Omar Barghouti

Introduction

As Israel shifts steadily to the fanatic, racist right, as the latest parliamentary election results have shown, Palestinians under its control are increasingly being brutalized by its escalating colonial and apartheid policies, designed to push them out of their homeland to make a self-fulfilling prophecy out of the old Zionist canard of “a land without a people.” In parallel, international civil society, according to numerous indicators, is reaching a turning point in its view of Israel as a pariah state acting above the law of nations and in its effective action, accordingly, to penalize and ostracize it as it did to apartheid South Africa.

Palestinian communities in Jerusalem, Jaffa, Hebron, the Jordan Valley and the Naqab (Negev), among others, have been recently subjected to some of the worst, ongoing Israeli campaigns of gradual ethnic cleansing intended to “Judaize” their space. Qalqilya is suffocated by the colonial apartheid Wall that surrounds it from all sides, while Nablus is under constant siege. A few months ago, the Palestinian community in Acre was brutally attacked by Jewish-Israeli fundamentalists and xenophobes in one of the worst pogroms witnessed by Palestinians inside Israel. Still, Gaza today stands out as the test of our common humanity and our indispensable morality. A thorough analysis of the role played by Western and some Arab governments in regards to Israel’s criminal war of aggression against Gaza will demonstrate a resounding failure on both accounts. Throughout the atrocious assault, the official West, along with the governments of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority and the UN leadership,[1] were willing accomplices in Israel’s grave violations of international law and basic human rights.

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Lawrence Wilkerson
& a comment by Stephen Soldz

There are several dimensions to the debate over the U.S. prison facilities at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba that the media have largely missed and, thus, of which the American people are almost completely unaware. For that matter, few within the government who were not directly involved are aware either.

The first of these is the utter incompetence of the battlefield vetting in Afghanistan during the early stages of the U.S. operations there. Simply stated, no meaningful attempt at discrimination was made in-country by competent officials, civilian or military, as to who we were transporting to Cuba for detention and interrogation.

This was a factor of having too few troops in the combat zone, of the troops and civilians who were there having too few people trained and skilled in such vetting, and of the incredible pressure coming down from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and others to "just get the bastards to the interrogators".

It did not help that poor U.S. policies such as bounty-hunting, a weak understanding of cultural tendencies, and an utter disregard for the fundamentals of jurisprudence prevailed as well (no blame in the latter realm should accrue to combat soldiers as this it not their bailiwick anyway).

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Pak Alert Press

The power of lies, deceptions and disinformation as Americans pay the price of collective stupidity.

“You know very well, and the stupid Americans know equally well, that we control their government, irrespective of who sits in the White House. You see, I know it and you know it that no American president can be in a position to challenge us even if we do the unthinkable. What can they (Americans) do to us? We control congress, we control the media, we control show biz, and we control everything in America. In America you can criticize God, but you can’t criticize Israel…” (How to Kill a Palestinian)

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Nicola Nasser

In view of a world consensus on a two – state solution for the Arab – Israeli conflict, most political analysts and commentators have concluded that the Israeli Prime Minister – designate Benjamin Netanyahu, who still refuses to affirm his commitment thereto, was to come face to face with his “moment of truth” during his recent meetings earlier this month with visiting U.S. Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, and her “presidential” envoy for peace in the Middle East, George Mitchell, but the outcome of Clinton’s first regional tour as secretary of state and Mitchell’s second tour in the region has proved vice versa:

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