Stephen Lendman

Jewish squatters take over a home in east Jerusalem. Its Palestinian
owners were evicted.

The UN General Assembly's 1947 Resolution 181 internationalized Jerusalem as a separate body (a corpus separatum), administered by a UN Trustee Council, a policy still binding but not followed. Nor have other resolutions or international law provisions Israel rejects, ones interfering with its military occupation, affecting E. Jerusalem Palestinians repressively since June 1967, more still after passage of the July 30, 1980 Basic Law, declaring "Jerusalem, complete and united, is the capital of Israel."

Yet on June 30, 1980, the Security Council unanimously adopted Resolution 476 (America abstaining), declaring "all legislative and administrative measures and actions taken by Israel, the occupying Power, which purport to alter the character and status of the Holy City of Jerusalem have no legal validity and constitute a flagrant (Fourth Geneva) violation."

Following Israel's non-compliance, the SC unanimously passed Resolution 478 (America again abstaining), "censur[ing Israel] in the strongest term" for enacting the Jerusalem Basic Law, calling it a violation of international law, saying the Council doesn't recognize it, and telling member states to withdraw their diplomatic missions from the city.

The Security Council and General Assembly reaffirmed their positions that East Jerusalem is occupied territory, that expropriating its land is illegal, and that all Israeli legislative and administrative measures, altering the city's character and status, are null and void and must be rescinded forthwith. To this day, Israel never complied, continuing its relentless policies of land seizures, home demolitions, and dispossessions, flagrantly flouting its obligations under international law.

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Paul Craig Roberts

"Why has the UN Security Council given a green light to the Obama regime to start yet another war in the Middle East? Why has Russia stepped aside? Why Has China Stepped Aside?"

The BBC reported on July 4 that US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that the US ballistic missile base in Poland was not directed at Russia. The purpose of the base, she said, is to protect Poland from the Iranian threat.

Why would Iran be a threat to Poland? What happens to US credibility when the Secretary of State makes such a stupid statement? Does Hillary think she is fooling the Russians? Does anyone on earth believe her? What is the point of such a transparent lie? To cover up an act of American aggression against Russia?

In the same breath Hillary warned of a “steel vise” of repression crushing democracy and civil liberties around the world. US journalists might wonder if she was speaking of the United States. Glenn Greenwald reported in Salon on July 4 that the US Coast Guard, which has no legislative authority, has issued a rule that journalists who come closer than 65 feet to BP clean-up operations in the Gulf of Mexico without permission will be punished by a $40,000 fine and one to five years in prison. The New York Times and numerous journalists report that BP, the US Coast Guard, Homeland Security, and local police are prohibiting journalists from photographing the massive damage from the continuing flow of oil and toxic chemicals into the Gulf.

On July 5 Hillary Clinton was in Tbilisi, Georgia, where, according to the Washington Post, she accused Russia of “the invasion and occupation of Georgia.” What is the point of this lie? Even America’s European puppet states have issued reports documenting that Georgia initiated the war with Russia that it quickly lost by invading South Ossetia in an effort to destroy the secessionists.

It would appear that the rest of the world and the UN Security Council have given the Americans a pass to lie without end in order to advance Washington’s goal of world hegemony. How does this benefit the Security Council and the world? What is going on here?

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Khalid Amayreh

In 1978, the famous American Jewish author Alfred Lilienthal wrote his masterpiece book “the Zionist connection: what price peace?”, in which he described in great detail the Jewish-Zionist stranglehold on the American media, especially the so-called agenda-setters.

Lilienthal, who died two years ago, knew what he was talking about. He explained that the Zionist cabal controlling the American media had only one mantra to invoke, one cause to serve, and one goal to achieve, namely Israel. Every other consideration, whether professional ethics or simple honesty, was subject to Zionist expediency.

Lilienthal used strong terms to describe the Zionist-Jewish octopus plaguing the American media discourse. I have no doubt that he would have cited the sacking by CNN this week of its senior editor for Middle Eastern affairs, Octavia Nasr, as a classical and scandalous example of how the American media is decidedly at Israel’s beck and call.

Nasr was sacked after she published a twitter message saying that she respected the Shiite cleric the Grand Ayatollah Muhammed Hussein Fadlullah, who died on Sunday.

She reportedly wrote in her twitter message “Sad to hear of the passing of Sayyed Mohammed Hussein Fadlullah … One of Hezbollah’s giants I respect a lot.”

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Bishop Donald Corder

Throughout most of history empires were built largely through military force or the threat of it. But, at the end of World War II , the emergence of the Soviet Union, and the specter of nuclear holocaust, the military option in and of itself became just too risky. The decisive moment occurred in 1951, when Iran rebelled against a British oil company that was exploiting Iranian natural resources and its people. The forerunner of British Petroleum, today’s BP. In response the highly popular, democratically elected Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, nationalized all Iranian petroleum assets. And an outraged England sought help of her World War II ally, the United States.

Instead of sending in the Marines, therefore, Washington dispatched CIA agent Kermit Roosevelt, the grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt. With a sinister precision he performed brilliantly in winning over the people through payoffs and threats of key centers of influence. He then enlisted them to organize a series of street riots and violent demonstrations, which created the impression that Mossadegh was both unpopular and inept. In the end, Mossadegh went down, and he spent the rest of his life under house arrest. The pro-American Mohammad Reza Shah became the unchallenged dictator. Kermit Roosevelt had successfully reshaped Middle East history even as it rendered obsolete all the old strategies for empire building.

In its dream of global empire (as envisioned by men like president Johnson and Nixon), it would have to employ strategies modeled on Roosevelt’s Iranian example. A new type of revolutionary ploy was also witnessed: the empowerment of international corporations and of multinational organization as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Who, were primarily funded through the United States and sister empire builders in Europe. A symbiotic relationship developed between governments, corporations, and multinational organizations invaded and defined the global capitalist stage where capital of a dominant class prepared the designs to subjugate the planet and its resources to US interests.

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Joharah Baker

Almost every subject can be argued two ways, especially when the subject at hand is as controversial as the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. No matter how unjust the Israeli siege on the Gaza Strip is, there will always be those biased souls that justify it with the “Hamas terrorists” argument and the hackneyed Israeli pretext of state security. However, one subject, which cannot possibly have a flip side to it, is the torture of children. Only a deranged and perverted mind could justify that. Oh, and of course, Israel’s security establishment.

On May 18, Defense for Children International released a press statement in which it said it had filed a complaint with the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture in which it documented the cases of 14 Palestinian children who were either sexually assaulted or threatened with sexual assault by Israeli interrogators, soldiers or police last year. Throughout 2009, DCI’s Palestine chapter reviewed over 100 affidavits from Palestinian minors between the ages of 12 to 16 who gave sworn testimonies of their torture and sexual assault at the hands of Israeli soldiers or interrogators.

To read some of these affidavits is shocking. Israeli interrogators bind boys as young as 13 to chairs, sometimes handcuffed, and squeeze their testicles until the child admits to throwing stones. In other sworn affidavits, all of which were taken immediately after the boys were released, the minors recount how Israeli soldiers or interrogators slap them, kick them, call their mothers whores and threaten to rape them. “He started beating me all over my body and once again he grabbed my testicles and started pressing hard. ‘I won’t let go of your testicles unless you confess,’ he said to me. I felt so much pain and kept shouting. I had no other choice but to confess to throwing stones,” said one 15-year old boy in his testimony to DCI.

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