Stephen Lendman

Nothing less than liberation is tolerable after 63 years of persecution and denial.

Since Hamas captured Gilad Shalit on June 25, 2006, there have been on and off talks to negotiate his release. Hamas took him captive, responding to repeated Israeli attacks, including a widely reported beach shelling. It killed eight Palestinians, injuring 32 others, including 13 children. Israel denied responsibility, falsely blaming a Hamas mine despite forensic evidence proving otherwise.

In retaliation, Hamas struck an Israeli military post near Kerem Shalom crossing, southeast of Rafah. Two Israeli soldiers were killed. Several others were injured, and Shalit was captured. He's been held ever since because Israel refused to negotiate responsibly to free him. It preferred using his captivity to vilify Hamas until now.

On October 12, Haaretz headlined, "Israel cabinet approves Gilad Shalit prisoner swap,” saying, "Voting early Wednesday morning, Netanyahu's cabinet agreed to free over 1,000 Palestinian political prisoners in two waves in return for Hamas releasing him after over five years in captivity."

According to newly released figures, Palestinian Central Bureau Statistics said over 750,000 Palestinians were arrested and detained since June 1967, including those affected several times. They include about 12,000 women and "tens of thousands of children." Throughout Occupied Palestine and Israel, prisons, detention camps and interrogation centers were established to incarcerate, torture, abuse and humiliate them.

Currently, Israel holds about 6,000 detainees, including 35 women and 285 children. Others as young as 10 (and occasionally younger) remain until adulthood, losing out entirely on their formative childhood years.

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Tony Cartalucci

Unelected corporate-funded policy makers constitute the greatest threat to US national security.

October 16, 2011 - While US politicians grapple over the credibility of using the US DEA's bomb plot to assassinate a Saudi ambassador as a pretext to escalate tensions with Iran, America's unelected, corporate-funded policy makers have already announced their long, foregone conclusion. The DEA's entrapment case is decidedly to be used as a pretext for war with Iran.

The Foreign Policy Institute (FPI), just one such unelected, corporate-funded think tank, has released two statements calling on President Obama to use force against Iran. FPI director William Kristol states:

"It’s long since been time for the United States to speak to this regime in the language it understands—force. And now we have an engraved invitation to do so. The plot to kill the Saudi ambassador was a lemon. Statesmanship involves turning lemons into lemonade. So we can stop talking. Instead, we can follow the rat lines in Iraq and Afghanistan back to their sources, and destroy them. We can strike at the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), and weaken them. And we can hit the regime’s nuclear weapons program, and set it back."

Likewise, FPI's executive director Jamie Fly claims, in tandem with Kristol's unqualified, corporate-funded opinion, "It is time to take military action against the Iranian government elements that support terrorism and its nuclear program. More diplomacy is not an adequate response."

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Gilad Atzmon

Liam Fox resigned over links to close friend and 'adviser'
Adam Werritty. (Photo: PA)

[T]he tide has changed. The duplicity of our elected politicians and their ties with the Jewish lobby is now being closely scrutinized. The time has come for all of us in this country to put as much distance as we can between ourselves and Jerusalem.

A rather stinky Israeli espionage mole has just been exposed in Britain. Yesterday, Liam Fox the Defence Secretary resigned following revelations about his dubious relationship with Adam Werritty. Some 17 years younger than Fox, Werrity has been involved with Fox both in business and in the conservative Atlanticist think-tank ‘The Atlantic Bridge’. While Fox was Defence Minister, Werrity visited Fox at the Ministry on many occasions, accompanied Fox on numerous official trips, attended some of his meetings with foreign dignitaries and used official-looking business cards which announced him as an 'adviser' to Fox – and all despite having no official government post whatsoever. However, it has now also been revealed that Fox and Werritty were heavily financed by the Israeli lobby and ‘beyond’.

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Adnan Al-Daini

In my student days our thermodynamics lecturer gave us a little talk regarding examinations.  He started with the usual advice about reading the question carefully, not to panic if we could not initially answer the question, and to move on to another... etc.  Finally, he said- do not do what one student did who wrote to the examiner: “I am sorry I cannot answer this question but I can answer the following one”.  He then proceeded to write his own question, and to answer it perfectly.  The above story sums up the actions of politicians thus far as they respond to the economic crisis engulfing capitalism worldwide.  The politicians are unwilling, unable, or both, to tackle the causes of the problem which are the lack of demand as a result of unemployment, cuts in real wages and soaring energy prices, with profits rising by 700% since June 2011. Instead, they continue to pump more and more billions into the banks, with the gap between the poor and the super-rich that lies at the core of the problem forever widening.

Jeffrey Sachs, the well-known American economist, interviewed on BBC radio 4 Today programme (October15, 2011) about his book “The Price of Civilisation”, made some very telling remarks:

“International capital at the top is mobile, and is running circles around our government: this is the essence of globalisation”.

Of course, this clearly implies that democracy itself is being subverted and corrupted.  The ordinary citizen is no longer able to effect change through the ballot box.  Is it any wonder that people are taking to the streets in the U.S and Europe, in actions that mirror the Arab spring to demand that they should be heard?

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