Peace and Justice Post

Intifada Palestine,  Nov,10, 2010

by Khalid Amayreh in occupied Palestine,

Israel’s fanatical supporters insist on behaving and acting like mad dogs by disregarding any consideration for honesty, rectitude and moral consistency.

They nearly completely overlook Israel’s Nazi-like behavior as if such behavior were taking place in a distant galaxy, not in this world.

Instead, they constantly focus on essentially mundane matters such as anti-Semitism and try desperately to link such secondary issues with the growing rejection in many countries of Israel’s decidedly fascist and criminal conduct in Occupied Palestine.

In fact, it is manifestly clear that Israel uses, or more correctly, misuses the issue of anti-Semitism as its ultimate red herring to distract attention from its affronting criminality in occupied Palestine.

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In his new book, George W. Bush writes that he was under pressure not just from hawks in the United States to invade Iraq, but from Arab statesmen as well.

In a revealing passage, Bush writes that President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt “told Tommy Franks that Iraq had biological weapons and was certain to use them on [American] troops,” a VOA article highlights. Bush goes on to say that Mubarak “refused to make the allegation in public for fear of inciting the Arab street.”

Additionally, Saudi Arabia’s Prince Bandar bin Sultan, who served as the influential Saudi ambassador to the United States for over 20 years and who Bush calls “a friend of mine since dad’s presidency” also wanted a “decision” to be made — although this seems less direct an indictment than “Iraq has biological weapons and will use them against you.”

So while the Arab street was firmly opposed to American intervention in Iraq, Arab heads of states were quietly and secretly either encouraging or tacitly endorsing allegations that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, a fact that was directly being used as the principal justification for invading the country.

Sounds familiar?

Netanyahu presents security cabinet with Clinton’s incentive of 20 F-35 fighter planes and security guarantees in exchange for 90-day West Bank building moratorium.

By Barak Ravid and Natasha Mozgovaya, Haaretz (Israel), Nov 13, 2010

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s seven-member inner cabinet discussed Saturday an offer by the United States to reinstate a freeze on West Bank Settlement construction in return for a package of incentives.

Netanyahu presented Saturday the U.S. offer, which was discussed by Netanyahu and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Thursday, to the forum of seven.

	U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at their meeting in New York, November 11, 2010.
	Photo by: Reuters

According to the offer Israel would stop construction in the West Bank for 90 days. The freeze includes construction that began after the end of the first settlement moratorium on September 26.

The moratorium would not apply to construction in East Jerusalem. The U.S. will not ask Israel to extend the new moratorium when it expires.

Saeb Erekat, the Palestinian negotiator, said the Americans had not officially informed the Palestinians about the details of the proposal, “but they know we have a major problem in not including east Jerusalem”.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas will  put the U.S. plan before Palestinian
decision-makers and call for an immediate session of Arab League officials before announcing an official decision, Erekat said.

In return for an Israeli freeze, the U.S. government would deliver 20 F-35 fighter jets to Israel, a deal worth $3 billion. Moreover, if an Israeli-Palestinian agreement is achieved, the U.S. would sign a comprehensive security agreement with Israel. The U.S. and Israel are to discuss the nature of the new security arrangements in the next few weeks.

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By ERIC LICHTBLAU, The New York Times, November 13, 2010

Dave Dieter/The Huntsville Times, via Associated Press

Arthur Rudolph, in 1990, was a rocket scientist for Nazi Germany and NASA.

Multimedia

Document

The O.S.I. Report

Interactive

In Hunt for Nazis, an Incomplete History

Associated Press

Dr. Josef Mengele in 1956.

The 600-page report, which the Justice Department has tried to keep secret for four years, provides new evidence about more than two dozen of the most notorious Nazi cases of the last three decades.

It describes the government’s posthumous pursuit of Dr. Josef Mengele, the so-called Angel of Death at Auschwitz, part of whose scalp was kept in a Justice Department official’s drawer; the vigilante killing of a former Waffen SS soldier in New Jersey; and the government’s mistaken identification of the Treblinka concentration camp guard known as Ivan the Terrible.

The report catalogs both the successes and failures of the band of lawyers, historians and investigators at the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations, which was created in 1979 to deport Nazis.

Perhaps the report’s most damning disclosures come in assessing the Central Intelligence Agency’s involvement with Nazi émigrés. Scholars and previous government reports had acknowledged the C.I.A.’s use of Nazis for postwar intelligence purposes. But this report goes further in documenting the level of American complicity and deception in such operations.

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by Jay Janson, Dissident Voice, November 11th, 2010

Turn Veterans Day into ‘Veterans Mourn Those They Killed Day!’ This should be the correct attitude of peace activists on Veterans Day.

It has been more than six decades since America fought a defensive war. Peace organizations going along with honoring veterans of previous wars in poor countries after WW II appear NOT to be against war in principle, rather only against the current wars we are losing. Calling for peace while permitting our now permanent war military establishment to turn all national holidays into celebrations hailing all U.S. wars, past and present, is contradictory.

What does it take? Peace activists are weary of quoting Albert Einstein, Helen Keller, Eugene Debs, General Smedley Butler, Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Howard Zinn, and the voices of today’s dissenters who are wise to the homicide for lies and money that has be going down for the last sixty-five years.

Tired of calling attention to Mohammed Ali having led the country in an inspiring way by refusing to eventually become a veteran of mass murder.

Tired of gritting our teeth watching militarized Network News promoting war to our children and gullible citizens.

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Daily Times, Nov 12, 2010

AFP

JERUSALEM: The United States is to significantly increase the amount of military equipment held in Israel as part of a move to upgrade security ties between the two allies, press reports said on Thursday.

The move, which will see an extra 400-million-dollars worth of smart bombs and other precision weaponry and equipment moved to Israel over the next two years, was approved last week by the US Congress, the Israeli correspondent of Defence News reported.

The upgrade will see the value of US military equipment stockpiled in Israel rise to one billion dollars in 2011, with another 200 million to be added in 2012, the paper said. In 2007, the stockpile was valued at 800 million dollars. Such equipment can be used by US forces throughout the world but also by the host country, under the terms of the US foreign aid law governing reserve stockpiles for allies.

Israel made use of the stockpile during the 2006 war with the Lebanese Hezbollah militia—a conflict which killed 1,200 people in Lebanon, most of them civilians, and around 160 Israelis, most of them soldiers, the Haaretz daily reported.

Using explosives and bulldozers, the US military has leveled hundreds of homes and trees.

Army engineers blow up a grape hut near a newly established U.S. base near Sia Choy, Kandahar province, Oct. 22, 2010. (Ben Gilbert/GlobalPost)

FORWARD OPERATING BASE WILSON, Afghanistan — The U.S. military has destroyed hundreds of Afghan civilian homes, farm houses, walls, trees and plowed through fields and buildings using explosives and bulldozers in war-torn Zhari district, a practice that has begun to anger Afghan villagers.

The much anticipated third phase of the Kandahar campaign, called Operation Dragon Strike, has U.S. troops from the 2nd brigade, 101st Airborne Division pushing into a dangerous swath of once-Taliban dominated territory from Highway 1 to the Arghandab River.

But it has come at much material cost to the Afghans, who complain that the troops are destroying their property, leaving some homeless and blocking their irrigation canals —potentially derailing the all-important counterinsurgency strategy that aims to win the hearts and minds of regular Afghans.

“You bulldozed some of my trees, they’re blocking the canal, now we can’t get water to the orchard,” Haji Jilal, a frail, weathered Afghan farmer with a white beard said to one of the U.S. military’s Afghan interpreters on a recent patrol here.

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