Featured This Week:

  The adage that “it is the victors who write history” in matters relating particularly to war and conflict is something of a euphemism when applied to recent military campaigns conducted by America and its NATO allies. For what is disputable – no, let us say repugnant – about the official accounts of these events is not merely a difference in emphasis or nuance on the matter, which the adage may infer. It is rather that the victors’ version of history is a wholesale fabrication, an obscene travesty of actual events. It is not a case of victors writing history, more one of victors “violating history”...
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...If Iran can ever quickly develop a nuclear deterrent through know-how and technological capability, this constrains Washington’s power to overthrow the regime and replace it with an obedient client (not a first in the case of Iran, of course). That is an unacceptable amount of power to afford an adversary. The threat to Israeli security and the notion that Iran would use nuclear weapons for anything other than to deter aggressive adversaries is quite simply a manufactured concern...
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...In the end, whether Israel’s penchant for serial atrocities encounters an effective obstacle will hinge on two types of resistance, elicited not from the fictitious “international community”, but from the active opponents of Israel’s ongoing projects, and from the withdrawal of moral and financial support for the ongoing reproduction of Israel as an apartheid Zionist State...
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...Kristol’s point: Refuse to toe the neocon line on Israel, and you have no future in the Republican Party. Ben-Ami seemed equally exultant: “We’ve won the war; we won the war,” he told the audience. Ninety-nine percent of Congress now votes almost 100% pro-Israel. But Ben-Ami appeared nervous about how this unanimity in the Congress behind Israel had been achieved...
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  Santayana’s famous dictum about those who forget history being condemned to relive it is nowhere better observed than in the mountains of Afghanistan. One of my favorite artists was the superb Victorian painter Lady Elizabeth Butler who captured in oil the military triumphs and tragedies of the British Empire. Her haunting painting, "The Retreat from Kabul (also known as "Remnants of an Army") shows the sole survivor of a British army of 16,500 during the first Anglo-Afghan War in 1842, Dr. William Brydon, struggling out of Afghanistan. All the rest of the British occupation force were killed by Afghan tribesmen after a futile attempt to garrison Kabul...
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  The attorney general of Turkey has filed charges against four senior Israeli military officers for the killing of nine people aboard the Turkish ship Mavi Marmara, which tried to break Israel’s blockade of Gaza in 2010. The move comes just days ahead of the second anniversary of the May 31, 2010, raid. Turkey’s state-run Anadolu Agency says a court in Istanbul voted unanimously Monday to approve an indictment against Israel’s former chief of staff Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi, along with former Israeli Navy head Vice Admiral Eliezer Marom, former Israel Air Force intelligence chief Avishai Levy and former Military Intelligence head Amos Yadlin...
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...Wars of choice, wars of aggression, are fundamentally different from wars of liberation or defensive wars in that unlike the latter the former lack a moral or ethical basis. This is hugely important: when a man fights for this country, nation, family or religion he does not need to demonize or dehumanize the enemy, nor does he need to come up with some convoluted logic to justify to himself and others why he is fighting. This is why for centuries man have come back from wars without turning into dysfunctional brutes. But when is the last time the USA actually had to fight a war to defend itself against an enemy?.. This is what this grotesque "Global War on Terror" does to people...

...more guns for Israel means less butter for us, bringing us that much closer to painful across-the-board budget cuts that will negatively impact tens, if not hundreds, of millions of Americans next year. More guns for Israel also make us more complicit in and responsible for Israel’s nearly 45-year military occupation of the Palestinian West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza Strip, and for Israel’s human rights abuses against and apartheid policies toward Palestinians...
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  Daniel has returned home. He had felt a lump in his stomach even before stepping on the plane in Mumbai. He felt sick when he saw all the young boys and girls checking everyone’s identity at Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv. Mom, dad, his older sister and younger brother greet him at the airport. Everyone is equally excited. Daniel had been gone for a whole year. He would have loved to stay a bit longer. But the money ran out and he did not want to ask his dad for more.. ”Tell us how it was, we want to know everything.” Daniel suddenly sees black, he panics. It was as if he had nothing to say, could not formulate the words...
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  Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein is tending toward not prosecuting the author or endorsers of the controversial book "Torat Hamelech," Haaretz has learned. The book, written in 2009 by Rabbi Yitzhak Shapira and Rabbi Yosef Elitzur, was endorsed by two other rabbis, Yitzhak Ginzburg and Dov Lior. The authors describe it as a discussion of Jewish law on the conditions under which it is permissible to kill a non-Jew in times of war and peace...

  I was just looking through my Facebook Newsfeed and discovered the Israeli graphic artist, Mysh. The first work of his I saw was this breathtaking cartoon, A Problem of Self-Image, which speaks so profoundly to elements of the Israeli psyche and explains how historical trauma has led to political dysfunction...
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...there is a reason to believe that the British Government is under the control of a foreign power. Following the pressure of the CFI, the Tory government recently amended the British Universal Jurisdiction law just to allow Israel war criminals to visit the Kingdom. I guess that some students must be clever enough to notice that acts taken by British politicians who shamelessly attempt to appease their pro Israeli paymasters at the expense of British values and ethical considerations actually expose Jews in this country to some potential animosity. How would the exam board mark such reasonable and critical young and innocent thinking?..
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  Taking the “scary Iran story” angle to a new low, a new report today reveals that Iran could theoretically make 5 nuclear bombs if it took all of its civilian uranium and dedicated it exclusively to weapons production...

Warsaw Ghetto, Israel Ghetto | Roy Tov

...This struggle is the source of the “heroism” in the name of the Israeli remembrance day. Can you imagine growing up in a place where all your teachers keep saying that your grandparents—or those of the kid sitting next to you—were made into soap? Do you understand what such a kid sees whenever he uses a soap bar? Can you understand what happens when he discovers later in life that no human genes were ever found in those soap bars? Can you understand what he feels after finding that everything was an evil emotional manipulation performed by a control-freak regime interested in keeping its citizens frightened forever?..

...Both the government and the armed opposition have become stronger in the past six months and neither side sees much reason to compromise. It feels like the beginning of a long war...
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...Haniyeh knows that the Muslim Brotherhood, from which Hamas evolved, is highly sophisticated politically and while it tries to avoid attracting condemnation, or worse, from Washington and Tel Aviv, the MB intentions regarding Camp David, giveaway gas and other deals with Israel, and even diplomatic relations with the occupiers of Palestine are clear. A majority of Egyptians believe all will eventually be discarded as will the singly remaining 19th century colonial enterprise itself...
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  The “race riots” in Tel Aviv last week — a mass demonstration that turned into a pogrom against about 60,000 asylum seekers, an overwhelming majority of them from Eritrea, the rest mostly from Sudan (Darfur and South Sudan) and a few other African countries — gives a revealing glimpse into Israeli realities under the current fascist government...
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...Right now, the United States and Israel are actively engaged in a variety of covert actions directed against Iran, and the United States still have military forces and bases all around that country. Top U.S. officials, Senators and Congressmen have openly called for "regime change" in Iran. And then we wonder why, oh why, Iran might be wary of us, and why some Iranians might think that having an effective deterrent to counter our vast military superiority might be a good idea...
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...Isidor Rabi worked on the Manhattan Project providing key leadership developing America’s first atomic bombs alongside Robert Oppenheimer at Los Alamos. When dispatched by a nervous JFK to visit Dimona in 1961, Rabi stated unequivocally he had found "no evidence of weapons related activity." The 2009 book Nuclear Express authors Thomas C. Reed and Danny B. Stillman skeptically noted "Rabi was already a member of the board of governors (and presumably on the payroll) of Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science, the incubator of most nuclear weapons work in Israel." Rabi’s misleading testimony took some heat off Israel as it raced to finalize the Dimona reactor and build an arsenal...
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  If the establishment manufactures disinformation (i.e., it lies), then what validity does the establishment have in its agenda? Also what moral pretext could the agenda have given that disinformation is argued to be a crime against humanity and a crime against peace?.. When the establishment disinforms about weapons-of-mass-destruction in Iraq and kills a few million people based on this lie, what claim to credibility does the establishment have thereafter? This is but one lie in a historical series of lies in which distant peoples have been slaughtered and their lands taken over...
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  A 2003 photo taken in Iraq was mistakenly used by the BBC website to illustrate a report about the recent massacre in Houla, Syria. The Daily Telegraph reports that the image of a child jumping over body bags was removed from the story after the BBC realized its error. The photographer who took the shot is incredulous that the BBC could have confused his photo with recent events. “I went home at 3am and I opened the BBC page, which had a front page story about what happened in Syria, and I almost felt off from my chair,”..

  Apparently yesterday’s MSNBC show Up with Chris Hayes is getting a lot of attention. And by attention I mean vitriol. His crime? questioning the martial civic religion and the morality of mindless soldier worship on Memorial Day. I can’t decide whether or not I’m surprised. Here is the first segment of that “controversial” show...

...There’s a long line of argument pointing to an eventual end to war, in part due to the increased connectedness and interdependence of human societies for whom it was once easier to identify someone else on the planet as the “other” — and thus a threat...

...On this Memorial Day, there will undoubtedly be much cant in the form of tributes to "our heroes" and then, Tuesday morning, when the mangled cars have been towed away, the barbeque grills cleaned, and the "heroes" set aside, the forgetting will continue. If the Obama administration has its way and American special operations forces, trainers, and advisors in reduced but still significant numbers remain in Afghanistan until perhaps 2024, we have more than another decade of forgetting ahead of us in a tragedy that will, by then, be beyond all comprehension...
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...I am not afraid anymore. I do not believe in the 'global war on terror'. I will not be made a coward by my government to hurt other people because I have been hurt. Instead, I will stand up as a United States citizen and disobey unlawful orders to perpetuate war. Ben Franklin once inferred that those 'who sacrifice liberty for security, deserve neither.' I agree. The United States has not "won" a war since War World II - instead, its imperial interests and rush to war have only bred international scorn. We go to war zones and the weapons often aimed at us are the ones we sold our "enemies" in the last war...

...Steve Rosen, a longtime official with AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobby group, argued that calling 5 million Palestinians refugees, including some 2 million who are citizens of Jordan, means recognizing their right to return, even though Presidents Clinton, Bush and Obama have said that a two-state solution would mean most refugees would not return to Israel proper, Foreign Policy reported. "How many generations does it go?" asked Rosen. "I'm Jewish, and as a grandchild of several refugees, could I make a claim on all these countries? Where does it end? Someday all life on Earth will be a Palestinian refugee."..

  Amid the focus on the economic hardships caused by Israel's ongoing blockade of the Gaza Strip, it has been easy for many to overlook the fact that the territory's 1.6 million people have been kept under a cultural siege as well. This is ironic because much international debate has emphasized the rights and wrongs of cultural boycott of Israel in the context of the growing boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaign. For years, the Palestine Festival of Literature — PalFest — has been trying to break this siege...
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...Political analyst Ibrahim Alloush told RT that the way the attack was done and its timing “make it obvious” that Damascus is not responsible. “It would not make sense for the Syrian army to commit these massacres and withdraw, and then just let the rebels come and take photos and make documentaries about them,” he explained. Alloush believes the crimes were committed “by the armed gangs supported from abroad, from the GCC countries and from the NATO specifically through Turkey.”..
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  Considering the current state of world peace and NATO's Responsibility to Protect (R2P) policy and to maintain a proper sense of balance, George Orwell's book "1984" should be reviewed periodically. In the spirit of the NATO Summit in Chicago, I present a few quotes from that textbook-for-tomorrow: "If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say this or that even, it never happened-that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death." .. "Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? Has it ever occurred to your, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?”..

...Osama Kahil, deputy head of the Palestinian Contractors Union, told the daily that a number of Israeli companies have contacted contractors in Gaza offering them half of the bids’ revenue to execute the projects. “It is unreasonable for the Israeli occupation to be rewarded for its destruction of Gaza’s economy,” Kahil told Al-Quds Al-Arabi. “It waged a relentless war on our livelihood, and now our markets are being opened to its companies.”..

  Since the attacks of September 11, a new, powerful class of people has swarmed into the nation’s capital and its surrounding suburbs. Armed with top-secret security clearances, they are government counterterrorism and intelligence workers and contractors who believe they are critical to keeping the country safe from jihadi terrorists. But their belief is suspect: the absence of another spectacular attack only magnifies the zeal of their belief in their own necessity. The rise of this homeland security and intelligence class, operating in secret, signals a distressing threat to American democracy from those ostensibly sworn, or hired, to protect it...

  Negotiations between Iran and the United States and other members of the P5+1 group in Baghdad ended in fundamental disagreement Thursday over the position of the P5+1 offering no relief from sanctions against Iran. The two sides agreed to meet again in Moscow Jun. 18 and 19, but only after Iran had threatened not to schedule another meeting, because the P5+1 had originally failed to respond properly to its five-point plan. The prospects for agreement are not likely to improve before that meeting, however, mainly because of an inflexible U.S. diplomatic posture that reflects President Barack Obama’s need to bow to the demands of Israel and the U.S. Congress on Iran policy...

...It is a serious violation of international law to acquire territory by force. Indeed, the case against the Nazis during the Nuremburg Trials asserted that the rationale behind their acquisitions was to acquire territories already inhabited by so-called “racial Germans” and those it needed as additional living space for “racial Germans” — all at the expense of other countries. This indictment echoes the Zionist/Israel defense of its claim to historic Palestine by “racial Jews” and its subsequent actions which include hundreds, if not thousands, of crimes against humanity, such as their nonstop deadly raids into Gaza and the West Bank, hundreds of checkpoints and roadblocks, the illegal construction of the racist, Apartheid Wall and the current ethnic cleansing of Arab-Israeli citizens within the Negev. The basic fact is Israel was created in violation of international law and remains so...

  Flynt Leverett, former Senior Director for Middle East Affairs at the National Security Council, discusses the latest negotiations on Iran’s nuclear enrichment program at the just-concluded P5+1 Baghdad summit; why the US will never agree to lift sanctions on Iran, no matter the concessions; how the US negotiating position makes Obama look like an idiot; Richard Nixon’s observation that the same political price is paid for going half way as all the way – so you might as well go to China; why the Obama administration still won’t (consistently) acknowledge Iran’s rational leadership and sovereign (and NPT) right to enrich uranium; and how bad-faith negotiating by the US ruined the “reciprocity framework” established in the previous Istanbul talks...

  RT speaks to US veterans who feel betrayed by the system that pushed them into fighting America’s false-pretense wars, as the former soldiers throw out their medals which they deem symbols of lies. Dubbed true patriots, they followed the order to fight their country’s battles. Scott Olsen survived two tours of Iraq, only to be critically injured upon returning home by police clashing with Occupy Oakland protesters...

  Montserrat Figueras – RIP

...The paper is especially important in light of the hunger strikes of 1,600 Palestinian prisoners who were protesting precisely the types of arbitrary administrative detentions Krebs discusses in her paper. The protesting prisoners complained about the arbitrary nature of their detention and the fact that often the evidence against them was secret both to them and their lawyers. In essence, they neither knew who was their accuser, what they were accused of, nor what evidence was offered. Six-month sentences could be renewed without offering any new evidence and renewed virtually forever. A number of prisoners were held for years under similar terms...

  All culture is essentially exclusionary; beliefs and practices distinguish one people from another precisely because they are different. The two systems of government defined above, for example, look as dissimilar as any two dissimilar things could possibly be. One depicts a society of self-governing free citizens; the other depicts its polar opposite. For much of the last 100 years, these two systems of government were in a state of war (hot or cold), and out of this bi-polar world came the Western, democratic conceit that ours is the best of all possible worlds: free elections vs. rigged elections; rule of law vs. police state; civil society vs. coerced conformity; peace vs. war...

...Washington serves the interest of western oil companies, not just because of their corrupt influence over the administration, but because the survival of the current U.S. petro-economy depends on western domination of the global oil trade. A passage in Drugs, Oil, and War describes this policy, and how it has contributed to recent American interventions, and also the impoverishment of the Third World since 1980. In essence, the U.S. handled the quadrupling of oil prices in the 1970s by arranging, by means of secret agreements with the Saudis, for the recycling of petrodollars back into the U.S. economy...

  Today the U.S. government approved a resolution to differentiate between Palestinians "personally displaced" in 1948 and their millions of descendants. The count will be conducted by the State Department and will only include refugees who receive United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) services...

  ...over time Israel’s nuclear weapons have taken on a completely different strategic rationale. Now, they enable Israel to adopt its intransigent, rejectionist approach to its neighbors and the Israeli-Arab conflict. In fact, I believe that many of Israel’s most rash and disastrous military adventures including the first Lebanon war (1982), the 2006 Lebanon War, and Operation Cast Lead could only likely have been undertaken by a government which knew it could back up its aggressive war-making with the threat of nukes. This seems an extension of Jabotinsky’s Iron Fist doctrine which argues that Israel must meet its enemies with overwhelming force and destroy their will to resist...
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  In this startling new memoir, Sibel Edmonds—the most classified woman in U.S. history—takes us on a surreal journey that begins with the secretive FBI and down the dark halls of a feckless Congress to a stonewalling judiciary and finally, to the national security whistleblowers movement she spearheaded. Having lived under Middle East dictatorships, Edmonds knows firsthand what can happen when government is allowed to operate in secret. Hers is a sobering perspective that combines painful experience with a rallying cry for the public's right to know and to hold the lawbreakers accountable. With U.S. citizens increasingly stripped of their rights in a calibrated media blackout, Edmonds' story is a wake-up call for all Americans who, willingly or unwillingly, traded liberty for illusive security in the wake of 9/11...

  As at least two days of talks on the future of Iran's nuclear programme got underway in Baghdad Wednesday, neo-conservatives and other hawks escalated their campaign against any compromise agreement, particularly one that would permit Tehran to continue enriching uranium on its territory...
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  Despite the deployment of UN ceasefire monitors in Syria the rebels seem to intensify their fighting by regularly attacking government checkpoints and logistics. Each day they kill some 15 to 20 government security personal and thereby undermine the Annan plan.It is obviously that the rebels have used the ceasefire to rearm with the quite open help of the U.S, the Gulf countries and Turkey. Of special concern is the visible proliferation of anti-armor weapons. Their main logistic line of communication seems to run through Tripoli, Lebanon where the Saudi financed Hariri Salafists have their base. The rather few genuine Syrian rebels also get active help from international AlQaeda like terrorist groups...
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  All 535 members of Congress are now on the record declaring that they have not authorized the use of military force against Iran in the latest round of legislation passed in the House and the Senate. This unanimous 'un-declaration' of war by Congress is a crucial victory, with particular significance given its passage on the eve of the U.S.-Iran talks in Baghdad...
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  ...The language used bodes terribly for the United States’ already disastrous and destructive foreign policy. The House affirms not merely that Iran will not be allowed to manufacture nuclear weapons, but that it will not be permitted the capability to manufacture them. Never mind that Defense Secretary Leon Panetta observed that Iran is not actually pursuing these weapons; given the extreme and persistent threats from the nuclear-armed Israel and United States, coupled with the U.S. forces surrounding Iran, we would have no right to prevent them if they were...
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  ...The judgment against Damascus is perhaps no coincidence as Syria is currently on everyone’s enemy list, but the principle involved, that supporters of militant groups can be held legally responsible for the consequences of that support, is referred to as “lawfare.” The preeminent promoter of the use of lawfare is the Israeli group Shurat HaDin, which on its website describes how its various courtroom victories have made it the “bane of anti-Israel groups throughout the world.”..
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  Prime Minster of Counterfeit Israel Benjamin Netanyahu recently visited the Mercaz Harav, the yeshiva of the first Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of British Mandate Palestine, Abraham Isaac Kook. The yeshiva gifted Netanyahu with a correspondence between his grandfather, Rabbi Nathan Mileikowsky and Rabbi Kook. Rabbi Kook taught 'Jews' to, "begin to shake off the dust of exile by our own efforts, through natural, historical processes ... that we have a sacred duty to try to do so by whatever means are at our disposal," and that it is "the End [redemption] that is forcing us," a delusion that Netanyahu so clearly labors under...
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  Prof. Fayezmanesh explores Israeli and US roots behind Iranian sanctions: US desire for total regional hegemony, Israel to annex the West Bank; the success of AIPAC in overcoming US corporate opposition to sanctions; of desire of Western oil companies to do business with Iran; of elevated gas prices US taxpayers have had to pay for Israeli-inspired US wars; of mistaken notion by Iranian ‘Greens’ that the US can help bring them democracy; of US shooting down of Iranian airliner while siding with Iraq in Iraq-Iran war...
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  CNET has learned that the FBI has formed a Domestic Communications Assistance Center, which is tasked with developing new electronic surveillance technologies, including intercepting Internet, wireless, and VoIP communications...
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  Sen. Mark Kirk (R-IL) is trying to get a handle on the real number of Palestinian refugees in the Middle East - a move that could result in a change of status for millions of Palestinians. His proposed language for the 2013 foreign appropriations bill would require the U.S. government to confirm just how many Palestinians currently served by the U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) - the body tasked with providing assistance, protection, and advocacy for Palestinian refugees - are actually refugees. The bill, slated for markup on May 22, would challenge the status of the children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of Palestinian refugees...
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  Every time Israel bans Palestinians from leaving Israel's West Bank-Gaza Prison, and every time a well-meaning foreigner is refused entry to give humanitarian assistance to Palestinians, Israel is consolidating its reputation as a global pariah, now, according to the BBC poll, on par with North Korea for having the highest negative influence on the global stage. Like Pavlov's dog, Israel rabidly salivates and attacks in response to any association with human rights and human decency. All compassionate attempts by the flotillas to bring aid to alleviate the dire humanitarian crisis in Gaza were confronted with Israeli violence, piracy, looting, and imprisonment peaking in the shocking Mavi Marmara massacre...
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  We broadcast from Chicago, site of the largest NATO summit in the organization's six-decade history. On Sunday, veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, as well as members of Afghans for Peace, led a peace march of thousands of people. Iraq Veterans Against the War held a ceremony where nearly 50 veterans discarded their war medals by hurling them down the street in the direction of the NATO summit. We hear the soldiers' voices as they return their medals one by one from the stage. "I'm here to return my Global War on Terror Service Medal in solidarity with the people of Iraq and the people of Afghanistan," said Jason Hurd, a former combat medic who spent 10 years in the U.S. Army...

  On Friday, 93% of the U.S. House of Representatives affirmed a resolution escalating America’s already aggressive position on Iran, from “crippling” sanctions to a zero-tolerance policy on nuclear weapons.. he resolution passed the House 401-11, with a few representatives absent and a few abstaining. This means it had massive bipartisan support – for those of you who only consider Republicans to be warmongers: 166 of 190 Democrats voted in support, including some of its ostensibly most progressive members, such as Barney Frank and Rush Holt...

  ...The great gulf between the American public and the elites when it comes to foreign policy is a constant source of irritation for the latter. The mandarins of the foreign policy establishment have long bemoaned the “isolationism” of the American people. It’s the natural inclination of a free people to leave others alone, and the Founders exemplified this sentiment when they decried the impulse to “go abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” America “is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all,” declared John Quincy Adams in his famous 1821 Fourth of July speech...
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  The North Atlantic Treaty Organization is not a benevolent organization. NATO is not about the North Atlantic and it's not about our collective defense. NATO is a cost-sharing organization that finances aggressive military action. By hiding behind the claim that the organization provides for 'common defense,' NATO allows us to wage wars of choice under the guise of international peacekeeping. The most recent example was the unconstitutional war in Libya where NATO, operating under a United Nations mandate to protect civilians, instead backed one side in a civil war and pursued a policy of regime change...

  ..The essential mission of Israeli soldiers stationed in the West Bank is to protect settlers against Palestinians. The job of protecting Palestinians against settlers falls to a separate Israeli police force that, as it happens, is massively understaffed. This imbalance--ample troops who are de facto allies of the settlers, dinky police force that could in theory help Palestinians but never seems to be around--is a recipe for the harassment of Palestinians and worse. This helps explain why settlers have repeatedly, with their impunity all but guaranteed, burned or cut down the olive trees of Palestinian farmers....

  There were no cameras around to record whether President Obama was winking when, on his first full day in office, he signed an executive order and two presidential memorandums declaring that “every agency and department should know that this administration stands on the side not of those who seek to withhold information, but those who seek to make it known.” But surely he must have been. No White House in my lifetime — not even that of the infamously secretive Richard Nixon — has been more of an attack dog when it comes to preserving governmental secrecy...
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  The age of revolutionary romance is over. Various Arab countries are now facing hard truths. Millions of Arabs merely want to live with a semblance of dignity, free from tyranny and continuous anxiety over the future. This unromantic reality also includes outside ‘players’, whose presence is of no positive value to genuine revolutionary movements, whether in Egypt, Syria, or anywhere else. Shortly after longtime President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali was ousted in the Tunisian revolution in January 2011, some of us warned that the initial euphoria could eventually give way to unhelpful simplification...
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  ...Sealed in the fifth century AD, the process of its [the Babylonian Talmud] compilation is seen as the Jewish Golden Age. Haredim would like to return not to the Biblical Kingdom of Israel, but to the Talmudic Diaspora of Babylon. The Talmud is a blasphemous and criminal text by all accounts. Technically it is a compilation of excuses allowing the commitment of crimes; non-Jews are considered by it as non-humans, thus every conceivable crime against them is allowed. This was the trick allowing Jews to avoid the difficult commandments of God given in the Bible. To make sure that they won’t be forced to follow their own holy texts, additional measures were taken, and the Bible was clumsily modified...

  A Turkish prosecutor has prepared an indictment seeking life sentences for four former Israeli military commanders over their alleged involvement in the 2010 killing of nine Turks on a Gaza-bound aid ship, Turkish newspaper Sabah reported on Wednesday...

  I’m a Palestinian who was born in the Israeli town of Lod, and thus I am an Israeli citizen. My wife is not; she is a Palestinian from Nablus in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Despite our towns being just 30 miles apart, we met almost 6,000 miles away in Massachusetts, where we attended neighboring colleges...