Gilad Atzmon

Prime Minister Gordon Brown has announced plans today to stop the issue of arrest warrants for foreign officials such as Tzipi Livni, Ehud Barak and other Israeli war criminals who were forced to cancel planned trips to London after arrest warrants were issued against them. Under Brown’s proposals, the Crown Prosecution Service will take over responsibility for prosecuting war crimes and other violations of international law. Currently magistrates have to consider the case for an arrest warrant to be issued.

A warrant for the arrest of Ms Livni was issued by a UK court in December last year following Israel's massacre in Gaza over a year ago. She consequently cancelled a planned visit.

Mr Brown wrote in the Daily Telegraph: 'As we have seen, there is now significant danger of such a provision being exploited by politically-motivated organisations or individuals who set out only to grab headlines knowing their case has no realistic chance of a successful prosecution’.

PM Brown better explain to the nation why arresting a genocidal war criminal like Livni, Olmert or Barak is a ‘politically motivated’ act. He should also explain to us all why is he convinced that a case against Livni wouldn’t stand a chance in court. As far as Justice Goldstone is concerned, the case against Israel and its leadership is actually watertight.

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Norman Finkelstein

Editors' Note: This article is excerpted from Norman Finkelstein’s important new book about the Gaza conflict, “This Time We Went Too Far” published this month by OR Books. To purchase a copy of the complete book please visit OR Books. This book is not available from bookstores or other online retailers.

Public outrage at the Gaza invasion did not come out of the blue but rather marked the nadir of a curve plotting a steady decline in support for Israel. As polling data of Americans and Europeans, both Gentiles and Jews, suggest, the public has become increasingly critical of Israeli policy over the past decade. The horrific images of death and destruction broadcast around the world during and after the invasion accelerated this development. “The increased and brutal frequency of war in this volatile region has shifted international opinion,” the British Financial Times editorialized one year later, “reminding Israel it is not above the law. Israel can no longer dictate the terms of debate.”

One poll registering the fallout from the Gaza attack in the United States found that American voters calling themselves supporters of Israel plummeted from 69 per cent before the attack to 49 per cent in June 2009, while voters believing that the U.S. should support Israel dropped from 69 per cent to 44 per cent. Consumed by hate, emboldened by self-righteousness, and confident that it could control or intimidate public opinion, Israel carried on in Gaza as if it could get away with mass murder in broad daylight. But while official Western support for Israel held firm, the carnage set off an unprecedented wave of popular outrage throughout the world. Whether it was because the assault came on the heels of the devastation Israel wrought in Lebanon, or because of Israel’s relentless persecution of the people of Gaza, or because of the sheer cowardice of the assault, the Gaza invasion appeared to mark a turning point in public opinion reminiscent of the international reaction to the 1960 Sharpeville massacre in apartheid South Africa.

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Yuram Abdullah Weiler

"One of the greatest crimes against humanity occurred right here in the United States of America. Support for the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People is a start to right this great wrong," declared the American Indian Movement in a press release on 24 September 2009.

Perhaps my natural sense of outrage and revulsion at the injustices and atrocities inflicted upon indigenous peoples by the U.S., Zionists and other colonizing powers is inherited from my mother. Before she died, she told me that ancestors on her father’s side of the family traced their roots back to the Iroquois nation.

The United States of America, of course, voted against the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Only a country that denies the rights of its own Native Indians could object to the right of self-determination for other indigenous peoples.

Likewise, only a country that had itself executed genocide on its own native peoples on a massive scale could be such an ardent supporter of the Zionist regime, which is currently engaged in a native Palestinian genocide.

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Ellen Brown

In addition to mandatory private health insurance premiums, we may soon be hit with a “mandatory savings” tax and other belt-tightening measures urged by the President’s new budget task force. These radical austerity measures are not only unnecessary but will actually make matters worse. The push for “fiscal responsibility” is based on bad economics.

When billionaires pledge a billion dollars to educate people to the evils of something, it is always good to peer closely at what they are up to. Hedge fund magnate Peter G. Peterson was formerly Chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations and head of the New York Federal Reserve. He is now senior chairman of Blackstone Group, which is in charge of disbursing government funds in the controversial AIG bailout, widely criticized as a government giveaway to banks. Peterson is also founder of the Peter Peterson Foundation, which has adopted the cause of imposing “fiscal responsibility” on Congress. He hired David M. Walker, former head of the Government Accounting Office, to spearhead a massive campaign to reduce the runaway federal debt, which the Peterson/Walker team blames on reckless government and consumer spending. The Foundation funded the movie “I.O.U.S.A.” to amass popular support for their cause, which largely revolves around dismantling Social Security and Medicare benefits as a way to cut costs and return to “fiscal responsibility.”

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Iain Murray & Roger Abbott

The "Climategate" scandal, which broke in November 2009, revealed what many skeptics had privately suspected. Prominent climate scientists at the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit (CRU) had collaborated to keep data out of skeptics' hands, subverted the peer review process, and used questionable methods to construct the temperature record on which the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel Climate Change (IPCC) based its recommendations.

Now a new "Climategate" scandal is emerging, this time based on documents released by NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in response to several Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) suits filed by the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI). The newly released emails further demonstrate the politicized nature of climate science, revealing a number of questionable practices that cast doubt on the credibility of scientific data provided by NASA.

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Donald W. Miller, Jr., MD

Two tenets of today’s health care are that a human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) causes AIDS and vaccines are effective and safe. Investigators who have the temerity to question this official dogma see their work blocked from publication, grant requests rejected, and in one signal case can even find themselves being subjected to a Soviet-style show trial.

Andrew Wakefield (b. 1957) recently underwent such a trial in the UK held by its General Medical Council (GMC) Fitness to Practice Panel. Along with two other well-respected gastroenterologists, he was subjected to the longest, most expensive trial in that council’s 148-year history.

In 1998, Dr. Wakefield and twelve colleagues at the Royal Free Hospital in London identified a new kind of bowel disorder in twelve children with autism. This case series of "autistic enterocolitis" was published in the Lancet. The parents of eight of these children reported that their child became autistic and developed disabling intestinal symptoms shortly after receiving the MMR (measles, mumps, and rubella) vaccine. Noting this, Dr. Wakefield and his colleagues raised the possibility that the MMR vaccine might have something to do with this syndrome. They concluded the Lancet paper with this statement: "Further investigations are needed to examine this syndrome [autistic enterocolitis] and its possible relation to this [MMR] vaccine."

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