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Unaccountable: Private Military Contractor Abuses
by Stephen Lendman
Wherever they're deployed, they're menacing and feared for good reason. Known historically by various names, they include mercenaries, soldiers of fortune, dogs of war, and Condottieri for wealthy city state leaders and the Papacy in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance Italy.
Ancient Greeks and Romans used them. So did Alexander the Great, feudal lords, Napoleon and George Washington against the British.
Article 47 of the 1977 Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions calls them anyone:
- specially recruited locally or abroad to fight in armed conflicts;
- directly participating in hostilities:
- doing so for greater private gain than conscripted or otherwise recruited combatants;
- acting unaffiliated to conflict parties and not a resident of territory where they're waged;
- not an armed forces member of either side; and
- not sent by a nation unrelated to hostilities as a member of its armed forces.
Reinventing the Middle East lexicon
Eric Walberg
Gilad Atzmon
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master — that’s all.”
Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass (1871)
The lexicon of Israel and its Western lobbyists constantly needs parsing to know just what is meant. Most glaringly is the term “settlers”, which suggests peaceful pioneers wishing to integrate with the locals. In Israel, the word “settlers” is a loaded term, for they are “aggressive squatters, half a million of them in over 100 illegal colonies — ugly blots on an otherwise lovely landscape ... who terrorise local villagers, vandalise their crops, pollute their land and harass their children,” as described by Stuart Littlewood. The Fourth Geneva Convention forbids that an occupying power transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.
Palestinian Liberation Requires Unity
by Stephen Lendman
PLO Executive Committee member Hanan Ashrawi wants EU help to end Israel's occupation. She said America's preoccupied with elections and grossly biased for Israel.
Calling the current situation "dangerous" she said Israel's "dragging the region into the abyss." As a result, urgent EU help is needed "to end the occupation."
EU nations know their obligations under international law, including Geneva's Common Article 1. Requiring all nations enforce them, it states:
Israel Plans More Walls
by Stephen Lendman
Instead of peace, reconciliation, equity and justice, Israel plans settlement expansions and more Walls. More on them below.
At the same time, Abbas broke his pledge about no peace talks unless settlement expansions stop. Chief negotiators Saeb Erekat and Yitzhak Molcho are meeting in Amman, Jordan. They're joined by Quartet representatives.
Netanyahu's spokesman Mark Regev claims "talks are intended to move forward to negotiations."
PA security agency harasses non-conformist Journalist
Khalid Amayreh
This is not the first time I'm subjected to harassment and abuse at the hands of Palestinian Authority (PA) security operatives. On several occasions, I had been abused, imprisoned and humiliated by these agencies. In one episode in 2009, I was made to sleep in a rancid cell after reporting that PA police were preventing and brutally suppressing demonstrations against Israel in protest against Israel 's 2008-09 genocidal blitzkrieg against the Gaza Strip.
I thought the Arab Spring would convince the PA security apparatus to abandon or at least alleviate their police-state tactics against dissent and show more respect for human rights and civil liberties. However, it seems that that the PA, as far as its treatment of its people, remains largely unchanged. Old habits die hard, after all.
The Zionization of American politics and how it could be terminated
By Alan Hart
The first headline I thought of for this article was The Zionization of American democracy and how it could be terminated, but then I said to myself: “Don’t be silly, Alan, there’s no democracy in the ‘Land of the Free.’”
Leaving aside the fact that any American can now be arrested and detained without due process, there’s no mystery about why.
There’s much more to democracy than voting every few years for the lesser of two or three evils or in America’s case naked political whores (with the exception among the would-be Republican presidents of Ron Paul).
Are Multinational Corporations Psychopathic?
by Gary G. Kohls, MD
The infamous decision of the NeoConservative, pro-corporate, anti-democratic members of the Supreme Court in their 2010 “Citizens United” decision granted personhood to corporations. The ruling, which allows unlimited and anonymous funding of political campaigns by inanimate paper corporations, has further emboldened the already too-powerful, greedy and easily corruptible multinationals and their conservative political lapdogs to tighten control, via their campaign contributions (aka “investments or bribes”), over both centrist and right-wing lawmakers and Republican governors in both state and national legislatures. It is estimated that big corporations, through their lavish use of campaign money bribery, control the vast majority of our “elected” national leaders, both Republican and Democrat.
When is a terrorist not a terrorist? & War with Iran or not?
By Alan Hart
The longer and complete form of the first question in the headline is - When is a terrorist not a terrorist in the eyes of the Obama administration (not to mention all of its predecessors) and the governments of the Western world?
Answer: When he or she is an Israeli Mossad agent or asset.
In the case of the assassination of Iranian scientists, the Mossad’s assets are almost certainly members of the Mujahedin-e Khalq Organization (MKO) also known as The Peoples’ Mujahedin of Iran, which is committed to overthrowing the regime of the ruling mullahs. Many of its activists are based in Iraqi Kurdistan where Mossad has a substantial presence. It does the training there, selects the targets in Iran and provides the bombs and other weapons, and MKO members do the actual killing.
THE ZIONIST CARICATURE
By Gilad Atzmon
Could it be that Zionist-caricature Alan Dershowitz has resorted to comedy as he desperately tries to win his battle against me and my book? What else could explain this intellectually retarded Zionist mouthpiece’s repetition of the same old lies? A few years ago Norman Finkelstein established that Dershowitz is a plagiarist, but now Dershowitz extends this infamous title - Now, he’s actually plagiarising his own phantasmic fibs!
Just a week before Hanukah, fancying himself as a bit of a music critic, Dershowitz described me as an ‘obscure saxophonist’. This was amusing enough, but yesterday Dershowitz elaborated on his notion of ‘obscurity’. In an embarrassingly unimaginative and vindictive article he called Chicago University Professor of Philosophy Brian Leiter a “relatively obscure professor of jurisprudence”. For a native English speaker (and a Harvard Professor) Dershowitz sure has a limited English vocabulary.
21st century racism
Mary Shaw
As I write this on the holiday honoring Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., I reflect on King's vision of a world in which our children "will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."
And it saddens me to see how - despite having our first African-American president living in the White House - racism still abounds.
Racism against African Americans is not as blatantly obvious as it was during the Jim Crow era. The GOP even had a black RNC chairman from 2009 to 2011, and a recent but brief campaign by an African-American presidential hopeful. But that's like denying racism by saying "some of my best friends are..."
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