Tag: Israel

Israel claims six Palestinian rights groups are “terrorist organizations” – CIA says “bullshit!”

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The CIA could not find any evidence to support Israel’s claim that six prominent Palestinian rights groups were “terrorist organizations,” intelligence sources told The Guardian…

Last October, the Israeli government labeled the following groups as terror-related: Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association, Al-Haq, the Bisan Center for Research and Development, Defense for Children International — Palestine, the Union of Agricultural Work Committees, and the Union of Palestinian Women Committees…

The lack of support from foreign governments on its designation has not prevented Israel from continuing to target the six groups.

…Nine EU countries issued a joint statement last month on the designation, saying: “No substantial information was received from Israel that would justify reviewing our policy toward the six Palestinian NGOs.”

Also last month, 22 Democrats in the US Congress sent a letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Avril Haines, director of national intelligence, urging Washington to stand up to Israel over the report.

Nothing new about criminally corrupt governments or, for that matter, demented rightwingers of any flavor, any country, calling those who oppose them “terrorists”. What’s rare is the CIA standing up and publicly shaming them for their lies.

Whatever your politics, please stop phony stories

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Here’s the post as it appeared on FACEBOOK:

LEAD STORIES reverse image searched the photos in the Facebook post, which led to a Mirror.co.uk article. That article gave a source of the video: CJ Werleman, currently a global correspondent for Byline Times.

Werleman posted the video on his Twitter account on October 22, 2015.

While searching for the original video, LEAD STORIES came across the name and nationality of the girl in the Facebook post. According to a Vox article, she is Palestinian activist Ahed Tamimi. She was 12 when the video was shot in November 2012, the article said. This is not the only time Tamimi has had a hostile encounter with Israeli troops. In August 2018, she spent eight months in an Israeli prison for slapping two Israeli soldiers. The Washington Post’s YouTube channel has a video that shows Tamimi hitting them.

The bravery is real. Everything else in the FACEBOOK post describing the photos is a lie.

Professional killers have a new weapon as an option

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Iran’s top nuclear scientist woke up an hour before dawn, as he did most days, to study Islamic philosophy before his day began…

Iran’s intelligence service had warned him of a possible assassination plot, but the scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, had brushed it off…Israel had wanted to kill him for at least 14 years. But there had been so many threats and plots that he no longer paid them much attention.

Reports of a Killing

Friday, Nov.27th, 2020…The news reports from Iran that afternoon were confusing, contradictory and mostly wrong.

Several Iranian news organizations reported that the assassin was a killer robot, and that the entire operation was conducted by remote control. These reports directly contradicted the supposedly eyewitness accounts of a gun battle between teams of assassins and bodyguards and reports that some of the assassins had been arrested or killed.

Except this time there really was a killer robot…it was also the debut test of a high-tech, computerized sharpshooter kitted out with artificial intelligence and multiple-camera eyes, operated via satellite and capable of firing 600 rounds a minute…

The entire operation took less than a minute. Fifteen bullets were fired.

Iranian investigators noted that not one of them hit Ms. Ghasemi, seated inches away, accuracy that they attributed to the use of facial recognition software…

Hamed Fakhrizadeh was at the family home in Absard when he received a distress call from his mother. He arrived within minutes to what he described as a scene of “full-on war.”…

“It was not a simple terrorist attack for someone to come and fire a bullet and run,” he said later on state television. “His assassination was far more complicated than what you know and think. He was unknown to the Iranian public, but he was very well known to those who are the enemy of Iran’s development.”

For some few, murder is the tool of choice for those who fail at politics. There’s probably some cowboy rhetoric that would provide the same defense of assassination. It would be equally popular in Israel or the United States.

Regardless, it is likely that the number of such nations continues to narrow with equivalent shrinking in the number of those who prefer guns over butter, profits over peace.

Demonstrations continue against Israeli cops evicting Palestinian families – turning homes over to Israeli settlers

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Ahmad Gharabli/AFP

Israeli forces raided the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood of occupied East Jerusalem for the second night on Tuesday, spraying skunk water, a chemically enhanced type of sewage water, and physically assaulting residents and solidarity protesters…

Palestinians have been protesting against the forced displacement of people in the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood following an Israeli court order. The Israeli district court in East Jerusalem approved a decision to vacate six Palestinian families from their homes in May in favour of Israeli settlers. The same court ruled that another seven families in Sheikh Jarrah are to leave their homes by August 1…

Palestinians fear it is part of an ongoing effort by Israeli settlers to take control of Palestinian homes in the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood … A video showing a settler attempting to take over a Palestinian home in Sheikh Jarrah on Saturday has further caused outrage.

Since 1956, a total of 37 Palestinian families have been living in 27 homes in the neighbourhood – including 28 refugee families who were ethnically cleansed from their homes in Jaffa and Haifa in 1948.

However, illegal Jewish settlers have been trying to push them out on the basis of a law approved by the Israeli parliament in 1970.

Yup. The land of the free 2.0 … in much of the American Press.

Trump/Kushner want Palestinians to meet “standards” never enforced on any Arab nation

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Newsweek

President Donald Trump’s senior adviser Jared Kushner told CNN that if Palestinians can’t meet certain conditions under the administration’s Middle East plan, then he doesn’t believe Israel should take “the risk to recognize them as a state.”…

Fareed Zakaria pointed out that “no Arab country” currently meets the criteria Palestinians are being asked to achieve in the next four years — including ensuring free press, free elections, guarantees of religious freedom and an independent judiciary and financial institutions that are as transparent as they are in the West.

“Isn’t this just a way of telling the Palestinians you’re never actually going to get a state,” Zakaria asked, “because … if no Arab countries today in a position that you are demanding of the Palestinians before they can be made a state, effectively, it’s a killer amendment.”

Anyone surprised at this crappola from Trump and Kushner? RTFA for beaucoup depth and analysis.

$45 and you can prove yourself a True Believer Trump fan

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AP/Sebastian Scheiner

” Before their Oval Office meeting on Monday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu lavished praise on US President Donald Trump for, among other things, declaring Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and vowing to fix or scrap the Iran nuclear deal.

In doing so, the Israeli leader likened Trump to Harry Truman, Lord Balfour — and Cyrus the Great.

” What gives with Cyrus?…Jewish tradition has been consistent in treating him as a pagan agent of God’s divine plan for Jews to return to the Land of Israel from their exile in Babylon…

” The idea that Trump is a modern-day Cyrus is particularly popular among evangelical Christians, in part to explain the gap between Trump’s, ahem, personal behavior and his support for policies that advance their agenda…Mike Evans told the Christian Broadcasting Network that Cyrus “was used as an instrument of God for deliverance in the Bible, and God has used this imperfect vessel, this flawed human being like you or I, this imperfect vessel, and he’s using him in an incredible, amazing way to fulfill his plans and purposes…”

John Fea, a professor of evangelical history at Messiah College in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, told Vox. “It’s the theopolitical version of money laundering, taking Scripture to … clean [up] your candidate.”

Um, OK. Theological money laundering probably makes as much sense as any other social or political attempt to make our fake president a savior.

Trump’s New World Order

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When the cameras are gone you can give me a hug! — levhaolam.com

❝ Over time, President Obama and his advisers came to believe that Netanyahu had been playing them, occasionally feigning interest in a two-state solution while expanding settlements in the West Bank, thus making the creation of a viable Palestinian state increasingly difficult to conceive. By Obama’s second term, his aides no longer bothered to mask their frustration with the Israelis. “They were never sincere in their commitment to peace,” Benjamin Rhodes, one of Obama’s closest foreign-policy advisers, told me. “They used us as cover, to make it look like they were in a peace process. They were running a play, killing time, waiting out the Administration…”

❝ The Israelis already had ties to the Trump family: Netanyahu had a long friendship with Charles Kushner, the father of Ivanka Trump’s husband, Jared Kushner. In recent years, the Kushners, Orthodox Jews who made their fortune in the real-estate business and hold conservative views on Israel, have donated large sums of money to Israeli causes and charities, including tens of thousands of dollars to a yeshiva in the Beit El settlement, in the West Bank. When Netanyahu visited the Kushners at their home in New Jersey, he sometimes stayed overnight and slept in Jared’s bedroom, while Jared was relegated to the basement…

❝ With Obama finally out of the way, Netanyahu could concentrate on getting the Trump team to embrace his grand strategy for transforming the direction of Middle Eastern politics. His overarching ambition was to diminish the Palestinian cause as a focus of world attention and to form a coalition with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to combat Iran, which had long supported Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza and had taken strategic advantage of the American folly in Iraq and the war in Syria.

❝ On Inauguration Day, State Department buses carried members of the diplomatic corps to the Capitol. The ambassadors in attendance had radically different perspectives on the incoming Administration. The French Ambassador, Gérard Araud, had tweeted after the election, “A world is collapsing before our eyes. Vertigo.” The presence of Kislyak took some observers by surprise. One of the European ambassadors at the ceremony said to Kislyak, “You are the most important ambassador here today!” Kislyak smiled and gestured at Ron Dermer [from Israel]. Actually, Kislyak said, “he is the most important ambassador here today.”

There are more twists and turns. A worthy read. Imperial hats have changed over the years though not so much in Israel. Everything the Brits did to suppress the native Arab population in Palestine has been continued in spades – with consistent support from the United States regardless of which Tweedledee or Tweedledum inhabited the White House. Now, it’s TweedleDumber and Israeli policies can comfortably move as far as they might wish towards complete fascism without a peep from Pennsylvania Avenue.

Fifty Years Ago, Israel attacked an unarmed US Navy ship killing 34

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❝ On June 8, 1967, an Israeli torpedo tore through the side of the unarmed American naval vessel USS Liberty, approximately a dozen miles off the Sinai coast. The ship, whose crew was under command of the National Security Agency, was intercepting communications at the height of the Six-Day War when it came under direct Israeli aerial and naval assault…an attack that would leave 34 Americans dead and 171 wounded.

❝ Last week marked the 50th anniversary of the assault on the USS Liberty, and though it was among the worst attacks in history against a noncombatant U.S. naval vessel, the tragedy remains shrouded in secrecy. The question of if and when Israeli forces became aware they were killing Americans has proved a point of particular contention in the on-again, off-again public debate that has simmered over the last half a century. The Navy Court of Inquiry’s investigation proceedings following the incident were held in closed sessions, and the survivors who had been on board received gag orders forbidding them to ever talk about what they endured that day.

This INTERCEPT article has a couple of documents leaked by Edward Snowden as its core. Excepting these 2 documents, our patriotic spies still keep the entire event under security wraps. So much for transparency in a democracy. Even after a half-century.

A worthwhile read. Learn some real history, folks.

Thanks, Martyn

Arms sales around the world are the highest they’ve been since the end of the Cold War

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Noah Seelam/AFP

❝ Global arms sales over the last five years reached their highest level since 1990, with India continuing to top the charts as the world’s largest defense importer, a report from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute has found.

Between 2012 and 2016, India accounted for 13 percent of global arms imports, followed by Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, China and Algeria, said SIPRI, which tracks global arms purchases. Between 2007 and 2011, India accounted for 9.7 percent of global imports, still more than any other country…

❝ Despite rising threats, and a ‘Make in India’ program to encourage local arms production, India’s domestic defense sector is not capable of meeting New Delhi’s growing requirements…

“They spend a lot of time and also money trying to develop weapons in India and things just go hopelessly wrong,” Siemon Wezeman, a senior researcher with SIPRI, said, adding that leaves them relying on imports…

❝ …The shift under Modi to rely more on private Indian companies for defense procurement, could lead to success. India signed an $8.7 billion contract to buy 36 Rafale jets from Dassault Aviation SA…Analysts also warned that structural changes to India’s defense purchasing would take a long time, given the lengthy timelines involved in defense R&D and manufacturing, as well as the necessity of meeting the military’s pressing requirements for combat-ready equipment.

RTFA for the gory details. Getting caught in the same sort of military-industrial complex that only shares ownership of the US economy with fossil fuel barons doesn’t seem like forward-looking economic design or planning. India might have more of a chance at long-term economic success working at building a mutual relationship based on peace with neighbors in the region. After all, they all were shoved into the same trick bag by departing Imperial England back in the day.