Stephen Lendman

Last July, B'Tselem published a report titled, "No Minor Matter: Violation of the Rights of Palestinian Minors by Israel on Suspicion of Stone-Throwing." It discussed their abusive treatment.

From 2005 through 2010, "at least 835 Palestinian minors were arrested" and faced military court trials for alleged stone-throwing. Thirty-four were aged 12 - 13, 255 aged 14 - 15, and 546 aged 16 -17.

All except one were convicted. Due process and judicial fairness were denied. In violation of international law, Israel treats children like adults. Some aged 10 or younger are arrested, intimidated, tortured, or otherwise abused.

In fact, on January 12, Al Haq reported "a new line crossed" after Israeli security forces harassed, blindfolded, arrested, and detained a seriously ill six-year old boy for seven hours. Obviously, his parents were frantic.

Soldiers usually make middle-of-the-night arrests. Children are taken away alone. Parents can't accompany them. Abusive interrogations follow. Enough food and water, bathroom privileges and proper sleep are denied. Nearly always, convictions and detentions follow.

Defense for Children International/Palestine Section (DCI/Palestine) covers their ill-treatment and torture during arrest, transfer, interrogation, detention, and for some, solitary confinement isolation. Case studies explain the traumatizing effects. More on them below.

DCI/Palestine says about 700 Palestinian children are prosecuted annually in Israeli military tribunals affording them no rights. Conviction rates are 99%. Those charged are guilty by accusation.

Children like 12-year old Bashar M. was arrested pre-dawn. His hands were painfully bound behind his back. He was blindfolded, placed on a military vehicle floor, verbally abused, slapped on the face, kept blindfolded at Al Mascobiyya interrogation center, strip-searched on arrival, struck again, denied bail or legal representation, traumatized, and told either confess (to stone throwing) or be imprisoned for a very long time.

Other children report similar or worse treatment including pre-trial isolation, torture, and other forms of abuse.

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Paul Craig Roberts

Since my January 11 column The Next War on Washington’s Agenda and the news alert posted on January 14, more confirmation that Washington is moving the world toward a dangerous war has appeared. The Obama regime is using its Ministry of Propaganda, a.k.a., the American media, to spread the story that President Obama, Pentagon chief Panetta, and other high US officials are delivering strong warnings to Israel not to attack Iran.

For someone as familiar with Washington as I am, I recognize these reports for what they are. They are Br’er Rabbit telling Br’er Fox “please don’t throw me in the briar patch.”

If you don’t know the Uncle Remus stories, you have missed a lot. Br’er Rabbit was born and raised in the briar patch.

What these “leaked” stories of Washington’s warnings and protests to Israel are all about is to avoid Washington’s responsibility for the war Washington has prepared. If the war gets out of hand, and if Russia and China intervene or nukes start flying, Washington wants the blame to rest on Israel, and Israel seems willing to accept the blame. Nikolai Patrushev, who heads Russia’s Security Council, has apparently been deceived by Washington’s manipulation of the media. According to the Interfax news agency, Patrushev condemned Israel for pushing the US towards war with Iran.

You get the picture. The helpless Americans. They are being bullied by Israel into acquiescing to a dangerous war. Otherwise, no more campaign contributions.

The facts are different. If Washington did not want war with Iran it would not have provided the necessary weapons to Israel. It would not have deployed thousands of US troops to Israel, with a view toward the American soldiers being killed in an Iranian response to Israel’s attack, thus “forcing” the US to enter the war. Washington would not have built a missile defense system for Israel and would not be conducting joint exercises with the Israeli military to make sure it works.

If Washington did not want Israel to start the war, Washington would inform the Israeli government in no uncertain words that an Israeli strike on Iran means that the US will NOT veto the UN’s denunciation of Israel and the sanctions that would be placed on Israel as a war criminal state. Washington would tell Israel that it is good-bye to the billions of dollars that the bilked American taxpayers, foreclosed from their homes by fraudulent mortgages and from jobs by offshoring, hand over by compulsion to Israel to support Israel’’s crimes against humanity.

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Ellen Brown

An electronic database called MERS has created defects in the chain of title to over half the homes in America. Counties have been cheated out of millions of dollars in recording fees, and their title records are in hopeless disarray. Meanwhile, foreclosed and abandoned homes are blighting neighborhoods. Straightening out the records and restoring the homes to occupancy is clearly in the public interest, and the burden is on local government to do it. But how? New legal developments are presenting some innovative alternatives.

John O’Brien is Register of Deeds for Southern Essex County, Massachusetts. He calls his land registry a “crime scene.” He is mad as hell and he isn’t going to take it anymore. A formal forensic audit of the properties for which he is responsible found that:

● Only 16% of the mortgage assignments were valid.
● 27% of the invalid assignments were fraudulent, 35% were “robo-signed,” and 10% violated the Massachusetts Mortgage Fraud Statute.
● The identity of financial institutions that are current owners of the mortgages could be determined for only 287 out of 473 (60%).
● There were 683 missing assignments for the 287 traced mortgages, representing approximately $180,000 in lost recording fees per 1,000 mortgages whose current ownership could be traced.

At the root of the problem is that title has been recorded in the name of a private entity called Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems (MERS). MERS is a mere place holder for the true owners, a faceless, changing pool of investors owning indeterminate portions of sliced and diced, securitized properties. Their identities have been so well hidden that their claims to title are now in doubt. According to the auditor:

What this means is that . . . the institutions, including many pension funds, that purchased these mortgages don’t actually own them . . . .

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Marjorie Cohn

Travelers to Cuba and music lovers are familiar with the song “Guantanamera” — literally, the girl from Guantánamo. With lyrics by José Martí, the father of Cuban independence, “Guantanamera” is probably the most widely known Cuban song.

But Guantánamo is even more famous now for its U.S. military prison. Where “Guantanamera” is a powerful expression of the beauty of Cuba, “Gitmo” has become a powerful symbol of human rights violations — so much so that Amnesty International described it as “the gulag of our times.”

That description can be traced to January 2002, when the base received its first 20 prisoners in shackles. General Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, warned they were “very dangerous people who would gnaw hydraulic lines in the back of a C-17 to bring it down.”

We now know that a large portion of the 750 plus men and boys held there posed no threat to the United States. In fact, only five percent were captured by the United States; most were picked up by the Northern Alliance, Pakistani intelligence officers, or tribal warlords, and many were sold for cash bounties.

The Guantánamo story starts in 1903, when the U.S. Army occupied Cuba after its war of independence against Spain. The Platt Amendment, which granted the United States the right to intervene in Cuba, was included in the Cuban Constitution as a prerequisite for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from the rest of Cuba.

That provision provided the basis for the 1903 Agreement on Coaling and Naval Stations, which gave the United States the right to use Guantánamo Bay “exclusively as coaling or naval stations, and for no other purpose.”

In 1934, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed a new treaty with Cuba that allows the United States to remain in Guantánamo Bay until the U.S. abandons it or until both Cuba and the United States agree to modify their arrangement. According to that treaty, “the stipulations of [the 1903] agreement with regard to the naval station of Guantánamo shall continue in effect.”

That means Guantánamo Bay can be used only for coaling or naval stations. Additionally, article III of the 1934 treaty provides that the Republic of Cuba leases Guantánamo Bay to the United States “for coaling and naval stations.” Nowhere in either treaty did Cuba give the U.S. the right to utilize Guantánamo Bay as a prison camp.

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Justin Raimondo

Israel's "rebel group" in Iran, Jundallah, threatened to
execute 16 Iranian security workers, June 19, 2008.

Will Israel succeed in dragging us into war with Iran?

If not, it won’t be for lack of trying. Their influential lobby in the US has been agitating for a US strike since the last year of the Bush presidency, when they almost succeeded in pulling it off: fortunately for us, Bush demurred, perhaps because he didn’t want his legacy to be two unwinnable and disastrous wars instead of just one.

Israel was to be the spearhead, with the US providing back up support, as the Guardian reported at the time:

“Israel gave serious thought this spring to launching a military strike on Iran’s nuclear sites but was told by President George W Bush that he would not support it and did not expect to revise that view for the rest of his presidency, senior European diplomatic sources have told the Guardian.”

Deterred from firing the first shots of World War III, the Israelis didn’t give up. Instead, they turned to other less direct means to achieve their goal. As Mark Perry reports on foreignpolicy.com:

“Buried deep in the archives of America’s intelligence services are a series of memos, written during the last years of President George W. Bush’s administration, that describe how Israeli Mossad officers recruited operatives belonging to the terrorist group Jundallah by passing themselves off as American agents. According to two U.S. intelligence officials, the Israelis, flush with American dollars and toting U.S. passports, posed as CIA officers in recruiting Jundallah operatives – what is commonly referred to as a ‘false flag’ operation.”

You bet those memos are buried deep – lest Americans discover that their faithful “allies” are trying to implicate them in war crimes.

Jundallah is a terrorist organization, Sunni-oriented and linked to al-Qaeda, that has murdered Iranian civilians in bombings and other attacks within Iran: their ostensible goal is to “liberate” Iranian (and Pakistani) Baluchistan. According to the memos, the Israelis recruited these terrorists right out in the open in London, where Mossad operatives – posing as CIA officers – met with Jundallah officials. “It’s amazing what the Israelis thought they could get away with,” Perry quotes one intelligence officer as saying. “They apparently didn’t give a damn what we thought.”

Of course not – and why should they? After all, we’ve given them a pass every time: when Jonathan Pollard stole what US officials described as the intelligence community’s “crown jewels” and passed them off to the Russians; when they stole our trade and military secrets and passed them off to China: when they were tracking the 9/11 conspirators and didn’t tell us what Mohammed Atta and his crew were up to. They took our “foreign aid” with one hand, and stabbed us in the back with the other.

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Stephen Lendman

The Constitution's Eighth Amendment prohibits "cruel and unusual punishment." The legal dictionary defines it as:

"any cruel and degrading punishment not known to the Common Law, or any fine, penalty, confinement, or treatment that is so disproportionate to the offense as to shock the moral sense of the community."

Sentencing minors to life without parole qualifies. The ACLU says American children as young as 13 "are sentenced to spend the rest of their lives in prison without any opportunity for release." In fact, some as young as 11 are affected.

Around 2,570 are sentenced to juvenile life without parole (JLWOP). America treats them like adults regardless of age or circumstances.

In 2005, the Supreme Court ruled in Roper v. Simmons that sentencing juveniles to death was cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment.

In 2010, the ACLU and its Michigan affiliate sued (in Hill v. Snyder) on behalf of nine Michigan inmates sentenced to life without parole while minors. They argued that doing so constitutes cruel and unusual punishment. It also violates international law prohibiting JLWOP. On July 15, 2011, the judge allowed the case to proceed.

On May 17, 2010, the Supreme Court ruled in Graham v. Florida that juvenile offenders can't be sentenced to life without parole for non-homicide offenses committed before age 18. Although the Court held states needn't guarantee eventual release, they must provide a realistic chance.

Calling the practice "cruel and unusual" punishment, the decision stated:

"Life in prison without the possibility of parole give no chance for fulfillment outside prison walls, no chance for reconciliation with society, no hope."

"A young person who knows that he or she has no chance to leave prison before life's end has little incentive to become a responsible individual."

It also said America "adheres to a sentencing practice rejected the world over."

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Stephen Lendman

Palestinian child being tortured in Israeli custody.

A November 30 Physicians for Human Rights/Israel (PHR-I) report explains "chilling evidence" of atrocities committed against sub-Saharan African refugees, migrants, and asylum seekers.

Titled, "Hundreds of Refugees Held Hostage in Sinai Torture Camps Need Rescuing," it discusses their horrific ordeal in captivity, including torture, other physical abuse, male and female rapes, and killings.

Human traffickers mainly hold Eritreans for ransom. Relatives are pressured to pay. Tactics include phoning them to hear loved ones cry out in pain. Survivors report starvation, punching, slapping, kicking, whipping, burial in sand, electric shocks, hanging by hands or legs, branding with hot irons, as well as rape or other forms of sexual abuse. Despite appeals for help, detention, extortion and torture continue. Hundreds remain captive.

A November 22 Amnesty International (AI) report discussed abuses committed against refugees, asylum seekers and migrants, including:

• Egyptian security forces shooting unarmed individuals trying to reach Israel; deaths and injuries resulted, some serious;
• others face arrest and prosecution in military courts, as well as imprisonment for trying to emigrate;
• forcibly returning individuals to countries of origin where they risk "egregious human rights violations;" and
• others abducted, held captive, tortured, raped, or killed by human traffickers, "while authorities have done little to protect them."

Egypt is party to the UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, its 1967 Protocol, and the 1969 Convention Governing the Specific Aspects of Refugee Problems in Africa. They require signatories protect refugees and prevent repatriation to countries of origin or third ones where serious human rights abuses may occur.

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Stephen Lendman

Thug deploys chemical agent on University of California,
Davis (UC Davis) students without any provocation other
than sitting peacefully on the ground, their arms linked.

America has a sordid repressive history.

Among others, First Amendment rights are violated. It guarantees freedom of religion, expression, to petition government for redress of grievances, and right to peacefully assemble.

The 1798 Alien and Sedition Acts restricted First Amendment freedoms.

So did 1919 anti-communist Palmer raids, the 1934 Special Committee on Un-American Activities, its House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) successor, secret FBI COINTELPRO crackdowns, the 1996 Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, the 2001 USA Patriot Act, and other post-9/11 measures.

These and other measures expanded government surveillance, eroded habeas, formalized military tribunals, permitted torture-extracted confessions, and instituted violence for national security.

FBI "terrorist profiles" can investigate anyone for any reason. So can local police working cooperatively or alone. Street protests can be criminalized. America's right to dissent is endangered.

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Paul Craig Roberts

Never in human history has a people been so easily and willingly controlled by a hostile government as Americans, who are the least free people on earth.

America has one last chance, and it is a very slim one. Americans can elect Ron Paul President, or they can descend into tyranny.

Why is Ron Paul America’s last chance?

Because he is the only candidate who is not owned lock, stock, and barrel by the military-security complex, Wall Street, and the Israel Lobby.

All of the others, including President Obama, are owned by exactly the same interest groups. There are no differences between them. Every candidate except Ron Paul stands for war and a police state, and all have demonstrated their complete and total subservience to Israel. The fact that there is no difference between them is made perfectly clear by the absence of substantive issues in the campaigns of the Republican candidates.

Only Ron Paul deals with real issues, so he is excluded from “debates” in which the other Republican candidates throw mud at one another: “Gingrich voted $60 million to a UN program supporting abortion in China.” “Romney loves to fire people.”

The mindlessness repels.

More importantly, only Ron Paul respects the US Constitution and its protection of civil liberty. Only Ron Paul understands that if the Constitution cannot be resurrected from its public murder by Congress and the executive branch, then Americans are lost to tyranny.

There isn’t much time in which to revive the Constitution. One more presidential term with no habeas corpus and no due process for US citizens and with torture and assassination of US citizens by their own government, and it will be too late. Tyranny will have been firmly institutionalized, and too many Americans from the lowly to the high and mighty will have been implicated in the crimes of the state. Extensive guilt and complicity will make it impossible to restore the accountability of government to law.

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Robert Parry

The murder of a fifth Iranian scientist on the streets of Tehran had all the earmarks of an Israeli-sponsored assassination. The killing also worsened tensions at a moment when the momentum toward war with Iran seems unstoppable, reports Robert Parry.

For many Americans the progression toward war with Iran has the feel of cattle being herded from the stockyard into the slaughterhouse, pressed steadily forward with no turning back, until some guy shoots a bolt into your head.

Any suggestion of give-and-take negotiations with Iran is mocked, while alarmist propaganda, a ratcheting up of sanctions, and provocative actions – like Wednesday’s assassination of yet another Iranian scientist – push Americans closer to what seems like an inevitable bloodletting.

Even the New York Times now acknowledges that Israel, with some help from the United States, appears to be conducting a covert war of sabotage and assassination inside Iran. “The campaign, which experts believe is being carried out mainly by Israel, apparently claimed its latest victim on Wednesday when a bomb killed a 32-year-old nuclear scientist in Tehran’s morning rush hour,” Times reporter Scott Shane wrote in Thursday’s editions.

Though U.S. officials emphatically denied any role in the murder, Israeli officials did little to discourage rumors of an Israeli hand in the bombing. Some even expressed approval. Brig. Gen. Yoav Mordechai said he didn’t know who killed the scientist but added: “I am definitely not shedding a tear.”

The latest victim, Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, was the fifth scientist associated with Iran’s nuclear program to be killed in the past four years, with a sixth scientist narrowly escaping death in 2010, Fereydoon Abbasi, who is now head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization.

As might be expected, Iran has denounced the murders as acts of terrorism. They have been accompanied by cyber-attacks on Iranian centrifuges and an explosion at a missile facility late last year killing a senior general and 16 others.

While this campaign has slowed Iran’s nuclear progress, it also appears to have hardened its resolve to continue work on a nuclear capability, which Iran says is for peaceful purposes only. Iranian authorities also have responded to tightening economic sanctions from Europe and the United States with threats of their own, such as warnings about closing the oil routes through the Strait of Hormuz and thus damaging the West’s economies.

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James Cogan

As in previous cases of military abuse, it seems the media will publicly vilify the rank-and-file troops involved in the desecration, but abstain from any commentary—let alone criticism—of the political and military establishment that created the debased climate in which this abuse took place.

A video published yesterday shows four US marines in Afghanistan urinating on the heads of three Afghan dead, joking among themselves as they desecrate the corpses. It will join the litany of images that have provided a glimpse of the inhumanity and brutality with which American soldiers are led to treat the victims of US militarism—in Afghanistan, Iraq and beyond.

A caption identifies the marines as members of “Scout Sniper Team 4” of the Third Battalion, Second Marine Regiment, which is based at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina.

The 3/2 Marines were last in Afghanistan between March and September 2011, as part of the Obama administration’s “surge” of 33,000 additional US troops, and were deployed in the southern province of Helmand. At least three members of the unit were killed in Helmand in June and July last year. The weather conditions in the video suggest it was also shot during the summer months.

The video—which runs for barely 50 seconds—appears to have been consciously staged, rather than being the recording of a spontaneous act. The corpses, of men aged somewhere between 20 and 40, had been placed in a line. The marines faced the camera in a semi-circle so their desecration was obvious.

There are no AK-47s or other weapons in view that would indicate the dead Afghans were armed combatants. Instead, an overturned wheelbarrow suggests otherwise. The bare feet of one of the deceased are also visible. He had been wearing the sandals typical of a farmer, not the sneakers or boots preferred by insurgents operating in the rugged terrain of southern Afghanistan.

Coming just days after an Afghan government investigation publicly accused the US military of torturing prisoners at the detention centre at Bagram Air Base, the public revelation of more abuses by American forces has provoked fury in the Obama administration. It underscores the criminality of the entire decade-long US occupation, again exposing the official lies according to which US forces are bringing human rights and democracy to Afghanistan.

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Stephen Lendman

Washington and Israel plan regime change in Iran and Syria. Israel wants regional supremacy. Washington wants global hegemony and control of the world's strategic resources. America tolerates no independent states. Making them client ones is prioritized.

Insurgent infiltrators ravaged Syria for months. Libya's model was replicated short of NATO intervention perhaps to follow.

Washington, Israel, and rogue allies use many destabilization tactics. They include fake accusations, political and economic sanctions, isolation, covert and direct confrontation, cyberwar, targeted assassinations, and other provocations short of war perhaps planned.

Accusing Iran of developing nuclear weapons is a red herring. In December 2007, America's National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) said:

"We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program; (perhaps it never existed); we also assess with moderate-to-high confidence that Tehran at a minimum is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons..."

The NIE also said:

"We assess with moderate confidence Tehran had not restarted its nuclear program as of mid-2007, but we do not know whether it currently intends to develop (them)."

"Tehran's decision to halt its nuclear weapons program suggests it is less determined to develop (them) than we have been judging since 2005."

In February 2010, America's Annual Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence said:

"We do not know....if Iran will eventually decide to build nuclear weapons." No evidence of an ongoing program was presented.

In March 2011, the US Intelligence Community Worldwide Threat Assessment for the Senate Armed Services Committee said precisely the same thing. Nothing new suggested an Iranian nuclear weapons program.

In other words, years of sophisticated satellite, covert, and other intelligence showed nothing.

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Stephen Lendman

A breadline somewhere in the Middle East (M. Becherer)

Rosy scenario optimists ignore clear-eyed analysis. Economist Paul Craig Roberts sees hard times getting harder.

His "Dismal Economic Outlook For The New Year" article highlights what media scoundrels and mainstream analysts miss or suppress.

Decades of imperial wars, exporting America's manufacturing base and other high-paying jobs, as well as financial deregulation and corporate/government collusion "severely damaged the US economy and the economic prospects of 90%" of households. They've never had it so bad with worse coming.

It's clear from wealth distribution, unemployment, growing poverty, and millions in need losing their struggle to get by. Homelessness, hunger, lost homes, closed strip malls, empty office buildings and other facilities, "shopping mall vacancies," and "huge population losses in America's" once prosperous manufacturing cities show a nation in decline.

Lower real median income, rising consumer debt, skyrocketing federal levels, banker bailouts, permanent wars, and other wrongheaded policies assure decline and perhaps collapse.

America's economic "recovery" is "all talk and no reality." Manipulated data exaggerate growth, understate unemployment and inflation, and hide pernicious offshoring, insolvent banks, and similar federal debt problems. They also conceal troubled states and cities in crisis.

At the same time, Washington and Wall Street's controlled Fed "ruled out permitting the banks to fail. That leaves inflation," high unemployment, and troubled times coming.

Expect it though guessing when's hard to know. However, reality eventually trumps hope based on false expectations. The "comfortable world" Americans once knew "is falling apart at the seams."

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Adnan Al-Daini

Religious flags of Shiite Imams waves while relative of
Qssim Abbas, 48, who was killed in a bomb attack take
his body for burial in the Shiite holy city of Najaf, 160
kilometers (100 miles) south of Baghdad, Iraq, Friday,
Jan. 6, 2012. (Alaa al-Marjani/Associated Press/SFGate)

In the daily carnage of today’s Iraq, with bombs and shootings targeting the innocent, one is forgiven for feeling despair at the sheer wickedness and inhumanity of these deeds.  In the midst of the misery and carnage, however, an act of heroism and sacrifice that shows the true face of Iraq has passed completely unreported by western media. 

This concerns the suicide attack on Thursday 5 January that targeted Shia pilgrims in Nassiriya, southern Iraq, causing death or injury to over 100 people.  The Arabic newspaper Alhayat (8 January) in a piece entitled “Heroes of Iraqi National Unity – Two Soldiers Attempted to Stop a Suicide Bomber from Exploding Himself”, its journalist, Abd-Alwahid  Jumma, reports the incredible bravery of two members of the Iraqi army, Lieutenant Nuzhan Saleh Al-Jebouri and Sergeant Ali Ahmed Sabih, who, having witnessed someone moving amongst the pilgrims and  acting suspiciously, ran towards the suspect, throwing themselves on him as he exploded his bomb, killing them instantly and causing the carnage. 

The figures for the dead and injured could well have been higher if Nuzhan and Ali had not taken the initial force of the explosion.  The two army personnel were Sunni Muslims from different parts of Iraq. They made the ultimate sacrifice to protect the Shia pilgrims. They acted instinctively to save fellow human beings; Shia or Sunni did not occur to them. 

Western media have covered the story of the carnage and other stories of sectarian violence and intolerance in detail, so why ignore the heroism of the soldiers?  These brave men are the true representatives of the Iraqi people.  Their martyrdom symbolizes the unity of the people in the face of of terrorists targeting the innocent, in the name of a warped and insane interpretation of the noble religion of Islam.

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Eric Walberg

"When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master — that’s all.” ~ Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass (1871)

The lexicon of Israel and its Western lobbyists constantly needs parsing to know just what is meant. Most glaringly is the term “settlers”, which suggests peaceful pioneers wishing to integrate with the locals. In Israel, the word “settlers” is a loaded term, for they are “aggressive squatters, half a million of them in over 100 illegal colonies — ugly blots on an otherwise lovely landscape ... who terrorise local villagers, vandalise their crops, pollute their land and harass their children,” as described by Stuart Littlewood. The Fourth Geneva Convention forbids that an occupying power transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.

Most recently we saw casual reference to native Christian and Muslim Palestinians as an “invented people”. US Republican presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich revived this insult, repeating Gold Meir’s quip in 1969 to The Sunday Times. At the time, Israel was basking in its devastating victory in the 1967 war, occupying all of Palestine and Sinai. The eternal Sinai Bedouin are fortunate that Meir didn’t have enough time — or gall — to claim that they too are a mere figment of some anti-Jewish schemer’s imagination. Their cousins in the Negev desert are now being expelled to make way for 10 Jewish settlements “to attract a new population to the Negev”.

Meir was extrapolating on her more famous phrase, also recorded in the same Sunday Times interview, that Palestine was “a land without a people for a people without a land”. Not only is this a cruel lie, one intended to justify theft of a people’s land, but it is a case of plagiarism, as it was Lord Shaftsbury, an early enthusiast of using a Jewish state in the Middle East as an imperial beachhead, who first used the phrase in 1839.

Meir surely knew this, just as she knew that it is not the Palestinians, a people who can trace their heritage back to the time of the Prophet Mohammed or further, but the Israeli people who are the “invented” ones. Israeli citizenship is barely 60 years old, and Israelis are a disparate lot, made up most of East European and Russian immigrants and Arab Jews, most of whom do not share a common language or even religious practice. The Russian immigrants, many of whom are not even Jewish, are defiantly secular.

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