Stephen Lendman

Palestinians worldwide want it. So do supporters and up to 140 countries. They comprise more than enough to ensure it and full de jure UN membership.

The Palestinian Authority (PA) can petition the General Assembly directly. It has sole admittance power, not the Security Council only able to recommend.

UN Charter Article 80(1) and others empower the General Assembly to recognize Palestinian statehood and take all necessary measures to end Israel's illegal occupation.

If Washington invokes its Security Council veto, the General Assembly can override it under the 1950 Uniting for Peace Resolution 377.

The choice is in Mahmoud Abbas' hands. Later this month, he can either support his own people or don his collaborationist hat. His recent comments and body language suggest the latter, whatever his next moves.

Hopefully enough pressure will push him in the right direction to back long denied recognition and justice for millions deserving more than they're now getting.

More »

Medea Benjamin & Charles Davis

When it comes to government handouts, there's no bigger welfare queens than the Pentagon and the legions of mercenaries and weapons manufacturers profiting from America's half-dozen ongoing wars and its global empire of military bases. In fact, more than half of U.S. income taxes are funneled, not to welfare mothers and underprivileged youths, but to what President Eisenhower called the “military-industrial complex.”

Endless war and a global empire are costly, as it turns out, with U.S. military spending roughly doubling since 2001 thanks largely to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And that's not counting the moral costs associated with being a nation whose greatest export these days is violence, the perpetration of which Barack Obama notably defended even as he was accepting a Nobel Prize for Peace. Military aggression doesn't just take its toll on those of the receiving end of America's liberating Hellfire missiles and cluster bombs—our last domestically manufactured goods.

Yet despite the riches it receives courtesy of the American taxpayer, no group feels more entitled than military contractors and their intellectual mercenaries on Capitol Hill fighting for ever more handouts, fear-mongering talking points in hand. War profiteers have even banded together to safeguard the money they make from death and destruction, forming the group “Second to None” to counter the “threat” of military spending cuts.

More »

Shahram Vahdany

The magical and yet extremely subtle gift that Gilad Atzmon offers through his personal journeys in The Wandering Who? is the wisdom of disillusionment; the gift of not floating above water, but having to take an insightful dive into a shrouded underworld of appearances and disappearances.

The Wandering Who? -Intelligent, bold, unapologetic.

At a certain stage, around 2005, I thought to myself that I might be King of the Jews. I have achieved the unachievable, accomplished the impossible. I have managed to unite them all: Right, Left, and Centre. The entirety of the primarily-Jewish British political groups: the Zionists, the anti-Zionists, Jewish Socialists, Tribal Marxists, The Board of Deputies, Jewish Trotskyites, Jews for this and Jews for that, for the first time in history all spoke in one single voice. They all hated Gilad Atzmon equally.

Gilad begins his book, The Wandering Who? with a brief story of his childhood and the tremendous influence of his grandfather on his adolescence. He writes “my grandfather was a charismatic, poetic, veteran zionist terrorist. A former prominent commander in the right-wing Irgun terrorist organization …” He writes about his attraction to jazz, his enlistment in the IDF (Israel Defense Force), and finally being sent to the first Lebanon war. He writes of his experience in Lebanon saying:

I studied the detainees. The looked very different to the Palestinians in Jerusalem. The ones I saw in Ansar were angry. They were not defeated, they were freedom fighters and they were numerous. As we continued past the barbed wire I continued gazing at the inmates, and arrived at an unbearable truth: I was walking on the other side, in Israeli military uniform. The place was a concentration camp. The inmates were the ‘Jews’, and I was nothing but a ‘Nazi’. It took me years to admit to myself that even the binary opposition Jew/Nazi was in itself as result of my Judeo-centric indoctrination.

This becomes the focal point of the transformation in Gilad’s young character. He writes “This was enough for me. I realized that my affair with the Israeli state and with Zionism was over.” In The Wandering Who?, Gilad divides Jews into three main categories: (1), those who follow Judaism; (2), those who regard themselves as human beings who happen to be of Jewish origin; and (3), those who put their Jewishness over and above all of their other traits. He regards the first two categories as harmless and innocent groups of people. Gilad is not so kind to the third category, however. This group is the primary focus in his book. He goes beyond the what to the how and why. Like a forensic scientist, he dissects them piece by piece historically, economically, philosophically, psychologically, and politically.

More »