Khalid Amayreh

"Fat Rat" © Nidal El-Khairy

Trying to justify its manifest moral and political bankruptcy, the Fatah movement, under PA leader Mahmoud Abbas, is trying to use the so-called Iran bogey to justify its effective surrender to the Zionist regime.

Fatah, which is kept alive by American money and Israeli tolerance, thinks that by joining the international Zionist-led campaign against Iran, it will obtain a certificate of good conduct from Israel, the US as well as from the many American puppet regimes in the Arab world.

In recent weeks, the Fatah leadership even began currying favor with some anti-Iranian regional groups, suggesting that resisting the so-called Iranian expansionism was more important than resisting Israeli Nazism.

In fact, the bulk of some of Fatah’s propaganda activities has centered on “highlighting” the Iranian danger and only secondarily on saving Jerusalem and occupied Palestinian land from the claws of Zionist ghoul.

I have no doubts that Zionist money and intelligence are behind those who are trying to tell the Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims that their real enemy is Iran, not the Zionist regime whose nuclear warheads are being trained toward Muslim countries.

Listening to some of the Fatah propaganda of late, one would get the impression that it is the Iranians, not the Zionist regime, that is trying to demolish the Aqsa Mosque, destroy homes in Jerusalem, build more colonies in the West Bank and carry out more wars and massacres in the Gaza Strip. This misplaced fixation on Iran surfaces and resurfaces every time Israel is facing a difficult situation at the international arena. Hence, it is probably no co-incidence that Israel’s Arab or “Muslim” agents hasten to help their ultimate master, the Venomous Zionist viper, every time it finds itself in a stressful situation.

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Scott Horton
Harper's Magazine

[Reporter Joshua Phillips discusses how American veterans have been psychologically scarred by their abusive treatment of Iraqi prisoners. AUDIO (Information Clearing House)]

Earlier this year, Joshua Phillips received the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award for his 2008 American Radio Works documentary What Killed Sergeant Gray. Now he’s developed that story in a book that offers a compelling account of how the use of torture and abusive techniques on prisoners affected the lives of American soldiers caught up in it. I put six questions to Joshua Phillips.

1. Most of the discussion of torture has focused on the prisoners as victims; you turn this around by describing the tragic consequences of torture for soldiers. How did you come to this approach?

By accident. I learned about the central story while investigating various veterans’ issues, and the problems that some troops faced trying to report prisoner abuse to their superiors. One of the soldiers I interviewed was Jonathan Millantz, an Army combat medic. Millantz told me he was upset by the pushback that he faced from officers when he tried to report abuse. Over time, he revealed how he and his fellow unit members became involved in prisoner abuse and, in some cases, torture. It was important to Millantz that I understand the complex circumstances that led to such misconduct. He and his fellow troops also wanted me to recognize how damaging the experience had been for them—especially for soldiers who felt remorseful about their involvement with abuse, such as Sergeant Adam Gray.

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Stephen Lendman

Israeli banks entrenched in settlement building: A billboard advertises
a special offer for a mortgage by Bank Leumi for constructing in Zufin
settlement. (Who Profits from the Occupation?) [Electronic Intifada]

Wall Street does it. Other Western banks do it. They all exploit markets, often ripping off customers illegally. Why not Israeli banks also in their own back yard, easily in expanding settlements.

The Coalition of Women for Peace (CWP) includes 10 feminist organizations and non-affiliated activist women in Israel. Founded in 2000, it advocates "radical social and political change," and is "a leading voice against the occupation, committed to feminist principles of organizing and Jewish-Palestinian partnership in a relentless struggle for a just peace."

In October, it released a report titled, "Financing the Israeli Occupation, The Direct Involvement of Israeli Banks in Illegal Settlement Activity and Control over the Palestinian Banking Market."

Besides stealing Palestinian land, economic interests play a large role in Israel's occupation, including resource control, labor exploitation, and commercial enterprises of all kinds, operating freely and illegally in settlements, banks among them.

Israeli banks profiteer several ways discussed below, but make no mistake. Like in the West, they're predators, especially in Occupied Palestine, permitted to steal and exploit because what say have occupied people. As a result, banks (construction companies, and other commercial enterprises) breach international law as participants in illegal projects, a lucrative profit center they freely exploit.

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Bill Van Auken
WSWS

The words of Broder and the Republicans, together with the actions of the Obama administration, underscore the threat of a new and far bloodier war that would carry with it the danger of a global conflagration.

Leading Republican Senator Lindsey Graham signaled a turn following the midterm elections toward an escalation of US threats against Iran, publicly calling for an all-out war that would “neuter” Tehran and leave it incapable of resistance.

Graham made the statement Saturday at a conference on international security in Halifax, Canada. “Containment is off the table,” he declared in relation to Iran’s nuclear program.

Washington and its allies have accused Tehran of developing its nuclear program for the purpose of building a weapon. The Iranian government has consistently denied this charge, insisting that its program is solely for peaceful, civilian purposes.

Employing the kind of total-war rhetoric that was heard from Germany in the 1930s, the South Carolina Republican vowed that a US attack would be carried out “not to just neutralize their nuclear program, but to sink their navy, destroy their air force and deliver a decisive blow to the Revolutionary Guard. In other words, neuter that regime. Destroy their ability to fight back.”

Graham added that, despite the Democrats’ defeat at the polls last week, if President Barack Obama “decides to be tough with Iran beyond sanctions, I think he is going to feel a lot of Republican support for the idea that we cannot let Iran develop a nuclear weapon.”

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Chris Floyd
Empire Burlesque

A tourist at a Gandhi museum in New Delhi. Though Gandhi is revered
here, modern India, with its rising economic and military aspirations,
does not always reflect his ideals. (Lynsey Addario for the NYT)

The Nobel Peace Laureate Barack Obama, who in his prize-claiming speech boldly claimed the mantle of Mahatma Gandhi, is now visiting India. And why has he made this pilgrimage to the homeland of his spiritual mentor? Has he come to drink more deeply of the wellsprings of satyagraha, to steep himself more thoroughly in the Gandhian principles of courageous, active, non-violent resistance to evil, to the Mahatma's ceaseless dedication to the poor and the outcast?

No: he has come to seal the deal on the sixth largest sale of war weapons in the history of the United States: $5 billion for the bristling, burgeoning Indian military, currently waging war on millions of its own people in Kashmir and the poverty-devastated state of central India, where the despair is so deep that suicide among the poor is epidemic.

Five billion dollars could have transformed the lives and futures of millions; instead it will go into the pockets of a few American war profiteers -- who will of course spread the wealth around to their favorite politicians ... such as Barack Obama, the leading recipient of war industry money in the 2008 campaign, outdoing even that old soldier and ardent militarist, John McCain.

And of course the Indian arms deal comes hot on the heels of the largest transaction of death-machinery in American history: Obama's $60 billion war-profiteering bonanza with Saudi Arabia, one of the most suffocatingly repressive and inhumane regimes on the face of the earth. But the Peace Laureate doesn't care about that. He knows what is truly important -- and it isn't the blighted lives of the Saudi people, or all those affected by the corruption and extremism that the Saudi royals have spread around the world (with the connivance, cooperation -- or at the command of -- the bipartisan American power structure). What matters most to the progressive paragon of peace is the sixty billion dollars stuffed into the coffers of his militarist backers.

If Obama wins re-election in 2012, it will not be because he "made a mid-course correction" or "learned the lessons" of the 2010 vote or "moved to the center" or any such witless expectoration of conventional wisdom. It will be because his militarist backers have judged his arms deals and Terror War operations sufficiently profitable to justify his retention. As is always the case with the War Machine that rules us, follow the money -- and the blood.

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David Michael Green
The Regressive Antidote

The Ship of Fools & The Rocks of Short-Term Economic Planning

I guess if you’re gonna go down, you might as well do it with style. And I guess if you can’t do it with style, you might as well do it with irony. Even if it is of the comedic sort. And even if the joke’s on you.

This country is imploding. It has been for thirty years, if not fifty. What happened Tuesday was egregious in every respect, but at the end of the day represents little more than just another data point on a secular trend line. Putting the tea party freaks in control of the world’s only superpower is hardly distinguishable, really, from giving those same governmental car keys to Ronald Reagan, Newt Gingrich, or George W. Bush. For that matter, it bears all too uncomfortable resemblance to having Lyndon Johnson or Bill Clinton or Barack Obama president (though at least in those latter cases, we mostly didn’t know beforehand what they’d turn out to be).

I want to say, before wallowing too much deeper into the despairing swamps of comedic irony, that there is some hope out there, at least in the longer term. Put bluntly, this country’s main problem is old white guys. If we can find a way to neutralize their destructive impact, there is a new generation of un-crazy people waiting to take control of the country, stop it from digging deeper down in the hole its in, and begin the repair process. The next generation is liberal, and will become even more liberal when it realizes the degree to which the state is necessary to solve problems and protect citizens from predatory actors (most of which are far more likely to be dressed in shiny business suits than Taliban get-ups). It is a generation that finds prejudice based on race, sex and sexual orientation not only stupid and repugnant, but something far better – just plain dismissively irrelevant. It is a generation willing to take the outrageous step of protecting the only planet we happen to have (what a concept!). It’s a generation that is largely unmoved by the institutionalized societal idiocy of organized religion. It is a generation that will be a lot more diverse than the regressive good ol’ white boy dinosaurs from the 1930s and 1940s still lumbering about the country, waiting for “Father Knows Best” to stage a resurgence.

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