Khalid Amayreh in occupied Palestine

Some of the pseudo intellectuals in the Arab world are lamenting the demise of "progressive regimes" in Libya, Tunisia and Egypt as well as the looming demise of some other regimes in the region.

These hypocrites and hangers-on, who had benefited immensely, financially and otherwise, from their close association with some of the defunct regimes, are now bewailing the allegedly negative impact of Arab revolutions on the overall Palestinian cause.

These orphans of tyranny and despotism falsely think that Arab tyrants, the ones who have been consigned to the dustbin of history and the others awaiting their turn, preserved the Palestinian cause from possible demise and prevented Israel from achieving its expansionistic goals.

The truth of the matter, however, is that all these regimes exploited the legitimate Palestinian cause in order to repress and torment their own people and stay in power as long as possible, all under the false rubric of challenging Zionism and Western imperialism.

Thus, thousands, probably tens of thousands of innocent Arabs and Muslims were brutally killed and tortured in the name of fighting Israel and Zionism. Hundreds of thousands were imprisoned and persecuted for demanding freedom, dignity and human rights.

The great Arab poet, al-Mutanabbi, may have had sycophants like these in mind when he said: "The tears of the eye betray their man if they happen to harrowing after the traitors."

Well, since when would the merciless murder of our fellow Arab citizens lead to the liberation of Palestine.

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Stephen Lendman

In today's America, prosecutors and hanging judges use any means to convict. Innocence and judicial fairness don't matter, just imprisoning another Muslim for political advantage with considerable major media help.

Post-9/11, Mehanna is one of hundreds of Muslim Americans victimized, vilified, and persecuted for their faith, ethnicity, prominence, activism, and at times charity.

On October 21, 2009, an FBI press release said:

"A Sudbury, Mass. man was charged today in federal court with conspiracy to provide support to terrorists."

Maliciously and spuriously, Mehanna was accused of

"conspir[ing] with Ahmad Abousamra and others to provide material support and resources for use in carrying out a conspiracy to kill, kidnap, main or injure persons or damage property in a foreign country and extraterritorial homicide of a US national."

Despite no evidence whatever proving it,

"Mehanna and co-conspirators [were accused of having] discussed their desire to participate in violent jihad against American interests and that they would talk about fighting jihad and their desire to die on the battlefield."

"[They also] attempted to radicalize others and inspire each other by, among other things, watching and distributing jihadi videos."

[In addition], Mehanna and two of his associates traveled to the Middle East in February 2004, seeking military-type training at a terrorist training camp [to] prepare them for armed jihad....including [against] US and allied forces in Iraq....[One] of Mehanna's coconspirators made two similar trips to Pakistan in 2002."

"....Mehanna and the co-conspirators had multiple conversations about obtaining automatic weapons [from a Mr. Maldonado, now serving a 10-year sentence for training with Al Queda in Somalia] and randomly shooting people in a shopping mall, and that the conversations went so far as to discuss the logistics of a mall attack, including coordination, weapons needed and the possibility of attacking emergency responders."

Yet no attack occurred. None, in fact, was planned or contemplated. According to FBI scoundrels, however, it was because no automatic weapons could be obtained even though legal semi-automatic ones are freely sold and illegal automatic ones easily gotten.

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Stephen Lendman

Right: Jacob Schiff, the Rothschild lieutenant who funded
communist revolution and the Japanese invasion of China.

The late Georgetown University historian Carroll Quigley said in his book titled, "Tragedy and Hope":

"(T)he powers of financial capitalism had another far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences."

By controlling democratic and despotic governments as well as others in between, they've moved closer to absolute global control of money, credit and debt to dominate economies, politics, commerce, and imperial adventurism. As a result, they've benefitted handsomely at the expense of nations and popular interests.

Josiah Stamp, former Director of the Bank of England said:

"Banking was conceived in iniquity and was born in sin. The bankers own the earth. Take it away from them, but leave them the power to create money, and with the flick of the pen they will create enough deposits to buy it back again." "However, take it away from them, and all the great fortunes like mine will disappear and they ought to disappear, for this would be a happier and better world to live in. But, if you wish to remain the slaves of bankers and pay the cost of your own slavery, let them continue to create money."

Aesop said "We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office." Bankers with money power are the most pernicious of all.

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Gilad Atzmon

We are indeed in a win-win situation. And it’s all because we know that truth is on our side.

It was a few years ago that I grasped that Zionism was just one manifestation of Jewish political power in the West. But at the time, hardly anyone was either brave or stupid enough to tackle the topic. In spite of Israel defining itself as the ‘Jewish State’, despite the fact that the warplanes that dropped their bombs on Palestinian civilians were covered in Jewish symbols, still no one was willing to openly ask exactly what Jewishness was all about or what it stood for – and those few who did dare to raise the question were subject to total abuse until they took cover or just faded away.

It’s also been clear for quite a while that many Palestinian solidarity activists, intellectuals and academics have been begging for recognition from mainstream Western institutions. For obvious reasons, many of us have been fearful of open confrontation with exponents of Zionist power, whether mainstream Zionist media organisations or even those AZZ (Anti Zionist Zionists) who have managed to lodge themselves so comfortably within our ranks.

But recently things have changed and the popularity of my book ‘The Wandering Who?’ (TWW) is just one example of that clear shift in consciousness. Somehow, we have lost our fear, somehow we have found the courage to say what we know to be the truth.

I’ve been engaged with Jewish identity politics issues for over a decade now but it was back in 2003 that I realised that total and uncompromised opposition to any form Jewish of identity politics was the only way forward. I also realised that I might be able to expose the framework of Jewish political infrastructure, not only within Israel but also within Zionist organisations, Western politics, Western media and the so-called Jewish ‘anti Zionist’ network. And it didn’t take long to realize I was in a true win-win situation. If they managed to destroy me, it would merely prove my point about their overwhelming influence but if they failed to neutralize me, that could only mean that Jewish power was disintegrating - which was exactly what I set out to achieve.

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Stephen Lendman

Corporate greed and profits over people priorities launched nationwide OWS protests in hundreds of US cities for change. Mindless of growing public rage, political Washington keeps cutting vital social benefits needing increases during hard times. With real unemployment approaching 23%, earlier cuts affected:

• Pell Grants help for college tuitions;
• federal wages;
• the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) to help impoverished families have heat in winter;
• the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP);
• community healthcare centers;
• nonprofit health insurance cooperatives;
• HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and other disease prevention programs;
• WIC (Women, Infants, and Children) grants to states for supplemental foods, healthcare, and nutrition education for low-income families;
• Head Start, providing comprehensive education, health, nutrition, and parent involvement services to low-income families with children;
• the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (targeted earlier with more coming), providing food stamps for poor households;
• community development block grants for housing, overall reducing HUD's budget by $1.1 billion;
• Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) first-responder funding;
• energy efficiency and renewable energy programs;
• Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) clean/safe water and other projects;
• National Institutes of Health (NIH) medical research;
• the National Park Service;
• vital infrastructure and transportation needs; and
• other non-defense discretionary spending.

New cuts will sustain Wall Street, militarism, favoritism, waste, fraud, and other rewards for Washington's usual special interests. They'll benefit at the expense of ordinary people losing out. Increasingly on their own sink or swim, Obama calls it "shared sacrifice." Ordinary people sacrifice to let business and super-rich elites share.

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John Chan

Residents gather on a street during a demonstration in Wukan
village in China's Guangdong province on Thursday.

Heavy-handed police-state responses to protracted protests by thousands of farmers at Wukan village in China’s Guangdong province have increasingly made the 20,000 villagers a national symbol of resistance against the Stalinist bureaucracy and the powerful corporate interests behind it.

Hundreds of paramilitary police armed with automatic weapons and water cannons sealed off the village throughout last week, cutting off food supplies for days. Despite this, the residents’ struggle against the sale of collective farmland to real estate developers has attracted the sympathy of working people throughout the country. Neighbouring villages and town people are providing food and supplies to Wukan.

Last Friday, the Wall Street Journal reporter in Wukan explained: “Interviews with people living near Wukan, meanwhile, suggested widespread sympathy with the protesters there and anger over what the locals said were many similar cases of local officials misappropriating farmland, or failing to pay sufficient compensation for land seized.”

Significantly, the unrest is drawing support from a section of the working class. Last Wednesday, a small demonstration in the provincial capital, Guangzhou, in solidarity with the Wukan villagers was quickly suppressed by the police. The crackdown revealed the Beijing regime’s fear that the protests could trigger broader anti-government demonstrations, not only in rural areas, but in the province’s manufacturing centres.

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Stephen Lendman

Under the UN Charter, other international law, and principles of sovereign equality, all states are equal. None are more or less legitimate than others.

Under the 1933 Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States, Israel qualifies as one. It has:

• a fixed recognizable territory;
• a permanent population;
• a functioning government; and
• the capacity to have relations with other countries.

At issue isn't its legal nation state legitimacy. Its lawless ideology is illegitimate.

It is corrosive, destructive, racist, extremist, undemocratic and hateful. It claims Jewish supremacy, specialness and uniqueness as God's "chosen people." It espouses violence, not peaceful coexistence. It chooses confrontation over diplomacy. It employs strength through militarism, intimidation, and naked aggression. It is contemptuous of moral values and ethical principles.

According to Joel Kovel, it's "a machine for the manufacture of human rights abuses." Alan Hart calls it "the real enemy of the Jews," and no wonder. It's a monster threatening its host and all humanity, especially in partnership with its Washington paymaster/partner.

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Hans-Hermann Hoppe

Hans-Hermann Hoppe explains how the ruling and banking elite steal wealth from the workers and producers of society, and why the OWS protesters should be protesting the privately owned Federal Reserve instead.

Imagine you are in command of the state, defined as an institution that possesses a territorial monopoly of ultimate decision making in every case of conflict, including conflicts involving the state and its agents itself, and, by implication, the right to tax, i.e., to unilaterally determine the price that your subjects must pay you to perform the task of ultimate decision making.

To act under these constraints — or rather, lack of constraints — is what constitutes politics and political action, and it should be clear from the outset that politics, then, by its very nature, always means mischief. Not from your point of view, of course, but mischief from the point of view of those subject to your rule as ultimate judge. Predictably, you will use your position to enrich yourself at other people's expense.

More specifically, we can predict in particular what your attitude and policy vis-à-vis money and banking will be.

Assume that you rule over a territory that has developed beyond the stage of a primitive barter economy and where a common medium of exchange, i.e., a money, is in use. First off, it is easy to see why you would be particularly interested in money and monetary affairs. As state ruler, you can in principle confiscate whatever you want and provide yourself with an unearned income. But rather than confiscating various producer or consumer goods, you will naturally prefer to confiscate money. Because money, as the most easily and widely saleable and acceptable good of all, allows you the greatest freedom to spend your income as you like, on the greatest variety of goods. First and foremost, then, the taxes you impose on society will be money taxes, whether on property or income. You will want to maximize your money-tax revenues.

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Stephen Lendman

On December 17, Gerald Celente told On the Edge host Max Keiser:

"The entire financial system is collapsing. Look what's going on in China. All of the empty buildings. Look at the home sales and real estate market. They're in steep decline now."

"The only way they kept this global ponzi scheme afloat following the 2008 panic is for the central banks around the world to keep juicing money into the system to keep it going, and now it's collapsing."

"When all else fails, they take you to war....They're going to do it again."

A year ago, Celente's predictions were spot on. He said "America's trend is nowhere bottomed, and the worst is yet to come." Now it's happening in real time as debt piles on more of it, politicians are gridlocked, and conditions ahead look grim.

He said "(t)eetering economies will collapse, currency wars will ensure, trade barriers will be erected, (and) economic unions will splinter."

Today, Eurozone countries are in sovereign debt crisis. Currency wars are happening, and America and China trade barbs.

Out of work, money and indebted, "legions of on-the-edge desperate (people) will do whatever they must to keep a roof over their heads and put food on the table."

Today, "(t)hieves are stealing copper piping and cables, cooking oil and temple donation boxes. Criminal recycling is flourishing. In 2011, a record number of cyber crimes is reported....more than 23,000 per month."

During hard times and growing poverty, "authorities will intensify their efforts" to get funds for their fiscal obligations.

Today, America has a "two-tier" justice system. Corporate crooks get slap-on-the-wrist fines. In contrast, ordinary people are severely punished for "small time crimes." Justice means "just us!"

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Stephen Lendman

Millions of Americans now endure protracted Depression conditions at a time half the population is either poor or low income. Long-term unemployment is unprecedented, and federal aid is being cut, not increased.

Two new reports highlight enormous depravation levels and human suffering, getting little or no major media attention. Many affected families used to be middle class. They're now low-income or impoverished by unemployment or spotty low-pay part-time work.

Most important is that much worse conditions are coming during America's greatest ever Depression to last years and devastate many more households than already.

In December, the US Conference on Mayors published its "Hunger and Homelessness Survey: A Status Report on Hunger and Homelessness in America's Cities."

It covered 29 cities. The period between September 1, 2010 and August 31, 2011 was examined. Key findings reflected dire nationwide conditions.

Only four cities said emergency help wasn't requested in the past year. In two cities, conditions were unchanged. Two others said they improved. Overall, aid requests increased by 15.5%.

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Khalid Amayreh in occupied Palestine

An Arab-Israeli boy looks at the remains of the mosque burned over-
night in an arson attack by Jewish extremists in northern village of
Tuba Zangaria. (Photo/Caption: AFP/The Australian)

As Jewish terrorist attacks on mosques in occupied Palestine are assuming a phenomenal frequency.

Indeed, with the Israeli government and security establishment doing next to nothing to put an end to this wanton and unprovoked terror, a huge fire is being started in the region.

In religious wars, all sides are usually variably culpable and blamable . However, in the occupied Palestinian territories, Jewish fanatics bear nearly 100% of the blame.

Their attacks against mosques are not provoked by similar Palestinian attacks against Jewish religious places. In fact, Jewish terror groups readily admit that arson attacks against mosques are meant to embarrass the Israeli occupation army.

The attacks are perpetrated under the slogan "Price Tag" every time the Israeli army moves to dismantle a Jewish settlement outpost.

So why is it that the Palestinians and their places of worship are attacked, not the Israeli army?

Well, it takes a thoroughly sick mind to rationalize, even glamorize such attacks, but the Israeli settler camp never faces a shortage of virulence, mental depravity and mental sickness.

We are talking after all about the worst of the worst that racist, Talmudic Judaism could breed, people who view the rest of mankind as subhuman.

The practical implications of such a venomous ideology are enormous and absolutely nefarious. If non-Jews are subhuman, then their lives must be worthless, have no sanctity and expendable.

Think not I am making an exaggeration as it is difficult to exaggerate the evilness of these racist thugs who spend a lifetime demonizing and dehumanizing humanity as they celebrate their Chosen-people or Master-race status.

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Ellen Brown

The campaign to "move your money" has gotten a groundswell of support. Having greater impact would be to "move our money" -- move our local government revenues out of Wall Street banks into our own publicly-owned banks.

Occupy Wall Street has been both criticized and applauded for not endorsing any official platform. But there are unofficial platforms, including one titled the 99% Declaration which calls for a "National General Assembly" to convene on July 4, 2012 in Philadelphia. The 99% Declaration seeks everything from reining in the corporate state to ending the Fed to eliminating censorship of the Internet. But none of these demands seems to go to the heart of what prompted Occupiers to camp out on Wall Street in the first place – a corrupt banking system that serves the 1% at the expense of the 99%. To redress that, we need a banking system that serves the 99%.

Occupy San Francisco has now endorsed a plan aimed at doing just that. In a December 1 Wall Street Journal article titled “Occupy Shocker: A Realistic, Actionable Idea,” David Weidner writes:

[P]rotesters in the Bay Area, especially Occupy San Francisco, have something their East Coast neighbors don't: a realistic plan aimed at the heart of banks. The idea could be expanded nationwide to send a message to a compromised Washington and the financial industry.It's called a municipal bank. Simply put, it would transfer the City of San Francisco's bank accounts—about $2 billion now spread between such banks as Bank of America Corp., UnionBanCal Corp. and Wells Fargo & Co.—into a public bank. That bank would use small local banks to lend to the community.

The public bank concept is not new. It has been proposed before in San Francisco and has a successful 90-year track record in North Dakota. Weidner notes that the state-owned Bank of North Dakota earned taxpayers more than $61 million last year and reported a profit of $57 million in 2008, when Bank of America had a $1.2 billion net loss. The San Francisco bank proposal is sponsored by city supervisor John Avalos, who has been thinking about a municipal bank for several years.

Weidner calls the proposal “the boldest institutional stroke yet against banks targeted by the Occupy movement.”

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Kenny's Sideshow

Nassim Nicholas Taleb's book, 'The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable,' is an interesting take on the 'outliers' of history. The short and sweet is:

A black swan is a highly improbable event with three principal characteristics: It is unpredictable; it carries a massive impact; and, after the fact, we concoct an explanation that makes it appear less random, and more predictable, than it was. The astonishing success of Google was a black swan; so was 9/11. For Nassim Nicholas Taleb, black swans underlie almost everything about our world, from the rise of religions to events in our own personal lives.

Why do we not acknowledge the phenomenon of black swans until after they occur? Part of the answer, according to Taleb, is that humans are hardwired to learn specifics when they should be focused on generalities. We concentrate on things we already know and time and time again fail to take into consideration what we don’t know. We are, therefore, unable to truly estimate opportunities, too vulnerable to the impulse to simplify, narrate, and categorize, and not open enough to rewarding those who can imagine the “impossible.”

Taleb makes a lot of good points in his work and he's worth reading but his website title, Fooled by Randomness, does not speak for an ever growing number of folks. When it comes to manufactured 'events' for political and monetary gain, nothing is random. As far as I can tell, Taleb considers 9/11 a 'black swan' but still portrays it as an Arab 'terrorist' attack. Without including elements of rouge governments and 'hidden hands' as being the perpetrators of 'black swan' events, he falls short in telling the whole story.

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Khalid Amayreh

Land grab: Fortified settlements for Jews on stolen Palestinian land

Despite knowing that settlements have broken the peace process, Israel is forging ahead with plans to build new Jew-only colonies on Palestinian land, writes Khalid Amayreh in occupied Jerusalem

Taking advantage of the ongoing turbulence in the Arab world, the proximity of the US presidential elections, and the international community's manifest powerlessness to check aggressive Israeli unilateralism, the Israeli government has been stepping up hostile measures against the largely unprotected Palestinian community.

The measures, which include the seizure of a large swathe of Palestinian-owned land for settlement expansion, wanton home demolition as well as unrelenting attacks and acts of vandalism against Palestinians and their property, are aimed at rendering unrealistic and impossible the goal of establishing a viable and territorially contiguous Palestinian state on the West Bank.

The latest colonialist Israeli scheme would confiscate thousands of acres of mostly privately owned Arab land south of Bethlehem. This week, the Israeli occupation army approved the establishment of a new permanent settlement south of the Biblical city. The new settlement would include a large farm as well other infrastructure. It would also cut off the southern West Bank -- the Hebron region -- from the Bethlehem and Ramallah regions, putting an end to Palestinian demographic continuity in the vicinity.

Virtually powerless Palestinian Authority (PA) officials described Israel's plans to build a new settlement as "outrageous". One PA official labelled the new expansion scheme as an "act of rape".

PA spokespersons appealed to Egypt and the European Union to condemn and actively oppose Israeli plans, rightly described as "effective decapitation of the last hopes for a dignified peace in the region".

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Stephen Lendman

Nazi Germany's historic analog shows how extreme racist persecution can become. Unless checked, genocide may annihilate a population entirely.

Virtually daily, Israeli security forces attack, kill, or injure Palestinian civilians with impunity. They also destroy their property by bombing, shelling, bulldozing and uprooting it.

At the same time, Israeli authorities wink and nod, occasionally decry, yet do nothing to deter extremist settler crimes against Palestinian civilians.

Most often, they're given license to terrorize, vandalize and commit physical violence with impunity. Rarely ever is anyone held accountable. The same holds for its own security forces, no matter how outrageous their crimes.

So imagine Defense Minister Ehud Barak's hypocrisy. In response to days of settler attacks, he shamelessly called them "Jewish terrorists."[1][2]

B'Tselem responded, saying "this is an illegitimate way to deal with the phenomenon of violence by Israeli citizens in the Occupied Territories. Instead, this phenomenon must be dealt with through the criminal justice system."

Netanyahu disagreed, stopping well short of condemning settler attacks and ordering arrests. Instead, he described them as a "small group that does not represent the public that lives in Judea and Samaria."

For years, radical settlers terrorized Palestinians with impunity. In the past two years alone, six mosques in Palestine and Israel (belonging to peace and other activist groups) were burned or otherwise vandalized.

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