The Chabadization of America

Nahida Izzat
Exiled Palestinian

The Deadly Ideology: Who is up for the challenge?

The Talmudists, supremacist, murderers chabad Lubavitch: "casually" become famous, charitable, lovely and friendly. Watch the promoting of and raising funds for the chabad in the Main Stream Media!

So... how do you pronounce 'Chabad'?


The Road to National Suicide

Philip Giraldi
Antiwar

It is not often that one sees an entire nation marching in lockstep to go over a cliff into an abyss, but that is essentially what the United States is doing at the moment. Not only have there been strong hints from the Obama Administration that the US presence in Iraq and Afghanistan will go on into the dim future, but there is also no sign of any necessary course correction in other areas. Israel, backed by Washington, continues its reckless policies and may be cranking up for a new war against Lebanon and Syria with the ultimate objective of involving its American patron in fighting against Iran. Clearly President Obama is unwilling to take any risks by challenging existing policies. He is edging towards what he perceives as the political center and is preparing to ride the status quo to electoral victory in 2012.

Consider the central dynamic of what the United States is engaged in. Washington is committed to a series of asymmetrical wars that are literally taking place all over the world. This is what the Obamaites now refer to as "overseas contingency operations." One might well ask contingent on what, but the words themselves quite likely are not considered to be really meaningful and are rather designed to constitute a reassuring euphemism. One of these wars, in Afghanistan, is costing the US taxpayer $10 billion a month and is tying up more than 100,000 American soldiers. Casualties are rising, most of Afghanistan has become insecure in spite of the effort, corruption and drug cultivation are rampant, and there is no end in sight. To put the cost of the war in some kind of perspective, Afghanistan’s gross domestic product for 2009 was $22 billion, meaning that it is costing nearly six times more to "defend" each year than its total economic activity. Asymmetrical indeed. Colonial empires of the past would have at least figured out how to turn a buck from their imperial endeavors, highlighting the cluelessness of Washington. If there has ever been an example of a war that makes no sense, Afghanistan is it.


America's Dire State of the Union

Stephen Lendman

Like last year, Obama's address was empty rhetoric, signaling business as usual with a twist - more than ever embracing reactionary extremism, promising harder than ever hard times on Main Street.

Last year, an earlier article discussed his first State of the Union address, accessed through this link.


Poverty in rural Texas

Results again this time were predicable. Democrats loved it. Time magazine called the Republican response "frosty," saying "Stand-up comics call it a tough crowd."

Released prior to the address, Rep. Paul Ryan's response stressed "work(ing) with the President to restrain federal spending," saying "(o)ur debt is out of control. What was a fiscal challenge is now a fiscal crisis."

His message was clear - reward the rich, soak working Americans, and fund America's war machine generously, an agenda enjoying bipartisan support, very much so by Obama clearly signaled in rhetoric and policy.

Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell's response following Obama was also predictable, saying:

"What government should not do is pile on more taxation, regulation, and litigation that kills jobs and hurts the middle class....Today the federal government is simply trying to do too much....The circumstances of our time demand that we....restore and proper, limited role of government at every level."

Like Ryan and Obama, he's pro-business, pro-elitist, pro-war and anti-populist, but so are most Democrats - together responsible for harder than ever hard times for working Americans they plan to worsen, not ease.


Mass Street Protests in Egypt

Stephen Lendman

[Anti-riot police hold back workers chanting anti-government slogans during a sit-in in Cairo demanding that the government re-evaluate the national minimum wage system. Image Credit: AP]

An August 2009 Council on Foreign Relations Steven Cook report headlined, "Political Instability in Egypt," [PDF] saying:

Facing possible instability, (m)ost analysts believe that the current Egyptian regime will muddle through its myriad challenges and endure indefinitely (with) enough coercive power to ensure" it.

It's also "entering a period of political transition. President Hosni Mubarak is (81) and reportedly" ill. His (46 year old) son Gamal "is evidently being groomed to succeed him." However, the "process could prove difficult."

"Thus, while Egypt on the surface appears stable, the potential for growing political volatility and abrupt discontinuities (ahead) should not be summarily dismissed."

Cook suggested two possible scenarios:

contested succession resulting in military intervention; or
"an Islamist push for political power."

One indicator to watch for, he suggested, would be "the number of protestors in the streets....in response to a leadership transition," not public anger against high unemployment, extreme poverty, and Mubarack's dictatorship, inspired by mass protests ousting long-time Tunisian despot Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, what some observers thought impossible until it happened and began spreading across the region. More on that below.


US pursues two-track policy to suppress protests in Egypt and Tunisia

Barry Grey
WSWS


The photographer who took this picture was shot in
the leg with a rubber bullet in Mahalla on Sunday.

The United States is working intensively to suppress mass protests in both Tunisia and Egypt and prop up the local ruling elites that are entirely subordinate to American imperialism. It is using different tactics in the two countries, dictated in large part by their relative strategic importance to US ruling class interests in the Middle East.

In Tunisia, Washington backed its long-time asset Zine El Abidine Ben Ali until it concluded that his position could not be salvaged despite weeks of violent repression against anti-government demonstrators. Just days before Ben Ali was driven from the country, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the United States was “not taking sides” between the dictator and protesting workers and youth.

It has been widely reported that the US instructed the Tunisian military to refuse Ben Ali's orders to fire live rounds into mass demonstrations in Tunis and other cities, effectively pulling the rug out from under Ben Ali and making the military leader, Gen. Rachid Ammar, the political arbiter within the country.

The US undoubtedly engineered the formation of a so-called interim unity government following Ben Ali’s January 14 flight to Saudi Arabia. This government, dominated entirely by political henchmen of the ousted dictator, has since been the target of popular demonstrations demanding a government free of former members of the ruling party.

The Obama administration has sent its assistant secretary of state for the Near East, Jeffrey D. Feltman, to Tunis to “confer with the interim government.” With the promise of elections in six months, Washington is backing in all essentials the old regime minus Ben Ali, and calling this cynical fraud “democracy.”

It is portraying General Ammar as the “protector” of the “democratic revolution,” even as the interim government sanctions increased police repression against the protests, which are increasingly dominated by impoverished workers and youth from Tunis and the blighted central and southern parts of the country where the revolt began in December.


The Canadian Zionism Question

Denis G. Rancourt
Activist Teacher Blog

This is the kind of obviousness that a child can see—though the child may, later in life, become browbeaten into believing that the obvious problems are "non-problems", to be argued into nonexistence by careful reasoning and clever choices of definition.” ~ Roger Penrose

... so obvious that it takes really impressive discipline to miss it ...” ~ Noam Chomsky

Here we have Israel as an internationally recognized thug, keeper of the largest open-air prison on earth, regularly practicing war crimes against civilians, targeting civilian infrastructure and continuously disregarding the Geneva Conventions – virtually unanimously denounced by the international community, by every human rights watch group on the globe, and by international civil society for the last many decades [1] – and how do Canadian politicians and parliamentarians respond?

Israel, the modern sate that shamelessly uses the Nazi holocaust to justify overtly racist domestic and foreign national policies, stock piles nuclear weapons, incites wars on its neighbours, overtly funds propaganda in foreign countries, routinely practices international pirating, kidnappings and murders, openly performs political assassinations [1]... and how do Canadian politicians and parliamentarians respond?

Israel has no significant economic exchanges with Canada and performs no significant geopolitical service of benefit to Canada; a Canada with virtually no economic ties with the Middle East and a Canada that is a net exporter of oil and gas.

Yet, apart from the independent-thinking Bloc Quebecois, it seems that half the time that English Canadian politicians open their mouths it’s to denounce a “new anti-Semitism” that social scientists and statisticians tell us is a media fabrication or to express Israel’s “right to defend itself” or to declare Canada’s “unwavering support for Israel.” Not to mention Israel’s “right to exist”! [2]

What about unwavering support for human rights and international law?


I Will Not Dignify This Witch Hunt

Maureen Murphy
Antiwar


Maureen Murphy speaks at Dec., 23,
2010 press conference (Fight Back!)

I have been summoned to appear before a federal grand jury in Chicago on Jan. 25. But I will not testify, even at the risk of being put in jail for contempt of court, because I believe that our most fundamental rights as citizens are at stake.

I am one of 23 antiwar, labor, and solidarity activists in Chicago and throughout the Midwest who are facing a grand jury as part of an investigation into “material support for foreign terrorist organizations.” No crime has been identified. No arrests have been made. And when it raided several prominent organizers’ homes and offices on Sept. 24, the FBI acknowledged that there is no immediate threat to the American public. So what is this investigation really about?

The activists who have been ensnared in this fishing net work with different groups to end the U.S. wars and occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan, to end U.S. military aid for Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land, and to end U.S. military aid to Colombia, which has a shocking record of repression and human rights abuses. All of us have publicly and peacefully dedicated our lives to social justice and advocating for more just and less deadly U.S. foreign policy.

I spent a year and a half working for a human rights organization in the occupied West Bank, where I witnessed how Israel established “facts on the ground” at the expense of international law and Palestinian rights. I saw the wall, settlements, and checkpoints and the ugly reality of life under Israeli occupation, which is bankrolled by the U.S. government on the taxpayer’s dime. Many of us who are facing the grand jury have traveled to the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Colombia to learn about the human rights situation and the impact of U.S. foreign policy in those places so we may educate fellow Americans upon our return and work to build movements to end our government’s harmful intervention abroad.

Travel for such purposes should be protected by the First Amendment. But new legislation now allows the U.S. government to consider such travel as probable cause for invasive investigations that disrupt our movements and our lives.


The Palestine papers and the dead-end of an independent Palestinian state

Bill Van Auken
WSWS

The Palestine papers released this week by Al Jazeera provide documentary confirmation of what is becoming plain to millions of Palestinians: the nationalist project of building an independent Palestinian state in the occupied territories has become transformed into a new means of their oppression.

These documents provide a graphic account of the “peace process”—a two-decade-long fraud perpetrated by Washington upon not only the Palestinians, but the entire world.

The US-brokered talks were initiated in 1988, when Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yassir Arafat agreed to recognize Israel, guarantee its security, and renounce the armed struggle with which the PLO had been long identified. The “process” was further institutionalized with the Oslo Accords of 1993, which set out the “two-state solution” to the Palestinian-Israeli question and laid the foundations for the Palestine Authority (PA). That year saw the infamous hand-shake with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, when Arafat protested that he was being ordered to perform a “striptease” on the White House lawn.

From the outset, US imperialism pursued these negotiations not out of some commitment to ameliorating the conditions confronting millions of Palestinians crushed under Israeli occupation or relegated to poverty and statelessness in the refugee camps of Lebanon and Jordan. Rather, the aim of successive administrations, Republican and Democratic alike, has been to facilitate US intervention in the Middle East and groom a section of the Palestinian leadership as an instrument for suppressing the struggles of the Palestinian masses.

As the newly released documents verify, Washington pursued its “peace process” strategy with utter ruthlessness and violence, backing every crime carried out by its Israeli ally and treating Palestinian negotiators with unconcealed contempt.

For their part, the Palestinian negotiators loyal to PA President Mahmoud Abbas were prepared to capitulate completely on all the issues that the Palestinian movement had once described as “red lines.” This included ceding virtually all of East Jerusalem to Zionist settlements, renouncing the right of return for all but a token 10,000 of the five million Palestinian refugees, and agreeing to support the ethnic cleansing of tens of thousands of Israeli Arabs slated for removal in order to guarantee a “Jewish state.”


Lebanon's Hezbollah-Led Government

Stephen Lendman

It's official, or nearly so, Haaretz, on January 25 headlining, "Hezbollah's PM pick wins majority backing as Hariri supporters hold 'day of wrath,' " saying:

Hezbollah-backed Najib Mikati, a Sunni billionaire, became new prime minister after getting 68 votes, a majority in Lebanon's 128-member parliament. Caretaker PM Saad Hariri got 60. As a result, Hezbollah "is now in position to control Lebanon's next government. The move has set off angry protests and drew warnings from the US that its support could be in jeopardy."

"Sunni blood is boiling," chanted protestors. Burning Mikati pictures, they said they won't serve in a coalition government, adding that anyone allying with Hezbollah is a traitor. After being appointed, he said:

"I extend my hand to everyone....This is a democratic process. I want to rescue my country....My actions (as PM) will speak for themselves."

"I affirmed to the president that cooperation will be complete between us to form a new government which the Lebanese want, a government to maintain the unity of their country and their sovereignty, achieve the solidarity of its people, protect the coexistence formula and respect the constitutional rules."

However, nothing in Lebanon is ever simple, especially with Washington and Israel often intervening politically, economically and/or violently.

Commenting briefly, State Department spokesman PJ Crowley said Washington has "great concerns about a government within which Hezbollah plays a leading role," adding that relations and Washington-supplied aid will be affected.


Olbermann's Sacking Shifts US Media Further Right

Stephen Lendman

Make no mistake. He didn't quit. He was pushed, the final straw perhaps being the January 18 FCC-approved Comcast-NBC Merger. Its chairman/CEO Brian Roberts co-chaired the 2000 Republican Convention host committee, and COO Stephen Burke/now NBC Universal CEO tilts heavily to Republicans. According to Public Citizen and Think Progress, he raised at least $200,000 for Bush's 2004 campaign, served on his Council on Science and Technology, and may wish to make MSNBC another Fox, despite pledging no "interference with NBC Universal's news operations."

Think Progress asked:

"Why would Comcast be interested in silencing progressive voices?" Because it opposes issues they support, including Net Neutrality, stiffer media regulation, and restraints on being able to buy telecommunications and media companies freely.

Despite having MSNBC's highest ratings, Olbermann's gone like (once top-rated) Phil Donahue ahead of Operation Iraqi Freedom. At the time, a leaked network February 25, 2003 memo to All Your TV.com, said he presented a

"difficult public face for NBC in a time of war....He seems to delight in presenting guests who are anti-war, anti-Bush and skeptical of the administration's motives." It outlined a nightmare scenario of his show becoming "a home for the liberal antiwar agenda at the same time our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity," promoting war, not diplomacy and peace.

For those on the far right, Olbermann, like Donahue, became too hot to handle, personality issues mattering less than staunchly right wing politics. Expect MSNBC to feature more of it, shifting more to the right like Fox and CNN, racing to the bottom to see who's more pro-business, pro-war, and anti-left of center ideologically. MSNBC's remaining prime time hosts take note.


Civility in politics vs Capitulation

David Michael Green
The Regressive Antidote

Civility in politics is – pardon the anti-pun – all the rage nowadays.

Go figure. I guess assassinating members of the ruling class tends to have that kind of sobering effect.

So everyone’s talking nicey-nice, certain members of Congress will be sitting together during this week’s State of the Union despite their differing party affiliations, and most (but not quite) everybody has avoided calling each other Nazis for a week or two.

That’s cool. You know, I’m all for civility in politics. I’ve been disgusted and sometimes horrified at what has become of our national discourse these last decades. Shit like a multi-draft-deferral war-avoider, for example, running for the US Senate by branding a triple-amputee Vietnam vet as weak on national security, an’ all. Like that kind of incivility.

So yeah, can we and should we disagree more politely in American politics? How does whatshername put it? ‘You betcha.’

What I’m not down for, however, is civility that is actually a mask for capitulation.


More evidence of US war crimes

Patrick Martin
WSWS

Military documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union after a lengthy lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act provide important new evidence of American war crimes. The documents include autopsy reports and investigative reports on the deaths of 190 prisoners held by the US military at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The more than 2,600 pages of documents were turned over to the ACLU on January 14 and made public on the organization’s web site five days later.

An ACLU statement said that 25 to 30 cases were “unjustified homicides.” US military investigators themselves identified many of the deaths as homicides, although there were very few trials or convictions of the soldiers involved.

The ACLU issued a statement declaring: “So far, the documents released by the government raise more questions than they answer, but they do confirm one troubling fact: that no senior officials have been held to account for the widespread abuse of detainees. Without real accountability for these abuses, we risk inviting more abuse in the future.”

Some of the deaths are well known cases of atrocities committed by American soldiers, such as the killing of four prisoners who were shot and then thrown into a Baghdad canal in 2007. Others are previously unknown or not widely reported. The autopsy reports make for gruesome reading.


Washington State Joins the Movement for Public Banking

Ellen Brown

Bills were introduced on January 18 in both the House and Senate of the Washington State Legislature that add Washington to the growing number of states now actively moving to create public banking facilities.

The bills, House Bill 1320 and Senate Bill 5238, propose creation of a Washington Investment Trust (WIT) to “promote agriculture, education, community development, economic development, housing, and industry” by using “the resources of the people of Washington State within the state.”

Currently, all the state’s funds are deposited with Bank of America. HB 1320 proposes that, in the future, “all state funds be deposited in the Washington Investment Trust and be guaranteed by the state and used to promote the common good and public benefit of all the people and their businesses within [the] state.”

The legislation is similar to that now being studied or proposed in states including Illinois, Virginia, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Maryland, Florida, Michigan, Oregon, California and others.

The effort in Washington state draws heavily on the success of the 92-year-old Bank of North Dakota (BND), currently the only state-wide publicly owned U.S. bank. The BND has helped North Dakota escape the looming budgetary disaster facing other states. In 2009, North Dakota sported the largest budget surplus it had ever had.


The "Palestine Papers" Revealed

Stephen Lendman


The Palestine Papers reveal the offer of concessions by
Palestinian peace negotiators on areas such as the Haram
al-Sharif/Temple Mount holy sites in Jerusalem. Photo:
Awad Awad/AFP/Getty Images

"Achieving those objectives won't come easily or soon, but what's more important than seizing a rare opportunity for change. Tunisian winds are spreading regionally. Thousands are demonstrating in Tunis, other Tunisian cities, Algeria, Yemen, Jordan, and may erupt anywhere from Morocco to Egypt to Occupied Palestine.

Sustained grassroots anger brings change, and what better reasons than poverty, unemployment, repression, occupation, and suffocating conditions under siege. Maybe exposed PA treachery [has] created a rare chance seldom possible. Now's the time to seize it.
"

On January 23, Al Jazeera released breaking news on its extensive "Palestine Papers" coverage, introducing them, saying it

"obtained more than 1,600 internal documents from a decade of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations," writer Gregg Carlstrom explaining that:

e last several months, Al Jazeera has been given unhindered access to the largest-ever leak of confidential documents related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict." They include "nearly 1,700 files, (and) thousands of pages of diplomatic correspondence detailing the inner workings of" peace process negotiations. Included (from 1999 - 2010) were "emails, maps, minutes of private meetings, accounts of high level exchanges, strategy papers and even power point presentations...."

Releasing them from January 23 - 26, they reveal information about:

the PA's willingness to concede all East Jerusalem settlements except one;
PA "creativ(ity)" about Islam's third holiest site, Haram al-Sharif (Nobel Sanctuary), what Jews call the Temple Mount;
compromise on the right of return, suggesting abandonment beyond token amounts;
numerous details of PA-Israeli "cooperation," suggesting complicity and unconditional surrender to Israeli demands; and
private late 2009 PA-US negotiator exchanges when Goldstone Report discussions were ongoing at the UN.

Because of obvious sensitivity, Al Jazeera will keep source information confidential as well as how documents were obtained.


The crusade of Western media against Islam

Kourosh Ziabari

As the Western governments add fuel to the fire of Islamophobic sentiments in their societies with inflammatory and rabble-rousing actions and statements, the Western media mischievously try their best to portray a lopsided, biased and prejudiced image of Muslims in an attempt which should be interpreted as an incontestable crusade against more than 25% of the world population.

Although it is arguable that the 9/11 attacks played in the hands of the United States and its European cronies to spread an all-encompassing wave of Islamophobic sentiments in the world and introduce the Muslims as the number one threat to the global peace and security, one should bear in mind that Muslims have been conventionally considered as the villains of the fables of the Western governments for a long time already and despite their unquestionable and treasured services to the world, they never did receive a fair, justifiable and humane treatment by the superpowers, be it from the deceitful, fraudulent and warmongering Russia that massacred some 50,000 innocent Muslims in Chechnya, or from the arrogant, bullying United States that incarcerated scores of innocent Muslims in its illegal, underground detention centers in Guantanamo bay and Abu Ghraib following the 9/11 attacks.

The corporate mainstream media is the most effective spearhead of the Western governments in their crusade against the Muslims and the Islamic world. When it was needed to conceal the most conspicuous realities which would attest to the righteousness of the Muslims, the mainstream media did their best: Marwa El-Sherbini was flagrantly murdered in a courtroom in Germany, and the Western media outlets unanimously kept silent, turning a blind eye against one of the most heartrending instances of the violation of human rights before the eyes of a judge and his colleagues. When it was needed to sabotage a truer perception of the facts, Western media went into high gear: the Freedom Flotilla was brutally attacked by the commandos of Israel Defense Forces and 9 of its passengers were massacred viciously -but the media justified the massacre as an act of self defense. Nobody asked the Western media how it could justify the killing of defenseless civilians as an act of self defense when the civilians lacked even a single knife with which to defend themselves against the rifles of the Israeli commandos. When it was needed to suppress the stark realities Gaza, the mainstream media scored its best ever: 1,500 innocent people in Gaza were massacred in a few days (less than 3 weeks), and the Western media acted so indifferently, that one might have felt as if nothing had really taken place at all!


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