Gilad Atzmon

The deepest possible grief: A mother lamenting her dead children.
They were murdered by the Phalangist killers of Ariel Sharon, who
let them loose on the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila in 1982.

" …then you must destroy them totally. Make no treaty with them and show them no mercy.” (Deuteronomy 7:1-2)
"…do not leave alive anything that breathes. Completely destroy them…as the Lord your God has commanded you…” (Deuteronomy 20:16)

I am here to announce as loud as I can, there is no need for any ‘International’, ‘impartial’ or ‘independent’ inquiry into the latest Israeli massacre on the high sea. Though the Israeli opposition to such an inquiry is there to suggest that the Israelis have much to hide, the truth of the matter is actually deeper. If you want to grasp what underlies the Israeli deadly barbarism all you have to do is open the Old Testament.

Though it is certain that there is no ethnic or racial continuum between the Biblical Israelites and the Khazarians who lead the Jewish state and its army, the similarities between the murderous enthusiasm described in Deuteronomy and the current string of Israeli lethal actions cannot be denied. Israel is a murderous society not because of any biological or racial lineage with its imaginary ‘forefathers’. Israel is deadly because it is driven by a fanatical tribal Jewish ideology and fueled by a psychotic merciless Biblical poisonous enthusiasm.

The Jewish State is beyond the law. It doesn’t follow any recognised universal value system either. In recent years Israel flattened Lebanon (2006) and left more than 3000 civilians dead, it managed to shell an UNRWA shelter with white phosphorus (2009) and left Gaza with 1500 fatalities most of them women, children and elders, earlier this year it assassinated in Dubai using forged foreign passports, last week we saw the Kosher navy slaughter peace activists in international waters.

Read more »

Juan Cole

© Carlos Latuff

Eric Blair, a.k.a. George Orwell, is often wrongly thought to have been writing science fiction in his seminal novel, 1984. In fact, he was simply warning about certain tendencies in governmental practice as actually observed not only in the mass authoritarian regimes but often in his own Britain.

Thus, newspeak, whereby the government calls things by their opposite, is an arrow in the quiver of the abject everywhere. So when the far rightwing government of Israel names anti-war peacenik Kenneth O’Keefe a “terrorist”, it is being Orwellian, but only in the sense of behaving as the worst governments typically do in contemporary times, not in the sense of resembling a dystopian future.

Rightwing Zionism is one of the more dangerous purveyors of newspeak nowadays. Former deputy secretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz tried to invoke anti-terrorism laws forbidding attacks on US troops to keep peaceful protesters away from US military bases.

Read more »

Stephen Lendman

This writer's May 5 article included a history of noted previous ones, accessible through this link.

Important ones caused the Spanish-American War, WW II, the Vietnam War, and Iraq and Afghanistan wars post-9/11 (a glaring false flag).

Besides constant Middle East tension, more now looms after North Korea was blamed for the March sinking of South Korea's Cheonan warship near the western border with the North.

At the time, New York Times writer Choe Sang-Hun headlined (March 26), "S. Korean Navy Ship Sinks in Disputed Waters," saying:

"A South Korean Navy patrol ship sank....after suffering damage to its hull....raising suspicions about the possible involvement of North Korea, whose navy has skirmished with South Korean ships in the waters off the Korean Peninsula."

Then on May 19, Sang-Hun headlined, "South Korea Publicly Blames the North for Ship's Sinking," saying:

"South Korea formally accused North Korea....of responsibility for the sinking....killing 46 sailors in one of the deadliest provocations" since the July 1953 Korean War armistice, leaving a "state of war" in place to this day. Also, longstanding economic sanctions in violation of the armistice and UN Charter's Article 39, permitting them only to restore international peace and security during war or when they're verifiably threatened.

Read more »

Kourosh Ziabari

The Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has stirred up international appreciation after he courageously blasted the Tel Aviv leaders for the bloody massacre of the peace activists aboard the Freedom Flotilla convoy of humanitarian aids which was heading towards the besieged Gaza strip to break the three-year-long blockade of the war-stricken enclave.

The beleaguered Gaza strip has been grappling with deteriorating economic and social situation over the past three years and needs urgent humanitarian aids to be disentangled from the growing crisis it's facing. More than 80% of the Gaza strip's 1.5m population lives under poverty threshold. The unemployment rate of the enclave hit 41.3% in 2008. According to the United Nations' World Food Program (WFP), some 70 percent of Gaza's population is food insecure and the vast majority is dependant on assistance from the United Nations to cover its basic needs.

According to the World Health Organization, 98 percent of industrial operations in Gaza have been shut down and there are acute shortages of fuel, cash, cooking gas and other basic supplies due to Israel's blockade of the enclave since 2007.

Israel's military operation in Gaza in the late 2008 and early 2009 led to the destruction of more than 7,500 Palestinian homes and displacement of some 3,500 families; however, Tel Aviv's prevention of the entry of infrastructural and building materials have impeded the reconstruction of the ruined homes and those 3,500 families are still living without any shelter and protection.

Read more »

Noam Chomsky

[MIT professor, author, activist, Noam Chomsky, world-renowned linguist and political dissident, speaking at Pace University in New York on March 21st, addressing more than a thousand people at the Left Forum. He began by discussing the case of Joseph Andrew Stack, who crashed his small plane into an office building in Austin, Texas, hitting an IRS office, committing suicide.]

One month ago, Joseph Andrew Stack crashed his small plane into an office building in Austin, Texas, hitting an IRS office, committing suicide. He left a manifesto explaining his actions. It was mostly ridiculed, but I think it deserves a lot better than that.

Stack’s manifesto traces the life history that led him to this final desperate act. The story begins when he was a teenage student living on a pittance in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, right near the heart of what was once a great industrial area. His neighbor—I’m mostly quoting now—his neighbor was a woman in her eighties, surviving on cat food, the widowed wife of a retired steel worker. Her husband had worked all his life in the steel mills of central Pennsylvania with promises from big business and the union that, for the thirty years of his service, he would have a pension and medical care to look forward to in his retirement. Instead he was one of the thousands who got nothing, because the incompetent mill management and corrupt union, not to mention the government, raided the pension funds and stole their retirement. All she had was Social Security to live on. And Stack could have added that are concerted and continuing efforts by the super-rich and their political allies to take even that away on spurious grounds.

Read more »