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Straight Talk on Gaza
by Stephen Lendman
Palestine's democratically elected government is targeted. West Bank coup d'etat authority has no legitimacy. Abbas' term as president expired in January 2009. Israel rigged his 2005 election.
What's ongoing is illegal aggressive war. Israeli provocations caused it. Israel's entire history reflects belligerence. It lives by the sword. It's a modern-day Sparta.
Operation Pillar of Cloud was planned months ago. All military campaigns take many weeks or months of planning. Attacking Gaza coincides with Israel's January elections.
Netanyahu hopes war will ensure his reelection. On January 22 he'll know. Also at issue is subverting Palestine's November 29 UN non-member observer status bid. Israel and Washington are going all out to sabotage it. As of now it looks certain.
Targeting Civilians: Israel's Specialty
by Stephen Lendman
Bullies choose easy adversaries to pummel. Equal fights are shunned. It's the same in schoolyards or battlefields.
America and Israel operate this way. They avoid foes able to give as much as they take. Rogue governments never say they're sorry.
During Cast Lead in January 2009, Professor Jeremy Salt wrote "A Message to the brave Israeli Airmen." His comments apply to what's now ongoing.
What’s it like firing missiles at people you can’t see, he asked?
Does it help being unable to see who you're killing?
Media Cover for Israeli Crimes
by Stephen Lendman
The pattern playing out in Gaza is one Israel followed many times before. Provocations target adversaries. Multiple ones usually occur before targets respond.
Blame the victim follows. Israeli aggression is called self-defense. Legitimate defense is called terrorism. Media scoundrels support Israel in lockstep. It plays out the same way every time.
Facts on the ground are ignored, sanitized, suppressed, and/or distorted. Readers and viewers get manipulated managed news misinformation.
Ten Years of Shame: Arguments About Blame THE INTELLECTUALS' BETRAYAL
Aleksandr Tarasov
The 1990s were the years in which the intelligentsia gave up its identity and its autonomy. The intellectual [intelligent] – if he is authentic and not a pseudointellectual (an intellectual by status, a bureaucrat, a clerk, a narrow specialist in a nonindustrial sphere such as education, management, or information technology) – is a creator: a creative individual, a genius, a person engaged in the search for truth through rational (scientific) or emotional (artistic) understanding and assimilation of the world. True intellectuals comprehend their individual role as thinking subjects and their social role as enlighteners and emancipators. Genuine intellectuals are paragons of critical thinking, opposed to conformity and parochialism.
Israel's Operation Pillar of Cloud
by Stephen Lendman
On November 14, Israel murdered Hamas military commander Ahmed Jabari in cold blood. A missile struck his car. Another passenger was killed. Unconfirmed reports said it was his son. An IDF Twitter message said, "We recommend that no Hamas operatives, whether low level or senior leaders, show their faces above ground in the days ahead."
Press TV said Shin Bet claimed responsibility. An official statement said:
"During a joint operation of the General Security Service (Shin Bet) and the IDF today, Ahmed al-Jabari, the senior commander of the military wing of Hamas in the Gaza Strip, was targeted."
Attacks continue. Israel's Operation Pillar of Cloud (aka Cloud Column) killed at least nine Palestinians. Over 20 others were injured. Authorities expect death and injury tolls to rise.
Excuse while I vomit
By Alan Hart
I imagine I am not the only one who feels the need to vomit (dictionary definition - “to throw up the contents of the stomach through the mouth”) when Israel’s Goebbels justifies the Zionist state’s ferocious and monstrously disproportionate attacks by air and sea on the Israeli-blockaded Gaza Strip, the prison camp which is home to 1.5 million besieged and mainly impoverished Palestinians. The Israeli to whom I am referring is, of course, Australian-born Mark Regev, the prime minister’s spokesman, for which read spin doctor. The more I see and hear him in action, the more it seems to me that he makes Nazi Germany’s propaganda chief look like an amateur.
President Obama and Remaking of US Presidency
Mahboob A. Khawaja, PhD
In his presidential re-election winning comments on November 6 at Chicago, President Obama reclaimed his moral and intellectual conscience to state that he “will be open to change and listening and learning and to be a better president to serve the American people.” If contemporary history is a reference point, he made similar assertions during and after the 2008 historic presidential win by a black candidate. Did Obama share new political imagination to pursue a different course of policies and actions in his 2nd term of office? Is Obama a changed person? Does he posses a rekindled consciousness of his broken commitments, failure and challenges in waiting to prove his leadership for the 2nd term? What is there to believe his credibility?
What Did Petraeus Know and When Did He Know It?
Michael Collins
(Washington, DC, 11/15) The bitterness of the neocons knows no limit. They're still having tantrums after being denied the unchallenged ability to pillage and plunder at will (and at our expense). Never mind that the public doesn’t want to hear it. The Congressional Republicans are jumping up and down over their big question: When did President Obama know about the affair between General Petraeus and Mrs. Broadwell? Talk about a misguided salvage operation. Their inquiries will spark some questions that they won't want asked. (Image)
The real questions concern the behavior and motivation of General Petraeus in the aftermath of the murder of the United States ambassador to Libya, Christopher Stevens, on September 11, 2012.
When did General Petraeus know the sequence of events that preceded the murder of United States Ambassador Stevens, indicating the likely motivation for the murder?
The Petraeus CIA provided inaccurate information about events on the ground to the Obama Administration, particularly to President Obama and United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice. Did they know it was inaccurate?
If the Petraeus CIA mislead or withheld information from the White House or allowed that to happen, was it in the service of the Romney campaign or those clamoring for an attack on Iran?
A World in Which Truth is a Dying Species
by GAITHER STEWART
Rome
US military bases encircling Iran
Hidden away somewhere within the labyrinth of the Pentagon there must be a top secret euphemism department engaged in the invention of the Orwellian surrogate words that have crept surreptitiously into the American English vocabulary and from there translated into many other languages. In my mind I see a unit of studiously serious executives, coffee mugs in their hands and their neckties awry, devising senseless terms for terrible things and used unthinkingly by people today from New York to California, from Maine to Texas. The goal of my imaginary secret unit is to render ugly terms meaningless or to transform them into their opposite. To quote the perceptive Scottish writer, Candia McWilliam, "plain words are always under threat." There are words that don't say what they mean and there are words that say what they don't mean.
Intensified or enhanced interrogation sounds oh so much more genteel than the hideous word TORTURE. Collateral damage goes down quite well instead of the savage bombing and strafing of a funeral procession or a wedding party. Military leaders themselves have come to love the suggestive word "footprints" to indicate the evidence of America's powerful presence throughout the world: "We were here and we leave this little sign with you." A little footprint, maybe a fleet of super bombers or Predator drones.
Tropical Storm Sandy: Natural or Political Disaster?
James Petras
“Homes still lack power a week on”
Financial Times 11/5/12, p. 3
“Households suffer without power as temperatures fall and storm looms”.
Financial Times 11/6//12, p. 3
“Climate change needs action but it has a cost”
Financial Times 11/5/12, p. 4
“City accused of not acting on plan”
Financial Times 11/1/12, p. 3
Introduction
What has the world’s biggest and most costly ‘national security state’ have to do with securing the life, livelihood and property of the global financial capital of the world? Virtually nothing!
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