Apocalypses Rehearsal
By Vicente Segura




“’Our nuclear weapons are first to deter the Arabs from striking Israel, and second, if deterrence fails and Israel were about to be overrun, to destroy the Arabs in a nuclear Armageddon.’” Rabin to Kissinger - 1970


Let Israel keep the illegal Jewish settlements in Palestine and you will see what will happen.
Let Israel stage war games against Iran, Syria, Sudan, etc. and you will see what will happen.
Let israel show-off too much power in the Middle East and you will see what will happen.
Let israel use and abuse it`s influence in USA and you will see what will happen to USA.

The US and Israel negotiations on to freeze the settlements is designed to be legitimized for the prospect of expanding the Jews community in the West Bank for the project of the "Big Israel".

Appears as if Israel was invented in this region to serve as a proxy for the penetration of USA-UK imperialism in the area. The strategy: take over the lands first, through militar means, then economically and culturally -with western ideology of democracy and capitalism- through permanent provocations, conflicts, invasions and occupations to finally control the area (full of fossil fuel), but triggering a world war III, as a consequence.

The target seems the Islam. Implant, transplant a Western style life (for the sake of the western corporations): inject the neoliberal model of economy in the name of "democracy", to expand the Global American Republic.




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A note from Roger Water to Scarlett Johansson
1. Februar 2014 um 05:46
Oxfam vs. SodaStream


In the past days I have written privately to Neil Young (once) and to Scarlett Johanson (a couple of times). Those letters will remain private.

Sadly, I have received no reply from either.

And so I write this note on my Facebook page somewhat in bewilderment.

Neil? I shall ponder all of this long and hard. We don't really know each other, but, you were always one of my heroes, I am confused.

Scarlett? Ah, Scarlett. I met Scarlett a year or so ago, I think it was at a Cream reunion concert at MSG. She was then, as I recall, fiercely anti Neocon, passionately disgusted by Blackwater (Dick Cheney's private army in Iraq), you could have been forgiven for thinking that here was a young woman of strength and integrity who believed in truth, human rights, and the law and love. I confess I was somewhat smitten. There's no fool like an old fool.

A few years down the line, Scarlett's choice of Soda Stream over Oxfam is such an act of intellectual, political, and civil about face, that we, all those of us who care about the downtrodden, the oppressed, the occupied, the second class, will find it hard to rationalize.

I would like to ask that younger Scarlett a question or two. Scarlett, just for one example, are you aware that the Israeli government has razed to the ground a Bedouin village in the Negev desert in Southern Israel 63 times, the last time being on the 26th of December 2013. This village is the home to Bedouin. The Bedouin are, of course, Israeli citizens with full rights of citizenship. Well, not quite full rights, because in "Democratic" Israel there are fifty laws that discriminate against non Jewish citizens.

I am not going to attempt to list, either those laws(they are on the statute book in the Knesset for all to research) or all the other grave human rights abuses of Israeli domestic and foreign policy. I would run out of space. But, to return to my friend Scarlett Johanson.

Scarlett, I have read your reposts and excuses, in them you claim that the Palestinian workers in the factory have equal pay, benefits and "Equal rights". Really? Equal Rights? Do they?

Do they have the right to vote?

Do they have access to the roads?

Can they travel to their work place without waiting for hours to pass through the occupying forces control barriers?

Do they have clean drinking water?

Do they have sanitation?

Do they have citizenship?

Do they have the right not to have the standard issue kicking in their door in the middle of the night and taking their children away?

Do they have the right to appeal against arbitrary and indefinite imprisonment?

Do they have the right to re-occupy the property and homes they owned before 1948?

Do they have the right to an ordinary, decent human family life?

Do they have the right to self determination?

Do they have the right to continue to develop a cultural life that is ancient and profound?

If these questions put you in a quandary I can answer them for you. The answer is, NO, they do not.

The workers in The Soda Stream Factory do not have any of these rights.

So, what are the "equal rights" of which you speak?

Scarlett, you are undeniably cute, but if you think Soda Stream is building bridges towards peace you are also undeniably not paying attention.

Love

R.



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It`s the Palestinians who have the right to defend themselves

The US and Britain stand behind Israel's onslaught on Gaza.
Justice requires a change in the balance of forces on the ground

by Seumas Milne
The Guardian, Tuesday 20 November 2012 22.32 GMT



The way western politicians and media have pontificated about Israel's onslaught on Gaza, you'd think it was facing an unprovoked attack from a well-armed foreign power. Israel had every "right to defend itself", Barack Obama declared. "No country on earth would tolerate missiles raining down on its citizens from outside its borders."

He was echoed by Britain's foreign secretary, William Hague, who declared that the Palestinian Islamists of Hamas bore "principal responsibility" for Israel's bombardment of the open-air prison that is the Gaza Strip. Meanwhile, most western media have echoed Israel's claim that its assault is in retaliation for Hamas rocket attacks; the BBC speaks wearisomely of a conflict of "ancient hatreds".

In fact, an examination of the sequence of events over the last month shows that Israel played the decisive role in the military escalation: from its attack on a Khartoum arms factory reportedly supplying arms to Hamas and the killing of 15 Palestinian fighters in late October, to the shooting of a mentally disabled Palestinian in early November, the killing of a 13 year-old in an Israeli incursion and, crucially, the assassination of the Hamas commander Ahmed Jabari last Wednesday during negotiations over a temporary truce.

Israel's prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, had plenty of motivation to unleash a new round of bloodletting. There was the imminence of Israeli elections (military attacks on the Palestinians are par for the course before Israeli polls); the need to test Egypt's new Muslim Brotherhood president, Mohamed Morsi, and pressure Hamas to bring other Palestinian guerrilla groups to heel; and the chance to destroy missile caches before any confrontation with Iran, and test Israel's new Iron Dome anti-missile system.

So after six days of sustained assault by the world's fourth largest military power on one of its most wretched and overcrowded territories, at least 130 Palestinians had been killed, an estimated half of them civilians, along with five Israelis. The goal, Israel's interior minister, Eli Yeshai, insisted, had been to "send Gaza back to the middle ages".

True, the bloodshed hasn't so far been on the scale of Operation Cast Lead in 2008-9, which left 1,400 Palestinians dead in three weeks. But the issue isn't just who started and escalated it, or even the grinding "disproportionality" of yet another Israeli military battering (even before last month's flareups, 314 Palestinians had been killed since 2009, as against 20 Israelis).

It's that to portray Israel as some kind of victim with every right to "defend itself" from attack from "outside its borders" is a grotesque inversion of reality. Israel has after all been in illegal occupation of both the West Bank and Gaza, where most of the population are the families of refugees who were driven out of what is now Israel in 1948, for the past 45 years.

Despite Israel's withdrawal of settlements and bases in 2005, the Gaza Strip remains occupied, both effectively and legally – and is recognised as such by the UN. Israel is in control of Gaza's land and sea borders, territorial waters and natural resources, airspace, power supply and telecommunications. It has blockaded the strip since Hamas took over in 2006-7, preventing the movement of people, materials, and food supplies in and out of the territory – even calculating the 2,279 calories per person that would keep Gazans on an exemplary "diet". And it continues to invade the strip at will.

So Gazans are an occupied people and have the right to resist, including by armed force (though not to target civilians), while Israel is an occupying power that has an obligation to withdraw – not a right to defend territories it controls or is colonising by dint of military power.

Even if Israel had genuinely ended its occupation in 2005, Gaza's people are Palestinians, and their territory part of the 22% of historic Palestine earmarked for a Palestinian state that depends on Israeli withdrawal from the occupied West Bank and east Jerusalem. Across their land, Palestinians have the right to defend and arm themselves, whether they choose to exercise it or not.

But instead the US, Britain and other European powers finance, arm and back to the hilt Israel's occupation, including the siege of Gaza – precisely to prevent Palestinians obtaining the arms that would allow them to protect themselves against Israeli military might.

It's hardly surprising of course that powers which have themselves invaded, occupied and intervened across the Arab and Muslim world over the last decade should throw their weight behind Israel doing the same thing on its own doorstep. But it isn't Palestinian rockets that stop Israel lifting the blockade, dismantling its illegal settlements or withdrawing from the West Bank and Gaza – it's unconditional US and western support that gives Israel impunity.

Whatever the Israeli government's mix of motivations for winding up the past week's conflict, it seems to have backfired. For the first time since the start of the Arab uprisings, the cause of Palestine is again centre stage.

Emboldened by the wave of change and growing support across the region, Hamas has also regained credibility as a resistance force, which had faded since 2009, and strengthened its hand against an increasingly discredited Palestinian Authority leadership in Ramallah. The deployment of longer-range rockets that have now been shown to reach Tel Aviv and Jerusalem is also beginning to shift what has been an overwhelmingly one-sided balance of deterrence.

The truce being negotiated on Tuesday would reportedly enforce Hamas responsibility for policing the strip and crucially break the blockade, opening the Rafah crossing with Egypt for goods as well as people. It doesn't, however, look like the long-term security deal with Hamas Israel was looking for, which would risk deepening the disastrous Palestinian split between Gaza and the West Bank.

Any relief from the bombardment, death and suffering of the past week has got to be welcome. But no ceasefire is going to prevent another eruption of violence. Whatever is finally agreed won't end Israel's occupation and colonisation of Palestinian land or halt its war of dispossession against the Palestinian people. That demands unrelenting pressure on the western powers that underwrite it to change course. But most of all, it needs a change in the balance of forces on the ground.



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Again, under US Protection, Israeli “War CRIMES, CRIMES against Humanity” on Syria ESCAPE Security Council Scrutiny

By Thalif Deen

IPS / The 4th Media News | Sunday, May 12, 2013, 13:54




UNITED NATIONS – Israel, which has launched three air strikes inside Syria since January this year, has escaped scrutiny or condemnation by a Security Council which remains sharply divided.

The continued air attacks have escalated tensions in the region and threatened a wider regional conflagration, according to reports from the Middle East.

Mouin Rabbani, co-editor of the Arab Studies Journal Jadaliyya, told IPS the Anglo-American reaction has been “the political equivalent of a standing ovation, though it remains unclear whether Washington and London’s public approval of Israeli aggression was in this case the result of a coordinated strategy or merely a Pavlovian response.”

He said the consequence has been – as it so often is in the Arab-Israel conflict – that the institutions charged with preserving international peace and security, first and foremost the U.N. Security Council, are once again caught with their pants down.

“And they have been prevented by Washington from formulating an effective response,” he added.

Matthew Russell Lee of Inner City Press, whose coverage of the United Nations includes a daily blow-by-blow account of Security Council activities, told IPS, “I’m not surprised they haven’t agreed on any statement.”

He said this happened after a car bombing by the opposition in Damascus, and when Russia proposed to condemn it, the U.S. (and other Western powers) wanted to add to the statement a condemnation of the government of President Bashar al-Assad.

“That would surely happen on any statement about Israel’s air attacks,” he said.

But no one has even requested a meeting of the type the Arab Group requested, and got, during Israel’s Operation Pillar of Defense aka Pillar of Cloud.

“I’d say that’s because the Arab Group, with the exception of Algeria and Iraq and the ‘dis-association’ of Lebanon, is seeking the transfer of power away from Assad,” Lee said.

The Arab Group, currently dominated by Gulf majority Sunni – or Sunni-ruled, like Bahrain – countries, had to write to the Security Council to have done at least as much as the 120-member Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) chaired by Iran.

“Actually, an Arab Group diplomat argued with me that while NAM only issued a statement, the Arab Group wrote to the Security Council and Ban Ki-moon: that’s the level of competition,” said Lee.

“But the Arab Group does not want a meeting in which Assad’s Syria would be portrayed as a victim,” he added.

Meanwhile, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov have agreed to convene an international conference on Syria. But whether all of the warring parties would participate in such a meeting remains in doubt.

Rabbani told IPS the silence of the Security Council, for all practical purposes, constitutes an international green light to Israel to continue with its new policy and military aggression.

That Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has, despite his unambiguous extremism, been less inclined to launch a major armed conflict than each of his predecessors, and is more susceptible to U.S. pressure, provides little solace, he added.

Having done this once and gotten away with it, his government and security establishment are almost certain to do so again, probably sooner rather than later, even while staring the potential Israeli disaster of war with Syria and/or Hezbollah – and perhaps a wider regional conflagration – straight in the face, said Rabbani, who is also a contributing editor to the Middle East Report.

Stephen Zunes, professor of politics and coordinator of Middle Eastern studies at the University of San Francisco, told IPS he cannot recall of any precedent of the Security Council remaining silent on air attacks on a sovereign country.

“But that doesn’t mean there aren’t any,” he said, pointing out that, “It appears that the Syrian regime has become an even bigger international pariah than Israel.”

Rabbani told IPS the Israeli explanation for its recent bombings of Damascus is that these were launched solely to prevent the transfer of advanced weaponry to Hezbollah in Lebanon and do not represent an Israeli intervention in the Syrian crisis. It is an explanation that is difficult to take seriously, he said.

Israel may indeed have acted to interdict weapons supplies to its foes in Lebanon. But more importantly, it acted to change its relationship with Syria and test the international response to this change of policy, he argued.

Specifically, said Rabbani, Israel was sending a clear message to the world’s capitals that henceforth it will act at will within Syria to promote its interests.

Resources and activities within sovereign Syrian territory previously considered immune from Israeli attack, such as military infrastructure and the transport of weapons systems to Lebanon, is no longer so.

In other words, Israel will henceforth retain the freedom to act, and act systematically, to degrade Syria’s military capabilities, Syrian support of guerrilla movements beyond its borders, and, further down the line, regimes and organizations within Syria it considers actively hostile, Rabbani said.

“It is a policy that bears numerous similarities to Israel’s approach to Lebanon, particularly southern Lebanon, during the late 1960s and 1970s,” he added.

More importantly, this new pattern of Israeli aggression is certain to make the Syrian crisis more difficult to resolve and even more catastrophic than it already is, Rabbani said. He added that Israel is determined to degrade Syria and keep it weak, and while internal Syrian matters may not have figured prominently or perhaps not even at all in its most recent actions, they eventually will.

And if this new policy is permitted to stand – perhaps even form an important motivation for Israeli policy, as was the case in Lebanon from the mid-1970s onwards.



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Because what must be said may be too late tomorrow!

WHAT MUST BE SAID
by Günter Grass



Why have I kept silent, held back so long,on something openly
practised inwar games, at the end of which those of uswho
survive will at best be footnotes?

It`s the alleged right to a first strike
that could destroy an Iranian people
subjugated by a loudmouth
and gathered in organized rallies,
because an atom bomb may be being
developed within his arc of power.


Yet why do I hesitate to name
that other land in which
for years -although kept secret-
a growing nuclear power has existed
beyond supervision or verification,
subject to no inspection of any kind?


This general silence on the facts,
before which my own silence has bowed,
seems to me a troubling, enforced lie,
leading to a likely punishment
the moment it`s broken:
the verdict "Anti-semitism" falls easily.


But now that my own country,
brought in time after time
for questioning about its own crimes,
profound and beyond compare,
has delivered yet another submarine to Israel
(in what is purely a business transaction,
though glibly declared an act of reparation)
whose speciality consists in its ability
to direct nuclear warheads toward
an area in which not a single atom bomb
has yet been proved to exist, its feared
existence proof enough, I`ll say what must be said.


But why have I kept silent till now?
Because I thought my own origins,
tarnished by a stain that can never be removed,
meant I could not expect Israel, a land
to which I am, and always will be, attached,
to accept this open declaration of the truth.


Why only now, grown old,
and with what ink remains, do I say:
Israel`s atomic power endangers
an already fragile world peace?
Because what must be said
may be too late tomorrow;
and because -burdened enough as Germans-
we may be providing material for a crime
that is foreseeable, so that our complicity
will not be expunged by any
of the usual excuses.
And granted: I`ve broken my silence
because I`m sick of the West`s hypocrisy;
and I hope too that many may be freed
from their silence, may demand
that those responsible for the open danger
we face renounce the use of force,
may insist that the governments of
both Iran and Israel allow an international authority
free and open inspection of
the nuclear potential and capability of both.
No other course offers help
to Israelis and Palestinians alike,
to all those living side by side in enmity
in this region occupied by illusions,
and ultimately, to all of us.




By Video Documentary from Free Palestine




Video-Clip | Click to watch

Israeli attack on Gaza | January 2009
Israeli attack on Gaza | January 2009





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