be viewed on the website (http://ifamericansknew.org) She can be reached at contact@ifamericansknew.org

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By Tim King* (Salem-News.com) | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

The Washington Times publishes story questioning official account.

Newly released photos of New York on September 11, 2001 by the NY Police Association

The mainstream press is showing interest in a taboo, however glaring subject; the inconsistencies in the Bush White House 9/11 account.

As The Washington Times reports today, "A lingering technical question about the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks still haunts some, and it has political implications: How did 200,000 tons of steel disintegrate and drop in 11 seconds? A thousand architects and engineers want to know, and are calling on Congress to order a new investigation into the destruction of the Twin Towers and Building 7 at the World Trade Center."

The problems with the official federal stories are endless and according to some of the world's top minds, the suggested account is impossible^[1].

When we first began to write about these seemingly pressing questions, our Web Designer Matt Lintz caught the U.S. Air Force attempting to hack into Salem-News.com^[2].

One person who has never let the matter fade away is Richard Gage. He's a San Francisco architect and founder of the nonprofit Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth.

Gage told The Washington Times, "In order to bring down this kind of mass in such a short period of time, the material must have been artificially, exploded outwards."

The federal government wants you to believe that fires brought the buildings to the ground, yet in all recorded history, no fire has ever toppled a skyscraper. They burn to the framework but they don't fall down.

Even if it was possible, the World Trade Towers were the least likely candidates. The steel core design of these buildings would not have come down, even if the building collapsed.

Even when you get past that, perhaps finding ways to justify the impossible "official" circumstances, how on earth could any logical explanation account for Building 7?

This is curious, I would suggest that half of all living Americans still don't realize that a third building also came down that day, and it wasn't hit by an airplane. But it did contain a lot of records that certain members of the financial industry didn't miss. Then there are the billions of dollars in missing gold evacuated just before Building 7 pancaked to the ground.

The words of Gage are reflected all over the nation in universities and engineering firms. The Trade Tower buildings were specifically designed to withstand the impact of a jet liner, specifically. Jet fuel is similar to diesel and it doesn't burn very hot. Firefighters, talking on radios, talked about how the aircraft crash fire in one building were going to easily be extinguisher by a few firefighters.

One of our writers, Jeff Gates, suggested that the only country that benefited from the ensuing wars is Israel.

"For instance, a skilled game theorist could foresee that, in response to a 911-type mass murder, "the mark" (the U.S.) would deploy its military to avenge that attack. With phony intelligence fixed around a preset goal, a game theory algorithm could anticipate that those forces might well be redirected to invade Iraq-not to avenge 911 but to pursue the expansionist goals of Greater Israel^[3].

Enforcing that thought, our writer Maidhc Ó Cathail wrote, "The day after 9/11, Benjamin Netanyahu let slip that the deaths of almost 3,000 Americans was 'very good' for Israel. In particular, the mass murder was very good for an emerging sector of the Israeli economy. In Laboratory for a Fortressed World, Naomi Klein detailed the post-9/11 "explosion of Israel's homeland security sector."^[4]

Another Salem-News.com writer, Dr. Alan Sabrosky, wrote about the connection between 9/11 and Israel in the article, Treason, Betrayal and Deceit: The Road to 9/11 and Beyond, "Second, only two intelligence agencies had the expertise, assets, access and political protection to execute 9/11 in the air and on the ground: our CIA and Israel’s Mossad. Only one had the incentive, using the 'who benefits' principle: Mossad."^[5]

The answers remain tangled up. Many Americans believe questioning the government over this is unpatriotic, then they turn around and burn effigies of Obama at tea bagger parties. I say it is highly unpatriotic and even disingenuous, to not question facts about the integrity of this nation.

I won't even start on Shanksville and the Pentagon; those stories are packed with more holes and in your face inconsistencies than there is time for in this report, but I have written about the Pentagon in particular, at great length^[6].

The tragedy of September 11th 2001 is so far reaching that we could never truly describe it. The event was the reasoning to launch two very costly, ongoing wars. The very notion of Arab terrorists selecting the day that is synonymous with emergency response in the U.S. is as hard to believe as the "terrorists" passports recovered so conveniently on the sidewalks in New York that day.

The Washington Times cites how Gage, a member of the American Institute of Architects, managed to persuade more than a thousand of his peers to sign a new petition requesting a formal inquiry.

"The official Federal Emergency Management [Agency] and National Institute of Standards and Technology reports provide insufficient, contradictory and fraudulent accounts of the circumstances of the towers' destruction. We are therefore calling for a grand jury investigation of NIST officials."

Gage says technical issues surrounding the collapse of the towers have prompted years of debate, rebuttal and ridicule.

The article cites how he is particularly disturbed by the fall of the 47-story skyscraper, Building 7. This engineer says, like the other two buildings, tower 7 fell in "pure free-fall acceleration."

He also talked about how more than a hundred first-responders observed flashes and explosions during the fall of the towers.

Even more disturbing evidence Gage says, are "multi-ton steel sections ejected laterally 600 ft. at 60 mph". He also talked about the "mid-air pulverization of 90,000 tons of concrete & metal decking."

Firefighters and Trade Tower employees en mass reported explosions before the buildings came down. They also talked about building closures in the weeks preceding 9/11, and men carrying large amounts of equipment into the elevator shafts.

Most experts agree that the buildings could only have come down the way they did if they were imploded. Experts who perform this type of work, common in places like Las Vegas, at least before the nation's economic downturn, place the main explosives in the elevator shafts, but also in many other strategic locations in a building's structure.

If you watch the World Trade Towers fall in slow motion, it is easy to observe what appear to be a series of planned explosions, running essentially the length of each building.

Gage says evidence of "advanced explosive nano-thermitic composite material" was found in the World Trade Center dust. Of course Rudy Gulliani, mayor of New York at the time, had all of the building evidence shipped away from the state almost immediately.

There is a long list of federal investigators who say they were not allowed to do their jobs or complete the investigation. Tie this to the revelations in 9/11 Commissioner John Farmer’s book: “The Ground Truth: The Story Behind America’s Defense on 9/11″, where the author builds the inescapably convincing case that the official version is almost entirely untrue, according to our writer Gordon Duff, and you just might be lifting a corner of the dirtiest rug that ever was used to suppress truth^[7].

Gage says the group's petition at ae911truth.org is already on its way to members of Congress.

He Told The Washington Times, "Government officials will be notified that 'Misprision of Treason,' U.S. Code 18 (Sec. 2382), is a serious federal offense, which requires those with evidence of treason to act."

"The implications are enormous and may have profound impact on the forthcoming Khalid Shaikh Mohammed trial."

For me, the biggest story here is that a mainstream member of the press published this article, I am amazed and encouraged. It is hard to suggest that we have perhaps been had in the biggest and worst way possible, but honesty is the only thing that matters.

Israeli Espionage - Part 1 of 4

Video link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEOecRtBU7U

Israeli Espionage - Part 2 of 4

Video link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o17SSuuZDkA

Israeli Espionage - Part 3 of 4

Video link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VclAeKYYvBc

Israeli Espionage - Part 4 of 4

Video link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVRsmodmCTE

Also, this video from CoreofCorruption.com which was released just over a year ago, details the information regarding four alleged "art students" who had free access to the Trade Towers, including construction passes, in the immediate weeks preceding 9/11:

Video link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dA9MvV-SrCo

References:

[1] Apr-07-2006 : Huge Contradictions in Official Theories on 9/11 Crash at Pentagon - Tim King Salem-News.com

[2] Apr-16-2006: U.S. Air Force Hackers Caught in Their Tracks by Salem-News.com - Tim King Salem-News.com

[3]Oct-20-2009: How Israel Wages Game Theory Warfare - Jeff Gates Salem-News.com

[4] Jan-20-2010: The Merchants of Fear: Israel's Profiting from Homeland Insecurity - Maidhc Ó Cathail Sabbah.biz

[5] Sep-10-2009: Treason, Betrayal and Deceit: The Road to 9/11 and Beyond - Alan Sabrosky Sabbah.biz

[6] Mar-21-2006: What Really Hit The Pentagon? - Tim King Salem-News.com

[7] Sep-11-2009: The 9/11 Commission Rejects own Report as Based on Government Lies - Gordon Duff Salem-News.com

* Tim King is a former U.S. Marine with twenty years of experience on the west coast as a television news producer, photojournalist, reporter and assignment editor. In addition to his role as a war correspondent, this Los Angeles native serves as Salem-News.com's Executive News Editor. Tim spent the winter of 2006/07 covering the war in Afghanistan, and he was in Iraq over the summer of 2008, reporting from the war while embedded with both the U.S. Army and the Marines. Tim holds numerous awards for reporting, photography, writing and editing, including the Oregon AP Award for Spot News Photographer of the Year (2004), first place Electronic Media Award in Spot News, Las Vegas, (1998), Oregon AP Cooperation Award (1991); and several others including the 2005 Red Cross Good Neighborhood Award for reporting. Serving the community in very real terms, Salem-News.com is the nation's only truly independent high traffic news Website. You can send Tim an email at this address: newsroom@salem-news.com

Source: Salem-news.com

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