International Ethical and Humanist Union

For the past eleven years the organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC), representing the 57 Islamic States, has been tightening its grip on the throat of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Yesterday, 28 March 2008, they finally killed it.

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Photo AP Markus Schreiber

The Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) publishes annual reports on the state of human rights in Israel and occupied Palestine. This article is based on its latest year end 2007 one.

ACRI is Israel's leading human and civil rights organization and the only one addressing all rights and liberties issues. It was founded in 1972, is independent and nonpartisan, and leads the struggle for these issues in Israel and the Occupied Territories through litigation, legal advocacy, education, and public outreach. ACRI also believes that civil and human rights are universal. They must be "an integral part of democratic community building and....a unifying force in Israeli public life" for everyone, especially those most marginalized, disadvantaged and currently persecuted or neglected.

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Global Research

"They make a desolation and call it peace." -Tacitus

Was Alan Greenspan really as dumb as he looks in creating the late housing bubble that threatens to bring the entire Western debt-based economy crashing down?

Was something as easy to foresee as this really the trigger for a meltdown that could destroy the world’s financial system? Or was it done, perhaps, "accidentally on purpose"? And if so, why?

Let’s turn to the U.S. personage that conspiracy theorists most often mention as being at the epicenter of whatever elite plan is reputed to exist. This would be David Rockefeller, the 92-year-old multibillionaire godfather of the world’s financial elite.

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Deseret Morning News

Curtis Allgier

Allgier's face is heavily covered with tattoos — so many that it almost appears from a distance that he's wearing a mesh mask over his pale white skin. And some police agencies say his face is just the start of an extensively tattooed body.

Allgier, a white supremacist, is accused of killing 60-year-old corrections officer Stephen Anderson on Monday inside a medical exam room at University of Utah Hospital's Orthopaedic Center.

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Leaders of the Palestinian citizens of Israel marching in the demonstration
in Jaffa commemorating the 32nd Land Day.

Alternative Information Center / Um Khalil

The First Yum El-Ard (Land Day) Protest: An interview with Fr. Shehadeh Shehadeh Sharif Hamadeh, The Electronic Intifada, 31 March 2005

"I am a pastor and I believe that a pastor should understand the pain of the people," says the priest. "It aches people when their land has been taken. It is as though a part of their body has been taken. It is very painful... My faith did not allow me to stand aside.

"Without land we have no roots in this country," says Fr. Shehadeh, "The land is our roots. The land is not only a place where you plant eggplants and cucumbers - it is our national home. I am a Palestinian and this is my homeland."

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The Palestinian Information Center

As prospects of true peace in Palestine look as bleak as ever, mainly because of Israeli intransigence and American complicity with the Zionist state, peace-loving people in the Middle East and around the world are once again affronted by yet another disingenuous visit to the region by US Secretary of State. Rice has made numerous visits to Ramallah and occupied Jerusalem ever since she became Secretary of State more than three years ago.

However, the overall situation pertaining to the Palestinian plight has more or less remained unchanged. In fact, one can safely contend that the Israeli occupation and apartheid are now much worse than they were three years ago. Hence, it is highly unlikely that Rice’s current visit is going to make any difference.

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fungus Ug99

A deadly fungus, known as Ug99, which kills wheat, has likely spread to Pakistan from Africa according to reports in the British New Scientist magazine. If true, that threatens the vital Asian Bread Basket including the Punjab region. The spread of the deadly virus, stem rust, against which an effective fungicide does not exist, comes as world grain stocks reach the lowest in four decades and government subsidized bio-ethanol production, especially in the USA, Brazil and EU are taking land out of food production at alarming rates. The deadly fungus is being used by Monsanto and the US Government to spread patented GMO seeds.

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From Tom Paine's Corner

Arab resurgence was born on the heels of European occupation of Arab lands in the 19th century as an anti-European, anti-imperialist struggle. However instead of Pan-Arabism the awakening spawned Pan-Islam, today reaching from Morocco to Indonesia. Islam’s concepts of religious universality and political theocracy overshadow all ideas of nationalism and political democracy espoused by militarized America in Iraq.

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Oil Stains - Georgeo Sodi

Oil greed generates war! International banksters, in London and New York, had quickly recognized that control of petroleum was essential to power and profit. After Britain’s Rothschild-orchestrated depression of 1873 (coincided with the U.S. stock market crash of September 18, 1873), a growing divergence existed “between the depressed economy of the British Empire and the emerging industrial economies of Continental Europe,” especially the very proficient German Reich. [i] Crashes, depressions, recessions, deflations or inflations (elastic dollars) are all contrived cash manipulations that allow the banksters to subtly seize public and private resources at fire-sale prices.

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Redress

Twenty questions radio and TV interviewers avoid asking about Israel

Stuart Littlewood reminds Western journalists about the questions they are failing to ask when dealing with Israel. He says that “when the day of reckoning comes to the Middle East ... much of the blame will rest squarely on the lack of journalistic rigour" in Britain and the USA.

The abysmal performance of Western TV and radio interviewers when dealing with issues surrounding Israel – that “rogue regime” or “Zionist entity”, as many now call it – is not only embarrassing, but a blot on the escutcheon of journalism *.

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The Anti-Empire Report

Propaganda as an Olympic competition

The latest protests in Tibet and crackdown by Chinese authorities have brought up the usual sermonizing in the West about Chinese government oppression and illegitimate control of the Tibetans. Although I have little love for the Chinese leaders -- I think they run a cruel system -- some proper historical perspective is called for here.

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(Nidal El-Khairy)

Electronic Intifada

Israeli Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilnai's much publicized remark recently about Gaza facing a "shoah" -- the Hebrew word for the Holocaust -- was widely assumed to be unpleasant hyperbole about the army's plans for an imminent full-scale invasion of the Strip.

More significantly, however, his comment offers a disturbing indication of the Israeli army's longer-term strategy towards the Palestinians in the occupied territories.

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“Alan Greenspan had a ‘calming’ influence...on Wall Street!” - Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY), a wannabe President of the U.S.

How did Alan Greenspan ever get appointed to the chair of the prestigious Federal Reserve? This is the same guy who told a federal regulator, in 1984, not to worry about the Saving & Loan Industry. This was just before “15 of the 17 thrifts,” he said were sound, went under. That fiasco cost the taxpayers a whopping “$3 billion in losses.” Now, Greenspan’s shaky tenure for nineteen years at the Fed of “cutting interest rates and printing money” has brought the nation’s financial system close to collapse and many in the working class to their knees. In his book, “Greenspan’s Bubbles: The Age of Ignorance at the Federal Reserve,” William A. Fleckenstein, reveals how Greenspan has created one huge mess after another in the finance, real estate and stock markets. In his scathing indictment, the author sets the record straight, too, about Greenspan’s over inflated reputation as an economic guru.

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Spirit of the Forest (Odilon Redon)

Smoking Mirrors

"I think we are all in for some surprises and some of them are going to be good. Our job is to try to be a little more aware, a little more human and a little more understanding as we move through our little lives wherever they are taking place."

To look at the mainstream news you wouldn’t think much was happening in places where a whole lot is happening. The Mahdi Army of 60,000 strong has done what armies in occupied lands have always done. They have waited for their moment.

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It's time to drive a stake through the heart of an evil beast --Bush's official conspiracy theory of 911. We are expected to believe that 19 Arab hijackers brought down the twin towers and damaged the Pentagon by flying hijacked airliners into them. Proof that the story is a lie is, at the same time, probable cause to indict Dick Cheney, George W. Bush and others in this criminal administration for the crimes of mass murder and treason.

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In a place just a few miles from sandy beaches and soaring sky-scrapers, white stone villas and sky-blue swimming pools, it seems the epitome of irony and injustice that over 1.5 million people would be subjected to drinking sewage-contaminated water. When there is such a fine line bordering wealth and poverty, privilege and need, how unsettling to realize that just a stones throw away, mothers and fathers must nourish their families with poison. As if the occupier could not find one more creative way to torment his victim.

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Online Journal

As the number of US troops killed in Iraq passed the 4,000 mark, George W. Bush, after conferring Monday with US officials in Washington and Baghdad, told the American people that the outcome "will ‘merit the sacrifice," according to the Washington Post.

My question is, for what mother, father, husband, wife or child will this illegal pointless war that has sapped the blood of a million Iraqis as well, not to mention some $12 trillion from our Treasury -- better used for life-giving projects -- will this sacrifice be merited?

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"Scoop" Independent News Washington, D.C.

We have been warned again and again that seeing the world as an "us versus them" proposition is a fatal error. It's polarizing. It leads to "class warfare." It absolves "us" of the collective responsibility we all have in a democracy. Can't have it, not allowed.

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[Photo: Uruknet]

Online Journal

A classified memo written by a top military official stationed in western Iraq reveals that a prison in downtown Fallujah is so overcrowded and dirty that it does not even meet basic “minimal levels of hygiene for human beings.”

“The conditions in these jails are so bad that I think we need to do the right thing in terms of caring for the prisoners even with our own dollars, or release them,” says the memo, written late last month by Maj. Gen. John Kelly, commander of U.S forces in western Iraq.

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Al-Ahram / Uruknet

Every once in a while Ibrahim Hawash, 42, calls his wife Noha from his nightshift job to make sure that she has followed the treatment course prescribed by their family doctor for the involuntary urination of their four children, who are in primary school. The doctor says that the four children lost their ability to control urination due to the fear they underwent when Israeli army jets bombed a home near theirs in the Jabalya refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip during the "Warm Winter" military campaign three weeks ago. The four children still remember the terrifying night when they woke frightened up to the sound of a thundering explosion in the area and found that the glass of their home's windows had fallen onto their bed.

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A review of the 2008 novel by James Howard Kunstler (Atlantic Monthly Press)

"The world has become such a wicked place," she said quietly, just a statement of fact."

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Jonathan Cook is a British-born independent journalist based (since September 2001) in the predominantly Arab city of Nazareth, Israel and is the "first foreign correspondent (living) in the Israeli Arab city...." He's a former reporter and editor of regional newspapers, a freelance sub-editor with national newspapers, and a staff journalist for the London-based Guardian and Observer newspapers. He's also written for The Times, Le Monde diplomatique, the International Herald Tribune, Al-Ahram Weekly and Aljazeera.net. In February 2004, he founded the Nazareth Press Agency.

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Lew Rockwell

We are guilty of a very great and ongoing evil.

Led by rulers blind to justice and deaf to history, arrogant and self-righteous, anxious for fame, indifferent to violence and willfully ignorant, a selfish and malleable American people, aroused by fear and steeped in obedience, sent their uniformed and armed sons and daughters into a strange and ancient land to conquer and root out its political leaders, defeat its forces, and remake that distant and foreign nation in its own image. Unfamiliar names like Mosul and Fallujah, crossed and re-crossed by the peoples of ancient civilizations for thousands of years before Americans birthed a nation and empire, became bloody headlines of mass destruction, death, desolation, and disruption.

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“All mankind are my brethren, and to do good is my religion.” - Tom Paine

On March 11, 2008, a rant from David Mamet appeared in the “Village Voice.” It was entitled: “Why I am No Longer a ‘Brain-Dead’ Liberal.” In it, he confesses that he now embraces the “Free Market” theology and that the late economist, Milton Friedman, is one of his heroes. (1) Mamet is a playwright, who prides himself for his writing on “politics.” His article, however, shows he’s not really much of a political thinker. I mean, what can you say about a man, who believes that Thomas Sowell is “our greatest contemporary philosopher?” The word “shallow” comes to mind. As for Mamet’s plays, I doubt if any will be remembered beyond 2020. In any event, Mamet’s piece stirred the raving Iraq War Hawk, Jonah Goldberg, into action. (2) He heaped fulsome praise on Mamet for abandoning his supposed liberal credo. Goldberg especially liked the fact that Mamet had ripped NPR (National Public Radio) as, “National Palestinian Radio,” and that he has now rejected “the pieties of the Left.”

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Photo by Awad Awad for AFP/Getty Images

Crescent & Cross

‘Perhaps you do not yet see that the worst is awaiting your kind in the face of the coming Islamo-Christian War, from which my kind will arise victorious. Perhaps G-d will find it suitable that a terrorist attack will end your misery. I shall personally pray for it to be so.”–Orri Joseph Avraham, an Israeli Citizen in an email to this writer

Like distant thunder and lightning that warn of an approaching storm, recent events strongly suggest a false-flag attack on the Catholic Church–either in the form of an assassination on the Pope himself or a terrorist attack on the Vatican–may soon be in the works for those wishing to widen the present ‘clash of civilizations’ between the Christian and Muslim worlds for Israel’s benefit.

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"More often than not, Tasers are being used dangerously by increasing numbers of police."

The occupation of a police officer is more a profession than it is an "on the job" routine, as so often is described by both police and their TV counterparts. What makes it a profession is the demanding work schedule, the stress of life-and-death realities not experienced by the public, and the ever-present realization that any day might be one's last. Spit-second life-and-death decisions are a daily concern.

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Land day

On March 28, 2008 the villagers of al-Masara, near Umm Salamona, in the occupied Hebron district will hold their annual non-violent demonstration and commemoration of Land Day and raise their voice in opposition to the separation wall and settlement expansion.

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American Journey

Somehow I wish I'd never seen the VIDEO showing the collapse of World Trade Center building 7 (WTC7) in March 2006 because I haven't stopped thinking about it ever since. Up to that point I'd not given much thought to the explanation the United States government provided it's citizens for the events of that day because although I wouldn't say I "trusted the government" I wouldn't say I distrusted them either. But one day while traveling Jer the Ripper turned his laptop to face me and asked me to look at a video - he didn't tell me what it was. I watched and told him it looked like a building implosion - who hasn't seen a couple of those at least on television? He then told me that what I had seen was WTC7, a THIRD skyscraper that collapsed that evening - but wasn't hit by an airplane.

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John Dugard is The UN Human Rights Council's Special Rapporteur on Palestine and a rare public official. In January 2008, he assessed the situation in Occupied Palestine (OPT). It was detailed, inclusive and honest. This article discusses his findings in-depth. Most of them have been widely reported, but they bear repeating nonetheless. It's because, in this instance, they're from an agency of the 192 member states world body. It's hoped that source highlights their importance and adds to their credibility.

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Smoking Mirrors

On they go, through the wreckage and the ruins, toward the glorious future that hangs like dew-kissed fruit on the rotating candy tree at the edge of the world. “Catch me and pick me and eat me.” The tree whispers into the dreams of the millions who follow the leader and onward they go. It doesn’t matter if it’s Chairman Mao or Dick Cheney, Olmert or Hitler. The uniforms change, the slogans change but the men remain the same. The people remain the same. They breed on the highway. They die by the roadside. They laugh in the sunlight and weep in the darkness. The circle of life completes.

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A mock cemetery set up in Gaza City to
symbolize the death of the economy due to
Israel's crippling blockade on the Gaza Strip.

aawsat.com

Gaza Strip, Asharq Al-Awsat - A 'cemetery' in the neighborhood of al Rimal in Gaza is attracting the attention of motorists and pedestrians alike. Set up last Tuesday in al Katiba Square, this symbolic cemetery is comprised of 'graves' symbolizing hundreds of factories that have been closed down as a result of the economic embargo.

The forty 'graves', which have been adorned with flowers, each have a tombstone that bears the name of the factory and the number of employees who have lost their jobs in the aftermath. The Popular Committee for Resisting the Siege (PCRS) in Gaza is responsible for the creation of this cemetery as a protest against the economic blockade that has been imposed on Gaza following the Palestinian legislative elections in 2006.

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He was only able to take a few steps and they bent his head back doing something to him
while the cop in front appears to hold both hands over the boy's nose and mouth
suffocating him into unconsciousness, this time killing him.

Have you ever seen somebody cruelly tortured to death, or seen a snuff film? Did you know that there are police in America that torture people to death? In this video we see a fourteen-year-old boy, tortured slowly, brutally to death by six police officers and a nurse in a Florida Juvenile detention center.

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The Ugly Truth

‘Israel on high alert as end of Mughniyeh mourning period draws near…’

‘Israeli fighters violate Lebanese airspace…’

To any average person, the above headlines seem like business as usual in the Middle East, as there has never been a period since 1948 where the once Holy Land was not a cauldron of violence and conflict. To those who understand the deeper reasons behind the recent (and not so recent) bloody history however–meaning Israel’s seeming addiction to the shedding of blood–what it indicates is that there’s more to all of this recent business than merely noise. The fact is, Israel’s war party is planning a hell of a bash, big enough to die for, and not just in the thousands but possibly in the millions.

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HaAretz

We need Europe, the peace needs Europe, but official Europe covers its eyes and automatically falls in line with the U.S. and its blind support for Israel and its boycott of Gaza. By not speaking about the siege on Gaza, the starvation imposed on it and the killing of hundreds of its people, Europe's leaders are not meeting their political and moral obligations. This blind friendship enables Israel to do whatever it wants.

The amount of support being shown for Israel these days is almost embarrassing. The parade of highly-placed foreign guests and the warm reception received by Israeli statesmen abroad have not been seen for quite some time. Who hasn't come to visit lately? From the German chancellor to the leading frontrunner for the American presidency. And the secretary-general of the United Nations is on his way. A visit to Israel has become de rigueur for foreign pols. If you haven't been here, you're nowhere.

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Uruknet

Whether their name is sectarian militias, paramilitary groups, death squads, mercenaries, criminal gangs, rogue elements in the new Iraqi security forces (no matter what they are called or how different they are), it is said they are controlling Iraq now and turning it into a no-man's land. It is said that the American occupation authorities, and their Iraqi agents in the government are helplessly incapable of controlling them. That they are ever stronger, better functioning, and more organized , and that they are consolidating their control over the north and the south of Iraq, making its division a de facto truth.

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Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons.” - Woody Allen

By now it should be clear to all but the craziest of optimists that we are in a recession, at least in US. What is not clear, however, is the severity of this recession and if this will turn into a depression. A technical recession is defined as the economic decline in two or more consecutive quarters. This means that the real economy instead of growing, contracts. This economic decline may involve a general decline in employment, investment and corporate profits. Recessions can be accompanies by inflation or deflation.

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Not sure the sneering, nasty old geezer heard her
correctly, she repeated, “You don’t care what the
American people think?” “No,” Cheney replied.

What will it take to really enrage the American people to the breaking point? Is it the comments made by that sneering, nasty old geezer with the pacemaker’s reply “So?” to ABC’s Martha Raddatz after telling him that only two thirds of the American people oppose the illegal invasion and war in Iraq? The truth is that it is more like 75 percent of the American people who want the war ended and believe, along with truly professional high-level military strategists and personnel, that the war is a horrific mistake and America’s most incompetent military misadventure. It has lasted longer than World War II!

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"Huda Ghaliya whom the whole world watched her running, screaming
hysterically on the beach looking for her dead father."

It is always difficult to accept the loss of someone dear, even if the death was caused by a normal reason; we always imagine that those whom we love will be for ever in our lives, they will be there for us whenever we need them, but it seems that this fact also is not true, and that every one of us will experience the loss of someone dear.

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Desert Peace

Israel and powerful Zionist circles in Europe and North America have been seeking of late to spread the message that criticizing Israel and her brutal policies and actions in occupied Palestine borders on anti-Semitism.

The ultimate purpose of this campaign is obviously to silence critics of Israel in order to allow the racist entity to murder Palestinians as quietly as possible and to steal their land as quietly as possible, and to get away with impunity.

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"So why all the concentrated media focus on New York Governor Elliot
Spitzer’s long-term rolls in the hay with paid sex partners?"

The DC Madam scandal has been erased from the American public’s radar screen by the Zionist-controlled “American” mass media. The Bush White House pedophile scandal is non-existent thanks to the Zionist MSM. And if one needs proof of the Zionist domination of our mass mainstream Establishment media, please go here to get up to speed.

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A Palestinian stands in Jerusalem's Old City Damascus gate

In face of the patent futility of talks with Israel, ordinary Palestinians are looking to a broader horizon of equal rights for all.

As an arrogant Israel continues to destroy the "two-state solution" through unrelenting settlement expansion in the West Bank, especially East Jerusalem, a growing number of Palestinians, including intellectuals, academics as well as ordinary citizens, are abandoning the goal of "Palestinian statehood".

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The Nabka - [Zionist terrorist groups] depopulated 400 villages
and forced 726,000 Palestinians to flee to Lebanon, Syria,
Jordan, and Egypt.

2,000 years ago the cross had no religious meaning and was not a piece of jewelry. When Jesus said, "Pick up your cross and follow me"...Everyone understood he was issuing a POLITICAL statement, for the main roads in Jerusalem were lined with crucified agitators, rebels, dissidents and any others who disturbed the status quo of the Roman Occupying Forces.

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ZionistWatch

In the delightful Mary Chase play Harvey, Elwood P. Dowd is seen as the amiable town eccentric. Dowd’s biggest foible in the eyes of the townsfolk is that he has a friend, what most would call an “imaginary friend”, who is a 6′1 1/2″ tall big white rabbit. Dowd spends most of his time frequenting the local bars and sitting and drinking with the rabbit, who is a pooka named Harvey. A “pooka” is simply a friendly spirit who appears in animal form. After having disrupted his sister Veta Louise Simmons’ social life by showing up at her social soirees and introducing her upper crust friends to Harvey, which none of them can see, she finally has enough of Elwood’s quaintness and takes him out to be committed to a sanitarium, a mental institution, with the misnomer Chumley’s Rest.

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Video

Rihab Kanaan, a Palestinian poetess, born in Beirut 1959, she used to recite her Patriotic Palestinian poems on Arab T.V. statons, the Intifadah and the Zionist occupation brutal manner to curbing it were the theme of her poems. She was called after the old Arab poetess Al-Khansaa that spent her life lamenting her killed brother with her poems. During the Lebanon Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila massacre in 1982 Rihab lost 54 of her family members and relatives.

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Smoking Mirrors

Well, I hate to tear you away from the screen. I know you are all focused hard, except for those who are hardly focused, on Slutz-Girl Vodka’s new butt girl “It goes down like smooooth reptile ooooooze.” It’s the American way to go from a whore to a princess of the marketplace over night. Where would we be if we didn’t have things like this to pay attention to? Maybe paying attention to something important, whatever that is.

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It takes one a lot of courage to be brave enough (read unashamed) to celebrate a 60 year history of ethnic cleansing, apartheid, occupation, racism and war crimes. And it looks like the main Jewish bodies in the UK have decided to work hand-in-hand, taking their pride in that history to a new level this year by organising the "Salute to Israel" parade in London next June.

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Redress

When you say you are going to be away for a couple of weeks, “have a nice holiday” is often the response. To explain that you are going to Gaza can meet with a blank look and even when you say Palestine this is confused with Pakistan. Maybe I am being hard but with a husband who has dedicated his later life to do all he can for the plight of Palestinians I feel, like him, that the Israel/Palestine “conflict” is at the heart of world peace and everyone should know about it.

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In the picture, a visual explanation of Jewish Self-Determination.

The right to self-determination is a luxurious approach at conservation of power reserved for the rich, strong and privileged. Since Zionists hold the reigns on international political power through their influence in important positions as well as the military might to maintain their right to self-determination, any current political debate on the legitimacy of this concept would lead inevitably to a dismissal of what we have come to accept as the Palestinian right of self-determination.

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Redress

To mark the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, nine foreign affairs "experts" offered their reflections in the New York Times on 16 March 2008 "on their attitudes in the spring of 2003 and … comment on the one aspect of the war that most surprised them or that they wished they had considered in the pre-war debate”.

Looking back, each of them did more to reveal their continuing blindness or to attempt to justify errors in their original judgment.

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CHARISMATIC, ARTICULATE, SMOOTH, AND INTELLIGENT, Barrack Obama is the living embodiment of his vague, ethereal, and tantalizing messages of “hope” and “change.” To the millions upon millions of US Americans desperate to purge the naked imperialism and blatant criminality of the Bush administration from the White House, Obama IS hope and change. Yet like many establishment liberals before him, Obama is no cure for the malignant creep toward fascism plaguing our nation. If elected, at best he will merely serve to postpone the inevitable a bit.

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TruthSpring

TS Admin : On the fifth anniversary of the Iraq invasion, George Bush said, "Because we acted, the world is better and the United States of America is safer." With a million dead Iraqis, more than 30,000 dead and wounded American soldiers, the world now teeming with a new breed of America haters and more than 3 trillion dollars blown to achieve all that, the US president sits atop an economically crumbling America and happily crows his mantra. George W. Bush indeed seems far removed from reality.

The essay below was written in the immediate aftermath of the destruction of Iraqi city of Fallujah. At the time, the article ricocheted across the cyber space and refused to die down. Every word of what was written has now been proven true. Here it is once again lest we forget.

Known as the "city of mosques" for its more than 200 mosques, Fallujah is also known for refusing to add Saddam’s name to the call for prayers from its ancient minarets. It is located on the banks of river Euphrates, the largest river in Southwest Asia. The 1700 miles long Euphrates is linked with some of the most important events in olden history.The city of Ur, found at its mouth, was the birthplace of Abraham. On its banks stood the city of Babylon. In the past, the army of Necho was defeated on its banks by Nebuchadnezzar. Cyrus the Younger and Crassus perished after crossing it. Alexander traversed it and continued his journey eastward. Presently, George Bush’s forces are crossing and re-crossing it making its waters redder each time with the blood of Fallujah’s citizens.

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(Written and distributed on the fifth anniversary of the last leg of the War on Iraq: BTW the US/British-led war on Iraq started on 15 Jan 1991 and has killed nearly 3 million people since then including nearly 1 million children by sanctions alone)

What is your position on Israeli violence? Palestinian violence? What do you think Israelis and Palestinians should or should not do? What do you think of Barak Obama? What makes Christian Zionists support Israel? These and many other questions came during over 30 talks given over the past three weeks.

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Popular Committee Against Siege (PCAS)

The siege of the Gaza Strip has lasted for more than 9 months now, and a new kind of target has become the “victims” of the siege...the 3900 factories and workshops that have been closed and / or completely destroyed by Israel.

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Republicans benefit from the fact that recessions are class conscious, affecting worse those who can least afford them. An era of highly leveraged US economic expansion and empire is about to come crashing down and swept away. Count on the GOP to make out like bandits.

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[Israel Palestine] As candidate McCain pandered to militants and fundamentalists during his trip to Jerusalem, giving firm "support for Israel's military response" [1] in Gaza, he ignored B'Tselem/the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in Occupied Palestine Report which affirms:

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CounterCurrents

On the 5th anniversary of the illegal, war criminal, Australian, UK and US invasion of Iraq we see an ongoing Iraqi Holocaust and Iraqi Genocide - post-invasion non-violent and violent excess deaths 1.7-2.2 million, post-invasion under-5 infant deaths 0.6 million, and 4.5 million refugees out of a current population of about 28 million i.e. about one quarter of Iraqis DEAD or HOMELESS.

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Smoking Mirrors

Today is March 19th. We celebrate five years of bloody war and torture based on lies. These lies came from Michael Ledeen and various neo-con insurgents like Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Pearle, Douglas Feith and Dick Cheney, operating in the United States government at various agencies. Well… the Afghan war began on October 7th, 2001 and that was also based on a lie so actually we have had around 6.5 years of bloody war and torture.

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AP photo / Dusan Vranic

Xymphora

Useful but fundamentally flawed article from the American Conservative by Robert Bryce on the amount of oil being used by the American military in killing the innocent civilians of Iraq, and the fact that almost none of it is coming from Iraq. We all remember how the neocons insisted that all that Iraqi oil was going to pay for the war and the occupation and the rebuilding (for the real world, see here and, taking into account the unreliable source, here).

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Znet

Apparently there is one set of rights for Blackwater mercenaries and another for the rest of us. Normally when a group of people alleged to have gunned down 17 civilians in a lawless shooting spree are questioned, investigators will tell them something along the lines of: “You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law.” But that is not what the Blackwater operatives involved in the September 16 Nisour Square shooting in Iraq were told. Most of the Blackwater shooters were questioned by State Department Diplomatic Security investigators with the understanding that their statements and information gleaned from them could not be used to bring criminal charges against them, nor could they be introduced as evidence. In other words, “Anything you say can’t and won’t be used against you in a court of law.”

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Baghdad: walls, wire and greetings from the occupiers

Lagauche Is Right

When I saw the first photos of Baghdad being bombed during the "shock and awe" phase of the illegal 2003 attack against Iraq, I was saddened. For millennia, the city had endured wars, occupations, plundering, natural disasters, and liberations. This time, however, it was different. I knew Baghdad would be changed in a despicable way that would take decades of recovery to become the city it once was.

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Mordechai Vanunu in 2004. Photograph: Sean Smith

Crescent & Cross

A Plea For Mordechai Vanunu

As some of you may know, yesterday, March17 I had the extreme honor of interviewing on the Republic Broadcasting Network Mordechai Vanunu, Christian convert from Judaism who spent nearly 20 years in the hellhole of an Israeli prison for revealing the Jewish state's nuclear weapons program. Not accustomed to patting myself on the back, nevertheless I can say unequivocally that the 2 hour program was phenomenal, 99% of the kudos going to Vanunu himself whom I credit with being a modern day apostle.

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In the name of patriotism, we have participated in a planned deception to create a state of permanent war. In the name of profit, America has been sacrificed on the altar of the god of war, to create a global empire based on the mass-marketing of death.

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As if the Israelis well practiced the devices and techniques to kill the hope inside us the Palestinians, the last operation in Gaza, proves that the killing machine of the Israelis is now created to put more pain and bitterness on the people of Gaza by targeting their small tiny buds, the innocent children, from infants up to toddlers, to even teenagers, and the only reason is that they are Palestinians.

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WUFYS

The Thief. You know, the one that killed your son and left your daughter in a vegetative state. The one that stole your valuables while at the same time, trashing your house.

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Mural from Abu Ghraib...

After Downing Street

Muslim prisoners held in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison were submerged in water-filled garbage cans with ice or put naked under cold showers in near-freezing rooms until they went into shock, Sgt. Javal Davis, who served with the 372nd Military Police Company there, has told a national magazine.

Davis, from the Roselle, N.J., area, said while stationed at the prison he also saw an incinerator with “bones in it” that he believed to be a crematorium and said some prisoners were starved prior to their interrogation.

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The Ugly Truth

When the scandal involving New York Governor Elliot Spitzer and his tryst with a $5,000-a-night prostitute named ‘Kristen’ was injected like an informational narcotic into the American consciousness the 2nd week of March, most people merely chalked it up as yet one more corrupt politician caught with his pants down, no pun intended. The theme of a moralizing, self-righteous politico pointing his finger into a news camera and Pharisaically grandstanding to the rest of the world while on the sly he was busying himself with the very business he was tasked with destroying is almost as old as the oldest profession itself.

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Thousands of Palestinian orphans on Tuesday took to the streets in this southern West Bank town to protest recent raids by the Israeli occupation army of their orphanages and boarding schools.

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From Tom Paine's Corner

Franz Kafka wrote what could be a writer’s credo: “It’s not laziness, bad will, awkwardness that causes me to fail in everything, but the lack of ground under my feet, of air, of law. My task is to create these things.”

(Rome) The reach and the role of literature in the unity of a Europe forever in search of its common roots is perhaps a uniquely European phenomenon. For while politics and economic issues have always divided these diverse peoples, cultured Europeans spread over the lands and seas from Finland to Sicily, from Wales to Poland, are unconsciously linked by the fine thread of their common literature.

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It is only the beginning as the decision makers of the Israeli army said. Threats of a new holocaust against the Palestinians from those who taste the ethnic cleansings they said. However, can not we consider what the Palestinians have witnessed since 1948 is a holocaust, a long term holocaust that happened every day, so it won’t be anew thing for us to suffer though this time it is an intensified sufferings addressed against the most innocent, helpless creatures, our children.

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The other day I heard some brilliant riffs on the news by the LA-based Frangela sitting in for Stephanie Miller and I laughed until my side felt like splitting in sync with their spot on takes on race, sex, rings of prostitution and propaganda in high places. Thanks Stephanie and Frances Callier and Angela V. Shelton. I need light relief.

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The Palestine Chronicle (http://www.palestinechronicle.com) continues to appeal to its friends, supporters and readers - and those who wish to preserve and support independent, alternative media - to come to its support, as it strives to raise needed funds to stay online.

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The state-corporate media keep deceiving you. While celebrating five years of media failure with books, articles, comments, TV and radio shows and happy birthday cakes, the same media are hiding the Iraq genocide in the most dreadful way.

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Why did Israel attack Gaza with such brutality? Did Israeli officials think, even for a fleeting moment, that their army's attacks could halt, as opposed to intensify, Palestinian rockets or retaliatory violence? Indeed, was Palestinian violence at all relevant to the Israeli action? Was the Israeli bloodletting in Gaza solely relevant to the Gaza/Hamas context, or is there a regional dimension that is largely being overlooked?

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Barack v. Hillary isn't the only Presidential election game in Washington these days. There is also the Samir v. Walid v. Michel (as in Geagea, Jumblatt and Suleiman) campaign underway as each seek through direct contact and surrogates, the US imprimatur in their quests to lead Lebanon.

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There is probable cause now to try George W. Bush for capital crimes in connection with the US program of torture at Abu Ghraib as well as the war of aggression against Iraq. There is evidence that George W. Bush ordered this program which most certainly resulted in numerous violations of the Geneva Conventions and the Nuremberg Principles.

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After two years of managing the Truth To Power website and subsequent to many more years of researching domestic and geopolitical events and trends, it is chilling to witness so much of what "prophets" like Mike Ruppert, Matt Savinar, Catherine Austin Fitts, Richard Heinberg, Matt Simmons, Dmitry Orlov, myself, and many others have been forecasting for nearly a decade or longer. We are no longer prophets but truly historians, and yet I take no pleasure in the accuracy of these forecasts or in the fact that our dire predictions are unfolding before our eyes.

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Once more, as Israel continues its ruthless attacks on the Palestinian population (against both civilians and resistance fighters), mainstream media outlets direct the blame on the victims. This time the villain is none other than the democratically elected Palestinian resistance movement Hamas.

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The Vineyard of the Saker

CENTCOM Commander Admiral William Fallon, the man who had dared to declare "there will be no war with Iran on my watch", has finally been fired. The pretext for his dismissal was a recent article in Esquire magazine. In his (rather sycophantic *) article about Fallon Thomas P.M. Barnett writes: If, in the dying light of the Bush administration, we go to war with Iran, it'll all come down to one man. If we do not go to war with Iran, it'll come down to the same man. He is that rarest of creatures in the Bush universe: the good cop on Iran, and a man of strategic brilliance. Setting aside the talk about Fallon's alleged "strategic brilliance" for a minute, there is no denying that Fallon has been outspoken against the Neocon plans for an aggression on Iran and against the Neocon's poster boy, General David Petraeus, whom he called an "ass-kissing little chickenshit" for cooking up the idiotic "Surge" plan to please the White House.

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If neither governments, nor most businesses are taking effective measures to avoid global climate catastrophe, what can people do at a grass-roots level to help sustain life on earth?

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The significance of Jim Garrison is not that he solved a murder, but that he stated the greater truth about a murder than was witnessed by the world on November 22, 1963. It was not only John F. Kennedy who was murdered that day but American democracy itself. It was, in Garrison's words, a coup d'etat!

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Eliot Spitzer takes the oath. (James Estrin/The New York Times)

Consortium News

[Robert Parry:] The U.S. news media can’t devote enough time to the prostitution scandal that just forced New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s resignation and gave the ethics enforcer of Wall Street a bitter taste of his own medicine. But the unspoken counterpoint to Spitzer’s dramatic fall from grace is how the same U.S. news media views public calls for the impeachment of George W. Bush or Dick Cheney -- over war crimes and violations of the U.S. Constitution -- as nutty and unworthy of serious debate. In this guest essay (which was written before Spitzer announced his resignation), Rabbi Michael Lerner looks at the perverse state of America’s ethics.

The cross-the-political-spectrum attacks on Elliot Spitzer and the intensity of the demands that he resign his office show just how far the right-wing sexual moralizing has been able to trump any other kind of ethical reasoning in American society.

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Reuters North American News Service

A young prisoner accused of throwing a grenade that injured two U.S. soldiers and their translator in Afghanistan called the Guantanamo war court illegal and unfair Wednesday, and then refused to participate further.

"I've been tortured. I'm a human being. I have not violated any law," Afghan prisoner Mohammed Jawad said in his first hearing on charges of attempted murder and causing great bodily injury. "I've been brought here illegally . I am innocent. It's an injustice to me," he said through a Pashto translator.

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© Liu Lijie Another Episode 2006 Courtesy of Bonni Benrubi Gallery,
New York

Smoking Mirrors

There are a number of things popping up on the radar these days and they’re all connected because everything is connected at some level. That is why some people work toward a common unity; these are the true minority in this world. There are those who divide people and things in order to manipulate and plunder them. These are more commonly seen because self-interest is more commonly present. Ever since Swine Rand came up with her, “greed is good.” slogan we’ve been treated to generations where each one is more selfish than the one before and we hear, “You’ve got to treat yourself right.” The ever popular, “you’ve got to look out for number one.” and all sorts of variations on the theme.

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TBRNews.org

For decades, it has been rumored and discussed, often on anti-Semitic websited and in revisionist journals, that “the Jews own all the media in America .” As the Internet is filled with all manner of rumors, some true but mostly invented fiction, it might be instructive to examine this question in a balanced way.

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© Carlos LATUFF

Desert Peace

Remember the name Baruch Goldstein? Fourteen years ago he charged into one of Palestine’s most sacred mosques, situated in the building that houses the Tomb of Abraham our Father, and gunned down 30 Muslims at prayer. He was killed before he could continue with his shooting spree…

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The Ugly Truth

AN OPEN LETTER TO THE AMERICAN PEOPLE

My fellow Americans, I sit here at 3:00 am with my heart racing and my hands shaking and I ask that you please take a moment to read my letter. I ask not that you read it for my sake, but rather for your own and for your children and grandchildren.

JUNE 8, 1967, during the Six Day War, we came as close to a nuclear war than anytime in history and it scares me to death as it should you. For the benefit of those who do not know what happened (the result of a deliberate campaign of cover-up and censorship by a Zionist-owned media in America) I will give you a quick history lesson.

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© Ben Heine

PoetSeers

And an orator said, "Speak to us of Freedom."

And he answered:

At the city gate and by your fireside I have seen you prostrate yourself and worship your own freedom,

Even as slaves humble themselves before a tyrant and praise him though he slays them.

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The world's number one terrorist organization, the CIA has committed heinous acts of terrorism abroad, murdering critics of US foreign and domestic policies and has done it on behalf of an increasing tiny, privileged American elite. This elite is a tiny one percent which owns more than the combined wealth the remaining 95% [See: the L-Curve]. On behalf of this tiny, privileged base, the CIA has placed itself above all law and supervision. The CIA's war on the world has claimed an estimated 12 million to 20 million victims, far more than the best estimates attributed to Adolph Hitler's 'Holocaust' of World War II.

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“Of Mommies and Daddies Who Just Don’t Give a Fuck”

Sorry kids, but you’re just going to have to deal with the fact that we are greedy narcissists. We’re dyed in the wool consumers, we worship Mammon, and eliminating the cancer of capitalism is simply out of the question.

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Online Journal

Don’t let the anthem fool you. The land of the free says “Go to Jail” to more than one in every 100 adult Americans, actually 99.1. What’s scarier is that one out of every 34 of the 230 million adult Americans are under the correctional system’s “guidance,” in jail or out on probation. This makes the US el numero uno jailer in the world, ahead of China, Russia, Brazil, India, Mexico, South Africa, England and Japan.

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Cartoon: "A People Divided" © Ben Heine

Desert Peace

On both sides of the wall today families are in the process of mourning their loved ones killed in battle. Anger, confusion, and hatred are rampant.

Confusion as to how could anyone kill a 20 day old infant in it’s mother’s arms, anger as to why it happened, hatred towards those responsible.

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Smoking Mirrors

Joe Scarborough calls for members of the 9/11 Truth movement to be thrown into secret prisons; possibly the greatest and most soulless whore to appear on television, ever; Geraldo Rivera, states that the New York bombing is likely the work of the 9/11 Truth movement. We’ve seen Netanyahu soul mate, Bill Maher, screaming like a hemorrhoidal finger puppet at his audience. We’ve seen sneers and grins and a denial that should be lining the outside of our space vehicles. We’ve seen and we have believed our lying eyes. Everyone else’s spouse is sleeping with the help.

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Death hovered over Gaza long before locally-made Palestinian rockets struck near the Israeli southern town of Sderot on February 27, killing Roni Yechiah and sparking an Israeli ‘retaliation’ that has already claimed over 120 Palestinian lives.

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Settler Graffiti in Hebron

The Palestinian Information Center

By Khalid Amayreh in Occupied East Jerusalem

I realize very well that you are not carbon copies of each other. And I also know that there are many Jews around the world who truly despise what Israel has been doing to the Palestinian people in your name. I earnestly commend these conscientious Jews for their morality and human decency. It is these honest people who enable us to retain the hope that counting on Judaic morality is not a lost cause.

Non the less, there are huge numbers of Jews who have found themselves transformed into soldiers of darkness and advocates of evil. There are Jews who shamelessly advocate the total annihilation of the Palestinian people. Unfortunately, these psychopaths are not isolated or marginal figures. On the contrary, they are highly respected by their hundreds of thousands of followers.

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The video obtained by Hope Steffey's lawyer and released to the public represents only a fraction of Hope's actual torture by the Stark County sheriffs department in Ohio. The video is difficult to watch, but it's very important for people, particularly Americans, to know that this outrageous crime has taken place in their country. The legal outcome of this case could determine what kind of country the United States becomes. If this level of injustice and brutality towards American citizens by their own law enforcement agencies and legal system is condoned and not corrected, the real possibility of humiliating and painful torture exists for all Americans.

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International Middle East Media Center (IMEMC)

The Al Haq Institute, a human rights center based in Palestine, issued a statement marking International Womens' Day yesterday, stating that Palestinian women are subjected to continual abuse of their basic human rights by the 40-year old Israeli occupation.

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On March 5, 2008, 404 House members beat the drum for more war by citing Iran and Syria as the main sponsors of Palestinian terror in the passing of House Resolution 951 citing the "more than 4,000 rockets and mortar shells [that] have been fired at Israel from the Gaza Strip by Hamas and other terrorist organizations... [and claims] the Government of Israel's military operations in Gaza only target Hamas and other terrorist organizations." [1]

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From Tom Paine's Corner

(Rome) A peculiar dualism marks the peoples of the Italian peninsula: the conflict of their enduring desire for order with their destructive attraction to anarchy. The consequence of this unresolved twist of character has been Italy’s historical stumbling block: the necessity of some strong-armed authority—whether a homegrown dictator or a powerful foreign occupier—to provide the cement to form a cohesive nation of the diverse Italic peoples. And today … to make them feel more like other Europeans.

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(A talk given on the First of March 2008 at Invitation to Learn’s weekend retreat) At the left, "Innocent" by Ben Heine

“They (the Palestinians) will bring upon themselves a bigger holocaust because we will use all our might to defend ourselves” (Matan Vilnai, Israeli Deputy Defence Minister, 29 February 2008)

It is clear beyond any doubt that the Israeli Deputy Defence Minister was far from being reluctant to equate Israel with Nazi Germany when revealing the genocidal future awaiting the Palestinian people, yet, for some reason, this is precisely what Western media outlets refrain from doing.

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Russian Military Analysts are reporting in the Kremlin today that China's President Hu has refused the United States request for over $2 Trillion in emergency assistance to bolster the collapsing American Dollar, and asked for in a personal meeting with the former US President Bush, the father of the current President Bush.

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Some people have likened the Earth to a relatively small lifeboat wheeling in an incredibly vast sea of outer space. If they also think that the sinking of the Titanic was a sad disaster, they will be heartbroken over the tragic devastation when this sort of occurrence happens on a planetary scale...

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"Instead of sending British youngsters to Auschwitz, I would suggest
spending governmental funds on student trips to Gaza concentration
camp."

David Cameron, the Tory leader, struggles these days. He faces demands for an apology, after he called government funding for school visits to the former Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz a "gimmick".

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Smoking Mirrors

The Levittown nation of Israel is going to be celebrating sixty years of being around in May of this year. As with any grand celebration they are going to want to have a lot of fireworks. They started celebrating early with a festive invasion of Lebanon in 2006. Party planners dressed as IDF insurgents slipped across the Lebanese border and got captured, although the press reported that it happened in Israel, and they lit up the sky in Lebanon. Amazingly the Israeli forces were already mustered before the event. That’s the nature of parties and celebrations, there’s always surprise and mystery.

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Common Dreams

It’s springtime in American politics. It’s only early March, but there’s a giddy, hopeful feeling to this election season, a sense that new leadership is blossoming. We could have a Democrat in the White House next year. But winter isn’t over yet and we need to balance our hope with a little fear. In 2000 Bush and Cheney stole the election in Florida. In 2004 they played dirty tricks in Ohio. In 2008 could they go one step further — and suspend the election altogether?

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Al-Ahram

With scores of Gazans killed by Israel, the position of President Abbas and the PA comes into focus, writes Khaled Amayreh in Ramallah

With Gazans being killed and maimed in the thousands, and with Israel's Deputy Defence Minister Matan Vilnai threatening them a "bigger holocaust", Palestinians -- intellectuals and ordinary people -- are wondering if the present calamity won't unite them, whatever will?

The question is not rhetorical. Israel is taking advantage of the enduring national rift between Hamas and Fatah to wreak as much death and havoc on the Palestinians as the international community -- i.e. the West -- can tolerate, which to say get away with tolerating.

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US rates of incarceration beat those of any European country to include Russia and former satellites of Stalin's Soviet Union. By the time you read this, more than 2.3 million adults will have been locked up in 'big houses' throughout the US. That number far exceeds some 1.8 million adult prisoners representing the total prison population of 36 European countries where the aggregate population is 2.7 timers that of the US.

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Smoking Mirrors

From the screaming loons at the Palm Beach election center to the bloodbath in Gaza, from the shores of Montezuma to David Motari’s puppy tossing, it’s been a hard Se7en years. I can honestly say that I saw it coming. I saw Mr. Executioner demagoging out of Texas and I looked at the source of the money behind him and I said to myself, “Bush… head for the mountains.” And metaphorically speaking, that is what happened.

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Water torture

Anti-Empire Report

With all the media coverage of "waterboarding" and all the congressional questioning of government officials about their views on the subject, I imagine that by now many people think that waterboarding must be the worst kind of torture that the United States has engaged in, and that if waterboarding is in fact not torture then the idiot king is correct when he says: "We don't torture." This is the way myths are born, so let's try and squash this particular one while it's still young.

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The Palestinian Information Center

From Khalid Amayreh in Occupied E. Jerusalem

"The shooting, which was highly expected, is believed to be a revenge attack for the killing by the Israeli army this week of more than 120 Palestinians, the vast bulk of them innocent civilians, including more than 13 children and toddlers."

In an apparent retaliation for the recent Israeli massacres in the Gaza Strip, (or the assassination in Damascus by Israeli agents last month of Imad Mughniya, a leading Hizbullah figure) unidentified guerillas on Thursday attacked the headquarters of the religious messianic Zionist movement in West Jerusalem, killing and injuring a number of settlers and soldiers. According to Israeli media reports, at least six settler-soldiers were killed and several others wounded. At least one Palestinian guerilla was killed.

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Underlying causes in richest countries in the world

One of the great joys of life is the absence of television early in life. Between then and now I have watched television; but for some years now, I have had no television reception in my home as I find television boring, crass, banal, uninspiring and unenlightening.

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ISAF TROOP DEPLOYMENTS IN AFGHANISTAN. (BBC) Source: ISAF

Index Research

1. Preface: Nato Dying in Afghanistan

While the US corporate media played out the Obama-Clinton soap opera, many respected organisations indicated “dire” problems within the structure of NATO and with its objectives in their Reports.

Bush is not interested in reading reports. Rice preferred meeting important people and visiting command posts rather than talking with the suffering people in Afghanistan.

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After Downing Street

One early morning, exactly five weeks after Casey was killed, I was awakened by a disturbing dream. Casey's father, Patrick and I had traveled to Santa Barbara for Mother's Day that year to visit the Arlington West exhibit sponsored by the Santa Barbara chapter of Veteran's for Peace. This was when we still believed that that our marriage was not going to be a casualty of the illegal and immoral travesty of the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

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Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and President George W. Bush, whose secret Palestinian interven-
tion backfired in a big way. (Vanity Fair)

ZioPedia

The corporate scribblings from Washington to Jerusalem are in overdrive. Vanity Fair has done it again, we are being told. In its April 2008 edition, we read Condi Rice and George W. Bush have secretly plotted to destroy Hamas. [1]

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As of February 8, 2005, "seventy-five Palestinians, including seventeen
innocent children, and fourteen Israelis, including two innocent
children, were murdered.

Award winning journalist David Rose, reporting in April's Vanity Fair, dropped "the Gaza Bombshell: Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and President George W. Bush's secret Palestinian intervention backfired in a big way. After failing to anticipate Hamas's victory over Fatah in the 2006 Palestinian election, the White House cooked up yet another scandalously covert and self-defeating Middle East debacle: part Iran-contra, part Bay of Pigs. With confidential documents, corroborated by outraged former and current U.S. officials, David Rose reveals how President Bush, Condoleezza Rice, and Deputy National-Security Adviser Elliott Abrams backed an armed force under Fatah strongman Muhammad Dahlan, touching off a bloody civil war in Gaza and leaving Hamas stronger than ever.

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It is always good to know as a citizen that your leaders think everything is under control, for this reason I can only begin to imagine the relief people in the United States must feel when President Bush publicly acknowledges; "I believe that our economy has got the fundamentals in place.² I must admit however that I struggle to understand where the president is getting his data from and I dread to think what things will look like by the time he admits that ³fundamentals² are not really ³in place². According to Alan Greenspan ³as of right now, U.S. economic growth is at zero², ³home prices will continue to weaken² and a boom in oil prices is going to "go on forever". As he puts it, the US is ³clearly on the edge.²

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Russian made RPO-A: 2.1 kg
thermobaric weapon. © B. Harry.

Marine Corps corporal: "Six rounds in three seconds... I thought this thing was sick."

Not content with their massive blood-letting and maiming mission last weekend, the Israelis couldn't resist nipping back into Gaza last night for more of the same.

Not that the British government seems to give a damn about the murder and mayhem being visited on the Gazans. Our foreign secretary David Miliband said: "I condemn the rocket attacks against Israel. These are terrorist acts. They should be seen for what they are - an attempt to break the political process by breaking the will of those committed to peace."

No condemnation of Israel's terrorist acts, then. No acknowledgement that any political process involving unrepresentative placemen like Abbas and Fayyad is doomed. No recognition that the prospect of peace has already been scuppered by the acceleration of Israel's land-grab and illegal settlement programme.

And the dear boy still seems utterly oblivious to the inevitable... that someone, sooner or later, will have to talk with Hamas. Good manners require it, even if good sense is lacking.

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“Credit is the air that financial markets breathe, and when the air is poisoned, there’s no place to hide.” - Charles R. Morris

“I hadn’t heard that!” This is how the President, George W. Bush, Jr., responded, when he was asked his thoughts on the prospect that gasoline could go over $4 a gallon this summer. At the White House press conference, on Feb. 28, 2008, he also denied the country was headed into a recession. President Bush is a dimwit, a crude frat house wise guy, who never grew up. It’s fair to say that President Bush is also a one-man-train wreck, not only with respect to the Iraq War, the loss of Civil Liberties, (some of which predate the U.S. Constitution), but to the faltering economy as well. What he doesn’t know about basic economics could fill volumes. Following the lead of the late President Ronald Reagan, Bush turned the country over to the Vulture Capitalists to exploit. This was like putting the fox in charge of the chicken coop.

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All that can be seen from the air is a vast
blanket of snow

Index Research

1. Preface

The Obama-Clinton media Soap Opera meant that the winter disasters in Afghanistan remained widely unknown. Reports were written but not read. The Guardian leader (01.02.07) echoed the despairing tone of these reports.

“It is hard to be hopeful about Afghanistan. Sliding away from progress, the country has begun a fretful, violent descent towards calamity that all the efforts of Nato, aid agencies and Afghans seem unable to stop. To be pessimistic about Afghanistan's future is not to say that the world should walk away: it is to recognise that reality is very grim. What is being done now in the country, at great cost in money and lives, is not working, and must be improved upon if it is not soon to be abandoned in the face of confusion, obstruction and defeat.”

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Walid Shoebat, "self-described former Muslim terrorist..."

[Melbourne, Fl. February 25, 2008] Nearly every one of the 2,000 seats at The King Center in Brevard County was filled with fannies attached to American fundamentalists [a fundamentalist is anyone who has quit thinking] who paid $18.00 for a seat and upwards of $1,000.OO to attend the pre-show meet and greet with the 'three stooges' of fundamentalism at the "WAKE UP AMERICA! Confessions of 3 X-Terrorists" show.

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Photo: Palestinian Pundit

The Guardian / Comment is Free

Washington's covert attempts to overturn an election result lie behind the crisis in Gaza, as leaked papers show.

The attempt by western politicians and media to present this week's carnage in the Gaza Strip as a legitimate act of Israeli self-defence - or at best the latest phase of a wearisome conflict between two somehow equivalent sides - has reached Alice-in-Wonderland proportions. Since Israel's deputy defence minister, Matan Vilnai, issued his chilling warning last week that Palestinians faced a "holocaust" if they continued to fire home-made rockets into Israel, the balance sheet of suffering has become ever clearer. More than 120 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza by Israeli forces in the past week, of whom one in five were children and more than half were civilians, according to the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem. During the same period, three Israelis were killed, two of whom were soldiers taking part in the attacks.

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“So I believe that I act in the spirit of the Almighty God. By defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.” - Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, 1924

“We will carry out a greater holocaust against the Palestinians,” - Matan Vilnai, Deputy Defense Minister, 1 March, 2006

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At 8:50AM on February 27, an Israeli aircraft fired two missiles at a civilian microbus on the coastal road near Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip. Six members of the Izziddin al-Qassam Brigades were in it at the time. Five of them were killed. The sixth one was seriously injured.

Twenty minutes later, another aircraft attacked a vehicle in which other Izziddin al-Qassam Brigades members were traveling. They escaped harm by fleeing before missiles struck their car and destroyed it.

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Anyone incapable of discerning the smear piece against Senator McCain, who I often refer to as Crazy Johnny “Madman” McCain, isn’t politically astute enough to vote or to even read a typical non-journalistic American newspaper. It was definitely a hit piece! And how, you may ask, do I know this?

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Ralph Nader

Making an exception this Sunday morning, and needing to nurse an aching back, I decided to light down gingerly in my favorite couch and switched on the worse-than-useless Sunday morning TV political blab sessions.

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A word of warning to the "Israel first" crowd in America, if you succeed in forcing us into a nuclear war to appease your fears about Iran, there will be hell to pay.

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The Palestinian Information Center

From Khalid Amayreh in Ramallah

The famous American magazine Vanity Fair has publishing a meticulously-researched expose showing that Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, his aide Muhammed Dahlan actively conspired with the Bush administration to topple the democratically-elected government of Hamas and engineer civil war in the occupied Palestinian territories.

In a lengthy article in the magazine’s latest issue, Vanity Fair said it obtained “confidential documents” corroborated by sources in the US and Palestine, which lay bare a covert American operation, approved by the President Bush and implemented by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Deputy National Security Advisor Elliott Abrams, to provoke a Palestinian civil war.

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The Ugly Truth

Despite the implication of what ‘Russian Roulette’ entails–meaning a fool’s game of chance with death–there is nothing suicidal (on a personal or national level) about what the ruling elite in Russia are planning, and no better proof of this lies than in the recent election of Dmitry Medvedev to the presidency.

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Sabbah

In June, 1942, in reprisal for the assassination of the Nazi commander Reinhard Heydrich, the Germans carried out a murderous rampage of murder and terror throughout Czechoslovakia. The small Czech village of Lidice bore the brunt of the German revenge, with the SS killing all the men, deported all women and children and razed the village to the ground.

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M. Thatcher, former British Prime Minister
and (since 2006) Patron of The Heritage
Foundation.

THE HERITAGE FOUNDATION, is a Washington, D.C.-based tax-exempt "non-partisan" Republican think tank celebrating three-plus decades of saying no to government and yes to privatization, deregulation, wars, intervention and 'traditional family values'.

Media Transparency

President Bush opened a recent speech at the Heritage Foundation about the "War on Terror" by acknowledging that while he had only 14 months left in his presidency he was going to be "sprinting to the finish line." Bush complained about the Senate being slow to confirm Michael Mukasey for attorney general, urged Congress to make the Protect America Act permanent, and blasted "MoveOn.org bloggers" and "Code Pink protesters." He wrapped up his speech by saying he believed a president of the United States will come to the Heritage Foundation 50 years from now and say "Thank God that generation that wrote the first chapter in the 21st century understood the power of freedom to bring the peace we want."

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WUFYS

Carlos Latuff's statement:

I'd like to beg all viewers to spread this image anywhere, as a way to expose Israeli war crimes against Palestinians. Use it on t-shirts, posters, banners. Reproduce it in zines, papers, magazines, and make it visible everywhere. Here is the high-resolution version for printing purposes: [link]

Thank you in the name of every suffering Palestinian.

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For all those who have been warning us about the Integration of Canada, United States and Mexico with the emergence of the North American Union, this latest agreement between Canada and the United States confirms what everyone feared.

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From Tom Paine's Corner
Symbols, rites and rituals: powerful ideological phenomena that express political statements about oneself and the world.

(Rome) When Italian Communist leader Enrico Berlinguer (1922-1984) spoke from the platform adorned in red banners raised on Piazza San Giovanni in Rome, a forest of red flags bearing the hammer and sickle waved over the great square in front of the Rome Cathedral, the traditional site of Italian Communist rallies. The entire event—place, objects, music, chants, language—was emblematic of the aspirations of Italy’s working class. Whatever Europe’s beloved Communist leader said was greeted with furious agitation of flags, the left arm, clenched fist salute and from loudspeakers bursts of the music of Bandiera Rossa (Red Flag). Italian Communist rallies are festive affairs, celebrated according to trusted rituals and symbols and a million voices singing the Internationale or Bandiera Rossa or Bella Ciao.

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The Palestinian Information Center

From Khalid Amayreh in Occupied Jerusalem

A worldwide organization representing anti-Zionist Jews has strongly condemned the ongoing mass killing and maiming by the Israeli occupation army of hundreds of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

In an “urgent statement” released Sunday, the Neturei Karta organization called on the world community to “stop the wild beast of the Zionist state from destroying the Palestinian people.”

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Photo © FREE GAZA

Redress

Stuart Littlewood shows how Israel’s stooges in Britain’s Parliament and at the core of the British government are disseminating disinformation in order to provide false excuses for Israeli crimes in the Palestinian territories and to influence UK policy in the interest of Israel.

The Israel lobby is now deeply embedded at the heart of British politics. Israel’s stooges keep up an endless flow of misinformation calculated to corrupt Parliament, blind MPs to the truth and bend decisions to suit the foreign regime’s interests.

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Palestine News Network (PNN)

Dear friends all over the world,

I'm calling on you in this moment while the Gaza Strip where I'm living is under attack by the Israeli occupation forces. They are showing no mercy; killing children, our beautiful youth and women. Sixty Palestinians were killed since Wednesday, the youngest of whom was six months old. Tens have been injured.

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On February 18, at 5:30PM in Havana an era ended when Fidel Castro's written statement announced it. It was read on early Tuesday morning radio and television and reprinted in the Cuban newspaper Granma as follows:

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Gaza City– On February 23, 2008, three Palestinian men picnicking in a field in the northern Gaza Strip were killed Saturday by an Israeli tank missile. The Israeli military confirmed the cross-border attack near the city of Beit Hanoun but claimed it targeted Palestinian militants on their way to fire mortar shells at Israel. Israel frequently carries out missile strikes and raids against militants in the the Gaza Strip believing this will end the near-daily rocket fire, which has killed 12 Israelis in the last seven years. According to B'Tselem, an Israeli human rights group Israeli missiles have killed 137 Palestinians in Gaza last year, 28 were civilians and since January, 79 were killed by the Israeli military. http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/mideastemail/la-fg-gaza24feb24,0,4640755.story

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Zionist apologists and hasbara doctors have been trying of late to convince the European public opinion that opposition to Israel’s brutal treatment of the Palestinian people amounts, more or less, to a new form of anti-Semitism.

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Queen Liliuokalani

America’s long-term foreign policy, including passive and/or aggressive regime change, is driven by corporate greed. Trade agreements or “reciprocity treaties” (tariff-free trade akin to economic annexation or the creation of American protectorates) always favor business. These obligatory contracts generally include the exclusive right to extract resources, sell products, and maintain commercial properties and military bases despite the justifiable objections of the native populations. [i] Though foreign interventions became even more frequent after the creation of the CIA, they began over a century ago.

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Bush's approval rating of some 18 percent (give or take a gopper) approaches zero. We're talking black holes and singularities here. This historic plunge is traced to numerous hoaxes Bush pulled on the American people: Iraq, the economy, a phony war on 'tehrruh', the GOPs elitist agenda. Bush has gotten away with it because the GOP are trained to believe whatever is repeated three times. Lately, Bush followers have surpassed the high standards of Lewis Carroll, believing "as many as six impossible things before breakfast." Among them is Bush's 'official conspiracy theory' of 911.

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The Palestinian Information Center (PIC)

Comment by Khalid Amayreh in the West Bank

As Israel is fulfilling its threat to inflict a “greater holocaust” (greater than the German Holocaust) on the Palestinian people, the vast bulk of Arabs and Muslims, as well as the rest of the world, are looking on passively as the Judeo-Nazi state is having a free season on the helpless Palestinians.

This is not a matter of controversy and the facts are neither nebulous nor incomplete. You are all watching the slaughter show before your eyes, on you TV screens. Yes, the scope of the massacres has not yet reached the Auschwitz proportions, but soon it will if you continue to play deaf and dumb as if the wanton slaughter is taking place on a different planet.

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The Zionists' land grab came first. Then the Israelis started killing the Palestinians.
They are still doing this. They will keep doing it for as long as it takes. -Just think of
the genocide against the Native Americans. No chicken. No egg. Just genocide.

Lataan Blogspot

The Western mainstream media propaganda is portraying the Gaza/Israel conflict as one that the Palestinians, Hamas in particular, started. For example, in today’s New York Times there is an article which says: “Tens of thousands of Gazans protested Israel’s repeated raids to halt persistent Palestinian rocket attacks…“

It explicitly says that Israel is bombing and killing Palestinians because of the rockets that Hamas is launching into Israel. The reality is; Hamas is launching rockets into Israel in order to get the Israelis to stop killing Palestinians in the Gaza.

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Palestinian medics carry a wounded child after an Israeli missile
destroyed the labor union headquarters in Gaza, 28 February 2008.
(Wissam Nassar/MaanImages)

The Electronic Intifada

Israeli officials began damage limitation efforts after the country's deputy defense minister Matan Vilnai threatened Palestinians in the occupied Gaza Strip with a "holocaust."

The comments came a day after Israeli occupation forces killed 31 Palestinians, nine of them children, one a six-month-old baby, in a series of air raids across the Gaza Strip. Israel claimed that the attacks were in retaliation for a barrage of rockets fired by resistance fighters in the Gaza Strip which killed one Israeli in the town of Sderot on Wednesday, 27 February. Palestinian resistance groups, including Hamas, said the rockets were in retaliation for the extrajudicial execution of five Hamas members carried out by Israel on Wednesday morning. Israeli occupation forces have killed more than 200 Palestinians since the US-sponsored Annapolis peace summit last November. In the same period, five Israelis have been killed by Palestinians.

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Bushehr nuclear power plant, Iran

There is no irony in appeasement, according to major media who, on February 20 and 21, reported on a press conference held in Brussels by the National Council of Resistance of Iran. From Associated Press account:

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Imad Mugniyah

We know well who killed the top Hezbollah commander, Imad Mugniyah on Feb 12th in Damascus.

While in the US media, only journalists like Seymour Hersh will have the nerve to point out the obvious, the Israeli media has not shied away from evidence of the Israeli intelligence’s involvement in this well-calculated assassination.

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There is one thing that defines everyone over the course of these early years of this new century. That thing is the 9/11 attack. Everyone in government and every field of endeavor the world over is defined by their position on this event. It is not necessary to know the truth. It is only necessary to know the extent of the lies in order to define any leader in any position anywhere in the world. By what they have said and by what they have not said, one can accurately judge who is an enemy of the people's of the world. One can accurately determine who is a tool of the psychopaths or one of them.

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