Stephen Lendman

Ted Kennedy and AIPAC Founder Isaiah L. Kenen

James Petras' powerful 2006 book titled, "The Power of Israel in the United States" explained the enormous Jewish Lobby influence on US Middle East policies. Often harming American interests, they're pursued anyway because of its grassroots and high-level control over government, the business community, academia, the clergy and mass media since at least the 1960s.

Intolerant of opposing views, they're suppressed for its own agenda, funded by PR propaganda domestically and overseas, America's top publications paid off to go along, now revealed by a secret document subpoenaed by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (FRC) investigation into the American Zionist Council (AZC), AIPAC's parent lobbying arm.

"Between 1962 - 1963, the FRC subpoenaed" AZC's internal documents, examining their activities as "registered agents of foreign principals," learning that over $5 million in tax exempt (and perhaps overseas funds) "had been laundered through the Jewish Agency's American Section into the (AZC)."

The Agency is a quasi-Israeli government branch, funded to review legislation ahead of its submission to the Knesset under its Covenant Agreement - in violation of IRS regulations regarding tax exempt charitable funds and the 1938 Foreign Agents Registration Act.

No matter. Israel got a pass to act illegally for nearly 50 years, doing it today more aggregiously than ever. In 1962, after being ordered to register as a foreign agent, AZC transferred its responsibilities to AIPAC, "which refuses to register as (an Israeli) foreign agent" and gets away with it.

Read more »

“EyesWideOpen”
Redacted News

A reader comment at Veterans Today

It’s refreshing to see there are so many people who “get it”– except maybe Steve. This was a great article and there are some really good comments here. I want to point out something I haven’t seen written about before regarding 9/11 and maybe it will cause some people who still don’t get it or refuse to examine the mountains of evidence pointing to 9/11 being an inside job to rethink their beliefs in the official story coming from our corporate government and their mouthpiece media.

Since there are so many vets here who I assume would understand attack strategies I thought this would be the place to bring this up.

While the events of 9/11 were in progress, remember how we were all waiting for the fighter jets that protect America to show up any second to handle the situation? Remember how we all expected that to happen, how it was just second nature to expect our military jets to come swooping in any second, and then remember that feeling of total incredulity when they never appeared as America was under attack? I know we were all waiting for them to take care of the situation, especially when the Pentagon was hit, the PENTAGON which some alleged hijacked plane had to fly through the most “protected airspace” in the world in order to hit it and we all couldn’t figure out how that could have happened and why there were no fighter jets protecting the nation’s capital.

Why did we, as a nation, expect to see the fighter jets flying up and handling the situation? Because it is standard operating procedure (SOP) to scramble jet fighters whenever a jetliner goes off course or radio contact with it is lost or its transponder is turned off. Between January 2001 and September 2001, interceptors were scrambled 67 times.

In the year 2000 jets were scrambled 129 times. They have never once in history not been scrambled.

Read more »

Les Visible
Reflections in a Petri Dish

"[This] elite, in order to generate maximum profit, destroyed manufacturing, jobs, benefits and pensions in order to push the margins. Their ally in all of this is the Homo erectus. This has been their greatest ally and victim. It’s two for one night at Little Caesars’."

Someone wrote me this morning to tell me that there are two types of human beings; Homo erectus and Homo sapiens. Apparently, the former turned into the latter but they have never found the missing link. He argued that maybe there was no missing link because they weren’t linked; being two different creatures and those of us that couldn’t see much of anything were in one and those of us who could see what was going on were in the other.

I saw a listing yesterday that had a selection of events that had taken place recently. As I studied them, I realized that the full impact of these events had not hit me in any real way, even though I knew such things were coming. Details about many of them were not presented to be as dramatic as they actually were. For instance, the Central European flooding was the worst in over 800 years. The heat wave and fires in Russia were the worst in over 1,000 years. The U.N. determined that the flooding in Pakistan was a greater disaster than the 2004 tsunami. Ten million people in Africa are in immediate danger of starving to death because of drought. Temperatures are so low in the Western United States that many fruits and vegetables are being destroyed. The southern and eastern portions of the United States are suffering from a terrible heat wave, which shows no signs of coming to an end. In Japan, 21,000 have been hospitalized for heat stroke. 6 millions fish, thousands of cattle and hundreds of people have been killed in South America. Thousands are dead in China from flooding. There’s a great deal that I haven’t mentioned but which you are familiar with.

Read more »

Denis G. Rancourt
Activist Teacher

In the present essay I introduce the general notion of “roundabout” as a mechanism of conflict avoidance used by privileged social justice activists. I then contrast this pseudo-liberation activism with the needed true liberation activism of Malcolm X, which I argue to be consistent with the model of liberation of Freire.

INTRODUCTION

The now familiar concept of “pacifism as pathology” was introduced by Ward Churchill as the central characteristic of First-World middleclass so-called social justice activism. Churchill argued from history that all liberations were leveraged through violence and proposed that pacifism as cowardice was pathology. [1]

Gandhi stated that it was better to practice armed resistance than to use pacifism as an excuse for cowardice [2]. Both men (Churchill and Ghandi) saw acceptance of and self-justification for one’s (legal or circumstantial) slavery as pathology.

Paulo Freire’s work showed that all hierarchies, no matter how cushioned in comfort, are violent and oppressive and argued that we could only fight our own oppression – that “solidarity” meant standing side by side with those fighting our same oppression. Freire advanced that all liberations had to be rooted in and driven by the struggles of the oppressed themselves no matter how underprivileged and that inter-social-class “solidarity” was insignificant and limited to rare individuals who joined in battle on the front lines. [3]

Churchill concentrated on the use of pacifism as an excuse to avoid the needed direct confrontation with the oppressive system. He and others have deconstructed and exposed First World pacifism as avoidance; including mainstream life-style environmentalism, ecological or economic isolationism, love ideologies, and so on, when taken to be activisms in themselves. These authors did not explore the main creative active strategies whereby pacifism can be enacted.

I explore the latter strategies of evasive action (roundabout) used by the most activist-minded sector of concerned citizens.

My goal is to provide a radical self-criticism for dedicated anti-hierarchy (social justice) activists to help ensure that we are as effective as possible and are not simply fooling ourselves. I hope that my analysis will help us to more easily recognize when we are fooling ourselves and wasting our energies and will help us to identify optimally effective outlooks and strategies.

Read more »