Christian Zionism: The Root of All Evil?

Tammy Obeidallah
It is common knowledge that many so-called Christians throw unconditional, unyielding support behind the Jewish state. Known as Christian Zionists, or more recently “Israel-firsters”—indicating their degree of loyalty over and above the interests of their own country—it is estimated they are over 50 million strong in the United States alone. By stripping biblical passages out of their proper context and ignoring historical perspective, Christian Zionist leaders have convinced the masses that Jesus Christ will return when all Jews are gathered in Palestine, even if it means the systemic destruction of the Palestinian people.
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Lebanon grants Palestinian refugees right to work

(AFP)
AFP - Lebanon's parliament adopted on Tuesday a law granting full employment rights to the roughly 400,000 Palestinian refugees living in the country, a high-ranking official said.
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25,000 Jews live in Iran

Mike Whitney
"Iranian civility toward Jews tells us more about Iran — its sophistication and culture — than all the inflammatory rhetoric. That may be because I’m a Jew and have seldom been treated with such consistent warmth as in Iran."
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What Israel and the lobby really fears about Iran

M.J. Rosenberg
The internet has been burning up with responses to Jeffrey Goldberg’s Atlantic cover story on the likelihood that either Israel or the United States will preempt development of an Iranian nuclear bomb by attacking its atomic sites. Goldberg does not flat-out endorse bombing Iran. Rather, after numerous conversations and briefings with US and Israeli officials, he concludes that there is at least a 50-50 chance that bombs will fly in a year or so. Goldberg himself does not take a position on whether bombing is warranted or justified. But, given the way he frames the article and his personal closeness, to Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu – who speaks in apocalyptic terms of the existential danger a nuclear Iran poses to Israel – it is clear that Goldberg sees no alternative to preventing an Iranian nuke, by whatever means necessary. And that includes war.
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White House denies Turkey arms ultimatum

The White House denied a report Monday that the U.S. has threatened Turkey with potentially withholding future arms sales because of its tougher stance towards Israel and vote against UN Iran sanctions. Obama “emphatically denied” a Financial Times story saying the president had told Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan future arms sales would be contingent on softening his anti-Israel talk, White House pool reporter Jonathan Weisman of the Wall Street Journal writes.
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Why WikiLeaks Won’t Stop the War

Noam Chomsky
The CIA memorandum should remind us that states have an internal enemy: their own population, which must be controlled when state policy is opposed by the public.
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What Should A Poor Warmongering Neoconservative Do?

Juan Cole
This political grouping includes WASPS such as former CIA director James Woolsey and former UN ambassor John Bolton, but at its core is politically active and extremely wealthy Jewish former Democrats who broke with their party in the 1980s to become war hawks in Republican administrations, and most of whom are rooted in Rightwing Zionism as exemplified in the thought of prominent fascist theorist Vladimir Jabotinsky.
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Israeli Ex-Soldier Defends Her Facebook Snapshots

By ROBERT MACKEY

Snapshots taken by Israeli soldiers of captured or killed Palestinians were posted on Facebook by Breaking the Silence, an Israeli human rights group on Tuesday.

Updated | 3:07 p.m. In an interview with Israeli Army radio on Tuesday, a former Israeli soldier said, “I still don’t understand what’s wrong” with photographs she posted on Facebook of herself posing next to blindfolded Palestinian detainees.

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that Eden Abergil, who posted the images in an album dedicated to her time in the military — called “The Army… the most beautiful time of my life :)” — said that the “pictures were taken in good will, there was no statement in them.” She added that they were not intended to humiliate the prisoners but merely to document her “military experience,” and that she had no idea they “would be problematic.”

Read more-The New York Times

More evidence that Israel’s image has dramatically shifted

Philip Weiss

"Robert Mackey of the Times did a good piece today about the former Israeli soldier's facebook photos of humiliated Palestinian prisoners. He mentions Breaking the Silence's collection of similar photos, he quotes a Palestinian on routine humiliation. He leads with the former soldier's statement that she feels like she did nothing wrong.

A commenter named M. Junaid from New York wrote:

In a pathetic but very real sense, this woman is right - within the context of a society such as Israel, there is indeed "nothing wrong" about humiliating and oppressing another people. That deterioration of any moral sense is exactly what happens in any colonizing country, whether it was France in Algeria or the British in Kenya.

The difference, of course, is that the Israeli colonial project has no interest in pulling back to pre-1967 borders. For that, we can thank AIPAC and the American public that foolishly subsidizes Israeli colonialism, no matter how wrong it is or how much it alienates the entire Muslim world.

Read more-Mondoweiss

Eating away the Jordan Valley

Jordan Valley is a microcosm of Israel's colonisation

Israeli land seizure and ethnic cleansing should be met with arrest warrants – not arms sales and diplomatic games
Ben White for the Guardian

"The presence of the valley's Palestinians is a "problem" that Israel approaches with the tools of evacuation orders and bulldozers. Amnesty International, among others, has noticed an intensification of home demolitions and evictions, while B'Tselem sees "the current wave" as "part of Israel's ongoing efforts to remove" Bedouin Palestinians from the Jordan Valley. As Luisa Morgantini, former vice-president of the European parliament, put it recently, "an area cleansed of its inhabitants today is more easily annexed tomorrow". Read more

'Facebook photos of soldiers posing with bound Palestinians are the norm'

Facebook photos depicting Israel Defense Forces soldiers pictured alongside handcuffed and blindfolded Palestinian detainees represent the norm, not the exception, in IDF conduct, an Israeli human rights group said on Tuesday, thus refuting an official army statement claiming the opposite.

Read more-Haaretz

Another village to be razed

IOF gives Farisiya residents 24 hours to evacuate ahead of demolition
The Israeli occupation forces (IOF) stormed Sunday morning the Farisiya area of the Jordan Valley and handed out demolition notices against structures in the area, eyewitnesses said.
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All Is Not Quiet on the Lebanese Front -- An Analysis

By Lawrence Davidson
The Lebanese border, or so-called Blue Line, has been a Middle East flashpoint for decades. It has been the site of repeated wars, cross border skirmishes and often futile United Nations peacekeeping efforts to keep things below a boiling temperature. Israel says that south Lebanon has harbored Palestinian fighters in the past, and now Hezbollah fighters, all of whom endanger its security. At least publically, Israel never asks why there is such long lasting hostility toward it. And, if their leaders do so in private, it never impacts policy. Instead, Israel has consistently waged war on its neighbors to stop the vengeful incursions of those whose land Israel has...what? Gotten from God? Conquered from the Canaanites? Confiscated after chasing out Arab forces who identified them as European interlopers? Stolen?
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NATO Acknowledges Killing Civilians

NATO acknowledged on Sunday that five Afghan civilians appeared to have been killed by one of its air strikes. The strike was carried out on Thursday.
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Polish soldiers blow up Afghan dwelling “for fun”

“What a beauty!” comments one of the soldiers when the building is blown to pieces in the 3-minute video (see here), recorded by Polish soldiers from the Army’s 6th rotation during their tour of duty between October 2009 and April 2010.
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Origins of Saudi-Israeli alliance: the untold story

The Angry Arab:
"This is from an unpublished (unclassified) American government study of the subject. It states: "Anctual Israeli support of the Saudi-Imamate causes probably began prior to any direct meetings between representatives of the two governments and the Yemeni Royalist movement...This study has been able to trace at least two locations of direct Saudi-Israeli meetings which began at two distinct phases in the Yemeni civil war. The first traceable set of meetings began in March of 1963 in India. Indian sources reported that an official of the Saudi Embassy in India, Ahmad Allalah Al-Qadi, began frequenting the Israeli consulate in Bombay. According to Arab (Egyptian) sources, Crown Prince Faisal ordered the Saudi official's meetings in reaction to the two Arab nationalist coups in Baghdad and Damascus in February and March 1963 that removed anti-Nasser governments from power in each state...The focus of the Israeli-Saudi talks were the prospects for Israel dropping arms for the Royalist tibal forces as well as Israel providing military intelligence regarding Egyptian army movements and capabilities to both the Saudis and Yemenis...

Neo-Nazi group English Defense League has now a Jewish division

Press Release from the EDL Jewish Division

"Yesterday 14^th August 2010, we attended the bi-weekly Ahava demonstration organized by the pro-Palestinian and their communist and socialist friends, a bunch of social misfits who sported dirty and greasy clothes, as well as a kaleidoscope of ugliness everywhere, in body and soul.

I have come across decomposed bodies, which are less offensive than they are!!

We went to counter-protest in favour of the Israeli shop Ahava, which is based on Israeli land, and to expose these ignorant protesters’ lies, their deceit, their racism and fascism, which is always very well evidenced in every single word they utter, despite the fact that they desperately attempt to use deceitful propaganda to convince the ignorant public of their anti-racist views.

The majority of the passers-by were on our side, and cars drove down the road giving us the thumbs up and shouting encouraging words. Something we did not see towards the scruffy rubbish that stood opposite us, flying the terrorist stained Palestinian flag. It’s funny to see them flying a flag [based solely on the Jordanian one], for a country that does not exist and has no hope of ever being formed. Terrorism is their speciality, not building a nation.

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IDF soldier Facebook photos: The best years of her life | Fond memories of blindfolded prisoners

The Hebrew blog “Sachim” which tracks the character of the young, pseudo-liberal Israeli mainstream, published a selection of pictures from the Facebook profile of one Eden Abergil, a recently discharged IDF woman soldier. The album, titled “Army.. the most beautiful time of my life :)

Adi Tal: “You’re the sexiest like that…”

Eden Abergil: “Yeah I know lol mummy what a day it was look how he completes my picture, I wonder if he’s got Facebook! I have to tag him in the picture! lol”

Shani Cohen: “LOL you psycho… I wonder who’s the photographerrrrr”

Shani Cohen: “Eden… he’s got a hard-on for you… lol for sure!!!”

Eden Abergil: Lol no honey he’s got a hard-on for youuu this is why you took that picture lol you took my picture!!!!”

Source here

Who Killed Hariri?

Israel's Hidden Hands in Lebanon

By ESAM AL-AMIN

Ever since that day the polarization in Lebanon has deepened between the pro-Western forces led by Hariri’s son Saad, his Sunni-led coalition with Druze and pro-American Christian allies, and the pro-Syrian block of the Shiite parties led by Hezbollah and their Christian allies of the Free Patriotic Front. Soon after, the pro-Western parties accused Syria of being behind the crime and immediately embarked on massive demonstrations and pursued the intervention of international powers in order to dislodge Syria from Lebanon after a twenty-nine year military presence.

Less than one month into George W. Bush’s second term, the U.S. president took advantage of the incident by applying immense pressure on the Syrian regime, which eventually culminated in a U.N. Security Council resolution on April 7, 2005 appointing an international tribunal to investigate Hariri’s assassination. From day one the tribunal, led by German prosecutor Detlev Mehlis, accused Syria of being behind the assassination. The enormous political and public pressures resulted in Syria’s withdrawal by the end of April.

Read more- Counterpunch

What it would look like?