Terrorizing Palestinians and Israeli Arabs

Stephen Lendman


A study conducted by SOS Children found that
a high percentage of children in [Palestine] show
highly pronounced symptoms of psychological
strain, and that around 60% of these children
required urgent psychological help.
(Source)

Two new reports provide more evidence besides volumes already available.

Explaining daily life in Occupied Palestine, the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS) said about half of Palestinian households experience Israeli and other forms of violence.

For Gazans, it's slightly higher than in the West Bank - 49.1% - 47.8%. In Qalqiliya governorate, however, (in northern West Bank) it's 60%.

Youths are especially affected, notably males. From July 2010 - July 2011, about 10% were targeted, including about 3% of children aged 12 - 17.

About 6% in this age category experienced psychological trauma during the same time frame.

Violence happens often at checkpoints. Over 13% of males are affected. Women face sexual harassment. However, street violence is most common, affecting about 20% of youths aged 18 - 29. About 29% of males are exposed.

In addition, physical and/or psychological violence can occur anywhere, including at home. Over 14% of youths are affected. In educational institutions, 9% suffer psychological trauma. Over 20% experience physical violence.

Other physical and/or psychological violence is committed by one family member against another. Women are mostly affected. So are children witnessing it. Elderly females more than males experience it through "health negligence."

PCBS defines violence as acts causing or threatening "physical, sexual or psychological abuse," including actions generating fear.

It can also be economic, political, verbal, and in other forms by anyone, including occupiers, settlers, household members or others.

Deprivation of basic rights are also included "such as shelter, food, drink, clothing, education, freedom of movement and loss of self-determination and self security."

Life in Palestine is harsh and intolerable. Imagine being repressively occupied under a system of institutionalized racist persecution.


Russian v. US Elections

Stephen Lendman

America's democracy is pure fantasy. Rigged elections lack credibility. Either way, duopoly power runs things. People have no say whatever.

Russia's December 4 elections filled 450 State Duma seats, Russia's Federal Assembly lower house.

Claims of electoral fraud followed. All elections have irregularities. At issue is whether results are comprised. Election monitor Golos accusations were spurious. America's National Endowment for Democracy (NED) funds it. It supports regime change in non-US client states. It backs opposition groups, conducts propaganda campaigns, and does openly what CIA operatives do covertly to destabilize sitting governments.

Its mission is subverting, not promoting democracy. It operates with State Department funding and direction. It serves US imperial interests destructively against targeted countries.

So do USAID, the International Republican Institute (IRI), and the National Democratic Institute (NDI). They meddle internally against sitting governments. One way is by funding Golos.

It calls itself a Russian NGO established in 2000 to defend democratic rights and civil liberties. Claiming it's Russia's only "independent" electoral watchdog is duplicitous. It represents imperial Washington's interests against those of Russia's people and government. Moreover, by taking foreign funding, it violated Russian law.


America’s Debt to Bradley Manning

Robert Parry

The cables and videos allegedly leaked by Pvt. Bradley Manning offer the American people gritty “ground truth” about what the U.S. government has done in their names, such as the slaughter in Iraq, but the information also sheds light on a possible future war with Iran, reports Robert Parry.


Manning prosecution lays basis for terror charge against WikiLeaks founder Assange

Naomi Spencer

In pre-trial proceedings against Army Private Bradley Manning at Fort Meade, Maryland this week, the Army’s lead prosecutor presented evidence purportedly linking Manning directly to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and alleged that by publishing documents leaked by Manning, WikiLeaks and Assange had aided terrorists, including Al Qaeda.

The proceedings concluded Thursday after less than a week of hearings. Manning is charged with leaking hundreds of thousands of classified documents, including evidence of US war crimes, to WikiLeaks.

The closing arguments of Captain Ashden Fein make clear that the United States government is seeking to use its prosecution of Manning, a 24-year-old soldier and former intelligence analyst, to lay the basis for extraditing Assange to the US and either prosecuting him as a terrorist or locking him away indefinitely in a military prison without any recourse to the courts or due process.

The attempt of the prosecution in the Manning case to make an amalgam between Manning, Assange and Al Qaeda is particularly ominous given the passage last week of the National Defense Authorization Act, which includes authorization for the US president to order the indefinite military detention without trial of anyone, citizen or non-citizen, whom the president names as a terrorist.

Assange is currently in Britain, appealing to Britain’s Supreme Court an extradition order to Sweden on the basis of trumped-up sex charges. If extradited to Sweden, Assange will likely face extradition to the US.


What’s really going on in Iraq?

Abdulla Hawez Abdulla

The recent tension in Baghdad between Nouri Al-Maliki’s Shiite Iraqi prime minister with both Iraqi president’s deputy Tariq Al-Hashimi, and his deputy for service affairs, Salih Mutlaq, which both are Sunnis is highly connected with the regional tension between Iran and Turkey on Syria, also the timing is connected. That’s despite Al-Maliki’s desire for power, and his autocratic approaches to wipe out his rivals one another.

As its obvious there are strong ties between Iran and Iraq’s ruling, Shiites, especially with the Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki which remained in power by a secret deal between Iran and United States. However, Al-Maliki is highly connected with the leaders in Iran regarding whatever he could do on Syrian case, as we have seen a delegation from Iraqi government arrived in Damascus to show Iraq’s support to Al-Asad’s Syria, even though Iraqi government announced they are trying to mediate that’s in one hand. On the other hand, Iraqi Sunnis have a strong tie with Turkey; Tariq Al-Hashimi, in particular, has a special relation with the leaders of Turkey’s AKP government, only this year he met with Turkish authorities many times. The recent tension between Iran and Turkey on Syria and NATO missile defense has certainly affected on the Iraqi leaders, especially Iran wants to move the center of attention from Syria to other friendly countries like Iraq.

The declaration of the Sunni cities of Salahadeen, Anbar, and later Dyala to become regions by the Saudi-Turkish support is another reason, as Shiites accuse such a step as a sectarian one that tries to divide the country. That led Muqtada Al-Sadr’s Mahdi militia to intervene in Dyala that around 20% of the province’s population is Shiites. Moreover, according to some sources, another possible scenario is linking part of the Sunni region with Jordan, specifically both cities of Anbar and Dyala. Whereas, Jordan’s King Abdullah arrived in London recently to discuss this possible scenario with the British officials, including British prime minister. According to the source, Britain is the spearhead of the scenario of linking part of the Iraq’s Sunni region with Jordan. While Mosul province which is dominated by the Iraqi parliament speaker’s Sunni leader, Asel Nujifi will become a federal region under Turkish supervision. Furthermore, Arabs will go out from Kirkuk, only Kurds and Turkmen will remain there, and both Kurdistan and Turkey will share the oil revenues with giving Mosul province some of the revenue, as well.


American exceptionalism — A survey

William Blum

The leaders of imperial powers have traditionally told themselves and their citizens that their country was exceptional and that their subjugation of a particular foreign land should be seen as a "civilizing mission", a "liberation", "God's will", and of course bringing "freedom and democracy" to the benighted and downtrodden. It is difficult to kill large numbers of people without a claim to virtue. I wonder if this sense of exceptionalism has been embedded anywhere more deeply than in the United States, where it is drilled into every cell and ganglion of American consciousness from kindergarten on. If we measure the degree of indoctrination (I'll resist the temptation to use the word "brainwashing") of a population as the gap between what the people believe their government has done in the world and what the actual (very sordid) facts are, the American people are clearly the most indoctrinated people on the planet. The role of the American media is of course indispensable to this process — Try naming a single American daily newspaper or TV network that was unequivocally against the US attacks on Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, Panama, Grenada, and Vietnam. Or even against any two of them. How about one? Which of the mainstream media expressed real skepticism of The War on Terror in its early years?

Overloaded with a sense of America's moral superiority, each year the State Department judges the world, issuing reports evaluating the behavior of all other nations, often accompanied by sanctions of one kind or another. There are different reports rating how each lesser nation has performed in the previous year in the areas of religious freedom, human rights, the war on drugs, trafficking in persons, and counterterrorism, as well as maintaining a list of international "terrorist" groups. The criteria used in these reports are mainly political, wherever applicable; Cuba, for example, is always listed as a supporter of terrorism whereas anti-Castro exile groups in Florida, which have committed literally hundreds of terrorist acts, are not listed as terrorist groups.


If Jesus Was a Rebel, Who Was He Rebelling Against?

Richard Edmondson


"Christ Driving the Merchants from the Temple"

“…and that no matter how many police state laws our AIPAC-vetted congress may enact, no matter how many of us they may round up and put into FEMA camps or some other detention facility, no matter how many wars they may start, no matter how many innocents they slaughter—no matter all of this, as long as there remain on this earth those who exalt this rebel, who follow his teachings, and who celebrate his birth each year, their control over humanity will never—never—be complete or total. And this they know.”

You could perhaps consider this a primer for Christian Zionists, although others, possibly even atheists, might find it interesting as well. Here is the question: If Jesus was a rebel, then who was he rebelling against? Jackson Browne, although his song is quite nice, doesn’t really give us an answer. Let us then examine the matter ourselves and see if we can reach a conclusion.

Was Jesus in revolt against Rome? This is something Jews often try and argue. Jesus, they tell us, was nothing more than a Jewish nationalist, who, like many other Jewish nationalists of the day, sought an end to the Roman occupation of Palestine (or the “land of Israel” as they now like to claim it). Some of these Jewish intellects have even gone so far as to hypothesize that Jesus practiced Pharisaic Judaism himself! But of course the preponderance of evidence does not support these claims.

And Jesus, answering, said unto them, “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.

The above quotation, from Mark 12:17, is one of the few statements from Jesus regarding Roman rule over Palestine that can be found in the canonized gospels, and it would suggest he had no strong grievances or objections to it. Of course, that’s only the canonized material. What of other early texts? What, say, of the Gnostic sources? Or the vast body of apocryphal writings? Is there anything in any of this material to support the notion that Jesus’ mission in life was setting up a Jewish state? The answer is little to none.


The Greatest Gift For All

Paul Craig Roberts

Christmas is a time of traditions. If you have found time in the rush before Christmas to decorate a tree, you are sharing in a relatively new tradition. Although the Christmas tree has ancient roots, at the beginning of the 20th century only 1 in 5 American families put up a tree. It was 1920 before the Christmas tree became the hallmark of the season. Calvin Coolidge was the first President to light a national Christmas tree on the White House lawn.

Gifts are another shared custom. This tradition comes from the wise men or three kings who brought gifts to baby Jesus. When I was a kid, gifts were more modest than they are now, but even then people were complaining about the commercialization of Christmas. We have grown accustomed to the commercialization. Christmas sales are the backbone of many businesses. Gift giving causes us to remember others and to take time from our harried lives to give them thought.

The decorations and gifts of Christmas are one of our connections to a Christian culture that has held Western civilization together for 2,000 years.

In our culture the individual counts. This permits an individual person to put his or her foot down, to take a stand on principle, to become a reformer and to take on injustice.

This empowerment of the individual is unique to Western civilization. It has made the individual a citizen equal in rights to all other citizens, protected from tyrannical government by the rule of law and free speech. These achievements are the products of centuries of struggle, but they all flow from the teaching that God so values the individual's soul that he sent his son to die so we might live. By so elevating the individual, Christianity gave him a voice.

Formerly only those with power had a voice. But in Western civilization people with integrity have a voice. So do people with a sense of justice, of honor, of duty, of fair play. Reformers can reform, investors can invest, and entrepreneurs can create commercial enterprises, new products and new occupations.

The result was a land of opportunity. The United States attracted immigrants who shared our values and reflected them in their own lives. Our culture was absorbed by a diverse people who became one.


Grand Delusion: Resisting the Siren Song of Specialness

Chris Floyd

Manifest Destiny: This painting (circa 1872) by John Gast called American Progress, is an allegorical representation of the modernization of the new west. Here Columbia, a personification of the United States, leads civilization westward with American settlers, stringing telegraph wire as she sweeps west; she holds a school book. The different stages of economic activity of the pioneers are highlighted and, especially, the changing forms of transportation. Native Americans and animals flee in terror. (Wikipedia)

The U.S. presidential campaign is now in full swing. (In truth, it never actually ends; the savage grasping and grappling among damaged souls seeking their brief season of domination and death-dealing goes on daily without respite.) In the months to come, we will be subjected to an ever-growing, ever-roaring flood of rhetoric about the unique, unquestionable, divinely ordained goodness of America. (And how the "other side" would destroy or demean this precious moral specialness.)

This rhetoric will come both from the radical, society-shaking extremists laughingly called "conservatives" in our fun-house political system, and from the reactionary defenders of elite wealth and murderous militarism laughingly known as "progressives." (And, of course, from the well-fed, milky mannered, comfortably numb burghers known as "centrists.")

All Americans are marianated in this mindset from birth, and it is reinforced in them, every day, by the most powerful and pervasive media machinery in history, by enormous societal pressure, and by the dead heavy weight of tradition. Even the most hardened cynics might feel the stirrings of atavastic response to these siren songs woven into the fabric of the American psyche.

In such cases, I recommend a reading of the following two articles. They will help remind you of the reality being cloaked by the psyche-stirring, button-pushing bullshit of the grasping wretches seeking power.


Meet the Republican Chickenhawks

Philip Giraldi

Nearly all the Republican presidential candidates are showing their muscles, supporting the war on terror and a robust military while also vowing to do whatever it takes to disarm Iran. They know that it is essential to play the jingoistic “American exceptionalism” card, and they understand that being president also means becoming commander in chief of America’s armed forces with the responsibility for committing U.S. soldiers to die for their country. But how are they qualified to do that? Of the sorry lot on display, only Ron Paul and Rick Perry have ever served in the military in any capacity, Paul as a U.S. Air Force medical officer and Perry as an Air Force pilot. The dramatically bellicose Newt Gingrich, who wants to coordinate a joint military operation with Israel to attack Iran, did not serve during the Vietnam War. He received deferments because he was a student and because he was, at the time, married to his first of three wives. Other candidates, including Rick Santorum and Jon Huntsman, are too young to have been subject to the draft, but neither volunteered for military service. Santorum entered a law firm, and Huntsman went to Indonesia as a Mormon missionary before stepping into the business run by his father.

But perhaps the most spectacular chickenhawk of all is Mitt Romney, frequently cited as the likely Republican candidate, who alone among GOP aspirants to the highest office in the land has advocated increasing the size of the Defense Department. Romney apparently is not aware of the foreign policy misadventures of the past 10 years and is eager to double down on a formula that has not worked very well. He believes that the correct response to the many threats in the world is to throw more money at the Pentagon. He also apparently has not noted the sinking economy, which might suggest to anyone but the politically ambitious that retrenchment would be preferable to more interventionism. But as an experienced self-described “businessman” he is not afraid of running up a little more debt.

Romney has several times declared that Iran will never acquire a nuclear weapon if he is president, suggesting that the other candidates are pusillanimous on the issue and implying that he alone will attack the mullahs “preventively” if such a development appears to be imminent. The willingness to start a war with a country that can hardly threaten the United States is the cornerstone of his foreign policy, which he describes as dealing with the world from a position of strength. If that sounds a bit like the Bush Doctrine, it should.

Romney’s personal history suggests, however, that his hawkishness might well be a recent affectation, carefully crafted to suit the presidential persona that he would like to present to the voting public. In particular, he has never been inclined to place either himself or anyone close to him in harm’s way to advance the wars that his country has been fighting, wars that he defends both in principle and in detail.


War Without End, Amen: The Reality of America's Aggression Against Iraq

Chris Floyd

Photo: Girl with amputated legs - victim of the US war on Iraq. Civilians make up 98 percent of the millions of dead and injured since the invasion. (The WE!)

In March 2003, the United States of America launched an entirely unprovoked act of military aggression against a nation which had not attacked it and posed no threat to it. This act led directly to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people. It drove millions more from their homes, and plunged the entire conquered nation into suffering, fear, hatred and deprivation.

This is the reality of what actually happened in Iraq: aggression, slaughter, atrocity, ruin. It is the only reality; there is no other. And it was done deliberately, knowingly, willingly. Indeed, the bipartisan American power structure spent more than $1 trillion to make it happen. It is a record of unspeakable savagery, an abomination, an outpouring of the most profound and filthy moral evil.

Line up the bodies of the children, the thousands of children -- the infants, the toddlers, the schoolkids -- whose bodies were torn to pieces, burned alive or riddled with bullets during the American invasion and occupation of Iraq. Line them up in the desert sand, walk past them, mile after mile, all those twisted corpses, those scraps of torn flesh and seeping viscera, those blank faces, those staring eyes fixed forever on nothingness.

This is the reality of what happened in Iraq; there is no other reality.

These children -- these thousands of children -- are dead, and will always be dead, as a direct result of the unprovoked act of military aggression launched and sustained by the American power structure. Killing these children, creating and maintaining the conditions that led to the slaughter of these children, was precisely what the armed forces of the United States were doing in Iraq. Without the invasion, without the occupation, without the 1.5 million members of the American volunteer army who surrendered their moral agency to "just follow orders" and carry out their leaders' agenda of aggression, those children would not have died -- would not have been torn, eviscerated, shot, burned and destroyed.

This is the reality of what happened in Iraq; you cannot make it otherwise. It has already happened; it always will have happened. You cannot undo it.


Bombings heighten sectarian tensions in Iraq

Joseph Kishore & James Cogan

Earlier this month, President Obama declared that with the departure of American combat troops the US was “leaving behind a sovereign, stable and self-reliant Iraq, with a representative government that was elected by its people”. — Nothing could be further from the truth.

Bombings ripped through sections of Baghdad on Thursday, killing at least 63 people and injuring nearly 200. The attacks, which mainly targeted Shiite Muslim areas, took place in the midst of intensifying sectarian conflicts, as different factions of the Iraqi elite battle over political and economic power in the wake of the departure of US combat troops.

One of the deadliest attacks was from a suicide car bomb near the central government’s Integrity Commission building and the Christian Nuns Hospital, which killed 25 people and injured more than 60. The combined death toll from the bombings made Thursday the deadliest day in Iraq in more than a year.

The bombings followed moves by the Iraqi central government led by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who heads the dominant Shiite Muslim bloc in the parliament, to politically destroy several prominent Sunni politicians.

On Monday, Iraq’s Judicial Council issued an arrest warrant for Vice President Tariq Al-Hashemi, charging him with coordinating bombing attacks and running an assassination squad to target Shiite officials. Maliki is also seeking a parliamentary no-confidence vote to oust Deputy Prime Minister Saleh al-Multaq, the leader of a Sunni-based party.

Fuelling sectarian tensions, Maliki immediately suggested that his Sunni rivals were culpable for the blasts. He stated: “The timing of the crimes and the choice of their areas confirms again to all those in doubt the political nature of the objectives that these people want to achieve.” No one has claimed responsibility for the attacks, though media speculation has focused on the Sunni-dominated groups associated with Al Qaeda.


Grim Holiday Season Tidings

Stephen Lendman

New global data show grim results. China's real estate was especially bleak. It reported 70% of its 70 largest cities experiencing home price deflation, up from 47% in October. Rarely ever does this bode well for economic prospects or banking.

As a result, copper is down 0.7% and 25% in 2011. The base metals complex also dropped 1%.

In Japan, department store sales were down 1.9% year over year, the fifth consequence negative reading. In October, Spain's service sector declined 2.7% year over year.

In America, recent data reflect downtrends in restaurants, clothing, jewelry, department, grocery, and drug store sales, household appliances, clothing, chemical products, electrical and communication equipment, machinery, paper and wood products, semiconductors, and computers and accessories.

Wage growth is especially weak, showing declines in four of the past six months, and 1% annually year over year.

Global economies also show weakness. Notably, it's showing up in negative paper boxes and containers four consecutive months and in free fall year over year.

On December 17, Hoisington Investment Management's Van Hoisington told Barrons he is bullish on bonds because of America's weak 2012 economic prospects.

He believes in Irving Fisher's 1930 Theory of Interest calling long rates a function of the real rate, plus expected inflation. In the last 140 years, the real rate's averaged about 2%, with wide variations up or down.

With deflationary pressures persisting, he sees bond price appreciation or bottoming around the real rate if (core) inflation stops at zero. "We aren't there yet, but we're headed in that direction. That's why we've had a bull market and why it will continue until such time as inflationary expectations start to rise."

The fundamental global problem, he believes, is "disequilibrium" because of over-indebtedness. In America's $15 trillion economy, "we have $52 trillion in debt, which is 350% of GDP."


The Bush/Obama War Against Truth

Melvin A. Goodman

The harsh treatment of alleged leaker Bradley Manning is part of a broader campaign to silence government whistleblowers, a pattern that began with Vice President Dick Cheney’s outing of CIA officer Valerie Plame but has expanded under President Obama, says ex-CIA analyst Melvin A. Goodman.

When Pvt. Bradley Manning appeared in a military courtroom at Fort Meade, Maryland, last week, it was his first public appearance in more than 19 months. Manning has been held without trial for the past year and a half; only now is a hearing being conducted to determine if there is sufficient evidence to refer his case to a general court martial.

During this period, Manning, who is charged with transferring classified information to an unauthorized source, has been treated as an “enemy combatant,” subjected to solitary confinement in a maximum-security cell as well as harassment day and night.

Manning’s inhuman and degrading treatment clearly is designed as a warning to other individuals who might be considering the unauthorized release of classified information. There were periods in his pre-trial confinement when he was forced to stand naked, which conjures up images of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib — not U.S. justice.

At the current hearings, the government has even been allowed to exclude journalists from portions of the proceedings. The norms of the legal system, including military justice, have been observed in the breach, particularly the right to a speedy trial.

The documents leaked by Manning were an embarrassment to the United States, but not a threat to U.S. security. The overwhelming majority of the documents were governmental boilerplate.

The campaign to intimidate potential whistleblowers or dissidents within the government is consistent with the national security state that the Bush and Obama administrations have created over the past decade.


Pvt. Manning and Imperative of Truth

Ray McGovern


Pvt. Manning on the left. - In today's America, pro-
secutors & hanging judges use any means to convict.

When I was asked to speak at Saturday’s rally at Fort Meade in support of Pvt. Bradley Manning, I wondered how I might provide some context around what Manning is alleged to have done.

(In my talk, so as not to think I had to insert the word “alleged” into every sentence, I asked for unanimous consent to using the indicative rather than the subjunctive mood.)

What jumped into my mind was the letter Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote from the Birmingham City jail in April 1963, from which I remembered this:

“Like a boil that can never be cured as long as it is covered up, but must be opened with all its pus-flowing ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must likewise be exposed, with all of the tension its exposing creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.”

I suggested that this is precisely what Bradley Manning did when he saw the need to uncover war crimes like the indiscriminate murder of civilians and torture he witnessed in Baghdad and read about in cables.

What he had become witness to was the inevitable result of aggressive war, which the post-World War II Nuremberg Tribunal called the “supreme international crime,” differing from other war crimes only inasmuch as it contains within itself the “accumulated evil of the whole.” Was he to obey orders to keep his mouth shut? Or was he to follow his conscience and lance this ugly boil of accumulated evil?


<< Previous :: Next >>

Health topic page on womens health Womens health our team of physicians Womens health breast cancer lumps heart disease Womens health information covers breast Cancer heart pregnancy womens cosmetic concerns Sexual health and mature women related conditions Facts on womens health female anatomy Womens general health and wellness The female reproductive system female hormones Diseases more common in women The mature woman post menopause Womens health dedicated to the best healthcare
buy viagra online