Asif Salahuddin

Imagine a large building full of about 50 people in a remote area, not accessible to other human beings.

Each person would need to have his basic needs - food, clothing, shelter and so forth, met. In doing so, each person would have to develop skills to go about earning his livelihood to support his needs. But it would be nonsensical for every person to develop each skill that is needed to survive. What would happen in reality is that each person would develop a few key skills and use these as his source of living; for example one person may specialize in growing crops and rearing animals, whist another may specialize in plumbing and carpentry.

Now these people would have to trade with one another to benefit from one another's skills. For example, the farmer may trade 10 chickens with the builder in exchange for him renovating his room, or a cleaner may trade half a day's cleaning in return for a knitter to knit two woollen jumpers for him.

As the number of skills or trades in the house (offered by the people resident there to one another) will be quite numerous, it would not only be very difficult and complex to keep track of all the exchange ratios between different goods and services, but also extremely impractical for day-to-day living.

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Auntie Ziona

Oy oy oy, we are so happy to hear that Hillary has accepted the Secretary of State position from our Obambi'le.

Condoleeza'le will be able to sleep well at night when she goes off to play the piano, knowing that Hillary is on the job.

Our Hillary has supported Israel for such a long time, even more so than her husband Bill, and she was the one who urged him to make "a different decision" when he was the President and the US once failed to use its veto to protect Israel in the Security Council.

Our Hillary'le is having a fantastic week, with Israel's blockade of food and medical supplies into Gaza and the tanks rolling into Rafah on Tuesday. She's been in favour of cutting off US aid if Palestine doesn't do what we, the Jews, want, since before her husband was President.

When asked about the possibility of a Palestinian State, she stated: "There is no question mark next to me. There's an exclamation point. I am an emphatic, unwavering supporter of Israel's safety and security."

Oy vey, what more could we ask for? She may be a shikse, but she's a shikse with a yiddisher kop.

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Khalid Amayreh

Khalid Amayreh in Occupied Jerusalem: The decision by the Buckingham palace to bestow an honorary knighthood on Israeli President Shimon Peres should be viewed as a blatant disregard for propriety and moral conduct by Queen Elizabeth II and the British government. It is also a definitive sign of the decadence of our time.

The symbolic honorary title, we are told, is accorded to people who have made distinguished accomplishments in various fields, ranging from world peace to scientific achievements.

In the past few decades, however, the honorary knighthood was often bestowed on decidedly evil people who carry on their hands the blood of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of innocent people.

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Whisleblower

Papers kept secret for 43 years show that the US Department of Justice attempted to register the parent organization of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, as the foreign agent of Israel.

Such a registration could have changed the course of Middle East history by giving the president, State Department and American public more insight and leverage over the Israel lobby during peace negotiations to compensate displaced Palestinians and avert Israel's covert development of nuclear weapons.

The 1962 Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) order was approved by Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy (RFK) and senior officials. The DOJ found the American Zionist Council had received the equivalent of $35 million in directed Israeli funds to lobby and conduct public relations in the United States for arms, aid and preferential diplomatic treatment.

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Daniel Taylor

In light of the current global financial meltdown, an examination of recent history in the United States may help us to get a better handle on our present day economic issues.

The United States was successfully seized by international bankers with the passing of the Federal Reserve Act in 1913. Then, with the crash of 1929, further control was gained and great profits were reaped by its engineers. Now, these same interests have their sights set on the globe in an unprecedented power grab. Daily calls for a "New World financial Order" and global governance are now a common occurrence. Discussion of dropping the dollar as the world reserve currency and the creation of a world currency is now taking place.

Author and researcher Gary Allen writes in his 1979 book None Dare Call it Conspiracy:

"When the Federal Reserve System was foisted on an unsuspecting American public, there were absolute guarantees that there would be no more boom and bust economic cycles. The men who, behind the scenes, were pushing the central bank concept for the international bankers faithfully promised that from then on there would be only steady growth and perpetual prosperity. However, Congressman Charles A. Lindberg Sr. accurately proclaimed:

“From now on depressions will be scientifically created.”

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Sameh A. Habeeb

Gaza Strip, 20, Nov, 2008- Following Israeli raids that killed around 15 Palestinians within one week, many rockets were fired into Israel in a reprisal of Israeli's provocation. As usual Israel started to blame Palestinians despite it was the one who initiated with violence again. The Israeli assault was an obvious breach of an agreed calm held with Palestinian fighting groups 5 months ago. It has provoked some Palestinians to fire some light rockets into Israel. Afterwards, Israel started a new phase of collective punishment and began more violent prevocational measures against 1.5 million people.

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Khalid Amayreh

[Jewish boys smuggle a calf for food into Ghetto Warsaw, 1943. A Palestinian man smuggles a cow for food into the Gaza Strip-2008.]

Israeli propagandists routinely dismiss comparisons between Nazi Germany and Israel as “corrupt” and “far-fetched.” Some Zionists would even argue that only pathological anti-Semites would dare make such comparisons.

However, in light of what Israel has been and is doing to the Palestinians, including the present ruthless blockade of the Gaza Strip, and the slow, agonizing death meted out to innocent Gazans, any honest person shouldn’t fail to observe the striking similarity between the Nazi mentality and the collective Israeli mindset.

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Stephen Lendman

Extra-judicial killings are indefensible, morally abhorrent, and illegal under international laws and norms. Article 23b of the 1907 Hague Regulations prohibits "assassination, proscription, or outlawry of an enemy, or putting a price upon an enemy's head, as well as offering a reward for any enemy 'dead or alive.' "

Article 3 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) states that "Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person." UDHR also recognizes the "inherent dignity (and the) equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family."

So do "just war" principles that rule out gratuitous violence, assassinations, especially if premeditated, war against civilians, and so on, despite the difficulties of distinguishing between combatants, those who've laid down their arms, and the innocent in times of war - let alone dealing with "terrorism" or what one analyst calls the "twilight zone between war and peace." Others say it's justifiable resistance or "blowback" in response to state-sponsored violence and other crimes of war and against humanity.

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DetainThis

When tanks, bulldozers, and soldiers of a militarily dominant state roll into the territories of the people it occupies and dominates — destroying private property, livelihoods, and prospects for a secure peace — many terms could appropriately describe the act. Others are simply too flattering.

This morning’s AP headline of note out of Gaza City is titled ”Israeli tanks move into Gaza, level farmland,” wherein the first sentence tells us that ”Israeli tanks forged into the southern Gaza Strip on Tuesday, drawing mortar fire from Palestinian militants and intensifying violence that has chipped away at a tenuous cease-fire.” [1]

Hmm, let’s see. They entered Gaza in a hostile fashion and ”level[ed] farmland.” Ah. They didn’t destroy private property. Nope. They didn’t invade. Uh uh. They didn’t even allegedly or perhaps commit collective punishment or any other act of aggression. They did what had to be done, you see: they “forged,” as in forge on, young brave soldiers! One day we will be liberated from the tyranny of those peasants!

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Chris Floyd

The American media is by and large swallowing the propaganda line that the Iraqi cabinet's acquiescence to a "Status of Forces Agreement" (SOFA) with the U.S. occupation force means that the Iraq War will be over in 2011. This will further cement the conventional wisdom that the suppurating war crime in Iraq is now behind us, and the topic will be moved even further off the radar of public scrutiny.

But as usual, there is a wide, yawning abyss between the packaged, freeze-dried pabulum for public consumption and the gritty, blood-flecked truth on the ground. As Jason Ditz reports at Antiwar.com, the so-called "deadline" in 2011 for the withdrawal of all U.S. forces remains, as ever, an "aspiration," not an iron-clad guarantee. The pace and size of the bruited "withdrawal" will remain, as ever, "conditions-based," say Pentagon and White House officials -- a position long echoed by the "anti-war" president-elect. And as we all know, "conditions" in a war zone are always subject to radical, unexpected change.

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