All posts tagged: Israel

AUMF 2018 and the “forever war” in the Middle East

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by Renee Parsons The Senate Foreign Relations Committee held a hearing on May 16th regarding the authorization of a new Authority for the Use of Military Force 2018 (AUMF). Despite a current lack of unanimity on the committee, the draft authorization (SJ Res 59) has been brought forward as a working document despite the lack of successful back-room negotiations in recent weeks. The hearing was conducted with no quorum present, the lack of which denied the sponsors an easy vote of approval. The AUMF 2018 would replace AUMF’s 2001 and 2002 which proponents suggest would remove the onerous Constitutional responsibility from a self-proclaimed over-burdened Congress from voting to approve every single separate act of war. While final approval of the AUMF 2018 represents a “Forever Vote,” product of a low vibration consciousness, the ACLU, which should be leading a vigorous national campaign against the proposal, appears absent from the debate. Approval of a one-size-fits-all AUMF will greatly facilitate the Pentagon’s long held desire to ‘take out’ seven countries in five years – although somewhat behind …

Trump – Israel Collusion on Syria

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by Renee Parsons Considering the sequence of recent events in the Middle East, it is obvious that the circumstances regarding the US withdrawal from the nuclear accord with Iran were carefully thought out in advance, as a pre-arranged strategy to pave the way for escalating Israel’s conflict with Iran and the war in Syria. In presenting their own self-serving narrative of lies and distortions that Iran is conducting a ‘secret’ nuclear weapons program, Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu and President Donald Trump remain oblivious to the stunning hypocrisy of their own duplicity and stupidity; as if the rest of the world does not see through their pathological deceits. In their most recent public presentations, both pathetically flawed individuals, trapped in a Matrix of their own, continue to confuse war with peace and have no clue how to distinguish the difference. Publicly projecting one’s own evil agenda onto an ill-fated population is an old political trick to deflect attention from one’s own sins while pointing the finger elsewhere and it would come as no surprise to discover …

Do you want to travel around the Middle East? Think twice!

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Text and Photos by Andre Vltchek Do you think it is that simple to travel around the Middle East? Think twice! Ask Palestinians, about trying to get from a point A to a point B in their own nation. Some time ago, sitting in an old Ottoman hotel in Bethlehem, I asked a waiter what it takes to travel from there to Gaza, where he said, several of his relatives were living. He looked at me as if I had fallen from the Moon: “There is no way I could travel there. If my relatives get very sick or die, then, in theory, I could apply for an Israeli travel permit to go there, but there is absolutely no guarantee that they would approve, or that I could get to Gaza on time…” I tried to appear naïve: “And what if someone from an Arab country which does not recognize Israel, wants to come here, to Bethlehem? Like, a Lebanese pilgrim or just a tourist? Could he or she enter from Jordan?” The waiter weighed …

Anti-Semitism. Orchestrated Offensive against Jeremy Corbyn in the UK

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by Jonathan Cook For months, a campaign has been aimed at destabilising British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, accused of anti-Semitism. The right-wing party, Tony Blair’s heir, and pro-Israel circles are targeting both Corbyn’s left-wing line and his support for the Palestinian people. Britain’s opposition leader should have plenty on his plate at the moment, but Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn is spending much of his time instead putting out fires as he is attacked from within and without his party for failing to get to grips with a supposed “anti-semitism crisis” besetting Labour. Late last month leading Jewish groups organised a large “Enough is enough” march on parliament, attended by prominent Labour MPs, to accuse Corbyn of siding with anti-Semites. In response to the rally, Corbyn issued a statement acknowledging that “anti-semitism has surfaced within the Labour Party,” apologised and promised “to redouble my efforts to bring this anxiety to an end.” Under Media Attack But there are no signs that Corbyn’s problems are about to end. On April 17, he had to endure the …

How Social Media Platforms Suppress Key Truths

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by Eric Zuesse On April 23rd, the great independent investigative journalist, Craig Murray — a former British diplomat — headlined at his blog, “Condemned By Their Own Words”, and he posted there the translated-to-English transcript (excerpted below) to this Israeli radio Hebrew broadcast on April 21st, in which an Israeli Brigadier-General, named Fogel, explained why Israel’s troops are doing the right thing to shoot and even to kill Gazans who come (an unspecified) too close to the wall which separates Israel from Gaza: FOGEL: Any person who gets close to the fence, anyone who could be a future threat to the border of the State of Israel and its residents, should bear a price for that violation. If this child or anyone else gets close to the fence in order [the soldier thinks possibly] to hide an explosive device or [to] check if there are any dead zones there or to cut the fence so someone could infiltrate the territory of the State of Israel to kill us… NESIEL [the interviewer]: Then, then his punishment …

Israel’s Legislature Votes War Against Syria

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Eric Zuesse The key decision now will be made by Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. On May 1st, Al Masdar News headlined “Netanyahu is granted the ability to wage war without the Knesset”, and reported that Israel’s Knesset or legislature had voted late on Monday night April 30th, to hand entirely to the far-right Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and to his extremely far-right Minister of Defense Avigdor Liberman the decision as to whether or when to invade any country — the main actual target is Syria, but Iran and Lebanon are also in Israel’s gunsights. Israel’s newspaper Haaretz reported about this on April 30th, while explaining that this legislation was “transferring responsibility for declaring war from the full cabinet to the smaller security cabinet. The joint committee of the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee and the Constitution, Law and Justice Committee rejected his request but it was later voted for by the Knesset plenum.” The real change that the new law introduces is to transfer Israel’s war-making decisions away from both the Knesset and the …

USA: No Restitution to Syria

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by Eric Zuesse On April 22nd, an anonymous U.S. “Senior Administration Official” told a press conference in Toronto, that the only possible circumstance under which the U.S. Government will agree to pay anything for the harms (bombings of infrastructure etc.) it’s doing to Syria, would be if Syria will agree to cede, to U.S. control, a portion of its land: QUESTION: When you say no reconstruction money for areas that are under Assad’s control, there is some reconstruction money that’s currently frozen or under question for areas that are not under Assad’s control? MODERATOR: That’s stabilization, which is different from reconstruction, just to clarify. “Stabilization” is the solidification of control by the U.S. Government, via its proxies (‘rebels’ trained by U.S. and financed by the Sauds) who are fighting to overthrow Syria’s Government; and the U.S. won’t pay any reconstruction unless it’s “stabilizing” that particular part of Syria. If America’s 7-year-long effort at regime-change in Syria turns out to be a total failure (grabbing no part of its territory), then the U.S. won’t pay even …

Barcelona, Roger Waters, White Helmets

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by Phillip Roddis A Pink Floyd fan for half a century, and neutral on the band’s acrimonious eighties divorce, I was thrilled by Roger Waters’ denunciation – an unequivocal exception to the rule that celebs are intimidated by the Western world’s most powerful lobby – of an Israel I recently described as: [the] world’s premier ethnographic crime scene and, alongside the USA, its most serial breacher of international law. Also – a fact insufficiently appreciated by a pro-Palestinian lobby understandably focused on immediate injustices – up there with Saudi Arabia as regional enforcer, covert and overt, for the West. Alas, many who support the Palestinian cause nevertheless buy the mainstream line on Syria. A vitriolic example is given by this comment from the pro-Palestinian Israeli – yes, there are more of them than Labour Friends of Israel would have us think – Dimi Reider, who took to FB to say: If you think Assad is somehow an anti-imperialist actor, or if your basic assumption is that he COULDN’T POSSIBLY gas his own people and it …

The Victims in Gaza and Douma

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by David William Pear, first published by The Greanville Post In their book Manufacturing Consent Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky distinguished between two kinds of victims: the worthy victims and the unworthy victims. The “worthy victims” are the victims (real and alleged) of leaders on the U.S. enemies list, such as Bashar al-Assad. The “unworthy victims” are those of the U.S. and its client states, such as Israel and Saudi Arabia. The U.S. led cabal calling itself the “international community” is outraged when there are worthy victims. For example the U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley holds up pictures of dead Syrian babies for the world to see. Worthy victims are granted human rights, and Assad deserves our outrage. Unworthy victims for example are the 50,000 Yemeni children who have died of starvation because of Saudi Arabia’s total blockade of Yemen, including blockading food, water and medicine. Unworthy victims are blamed for being victims and ignored by the international community and the mainstream media. Unworthy victims have no human rights. Yemen is a humanitarian …

How the Military Controls America

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by Eric Zuesse, originally posted at strategic-culture.org Unlike corporations that sell to consumers, Lockheed Martin and the other top contractors to the U.S. Government are highly if not totally dependent upon sales to governments, for their profits, especially sales to their own government, which they control — they control their home market, which is the U.S. Government, and they use it to sell to its allied governments, all of which foreign governments constitute the export markets for their products and services. These corporations control the U.S. Government, and they control NATO. And, here is how they do it, which is essential to understand, in order to be able to make reliable sense of America’s foreign policies, such as which nations are ‘allies’ of the U.S. Government (such as Saudi Arabia and Israel), and which nations are its ‘enemies’ (such as Libya and Syria) — and are thus presumably suitable for America to invade, or else to overthrow by means of a coup. First, the nation’s head-of-state becomes demonized; then, the invasion or coup happens. And, …

A Madman on the National Security Council

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by Matt Purple, from The American Conservative Would that John Bolton were only a clown. The mustachioed alleged diplomat, briefly of the Bush administration—and initially criticized as too controversial even for that team—has now been appointed national security advisor. That position will give him the president’s ear on matters of foreign policy, as well as control over which other administration principals enjoy such access. Donald Trump pledged that if elected he would be a different kind of Republican president, and he’s delivered: under the last GOP administration, Bolton occupied a slightly lower-ranking position than he does now. Bolton is indeed no circus act: he’s one of the sharpest and most dangerous national security operatives in Washington. To take just one example, last summer, Trump made it known that he was considering pulling out of the Iran nuclear deal, a campaign promise he wanted fulfilled but that had been discouraged by his then-secretary of state Rex Tillerson. Sensing an opportunity, Bolton wrote an essay for National Review explaining in breezy (i.e. Trump-digestible) terms just how to …

Documentary: Life Without Water

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by Ruwaida Amer and Sanad Abu Latifa, via Electronic Intifada “We live in an area where there is no water,” says Ibrahim al-Majaida, a resident of al-Mawasi, an agricultural area near Khan Younis in the southern Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip. The average Palestinian family in Gaza receives running water only four to six hours, every three to five days, due to chronic electricity shortages resulting from Israel’s decade-long siege. This forces many to buy water from expensive and unregulated private sources. “We travel two kilometers to bring water to our homes,” al-Majaida says. More than 96 percent of Gaza’s water supply is unsafe for drinking. Desalination plants are functioning at 15 percent of their capacity due to electricity shortages. The diminished capacity of water and wastewater treatment facilities means that 108 million liters of raw sewage are being dumped into the Mediterranean Sea every day. The disrupted operation of treatment facilities has led to sewage spills in various areas of Gaza, such as al-Mawasi. “Even plants and vegetables don’t survive in it because of the contamination,” says Rasha al-Majaida, another resident of al-Mawasi. “Not even …

Why doesn’t Russia defend Syria against Israeli fighter jets?

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The image taken from social media shows the site of a reported Israeli strike in Masyaf, Hama Province, Syria, September 7, 2017.   ArabiSouri on steemit: This was a question asked on Quora and some had different answers, many talking in favor of #Israel with a lot of wishful thinking for the #Zionist apartheid Israel. Here’s my reply which covers some of the reasons. Israel is a rogue borderless ‘entity’ living on land foreign imported immigrants stole from Palestinians using terrorism as the main method then waging horrific wars against its neighbors. Israelis couldn’t live a single day without complete funding from the USA, France, Germany and even from Russians but through a different way. US Aid to Israel – Try not to be shocked! Here’s how the Political Zionism movement took control of all the Western countries: Political Zionism in the United States of America – Astounding Facts! About 1 million Russians, many of them Jews, migrated to occupied Palestine aka Israel. They are a main source of income and trade and a profound …

Pentagon Think-Tank Praises Al Qaeda as ‘Moderate’ Islamists

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by Eric Zuesse An October 24th article by Colin P. Clarke of the Rand Corporation — the main think-tank for the Pentagon — is headlined “The Moderate Face of Al Qaeda”, and a section of it is headed “A Moderate Alternative,” presenting Al Qaeda as the moderate alternative to ISIS. That article praises the 5 July 2005 decision, by Al Qaeda’s then #2 leader — who now is their #1 leader after the killing of Osama bin Laden — Ayman al-Zawahiri; Clarke’s article praises there Zawahiri’s decision to chastise the founder of ISIS, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who was then in Iraq. Zawahiri chastised Zarqawi for slaughtering Shia Muslims. However, if one looks at the Zawahiri letter, Zawahiri actually says there that Shia ought to be slaughtered, but not now, because most Muslims won’t understand why Shia deserve death. The matter is presented by Zawahiri as a severe PR problem for jihadists at this stage of building the fundamentalist Sunni movement to establish a global Islamic Caliphate or theocracy, if they slaughter Shia Muslims (such as …

Trump’s Hate-Iran Campaign

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by Eric Zuesse On October 19th, the far-right Foundation for Defense of Democracy (FDD) held a “National Security Summit” which featured as speakers both Donald Trump’s CIA chief Mike Pompeo and Donald Trump’s National Security Advisor Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, both of them (as will be shown here by extensive excerpts from their speeches) whipping up hatred against Shia Iran and against Shia Muslims generally. They presented Shia Iran — not Sunni Saudi Arabia — as being the most dangerous source of radical Islamic terrorism. Donald Trump during his Presidential campaign had spoken frequently against ‘radical Islamic terrorism’, but everybody thought it pertained to the people who had perpetrated the 9/11 attacks, and those individuals were all fundamentalist Sunnis, not any Shias, and no one from Iran. But now, nine months into his Presidency, it’s clear that he was referring instead to Shia Muslims (and to Iran most of all), which Muslim category the Saud family who own Saudi Arabia hate, and call an “existential threat” to themselves, and so they even bomb Shia parts …

Syrian Victory Will Reshape the Middle East and Recalibrate Global Hegemony

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A Syrian Arab Army soldier soldier celebrates the lifting of the three year long siege of Dier ez-Zor by ISIS. Alastair Crooke* in Consortium News: Plainly, Syria’s success – notwithstanding the caution of President Bashar al-Assad in saying that signs of success are not success itself – in resisting, against the odds, all attempts to fell the state suggest that a tipping point in the geopolitics of the region has occurred. We have written before how the Syria outcome dwarfs that of Israel’s 2006 war against Hezbollah, significant though the result of that war was, too. Both events taken together have brought America’s unipolar moment in the Middle East to an end (though not globally, since the U.S. still retains its necklace of military bases across the region). The successes have corroded badly, the reputation of the Gulf States and have discredited fired-up Sunni jihadism as a “go-to” political tool for Saudi Arabia and its Western backers. But, aside from the geopolitics, the Syria outcome has created a physical connectivity and contiguity that has not existed for some …

The Nations that Accept Nazism Today

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Eric Zuesse, originally posted at strategic-culture.org The U.S. Government leads a global operation to make racist fascism ‘respectable’ again. On 21 November 2014, in a vote at the United Nations on a Resolution opposing a resurgence of the racist-fascist ideology (opposing the ideology that’s commonly called “nazism”) which Resolution was titled “Combating glorification of Nazism, neo-nazism and other practices that contribute to contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia, and related intolerance”, 115 nations voted “Yes” to pass the Resolution, 3 voted “No” to reject it, and 55 voted “Abstain,” meaning they didn’t want to express a view on the resolution. An additional 19 didn’t vote at all on it (decided to absent themselves from that roll-call, for whatever reason — basically, not even saying whether they were neutral on it by voting “Abstain” — just said nothing at all on it). The document that they were voting on had been posted complete on 17 November 2014, and is still posted in its entirety here. As can be seen there, it had been proposed by …