This is what ethnic cleansing looks like in 2010.

These peaceful people have been living in the Negev Desert since the Ottoman Empire.

Israel destroys a whole Negev Village — 200 Children left Homeless.

The villagers, mostly children and old people, were left stunned near the destroyed village, shelterless and waterless under the blazing sun.

The destruction of the village was carried out despite dispute over ownership of the land still pending in the courts.

Residents of al-Arakib are neither squatters nor invaders: their village has existed many years before the creation of Israel in 1948.

http://www.intifada-palestine.com/201…

Villagers said they’ve lived in the region for years back to the Ottoman days before Israel was founded,

and have original deeds to the land.

“The state of Israel is treating us like cockroaches,” said Sulaiman Abu Mdian, 29, a father of four who works as a chicken farmer.

http://edition.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/mea…

“More than 1,500 police arrived at the village at around sunrise — they came in dozens of vehicles and began destroying the structures there,” said Chaya Noach, head of Negev Coexistence Forum for Civil Equality, a group which fights to protect the rights of the 160,000 Bedouin living in the Negev.

“It’s like they want to erase the Bedouin from the landscape,” she said.

http://www.middle-east-online.com/eng…

“Usually they destroy seven or 10 houses at once, but this time they bulldozed the roads and anything that would indicate people had lived here,” said Waqili.
The operation set “a dangerous precedent,” he warned, saying it posed a threat to the 45 unrecognised villages in the Negev that are home to some 100,000 Arabs.

http://www.gulf-times.com/site/topics…

Bedouins are predominantly desert-dwelling Arabs who have been living in the Negev desert for hundreds of years.

http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=…

Many live in extreme poverty.

The Bedouin say they have lived in the area since before the foundation of the state of Israel.

“Today we shall evacuate them and should they return we’ll do it again,” he said.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middl…

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But there is another side to that relationship.

The technologies used by militaries to kill by remote control, which are becoming increasingly sophisticated and prevalent, are transforming warfare.

A senior United Nations official recently warned of the emergence of a “PlayStation mentality to killing”, conjuring up an image of armies on the battlefield being replaced by unseen, nerdy teenagers spraying bullets and missiles with joysticks as wantonly as they already do when playing video games.

Israel is one of the pioneers of these technologies.

The first remote-controlled machines were surveillance aircraft built to fly over Lebanon in the early 1980s, as Israel invaded and then occupied the country for 20 years.

Today Israel is the world leader in developing and selling unmanned aerial vehicles – or drones, as they have come to be called.

Israel’s disproportionate role in researching and developing this technology should not surprise us.

Despite being a tiny country with a small population, Israel has had vast sums of military aid thrown at it by the United States.

As a result, its regional ambitions have sometimes outstripped the human resources available to carry them out.

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No matter that the Israeli media views the whole incident as a debacle for Israel,

in this country the Israel-can-do-no-wrong crowd is on overdrive defending the operation.

As usual, facts don’t matter to them.

Except they do.

The first thing you need to know about the Gaza flotilla disaster is that the intention of the activists on board the ships was to break the Israeli blockade. Delivering the embargoed goods was incidental.

In other words, the activists were like the civil rights demonstrators who sat down at segregated lunch counters throughout the South and refused to leave until they were served. Their goal was not really to get breakfast. It was to end segregation.

That fact is so obvious that it is hard to believe that the “pro-Israel” lobby is using it as an indictment.

Of course the goal of the flotilla was to break the blockade. Of course Martin Luther King provoked the civil authorities of the South to break segregation.

Of course the Solidarity movement used workers’ rights as a pretext to break Soviet-imposed Communism.

The bottom line is that the men and women of the flotilla had every right to attempt to destroy an illegal blockade that Israel had no legal standing to impose and which was designed to inflict collective punishment on the people of Gaza.

(There is no truth to the story that Israel would have delivered the goods on the ships to Gaza if asked; the Israelis never made that offer and, judging by years of precedent, would have blocked any delivery.)

As for the Israeli argument that its soldiers were attacked, that is ridiculous.

Israeli commandos were ordered to board a civilian ship in international waters and the government that sent them claims that the resisting passengers attacked them without provocation.

This is like a carjacker complaining to the police that the driver bashed him with a crowbar that was under the seat.

Neither carjackers nor hijackers should expect their victims to acquiesce peacefully.

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The international aid agency Oxfam demanded Monday that Israel compensate Palestinians in a northern Jordan Valley village after soldiers destroyed at least $29,000 of aid.

In a statement, the charity said villagers in Al-Farisiya were forced into poverty when soldiers demolished 79 structures in the village, including homes, stables, sheds, water tanks, two tons of animal fodder, fertilizer and wheat.

An initial assessment by Oxfam and other NGOs in the area calculated that the demolitions affected 113 Palestinians, half of them children and identified as some of the poorest in the area.

Water tanks and irrigation pipes provided by Oxfam were among the damaged goods.

Oxfam’s advocacy officer, Cara Flowers, said the area looked like “a natural disaster had taken place,”

adding that “With no access to shelter, water or fodder for their goat and sheep herds,

an entire community is being forced to leave their land.”

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In future, such decisions must be transparent.

It was almost exactly eight years ago that the public beat of the Washington war drums became so loud and insistent that it could no longer be ignored.

But we now know that for quite some time before July 2002 Tony Blair and George Bush had been engaged in a dialogue of the determined with regime change in Iraq at the top of their agenda.

Before Chilcot, we had to rely on leaked documents such as telegrams from diplomats, accounts of meetings held round the sofa at No 10, and, for lawyers, the crown jewels of the Attorney General’s written advice to the Prime Minister.

The Hutton and Butler inquiries helped to fill in some of the blanks, though qualified by their restricted remits and security considerations.

But slowly and with only occasional fanfare the whole sad, sorry story is being systematically laid out in evidence before the Chilcot inquiry.

Chilcot has not been about surprises but rather about confirmation, less about revelation and more about corroboration of what we thought we knew.

Sir John Chilcot has made it clear that his committee is not a court of law and that no findings of legality will be made but just by exposing to public scrutiny the process by which legal advice was tendered and disregarded, he has provided more than enough evidence in support of the proposition that military action against Iraq was illegal.

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and other buildings in the West Bank,

after a further 74 were destroyed in the Jordan Valley earlier this week.

The demolitions were carried out by the Israeli military in the villages of Hmayyir and ‘Ein Ghazal in the area of al-Farisiya on Monday,

displacing 107 people, including 52 children.

According to UN figures, at least 198 Palestinian structures in the West Bank have been demolished this year,

resulting in the forced displacement of almost 300 Palestinians, half of them children, while 600 others have also been affected.

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Where Pearl Harbor began America’s official role in crushing the Fascist juggernaut that threatened to dominate the world,

9/11 had quite the opposite effect.

America’s response to 9/11 was oppression at home and a tirade of frenzied phobic reactions around the world.

No American institution suffered more than the military.

The team of Cheney and Rumsfeld,

together since the disastrous Nixon years,

began a process of purging America’s military of talent and leadership,

instead building a force to serve a sinister agenda of religious heresy and extremist politics.

Nearly a decade later,

it isn’t the economic collapse or the discredited military adventures that have now embittered a military leadership infrastructure that now sees itself as duped, dishonored and discarded.

A number of factors can be attributed,

the proverbial “straw that broke the camel’s back” as it were but it is 9/11 where things begin to fall apart.

The cover story,

a group of Muslims with box cutters and a few remarkably unproductive hours of pilot training,

simply hasn’t held up.

America has had many airline hijackings,

starting with the 1960s and was under strict terror alert on 9/11,

despite the obfuscations of Donald Rumsfeld.

Top military pilots,

among themselves and their fellow officers,

voiced doubts about the “twin towers” scenario,

doubts that began reaching a quiet crescendo pointing to 9/11 as an “inside job.”

With the dozens of conspiracy theories and a weak and implausible cover story,

one the 9/11 Commission itself eventually rejected,

only one plausible answer was left, an answer very much “not for public consumption.”

Few Americans know that a team of Israeli intelligence agents were arrested on 9/11 after being observed using “video” equipment to record the planes crashing into the towers.

After the disaster, the Mossad agents, soon to be arrested and released by the FBI, began celebrating as though they had completed a successful operation.

This enraged New Yorkers who mistook them for terrorists.

In fact, New Yorkers weren’t wrong.

Only top members of America’s military knew the truth, the “dancing Israelis” had remotely guided the two planes into the World Trade Center, not simply videoing,

itself proof of guilt.

Military pilots, in particular, knew the planes were nearly impossible to maneuver at those speeds without Israeli designed auto-pilot systems,

not unlike those used on Tomahawk/Cruise missiles.

Behind a flurry of “conspiracy theories,”

many totally implausible,

some obvious to military leaders as part of an elaborate deception plan requiring widespread control of media assets,

more subtext came to light.

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which it used heavily in its latest war on the Gaza Strip,

causing hundreds of Palestinian deaths,

in addition to serious environmental damage.

Israel submitted an official report to the UN this week admitting its use of white phosphorus bombs in its war on Gaza

after having previously denied such allegations,

and assuring that it would use the bombs in a “restricted” manner,

but refusing to assure complete discontinuation.

Read the rest here

The Conflict

A cartoon published in an American newspaper in 2002 showed former president George Bush sitting behind his desk in the Oval Office,

utterly confused by a news report he was reading about India and Pakistan going to war over Kashmir.

“But why are the two countries fighting over a sweater,” he asked Dick Cheney who stood by with his usual sly smile on his face.

Besides reflecting the intellectual capacity of the American president of the time,

the cartoon was a realistic portrayal of the understanding that American leaders have generally shown of this longstanding dispute between Pakistan and India.

The unresolved Kashmir conflict has rocked South Asia for six decades.

It has created an environment of distrust and acrimony,

forced the people to sink into poverty with bulk of the resources consumed by the war machines and claimed lives of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians as well as soldiers who died in the three wars fought between India and Pakistan.

India, whose forcible occupation of Kashmir in 1947 created the conflict,

refuses to settle it.

The other stake holders, the Kashmiri people and Pakistan, insist on a fair solution.

The international community including the US and the United Nations played little or no role in diffusing it either.

Consequently, the conflict has developed into one of the most intractable problems of international politics that remains a continuing threat to peace of the region.

Read the rest at Axis of Logic

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from the Defense Department,

from the White House, all to no avail.

The official word was that Gulf War Syndrome did not exist.

So they suffered in silence.

Tens of thousands died from these conditions.

Many lost their homes because of the high costs to pay for medical care themselves.

Independent investigations, including those conducted by many of the Gulf War veterans themselves,

showed multiple causes behind Gulf War Syndrome,

including experimental vaccines,

exposure to depleted uranium (DU),

and toxicity from biological and chemical weapons,

oil fires

and other environmental contaminants.

The current wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are manifesting with an entirely new series of physical and mental illnesses and diseases.

Some are being recognized, such as post traumatic stress  (PTS), but many others are not.

Hundreds of thousands of our veterans are living in destitution,

are incarcerated,

have attempted or committed suicide,

and can no longer fit into a normal family life.

And yet the government once again,

as it did to previous Gulf War vets,

turns its backs on them.

This is an American tragedy,

and that is where our story begins.

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Israeli Minister of Trade, Industry and Labor, Binyamin Ben-Eliezer,

says the world is tired of Israel and that Israel,

rather than the Gaza Strip,

is actually the terrorist state.

“We’re the ones maintaining a blockade.

And we too are blockaded, utterly isolated.

This business just isn’t working anymore.

We’re in a situation where the world is tired of us,” the Jewish Daily quoted Ben-Eliezer as saying in an interview in the Yediot Ahronot Friday supplement.

“They’re tired of hearing our excuses, of feigning sympathy for us under pressure from our lobbies, when all we do is kill and oppress.

(The world is) Tired of trying to understand us.

No one believes our bullshit anymore.

After 43 years, nobody wants to hear any more excuses about why this occupation is continuing and how we have nobody to talk to,” Eliezer continued.

Born in 1936 in Basra in southern Iraq, Binyamin “Fuad” Ben-Eliezer is the senior leader of the Labor Party’s hawkish wing, a tough-as-nails ex-general and a seasoned war criminal.

Mossad Chief Meir Dagan expressed similar concerns. “It’s true that the international community is fed up with our incessant lies, which spew forth like the political equivalent of the BP oil rig blowout”, he said.

“Of course we’re the terrorists.

We invented modern terrorism, we were founded on terrorism and we continue to thrive on it.

We grew up on terror and racism and we’re addicted to it.

And as I mentioned not long ago, we’re a burden on the United States and have no strategic relevance to them at all.”

Dagan is celebrated in Israel for his no-nonsense approach to being a war criminal and his history of cutting off Palestinians’ heads with Japanese knives.

The comments have encouraged other Israeli officials to come clean about the Jewish state’s true nature.

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s bizarre response to the surprising outpouring of honesty from across the Israeli political spectrum came from his office in the form of a press release, which simply read: “Holocaust! 6 million, holocaust, holocaust, victims, holocaust holocaust.”

In an unusual demonstration of unanimity, an Israeli cross-party motion is urging the parliament to pass legislation that will mandate an official Israeli confession to the people of Occupied Palestine and the international community that the Zionist regime has been full of shit all along on a wide range of issues, including the 2008-09 Gaza offensive, the recent flotilla massacre, the USS Liberty incident of 1967 and even the origins of the state itself and its ostensible legitimacy.

“The motion will be adopted. There’s no doubt,” Tal Nachum, spokesman for the far-right Yisrael Beiteinu party, told Reuters late Thursday. “At this point, I think if we could sever economic, diplomatic and military ties with ourselves, we would. We’re so fucking full of shit that even we can’t bear us anymore.”

The Obama White House has thus far remained conspicuously silent on the recent developments in Jerusalem, amid escalating tension in Washington. Josh Block, spokesman for the powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), told the Daily Zionist that Israel has become one of at least eight “existential threats” to itself and must be stopped.

AIPAC has scheduled urgent meetings with members of Congress in order to tell them what to do, think and say in response to the issue.

According to sources close to AIPAC, Jewish lobbyists are busy drafting legislation for lawmakers calling on the U.S. government to deliver a $6 billion emergency security assistance package to Israel, including four state-of-the-art F22 fighter jets.

Abraham Foxman, National Director of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), reflexively issued a statement condemning American and Israeli leaders for their “recidivistic anti-Semitism” and blasting the Jewish state as a nation of “self-hating Jews”.

Source

The Israeli Navy reportedly blockades a Libyan-chartered aid vessel which has set sail for the blockaded Gaza Strip,

issuing threats against the convoy.

“Israeli warships are surrounding and threatening the cargo ship.

There is a real threat,” said Yussef Sawan,

the executive director of the Tripoli-based Gaddafi International Charity and Development Association,

AFP reported.

The organization tasked the seaborne mission on board the Moldova-flagged cargo ship,

Amalthea,

to break Tel Aviv’s years-long siege of Gaza.

The vessel is carrying 12 crewmembers and 2,000 tons of relief supplies from Greece to the impoverished sliver.

Communications with the ship are being jammed, Sawan added,

pointing at possible electronic obstructions against the humanitarian effort.

The bid follows the Israeli commandos’ May 31 killing of nine Turks among the Freedom Flotilla,

a hundreds-strong aid convoy,

which intended to fulfill the same mission.

The attack sent shockwaves across the world and gave rise to global calls

for an international investigation into the incident.

Tel Aviv, however, subsequently insisted it will not allow any seaborne convoys to reach the strip.

“I say very clearly, no ship will arrive in Gaza.

We will not permit our sovereignty to be harmed,” Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman

[ ... who is the -biggest- control freak that you have ever met in your life ]

said on Army Radio on Sunday.

Israel’s Defense Minister Ehud Barak also branded the bid as “unnecessary provocation.”

Israel, meanwhile, campaigned to seek foreign cooperation against the effort,

while obliging the ship head either towards the port of El-Arish in Egypt or the Israeli port of Ashdod.

Sawan earlier denied reports that the ship was heading towards El-Arish.

Mashallah Zwei, a representative for the Libyan charity, who is accompanying the mission,

had clarified earlier that the organization was not seeking “a confrontation or a provocation.”

“We only have food, medicine and young pacifists on the boat.”

“The Israelis can inspect the ship and if they have an ounce of humanity they will let us unload in Gaza,”

he added, calling for international pressure on the regime not to disrupt the relief bid.

Source

[ I'll miss you most of all, Heineken   ]

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While this was happening 2000 year old ancient graves were being desecrating by Israel to make way for hotels.

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in its mad and frenzied dash for ad revenue,

TVNZ news not only -produced- this jaw-dropping piece

but they televised it as well.

Nine people dead, international outrage – and one committed Kiwi activist right there.

Nicola Enchmarch was aboard the Gaza-bound aid ship

when Israeli commandos dropped out of the night sky.

On SUNDAY Nicola gives her first major television interview, a dramatic eyewitness account.

She tells how a friend was shot between the eyes, describes the taunts of the Israeli soldiers,

and calls for an international inquiry.

Part 1 here

Part 2 here

and Israeli policy makers try to cover their own ass and fail here

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We know nearly 2,000,000 humans have been killed in Iraq so how many have been killed in Afghanistan??

This is a brilliant observation and comment by George Galloway which I have taken from PressTV’s program called Comment.

The rest can be seen here-

Press TV-Comment with George Galloway-The Afghanistan War-07-01-2010(Part1)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFQe4o…

Originally uploaded by the best news channel at the moment that is PressTV-

PressTVGlobalNews-
http://www.youtube.com/user/PressTVGl…

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But the campaign is rapidly losing support on the home front.

RT interviews veteran war critic, professor Bill Ayers, who says nothing has really changed since Vietnam …

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Increasingly, despite its early military and political successes, Israel cannot for long endure as a colonial project.

It must choose between wars – and destruction – or transition to a state for all its peoples.

In order to firmly secure its existence – as firmly as that is possible for any state – a settler state has to overcome three challenges.

It has to solve the native problem; break away from its mother country; and gain the recognition of neighboring states and peoples.

It can be shown that Israel has not met any of these conditions.

Consider Israel’s native problem. In 1948, in the months before and after its creation, Israel appeared to have solved its native problem in one fell swoop.

It had expelled 80 percent of the Palestinians from the territories it had conquered.

In addition, with the rapid influx of Arab Jews, Palestinians were soon reduced to less than ten percent of Israel’s population.

So, had Israel licked its native problem for good?

Not really.

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Israel’s raid on the flotilla has strengthened the non-violent resistance movement [AFP]

The Israeli attack on the international aid flotilla – killing nine and injuring dozens more – is not the first example of non-violent resistance by Palestinians and their supporters being met by force.

Israel has, in fact, at different times reacted with repression or even extreme violence to cultural and political manifestations of Palestinian identity.

But the flotilla carnage is the first direct and officially declared attack by the Israeli army on foreign activists – taking Israel’s reaction to solidarity activities to a new and unprecedented level.

Israeli claims that Turkish activists “resisted” its takeover of the ships do not change the reality that the Israeli army performed an illegal armed operation against activists who challenged the siege of Gaza – not with weapons, but by trying to deliver food and medical supplies to the besieged Palestinian population.

Israeli impunity has already been shown in the cases of Western peace activists Rachel Corrie and Tom Hurndell who were killed while peacefully protesting against Israeli army actions against Palestinian citizens.

An act of fear

But Israel’s reaction was not merely an act of arrogance. It was also an act of fear and weakness in the face of a rising tide of Palestinian and international civic campaigns.

Israeli concerns run so deep that it has been pouring money and energy into a worldwide campaign to counter what it considers to be a drive “aimed at delegitimising” Israel.

But Israel’s own actions, such as the raid on the aid ship, only serve to reinforce the image of a state fully engaged in illegal actions in the occupied territories and beyond.

Read the rest here