Stephen Lendman

Decades of liberating struggle will end. Palestine will again be free. One day. When, who knows.

He admitted it. He's not finished. He has lots more killing and destruction to do. He "will not hesitate to do what is necessary to defend our people," he said. In other words, he'll ignore memorandum of understanding ceasefire terms, maintain Gaza's siege, manufacture pretexts to eliminate Israeli enemies, and kill Palestinian civilians he calls threats.

On November 25, Mossad-connected DEBKAfile (DF) headlined "Middle East in high suspense for Gaza operation sequels."

America's beefing up its regional presence. Washington also approved Patriot missiles for Turkey's Syrian border. US military crews will man them.

Russian Institute for Oriental Studies expert, Vladimir Kudelev, said deploying them means "no-fly zone" protection. Imposing it circumvents Security Council authority. Doing so is an act of war.

Washington-led NATO incrementally inches closer to full-scale involvement. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov fears militarizing the Turkish/Syrian border may spin things out of control. Libya 2.0 looms.

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Patrick Martin

According to a report published Sunday on the front page of the New York Times, the Obama administration is pushing ahead with plans to establish a more systematic and regular program of using unmanned drones to kill people selected by the White House for death.

The newspaper estimated that US drone strikes have killed more than 2,500 people—a death toll approximating the number killed in the attacks of September 11, 2001.

The article was written by Scott Shane, the same reporter who was the conduit for administration propaganda last May, glorifying drone missiles as a great advance in the “war on terror” and detailing Obama’s personal role in the approval of targets.

Like the earlier report, Sunday’s article describes the assassination program in entirely uncritical terms, raising questions only over the political motivation of the decision to “develop explicit rules for the targeted killing of terrorists by unmanned drones.” This effort was supposedly spurred by concern that Republican Mitt Romney might win the presidential election and inherit an open-ended drone missile program that he would then be able to define as he pleased.

The Times article claims that Obama and his top aides “are still debating whether remote-control killing should be a measure of last resort against imminent threats to the United States, or a more flexible tool, available to help allied governments attack their enemies or to prevent militants from controlling territory.”

The language is remarkable, since what is being discussed is nothing less than acts of political murder, and the two sides in the official “debate” are wrangling, like a Mafia council of war, over who should be targeted for “hits” and how to do it. The language used to describe various “options” in relation to the drone killings marks a further debasement in American political discourse.

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William T. Hathaway

From the book
RADICAL PEACE: People Refusing War
by William T. Hathaway

Merna al-Marjan is a young Iraqi who is currently in Germany studying European history. We talked in her dormitory room, a spartan but functional cubicle in a building that embodies a hopeful change in European history: it was constructed in the nineteenth century as an army barracks but now houses university students. That's progress.

On Merna's small table sat a pot of peppermint tea and a plate of baklava. She's short and plump with smooth skin the color of clover honey and deep anthracite eyes; she was wearing a long skirt of light cotton, a long-sleeved blouse, and a green paisley headscarf.

Hathaway: "Headscarves have become a controversial item of clothing here in Germany."

Al-Marjan: "Yes, you can't teach in the schools if you wear one. It's OK for a teacher to wear a Christian crucifix but not a Muslim headscarf. I didn't wear a hijab in Iraq, but I've started doing it here to show solidarity. It's ridiculous to ban an article of clothing, a simple piece of cloth. What sort of freedom is that?

"The West has such a distorted view of Arab women. Well, of men too, but since I'm a woman, I notice that more.

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