David Richards
Henry Makow's Blog

Ban and Mongolian Archer woman

"After an initial settling in period, the Soviets went about destroying Mongol identity. Buddhism was top of their hit list and they murdered 30,000 monks and liquidized over 750 monasteries."

Situated between Russia and China, Mongolia is the least densely populated country in world, with three million people living in a country the size of Western Europe.

Over thousands of years, the Mongol people have perfected a nomadic lifestyle to thrive in Siberian winters, acrid deserts and barren steppes. Despite recent urbanization, half the population continues to live a nomadic lifestyle.

The warring tribes of the region were once merged under the leadership of Genghis Khan and used their innovative military tactics to create the great Mongol empire.

Yet despite their famed indigenous culture, the United Nations classifies Mongolia as a developing country. By 'development', the UN means the integration of Mongolia into a world government.

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Stephen Lendman

In 1982, Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs senior advisor Oded Yinon published a revealing document for regional conquest and dominance. Still relevant today, it's titled "A Strategy for Israel in the 1980s, translated, edited, and retitled "The Zionist Plan for the Middle East" by distinguished Professor Israel Shahak (1933 - 2001), longtime activist, analyst, and outspoken Israeli critic.

Its publisher, the Association of Arab-American University Graduates called it "the most explicit, detailed and unambiguous statement to date of the Zionist strategy in the Middle East....Its importance....lies not in its historical value but in the nightmare which it represents," what thereafter continued to unfold.

Its two essential premises include:

● to survive, Israel must dominate the region and become a world power, and

● succeeding requires dividing Arab nations into small states - Balkanizing them along ethnic and sectarian lines as Israeli satellites, controllable satraps, the idea modeled after the Ottoman Empire's Millet (or nation) system under which local authorities governed confessional communities with separate ethnic identities.

Israel's 1967 Golan seizure and 1978 and 1982 Lebanon invasions followed the plan, Yinon noting "far-reaching opportunities for the first time since 1967, (created by the) very stormy situation surround(ing) Israel," resurrected whenever Israel wishes. Its method involves preemptive belligerence against Palestinians and regional states, making them all eventual targets to be weakened, fragmented, divided, and reconfigured under Israeli control.

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Gilad Atzmon
Gilad Atzmon's Blog

In case the Goyim cannot find a purpose in their life, Israeli senior Sephardi Rabbi Ovadia Yosef is there to help them out. In his Saturday sermon Rabbi Yosef revealed that the sole purpose of Gentiles is to serve Jews. “Goyim were born only to serve us. Without that, they have no place in the world.” The Rabbi was also kind enough to provide the Goyim with some precise tasks. “Why are gentiles needed? They will work, they will plow, they will reap. We will sit like an effendi and eat. That is why gentiles were created.”

I guess that it is about time the friends of Israel in Western politics started to fully comprehend their role in our Judified universe -- AIPAC and the Conservatives’ Friends of Israel do indeed, have a crucial function : They are there to ‘help’ our politicians grasp why they ‘were created’.

And their role is, apparently, to ‘serve the Jews,’ as the Chief Rabbi describes it so eloquently.

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Jonathan Cook
The National

NAZARETH // As US-sponsored peace talks have stalled over the issue of settlements, Israel's national police force has revealed that it is turning to the very same illegal communities in its first-ever drive to recruit officers from among the settlers.

The special officer training course, which is chiefly aimed at discharged combat soldiers, includes seven months of religious studies in an extremist West Bank settlement.

The programme has provoked widespread concern among Israel's 1.3 million Palestinian citizens, a fifth of the population.

"The police have already repeatedly demonstrated their hostility to Palestinian citizens, but this move proves that the authorities want to extend and deepen our oppression," said Jafar Farah, the director of Mossawa, an advocacy centre for the Palestinian minority.

"Is it really credible that these religious extremists who have been educated to hate Palestinians in the West Bank are going to behave differently when they police our communities inside Israel?"

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Gilad Atzmon
Gilad Atzmon's Blog

London Jazza festival is behind us. It was stressful and we took a massive risk, but it turned into a great success. For some of us, it was the most musically meaningful event we have ever participated in.

It occurred to me a while back that as far as Palestinian affairs are concerned, the tide has indeed changed -- The struggle of the Palestinian people has now become a part of a Western collective conscience. We are a mass movement becoming increasingly aware of itself. At our last week's first Jazza Festival, leading artists of all genres united together with an audience from all walks of life to side with the Palestinians. In the Scala London, we stood together, protesting against Israeli brutality. Funds were raised for the Free Palestine Movement, an organization that challenges many aspects of the occupation, and will soon bring the all important question of the 'Right of Return' right to the heart of Tel Aviv.

Jazza is an event though, which is above political agendas: like the peace activists on board the Mavi Marmara, we have a humanitarian mission to accomplish. We are artists who very simply believe that beauty is hope. And we know that it is our duty to depict an alternative reality through our music.

Naturally enough, we were supported by every possible Palestinian and Arab media outlet: The Palestine Telegraph rallied with us, as did the Palestine Chronicle. Middle East Online covered the production process and covered the event. Press TV promoted us and sent a team to cover the event.

We were supported by the dissident network too: the SWP featured us on its front page, as did The Truth Seeker, Salem News, Whatreallyhappened.com, Rense.com, The People Voice, Uprooted Palestinians and many others.

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Stephen Lendman

M. Abbas & War Criminal Ariel Sharon

"Underneath everything is hatred - hatred and contempt for Arabs....This is what is behind the right wing's nationalist laws and its so-called (no-peace) 'peace.' " It reflects "dark and dangerous instincts," throughout Israel's leadership and Knesset members. "(A)ll of them are Arab haters, whether openly or not." Most never "met an Arab, but they know everything about them. Not one of them has even begun to think of Arabs as being equal to Jews," let alone as human beings deserving basic rights and freedoms." ~ Gideon Levy

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas' duplicitous treachery exposes him as an enemy, not ally, of his people. An earlier article on him quoted Jeffrey Blankfort calling him a "double agent (serving) his Israeli and US masters in plain sight." In June 2003, Edward Said called him "Israel's sheriff," saying he's "colorless, moderately corrupt, and without any clear ideas of his own, except that he wants to please the white man," his Washington and bosses. Access the article through THIS link.

Israeli Terror Throughout the Territories

Daily throughout Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem, Palestinians face Israeli (and complicit PA) terror, the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) documenting it, clear crimes against humanity ongoing for decades.

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Michael Roberts
Lew Rockwell

My name is Michael Roberts, and I am a pilot for ExpressJet Airlines, Inc., based in Houston (that is, I still am for the time being). This morning as I attempted to pass through the security line for my commute to work I was denied access to the secured area of the terminal building at Memphis International Airport. I have passed through the same line roughly once per week for the past four and a half years without incident. Today, however, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) agents at this checkpoint were using one of the new Advanced Imaging Technology (AIT) systems that are currently being deployed at airports across the nation. These are the controversial devices featured by the media in recent months, albeit sparingly, which enable screeners to see beneath people’s clothing to an extremely graphic and intrusive level of detail (virtual strip searching). Travelers refusing this indignity may instead be physically frisked by a government security agent until the agent is satisfied to release them on their way in what is being touted as an "alternative option" to AIT. The following is a somewhat hastily drafted account of my experience this morning.

As I loaded my bags onto the X-ray scanner belt, an agent told me to remove my shoes and send them through as well, which I’ve not normally been required to do when passing through the standard metal detectors in uniform. When I questioned her, she said it was necessary to remove my shoes for the AIT scanner. I explained that I did not wish to participate in the AIT program, so she told me I could keep my shoes and directed me through the metal detector that had been roped off. She then called somewhat urgently to the agents on the other side: "We got an opt-out!" and also reported the "opt-out" into her handheld radio. On the other side I was stopped by another agent and informed that because I had "opted out" of AIT screening, I would have to go through secondary screening. I asked for clarification to be sure he was talking about frisking me, which he confirmed, and I declined. At this point he and another agent explained the TSA’s latest decree, saying I would not be permitted to pass without showing them my naked body, and how my refusal to do so had now given them cause to put their hands on me as I evidently posed a threat to air transportation security (this, of course, is my nutshell synopsis of the exchange). I asked whether they did in fact suspect I was concealing something after I had passed through the metal detector, or whether they believed that I had made any threats or given other indications of malicious designs to warrant treating me, a law-abiding fellow citizen, so rudely. None of that was relevant, I was told. They were just doing their job.

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Alan Hart
AlanHart.net

Better late than never, a very senior Palestinian official in Ramallah, Yasser Abed Rabbo, found the right way to challenge Israel and the U.S. As reported by AFP on 13 October, he said, “We officially demand that the US administration and the Israeli government provide a map of the borders of the state of Israel which they want us to recognise.”

That’s a completely logical and totally reasonable demand.

IF Israel was interested in peace on terms virtually all Palestinians and most other Arabs and Muslims everywhere could accept, the map provided would show Israel with borders as they were on the eve of the 1967 war. An accompanying note would say that, subject to agreement in final negotiations, Israel seeks minor border adjustments here and there. The note would also propose that Jerusalem should be an open, undivided city and the capital of two states.

If such a map with the note as above was presented, it would open the door to peace.

But the implementation of such land-for-peace deal would require the IDF to confront and forcibly remove illegal Jewish settlers who refused to leave; and that would open the door to a Jewish civil war – the price Israel’s Jews would have to pay for 62 years of contempt for and defiance of international law. Of course it won’t happen.

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Stephen Lendman

They're commonplace in developing countries in different forms, at times through what Edward Herman calls "Demonstration Elections," the title of his 1980 book on sham ones in the Dominican Republic, El Salvador and Vietnam. They also occur regularly in countries like Egypt, where for the past 20 years president Hosni Mubarak has gotten around 98% of the vote when he runs. Sadam's Iraq, much of the Middle East, and elsewhere work the same way, holding mock elections pretending to be real, while in the West, especially America, real elections are, in fact, mock ones.

Of course, elections held in occupied countries, like Iraq and Afghanistan, installed puppet regimes, not legitimate ones, both countries run from Washington, not Baghdad or Kabul.

America's history is rife with electoral fraud, in 1824 for example, the one called the "Corrupt Bargain." Four major candidates were involved, all from the same Democratic-Republican party, today's Democrats who are also Republicans who are also Democrats in our one-party state with two wings - plus the lunatic fringe Tea Party offshoot likely to send extremist morons to Congress, joining legions of others already there.

When all 1824 votes were tallied, no winner emerged, so under the 12th Amendment, it fell to the House to decide from the top three. On February 9, 1925, after a month of furious lobbying, members chose John Quincy Adams over Andrew Jackson (later elected president in 1828 and again in 1832), Henry Clay and William Crawford. Outrage followed because deal-makers prevailed over voters. It showed up when Adams nominated Clay as Secretary of State, infuriating Jackson supporters. Thereafter, Clay was dogged for striking a corrupt bargain, depriving Jackson, the highest vote getter of the four.

The 1876 election was even worse because Democrat Samuel Tilden got today's equivalent of over two million more votes than Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, and with 20 disputed Electoral College votes uncounted led by 184 - 165. Yet a secretly struck "bargain of 1877" to abandon Reconstruction and sell out freed Blacks handed the election to Hayes.

Another example was Lyndon Johnson's 1948 senatorial primary win - until the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections, the most blatant example of electoral theft in US history, according to some observers. Historian Robert Caro is one, documenting how Johnson miraculously overcame a 20,000 vote deficit to gain an 87 vote victory. According to Caro, it wasn't "the only election....ever stolen, but there was never such brazen thievery," and as they say, the rest is history.

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Khalid Amayreh in occupied East Jerusalem

Talmudic ideologue O. Yosef and Zionist War Criminal E. Barak.

"Whenever Orthodox rabbis use the word human, they normally [don't] refer to all humans, but only to Jews, since non-Jews are not considered humans according to Halacha of Jewish law."

A major Jewish religious figure in Israel has likened non-Jews to donkeys and beasts of burden, saying the main reason for their very existence is to serve Jews.

Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, spiritual mentor of the religious fundamentalist party, Shas, which represents Middle Eastern Jews, reportedly said during a Sabbath homily earlier this week that "the sole purpose of non-Jews is to serve Jews." Yosef is considered a major religious leader in Israel who enjoys the allegiance of hundreds of thousands of followers. Shas is a chief coalition partner in the current Israeli government,

Yosef, also a former Chief Rabbi of Israel, was quoted by the right-wing newspaper, the Jerusalem Post, as saying that the basic function of a goy, a derogatory word for a gentile, was to serve Jews.

"Non-Jews were born only to serve us. Without that, they have no place in the world -only to serve the People of Israel,"

Yosef said in his weekly Saturday night sermon which was devoted to laws regarding actions non-Jews are permitted to perform on the Sabbath.

Yosef also reportedly said that the lives of non-Jews in Israel are preserved by God in order to prevent losses to Jews.

Yosef, widely considered a prominent Torah sage and authority on the interpretation of Talmud, a basic Jewish scripture, held a comparison between animals of burden and non-Jews.

"In Israel, death has no dominion over them...With gentiles, it will be like any person. They need to die, but God will give them longevity. Why? Imagine that one's donkey would die, they'd lose their money. "This is his servant…That's why he gets a long life, to work well for this Jew."

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Alex Newman
Dprogram.net

After terrorist conspirator and “former” U.S. government agent David Coleman Headley received promises of leniency and extradition protection from American prosecutors for his role in the 2008 Mumbai massacre, speculation about his true masters was set ablaze as outrage erupted across India.

Headley — a former Drug Enforcement Administration agent and the son of a Pakistani diplomat — pled guilty to various criminal charges on March 18 in connection with his terrorist activities in India, Pakistan and Denmark. He is reportedly “cooperating” with investigators.

In exchange, the government vowed not to allow foreign authorities to question him or subject him to trial. Prosecutors also agreed not seek the death penalty, and he may not even serve a life sentence. Links to U.S. intelligence agencies will remain classified. And his guilty plea ensures that there will be no drawn-out trial that could publicly reveal any relationships with various intelligence agencies — most notably, the Central Intelligence Agency-linked Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence.

Headley admitted in the plea bargain that he helped plan the bloody massacre by conducting surveillance and selecting targets, gathering GPS coordinates for the terrorist team’s boat landing along the coast, and more. He was also helping to plan an attack on a Danish cartoonist. And while the Federal Bureau of Investigation was given almost 10 hours to question the only surviving attacker in India, a team of Indian investigators who traveled to the U.S. to interrogate Headley was turned away. The plea deal and the lack of American cooperation immediately sparked fury and despair in India, as the U.S. is reportedly bound by treaty to surrender Headley to Indian authorities. It also fueled accusations in the media that Headley still may have been linked to the American or Pakistani governments in some capacity. He began his terrorist training around the time that he was working for the U.S. government. But the connections, however, remain shrouded in mystery.

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Felicity Arbuthnot
Global Research

US massacre Najaf, January 2007. Photo: Najaf Governor Office

"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." ~ François-Marie Arouet ("Voltaire") (1694-1778.)

I have a deeply held belief that the duty of a commentator is, to the best of one's ability, to record, to shine light in often dark places, to act as a voice for those whose own voice, fears, plights might not be heard or known. To write about the emotions one sometimes feels when doing it, is an anathema and anyway a redundancy. The purpose is to attempt to draw attention to wrongs, not to whinge about the effects they can have - and any way, a private life should be just that. If politicians wish to strip themselves of their dignity and allude to everything from their sex life, to using private grief to gain sympathy votes, those with a shred of self-respect do not wish to emulate them. Here, I am breaking my taboo, for a reason.

Over the last several weeks I have again researched in depth, invasion's atrocities in Iraq, unearthing the unthinkable, switching off emotion and reading of terror, torture, monstrous wickednesses, word after sickening word. Then, Fallujah revisited (1) with document after document revealing the depth of the darkest depravities towards others, which can be plumbed, by "some mother's son" - or daughter. Indeed, some child's father or mother, able to shoot the children, toddlers, babies of others, in cold blood, drive over them in tanks, leaving the pathetic remains to be eaten by stray dogs.

Photographs viewed have included many which even hardened investigators have deemed: "too disturbing to view." This is not a view I hold. If family members who have survived, emergency workers (when not incinerated by U.S., troops themselves) medical staff, if not shot, imprisoned, tortured, or tied up with a bag over their head) can view, identify, bury with love and respect - or in the case of medical staff, carefully photograph, and note time, location of finding, then number, wrap and retain for a period, before burial, hoping a relative will claim the charred, mutilated, or worse, remains. It is a duty for those with any "voice", from countries responsible for this first documentable U.S., U.K., genocide of the 21st century, to draw attention to it, in the memory of and in tribute to, the voiceless, nameless, uncounted victims, in the hope that eventually, legal recourse might result.

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Patrick Martin
WSWS

With only two weeks remaining in the 2010 election campaign, Democratic Party candidates in closely contested races for the Senate, the House of Representatives and many statewide offices are highlighting their right-wing policies and minimizing any differences with their Republican opponents.

Opinion polls and media analysts are generally forecasting a Republican takeover of the House of Representatives, now held by the Democrats by a margin of 255 to 178, and significant Republican gains in the Senate, where the Democrats hold 59 seats out of 100, counting two independents who vote with them.

Some 40 states are electing governors as well, with Republican candidates expected to sweep a belt of economically devastated industrial states—Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin—from the Atlantic to the Great Lakes. There are more closely contested gubernatorial races in three of the four largest states: Florida, Texas and California.

The right-wing policies of the Obama administration, above all its failure to take any significant measures to alleviate mass unemployment, have opened the doors for a revival of political influence for the Republican Party, which was thoroughly repudiated by the American people in the past two elections, losing control of both houses of Congress in 2006 and losing the White House in 2008.

The anticipated Republican victories are due mainly to a projected collapse in turnout by those who voted for Obama and other Democratic candidates in 2008, not to any great surge of popularity for the Republican candidates, many of them associated with the ultra-right Tea Party movement. An Associated Press-Knowledge Networks poll published over the weekend found that one-quarter of Obama voters were considering voting against the Democrats this year, and an even larger number were not planning to vote at all.

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Rick Rozoff
Stop NATO

Pakistan's Ghaznavi ballistic missile takes off during a test flight from an
undisclosed location in this file photo. [Reuters]

"As the war in Afghanistan, the largest and longest in the world, proceeds with record casualties among civilians and combatants alike on both sides of the Afghan-Pakistani border, plans are afoot to further expand the war into Pakistan and to threaten Iran as well."

Two recent news items emanating from the United States have begun to reverberate in Pakistan and give rise to speculation that growing American drone strikes and NATO helicopter attacks in that country may be the harbingers of far broader actions: Nothing less than the expansion of the West’s war in Afghanistan into Pakistan with the ultimate goal of seizing the nation’s nuclear weapons.

The News International, Pakistan’s largest English-language newspaper, published a report on October 13 based on excerpts from American journalist Bob Woodward’s recently released volume “Obama’s Wars” which stated that during a trilateral summit between the presidents of the U.S., Afghanistan and Pakistan on May 6 of 2009 Pakistani head of state Asif Ali Zardari accused Washington of being behind Taliban attacks inside his country with the intent to use them so “the US could invade and seize its nuclear weapons.” [1]

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Matthew Nasuti
Kabul Press

It is premature for the international media to conclude that Ms. Norgrove’s death was “accidental.” It appears increasingly likely that UK citizen Linda Norgrove was killed on October 8, 2010, by an American fragmentation grenade. If true, its use may violate U.S. Army rules and could be grounds for a criminal prosecution. Pursuant to American and British law, conduct that is sufficiently “reckless” can support a charge of intentional killing.

What is also disturbing is that at least some American military personnel concocted a false cover story and tried to blame her death on the Taliban. Instead of telling the truth, these Americans were willing to have her family believe that she died in the horrible explosion of a suicide vest detonated by her captors. The BBC’s October 10, 2010, headline was: “UK Hostage Linda Norgrove Killed by Vest Bomb”

The Daily Mail, on the same day, reported that she had been “blown up by a suicide vest.” These are dreadful headlines for any parent to read. The motive for falsely accusing the Taliban of murder may be to distract the public from asking important questions.

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