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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Curtis Allgier

Deseret Morning News

It's the most distinguishing feature of Curtis Allgier, the one that makes him stand out in a crowd.

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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