By Gerald Celente
1-15-9
CAIRO, 14 January 2009 Israel’s invasion of Gaza sets up the United States and any other nation supporting Israel as terror targets, predicts Gerald Celente. The Trends Research Institute Director also warns that should Israel continue the invasion, or take the war beyond Gaza, the world risks both a 1973-style oil shock and global conflict.
Mmm Hmm. Strangely familiar. - Ed.
By Ivan Simic
Hegemony is the dominance of one group over other groups, with or without the threat of force, to the extent that, for instance, the dominant party can dictate the terms of trade to its advantage; more broadly, cultural perspectives become skewed to favor the dominant group. The cultural control that hegemony asserts affects commonplace patterns of thought: hegemony controls the way new ideas are rejected or become naturalized in a process that subtly alters notions of common sense in a given society.
Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian president, has urged all Arab nations to sever diplomatic ties with Israel because of the Gaza war.
Addressing leaders at Friday's emergency Arab summit in Doha, the Qatari capital, al-Assad declared that the Arab initiative for peace with Israel was now "dead".
Read more @ Al Jazeera English
omerta: A code of silence amongst members of a criminal organization (especially the Mafia) that forbids divulging insider secrets to law enforcement.
The biggest no-no in the criminal world is to snitch, to tell, to let the cat out of the bag, to spill the beans, to GO PUBLIC with what’s considered a private affair.
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL), Israel’s combined propaganda/intelligence/police brainwashing arm of Israeli interests in America, is a large part of the criminal enterprise known as Zionism with an almost 100 year history of interfering in American life. In the below article from The Forward, the oldest Jewish publication in America, the ADL’s Glorious Leader Abe Foxman lets the cat out of the bag about letting the cat out of the bag.
| By Timothy V. Gatto Jan 15, 2009, 12:54 |   |
Sometimes I feel as if I’ve been writing about the mistakes our country is making for most of my life. It has only been a little over six years; still I end up writing about the same issues. Usually I write about how we are either killing people overseas, or helping other countries to kill people. Every time I write an article I believe that maybe it will do some good. The truth is that while one or two people understand what I’m trying to point out, most times what I write about falls on deaf ears.
By Louis Charbonneau
UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - The Nicaraguan head of the U.N. General Assembly, who has been highly critical of Israel and the United States, has been the target of death threats posted on the Internet, his spokesman said on Monday.
"This matter is being looked into by the pertinent authorities," Enrique Yeves, spokesman for General Assembly President Miguel D'Escoto, told reporters.
D'Escoto, a Catholic priest, has repeatedly criticized both the United States and Israel since taking office in September. Recently he compared Israel's treatment of the Palestinians to the former South African apartheid racial segregation policy.
Reporters Without Borders calls on the Israeli military to investigate and explain exactly how a 16-storey building in Gaza City that houses several news organisations including Reuters came to be hit by an explosion this morning.
An Abu Dhabi TV journalist and a Reuters cameraman were injured in the blast that shook the Al-Shurouq Tower. It was not immediately known whether the explosion was the result of a missile or a shell fired by a tank.
PACIFICA – About 700 Israelis have been arrested for protesting against the war on Gaza since the beginning of the deadly offensive, said Neve Gordon, chair of the Department of Politics and Government at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel on Monday.
Deutsche Bank, the heart of the Octopus. - Ed.
Fresh turmoil hit the banking sector as Deutsche Bank issued a profits warning and analysts suggested that HSBC could need a massive injection of fresh capital.
Deutsche Bank, Germany's biggest lender, said it would post a net loss of about €3.9bn (£3.5bn) for 2008, compared with net profit of €6.5bn a year earlier – its first annual loss for five decades. The bank suffered a record €4.8bn loss in the fourth quarter as the financial crisis battered its debt and equity trading operations.
by Wayne Madsen
The U.S. District court for the Southern District of New York seems intent on keeping ex-NASDAQ chairman and $50 billion Ponzi scheme swindler Bernard Madoff confined to his Upper East Side Manhattan luxury home and not in a federal lock-up.
Two judges in the New York federal circuit, Theodore Katz and Ronald Ellis, have ruled that Madoff should stay in his town house and out of prison.
Gee Wally. Do you think it's intentional? - Ed.
GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip — Israel shelled the United Nations headquarters in the Gaza Strip on Thursday, engulfing the compound and a warehouse in fire and destroying thousands of pounds of food and humanitarian supplies intended for Palestinian refugees.
U.N. workers and Palestinian firefighters, some wearing bulletproof jackets, struggled to douse the flames and pull bags of food aid from the debris after the Israeli attack, which was another blow to efforts to ease the humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip. Dense smoke billowed from the compound.
Israeli forces have shelled a hospital and UN compound as they continue to pound Gaza City while pushing deeper into densely-populated neighbourhoods.
Thousands of fear-stricken Gazans fled the advancing Israeli trooops on Thursday, but observers said there was nowhere safe for them to take refuge in the territory that is under relentless Israeli attack.
Officials said that a building of the UN relief agency in Gaza had been hit by Israeli shells and set ablaze.
"They are phosphorus fires so they are extremely difficult to put out because if you put water on it, it will just generate toxic fumes and do nothing to stop the burning," John Ging, the director of UN relief operations, said.
"This is going to burn down the entire warehouse ... thousands and thousands of tonnes of food, medical supplies and other emergency assistance are there."
Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary-general, said he was "outraged" by the attack on the UN compound and demanded an explanation as he met Israeli officials in Tel Aviv.
Read more @ Al Jazeera English
Until last week, I lived with my husband, Muhammad, 24, and our two little daughters, Farah, 3, and Aya, 6 months, in the a-Sifa section of Beit Lahiya. We lived in the same house as Muhammad’s parents, Sa’dallah Abu Halima, 44, and Sabah Abu Halima, 44, and his brothers and sisters: ‘Omar, 18, Yusef, 16, ‘Abd a-Rahim, 13, Zeid, 11, Hamzah, 10, ‘Ali, 4, and baby Shahd, 1.
Our house had two floors. On the first floor were 250 square meters of storage rooms, and we lived on the second floor. We are farmers and have land next to the house.
On Saturday night [3 January], Israeli jets dropped leaflets calling on residents of the area to leave their homes. The army did the same thing in previous incursions and we didn't leave the house, so this time, too, we decided not to leave.
A US businessman suspected of faking his own death in a plane crash is in custody after he was found alive at a Florida camping ground.
Marcus Schrenker, accused of stealing millions from investors, was treated in hospital for self-inflicted cuts.
He was semi-conscious and apparently resisting first aid when found.
It is thought he parachuted out of his company aeroplane after making a fake distress call, leaving the plane to crash in north-western Florida.
The Indiana businessman was arrested on Tuesday night at a campsite in Quincy, northern Florida.
Priorities. - Ed.
Most U.S. Government spending on nuclear weapons-related programs is unclassified. But it is functionally secret since such spending is widely dispersed across many programs in several agencies and it is not formally tracked or reported.
A new study prepared for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace estimated that the cost of U.S. nuclear weapons and weapons-related programs exceeded $52 billion last year.
Yet here in Israel very few, at least among the Jewish population, see it that way.
“We despise liberty…We despise justice…We repudiate everything our founding fathers fought for and achieved…Long live George III, and may our founding fathers rot in hell for what they did.”
Well, as the old saying goes, be careful what you wish for America, because some day you may get it. Indeed, America will pay for her sins in betraying her past and her principles by siding with the enemy of all that is good and decent, and one day we will look upon the Palestinians and recognize that we lost our freedom because of the fact we denied them theirs…
...Because indeed, what goes around comes around.
By Gary Corseri
1/12/09
“And why should ye not fight in the cause of Allah and of those who, being weak, are ill-treated and oppressed?—Men, women, and children whose cry is, “Our Lord! Rescue us from this town, whose people are oppressors; and raise for us from Thee one who will protect; And raise for us from Thee one who will help.”
-Jennifer Loewenstein; Beirut, Hamra; 1.10.09. 2:30am
Here are some newsworthy items out of Gaza that are unlikely to be making it to the Western presses. I received this information directly from one of the staff of the Mezan Center for Human Rights about twenty minutes ago.
1. Israel has begun a new policy in Gaza in the past two days called the “roof knock”. This is when a “small” rocket is fired from Israeli military aircraft that is strong enough to blast open the roof of a targeted building. It is sent as a “warning message” to the building’s inhabitants giving them between 2 and 3 minutes to evacuate before the building is completely destroyed. A number of cases of this new technique have been reported recently.
The following is a very astute observation by the editor of dictatorshipwatch and it cannot be glossed over:
“The truth: The warlords in Washington, London and Tel Aviv do not want less radicalization in the Muslim world. They want more. If there is not enough, they will make sure more people get angry. The more Muslims are against their policies and the puppets they impose on the masses, the more the warlords are able to justify the totalitarian, expansionists policies.” ( Dictatorshipwatch.com January 11, 2009)
To understand why this observation is so profound, and in fact, penetrates to the heart of the matter, please see this Project Humanbeingsfirst’s response to an oped which appeared in the Financial Times in December 2008. It was the first time in recent memory, to this scribe’s knowledge, certainly since 911, that a very respected mainstream newspaper which is read by the who’s who of the entire world, and not just the financial mainstream, had put it all together to test the waters. Project Humanbeingsfirst was immediately on the tail of this bogeyman:
"In blood and sweat, our race will rise, proud and generous and cruel."What happens in Gaza, the death of 800 people, mostly civilians, crushed under debris, mutilated, children starved to death near the decomposing body of their parents, all this is a very natural part and consequence of that project.
Cities across the world became the platform for protest on Israel's military action in Gaza today.
Organisers said more than 250,000 people marched through Spain's capital of Madrid, with other European cities including Athens, Brussels, Rome, Naples Frankfurt, Munich and Berlin also the focal points of protesters.
The protest in Madrid was the largest of demonstrations across Europe, although there were expressions of both support and opposition for the Israeli offensive in Gaza.
IN the annals of war crimes, the name "Zeitoun" will assume its place alongside names like "My Lai," "Fallujah," "Sabra-Shatila," "Guernica," "Nanking," "Lidice," and "Wounded Knee."
In the last two days, the massacre that took place in Zeitoun, a neighborhood on the southern flats approaching Gaza City, has only now begun to come into focus. Aid groups, including the Red Cross, have used the three-hour pauses in Israel bombardment that began on Wednesday in a desperate attempt to remove the wounded, some of whom apparently still remain. Most of the dead have been left behind.
World concern over, and opposition to, the Israeli war in Gaza is rapidly mounting:
The Israelis have deliberately made it impossible to know the full extent of the carnage and humanitarian disasters because they continue to prevent journalists from entering Gaza even in the face of a now week-old Israeli Supreme Court order compelling them to do so.International pressure intensified sharply on Israel on Thursday, the 13th day of its Gaza assault, after the United Nations suspended food aid deliveries, the International Committee of the Red Cross accused the Israelis of knowingly blocking assistance to the injured, and a top Vatican official defended comments in which he compared Gaza to a concentration camp.
"I've seen some very bad press about Israel," said Wurzelbacher, a colorful figure in the U.S. presidential campaign in which defeated Republican John McCain cited the Ohio plumber as an example of someone who would be hurt by Democrat Barack Obama's tax plan.Read more
"Israel is being attacked and they're defending themselves," Wurzelbacher told reporters. His remarks were interrupted by an alert for an incoming rocket which sent him dashing to a concrete shelter. No one was hurt.
Why are we so indifferent to the death and destruction in Gaza?
The major news outlets meekly accepted Israel’s banning of journalists from entering Gaza as an excuse for downplaying collateral civilian casualties, our president-elect, Barack Obama, has had little to say about an invasion that will much complicate his future Mideast peace efforts, and most commentators easily rationalize Israel’s many-more-eyes-for-an-eye killings.
This unbelief grew stronger with each curfew, with each strike that mourned the death of yet one more martyr, with a decapitation induced by gunfire in the main square on a sunny Ramallah afternoon so many years ago. But it was cemented the day I had to tell one of my fifth grade students that his brother had just been taken away by the Israeli army. His expression, his body going limp, the shuddering of his shoulders as he wept with his classmates…that’s what finally did it.
Nearly 20 years have passed since that day, and I have now married into a Gazan family. I am a wife and mother, the sister and aunt of so many kids living the horror of what Gaza has become. As we watch the footage of Israel’s onslaught, I hear myself, whispering as I see one more martyred child, “Run to the angels….run.” After so many years, this living nightmare is fostering a burning desire to believe once again in the afterlife.
Caged, starved, sniped, suffocated. They are slaughtered like sheep, but the leaders of the free world just cannot seem to find a moment to comment. Golfing, vacationing, Obama, Bush, even the EU, they just aren’t important enough. My mutterings have become a like a canter. I call out to these stricken and shattered little bodies, who frankly never experienced life to lose it. The only consolation to offer is the respite found in death.
A crowd gathers, shrouded in gas, smoke and dust. In the front stand eight young fathers, each holding a white swaddled bundle of what used to be a son, a daughter. For a few moments there is no screaming, no chanting or crying, but a moment of quiet and stillness that presses one to wonder just whom has been granted the greater mercy, the toddler who caught the snipers bullet, or the young father, who will have to find some way to live beyond this moment?
A young boy sits on the sidewalk beside his mother. She is propped up against the wall of a collapsed building and her life is bleeding out all over the sidewalk. It is spattered on his face and smeared on his shirt. She uses the last of her strength to lift her arm and clutch his cheek in her palm and then she is gone. He rests his head in his hands and cries. He is all alone.
The camera zooms in on the scene of a freshly detonated building, a civilian home. A little girls brown curly hair covered in dust and eyes wide open is all that can be found of her. Her mother wails and pulls her hair while her father frantically searches among the rubble for the rest of his daughter, where could she be? I whisper again, “you will be made whole again in Paradise. Run to the angels”.
What amazing faith. What strong devotion that a father loses his mother, father, wife and eight children, that this man before anything can assert, “God is Great, Thank God for Everything”. He holds his child, now still and ashen, he smothers him with kisses and then gently pulls back the sheet to expose two bullet holes in his chest. He then tenderly places the child beside his brother and again, pulls the sheet back of his youngest son to reveal a single snipers bullet to the chest. He can barely compose himself and he moans to the sympathizing camera man, “God is Great, Thank God for Everything”.
An old and wrinkled Imam so lovingly cradles a little girl’s lifeless body, as if mishandling her now could inflict more pain, he mumbles a benediction and gently lies her beside her sisters and her brothers in the mass grave. I try to comfort her, saying, “Finally, a place of safety. Rest beside your sister. Your brother. Put your fears to rest and meet your beloved Prophet and the many of your little friends who have fallen before you.”
Hospitals, schools, mosques, civilian homes, UN shelters, all worthy targets. Doctors, medicines, food and water, truckloads of relief from all corners of the world line up for miles at the Egyptian border but they are refused entry. Security is high, food is scarce, water is completely gone.
Faith seems to spring forth in the strangest of moments. For me, it seems to be coming full circle out of desperation and in agony, for the sake of the snow-white souls of the many bloodied and dismembered innocents of Gaza.
UN workers coordinate with Israelis to get civilians to safety inside a UN school. Hundreds are tucked inside the mutually agreed safe haven. Soon after, the school comes under Israeli fire. Bruised and battered refugees stare Satan in the face, clad in his fatigues. Hundreds wounded, scores dead, many lost and unaccounted for.
Governments negotiate a cease-fire. Rumors buzz of conspiracies. The US President-elect is forever silent. Parents search beneath the collapsed walls for what remains of their children. Shattered concrete, random arms and legs, broken glass, tossed together in a bloody hodge-podge. But, in my mind, I see them whole, their little bodies swiftly being swept up into Paradise and I call out to them, “Run!”
