Gabi and Vera Raised 11.7000 Euro

Gilad Atzmon, London: Following our appeal and thanks to your support, we have now managed to raise more than 11.700 Euro. This money is sent directly to the people of Gaza. For the first time I feel that we can make a real change. It is down to us to transform solidarity into a meaningful event.

Gabi Weber, Freiburg:
DEAR FRIENDS,

Usually I dont feel happy when I distribute my newsletters with all the sad stories about Palestine.

Today is different.

It is really an incredible pleasure for me to tell you that our call for donation was so successful that until today we received more than 11.700 Euro!

THIS IS UNBELIEVABLE!!!
People from Australia, Canada, Europe and the United States were so generous. We are truely overwhelmed! THANK YOU ALL SO MUCH!!!

Vera Macht, her friends from ISM Gaza and also Nasser and his children started to regain hope because they don´t feel that lost and alone any more. And - we are starting to develop realistic plans to build a house for Nasser and his family. I AM CONVINCED THAT WITH YOUR HELP WE CAN MAKE IT!

Below you find Vera´s THANK YOU and two new texts about the awful situation in Gaza.

Please don´t stop spreading our messages and calls for donation.

PEOPLE IN GAZA WANT TO HAVE THE HOPE FOR A BETTER LIFE - WE CAN HELP THEM ON THEIR WAY!

Best  wishes and THANK YOU AGAIN!

Gabi Weber, FreiburgVera Macht, Gaza:


"I would like to thank you a thousand times. Me, the ISM members, and all of us here are overwhelmed and touched by your incredible support and generosity. We haven’t expected that. I want to thank you for the confidence in us and in our work, which you showed us. I want to thank you for having donated to ISM Gaza. There are many humanitarian aid organizations here, but we are primarily a political organization. We believe that what people need here is less charitable gifts, but fundamental human rights, and for that we work. "We don’t want food or clothes," a farmer from the border area told me, "we want to live in safety, we want our children to be able to sleep at night." "I want to live in freedom," a friend told me yesterday. "I want a life like everyone else, I want to study and travel, and not to vegetate in this prison."

I want to thank you for the courage to donate to ISM, and thus recognizing that the suffering of the people of Gaza is a political and not a humanitarian problem, that what happens to them here is wrong.

I want to thank you for enabling us with this money to continue our work, so that we can stay here to work for free. That we will be able to report about what is happening here, that we can support people in peaceful resistance, through demonstrations, or student groups which call for an academic boycott of Israel. Or through the everyday resistance of farmers in the border area, when we accompany them on their fields which are rendered extremely dangerous to enter by the Israeli military.

And of course, especially, I want to thank you on behalf of Nasser and his children, who will get a large part of the money. His suffering is a political one too. Without the Israeli military he, his wife and his children would be a happy family of farmers. But his wife was killed by a flechette shell, his fields are no longer accessible, and Nasser lives in fear of his life and that of his children in a tent. It was you who have given this family through your generous donation the means to live. None of the many charities of Gaza had helped until we became involved, because of the risk their international staff are not even allowed to go so close to the border. Thanks to all of you, the family has food now, clothes, blankets, mattresses, and a second tent. And since there is still money left, and we hope for donations of cement, we will dare to build him against all danger a new house. I want to thank you a thousand times, for the hope that we now see in the faces of this family when we visit them. Hope they got from the fact that they no longer feel abandoned, that they see how people "out there" show not only compassion, but also recognize the injustice that has befallen them.

I would like to thank you for reading my articles, for you not only sharing my and all our despair and helplessness in the face of the situation in Gaza, but also relieving it. I want to thank you that you do not look away.

I want to thank all of you a thousand times that you have shown us and the people here that Gaza is not forgotten.

Vera Macht ISM Gaza
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
To donate via Jazza Production’s Paypal
To donate via bank transfer:

Beneficiary: Vera Macht

Account Number: 2007474881 (for transfer inside Germany only)

Bank Code Number: 20130600 (for transfer inside Germany only)

Bank: Barclays Bank PLC

Reason for Payment: 4906386296166705

BIC: BARCDEH1

IBAN-Nr.: DE02201306002007474881

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Susan Lindauer: Lockerbie Diary-Gadhaffi, Fall Guy for CIA Drug Running

March 4, 2011 posted by Susan Lindauer ·

By Susan Lindauer, Former U.S. Asset covering Iraq and Libya

For years I was told the terrorist who placed the bomb on board Pan Am 103, known as the Lockerbie bombing, lives about 8 miles from my house, in Fairfax County, Virginia.

His life-time of privilege and protection, gratis of high flyers in U.S. Intelligence, has been a reward for silence on the CIA’s involvement in drug trafficking in Lebanon during the 1980s.

As sources go, I was more than a casual observer. From May 1995 until March 2003, I performed as a back channel to Tripoli and Baghdad, supervised by my CIA handler, Dr. Richard Fuisz, who claimed from day one to know the origins of the Lockerbie conspiracy and the identity of the terrorists.
http://issuepedia.org/1998-12-04_Susan_Lindauer_Deposition He swore that no Libyan participated in the attack.

Armed with that assurance, our team started talks with Libya’s diplomats for the Lockerbie Trial, and I attended over 150 meetings at the Libyan Embassy in New York. After the hand over of Libya’s two accused men, our team engaged in a concerted fight to gain permission for Dr. Fuisz to give a deposition about his primary knowledge of the conspiracy, during the Lockerbie Trial. In a surprise twist, the U.S. Federal Judge in Alexandria, Virginia imposed a double seal on a crucial portion of Dr. Fuisz’s deposition. The double seal can only be opened by a Scottish Judge. In my opinion, that should be a priority, as testimony hidden by the double seal maps out the whole Lockerbie conspiracy. Most significantly, it identifies 11 terrorists involved in the attack. Dr. Fuisz’s testimony could put the whole matter to rest forever.

There’s good reason for my confidence. Much to my surprise, during the Lockerbie talks, Dr. Fuisz’s allegations of CIA opium running in Lebanon received unusual corroboration. One day, as I left the office of Senator Carol Moseley-Braun on my lunch break, an older spook caught up with me in front of the U.S. Supreme Court. From out of nowhere, he stepped in my path and invited me to lunch. With extraordinary candor, he debriefed me as to what motivated the CIA’s actions. I remember it as one battle-hardened old spook sharing the perils of fieldwork with a gung ho young Asset, anxious to get started on great adventures.
It was a morality tale for sure. According to him, the CIA infiltrated opium and heroin trafficking in Lebanon as part of a crisis operation to rescue AP reporter Terry Anderson and 11 other American and British hostages in Beirut, including CNN bureau chief Jeremy Levin and Anglican envoy Terry Waite. The hostage crisis was a legitimate CIA concern. The CIA Station Chief of Beirut, William Buckley, was also kidnapped by Islamic Jihad and brutally tortured to death, his body dumped in the street in front of CIA headquarters. The rescue was protracted and complicated by Lebanon’s Civil War—ultimately, Terry Anderson’s captivity lasted seven years. Many of the hostages suffered beatings, solitary confinement chained to the floor, and mock executions.

The older spook who refused to identify himself swore that the CIA considered it urgently necessary to try every possibility for recovering the hostages. The concept of infiltration into criminal networks cuts to the murky nature of intelligence itself. Drug enforcement frequently rely on the same strategies. Where the CIA went far wrong was in pocketing some of those heroin profits for itself along the way. The dirty little secret is that the CIA continued to take a percentage cut of opium and heroin production out of Lebanon well into the 1990s.

As for the hostage rescue itself, considering the operation took years to accomplish, it’s always been whispered that a corrupted CIA officer enjoying those opium profits might have swallowed reports on the hostages’ locations, or otherwise diverted his team in order to protect his narcotics income.
That appears to have become a serious fear at the time, among other U.S. officers jointly involved in the rescue.

In December 1988, infuriated Defense Intelligence agents issued a formal protest, exposing CIA complicity in Middle East heroin trafficking. When teams from both agencies got summoned back to Washington to attend an internal hearing, they boarded Pan Am 103. A wing of militant Hezbollah led by Ahmed Jibril, his nephew Abu Elias, Abu Talb and Abu Nidal took out both teams in order to protect their lucrative cartel.
Classified Defense Intelligence records show that Jibril and Talb had been toying with a conspiracy to bomb a U.S. airplane during the 1988 Christmas holidays anyway. They planned to bomb a U.S. airliner in revenge for the U.S.S. Vincennes, which shot down an Iranian commercial airliner loaded with Hajiis returning from Mecca in July, 1988. However the Defense Intelligence threat to expose their heroin network put the bombing plan into action. Islamic Jihad’s ability to discover actionable intelligence on the flight schedules would definitely confirm that somebody at CIA was operating as a double agent, keeping Islamic Jihad a step ahead of the rescue efforts.

That’s the dirty truth about Lockerbie. It ain’t nothing like you’ve been told.

Wait a darn moment—I anticipate your confusion. Libya got blamed for the Lockerbie attack. Daddy George Bush told us so! The United Nations imposed sanctions on Libya, demanding that Colonel Moammar Gadhaffi hand over two Libyans for trial. One of the two, Lameen Fhima got acquitted immediately. The other Abdelbasset Megrahi got convicted (on the most flimsy circumstantial evidence that overlooked endless contradictions). Libya paid $2.7 billion in damages—amounting to $10 million per family death— to make the U.N. sanctions go away, and expressed a sort of non-apology for the deaths—while never acknowledging its involvement in the conspiracy.

So Libya was innocent the whole time? In a word, yes.

Don’t get me wrong: I have no soft spot for Libya. As an Asset, I saw that no matter the flowing promises of friendship, at heart Libyans hearken to their glory days as Bedouin raiders. It’s pathological, not personal. They are deeply tribal and Islamic, which often makes them paranoid and suspicious of outsiders. They have an ancient history of raiding each other’s camps, back and forth, stealing livestock, women and children. One of my best diplomatic sources had a tattoo on his wrist, because his grandmother feared he would be kidnapped as a small child (in the 1950s). Libya simply does not have a history of believing that it needs to keep promises to individuals outside their clans. That’s not part of their heritage.

That vendetta culture bodes dangerously for the current rebellion. Even after Gadhaffi’s gone, in all likelihood these tribal families will continue to exact vengeance on one another. It remains to be seen whether the new government will hide those clashes to protect its image of cohesion and legitimacy to the outside world. In truth, Libyan culture poses a threat to itself most of all.

I don’t say that about just any Arab country. I enjoy Arab culture very much. I just know better than to do favors for Gadhaffi. His actions often mask some other agenda.

But the bottom line is that Libya had nothing to do with the bombing of Pan Am 103, which exploded over the town of Lockerbie, Scotland.

We should care about Lockerbie because of the serious problem that it exposed. Opium trafficking out of the Bekaa Valley provides a major source for global heroin production. In turn, the global pipeline of narco-dollars keep militant operations alive world-wide from the Middle East to Indonesia, Colombia, Burma and the Far East.

That’s something to fear. We don’t have to deploy soldiers to shut it down. With a little creativity, we could attack the bank accounts of these global heroin traffickers and cut off funds for the violence without damaging the local society through warfare. We could strike down two scourges—heroin and terrorism. And the U.S. would not require military action all over the planet to accomplish its goals. Thankfully, there are other ways.

The first step is recognition.

—END—

Susan Lindauer is the author of Extreme Prejudice: The Terrifying Story of the Patriot Act and the Cover Ups of 9/11 and Iraq.
http://www.amazon.com/Extreme-Prejudice-Terrifying-Story-Patriot/dp/1453642757

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KOUROSH ZIABARI : Who Pays for the Loss of Life in Iran?

March 5, 2011 posted by Kourosh Ziabari ·

By Kourosh Ziabari

Since the victory of Iran’s Islamic Revolution in 1979 which toppled the U.S.-backed regime of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Iran has been facing with devastating and agonizing financial sanctions of the United States and its European allies who didn’t favor the post-revolutionary Iran’s doctrine of confrontation with the superpowers and its denial of Western liberal democratic values.

The 1979 revolution which put an end to 2,500 years of imperial monarchy in Iran was pivoted on theocratic and ideological values which the sumptuous, thrilling West usually tends to dislike and rebuff. Under the spiritual leadership of Imam Khomeini, Iranians declared that they wouldn’t need the support of Western and Eastern superpowers, will stand on their own feet and only seek to realize a political regime which establishes its bases and principles in accordance with morality and Islamic solidarity.

Iran’s ideological disagreement with the West and its efforts to fulfill independence as an Islamic state, however, cost for the Iranian people heavily. First of all, the United States spurred its regional puppet, the late dictator Saddam Hussein, on to launch a massive, crushing war against Iran so as to push the country’s newly-established political regime to annihilation. The 8-year war demolished Iran’s infrastructures irreversibly, caused irreparable damages to country’s economy and left more than 350,000 Iranians dead.
The 8-year resistance of the Iranian people, however, rendered the plans of the U.S. and its Baathist ally futile. Iran rose from the rubbles of 8-year war with Iraq and set out to emerge as a regional superpower gradually. Iranians recreated the country’s war-torn economy once again, renewed the obliterated infrastructures, appeased the pains of the families of 350,000 martyrs with compassion and brought hopes to the hearts of those who had come to think that a political state with the ideological pillars of Islam would be impossible to survive.

The animosity of the United States and its cronies, however, didn’t seem to be ending. In 1984, the United States approved its first set of sanctions against Iran which would prohibit Washington from selling American weapons to Tehran. During the presidency of Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjani, the sanctions got tougher and broader. In April 1995, President Bill Clinton issued a total embargo on U.S. dealings with Iran, banning every kind of financial transaction with the war-hit country. In 1996, the United States Congress passed the Iran–Libya Sanctions Act under which all the foreign firms and companies that provide investments over $20 million for the development of petrochemical projects in Iran would be penalized. The most inequitable and unreasonable sanctions against Iran, however, were those which would were endorsed in 1995 and disallowed the aviation companies around the world to sell aircrafts and repair parts to the Iranian airlines directly.

Iran’s aviation fleet which is chiefly comprised of Russian low-quality Tupelov and outdated Airbus and Fokker planes is one of the most vulnerable fleets in the world which suffers from increasing dilapidation and is considered to be highly at risk due to the unjust sanctions which are imposed against the country.
In December 2005, BBC World published a report in which it was expressively stated that Iran’s civil and military aviation fleet is undergoing intense safety setbacks. The report came after an Iranian Air Force C-130E military transport aircraft crashed into a residential complex in Tehran, killing 128 people including 68 reporters and journalists that were supposed to cover a military drill off the country’s southern coast on the Persian Gulf.

Two years earlier, a Russian-manufactured Ilyushin Il-76 transporter plane crashed in southeastern Iran, killing 302 passengers and cabin crew.

Iran has experienced several deadly air accidents in which hundreds of innocent civilians lost their lives. On July 15, 2009, the Caspian Airlines Flight 7908 heading from Tehran to Yerevan crashed near the village of Jannatabad in northern Iran, killing 168 passengers and cabin crews. Among the dead were all members of Iran’s national youth judo team members and several other prominent persons including a former parliament member and the wife of Georgian Ambassador to Tehran.

On July 24, 2009, another deadly plane crash happened in Iran which cost the life of 16 people. While attempting to land, the plane skidded off the runway and broke into a wall, killing 16 out of 153 passengers and crew members who were aboard the plane.

Unfortunately, the frequency of deadly plane crashes in Iran has been so high that made Iran’s aviation fleets one of the most insecure and unsafe ones in the world. Tens of people die each year as a result of a childish altercation which seems to have no rational basis. The United States has failed to dictate its political will to Iran and resorts to this failure as a pretext for punishing its people.

The United States and its European allies who boast of themselves as being the harbingers of human rights and liberty have obliviously forgotten that they are simply human beings who lose their lives as a result of the sanctions which they’ve devised. The civilian passengers who are destined to die in the insecure flights of Iran’s aviation fleet are the victims of those who have long trumpeted in our ears that they’re the sole defenders of human rights. If the life of each human being is respectable, then who is responsible for the lives of these hundreds of people who pass away before the eyes of the so-called international community which is always alert to caution about the violation of human rights in Iran and other independent countries? Isn’t the life of these people who get in the dilapidated Russian planes of Iran’s fleet and embrace death to the most extreme point of imagination respectable that you’ve deprived them of having the opportunity to experience a safe and secure trip? If you’re at loggerheads with the government of Iran, what’s the fault of its innocent civilians whom you’re punishing collectively?

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Geagea': 'I Am Resistance!'

Via Friday-Lunch-Club

()- Geagea lashed out at his critics and said the March 14 forces were the first to introduce the concept of real resistance to Lebanon... “To those who claim we are against the choice of resistance, I say: We originally introduced the concept of resistance to Lebanon,”.....The LF leader also stressed that his resistance aims at deterring foreign occupiers and not occupying Lebanese land, in reference to Israel and Syria..."

Posted by G, Z, or B at 11:11 AM

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DR. ASHRAF EZZAT: Will America Make The Right Choice In Libya?

Anti-Gaddafi Libyan fighters

March 5, 2011 posted by Dr. Ashraf Ezzat

The capture of a paranoid dictator was the pretext for the American invasion of Iraq; will history repeat itself in Libya?

By Dr. Ashraf Ezzat / Staff Writer

The revolutionary changes that are taking place in the Arab world now or what the west and the United States like to refer to as the Middle East have come about so suddenly it interrupted ongoing plans for the region which depended mainly on the believed to be stable and enduring political regimes that showed the so called moderation or in other words, conformity with the definition and views of the united states and Israel of the region.

And in return the west and the American Zionist axis supported those rules knowing they were either corrupt dictatorships like that of Mubarak of Egypt or corrupt and psychologically disturbed like that of Gaddafi of Libya – an obvious case of paranoia with delusions of Grandeur.

To be honest the Arab people are to be mostly blamed for how brutal and corrupt these autocratic regimes have grown to be. The shameful submission and silent obedience to these heads of regimes over the years have turned them into near to god rulers with absolute powers capable of thinking and doing the unthinkable and committing the unbelievable crimes with impunity.

Post-colonial broken dreams in the Arab world

Historically speaking, the modern Arab world has suffered much during the colonial era throughout the 19th & 20th centuries, and when the Arabs finally gained independence around the second half of the 20th century they thought they had rid themselves of centuries of oppression and injustice but little did they know what future held for them. The years and decades of the post-colonialism in the Arab world brought nothing the Arabs dreamed of; they only replaced the foreign occupation with national and native authoritarianism that abused and subjugated them in the most despicable ways.

The post-colonial Arab countries failed to gain the freedom and dignity they were promised when the Europeans were driven out, instead they fell prey to decades of exploitation but this time by enemies within. The post-colonial Arab geo-political map has not varied much In essence from its colonial picture except in one major variation and which added to the suffering and irritation of the Arabs in the region namely, Israel.

Strangely enough the past 60 years were the years during which political dictatorships flourished in the Arab world and those are the very same years that witnessed the growth of the Israeli military dictatorship and its spread into the heart of the Arab world body.

For 60 years the Arabs have been politically hypnotized and denied their basic rights of expression, they were made to believe that politics were actually not their business, whoever ran their affairs and how he did it was not for them to have a say about it. They sometimes were allowed to show their anger at the Israeli atrocities committed against their Palestinian brothers but they were never allowed to show any criticism of their ruling regimes.

One flagrant example of this sick totalitarian rule is that of Mummar Gaddafi of Libya. He is one of Arabic dictators the absolute power has literally gone to his head. Gaddafi has been ruling for 41 years now, more than enough time to turn him into the lunatic addict of power he is today. With practically all Libyans revolting and protesting against his rule, yet, Gaddafi could only see that the Libyans love him and are dying for him, a denial symptom characteristic of his psychic diagnosis.

Gaddafi- the history of delusions

Libya is a tribal society, where the traditions and the law of the tribe are the most common practice and moreover Libya enjoys a harmonious and peaceful atmosphere amongst all tribes.

Unlike countries as Egypt, Libya never witnessed any genuine political oppostion or partisan practice. Four decades of Gaddafi’s rule has left Libya in a total state of political inertia with no parliament, no elections, no constitution and virtually no flag for that matter.

Gaddafi has replaced the constitution with his personal and sick views of the world written down in his so called the green book – an amusing cocktail of some of the ideas and stuff the colonel has come to like- and moreover he changed the royal tricolor old flag to be replaced by his mono green-colored piece of cloth flag.
Everything in Libya was being viewed through the eyes of this paranoid colonel as he was getting used to pulling all the political strings and playing those around him as pawn chess pieces.

Gaddafi’s delusions of grandeur reached its peak when he recently changed the official name of the country to the “Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiria”- not sure what that means- and he ordered to be referred to as brotherly leader and guide of the revolution.

Gaddafi had this weird obsession with revolts and uprisings; he was occasionally accused of supporting and financing secret separatist groups all over the world like Sinn Fein and the Irish Republican army in Northern Ireland but he never knew that the only revolution he would come to experience was going to be led by his people and against his own rule of Libya.

Arab uprisings and 9/11

More than any people in the Arabic world, the Libyan people need this uprising most; they need to deliver themselves of decades of submission and indifference, they need to regain a long lost national confidence and pride, they have to change the way the world has been looking at them, the world must recognize Libyans as the free people of Libya and not the enslaved followers of a mad colonel and they have to reestablish the true foundations of a civil society and government. The Libyans needed this revolution to be born again as free.

As I have stressed before these Arab uprisings are not only about the economic grievances and fairer redistribution of national wealth’s but they are primarily about restoring lost dignity and freedom of Arabs in their home countries. They are about a better tomorrow with more political participation for the coming generations of the Arab world, generations that won’t have to live according to a mistaken and preoccupied western definition of Arabs and terms of traitorous dictators that would sell them to the west only as potential extremists and terrorists.

These uprisings and the spontaneous way in which the Arab people have acted in their peaceful protests have managed to expose the fallacy of a lot of allegations and arguments that linked them to fundamentalism and violence, not in one instance in the Arab rallies have we witnessed religious slogans chanted out by the angry Arab protesters nor witnessed intended violence or sabotage – around 12 millions Egyptians shouting, the people want the regime down, rallied in all major cities of Egypt the day Mubarak stepped down and yet not a single incident of erupted violence or sabotage of civil property was reported- in a clear message to the world pointing out how misinformed about Arabs a lot of people are especially those subjected to the post- 9/11 Zionist main stream media which are always keen to keep this anti-Arab propaganda in Europe and the united states alive.

Historical crossroad

With this popular uprising taking place, Libya and Libyans have come to the crossroad in their modern history where they have to finish what they have gallantly started. Gaddafi is losing ground and popularity with every passing day, he is only left with his security apparatus and on the payroll foreign mercenaries – not genuine Libyans – trying to secure Tripoli, the last stronghold of Gaddafi’s regime. Gaddafi’s final downfall has now become a matter of time.
With the American statement of keeping all options under review for Libya including the military option another unfortunate American act of war in the Arab world is looming in the distance. A new dawn is emerging in the Arab world and another American invasion in the region is the last thing the Americans or Arabs need right now. This new age needs smart and credible diplomacy not military might .

Most People are aware that politics is more about oil and dollars – the US sixth fleet doesn’t get repositioned for free or fun- but ignoring the aspirations of the Libyan protesters and turning this noble struggle for freedom into another American Marines operation is going to be another historical blunder foolishly committed by the United States.

Most people are aware of the fact that western politics is more about dismantling the old Middle East and paving the way for a new one that would suit the satisfaction of both the white house and Tel Aviv but neglecting the request of the Libyan anti-government fighters that implores the Americans and the NATO troops not to interfere in the ongoing fight and to only provide them with a no-fly zone over Libya that would be like killing this uprising and shifting this whole thing into new dimensions alien to the reason why Libyans revolted in the first place.

The white house talk of impending civil war or chaos in Libya is unsubstantiated and unverified, the Libyan people and the Libyan tribes in the east and west have never been more united. And if the NATO and the United States want to see the end of this fighting, they can work out this no fly zone operation that would keep Gaddafi’s planes on the ground and stop this influx of those Serbian and Croatian pilots from pouring into Libya and at the same time it should be carried out as a transient international rescue operation and not as initiation of an act of war.

The military intervention in Iraq hasn’t managed to promote democracy nor secure the oil resources; it only managed to leave one million plus innocent Iraqis dead and lingering- allegedly constructive - chaos behind.
Let’s not deny the Libyans the honor of overthrowing this psycho dictator and embracing their long waited for- freedom. The capture of a paranoid dictator was the pretext for the American invasion of Iraq; will history repeat itself in Libya?

History is in the making in the Arab world … and making history is all about making the right choice.

For more articles by Dr. Ashraf Ezzat visit his website “Pyramidion”

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Settlers attack Palestinian villagers

[ 05/03/2011 - 03:34 PM ]

NABLUS, (PIC)-- Jewish settlers attacked on Saturday villagers of the Irak Burin south of Nablus city and tried to storm their village but were repelled by its inhabitants, local sources said.

Eyewitnesses told the PIC that the settlers from Bracha settlement attacked Palestinian farmers and shepherds near the village and threw stones at them.

They said that inhabitants of the village rushed to aid their compatriots and violent clashes ensued with both sides throwing stones at each other.

Last night groups of armed settlers stormed the village of Raba east of Jenin city to terrorize its inhabitants, witnesses said, adding that the around 20 armed settlers riding bicycles roamed the streets for 20 minutes while chanting anti Arab slogans and threats.

In Bethlehem, settlers dumped stones and sand west of the village of Artas, locals said, adding that the tens of trucks routinely dump such refuse in the same area threatening its environment.

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For Israel, "everything is back on track!"

Via friday-Lunch-Club

"(Reuters)- Egyptian factories that use products from Israel under a U.S.-sponsored trade deal have resumed work, overcoming disruptions caused by the power struggle in Cairo, an Israeli official said on Saturday.......Israelis worry ....

Gabby Bar, head of the Middle East department at Israel's Industry and Trade Ministry, said supplies to Egyptian factories had been halted during the February upheaval in Cairo, which saw widespread curfews, worker strikes, and bank and port closures."Everything is back on track," Bar told Israel Radio. He continued, saying "indeed, we are seeing today a desire by Egyptian firms which are very interested in continuing to operate in this manner, as it allows them to stand competitively in the American market, because they are selling with a full customs waiver." The Israeli-Egyptian cooperation, known as the Qualifying Industrial Zones (QIZ) deal, was instituted in 2005 and mirrors a similar accord between Israel and Jordan from the late 1990s. Bar said banking operations had yet to be fully restored in Egypt and that employees at some factories were still on strike...."

Posted by G, Z, or B at 10:02 AM

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Arabs Challenge Israeli Hasbara

Israeli message in the face of Arab uprisings seems unclear. (Aljazeera)

By Ramzy Baroud

When the Libyan people took on their reviled dictator, Moammar Gadhafi, Israeli officials seemed puzzled by the alarming and unprecedented trend of popular awakenings in the Arab world.

Israel's Foreign Minister, Avigdor Lieberman, has claimed that these awakenings are only proof of the ‘weakening’ of the Arabs – even at a time when international consensus points to the opposite conclusion. According to Israeli daily, Haaretz, Lieberman has claimed, “the Arab world is becoming increasingly weakened.”

Worried perhaps that all rational analyses will show how Israel’s decade-long aggression has been a major contributing factor to instability in Middle East, Lieberman decided to dismiss the notion altogether. “Whoever thinks that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is part of the problems in the Middle East is trying to escape reality,” he said.

It must be a strange ‘reality’ which Lieberman subscribes to, but he isn’t the only Israeli official that sees the world through such tainted logic.

While Lieberman has settled on the realization that “it is clear to everyone…that the greatest danger they are facing is not Zionism, but rather Hamas and Jihad,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pushed into a different direction involving Iran and post-Mubarak Egypt.

Addressing the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations in Jerusalem, Netanyahu labored desperately to link some imagined Iranian designs into the future of Egypt. “The leaders in the West and the leaders in Tehran do not want the same future for Egypt,” he claimed, according to the Jewish Tribune (February 24).

“American and European leaders want an Egypt that is free, democratic, peaceful and prosperous…On the other hand, leaders in Tehran want to see an Egypt that is crushed by that same iron despotism that has crushed human rights in Iran for the last three decades,” he said.

One is accustomed to hearing the flawed historical references of Israeli officials, but Netanyahu’s latest comments are truly baffling. Tehran’s political involvement in Egypt was and remains nominal. Yet again, Israeli officials are interpreting the Middle East solely from the self-serving viewpoint of the Israeli political establishment itself.

This Israeli discourse is as old as the Israeli state. The initial narrative was predicated on the assumption of a unified party of ‘Arabs’ hell-bent on destroying a small, beleaguered Israel. The former represented all that was evil, extremist and anti-Western, and the latter embodied all that was good, democratic and civilized.

Maintaining this illusory discourse continues to be essential for Israel, for it serves multiple purposes and has long been the backbone of Israeli official hasbara, or propaganda. Even as the Israeli army demolished much of Gaza and killed and wounded nearly 7,000 Palestinian civilians in the 22-day military onslaught of 2008-09, the propaganda continued in full-force. It suggested that the loss of so many civilian lives was a price worth paying in order to uproot Islamic ‘extremism’ (as represented by Hamas).

Although Israeli propaganda has always been relentless, the Israeli official message in the face of popular Arab uprisings seems befuddled and unclear. The reason for this might be the fact that the current push for democracy – using largely non-violent means - in several Arab countries, took Israel by complete surprise. The Arab peoples’ desire for reforms and democratic change is utterly inconsistent with the image of Arabs shrewdly crafted by Israel and its friends in Western media. This image suggests that Arabs are simply incapable of affecting positive change, that they are inherently frenzied and un-democratic. Thus Israel, ‘the only democracy in the Middle East’, can be trusted as an oasis of stability and democracy.

Israeli officials tried to infuse this tired message following the uprisings in North African Arab countries, but this time it seemed incoherent and was quickly overshadowed by the chants of millions of Arabs for democracy, freedom and social justice.

Another reason behind the current failure of Israel to capitalize on the ongoing turmoil is that Israeli propaganda tends to precede - not follow - such upheavals. Israeli hasbra is most useful when Israel takes the initiative, determining the nature, scope, timing and location of the battle.

The official propaganda that preceded the war on Gaza seemed more institutionalized than ever. Former Israeli ambassador to the UN, Dan Gillerman was reportedly summoned by Tel Aviv to lead the PR effort. He said that the diplomatic and political campaign had been underway for months. The Guardian’s Chris McGreal, reporting on the campaign from Jerusalem during the war, quoted Gillerman as saying, “I was recruited by the foreign minister to coordinate Israel's efforts and I have never seen all parts of a very complex machinery - whether it is the Foreign Ministry, the Defence Ministry, the prime minister's office, the police or the army - work in such co-ordination, being effective in sending out the message.”
Israeli hasbra had then worked in tandem with the Israeli military, leading to a most coordinated campaign of war and deceit. But when the Arab people revolted, starting in Tunisia, the belated Israeli response was confused.

Israeli officials warned, yet again, of some Islamic extremist menace at work involving Hamas and Hezbollah, and others warned of an Iranian plot.

Some praised their fallen Arab allies, while taking pride in Israel for being a fortress of stability, while others called to speed up the ‘peace process’. Some denied any association between the absence of peace and Arab revolution. Meanwhile, Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Silvan Shalom, who duly accused Iran of attempting to exploit the situation, chastised Western countries for disowning their beleaguered allies in the region.
The fractured nature of the latest round of Israeli official propaganda could partly be blamed on the element of surprise. Israel, which bought into its own dehumanization of its Arab enemies for so long, couldn’t fathom such scenarios as popular non-violent revolutions underway in the Middle East.

But even if a solid, streamlined, and certainly well-financed Israeli hasbara campaign is launched to better manage Israel’s crisis, one wonders if it could really make much of a difference. If a multi-million dollar campaign to hide or ‘explain’ the bloodbath wrought by Israel in Gaza in 2008-09 have largely failed, Israel cannot possibly succeed in hiding the fact that it is no longer the ‘only democracy in the Arab world’ - or that it was ever a true democracy to begin with.

- Ramzy Baroud (www.ramzybaroud.net) is an internationally-syndicated columnist and the editor of PalestineChronicle.com. His latest book is My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza's Untold Story (Pluto Press, London), available on Amazon.com.

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PRC asks new Egyptian gov't to lift the siege on Gaza

[ 05/03/2011 - 02:29 PM ]

GAZA, (PIC)-- The Popular Resistance Committees and its armed wing have called on the new Egyptian government led by Essam Sharaf to immediately lift the "strangling" siege on the Gaza Strip.

The PRC called in a statement on Saturday for completely opening the Rafah border terminal between Egypt and Gaza, and facilitating movement of passengers round the clock.

The statement also called for cancelling all restrictions on Palestinians' travel in and out of the Strip, adding that the travel ban on certain Palestinians under trivial security pretexts should come to an end in addition to allowing all Palestinians abroad to return to the Strip.

Rights group calls on UN after crippling Gaza crossing closure


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EXCLUSIVE: BENGHAZI EXPLOSION – TACTICAL NUKE USE BY GADDAFI SUSPECTED

"GROUND ZERO" DEVASTATION

March 5, 2011 posted by Gordon Duff ·

WERE “MICRO-NUKES” IN ISRAELI AID PACKAGE TO GADDAFI?

“a massive explosion that completely destroyed an area three times the size of a soccer field…..photographers who arrived at the site of the explosion Saturday saw entire buildings, cars and trees flattened and smoldering as a result of the blast” Associated Press

By Gordon Duff STAFF WRITER/Senior Editor

Last nights  explosion at the Rajma military base outside Benghazi, Libya’s second largest city leveled blocks, left fires and left fire burning through the night.  Reports indicate an ammunition depot caused the blast but another, far more sinister cause is much more likely, a tactical nuclear weapon.

The use of such weapons, believed “unthinkable” by the public, may be much more common than believed. From Veterans Today;

What if someone could prove that the terrorist bombs, Oklahoma City, Beirut Marine Barracks, the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, the Bali attacks and more, many more weren’t car and truck bombs at all, not the kind we were told, what then? Buildings thrown into the air like toys, mushroom clouds rise a dozen miles, explosions larger than anything known previously, many times larger than the biggest bomb, even larger than exploding munition ships from World War 2. These have happened over and over, been misreported in our news, nuclear attacks, new precision weapons that emulate conventional explosives.

YouTube - Veterans Today -

LIBYA

Thus far, the bodies of 27 of the bases’s 40 staff have been recovered.  Damage cover’s, not only the base itself but extends to the residential neighborhood nearby where an even larger area was obliterated by the blast coinciding with Colonel Gaddafi’s move against Libyan freedom fighters in and around the city of Zawiya, 25 miles west of Libya’s capitol of Tripoli.  Zawiya fell to government forces yesterday though some opposition forces still hold out in parts of the city of 200,000, where fires are still burning.



The rebels’ setback at the city of Zawiya, 30 miles (50 kilometers) west of Tripoli, was the second in as many days. A large arms and ammunition depot outside the city of Benghazi, the largest city in the rebel-held east of the country, blew up Friday in a massive explosion that completely destroyed .3 square kilometers.

HIDING NUKE USE, POTENTIAL SOURCES

This week, Bob Nichols, writing for Veterans Today, cited the ability to mask nuclear explosions, radiation, EMP and even seismographic signatures, particularly in newer weapons which include the highly secretive “4th generation” nuclear weapons.  Nichols, who writes on defense and nuclear weapons issues told this reporter:

“There have been breakthroughs we never hear about.  These programs went ‘dark’ years ago after a significant advance in physics.  Small nukes have been used in Iraq and Afghanistan and people are getting sick, not just locals but Americans as well.  These new weapons have little lingering radiation and can be easily hidden.”

In a related story,9/11 “first responder” Randy Wiebicke died March 3 after experimental stem cell treatments failed to stop the onset of multiple cancers and the total failure of his immune system.  The cause of death was listed as multiple myeloma, a type of aggressive skin cancer blamed on toxic exposure at “ground zero.” Myeloma is a form of radiation sickness. Ref 1, Ref 2, Ref 3, Ref 4 (Scientific journals citing Multiple Myeloma resulting from exposure to nuclear explosions)

The “toxic” materials killing so many in Iraq and having sickened so many in New York are, as pointed out by former Soviet nuclear intelligence services officer, Dimitri Khalezov, is actually ionizing radiation from nuclear weapons. 

Khalzov, while serving with the Soviet Army forces tasked with cataloging and overseeing all nuclear weapons use around the world describes briefings about demolition devices, thermonuclear bombs, that were planted under the World Trade Center, information that was shared with the Soviet Union in accordance with their treaty with the United States;

YouTube - Veterans Today -

MISSING NUKES, ONE POSSIBILITY

Israel went nuclear in the 1960s.  Libya’s leader, Colonel Gaddafi claims Israel had Kennedy murdered because he demanded they end their nuclear program.  Gaddafi, while speaking before the United Nations General Assembly said;

“Why did this Israeli kill the killer of Jack Kennedy? The whole world should know that Kennedy wanted to investigate the nuclear reactor of the Israeli demon”

Yet we find a convoluted history of “love/hate” between Gaddafi and Israel.  Libya and Israel have, for decades now, traded arms, WMD technologies, shared intelligence and even spied on America together as part of a consortium of rogue states whose membership has grown and shrunk over the years.  Iran, East Germany and Czechoslovakia were overthrown by revolutions.  Apartheid South Africa, another “rogue” friend, at one time a nuclear state.  It was South Africa’s nukes, built between 1975 and 1983, that created the first great “missing nuke” controversy, one that lasts till this day, one that may well have killed Dr. David Kelly and brought down British Prime Minister Tony Blair in the process;

There are nuclear weapons out there, maybe in terrorists hands, two or five, as many as seven or more. Iran and North Korea didn’t build them. North Korea’s nuclear program is a sham and Iran may simply be a scapegoat. Iran is not building nuclear weapons, they don’t possess the necessary centrifuges to enrich uranium. Using their available technology, a nuclear weapon could not be produced in a century.

However, the threat of nuclear terrorism is very real, the facts are there but America is sitting on the truth. Remember three names, Valerie Plame and Dr. David Kelly and Mordechai Vanunu. Plame was “burned” as an American spy, burned by the Bush administration. Vice President Cheney’s Chief of Staff, “Scooter” Libby (Liebowitz) was convicted of the crime but received a pardon from President Bush.

Plame wasn’t looking for “yellow cake” uranium from Niger, she was looking for lost nuclear weapons. When she got close, she was destroyed and then silenced by the Justice Department. Dr. David Kelly was a weapons scientist in Britain until his very unexpected suicide while trying to report wrongdoing tied to missing nuclear weapons, wrongdoing he attributed directly to Prime Minister Tony Blair. A secret investigation currently being conducted has ruled his death a murder and top members of government, from Blair downward are being grilled about, not only this, but missing nuclear weapons, a subject newspapers are being threatened to stay silent on daily.

Mordechai Vanunu is a nuclear weapons specialist who worked at the illegal Dimona facility in Israel. When he fled the country and alerted the world about the nuclear program there, he was kidnapped, returned to Israel and put in solitary confinement for 18 years. He has been under house arrest or in solitary confinement after his release. He is currently locked in a small cell in a secret prison in Israel for talking to someone not on his official list of contacts.

These three people and a number of people behind them hold the key to the biggest story in recent years, a massive worldwide coverup so frightening it is treated almost as though it was involved secret UFO landings. Not everyone has all the information. Some key figures are waiting for the results of the investigations going on in London now, the findings of which will be above top secret.

HOMEGROWN, ISRAEL OR “BOUGHT?”

In March, 2004, after Iraq was mistakenly believed to have been “stabilized,” British Prime Minister Tony Blair flew to Tripoli for a “crash meeting” with Colonel Gaddafi to discuss “weapons of mass destruction.”(WMDs)  Libya had long been cited as having an advanced nuclear program and one of the largest biological and chemical warfare programs in the world.  In December, 1988, Pan American flight 103 crashed in Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 11 local residents in addition to the 243 passengers and 16 crew members.

Colonel Gaddafi had order the plane destroyed and had arranged for a bomb to be placed on the flight.  Blair would never mention this “minor issue.”  Instead, Blair returned with an oil contract and what was believed to be Libya’s promise to disarm.
Blair left Libya with an oil contract and an aircraft sale contract for BAE Systems.  Blair and Gaddafi have been close ever since.

Months before, in October 2003, America had seized advanced centrifuges capable of enriching uranium for nuclear weapons, centrifuges quite unlike those used in Iran.  Israel claims they helped the US stop the sale to Libya.  That is a lie.

Though reported as having been purchased from Pakistan through a Japanese company, the centrifuges were shipped from South Africa through an Israeli company.  In September 2004, South Africa arrested Israeli, Johann Meyer for arranging the sale.

In September 2004, South African authorities arrested Johan Meyer, president of TradeFin Engineering, and charged him with three criminal counts of trafficking sensitive nuclear equipment between November 2000 and 2001. Six days after his arrest, charges were dropped against Meyer, who apparently agreed to testify against two other parties in the scheme: Gerhard Wisser, the owner of Krisch Engineering, and its managing director, Daniel Geiges. The final indictment has been served against them, and in March 2007 prosecutors applied for the bulk of the case against them to be heard in camera, in order to prevent proliferation-sensitive information from entering the public domain.

A more honest and accurate telling of the story has Meyer escaping from custody with help from the French intelligence services.  Meyer is currently residing in the State of Israel.

More revelations show that Meyer, an Israeli, actually was “the Khan network.”   A.Q. Khan, the Pakistani scientist reputed to have been involved in widespread nuclear proliferation activities, continues to deny all involvement.  No ties to South Africa, Israel or Myer, those actually found complicit in selling centrifuges to Libya,  were ever established for A. Q. Khan.

Reliable reports indicate that Khan had offered “nuclear triggers” to “any and all” as part of a highly classified CIA operation looking for “possible” missing nuclear weapons.

Attempts by media to portray Meyer and Khan as partners in an arms program tied to former Pakistani President Musharraf are, according to informed sources, part of a CIA-Mossad disinformation program.

With Israeli security companies openly operating inside Libya, in violation of UN sanctions, reportedly 50,000 “mercenaries” on the way to lead the crackdown on rebel forces, is there a chance that the covert arms relationship between Israel and Libya, alive and well and very “nuclear” in 2003, may be a factor in the recent “mishap?” 

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Student group pushes Carleton to become first university in Canada to divest from the occupation

Source

Mondoweiss -


SAIA Carleton is one step closer to becoming the first student group to successfully push for a Canadian university to divest from the Israeli occupation. Launched in early 2010, the divestment campaign focuses on four specific companies that Carleton invests in through its pension fund: BAE Systems, Tesco, Northrupp Grumman and Motorola. All of them are complicit in serious violations of international law and human rights by supporting and profiting from the illegal occupation of Palestine. The campaign's latest big step was a motion passed at the undergraduate student union (CUSA) that calls on the university to divest from companies involved in 'illegal occupation.'

In the months leading up to the event, dozens of SAIA members met with professors, classrooms, individual students, community members and student groups to garner support. Organizers asked students to send personal letters addressed to the CUSA councillors and executive. Over 2,000 were sent. This represents about one tenth of the undergradute population and is more support than the incoming CUSA president received (in votes of the last election). The campaign has also received an endorsement from the Graduate Students' Association (GSA), over two dozen student groups on campus, dozens of faculty members and the union representing contract instructors and teaching assistants.

When the day arrived, it was apparent the campaign has some of the strongest support the campus has seen in recent memory. Hundreds of supporters flooded the small corridors adjacent to the small meeting room. In order to deal with the room occupancy and fire code regulations, a Carleton official set a quota for each 'side' to be allowed into the meeting; 20 each. Although the CUSA executives knew there would likely be a significant amount of support, a curiously small room was chosen to house the council meeting.

Despite the overwhelming support on campus, some elements within CUSA were keen to refrain from an overt endorsement. A few days before the council meeting, a new motion was drafted that echoed the toothless ethical investment policy that the Carleton administration passed earlier in an attempt to marginalize SAIA's campaign. Ignoring the support for SAIA's motion and an earlier introduction, the watered-down motion was heard first by the council. An attempt to reverse the order were unsuccessful. In a bid to compromise during an elaborate and passionate discussion, an amendment was proposed to include companies involved in 'illegal occupation' as one of the criterion for Carleton's divestiture. This motion with the amendment passed. Consequently, the original motion drafted by SAIA was discarded due to redundancy because its content was too similar to the first. Attempts to have the motion discussed were ultimately unsuccessful.

The decision was met with chants of protest from the massive crowd outside. Councillors and executives leaving the meeting had to navigate a sea of people whose reaction depended upon their support for the motion or lack thereof. It was truly one of the most inspiring outpourings of democracy and solidarity the supporters had experienced on campus. While the campaign did not receive an explicit endorsement from CUSA, it has succeeded in rallying a critical mass of supporters and gaining the tacit support of the undergraduate student union.

Moving forward, SAIA is planning for another successful Israeli Apartheid Week (IAW) from March 7 - 11, this year including a keynote from Ali Abunimah of Electronic Intifada. We plan to further increase our support and finally present our campaign to the Board of Governors in the coming weeks.

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