Tag: Israel

Palestine (Yes, That Is Named After a People)

Sheldon Richman is one of my “go to” people like Walter E. Williams. Wise men who have lived through decades of change and can see truths so easily while also doing the research that backs up the issues they bring light to.

From a Libertarian Institute article called “Depopulating Palestine, Dehumanizing Palestinians” Sheldon defines some words to set the context:

Dehumanization is an apt term because it consists of more than merely murder, massacre, torture, blockade, dispossession, humiliation, and the like. It consists of the very denial of the humanity of the victims and their cultures; it may include attempts to wipe them from the archives and from anyone’s memory.

I am sure most minds go back to the stories of Nazi efforts, but they were not the only ones that used this method to achieve their goals .. African peoples dehumanized by European powers, Maoist China, Rwanda, South Africa, Cambodia, etc. However, it seems that the systematic and even popular effort to dehumanize the Muslim AND Christian people who have lived for a very long time south of Syrian and Lebanon and north of Saudi Arabia compounded with an effort to actually deny they ever existed:

No one better vocalized this denial better than a former Israeli prime minister, Golda Meir, who famously said:

There were no such thing as Palestinians. When was there an independent Palestinian people with a Palestinian state? It was either southern Syria before the First World War, and then it was a Palestine including Jordan. It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist.

The tendency might be to counter with an effort to prove that a people group existed, however, that is beside the point. The point is that there is epic proof that individuals lived there and it was not like after WWII there was no one there and it would be the perfect place to put Jews, even though a vast majority of these Jews do NOT have as their ancestors a Hebrew people. So Sheldon fleshes out who these people were and part of their story as well as any claim to land based on a people group:

Morally, we have rights by virtue of our personhood, not by virtue of our inclusion in a subgroup of persons. The idea of rights not rooted in the individual literally is nonsense. Among other things, this means there is no Jewish land, Palestinian land, or land with any other ethnic, racial, or religious qualifier. There is only legitimately and illegitimately acquired land.

It is not up to governments or narratives to grant people land that belongs to others .. although many have been duped into thinking that God explicitly directed the events to create an apartheid state that has caused nothing but violence and death in the Middle East in the last 70 years.

But in fact, notwithstanding fabricated and wholly discredited “histories” of Palestine and Israel, it is now uncontroversial to state that the establishment of Israel saw hundreds of thousands of indigenous individuals driven from their ancestral homes and hundreds of others massacred by recent European immigrants (many of them atheists yet nevertheless claiming to be Jewish) with a tenuous connection to Palestine or ancient Israel. H. G. Wells posed a reasonable question: “If it is proper to ‘reconstitute’ a Jewish state which has not existed for two thousand years, why not go back another thousand years and reconstitute the Canaanite state? The Canaanites, unlike the Jews, are still there.” (Quoted in Ian Gilmour and David Gilmour, “Pseudo-Travellers,” London Review of Books, February 1985.)

Ian and David go on to state: “.. The modern Palestinians are a people of various ethnic origins, descended from the conquerors of Palestine since early Biblical times. Their ancestors are the Canaanites and Philistines who, unlike the Jews, were never deported. They remained in Palestine (which took its name from the Philistines) and their descendants formed, and still form, the core of the indigenous population…”

Evidence of this come from the founding members of the nation of Israel, David Ben-Gurion, as it came into existence in 1948:

The fellahin [Palestinian farmers] are not descendants of the Arab conquerors, who captured Eretz Israel and Syria in the seventh century CE. The Arab victors did not destroy the agricultural population they found in the country. They expelled only the alien Byzantine rulers, and did not touch the local population. Nor did the Arabs go in for settlement. Even in their former habitations, the Arabians did not engage in farming.… They did not seek new lands on which to settle their peasantry, which hardly existed. Their whole interest in the new countries was political, religious and material: to rule, to propagate Islam and to collect taxes.

So, we have a 70 year old effort that has squeezed these people into smaller and smaller areas of their land …

What is clear is that people WERE in the land and a SMALL number of Jews could have settled there however, once there was a groundswell of dispensation religious support that made it appear that God had indeed brought the Jews back to the Promised Land, the Zionists (atheists) seized this opportunity for power and control:

Ahad Ha’am, a “spiritual Zionist” who had spent time there, reported in 1891, “‘Palestine is not an uninhabited country,’ and has room ‘for only a very small proportion of Jews,’ since there was little untilled soil except for stony hills or sand dunes.” Ha’am and others warned the Zionist movement to respect the indigenous population.

Thus if there was to be a Jewish state, most if not all of the non-Jews would have to go. “Only in a very few places in our colonialisation were we not forced [sic] to transfer the earlier residents,” Ben-Gurion told the 1937 Zionist Congress” (Gilmours). His militias would “be forced” to transfer many more a decade later.

The view most American Christians have is that these people are Arabs that came into this area in the 7th century, however, this is simply not the case:

The dehumanization of the Palestinians was manifest in the Western attitude that these individuals saw themselves merely as undifferentiated members of an Arab horde, indifferent to their immediate surroundings, that is, to their homes, towns, villages, farming communities, market connections, and ultimately their larger homeland, and thus would accept “transfer” to other Arab areas. No westerner ever thought of himself in such nonhuman terms, but thinking of Palestinians that way came easy. That’s the stuff of mass injustice, of literal and cultural genocide.

This injustice is real, and it is time to spread the truth of the 70 year lie and a people (Muslims and Christians) that are being evaporated and marginalized.

SF1

What is the Pivot Point of US Foreign Policy in the Middle East?

When you think of Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, and Syria (all adversely impacted by US foreign policy) and then consider the region’s powers of Israel, Saudi Arabia and UAE that are pitted against Iran, it all becomes a bit more clear. Israel desires to be a permanent fixture in the Middle East in spite of its illegitimate birth at the expense of native Palestinians. To preserve their place in the Middle East, they have become more desperate in their quest to control the narrative as well as the lands outside their true borders (i.e. Golan Heights, West Bank as well as Gaza).

Paranoid to a fault, they have used the United Kingdom and the United States of America for seven decades since they were given partial ownership of land in this region after the Zionist movement gained UK support three decades prior to that.

From AntiWar comes a fair synopsis [ Titled: “Making Sense of US Moves in the Middle East” by and ] of the region’s neighbors who have been decimated by US foreign policy working towards protecting Israel at all costs.

Starting with the US’s longest undeclared war to date, Afghanistan, the article points out:

The report was devastating – or would have been, if anyone here had noticed it. “Between 2001 and 2017,” it concluded, “U.S. government efforts to stabilize insecure and contested areas in Afghanistan mostly failed.”

If you think this has nothing to do with Israel, you are sorely mistaken. Israel has seen Iran (used to be Iraq) as it’s biggest enemy in the region since it has Saudi Arabia and UAE as allies.

Of course the US would like the world to believe that Iran is threatening the US but in reality just its existence WITHOUT any nukes it threatens Israel which has 100 nukes. Iran is not really an offensive powerhouse with its 40 year old military equipment mainly from the US before the Shah of Iran (US puppet) was overthrown.

So $2T to date has been spent in Afghanistan with 2,000 US soldiers dying there as well as 100,000 Afghans to date. The fact that the poppy-market (Opium) market there is thriving makes the country fantastic in funding CIA black budget towards its black ops worldwide as well as being lucrative for the Military Industrial Complex.

The background on Afghanistan and how it became a target after 9/11 is an interesting one:

From Lew Rockwell

In 1998, the Afghan anti-Communist movement Taliban and a western oil consortium led by the US firm UNOCAL signed a major pipeline deal. UNOCAL lavished money and attention on Taliban, flew a senior delegation to Texas, and also hired an minor Afghan official, one Hamid Karzai.

Enter Osama bin Laden. He advised the unworldly Taliban leaders to reject the US deal and got them to accept a better offer from an Argentine consortium, Bridas. Washington was furious and, according to some accounts, threatened Taliban with war.

In early 2001, six or seven months before 9/11, Washington made the decision to invade Afghanistan, overthrow Taliban, and install a client regime that would build the energy pipelines. But Washington still kept up sending money to Taliban until four months before 9/11 in an effort to keep it “on side” for possible use in a war or strikes against Iran.

The 9/11 attacks, about which Taliban knew nothing, supplied the pretext to invade Afghanistan. The initial US operation had the legitimate objective of wiping out Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida. But after its 300 members fled to Pakistan, the US stayed on, built bases — which just happened to be adjacent to the planned pipeline route

So with that unpleasant fact out of the way (i.e. rationale for invading Afghanistan), let’s take a look at the West Bank before we turn our eyes to Syria.

Early on, Israel has made a point to solidify it’s grip on ALL the land promised the Hebrews and given to the Zionists (close enough for government work right?) by the UK and US after WWII:

From the AntiWar article mentioned above:

… the United States has often been Israel’s sole ally as, in direct contravention of international law, that country has used its own settlements to carve Palestinian territory into a jigsaw puzzle of disparate pieces, making a contiguous Palestinian state a near impossibility.

Then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon explained Israel’s plan for the Palestinian people in 1973 when he said, “We’ll make a pastrami sandwich of them.” Promising to insert “a strip of Jewish settlements in between the Palestinians and then another strip of Jewish settlements right across the West Bank,” he insisted that “in 25 years’ time, neither the United Nations nor the United States, nobody, will be able to tear it apart.”

Forty-five years later, his strategy has been fully implemented, as Barack Obama reportedly learned to his shock when, in 2015, he saw a State Department map of the shredded remains of the land on which Palestinians are allowed to exist on the West Bank.

The “pastrami sandwich” strategy has effectively killed any hope for a two-state solution.

How convenient for Israel, and now in its effort to solidify this even more (as they are in fact now the minority class in Israel in terms of shear population), they are doing this (again from the AntiWar article):

.. as the number of non-Jews begins to surpass that of Jews in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza, that country once again confronts the inherent contradiction of a state that aims to be both democratic and, in some sense, Jewish. If everyone living in Israel/Palestine today had equal political and economic rights, majority rule would no longer be Jewish rule. In effect, as some Israelis argue, Israel can be Jewish or democratic, but not both.

A solution to this demographic dilemma – one supported by present Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – is to legislate permanent inequality through what’s called “the basic law on Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people,” which is now being debated in the country’s parliament, the Knesset. Among other provisions, that “basic” law (which, if passed, would have the equivalent of constitutional status) will allow citizens “to establish ‘pure’ communities on the basis of religion or ethnicity.” In other words, it will put in place an official framework of legalized segregation. [Editor’s note: The Jewish Nation-State bill described here was passed early Thursday morning. This article was written before passage.]

Apartheid .. segregation .. a last ditch effort to strong arm its way in a region that is hostile to its own paranoid agenda. Acting like the US Empire as a world’s bully, not even allowing UN inspectors in Israel while it demands Iran to have total transparency in the world’s court.

Blowback is a bitch, but the current Zionist leaders only care about themselves and not their kids when they use this method to coexist in this world.

So while the US has given the Israeli military almost every toy the US has in its inventory as well as $134.7B (current, or non-inflation-adjusted) dollars in bilateral assistance and missile defense funding and promising $39B more in the next ten years it appears that GOP, Democrats and Zionist Christians are falling all over themselves to aid in this intimate partnership for the long term. The world is NOT impressed.

Lastly, what is up with Syria?

Meanwhile, if it weren’t for Yemen (see below), it might be hard to imagine a more miserable place in 2018 than Syria. Since 2011, when a nonviolent movement to unseat Assad devolved into a vicious civil war, more than half the country’s pre-war population of 22 million has become internally displaced or refugees, according to numbers from the U.N. High Commission on Refugees. Actual casualty figures are impossible to pin down with any exactitude. In April 2018, however, the New York Times reported that the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights put the number of directly caused deaths at 511,000, including fighters and civilians.

Death and destruction have come from all sides: al-Qaeda-linked terror groups and the Islamic State killing civilians; the Syrian military, which is presently driving opposition forces out of the southern city of Dara’a, where the original uprising began (creating a quarter-million refugees with literally no place to go); and U.S. bombs and other munitions – 20,000 of them – reducing the city of Raqqa to rubble in a campaign to liberate it from ISIS militants. Add it all up and the war, still ongoing, has destroyed millions of homes and businesses, along with crucial infrastructure throughout an increasingly impoverished country.

So with Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria all smarting from Israel’s lover, the US, all to protect Israel (more than US citizens when you understand the $20T debt, $200T unfunded liabilities and the loss of freedoms across the spectrum the American people have suffered (out of ignorance they would not understand this sentence)) .. what else is there? Yemen!!!

Saudi Arabia with US weapons and assistance have decimated Yemen towards a genocidal disaster. It is almost as if the US is getting Saudi Arabia up to speed to be another useful puppet in the region to protect Israel .. yes, you heard that right .. in fact, the US/Israel/Saudi Arabia team were the proud parents of ISIS.

With U.S. logistical and financial support, Saudi Arabia has waged a cruel air war against the Houthis, a home-grown movement that in 2015 overthrew the government of president Ali Abdullah Saleh. What is the Saudi interest in Yemen? As in their support for a potential UAE-Israel-Russia-U.S. alliance in Syria, they’re intent on fighting a proxy war – and someday perhaps via the U.S. and Israel, a real war – with Iran.

In this case, however, it seems that the other side in that war hasn’t shown up. Although, like the Iranian government and most Iranians, the Houthi are Shi’a Muslims, there is little evidence of Iranian involvement in Yemen. That hasn’t stopped the Saudis (with American support) from turning that country into “the worst humanitarian crisis in the world.” Their destruction of infrastructure in rebel-held areas has collapsed a once-functioning public health system, touching off a cholera epidemic, with the World Health Organization reporting a total of 1,105,371 suspected cases between April 2017 and June 2018. The infection rate now stands at 934 per 10,000 people.

Even worse than the largely unchecked spread of cholera, however, is Yemen’s man-made famine. Photographs from the country display the familiar iconography of widespread hunger: children with stick-like limbs and blank, sunken eyes. As it happens, though, this famine was not caused by drought or any other natural disaster. It’s a direct result of a brutal Saudi air campaign and a naval blockade aimed directly at the country’s economic life.

Before the war, Yemen imported 80% of its food and even today, despite a disastrous ongoing Saudi/UAE campaign to blockade and take the port of Hodeidah, Yemen’s main economic center, there is actually plenty of food in the country. It now simply costs more than most Yemenis can pay. Because the war has destroyed almost all economic activity in Houthi-controlled areas, people there have no money with which to buy food. In other words, the Saudi offensive against Hodeidah is starving people in two ways: directly by preventing the delivery of international food aid and indirectly by making the food in Yemen unaffordable for ordinary people.

Nice … am I right? American exceptionalism at its finest! A nation under God right?

The author summarizes with this statement of hope (she is young, so you will have that):

For more than 70 years, Americans have largely ignored the effects of U.S. foreign policy in the rest of the world. Rubble in Syria? Famine in Yemen? It’s terribly sad, yes, but what, we still wonder, does it have to do with us?

That Part of the World doesn’t wonder about how U.S. actions and policies affect them. That Part of the World knows – and what it knows is devastating. It’s time that real debate about future U.S. policy there becomes part of our world, too.

Fat chance on the US really having a debate on foreign policy as the only export this country really has anymore is weapons and a bully military.

Again, blowback will be a bitch someday. I just with my generation would have learned from Vietnam and thought more like Thomas Paine:

Is Israel 2.0 Anything Like Israel 1.0 was Supposed to Be?

From The Electronic Intifada

No surprise .. from supporting ISIS to supporting neo-Nazis .. they ain’t anything like Israel 1.0 .. or at least what God intended for Israel 1.0.

Azov Battalion online propaganda shows Israeli-licensed Tavor rifles in the fascist group’s hands

Neo-Nazis supported by Israel 2.0? No, get out, I thought they only supported ISIS …

The rifles are produced under licence from Israel Weapon Industries, and as such would have been authorized by the Israeli government.

OK, so what would be the motive?

When the civil war began in eastern Ukraine against Russian-backed separatists, the new western-backed government began to arm Azov. The militia soon fell under the jurisdiction of the Ukrainian interior ministry, and saw some of the most intense frontline combat against the separatists.

The group stands accused in United Nations and Human Rights Watch reports of committing war crimes against pro-Russian separatists during the ongoing civil war in the eastern Donbass region, including torture, sexual violence and targeting of civilian homes.

Today, Azov is run by Arsen Avakov, Ukraine’s interior minister. According to the BBC, he pays its fighters, and has appointed one of its military commanders, Vadym Troyan, as his deputy – with control over the police.

Avakov last year met with the Israeli interior minister Aryeh Deri to discuss “fruitful cooperation.”

Azov’s young founder and first military commander Andriy Biletsky is today a lawmaker in the Ukrainian parliament.

As journalist Max Blumenthal explained on The Real News in February, Biletsky has “pledged to restore the honor of the white race” and has advanced laws forbidding “race mixing.”

There it is … Israel HEARTS this …

Israel’s military aid to Ukraine and its neo-Nazis emulates similar programs by the United States and other NATO countries including the UK and Canada.

So obsessed are they with defeating a perceived threat from Russia that they seem happy to aid even openly Nazi militias – as long as they fight on their side.

This is also a throwback to the early Cold War, when the CIA supported fascists and Hitlerites to infiltrate from Austria into Hungary in 1956, where they began slaughtering Hungarian communist Jews and Hungarian Jews as “communists.”

.. and when the US supported Bin Laden as a freedom fighter in the late 1970s .. what can go wrong when you chose sides like your “enemy’s enemy is your friend” mantra.

Israel has historically acted as a useful route through which US presidents and the CIA can circumvent congressional restrictions on aid to various unsavory groups and governments around the world.

In 1980s Latin America, these included the Contras, who were fighting a war against the left-wing revolutionary government of Nicaragua, as well as a host of other Latin American fascist death squads and military dictatorships.

The US and Israel, a couple that overtly or covertly bring their violence to the world at large .. while all the time claiming to either being the world’s policeman or the nation that God favors yet again.

 

When Russia (Not the USA) Fights for Peace

From Russia Insider

Russian intervention on behalf of Mideast Christians has pricked the conscience of many American evangelicals. Long conditioned to Cold War enmity, the question is entertained: Are they the good guys in the cradle of Christianity? Or are persecuted Christians just a handy excuse for political interests?

“The news tells us Russian troops are bringing peace to the region, said Vitaly Vlasenko, ambassador-at-large for the Russian Evangelical Alliance. “Maybe this is propaganda, but we don’t hear anything else.”

Yes, the Middle East Christians have been more than patient, waiting decades for the US to bring peace. However, there are millions less Christians in the Middle East since the USA convinced other countries to topple Saddam in Gulf War I and II and spread this regime change to other countries as well.

Thanks to Russia we have a model of what really works for all people including Christians. Being INVITED into a country to fight rebels that have an evil worldview (either intentionally or misguided). Peace is being realized in Syria and the tears of appreciation flow!

One example is Sergei Riakhovskii, lead bishop of the Pentecostal Russian Union of Christians of Evangelical Faith.

A member of several governmental councils to help convey the concerns of religious citizens, his church has forged strong connections with Syrian Protestants and organized several food convoys to aid the displaced.

I still don’t understand the actions and statements of some American politicians,” said Riakhovskii. “If it were not for Russia, Christians in Syria might not have survived at all.”

Vlasenko cited local polls which show two-thirds of Russians view the United States as their enemy. Evangelicals are more open, believing Americans want peace.

But the US, viewed widely as an evangelical country, leaves them very confused.

“American policy has created chaos, giving oil to the fire of Islamic terrorism,” he said. “It is hard for Russian evangelicals to understand this.”

Rightly so. There is NO understanding of US foreign policy in light of a policy of peace that is desired by all REAL Christians!

Russia, in many Christian eyes, is a balancing power to Israel-focused American interests, Munayer said. But local believers should not align too closely with either.

“Otherwise, we will bind ourselves in the trap of political interests, getting manipulated by one side or the other,” he said.

Very wise insight, and yes, the US Empire’s sole interests in the ME seems to align directly with Israel’s.

Without Russia, Syria would have been yet another nation overrun by rebel groups that would kill all Christians if they had the opportunity.

Why I Appreciate (and Support($)) True Researchers

Holding the UN accountable is _____? Yeah, no official body of any government really holds anyone accountable for the numbers they generate .. out of thin air.

This is where Moon of Alabama and others like this website are willing to spend hours to get down in the weeds and validate (or invalidate) the claims of these bureaucracies:

Neither the OCHA map nor the UN report explain how, when or why 164,000-171,000 people are supposed to have moved the few miles towards the Israel occupied Golan Heights. There is no evidence that this claimed movement of IDPs, who may or may not exist, happened at all.

Where does the OCHA claim come from?

The nearly unreadable fine-print of the OCHA map says about the “Map Data Source(s)”:

The data of this map has a limited number of sources, including parties of the conflict. The data has not been independently verified and is subject to error or omission, deliberate or otherwise, by the various sources.

There is the explanation for the unbelievable high refugee numbers the UN is peddling around. They are based on claims made by the Islamic State, the al-Qaeda offshoot Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham and various other sectarian “rebel” groups and their propaganda outlets. These claims have not be verified at all. Whoever made up that map did not even ask if the numbers were plausible or made any sense. They obviously don’t.

It is irresponsible that UN spokespersons come out and make claims of an extreme refugee flow when only some dubious ‘rebel’ sources say that these happened and no reasonable explanation exists why such a movement might have taken place at all.

There has so far only been moderate fighting during the three weeks of the Daraa campaign. Most of the affected towns reconciled with the  Syrian army without any fight. The real recent refugee flow in the whole Daraa governorate is thus more likely in the order of ten-thousands than in the order of hundred-thousands.

The UN must stop to distribute such alarming numbers that evidently can not be backed up at all. Otherwise its credibility and long term efficiency will be severely damaged.

Yeah, it has come to the point where EVER government and/or international organization is going to give data that supports their agenda but never gives the people the truth. You probably already support a government (and UN indirectly) with your tax money .. why not search out true researchers and support them as well?