Stuart Littlewood

Stuart Littlewood pays tribute to the generous-heartedness, human decency and sense of honour of the courageous men and women of the Viva Palestina aid convoy, who made it to Gaza despite the dirty tricks, meanness and brutality of Egypt’s senile Pharaoh, Hosni Mubarak, and his goons.

”Mubarak’s misdeeds have shamed the Egyptian people and indeed all Arabs, and will be written indelibly into the history of the Middle East. Who would have thought that a man of his experience would visibly stoop so low as to invite wholesale ridicule and disgust?”

It has been a bad week for the forces of darkness that prey on the Holy Land.

Hosni Mubarak, President of Egypt, has plumbed new depths and caused deep offence with his shameful bullying of the Viva Palestina convoy bound for Gaza, which had driven for weeks and thousands of miles from many countries to bring medical aid and other relief to women and children cruelly shut off from the world and under endless lethal bombardment by Israel.

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Stephen Lendman

On November 2008, the Israeli military border police forcibly ex-
pelled Mahmoud Al-Kurd, an old paralyzed man on a wheelchair,
his wife Fawzia, Um Kamel, and their five children, from their home
in Sheikh Jarrah in the East of Jerusalem.

Adalah, meaning justice in Arabic, is the legal center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel advocating through Israeli Supreme Court petitions; lawsuits and appeals to the District, Magistrate and Labor Courts; pre-petitions to the Attorney General; and various other ways to serve its constituency in a nation where only Jews have rights.

It also prepares publications and reports on vital issues of concern to Palestinians, including two recent ones on the theft of their property, an ongoing international law violation since Israel's "War of Independence" - a six-month atrocity that expelled about 800,000 people, massacred many others, destroyed 531 villages, 11 urban neighborhoods in cities like Tel-Aviv, Haifa and Jerusalem, and stole 78% of historic Palestine as the first step toward seizing it all for exclusive Jewish use.

For over 60 years, Israel has done it ruthlessly, incrementally, systematically, and illegally, intending at most to leave Palestinians cantonized and surrounded in the least valued portions, the rest being exclusively for Jews.

This writer addressed Israel's discriminatory land policies in a previous article, part of which is repeated below as an introduction to what follows.

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William Blum

Lincoln Gordon died a few weeks ago at the age of 96. He had graduated summa cum laude from Harvard at the age of 19, received a doctorate from Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, published his first book at 22, with dozens more to follow on government, economics, and foreign policy in Europe and Latin America. He joined the Harvard faculty at 23. Dr. Gordon was an executive on the War Production Board during World War II, a top administrator of Marshall Plan programs in postwar Europe, ambassador to Brazil, held other high positions at the State Department and the White House, a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, economist at the Brookings Institution, president of Johns Hopkins University. President Lyndon B. Johnson praised Gordon's diplomatic service as "a rare combination of experience, idealism and practical judgment".

You get the picture? Boy wonder, intellectual shining light, distinguished leader of men, outstanding American patriot.

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Lawrence Swaim

The Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, California, is named after the famed Austrian Nazi-hunter, Simon Wiesenthal, a connection that turns out to be appropriate in disturbing but unexpected ways. That is, both Simon Wiesenthal and the Center named after him have been accused of flagrant lying, exaggerations and half-truths. Wiesenthal’s confabulations were never a matter of published discourse among scholars, so far as this writer can determine, nor were they popular knowledge until quite recently. In any case, it is now known that Wiesenthal, a born story-teller, rarely let the facts get in the way of a good story—in fact many of the things he claimed to have done were fabrications. This recently came to light with the publication, in June of 2009, of Hunting Evil, by British Author Guy Walters, in which he characterizes Simon Wiesenthal as “a liar—and a bad one at that.” Wiesenthal, he maintains, would “concoct outrageous stories about his war years and make false claims about his academic career.” Walters found that there were “so many inconsistencies between his three main memoirs and between those memoirs and contemporaneous documents, that it is impossible to establish a reliable narrative from them. Wiesenthal’s scant regard for the truth makes it possible to doubt everything he ever wrote or said.”

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