Khaled Amayreh

A Palestinian boy throws stones at an Israeli army watchtower at the
Qalandia checkpoint near the West Bank city of Ramallah.

While Fatah looks to use Palestinian elections as a means to destroy Hamas, it is the Israeli occupation that ultimately uses elections to control the Palestinian struggle.

Reeling from the so-called "Goldstone scandal", Fatah has been waging a fresh war of words against Hamas, accusing the Islamic movement of sabotaging chances for Palestinian reconciliation.

The decision by the Palestinian Authority (PA) leadership to seek to defer the adoption by the UN Human Rights Council of the Goldstone Report on Israeli war crimes in the Gaza Strip, which nonetheless the PA successfully reversed, created an unprecedented storm of criticism among Palestinians at home and in the Diaspora.

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by Stephen Lendman

Founded in 1958 for aged 50 and older Americans, AARP call itself "a nonprofit, nonpartisan membership organization (dedicated to) improv(ing) the quality of their lives," even though from inception it sold insurance to earn royalties - now to its 40 million members in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the US Virgin Islands while claiming a mandate to:

-- deliver "value to members through information, advocacy and service;"

-- work "tirelessly to fulfill its vision: a society in which everyone ages with dignity and purpose, and in which AARP helps people fulfill their goals and dreams;" and

-- speak "with one voice - united by a common motto: 'To serve, not be served."

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by William C. Carlotti

The Jewish Zionist led, Christian Zionist supported Israeli government, with organizational and financial support from 30 branches of the World Zionist Organization in just as many countries, is engaged

in bombing, strafing, shooting the people of Palestine using depleted uranium coated bombs, cluster bombs, phosphorous bombs, dropped from supersonic jets,helicopter gunships, and armored tanks

they are using behemoth bulldozers supplied by Caterpillar to demolish more than a thousand Palestinian homes, countless Mosques and to eradicate hundreds of whole villages and towns;

they crush thousands of hectares of decades old olive and orange orchids;

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Gene Lyons

[U.S. marines fire during a Taliban ambush as they carry out an operation to clear an area in Helmand province, October 9, 2009. (Reuters/Asmaa Waguih)]

One of the enduring oddities of the American foreign policy debate is that asking the most obvious questions is all but forbidden. For example, how does Afghanistan pose a threat to the United States?

Certainly not in any military sense. The impoverished, largely illiterate Afghans have no army apart from the one U.S. and NATO forces, with very limited success, are trying to train. No air force, no navy, no offensive military capacity whatsoever.

From the U.S. perspective, Afghanistan is the absolute end of the earth. Indeed, it's not a nation at all. The idea that well-intentioned Westerners can create an efficient central government on, say, the Swiss model, where none has ever existed, much less one acceptable to Afghanistan's many warring tribes, sects and ethnic factions, is almost certainly a delusion.

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by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

T. Boone Pickens

Texas oil man T. Boone Pickens typifies what is dead wrong about America and what passes for 'foreign policy'. Pickens claims the US is 'entitled' to Iraqi oil. How convenient for the oil barons who conspired with Dick Cheney to carve up the oil fields of Iraq before 911 would give Bush the pretext he would need to attack and invade Iraq, a nation that had nothing whatsoever to do with 911.

Nevertheless, it would be claimed that Iraq was --somehow --a part of the 'war on terror'. Is there no end to the lies? Might I remind that on 911, it was a gang of Israelis, perhaps criminals from Mossad, who were seen dancing and celebrating! It was NOT Iraqis who celebrated the deaths of innocent Americans! Clearly --Bush waged war on everyone but the 'real terrorists'.

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Karin Friedemann

T

The debate over the Goldstone Report is a huge distraction from the real problem: the Report's inadequacy and the futility of bringing the case to the International Criminal Court. The Report itself, written by a Zionist Jew, is extremely flawed and biased in favor of Israel. Richard Goldstone's daughter Nicole told Israeli Army Radio (in Hebrew) that her father, as head of the UN Fact Finding Commission on the Gaza Conflict, had actually softened accusations against Israel.

Goldstone's Report creates a fictional equality of power and obligation between Hamas and the State of Israel. In addition, it incorrectly tries to fit both within the same legal framework, as Goldstone misapplies the Geneva Conventions to Hamas.

The Geneva Conventions apply to Israel because Israel is a state and a signatory while post-WW2 Nuremberg Law provides the appropriate legal framework for resistance movements like Hamas. The Nuremberg indictment of the Nationalist Socialist Government concerning German conquests and the Sudetenland, which was annexed to the Reich under international agreement, charges (International Military Tribunal, vol. 1, p. 63):

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Richard Gale & Gary Null

One hard lesson we should have learned after Wall Street’s collapse and the government’s handling of the bailout is that there is no reason, whatsoever, for us to sacrifice our good faith and trust in former bankers who now run the Treasury and Federal Reserve. And now as the flu season gets ready to kick off amidst much fanfare and predictions of doom due to a new H1N1 influenza virus, there is emerging sufficient information to raise very serious doubts whether our nation’s health authorities are truly serving the public health instead of commercial interests.

If the flu season goes according to schedule, the vaccine industrial complex will be poised to join Wall Street for record year rip-off profits. We will also likely witness huge Pharma executive bonuses and perhaps gold-plated toilets. Even if the CDC statisticians’ crystal ball used to forecast rampant swine flu infections turns into a complete bust—which would only be one more added to many other failed flu predictions back to 1976—it will nevertheless be a very profitable failure as was the economic collapse for the banking cartel. The vaccine industry has now received orders in the range of 3 billion doses during the course of the coming flu season. The World Health Organization would like to vaccinate two thirds (4 billion) of the global community, and the US alone is spending $2 billion to stockpile the nation with upwards to 250 million doses.

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John Pilger

Obama, the man of peace, is planning another war to add to his impressive record.

Barack Obama, winner of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize, is planning another war to add to his impressive record. In Afghanistan, his agents routinely extinguish wedding parties, farmers and construction workers with weapons such as the innovative Hellfire missile, which sucks the air out of your lungs. According to the UN, 338,000 Afghan infants are dying under the Obama-led alliance, which permits only $29 per head annually to be spent on medical care.

Within weeks of his inauguration, Obama started a new war in Pakistan, causing more than a million people to flee their homes. In threatening Iran - which his secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, said she was prepared to "obliterate" - Obama lied that the Iranians were covering up a "secret nuclear facility", knowing that it had already been reported to the International Atomic Energy Authority. In colluding with the only nuclear-armed power in the Middle East, he bribed the Palestinian Authority to suppress a UN judgment that Israel had committed crimes against humanity in its assault on Gaza - crimes made possible with US weapons whose shipment Obama secretly approved before his inauguration.

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Keith Jones

[THE BORDER Pakistan has a military base in South Waziristan, an unruly region on the Afghan border that is dominated by local tribes. But one sign of how limited the Pakistani government’s reach is here is that soldiers on a United States base nearby say they routinely see Taliban fighters cross the mountains at night.]

The enthusiasm in Washington for the bloodletting in South Waziristan exemplifies the bloody mindset that prevails within the US ruling elite. It also speaks to their shortsightedness and recklessness.

Under heavy pressure from the Obama administration, Pakistan is now waging all-out war in South Waziristan. Since last Saturday, 28,000 Pakistani troops, supported by F-16 fighter aircraft and helicopter gunships, have mounted a three-pronged offensive in the Pashtun-speaking tribal agency.

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Jeff Gates

In the early 1960s, Sen. William J. Fulbright fought to force the American Zionist Council to register as agents of a foreign government. The council eluded registration by reorganizing as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. AIPAC has since become what Fulbright most feared: A foreign agent dominating American foreign policy while disguised as a domestic lobby.

Israelis and pro-Israelis object when they hear that charge. How, they ask, can we so few wield such influence over so many? Answer: It’s all in the math. And in the single-issue advocacy brought to bear on US policy-making by dozens of “domestic” organizations that now compose the Israel lobby, with AIPAC its most visible force.

The political math was enabled by Sen. John McCain whose support for all things Israeli ensured him the GOP nomination to succeed George W. Bush. McCain’s style of campaign finance reform proved a perfect fit for the Diaspora-based fundraising on which the lobby relies. Co-sponsored by Sen. Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, this change in federal election law typifies how Israeli influence became systemic.

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