be just

Major British supermarket chain announces boycott of produce made in West Bank settlements - Haaretz Daily Newspaper | Israel News The anniversary of the day Baghdad fell nine years ago during the US-led invasion of Iraq also marked the anniversary of the massacre in the Palestinian village of Deir Yassin by Jewish forces 64 years before. Ironically, in the month that Israel has arranged world-wide celebrations to mark its 64th birthday on 26 April this year, Palestine has marked the 64th anniversary of this butchery and carnage, even as almond and olive blossoms and spring flowers fill the slopes of the village where this happened with fragrant life. The anniversary also marks the beginning of the policy of "cleansing" Palestine's villages by Jewish forces, aiming at the destruction, diminution and fragmentation of what was once Palestine. The Deir Yassin massacre marked the first time Jewish forces had gone on the attack, setting a precedent and causing a weeping...

Deir Yassin Remembered       : Information Clearing House The anniversary of the day Baghdad fell nine years ago during the US-led invasion of Iraq also marked the anniversary of the massacre in the Palestinian village of Deir Yassin by Jewish forces 64 years before. Ironically, in the month that Israel has arranged world-wide celebrations to mark its 64th birthday on 26 April this year, Palestine has marked the 64th anniversary of this butchery and carnage, even as almond and olive blossoms and spring flowers fill the slopes of the village where this happened with fragrant life. The anniversary also marks the beginning of the policy of "cleansing" Palestine's villages by Jewish forces, aiming at the destruction, diminution and fragmentation of what was once Palestine. The Deir Yassin massacre marked the first time Jewish forces had gone on the attack, setting a precedent and causing a weeping wound in the collective Palestinian soul. Since then, year after year, P...

Act now: more Palestinian hunger strikers in hospital with serious health problems Yesterday, Palestinian lawmaker and leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine Ahmad Saadat was moved to Ramleh prison hospital by the Israeli Prison Service, according to Maan News Agency. Saadat joined the mass hunger strike which started on 17 April. One day earlier, Muhammad Halas was moved to an Israeli hospital after 12 days without food, according to Maan. More than 60 days ago, Palestinian political prisoners Bilal Diab and Thaer Halaheh went on hunger strike to protest their administrative detention.

Food Stamps In Crosshairs Of Republicans' Plan To Save Military        : Information Clearing House So instead, the House has embarked on a seldom-used reconciliation process. Its aim is to have at hand an alternative to the sequestration on the theory that the Senate will not want to allow the defense cuts either, and won't have its own plan. In a memo sent to members Wednesday instructing them how to write their reconciliation bill, Republicans picked a number of targets, including extracting $80 billion from federal workers and $44 billion from health care. In all, it identifies $78 billion to cut in 2013, and details around $300 billion over 10 years. But the memo spends the most time targeting the exploding cost of food stamps, on which more Americans rely than ever, at greater expense to the government than ever before. Each month during fiscal 2011, an average of 45 million mostly poor Americans received benefits under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program...

The NSA Is Watching You        : Information Clearing House The NSA Is Watching You By Amy Goodman with Denis Moynihan April 27, 2012 "Information Clearing House" --- Three targeted Americans: A career government intelligence official, a filmmaker and a hacker. None of these U.S. citizens was charged with a crime, but they have been tracked, surveilled, detained—sometimes at gunpoint—and interrogated, with no access to a lawyer. Each remains resolute in standing up to the increasing government crackdown on dissent. The intelligence official: William Binney worked for almost 40 years at the secretive National Security Agency (NSA), the U.S. spy agency that dwarfs the CIA. As technical director of the NSA’s World Geopolitical and Military Analysis Reporting Group, Binney told me, he was tasked to “see how we could solve collection, analysis and reporting on military and geopolitical issues all around the world, every country in the world.” Throughout the 1990s, the NSA ...

The Children of Fallujah - the Hospital of Horrors        : Information Clearing House April 27, 2012 "The Independent" - - The pictures flash up on a screen on an upper floor of the Fallujah General Hospital. And all at once, Nadhem Shokr al-Hadidi's administration office becomes a little chamber of horrors. A baby with a hugely deformed mouth. A child with a defect of the spinal cord, material from the spine outside the body. A baby with a terrible, vast Cyclopean eye. Another baby with only half a head, stillborn like the rest, date of birth 17 June, 2009. Yet another picture flicks onto the screen: date of birth 6 July 2009, it shows a tiny child with half a right arm, no left leg, no genitalia.

"He needs multiple surgery outside Iraq. It's a dysfunctional problem. He has no hearing in his left ear. They told me he has to be six before they can remove cartilage from his chest wall to put in his ear. All operations have to be outside Iraq to beautify the ear and give him his hearing." And all the while his father talks, five-year-old Sayef Ala'a sits obediently on the sofa beside us, doing as his father tells him, moving his head to show us the scrappy bit of flesh that constitutes his left ear, tipping his head to one side so we can take pictures of it. Compared to other children with birth deformities, Sayef Ala'a is lucky. He can see, breathe, walk, run, play and listen to his father and friends with his right ear. And he is a little boy of much courage. "He hasn't learnt much yet – that's because he hasn't been to school," his father says. "I'm worried he would be bullied at school. He's a child, but sometimes he co...

Revolution In The Air:    John Pilger speaks @ Marxism 2012     : Information Clearing House Revolution In The Air John Pilger Speaks At Marxism 2012 Marxism 2012: Revolution in the air hosts radical journalist, writer and film-maker John Pilger for a fascinating session on the mass media and propaganda. Back for his fourth year, Pilger says about the Marxism conference: Posted April 27, 2012   "Marxism in Melbourne is now Australia's premier festival of debate and free speech on issues that are either excluded from or suppressed by the mass media: issues such as the government's agenda for Indigenous Australians, Palestine and propaganda in its many disguises." Pilger is recognized the world over for his investigative journalism. His many awards include: - British Academy of Film and Television Arts - The Richard Dimbleby Award - American Television Academy Award ('Emmy') - International Reporter of the Year - Journalist of the Year Marxi...

How Obama Recycled a Lie about Iran      : Information Clearing House April 26, 2012 "Information Clearing House" --- In June 2007, Middle East expert and University of Michigan professor Juan Cole remarked that bad translations can sometimes start wars. Professor Cole, in this case, was referring to the misleading, yet widely circulated mistranslated remark by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad during a speech in 2005 — in which he is purported to have said that Israel should be “wiped off the map.”

 Why I Refused to Return to Fight in Afghanistan's Brutal Occupation        : Information Clearing House Why I Refused to Return to Fight in Afghanistan's Brutal Occupation The Taliban clearly has broad support from Afghan people. Conscientious objection is a right and obligation in a failed war By Joe Glenton April 27, 2012 "The Guardian" - - Recent attacks in Kabul confirm the occupation is falling to pieces. Claims about "decisive years" and "turned corners" are little more than cant. Instead for all their lack of air power, drones and high-tech equipment, the Taliban are gaining ascendancy. The ability to attack up to seven different locations, to hold one for 20 hours, and to attack the fortified compounds of the occupiers and local supporters cannot sensibly be read as a sign that the insurgency is losing ground. Fighting in Afghanistan is seasonal and the Kabul attacks were the season's opening game. No insurgency can survive ...

The Cost of a Nation of Incarceration      : Information Clearing House Nationwide, the numbers are staggering: Nearly 2.4 million people behind bars, even though over the last 20 years the crime rate has actually dropped by more than 40 percent. (CBS News) Is it fair to call the United States the "incarceration nation"? That's what some experts say. And even some veteran law enforcement and correction officials think something's gone wrong. Our Cover Story is reported now by Martha Teichner:

A New Record is Set for Military Spending     : Information Clearing House April 23, 2012 "Information Clearing House" --- On April 17, 2012, as millions of Americans were filing their income tax returns, the highly-respected Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) released its latest study of world military spending. In case Americans were wondering where most of their tax money — and the tax money of other nations — went in the previous year, the answer from SIPRI was clear: to war and preparations for war. World military spending reached a record $1,738 billion in 2011 — an increase of $138 billion over the previous year. The United States accounted for 41 percent of that, or $711 billion.

How Liberty Was Lost         : Information Clearing House April 24, 2012 "Information Clearing House" --- When did things begin going wrong in America? “From the beginning,” answer some. English colonists, themselves under the thumb of a king, exterminated American Indians and stole their lands, as did late 18th and 19th century Americans. Over the course of three centuries the native inhabitants of America were dispossessed, just as Israelis have been driving Palestinians off their lands since 1948.".......

First forced eviction of Palestinian family in Jerusalem's Beit Hanina to make way for Jewish settlers On 18 April, the Palestinian Natsheh family was evicted from their home in Beit Hanina, a Palestinian neighborhood in the north of occupied East Jerusalem The eviction was carried out by the Bailiff’s Office with police back-up. Beit Hanina’s first forced removal left two parents and nine children homeless.

MI6 and Colonel Muammar Gaddafi's Libyan intelligence service set up a radical mosque in a Western European city in order to lure in al-Qaeda terrorists, The Sunday Telegraph can reveal. The operation, which had the potential to backfire if a terrorist cell launched an attack using the location as a base, was run behind the backs of Western allies in the chosen city. The joint operation, which was undertaken as Britain attempted to secure a deal with Col Gaddafi to reopen diplomatic relations, shows how closely Britain's Secret Intelligence Service was prepared to work with his regime's spies despite widespread allegations of human rights abuses. At the time, Britain was encouraging Col Gaddafi to give up plans for weapons of mass destruction. Four months later, the dictator and Tony Blair, then prime minister, struck the 2004 "deal in the desert" which ended Libya's pariah status. The cooperation extended to recruiting an agent to infiltrate an al-Qaeda t...

US Border Patrol  Beat and Taser Man to Death    : Information Clearing House

Why America Needs the Left -- In These Times From the beginning of the American republic, most of the country’s thinkers and politicians have argued that our nation neither had nor needed a Left. Historians of the so-called liberal consensus school argue that the United States has simply always enjoyed agreement on such matters as private property, individualism, popular sovereignty and natural rights. Others claim that the country never developed the leftist working class or peasantry seen in other nations, a claim often termed American exceptionalism. Still others say that the country doesn’t need a Left because it already believes in, or has even achieved, such goals as democracy and equality – a view held by Cold War liberals and neoconservatives.

Methodist Church divestment group forcefully rejects American Jewish Committee attack Members of United Methodist Church have responded forcefully to an attack from Rabbi A. James Rudin, the “senior interreligious adviser” of the American Jewish Committee, just as the Church’s upcoming national conference is to vote on a major initiative to divest from companies profiting from Israeli occupation and human rights abuses against Palestinians. Writing in The Washington Post, Rudin belittled the divestment initiatives in the Methodist and other Protestant churches as “pointless,” and deployed the now standard tactic of trying to divert attention away from Israel by berating church members for a “biased double standard that judges Israel much more harshly than its neighboring nations and terrorist organizations including Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah.” Not taking the bait United Methodist Kairos Response (UMKR), a group organizing in favor of the divestment initiative rejected Rudin’s c...

US Muslim: I Was Tortured at FBI's Behest in UAE The Associated Press American Muslim blames the FBI, saying he was tortured at their behest in United Arab Emirates AP Yonas Fikre, a Portland, Oregon Muslim American talks to media at his lawyer's office in Stockholm, Sweden, April 18, 2012. After a 2010 trip to visit family in Khartoum, Sudan, Fikre claims to have been detained and tortured. Put on a FBI no-fly list, Fikre is now unable to return home to the U.S. (AP Photo / Claudio Bresciani) By MALIN RISING and STEVEN DUBOIS Associated Press 4/18/12, 1:15 PM EDT A Muslim American seeking asylum in Sweden claimed Wednesday he was detained at the U.S. government's request while in the United Arab Emirates last summer, tortured in custody and interrogated about the activities of a Portland, Oregon, mosque. Yonas Fikre told a news conference Wednesday that he was held for 106 days and was beaten, threatened with death and kept in solitary confinement in a frigid cell. The 3...

     Has Ron Paul Sold Out To Israeli Lobby?    : Information Clearing House While there’s no evidence Israel’s attack prevented Iraq from acquiring a nuclear weapon, according to U.S. intelligence, it was likely an important factor that played into Saddam Hussein’s subsequent decision to move his nuclear program underground and seek to develop an Iraqi nuclear deterrent to further Israeli aggression. An interagency intelligence assessment on the consequences of Israel’s attack stated that it “could be a watershed event in the Middle East” by adding “new strains” to “US-Arab relations” and sparking an “arms race” in which “Arab leaders will intensify their search for alternative ways to boost their security and protect their interests” (much the same observation that Rafsanjani made in 2001). Israel’s own possession of nuclear weapons made its actions all the more destabilizing. Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan had “dispelled the ambiguity that surrounded Israel’s nuclear program ...

  WikiLeaks Supporters Plan US Foundation to Restore Funding       : Information Clearing House WikiLeaks Supporters Plan US Foundation to Restore Funding Whistleblowing website's backers look to break 'bank blockade' 500 days after Visa, MasterCard and PayPal blocked donations By James Ball April 21, 2012 "The Guardian" --   High-profile US supporters of WikiLeaks are planning to establish a foundation to break the 500-day "banking blockade" that has disrupted donations to the whistleblowing website. WikiLeaks was forced to suspend many of its publishing operations in October last year after Visa, MasterCard and PayPal refused to process supporters' donations to the website, reducing its donation income by about 95%. The move, which came after the US senator Joe Lieberman called on US companies to cut off services to WikiLeaks, was called a blockade by the organisation's editor-in-chief, Julian Assange, and came without any legal orde...

How Wealth Reduces Compassion        : Information Clearing House In order to figure out whether selfishness leads to wealth (rather than vice versa), Piff and his colleagues ran a study where they manipulated people’s class feelings. The researchers asked participants to spend a few minutes comparing themselves either to people better off or worse off than themselves financially. Afterwards, participants were shown a jar of candy and told that they could take home as much as they wanted. They were also told that the leftover candy would be given to children in a nearby laboratory. Those participants who had spent time thinking about how much better off they were compared to others ended up taking significantly more candy for themselves--leaving less behind for the children.

Tarek Mehanna: punished for speaking truth to power     : Information Clearing House  April 15, 2012 "Information Clearing House" ---   On 12 April, Tarek Mehanna was found guilty of conspiracy and of giving material support for terrorism and was sentenced to 17 years in prison. The prosecution accused Mehanna of translating statements for al-Qaida and of disseminating pro-jihadist material on the internet. Mehanna maintains that he does not support the world view of al-Qaida, though he is unapologetic for supporting the rights of Muslims to defend themselves against their oppressors – in this case, US and British soldiers. The American Civil Liberties Union has said that the verdict against Tarek "undermines" free speech, while the prosecution holds that Tarek was "conspiring to support terrorists" and "for conspiring to kill Americans overseas".

And Then They Came For The Muslims     : Information Clearing House And Then They Came For The Muslims By Roqayah Chamseddine April 15, 2012 "Information Clearing House" --- 29-year-old Tarek Mehanna, a United States citizen and graduate from the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences, was recently sentenced to seventeen and a half years in prison, followed by seven years of supervised release, on federal criminal charges of “conspiracy to provide material support to terrorists and providing or attempting to provide material support to terrorists.” Mehanna, through instant messages and emails, communicated his opposition of U.S. military operations in the Middle East and openly criticized what he viewed as “the oppression of Muslims in the United States”; as per his defense council, Tarek had been under investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, to his knowledge, since approximately 2005 wherein he was periodically interviewed and monitored: ...

SANAA, YEMEN— With the house still quiet with slumber, the 15-year-old left a letter for his mother begging forgiveness, then crawled out a second-storey kitchen window and dropped to the garden below. Abdulrahman al Awlaki crossed the front yard past potted plants and a carnival ride graveyard — Dumbo, Donald Duck, an arched seal balancing a beach ball — debris from his uncle Omar’s failed business venture to install rides in local shopping malls. The family’s guard saw the grade nine student with a mop of curly hair leave the front gate at about 6:30 a.m. that morning on Sept. 4. Abdulrahman then made his way to the gates of Bab al-Yemen to catch a bus to a cousin’s house in Shabwa province in the south. As he crossed the desert on his six-hour journey, his family awoke to news of his disappearance. “He wrote to his mother, ‘I am sorry for leaving in this kind of way. Forgive me. I miss my father and want to see if I can go and talk to him,’ ” said the boy’s grandfather, Nasser al Aw...

Gunter Grass accuses Israel of plotting to 'wipe out' Iran BERLIN - Controversy-courting German Nobel literature laureate Gunter Grass published a poem Wednesday in which he accused Israel of plotting Iran's annihilation and threatening global security. The 84-year-old longtime leftist activist wrote in "What must be said" that he worried Israel "could wipe out the Iranian people" with a "first strike" due to the threat it sees in Tehran's disputed nuclear program. "Why do I only say now, aged and with my last ink: the atomic power Israel is endangering the already fragile world peace?" reads the poem, which was published in the daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung. Grass answers that Nazi Germany's "incomparable" crimes against Jews and fears of accusations of anti-Semitism kept him from openly criticizing Israel. But now, "tomorrow could already be too late" and Germany could become a "supplier to a ...

Uprooting 30,000 Bedouin in Israel - Opinion - Al Jazeera English Beer-Sheva, Israel - "It is not every day that a government decides to relocate almost half a per cent of its population in a programme of forced urbanisation," Rawia Aburabia asserted, adding that "this is precisely what Prawer wants to do". The meeting, which was attempting to coordinate various actions against the Prawer Plan, had just ended, and Rawia, an outspoken Bedouin leader who works for the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, was clearly upset. She realised that the possibility of changing the course of events was extremely unlikely and that, at the end of the day, the government would uproot 30,000 Negev Bedouin and put them in townships. This would result in an end to their rural way of life and would ultimately deprive them of their livelihood and land rights. Rawia's wrath was directed at Ehud Prawer, the Director of the Planning Policy Division in Prime Minister Binyamin ...

Man Whose WMD Lies Led to Iraq War Confesses All  : Information Clearing House http://v.imwx.com/v/mrss/news/595624.mov April 01, 2012 "The Independent" - -A man whose lies helped to make the case for invading Iraq – starting a nine-year war costing more than 100,000 lives and hundreds of billions of pounds – will come clean in his first British television interview tomorrow. "Curveball", the Iraqi defector who fabricated claims about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, smiles as he confirms how he made the whole thing up. It was a confidence trick that changed the course of history, with Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi's lies used to justify the Iraq war. He tries to defend his actions: "My main purpose was to topple the tyrant in Iraq because the longer this dictator remains in power, the more the Iraqi people will suffer from this regime's oppression." The chemical engineer claimed to have overseen the building of a mobile biological lab...