Stephen Lendman

Image from a Corvus Blog VIDEO

In promoting his 2008 book, "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid," Jimmy Carter said one reason for writing it was "to provoke (unbiased) discussion, which is very rarely heard in this country" on the question of Israel. In America, "any sort of debate back and forth, any sort of incisive editorial comment in the major newspapers, is almost completely absent....There are no significant countervailing voices" to deter Israel from getting away with murder, an illegal blockade, aggressive wars, and the most extreme crimes against humanity; its latest, of course, the massacre of peace activists taking aid to besieged Gazans.

Besides coming from officials and their spokespersons, Israel's propaganda arm, Israel Politik, said "Israel had no choice but to stop the flotilla from breaking the blockade....While Israel was forced to take action in international waters, its actions are supported by international maritime law." False. Under international law, interdictions in international waters constitute piracy in the broadest sense of the term, and blockades are acts of war, variously defined as:

● surrounding a nation or objective with hostile forces;
● measures to isolate an enemy;
● encirclement and besieging;
● preventing the passage in or out of supplies, military forces or aid in time of or as an act of war; and
● an act of naval warfare to block access to an enemy's coastline and deny entry to all vessels and aircraft.

According to international law expert, Professor Francis Boyle, blockades under international law are:

"....belligerent measures taken by a nation (to) prevent passage of vessels or aircraft to and from another country. Customary international law recognizes blockades as an act of war because of the belligerent use of force even against third party nations in enforcing the blockade. Blockades as acts of war have been recognized as such in the Declaration of Paris of 1856 and the Declaration of London of 1909 that delineate the international rules of warfare."

As an occupying power, Israel is obligated under the Hague Regulations of 1907, Fourth Geneva, and numerous UN resolutions to protect Palestinian rights, including for adequate food, health, education, and housing. The blockade and occupation deny them. According to Amnesty International (AI), "The blockade constitutes collective punishment under international law and must be lifted immediately." So does the occupation. Israel maintains them both repressively. Yet Gaza poses no threat to Israel.

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Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

Who's in Charge of Your Life?

It seems incredible that in the last days, a fundamental right of the whole of humanity, the freedom of association, has been denounced by the New York Times and all major opinion sources, even as a national political figure was reluctant to defend his own statements in favor of the idea, and then distanced himself from the notion. Has such a fundamental principle of liberty become unsayable?

Or perhaps it is not so incredible. An overweening government, in an age of despotism such as ours, must deny such a fundamental right simply because it is one of those core issues that speaks to who is in charge: the state or individuals.

We live in anti-liberal times, when individual choice is highly suspect. The driving legislative ethos is toward making all actions required or forbidden, with less and less room for human volition. Simply put, we no longer trust the idea of freedom. We can't even imagine how it would work. What a distance we have travelled from the Age of Reason to our own times.

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John Pilger

How do wars begin? With a “master illusion”, according to Ralph McGehee, one of the CIA’s pioneers in “black propaganda”, known today as “news management”. In 1983, he described to me how the CIA had faked an “incident” that became the “conclusive proof of North Vietnam’s aggression”. This followed a claim, also fake, that North Vietnamese torpedo boats had attacked an American warship in the Gulf of Tonkin in August 1964.

“The CIA,” he said, “loaded up a junk, a North Vietnamese junk, with communist weapons—the Agency maintains communist arsenals in the United States and around the world. They floated this junk off the coast of central Vietnam. Then they shot it up and made it look like a fire fight had taken place, and they brought in the American press. Based on this evidence, two Marine landing teams went into Danang and a week after that the American air force began regular bombing of North Vietnam.” An invasion that took three million lives was under way.

The Israelis have played this murderous game since 1948. The massacre of peace activists in international waters on 31 May was “spun” to the Israeli public for most of last week, preparing them for yet more murder by their government, with the unarmed flotilla of humanitarians described as terrorists or dupes of terrorists. The BBC was so intimidated that it reported the atrocity primarily as a “potential public relations disaster for Israel”, the perspective of the killers, and a disgrace for journalism.

A similar master illusion currently preoccupies Asian governments. On 20 May, South Korea announced that it had “overwhelming evidence” that one of its warships, the Cheonan, had been sunk by a torpedo fired by a North Korean submarine in March with the loss of 46 sailors. The United States maintains 28,000 troops in South Korea, where popular sentiment has long backed a détente with Pyongyang.

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Neerdaels

Statement by David Swallow, Jr., Wowitan Yuha Mani
Teton Lakota Spiritual Leader, Sun dance Chief of the Medicine Wheel Sun dance, and a Headman of the Lakota Nation Band of Wana Way Gu (Broken Bow)

Hau, Mitakuyepi na Mita Kola. [ Hello. Greetings my relatives and my friends. ]

My name is Dave Swallow Jr. My Lakota name is Wowitan Uha Mani, Walks With Pride. I’m a Lakota. I live on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation [South Dakota]. I was born and raised there. Pine Ridge Indian Reservation is The United States Prisoner of War Camp Number 344. That’s where I was born and raised.

We are the People of the Lakota, Nakota and Dakota People. We have adopted the Sacred Horse, [ Sunka Wakan ] into our nation and into our families.

It is part of who we are. It is hard in our ways to remember our lives with out our Horses. They are part of our family. We give them names and honor them. They take part in our ceremonies. They are part of our lives, not only for transportation but also the Sunka Wakan help heal our minds, bodies and spirits.

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