National Defense Authorization Act instructs U.S. to take 'all necessary steps' to help Israel defend its vital national interests, among them preventing a nuclear Iran. The U.S. House of Representatives passed a defense authorization bill that would make it U.S. policy to take "all necessary steps" to ensure Israel is able to "remove existential threats," among them nuclear facilities in Iran. "It is the policy of the United States to take all necessary steps to ensure that Israel possesses and maintains an independent capability to remove existential threats to its security and defend its vital national interests," said the amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act passed Friday.

JTA: House passes bill making it U.S. policy to help Israel ‘remove threats’

Israeli TV, Channel 1, aired an interview with Israeli deputy Defense Minister, Member of Knesset (MK) Danny Danon, who said that there will never be a Palestinian State, and that the Palestinians are “settlers”, should be part of Jordan. - During the interview, Danon said that “the Public should not be misled”, as Israel would never allow the establishment of a Palestinian state, whether the United States sends envoys or not, whether it presents initiatives or not. When asked if Israel would “annex” the West Bank, Dannon said that Israel will not do so, but will continue its settlements activities “on vacant lands in the West Bank”, and will act onto turning the Palestinian areas into “settlements”. “Jews in the West Bank aren’t settlers anymore, they are citizens of the state of Israel”, the Israeli official said, “Israel will turn the Palestinians into settlers under Jordanian authority, and this is that…” He further stated that several Israeli members of Knesset agree with his opinions despite the fact they do not go public about them.

The United Nations Special Rapporteur on Palestinian Human Rights has condemned the Israeli regime for its long-time occupation of Palestinian territories and violation of the human rights of the Palestinians. - Richard Falk made the remarks on Monday while presenting his latest report at a meeting of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva. “Forty-six years ago today Israel's occupation of Palestine began. Six days of war has turned into 46 years of occupation,” Falk told the Geneva forum. He described the treatment of “thousands of Palestinians detained or imprisoned by Israel” as being “extremely worrisome,” and called for an international inquiry into the situation of Palestinians in Israeli prisons. He said there are 5,000 Palestinians in Israeli custody at the moment and 750,000 Palestinians have gone through detention in Israeli jails since the regime’s occupation of the Palestinian territories began in 1967.

Zakaria Baker, head of the committee for fishermen in Union of Agricultural Work Committees (UAWC) explains the reality for fishermen in Gaza, following Israel re-extending the permitted sailing area for Palestinians from three to six nautical miles. Despite this ‘allowance’, Palestinian fishermen have recently been attacked and their boats confiscated by the Israeli military when they were well inside the previously allowed three nautical miles.

It has been five years since Israel imposed its oppressive and inhuman blockade on the Gaza Strip. Without doubt it has been easily one of the toughest and most trying periods in the eventful history of the Palestinian people. The proud and fiercely independent people, however, have refused to give in to Israeli diktats or allow their fighting spirit to waver under the totally asphyxiating blockade of Gaza by land, air and sea.

However, the Palestinians have had a monumental price to pay for their defiance. The United Nations report on Gaza, issued to mark the five nightmarish years of Israeli siege on Tuesday, makes for disturbing reading and must come as a wake-up call to the world’s sleeping conscience. The UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA) has slammed Israel for the acute humanitarian crisis in Gaza, warning of a humanitarian catastrophe.

RE: Samantha Power: And there is also this--in addition to the vote of confidence from Israel's ambassador: “Her views came out of the political and cultural environment she was in at the time,” said Abraham H. Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League. “But that’s in the past. She’s matured and moved on, and I look forward to working with her at the U.N.”

Human rights activist Jawad Abu Eysheh, 39, was arrested Friday 7th June following a complaint he made four months ago about a settler attack. - At 4:20 pm on 7th June, Israeli Police arrived at the house of the Hebron organisation Youth Against Settlements and demanded to see the ID’s of Jawad and three other men present. The police then told Jawad that they wanted to take him away ‘for investigation’, and called the Israeli military to escort Jawad away in handcuffs. Jawad was then paraded through the adjacent illegal Tel Rumeida settlement and taken to the nearby checkpoint 56, before being transferred to the police station in the settlement of Givat Ha’avot outside the city centre. The line of questioning from the police made clear that Jawad was being detained as a result of events that happened back in February, when Jawad and other activists were attacked by American-born extremist Baruch Marzel and other settlers. Despite being a victim of that violent assault in February, it was Jawad who was subjected to arrest today, not the perpetrators. During his detention, Jawad was also forced to submit a DNA sample against his will, and to sign conditions that he will not speak with Baruch Marzel for the next 30 days. Jawad stated he is happy to comply with this stipulation at least. Jawad was released at around 9pm.As well as today’s arrest, Jawad has faced other harassment recently, including not being allowed to walk on the street where his factory space and uncle’s house are located. The Israeli army and police in Hebron have a long history of harassing human rights defenders such as Jawad and his colleague Issa Amro, and of following the wishes of extremist settlers when deciding who to harass.

Last month marked the 65th anniversary of the Nakba — the Palestinian catastrophe of 1948, during which Israeli forces expelled some 800,000 Palestinians from their homeland and seized their properties. In total, 536 cities, towns and villages — 78 percent of the land of historic Palestine — were taken during the 1948 war. The Nakba is not just a historical event, however. It remains an ongoing trauma. Palestinian human rights are assaulted daily; Palestinians still live under occupation or are barred from their homeland. Meanwhile, Israeli land and water confiscation continue — particularly in the West Bank and the Naqab (Negev) desert. Palestinians worldwide remain excluded and uncompensated, despite Israel’s admission to the United Nations in 1949 being preceded by its expressed willingness to abide by Resolution 194, calling for the Palestinian refugees’ repatriation and compensation. - Little known, however, is that four communities in Palestine have received carefully evaluated and internationally arranged compensation for their losses. The four villages — Sarona, Wilhelma, Betlehem (not the famed Bethlehem) and Waldheim — belonged to a Christian German group called the Templers.

It is a clever trick by left wing Zionists to take over the anti-Zionist movement by creating the demand that Israel return to its pre-1967 borders as part of the Boycott, Disinvestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign, anti-Zionist activist and self-proclaimed “ex-Jew” Gilad Atzmon has pointed out.

In an interview with PressTV, Gilad, one of the bravest dissenters yet to emerge from Israel, pointed out that the BDS campaign was based on a demand to “end occupation and colonization of all Arab lands occupied since 1967.” He went on to point out that this “dismisses the fact that the Nachba” (Arabic for the “disaster”, or the driving out of Palestinians from their homeland to create Israel) took place in 1948. “Tel Aviv is also an occupied Palestinian land. And so is Haifa. I know about my grandfather who was in the Irgun (one of the Jewish terrorist groups who ethnically cleansed Israel of Palestinians) who actually invaded Jaffa,” Gilad continued. “In a way, when I see that I can that there is somehow a kind of a liberal Zionist ideology filtering in.”

Russia announced on Thursday that it will keep a fleet of about dozen navy ships in the Mediterranean Sea, a move President Vladimir Putin said is needed to protect his country's national security. Putin said the plan should not be seen as saber rattling, but it comes as Moscow is serving as a key ally and arms supplier to Syrian President Bashar Assad during that nation's civil war. The only naval base that Russia has in the Mediterranean and anywhere outside the former Soviet Union is located in Syria.

Fars News Agency: Russia, Ukraine to Hold Joint Naval Drills

Official statistics from the Ministry of Information in Ramallah have revealed that 1,518 Palestinian children were killed by Israel's occupation forces from the outbreak of the second Intifada in September 2000 up to April 2013. That's the equivalent of one Palestinian child killed by Israel every 3 days for almost 13 years. The ministry added that the number of children injured by the Israelis since the start of the Second Intifada against Israel's occupation has now reached 6,000. "The International Day for the Protection of Children is on June 1," said a spokesman, "but Palestinian children are still subject to attacks by the Israelis and Jewish settlers on an almost daily basis." Noting that 2012 saw an unprecedented rise in the number of children arrested by Israeli forces, the report pointed out that 9,000 Palestinians under 18 years old have been arrested since the end of September 2000. Almost half of the Palestinian population is under 18. Almost two hundred and fifty Palestinian minors are being held in prison by Israel; 47 of them are children under 16 years of age.

It is time to call out the scumbags who historically have been mostly responsible for promoting gun control legislation in what have been obvious attempts to destroy the Second Amendment. At the forefront of these activities we find that most of these people are Zionist Jews. Even though this is a proven fact, there will undoubtedly be a number of pro-Zionist Hasbara Internet trolls who will cry racism, anti-Semitism and other rubbish to distract people from the obvious. Considering that Jews represent only a small percentage of the American population, why is it that many of the most vocal supporters of gun control just so happen to be Zionist Jews? This is a serious question that needs to be asked as it shows that a small minority of people are attempting to make it increasingly more difficult for the average law abiding American citizen to defend themselves.

The remains of hundreds of Palestinians killed in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War have been discovered in six mass grave sites in a Muslim cemetery in Tel Aviv’s Jaffa district. - An official of the Kazkhana cemetery said on Friday that the gruesome finding took place on May 29, when the ground caved in as workers carried out renovations. Eighty-year-old Atar Zeinab said that as a teenager he helped collect the bodies of people killed during the final months of fighting in 1948 and brought them for hurried burials in the graveyard.

Stephen Lendman: Evidence of Israeli Mass Murder Discovered

Ken O'keefe speaks nothing but the facts, some zionists hecklers can't handle it

Laurent Guyénot: "The neoconservative movement, which is generally perceived as a radical (rather than “conservative”) Republican right, is, in reality, an intellectual movement born in the late 1960s in the pages of the monthly magazine Commentary, a media arm of the American Jewish Committee, which had replaced the Contemporary Jewish Record in 1945. The Forward, the oldest American Jewish weekly, wrote in a January 6th, 2006 article signed Gal Beckerman: “If there is an intellectual movement in America to whose invention Jews can lay sole claim, neoconservatism is it. It’s a thought one imagines most American Jews, overwhelmingly liberal, will find horrifying. And yet it is a fact that as a political philosophy, neoconservatism was born among the children of Jewish immigrants and is now largely the intellectual domain of those immigrants’ grandchildren”. The neoconservative apologist Murray Friedman explains that Jewish dominance within his movement by the inherent benevolence of Judaism, “the idea that Jews have been put on earth to make it a better, perhaps even a holy, place” (The Neoconservative Revolution: Jewish Intellectuals and the Shaping of Public Policy, 2006)." "Neoconservatism is essentially a modern Jewish version of Machiavelli’s political strategy. What characterizes the neoconservative movement is therefore not as much Judaism as a religious tradition, but rather Judaism as a political project, i.e. Zionism, by Machiavellian means."

Gilad Atzmon: Take It From the Rabbi’s Mouth - Every so often we come across a secular Jewish ‘anti’ Zionist’ who argues that Zionism is not Judaism and vice versa. Interestingly enough, I have just come across an invaluable text that illuminates this question from a rabbinical perspective. Apparently back in 1942, 757 American Rabbis added their names to a public pronouncement titled ‘Zionism an Affirmation of Judaism’. This Rabbinical rally for Zionism was declared at the time “the largest public pronouncement in all Jewish history.”

Joe Biden spoke last night in honor of Jewish American Heritage Month. Biden has long, deep ties to the Jewish community — Obama actually picked him in 2008 in part to reassure skittish Jewish Democrats. Biden indeed offered fulsome, heartfelt praise in his remarks, before wandering into highly uncomfortable terrain and delivering a speech that is likely to be quoted by anti-Semites for years and decades to come. (It’s already the subject of excited discussion among the white supremacist community.) Biden’s remarks were not anti-Semitic. They were very, very philo-Semitic. The thrust of his largely unscripted monologue is that Jews have contributed enormously to the United States. That’s obviously a standard spiel for praising any ethnic group, but Biden took care to emphasize that Jews have not just contributed their share to the United States, but far more...

Warns Expansion Policies Costing EU Backing - British Foreign Secretary William Hague’s visit to Israel was perhaps more uncomfortable than initially advertised, coming just two days after Israeli Strategic Affairs Minister Yuval Steinitz accused Britain of being “anti-semitic.” Steinitz had cited criticism of Israeli policy in the British press as his basis for the charge, noting that the American press was much friendlier. Hague responded today that Israel’s dwindling support in Britain and indeed across Europe stems from their settlement expansions.

In a show of force, the United States Senate on Wednesday unanimously passed a resolution urging an uncompromising US stance against Iranian efforts to acquire nuclear weapons, calling for Washington’s support should Israel strike the program. - “If the Government of Israel is compelled to take military action in legitimate self-defense against Iran’s nuclear weapons program, the United States Government should stand with Israel and provide, in accordance with United States law and the constitutional responsibility of Congress to authorize the use of military force, diplomatic, military, and economic support to the Government of Israel in its defense of its territory, people, and existence,” the resolution reads. It also calls for the US to take “such action as may be necessary” to keep Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapons capability. While senators are careful in their calls for US military intervention, the resolution, which passed 99-0 [sic], is seen as the most direct expression yet heard from Washington reflecting support for a potential Israeli strike.

Al Qassam website - Ramallah- More than 7 million Palestinian refugees, uprooted from their homes and lands since the Palestinian Nakba (the usurpation of Palestine), are still hoping to return to their homeland, and reject the notion of land swaps.Many of the Palestinian families who fled Palestine still hold keys to their homes after being forced to leave their lands and homes at gunpoint. MP Mona Mansour stressed the right of return for all Palestinian refugees who were forcibly expelled from their historical lands. She confirmed her total rejection of the notion of land swaps, warning of its seriousness on the Palestinian cause. Dr Abdel Sattar Qassem Professor of Political studies confirmed that Nakba anniversary highlights the Palestinian refugees’ adherence to their right of return despite their difficult living conditions in refugee camps. The refugee Ahmed Abu Saada from Jalazoun refugee camp confirmed that the Palestinian right of return will never be compromised. Resistance is the only reliable option to return to our homeland, he stressed.

"Die Wahrheit Wird Euch Frei Machen" (The Truth
Will Set You Free)

University of Freiburg´s refusal to let lecture hall to Cafe Palestine Freiburg found to be illegal.

Last Friday, Cafe Palestine Freiburg won a landmark victory in the Administrative Court, when the refusal by the University of Freiburg to make available to Cafe Palestine a lecture hall for a presentation by Professor Christophe Oberlin of Paris on the topic "Plastic Surgery in Gaza" was found to be illegal. The Court, consisting of three professional and two lay judges determined that the leeway granted to the University in the practice of its authority is limited by the principle of equal treatment and the right to freedom of opinion (though this does not of course include every opinion). The reasons offered by the University in refusing use of a lecture hall were that the event might serve illegal and anti-constitutional aims and might lead to constitutional and legal violations which, according to the administrative regulations of the Ministry of Science (Wissenschaftsministerium) and the University’s own guideline, are grounds for refusal. But the university failed to prove that the event might encourage constitutional and illegal violations and therefore was found to be abusing freedom of opinion.

Gilad Atzmon: Landmark victory For a Change - Cafe Palestine Freiburg won a landmark victory against Freiburg University in the German administrative court last Friday. Six months ago Café Palestine filed a complaint against the University in the Administrative Court following the University´s refusal to let the Palestinian solidarity group use a space for a lecture by Paris University professor Christophe Oberlin. On Friday, the Administrative Court of Freiburg made of five judges found that the University acted illegally. Freiburg University together with Dr. Heinrich Schwendemann, who was the main actor against the Café, were highly criticized by the court. Schwendemann is one of the founders of the German Holocaust memorial site shoa.de. As far as I am aware the University will have to pay a penalty. I guess that Dr. Schwendemann may need to consult with a legal expert soon. Apparently the Shoa expert was lying in court and he may face a further legal humiliation soon.

The Other Site: Gabi Weber: The Truth Will Set Us Free?

Israel has given the green light for the construction of a further 300 homes in a West Bank settlement.The number of eviction incidents has risen sharply since a new Israeli government, with even stronger opposition to a 2-state solution, took office in March. And the Israeli defense force are ready to use almost anything to back their governments orders, including special anti-riot measure called 'Skunk'.