Helen Thomas on Her Resignation and Middle East
November 16th, 2010 § 5 Comments
Brave and outspoken: the great Helen Thomas.
Thomas: Israel should get out of Occupied Territories; White House Correspondents Association were out of line.
Virginia standing up to the Fifth Column
November 15th, 2010 § 3 Comments
Eric Cantor
IMPORTANT: Pro-Palestine activists and ordinary Americans who want their country back have an ideal opportunity to strike against Israel and its fifth column in the United States. Rep Eric Cantor recently promised the Israeli government that he would do everything in his power to undercut his own president on behalf of Israel, statements which are demonstrably felonious under the Logan Act of 1799. Even the rightwing Examiner was moved to write that
Cantor’s comments take away from American prestige, and set a dangerous precedent for future United States foreign policy. Cantor and his Republican colleagues have every right to support the nation of Israel, but their ultimately loyalty should be to the United States and not the country of Israel. If Israel’s interests conflict with that of the United States, the Israeli government should theoretically not be able to call on Republicans in Congress to “check” the foreign policy of the Obama administration.
Should someone take this case to court, it will be an open and shut case. Veteran journalist and blogger Helena Cobban is already rallying Virginians to confront Cantor. If you are one, this campaign could really use your support.
The following two posts are a must read, one by Helena Cobban and the other by Glenn Greenwald.
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Robin Yassin-Kassab: Too late for two states
November 15th, 2010 § 4 Comments
Reporting for Al Jazeera, writer and PULSE co-editor Robin Yassin-Kassab writes:
I saw Haneen al-Zoabi giving a lecture. She is the knesset member who sailed with the Gaza Flotilla and was so shabbily abused while attempting to give her account of events to Israel’s parliament. In Nablus, she spoke emotionally about the situation of Palestinian-Israelis, the descendants of those few who escaped ethnic cleansing in 1948.
Citizens but not nationals of the state (nationality is for Jews only), Palestinian-Israelis receive a fraction of the services offered to Jews, are forbidden from teaching Palestinian history in schools and are as likely to be victims of land confiscation as fellow Palestinians in the West Bank. Ninety-three per cent of Israel’s land is off-limits to non-Jews and half of Palestinian-Israeli families live below the poverty line.
I heard Jamal Hwayil speak. He was the leader of the Fatah-affiliated al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade in Jenin at the time of Israel’s 2002 massacre there and now he is an independent member of the Palestinian parliament. He took a clear position on Palestinian division: “Political arrests are wrong. Wrong in Gaza and wrong in the West Bank. Political arrests have no place in a liberation struggle.”
A little later he added: “There can be neither meaningful negotiations nor productive armed resistance so long as the political leadership is divided.”
Read all of Yassin-Kassab’s “Too late for two states” here.
Valley of the Wolves: Palestine
November 14th, 2010 § 6 Comments
Israel-Turkey relations may survive the Flotilla flap, but lets see if they can survive this. Kurtlar Vadisi is the immensely popular Turkish series which was first turned into a Rambo-style big budget film attacking the US occupation of Iraq (at a time when relations between the US and Turkey were otherwise cordial). In the forthcoming film, the same Turkish team infiltrates Israel (or Palestine, as the film’s hero insists on calling it) to exact revenge for the flotilla murder. Here’s the trailer:
Harman’s Newsweek set to merge with Daily Beast
November 14th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
Back in August, 92-year-old multimillionaire Sidney Harman bought Newsweek for $1. Sidney’s decision was hardly “a financial one,” considering Newsweek’s major losses and liabilities. Note that Sidney is the husband of the infamous Blue Dog Jane Harman who was put under FBI and Justice Department investigations after she was caught on tape negotiating with an Israeli agent about charges against AIPAC’s Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman — both indicted for spying for Israel. In August Dirk Smillie reported that Jane “would like to control Newsweek “since she has been considering leaving congress, especially if the Democrats suffer major losses during this election cycle (which they have).
She is interested in exiting Congress andNewsweek would be a perch for her to be a major player,” says the source. Harman has served in the House for 17 years. If House Democrats lose as many seats this November as polls predict, her new minority status could certainly accelerate such a decision.
Sidney will be Executive Chairman of the new company and the Daily Beast’s Tina Brown will remain as Editor-in-chief. The merger is being referred to as a “joint venture” but as a print magazine with many more years in the industry, Newsweek generates more revenue than the Daily Beast and has a significantly larger readership, giving Newsweek the upper hand. Shortly after Harman’s purchase, Fareed Zakaria (who boldly returned an award to the ADL and the $10,000 that came with it as a stand against the ADL’s displays of racism against Muslims) left his position as editor of Newsweek. Harman downplayed the loss of Zakaria, saying that ”Fareed has done us a great favor by leaving so we can start fresh.”
Ali Gharib on the ‘Goldbergian Principle’
November 14th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
From Mondoweiss:
After the break-up the latest plot by Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) to attack the U.S. by FedExing bombs set to blow up in mid-air, Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic set out to use the attempted attack as a way to disprove ‘linkage‘ – ie the notion that solving (or even pressuring Israel to solve) the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a productive step towards helping the U.S. with it’s myriad problems in the Mid East, including international extremist Muslim terror.*
Learn more about Jeffrey Goldberg (whose claim to fame began with successfully pushing the idea that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and posed a threat to the entire world) here.
Questions about fighter jets
November 14th, 2010 § 2 Comments
Worth how many fighter jets?
Today’s Jerusalem Post summarizes some of the rewards offered by the U.S. in its latest attempt to coax Israel into briefly curtailing its illegal activity on Palestinian land. In exchange for a proposed 90-day moratorium on settlement-building, East Jerusalem excluded,
The US administration would ask Congress to approve the supply of 20 additional advanced fighter planes to Israel worth $3 billion so that Israel can keep its qualitative [military] edge.
This defense assistance will be added into Israel’s security agreement with the US, so that Israel’s safety can be assured.”
I have just a few initial questions about this proposed exchange:
- Is the number of illegal settlements that can be erected in a period of 90 days somehow equivalent, in terms of qualitative military edge, to 20 advanced fighter jets?
- Is continued building in East Jerusalem vital for Israeli security, no matter how many fighter jets the state possesses?
- Do pauses in settlement-building embolden the Iranian regime and cause it to forget about Israel’s nuclear stockpile?
Additional questions might be posed to U.S. taxpayers, such as whether the Israeli ability to break the sound barrier over Lebanon is a personal priority.
Politics of terror threats
November 13th, 2010 § 2 Comments
Riz Khan Show with Robert Baer and Amitava Kumar. Baer is refreshingly forthright about the terrorism industry, and its investment in amplifying fear.
If you give us cholera, we will give you fire
November 12th, 2010 § 1 Comment
Residents of the largest slum in Haiti’s capital Port-au-Prince have been demonstrating over the country’s response to the cholera outbreak. The protesters in Cite Soleil said the government and the UN have failed to protect them, as the number of people killed by the highly contagious water-borne disease soared to 724. In the meantime, the US Congress continues to block the delivery of the $1.15 billion in reconstruction money it promised to Haiti back in March.
The Pan American Health Organisation, the regional office of the UN’s World Health Organisation, has warned Haiti to expect hundreds of thousands of cases now that the disease appears to have taken hold.
They also vented their anger at NGOs operating in the country, where a devastating earthquake on January 12 killed more than 250,000 people and destroyed homes, forcing more than one million people to seek shelter in cramped makeshift camps.
