Neve Gordon

Link to the Guardian video HERE.

Neve Gordon recounts his experience of visiting the Israeli Arab village of Al-Arakib moments after it had been razed to the ground by the Israeli authorities, in the latest example of ethnic cleansing in the Negev desert.

A menacing convoy of bulldozers was heading back to Be'er Sheva as I drove towards al-Arakib, a Bedouin village located not more than 10 minutes from the city. Once I entered the dirt road leading to the village I saw scores of vans with heavily armed policemen getting ready to leave. Their mission, it seems, had been accomplished.

The signs of destruction were immediately evident. I first noticed the chickens and geese running loose near a bulldozed house, and then saw another house and then another one, all of them in rubble. A few children were trying to find a shaded spot to hide from the scorching desert sun, while behind them a stream of black smoke rose from the burning hay. The sheep, goats and the cattle were nowhere to be seen – perhaps because the police had confiscated them.

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Matthew Nasuti

“The Chinese contribution (to Afghanistan) is as important as that of Western troops.” ~ A quote from Mohammad Yalaqi, the Afghan Minister of Commerce and Industry to Tini Tran of the Associated Press on July 4, 2010, for the story: “As US fights, China spends to gain Afghan foothold.”

It should stun the American public to discover that some Afghan officials place Chinese commercial ties on an equal par with ten years of American military and reconstruction efforts.

On July 5, 2010, Senator John McCain, speaking in Afghanistan, stated: “If we succeed there (Kandahar) we will succeed in the rest of this struggle.” The reality is that Afghans may credit China for any defeat of the Taliban. It is disquieting that the American Embassy in Kabul is losing a little-known propaganda war over who is helping the Afghans the most.

In contrast, the Chinese Embassy in Kabul is waging a brilliant campaign to advance its interests. Almost as significant, it is waging its war so skillfully that American diplomats are seemingly oblivious to the Chinese efforts. Assistant Secretary of State Kurt Campbell traveled to Beijing in October 2009, to urge China to assist and invest in Afghanistan. Earlier this month, when the Associated Press interviewed State Department spokesman Gordon Duguid, he praised China’s efforts in Afghanistan!

China is not merely winning the propaganda war. It is keeping a low public profile in Afghanistan, which keeps Muslim militant efforts focused on the very visible American military presence.

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Paul Craig Roberts

The morality of the American people now resides, insecurely, in the Presbyterian Church. Every other institution of American society–the evangelical churches, the bought-and-paid-for American media, both houses of Congress, the executive branch, both political parties, the corporations, the financial sector, the universities–all support Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians. Only the Presbyterians dissent.

The genocide is cloaked behind the propaganda that no Palestinians lived in Palestine until after the Israelis arrived, that all Palestinians are terrorists who want to murder innocent peace-loving Israelis, and that the terrorist Palestinians are armed by the few remaining Muslim governments that so far have escaped becoming American puppet states.

The solution, of course, is for the few remaining independent countries in the Middle East to be brought by force under US and Israeli hegemony.

The Presbyterian Church, as it is the only US organization that is not under the Israel Lobby’s suzerainty, is included among the independent institutions that must be brought to heel.

The Presbyterian Church, which alone in America has a moral conscience, has been disturbed for some time by the Israeli/American policy of Palestinian extermination. In violation of international law and under the protection of US diplomacy and America’s UN veto, Israel has evicted Palestinians from their homes and villages since the Israeli occupation of the West Bank in 1967 and even before. The remaining small parts of the West Bank in which Palestinians still reside have been turned by Israel into ghettos cut off from the rest of Palestine.

The Presbyterians, being meek Christians, have only mild criticisms of Israel which are packaged together in the church’s Middle East Study Committee’s report with the Presbyterians’ commitment to Israel’s continued existence and to “our American Jewish Friends.” The Presbyterian report even disavows divestment from Caterpillar, the US company that supplies Israel with the machines that destroy Palestinian homes, thus driving Palestinians from their lands so that Zionist settlers can confiscate their properties. It was a Caterpillar bulldozer that killed the American Rachel Corrie who was protesting Israel’s destruction of Palestinian homes.

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Gilad Atzmon

"Stone doesn’t refer to race. There is nothing anti Semitic in his remark whatsoever unless telling the truth is a form of anti Semitism. Moreover, Stone didn’t demonize Jews for being Jews, he described some actions committed by Jewish institutional lobbies, actions that are now academically documented and studied. He did it for a good reason. Stone is probably patriotic or pragmatic enough to gather that peace is important."

There you go, Oliver Stone apologized for suggesting that the Jewish lobby controls Washington's foreign policy and that Hitler's actions should be put into context.

In fact, Stone’s apology confirms Stone’s argument. We are subject to constant assault by Jewish and Israeli gatekeepers who insist on controlling the political and historical discourse and defy any possible criticism of Jewish national affairs.

“In trying to make a broader historical point about the range of atrocities the Germans committed against many people, I made a clumsy association about the Holocaust, for which I am sorry and I regret,” Stone said in a statement released late Monday, the day after his remarks were published in a British newspaper.

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