Jean Shaoul

The late Ariel Sharon. Here in a quiet moment with one of his acolytes,
Madeleine Albright, who later, speaking of the half a million children
the Clinton administration had killed in Iraq, calmly said: "I think this is
a very hard choice, but the price - we think the price is worth it." (FAIR)

Former Israeli prime minister, general and unindicted war criminal Ariel Sharon was pronounced dead on Saturday, January 11 at the age 85. He had lay for eight years in a comatose state after suffering a series of strokes in January 2006.

Under investigation for corruption at the time, he had been kept alive on the insistence of his family, despite the advice of the doctors treating him, while relatives sorted out his financial affairs.

Sharon is justly reviled by millions for his policies of provocation, murder and ethnic cleansing. His entire military and political career, for which he earned the nickname “butcher of the Palestinians,” was marked by a series of atrocities carried out against both the Palestinians and Israel’s Arab neighbours. The most notorious was his collusion with the Lebanese fascist Phalange in the September 1982 massacre of over 3,000 Palestinians in the Beirut refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, following the Israeli invasion and occupation of Lebanon.

The Israeli government-appointed Kahan Commission concluded that Sharon, as minister of defence and commander of the occupying force, bore “personal responsibility” for this barbarous crime. But he was never prosecuted and remained in the Israeli cabinet.

More than any other politician, Sharon was the architect and promoter of Israel’s expansionist policy. The cost of this policy continues to be borne directly by the Palestinian masses and indirectly by the Israeli working class, in the form of social cuts and tax hikes carried out to fund a militarised and increasingly anti-democratic state.

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Stephen Lendman

Photo: Ariel Sharon, right, as Israeli defense minister, rides with troops in June 1982 en route to East Beirut. Sharon had received Cabinet approval to thrust 25 miles into Lebanon, for a strike that was supposed to last two days, to thwart Palestinian rocket attacks on Israel. Instead, he instructed the army to drive all the way to Beirut, where it laid siege to Yasser Arafat and his forces for two months. The invasion drew international condemnation for the high number of civilian casualties.

Gilad Sharon chronicled his father's life. He wrote his biography. It's titled "Sharon: The Life of a Leader." It discusses his history from soldier to general to political leader. According to Gilad, his father "was a much better prime minister" than Netanyahu. He was Sharon's finance minister. He claimed

[he] "gave and gave and gave." "Palestinians got and got and got, and my question is, what did we get? Nothing and nothing and nothing." "What the public wants to know is when will it get a prime minister who stops putting wind in the sails of terrorists and begins to demand things in return for concessions." Gilad calls Netanyahu "subversive." He's "coward(ly)," he added.

Sharon was 85 years old. He was in stroke-induced coma. He clung to vegetative life for eight years. He faded. He's gone. Eulogies were ready to be published. Israel calls them havatzelets. They're prepared in advance obits. They're written ahead of notable figures' deaths. Sharon's are now being published. His vital signs were weak. His kidneys failed. He clung to life for eight years. He's gone.

He was a rogue figure writ large for decades. He's responsible for numerous crimes of war and against humanity. He was Machievellian. He was a terrorist turned statesman. He never changed his ways. He was responsible for regional violence and instability for decades. He left unexplained his father's blood-drenched career. Evil best describes it. He committed multiple high crimes against peace. A special place in hell awaits him. Some call him Israel's most Nietzschean leader. Others consider him the devil incarnate.

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Noam Chomsky

Humans are social beings, and the kind of creature that a person becomes depends crucially on the social, cultural and institutional circumstances of his life. We are therefore led to inquire into the social arrangements that are conducive to people's rights and welfare, and to fulfilling their just aspirations—in brief, the common good.

For perspective I'd like to invoke what seem to me virtual truisms. They relate to an interesting category of ethical principles: those that are not only universal, in that they are virtually always professed, but also doubly universal, in that at the same time they are almost universally rejected in practice.

These range from very general principles, such as the truism that we should apply to ourselves the same standards we do to others (if not harsher ones), to more specific doctrines, such as a dedication to promoting democracy and human rights, which is proclaimed almost universally, even by the worst monsters—though the actual record is grim, across the spectrum.

A good place to start is with John Stuart Mill's classic On Liberty. Its epigraph formulates “The grand, leading principle, towards which every argument unfolded in these pages directly converges: the absolute and essential importance of human development in its richest diversity.”

The words are quoted from Wilhelm von Humboldt, a founder of classical liberalism. It follows that institutions that constrain such development are illegitimate, unless they can somehow justify themselves. Concern for the common good should impel us to find ways to cultivate human development in its richest diversity.

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William Blum

If you’ve never done anything you wouldn’t want the government to know about, you should re-examine your life choices.

“The idea is to build an antiterrorist global environment,” a senior American defense official said in 2003, “so that in 20 to 30 years, terrorism will be like slave-trading, completely discredited.”[1]

One must wonder: When will the dropping of bombs on innocent civilians by the United States, and invading and occupying their country become completely discredited? When will the use of depleted uranium, cluster bombs, CIA torture renditions, and round-the-world, round-the-clock surveillance become things that even men like George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Barack Obama, and John Brennan will be too embarrassed to defend?

Last month, a former National Security Agency official told the Washington Post that the Agency’s workers are polishing up their résumés and asking that they be cleared – removing any material linked to classified programs – so they can be sent out to potential employers. He noted that one employee who processes the résumés said, “I’ve never seen so many résumés that people want to have cleared in my life.”[2]

Morale is “bad overall”, said another former official. “The news – the Snowden disclosures – it questions the integrity of the NSA workforce,” he said. “It’s become very public and very personal. Literally, neighbors are asking people, ‘Why are you spying on Grandma?’ And we aren’t. People are feeling bad, beaten down.”[3]

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Kevin Barrett

Why do Americans let people with declared loyalty to a foreign country overrun top positions in the US government?

The United States of America is supposed to be a democratic republic. Under its Constitution, the Congress decides whether to go to war, and the President serves as commander-in-chief.

Today, with nearly 1,000 military bases around the world, the USA looks more like an empire than a republic. But who is the emperor? Is the USA ruled by an “imperial presidency”? Or is the real emperor of America enthroned in Tel Aviv?

A bill introduced in the US Senate by Chuck Schumer (D-NY), entitled the “Nuclear Weapon Free Iran Act of 2013,” formally turns over American war powers to the State of Israel and its Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.

According to a leading American Iran expert, Columbia University professor Gary Sick, “the bill outsources any decision about resort to military action to the government of Israel, by committing the United States in advance to support any military action by Israel.

That effectively gives Netanyahu the war powers of both the US Congress and the US president. In effect, it makes Netanyahu emperor of the USA, empowered to lead America into any war he wants at the time and place of his choosing.

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William Blum

The horrors reported each day from Syria and Iraq are enough to make one cry; in particular, the atrocities carried out by the al-Qaeda types: floggings; beheadings; playing soccer with the heads; cutting open dead bodies to remove organs just for mockery; suicide bombers, car bombs, the ground littered with human body parts; countless young children traumatized for life; the imposition of sharia law, including bans on music … What century are we living in? What millennium? What world?

People occasionally write to me that my unwavering antagonism toward American foreign policy is misplaced; that as awful as Washington’s Museum of Horrors is, al-Qaeda is worse and the world needs the United States to combat the awful jihadists.

“Let me tell you about the very rich,” F. Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote. “They are different from you and me.”

And let me tell you about American leaders. In power, they don’t think the way you and I do. They don’t feel the way you and I do. They have supported “awful jihadists” and their moral equivalents for decades.

Let’s begin in 1979 in Afghanistan, where the Moujahedeen (“holy warriors”) were in battle against a secular, progressive government supported by the Soviet Union; a “favorite tactic” of the Moujahedeen was “to torture victims [often Russians] by first cutting off their nose, ears, and genitals, then removing one slice of skin after another”, producing “a slow, very painful death”.[1]

With America’s massive and indispensable military backing in the 1980s, Afghanistan’s last secular government (bringing women into the 20th century) was overthrown, and out of the victorious Moujahedeen arose al Qaeda.

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Julie Hyland

Mark Duggan, whose death sparked the Tottenham riots,
pictured with his sister. (Photo: M. Argles / The Guardian)

The eight to two verdict by a coroner’s inquest that Mark Duggan was lawfully killed by London’s Metropolitan Police is a travesty of justice.

The jurors arrived at their findings despite unanimous agreement that the 29-year-old father of six was unarmed when he was shot twice in Tottenham, north London by an armed police officer on August 4, 2011.

Duggan’s killing was the spark for riots that began just two days later in Tottenham after a protest over the young father’s murder and which quickly spread across the country.

From the start, the powers that be had been reluctant to hold any investigation into Duggan’s shooting—not least because of their insistence that the riots were not the result of yet another instance of police brutality, but were down to “criminality”.

As in case of previous police killings, most notoriously the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes, the innocent Brazilian worker murdered by police in July 2005, misleading information as to Duggan’s shooting was initially given to the press.

The misnamed Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPPC), which has been involved in the cover-up of every police shooting, briefed the media that when three police cars blocked the taxi in which he had been travelling, Duggan leapt out of the vehicle and began firing at police. A police officer had only narrowly escaped death, it was claimed, when one of the bullets fired by Duggan lodged in his radio.

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Philip Giraldi

As usual official Washington is lining up on the side of the Israelis while pretending to be an "honest broker".

A picture is indeed sometimes worth a thousand words. A photo of Secretary of State John Kerry disembarking from his plane in Tel Aviv showed chief US negotiator Martin Indyk walking along at his side with a grin on his face as if he had just heard a new Palestinian joke in the plane on the way over. It looked like Israel’s American legal team had arrived and just couldn’t wait for the first photo op with a glowering Benjamin Netanyahu. They may even have been chuckling over what might be the funniest line ever uttered by an Israeli prime minister, Netanyahu greeting their arrival by claiming that "There’s growing doubt in Israel that the Palestinians are committed to peace. In the six months since the start of peace negotiations, the Palestinian authority continues its unabated incitement against the State of Israel."

Netanyahu, who insists that the Palestinians declare Israel to be a Jewish State as a precondition for further talks and that Israel be able to maintain a permanent military occupation of the Jordan River valley, certainly knows all about "unabated incitement." And he has plenty of friends hanging on his every pronouncement. US Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham were already in Israel when Kerry arrived, consulting with the Israeli government and coming to the conclusion that there are serious concerns about any possible peace agreement with the Palestinians, nearly all relating to "Israel’s security." More fool I to think that Graham and McCain were elected to represent the people of South Carolina and Arizona, but as some have observed politics is the art of the impossible.

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Stephen Lendman

Click on this image. Notice the smile on this soldier's face. -Says it all.

Iraq today is a grim reflection of America's ruthless imperial agenda. It includes mass slaughter, destruction, devastation, deprivation, human misery and unending violence.

On August 31, 2010, Obama displayed criminal contempt. He's done it many times. He declared an end to America's combat mission in Iraq, saying: "Through this remarkable chapter in the history of the United States and Iraq, we have met our responsibility."

Ignored was America's genocidal legacy. Iraq was ravaged and destroyed. Pre-1990 Iraq no longer exists. Charnel house conditions replaced it. So did plunder on the grandest of grand scales, millions of internal and external refugees, ongoing violence, dozens of daily deaths, a plague of preventable diseases, ecocide, and overall conditions too horrific to ignore.

Remember Fallujah! In September 2004, the UN Human Rights Council issued a report titled "Testimonies of Crimes Against Humanity in Fallujah: Towards a Fair International Criminal Trial." It discussed horrific conditions, saying:

"From the (2003) outset and at the start of the indiscriminate and merciless campaign of collective punishment and willful destruction, undertaken by the occupational troops of the United States of America," innocent civilians endured an "inhumane siege and indiscriminate killing" during April and May 2004. "(G)enocidal massacres" included "sustained and targeted bombing(s), aimed directly at the homes of defenseless civilians."

A November/December massacre followed. Thousands more Iraqis were slaughtered, wounded and maimed. Depleted and enriched uranium, cluster bombs, white phosphorous and other terror weapons were used.

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Stephen Lendman

Israel gets away with murder and much more. Crimes against humanity repeat multiple times daily. Palestinians are defenseless. Who can contest Israel's military might? It's other security forces are ruthless. So are extremist settlers.

Yesh Din Volunteers for Human Rights addresses them. "Acts of violence are being committed by Israeli civilians against Palestinians in the West Bank on a daily basis," it says. They repeat in many forms. They include violence and vandalism.

They're not isolated incidences. They reflect more than hate or anger. They're "part of a sophisticated wider strategy," says Yesh Din. They're "designed to assert territorial domination of Palestinians in the West Bank. They include settler-imposed "no go zones." Palestinians face armed militants. They come from nearby settlements and outposts. They "create effective 'no go zones.' " They're on privately owned Palestinian land. Doing so gets them to abandon it. The do it in fear for their lives.

Israeli soldiers, police and other security forces provide no protection. They support lawless settlers. They commit so-called "price tag" attacks. Settlers use the term to describe retaliations relating to Israeli government actions limiting their political goals.

Palestinians bear their brunt. From September 2004 through 2011 alone, around 3,700 incidents occurred. They're documented by time, type, location, number of injuries and/or deaths, and settlements of origin. Every West Bank governorate is affected. Key is that Israeli and collaborating Palestinian security forces do little to stop them. Ordinary Palestinians are left vulnerable on their own. They live in a virtual war zone.

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James Petras

Image: During the disturbances following Nero's deposition, Vitellius was a military commander proclaimed emperor in 69 by his troops. He gained Rome, but was challenged by Vespasian, who defeated Vitellius' forces. Vitellius was either cut to pieces by his own troops or thrown at the Roman mob, as in this painting.

♣ ♣ ♣

Introduction: In ancient Rome, especially during the late Republic, oligarchs resorted to mob violence to block, intimidate, assassinate or drive from power the dominant faction in the Senate.

While neither the ruling or opposing factions represented the interests of the plebeians, wage workers, small farmers or slaves, the use of the ‘mob’ against the elected Senate, the principle of representative government and the republican form of government laid the groundwork for the rise of authoritarian “Caesars” (military rulers) and the transformation of the Roman republic into an imperial state.

Demagogues, in the pay of aspiring emperors, aroused the passions of a motley array of disaffected slum dwellers, loafers and petty thieves (ladrones) with promises, pay-offs and positions in a New Order. Professional mob organizers cultivated their ties with the oligarchs ‘above’ and with professional demonstrators ‘below’. They voiced ‘popular grievances’ and articulated demands questioning the legitimacy of the incumbent rulers, while laying the groundwork for the rule by the few. Usually, when the pay-master oligarchs came to power on a wave of demagogue-led mob violence, they quickly suppressed the demonstrations, paid off the demagogues with patronage jobs in the new regime or resorted to a discrete assassination for ‘street leaders’ unwilling to recognize the new order’. The new rulers purged the old Senators into exile, expulsion and dispossession, rigged new elections and proclaimed themselves ‘saviors of the republic’. They proceeded to drive peasants from their land, renounce social obligations and stop food subsidies for poor urban families and funds for public works.

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John Robles

Jeremy Hammond, American Political Prisoner (@FreeAnons)

On November 15, 2013, Loretta A. Preska (born January 7, 1949 in Albany, New York) a Chief Judge of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York and a former nominee to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit handed down an extremely harsh sentence to Mr. Jeremy Hammond for being entrapped by a an FBI informant into hacking the Stratfor Global Intelligence e-mails servers, in a case she should have removed herself from due to the fact that her husband works with Stratfor and had some minor personal information revealed (reportedly his e-mail address) in the Stratfor hack.

The blowback from the ruling is just beginning to be felt but it promises to be massive with WikiLeaks being one of the first by releasing the rest of the Stratfor e-mails (over 500,000 documents)for which Mr. Hammond has been charged. Hacktivist groups Anononymous, LULZSEC, ANTISEC and others are promising operations and “payback” which will be massive according to members of Anonymous without giving details saying they had already arrived.

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Finian Cunningham

US top diplomat John Kerry must have taken us for fools. Earlier this week, speaking in Saudi Arabia, he warned that al-Qaeda in Syria and Iraq are “the most dangerous players in the region.”

The US secretary of state vowed Washington’s support for the Iraqi government in its fight to regain control of towns in its western province taken over by militants belonging to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

That’s rich. The government of Syria is battling to root out these same al-Qaeda-linked militants. But in that country, Washington offers no such support. In fact, the priority there for Washington is to sack the government of President Bashar Al-Assad.

So, how does Kerry square that contradiction? In Iraq, al-Qaeda is a threat that needs to be defeated, whereas in Syria the very same organization is apparently not a threat, but the Syrian government is.

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Stephen Lendman

Blaming victims repeats with disturbing regularity. More on this below. Extremist ideologues run Israel. They're criminals. They're thugs. They're militantly hardline. They threaten humanity. They deplore democratic rights. Rule of law principles are ignored. Institutionalized racism is official policy. So is occupation harshness. State terror reflects it. For over six decades, Palestinians endured its worst form. They still do today. Daily suffering persists. No one's sure each day who'll live, die, remain free or be arrested, imprisoned and tortured. State terror occurs daily.

In the week ending January 1, Israeli forces conducted 53 Palestinian community incursions. Defenseless civilians were terrorized. Israeli warplanes bombed Gaza multiple times. Fishermen were attacked at sea. Peaceful protesters were beaten, tear-gassed and arrested. Photojournalists were targeted. An elderly man died from tear gas inhalation. Women and children were wounded. Dozens of Palestinians were wrongfully arrested.

Settlement construction continues unabated. Another 272 units were approved. Stolen Palestinian land will be used to build them. On January 2, Israeli Interior Minister Gideon Sa'ar laid a cornerstone for a new Jordan Valley settlement. His deputy, Ze'ev Elkin, said "Israel will build, will continue to build and expand the settlement." They are illegal. It doesn't matter. Palestinian land is stolen daily to expand them. Residents are dispossessed to do so. They have no say.

On January 7, Israel kidnapped five Nablus residents. Several East Jerusalemites were abducted at the same time. A Palestinian man was crushed to death inside an Israeli checkpoint. Marauding security forces raided Beit Awwa. The entire town was closed off. It's under siege.

Racist settlers stormed Orif village. Israeli soldiers accompanied them. They protected their lawlessness. They broke into a school. They struck a water tank. They damaged a power panel. They terrorize Palestinians freely. They commit violence and vandalism. They do so repeatedly. They do it with impunity.

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Chris Hedges

This is our last gasp as a democracy. The state’s wholesale intrusion into our lives and obliteration of privacy are now facts. And the challenge to us—one of the final ones, I suspect—is to rise up in outrage and halt this seizure of our rights to liberty and free expression. If we do not do so we will see ourselves become a nation of captives.

The public debates about the government’s measures to prevent terrorism, the character assassination of Edward Snowden and his supporters, the assurances by the powerful that no one is abusing the massive collection and storage of our electronic communications miss the point. Any state that has the capacity to monitor all its citizenry, any state that has the ability to snuff out factual public debate through control of information, any state that has the tools to instantly shut down all dissent is totalitarian. Our corporate state may not use this power today. But it will use it if it feels threatened by a population made restive by its corruption, ineptitude and mounting repression. The moment a popular movement arises—and one will arise—that truly confronts our corporate masters, our venal system of total surveillance will be thrust into overdrive.

The most radical evil, as Hannah Arendt pointed out, is the political system that effectively crushes its marginalized and harassed opponents and, through fear and the obliteration of privacy, incapacitates everyone else. Our system of mass surveillance is the machine by which this radical evil will be activated. If we do not immediately dismantle the security and surveillance apparatus, there will be no investigative journalism or judicial oversight to address abuse of power. There will be no organized dissent. There will be no independent thought. Criticisms, however tepid, will be treated as acts of subversion. And the security apparatus will blanket the body politic like black mold until even the banal and ridiculous become concerns of national security.

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