Kevin Barrett

Throughout the Occupied West Bank and Occupied al-Quds (Jerusalem), Zionist settlers are digging in.

They are excavating foundations for new settlements, uprooting Palestinian olive trees and smashing Palestinian homes with their bulldozers.

Today there are well over half a million Zionist invaders squatting in al-Quds and the West Bank, stocking up on weapons and – all too often – using Palestinian children for target practice.

The Zionist settler-colonialists are digging in for the long haul. Clearly they are not planning on leaving.

Ironically, by burrowing into the land of Palestine like aggressively parasitical vermin, the genocidal Zionist settlers are digging their own grave...and the grave of the so-called state of Israel.

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Kevin Barrett

Yesterday we learned that three Israeli suspects have confessed to burning to death Palestinian teenager Mohammed Abu Khdair. The killers even re-enacted their grisly deed for police.

The Western media is treating this incident as an isolated outrage. It is not. During the past 14 years, Israelis have murdered one Palestinian child every four days, on average.

During the second half of June, while the Zionist-dominated global media relentlessly hyped the “three kidnapped Israeli teens” story, several Palestinians were shot to death by the IDF, including 15-year-old Mohammed Dudin, who was murdered in Dura on June 20th. Corporate media coverage of the killing of Mohammed Dudin was negligible. To the mainstream media, the lives of Israeli Jews are priceless, while those of Palestinians are worth little or nothing.

Statistics bear out this conclusion. A study by If Americans Knew found that the New York Times, America’s newspaper of record, reported Israeli children’s deaths at 6.8 times the rate of Palestinian children’s deaths.

In an exclusive interview with Truth Jihad Radio, Palestinian professor Mazin Qumsiyeh said: “We have a huge problem in the way American media portrays the situation. Between the year 2000, when an uprising started against the occupation, until today, there have been over 1,540 Palestinian children killed by Israeli soldiers and illegal settlers. These children are barely mentioned anywhere in Western media; whereas every time an Israeli is killed, rare as that may be compared to the number of Palestinian children and civilians killed, we hear everything in detail about these people.”

What explains the disparity? The New York Times, like much of the Western mainstream media, is owned and operated by Zionists. In an article entitled “Do Jews Dominate in American Media? And So What If We Do?” Jewish ex-New York Times journalist Philip Weiss notes that pro-Israel Jews do indeed dominate US corporate media. He adds: “The result is that Americans are not getting the full story re Israel/Palestine.”

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Ibrahim Hewitt

Introduction by Kenny's Sideshow — Today there are many of us who would like to dismantle the NSA and the related false flag criminal syndicate we call the US government. On June 8, 1967 our 'best friend' took it on themselves to try and take down a small part of the NSA, the USS Liberty, during the 1967 so called "Six-Day War" which actually never ended. This crime was not only never officially acknowledged but as time went on we have found that the NSA came to backdoor all of its data theft directly to Israel to use as it pleases. Crimes against humanity and especially the killing of Americans often get rewarded in zionist occupied territory.

It is often assumed that Israel was on the defensive in the Six-Day War of June 1967. That is testimony to the success of its propaganda, because the reality was very different.

"From the very beginning," wrote James Bamford in Body of Secrets (2001), "an essential element in the Israeli battle plan seemed to have been to hide much of the war behind a carefully constructed curtain of lies. Lies about the Egyptian threat, lies about who started the war, lies to the American president, lies to the UN Security Council, lies to the press, lies to the public." The facts reveal that being Israel's main ally did not mean that American citizens were safe. The story of the attack on the USS Liberty by the Israeli air force and navy still has the power to shock, as has the official cover-up that has persisted ever since.

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Alan Hart

Netanyahu to commission a Mossad false flag operation – an attack on a vital American interest or interests for which Iran will be framed?

The headline over an article in Ha-aretz by Bradley Burston on Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s poker game with President Obama was "If Obama wins in November, is Netanyahu in trouble?" That’s a question I’ve had in my own mind for quite some time and it begs another. What, really, worries Netanyahu most – the prospect (not real) of Iran posing an existential threat to Israel or the prospect (real) of a second-term Obama?

There is, Burston wrote, something new in the air, something Netanyahu does not like. What is it? “American conservatives have begun to think out loud that Barack Obama will win in November.”

In my opinion there’s a better than evens chance that in the course of a second Obama term, America would put its own best interests first, which would mean an end to unconditional American support for the Zionist state of Israel right or wrong. (As is often the case, the Gentile me and Gideon Levy are on the same page. The headline over one of his recent articles in Ha-aretz was "It’s only a matter of time before U.S. tires of Israel").

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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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Stephen Lendman

Israeli Palestinian "suspect" publicly assaulted by police

What do you call a country that persecutes occupied people and one-fifth of its own population for not being Jewish? An illegal occupier for over 44 years, suffocating over 1.6 million Gazans under siege! A nation practicing torture, persecution, and racism as official policies! A modern day Sparta, glorifying wars and violence!

A country spurning rule of law principles! An unparalleled regional state terrorist! A nuclear armed global threat! A society of extreme social inequality! A nation with no legitimacy for all of the above reasons, besides having stolen another people's nation violently!

It's called Eretz Yisrael - Israel, a nation where thousands of fed up Jews vote with their feet and leave regularly. Like America, Israel isn't fit to live in. One day perhaps that will be its epitaph.

Many Jews and analysts believe Zionism is destroying Judaism. In his book "Overcoming Zionism," Joel Kovel explained how it fosters

"imperialist expansion and militarism (with) signs of the fascist malignancy," adding that it turned Israel "into a machine for the manufacture of human rights abuses."

Author Alan Hart calls Zionism "the real enemy of the Jews," an ideology contemptuous of moral and ethical principles. Others call it corrosive, destructive, racist, extremist, undemocratic and hateful, espousing violence, not peaceful coexistence.

Nations living by the sword in the end die by it. Israel and America aren't exceptions. They've, in fact, partnered on a self-destructive mission, perhaps taking planet earth with them before they're through.

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Nahida Izzat, Exiled Palestinian

In his article Alan Hart present us with a myth of a solution to the chronic Palestinian suffering, presented as an alternative way to solve this long-lasting problem.

Mr. Hart wants us to believe that the only hope for Palestinians is to turn to the major powers, led by America, and find a way to make them "put Israel on public notice" and that if Israel "resort to a final round of ethnic cleansing" that "it would be universally condemned as a criminal state and subjected to sanctions of every kind, universally applied."

I am sorry to disappoint Mr. Hart, but his calculations, his conclusion and his solution are wrong, yet again!

In his analysis and elucidation, Mr. Hart puts "zero" value for the Arab and Muslims populations, these millions of oppressed masses, who have been raging for decades, do not even surface in his conscious or subconscious mind.

His three possible outcomes that he presents in his article are not the only scenarios as he would like to believe.

There are many more that he seems to be unaware of or ignore.

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Silvia Cattori
Silvia Cattori's Blog

Jazz saxophonist Gilad Atzmon has a blog where he denounces the policy of his country of origin, Israel. He is not afraid to bluntly tell what he regards to be the truth. He is impervious to the concept of self-censorship. He tells here how little respect he has for the Western press. (*)

Silvia Cattori: Your political analyses, translated into dozen languages [1], reach a wide readership on the web. For whom exactly do you write?

Gilad Atzmon: I write mainly to myself. I try to understand the world around me. A few years ago, I understood that a lot of people out there are interested in the thoughts I indulge myself with, so I started to let other people have access into my boiling destructive mind.

Silvia Cattori: At a time when the press has reached its lowest point ever, are you among those who still continue to read newspapers?

Gilad Atzmon: No, for many years I do not buy newspapers, because I am interested in Middle East, and the mainstream media has very little to offer on that front. Probably the only expert within the British or even English-speaking media press is Robert Fisk. If I want to know what happens in the Middle East I go to “Counterpunch”, “Information Clearing House”, “Veterans Today”, “Rense.com”, “Uprooted Palestinian”, “PalestineTelegraph”, “Palestine Chronicle”, “Dissident Voice”, “Uruknet”, and other great sites. Our websites and blogs are far more informative than the mainstream media. We are the experts. We are becoming the main source of information. I see how many people are coming to visit my site. If there is a crisis in Gaza for instance, they want to see what Gordon Duff, Ramzy Baroud, Alan Hart, Israel Shamir, Alex Cockburn, Ali Abunimah have to say about it. I have zero respect for the mainstream media. And if the mainstream media wishes to survive, it had better move on quickly, otherwise it is finished.

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Anayat Durrani
Al-Ahram Weekly

Anayat Durrani interviews jazz musician extraordinaire Gilad Atzmon, discovering a secret weapon that Palestinians have in their struggle for freedom

World-renowned Israeli-born jazz saxophonist Gilad Atzmon brought his ensemble to the United States on his third annual North America Jazz tour 4-15 May, crisscrossing the country from New York, to Chicago, Dallas and San Francisco, finishing up in Colorado. The concerts' theme was "Music for Palestinians' Resistance", and the tour was used to raise awareness and fundraise for various humanitarian causes concerning Palestine.

Atzmon described his multi-city tour as giving him an opportunity to "talk about Israel, Palestine and the power of beauty". His tour included a stop in Oakland to attend a benefit for the Bay Area's flotilla passengers set to embark on the US-flagged Audacity of Hope in June to break Israel's illegal naval blockade of Gaza. The novelist, political activist and writer, who now makes his home in England, said he began visiting the US four years ago and comes once a year for two weeks. He said he has a lot of fans in the US and believes the exchange of ideas is crucial.

"I visit as many cities as I can, I meet a lot of people, I give interviews. I believe that true spiritual and intellectual exchange can lead towards a shift of consciousness. It is crucial for me to unveil the spirit and ideology that drives the Jewish state and Zionists around the world," Atzmon told Al-Ahram Weekly. "I believe that we are dealing with a unique ideology and practice and I am also aware that due to self censorship, not many people can discuss openly some of the topics I touch on, such as the fact that Zionism is a continuation of Jewish ideology."

Atzmon, who was born in Tel Aviv and served as a paramedic in the Israeli Defence Forces, is known for his no holds barred criticism of Israeli policies. He has a master's degree in philosophy and is a writer of both fiction and nonfiction, and speaker on Israel and Palestine. He is particularly outspoken on human rights denied the occupied Palestinian people.

"For me the support of the Palestinian cause was a lesson in humanity. Through Palestinian suffering I grasped the supremacy that was inherent in my culture," said Atzmon. "I confronted the tribal and 'chosen' in me. I searched for a new meaning of universalism, humanism and empathy."

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Gilad Atzmon
Gilad Atzmon's Blog

Despite relentless underhand efforts by Israeli operators in the UK and their close allies within the Jewish ‘anti Zionist’ network to block a panel event discussing ‘Jewishness, Zionism and Israel’ , the debate went ahead as scheduled yesterday.

It was a tremendous success. Speaking to a full hall, Alan Hart, Karl Sabbagh, Sameh Habeeb and myself elaborated on the meaning of ‘Jewishness’ and the essence of Zionism.

But we also tried to understand once and for all; why is it that some of the Jews who claim to be the most sincere ‘supporters of Palestine’ -- are always amongst the first to stifle debate on such crucial issues?

Six years ago, I was shocked to learn about the destructive impact of elements within the UK Jewish ‘anti Zionist’ network: at the time they were intent on burying ‘Deir Yassin Remembered’ (DYR), probably the most significant Nakba memorial group in the history of the Palestinian Solidarity Movement. Unfortunately, they succeeded-by putting into action the most repulsive Zionist tactics, the Jewish ‘anti Zionists’ did eventually manage to bring down DYR.

But in doing so, they also inflicted some serious damage on themselves. They were exposed for what they are -- a bunch of crypto Zionists. They smeared and defamed other activists; they lied, and they mounted pressure on Palestinian officials. They exposed the ugliest possible form of Zionist politics. I did not like what I saw and published a satirical exposé of their tactics which I titled “The Protocols of the Elders of London”.

Needless to say that my criticism was not welcome amongst UK Jewish ‘progressive’ leaders.

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