The Jewish Third Reich

The mass slaughter perpetrated by Israel in the Gaza Strip in the last week of the 2008, once again reveals the Nazi nature of the Zionist state. It also underscores the genocidal nature and brutal ugliness of the Zionist mentality, a mentality based on and shaped by murder, bullying, coercion, aggression, brutality and criminality.

Pictures of Hamas’ most wanted “terrorists”

Mel Gibson: Zionists are the source of destruction, I wish I can fight against them. (American actor)

Angenlina Jolie: Arabs and Muslims are not terrorists. The world should unite against Israel. (American actress)

By Khalid Amayreh

The “Israeli Defense Forces (IDF)” on Sunday  released the pictures of some of Hamas’ most wanted  “terrorists” it said it has killed since the start of the  Israeli onslaught in the Gaza Strip more two weeks ago.

An Israeli spokesman told foreign reporters  in Jerusalem that the world community, especially Americans and Europeans, shouldn’t be deceived by the ostensibly young age of the killed terrorists.

UNSC Resolution 1860…Israel’s Real Fiasco Exposed

The United Nations Security Council approved Gaza Strip ceasefire resolution number 1860. The resolution, submitted by Britain, passed with a majority of 14 votes. The United States abstained from voting. Notably, the word “Hamas”, the key Palestinian party in the Israeli war on Gaza is not mentioned in the document. Israel’s UN Envoy Gabriela Shalev said that “the international community must focus its attention on the cessation of Hamas’ terrorist activity and make clear that a terrorist organization can never be a legitimate leadership.”

Israel Elite Brigade Toll Climbs;Gaza Quagmire Deepens

It’s the eleventh day of the Israeli offensive on Gaza and the fourth day of the ground operation. 11 days have passed and Israel has so failed to achieve any clear objective; a reason to dump all calls for ceasefire. On the ninth of January, PA chief Mahmoud Abbas’s term ends and on the twentieth of January US President Barack Obama takes the oath.

Time is not in Israel’s favour as elections are a few weeks ahead. The political confusion has been reflected recently on the battleground in Gaza. Israeli elite soldiers are getting killed, at least 3 on Monday night alone and settlers are still haunted by Palestinian resistance rockets. Practically, nothing has changed in Gaza for Israel to save face. The stigma of Israel’s blood thirst in Gaza, however, adds another paragraph to the books of Israel’s reference to massacres.

“Palestine’s Guernica” and “Why should Israel bomb a university?”

By Ray Bergmann

Dr. Mustapha  Barghouti (founder of the Palestinian Medical Relief Committees and  Secretary General of the Palestine National Initiative) confronted several of Israel’s claimed justifications for the Gaza actions in his article on the Gaza onslaught entitled “Palestine’s Guernica”.

Last words from underneath the rubble

By Mr. Hosam Abu Al Nasr
Translated by Safa Mohammad Al Anani

I am here in this dark place… Surrounded by death… I smell nothing but death and fumes. I don’t know where I am or where my children are now or where my brothers or the rest of my people are.
I opened my window to a sunny beautiful morning , indicating a pleasant start of the day, after the days of rain.
I was getting ready to go to work when I heard the first strike, the second .. and the tenth. The earth moved the sky was aflame. Everything has suddenly changed… kids were still at their schools. The ambulances sirens were sounded and death was everywhere. I realized now that the crows are back in our skies, only this time was like no other time. This is the worst attack since 1948 . 200 Martyrs in just seconds! The injured were uncountable and the destruction was everywhere.

USA needs nuclear explosion to turn the world into dictatorship

Is the United States going to put dictatorship into effect under the guise of the anti-terrorist struggle? What may trigger another major transformation in 2009? The answer is obvious: another 9/11 in the USA.

Terrible and bloody events are in store for the world in the beginning of 2009. Most likely, the world will witness a reality show with a nuclear blast, which will be used as a reason for the US administration to change the world order again and leave the new Great Depression behind. There is every reason to believe that the Russian Federation may suffer as a result of this possible initiative too.

Message From the Preparatory Committee for the First International Labor Conference in Iraq

Dear Brothers and Sisters in the global struggle for workers’ rights, peace and justice:

Plans are underway to hold an International Labor Conference in Iraq in February 13 & 14,  2009.  We see this as an important and urgent step toward strengthening and unifying the labor movement in Iraq.  Only through increased solidarity in Iraq, and with workers in the region and around the world can we hope to impact the fate not only of workers but of all Iraqis.

We call upon all unions and labor organizations around the world to support this conference morally and financially. Your expressions of solidarity with workers in Iraq in the past have given us a lifeline of hope. 

A Pair of Boots for Mister Bush

Aijaz Zaka Syed

The US President George W Bush gives us a whole lot to write about each week – week after week. And this week was a fitting finale to eight years of beating about Bush when he paid another ‘surprise’ visit to the country he invaded nearly six years ago. It would be Bush’s fourth and last trip to Baghdad before he turns over the reins-and two unfinished wars – to Barack Obama on January 20.

So there he was once again working up the charm on Iraqi politicians in Baghdad who owe their fortunes and power to him. And of course how could he have missed out on those last photo ops with the US troops at Camp Victory!

What really fascinates you about Bush is his remarkable consistency in sticking to the script from which he has been faithfully reading all these years –  without ever pausing to ponder for one moment the bedtime stories he’s been telling himself and his captive audience.

Standing next to the larger-than-life Iraqi President Jalal Talabani and without batting an eyelid Bush said, “the war had been necessary for American security, Iraqi hope and world peace.”

Praising the bitterly contested US-Iraq pact, the president reminded the world that the agreement was “a way forward to help the Iraqi people realise the blessings of a free society!”

Blessings, huh? Only last week, in a rare moment of self-doubt, the president had told ABC’s Charles Gibson that his biggest regret was the flawed intelligence about Iraq on which the entire case for the war was built. When asked if he would have invaded Iraq if he knew Saddam didn’t have any WMD, pat came the reply: “That’s a do-over I can’t do!”

Mass demonistrations demand the release of shoe-hurling journalist and hail him

By Louay Al-Zaher

Tens of thousands of Iraqis took to the streets last Monday and Thursday in Baghdad, Anbar, Najaf, and Basra provences to demand the release of a reporter who threw his shoes at President George W. Bush, as Arabs across many parts of the Middle East hailed the journalist as a hero and praised his insult as a proper send-off to the unpopular U.S. president.

American flags were burned in protest against Bush and called for the release of Al-Zeidi.”Bush, Bush, listen well: Two shoes on your head”, the protesters chanted in unison. In Najaf, a Shiite holy city, some protesters threw their shoes at an American patrol as it passed by. Witnesses said the American troops did not respond and continued on their patrol.

Journalist Muntadhar Al-Zeidi, who was kidnapped by militants supported by the US in November last year and released due to the Arabic and international media pressure, is a patriot communist (not a member of traitors’ wing of the communist party led by Hameed Majeed who co-operates with the CIA). Al-Zeidi, lives in Al-Thawra (which it means: Revolution) district which well-known nowadays as AL-Sadr district that witnessed many times major horrible attacks and massacres initiated by US troops.

“This is from the widows and the orphans and all those who were killed in Iraq!”

“Zaidi, a reporter with Cairo based Al-Baghdadia channel, was wrestled to the ground and then led away by half a dozen security guards.” (mx brisbane)

A White House spokesman said the second shoe “narrowly missed the president”. (mx brisbane)

By Ray Bergmann

I was surprised to see on mainstream media, on the Channel 7 Good Morning Brisbane program, a news broadcast of US President George Bush and Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki giving a media conference in Baghdad on the new agreement Maliki’s government has signed with the US. Suddenly a journalist sitting about 6 rows from the front stood up and threw a shoe at President George Bush while shouting in Arabic.

A Call Upon The World… Release al-Zaidi!

Release al-Zaidi!

The journalist who threw his shoes at George Bush has been taken into custody.

Bush ducks flying shoe and al-Zaidi is arrested

He is being held by the occupation forces in Baghdad.

He should have been freed without harm.

You can hear al-Zaidi scream as he is taken into custody! (see U-tube video below)

This is a call for anti-war activists, unionists, and journalists to defend al-Zaidi! To demand his immediate release.

He should not be punished for what he has done, he deserves a medal!

It is easy to duck flying shoes…

What did the Baghdad journo, al-Zaidi, say as he threw his shoes at George Bush?

Gaza reduced to bare survival

Palestinians hold candles as they march during demonstration against Israeli fuel cut, Gaza City, 19 Nov 2008

 © AP Photo/Adel Hana

  5 December 2008

The Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip is having ever more serious consequences on its population. In the past month the supply of humanitarian aid and basic necessities to Gaza has been reduced from a trickle to an intermittent drip.

Settler ‘Pogrom’ for Palestinians

 

Israeli settlers shot and wounded three Palestinians and torched a number of Palestinian homes, fields and cars in Al-Khalil (Reuters). December 5, 2008

Arabs…Seize the Moment and Save Gaza

By Mohamad Shmaysani For the sixteenth consecutive day, besieged Gaza is still taking the blows of Israel’s battering ram amid international silence and Arab apathy. Today a 19-year-old Palestinian fighter belonging to the resistance movement Hamas was killed by an Israeli tank shell east of the Strip. 19 years, but who’s counting anyway? To hear about the death of young men striving for the least standards of life, does not touch hearts anymore. Why should it, when television networks broadcast weak-up calls like the pictures of 4-months-old Iman Hajo with a bullet hole in her heart or Mohammed Durra being shot dead on his father’s lap, in vain. Patients in coma do not always respond to wake-up calls. If the scenes of death of these infants did not move the “Arab Conscience” how can empty stomachs and empty pockets move it.? When you hear more news, astonishment just never stops.

Tonight We Rest Here – An Interview with Poet Saadi Youssef

by Joy E. Stocke

Why did you come to me from your Nevada desert, soldier armed to
the teeth?
Why did you come all this way to distant Basra, where fish used to
swim by our doorsteps?
– Saadi Youssef, “America, America”
Without An Alphabet, Without a Face

Saadi Youssef
The room in which I sit with one of the world’s great poets, Saadi Youssef, seems far removed from the sound of traffic on New York’s Lexington Avenue. With its thick plaster walls, old-fashioned furniture, high ceilings, and a loft holding a cast iron daybed, this room could be in Beirut, Damascus, Cairo, Alexandria, Algiers, Paris, London, or any of the places Youssef has lived since he left his native Iraq in 1978.
Considered by many to be the greatest living Arabic poet, Youssef speaks quietly and deliberately, as if each word holds the weight of his lifetime. Around his neck, hangs a gold pendant: a map of Iraq.

“I was in Stockholm, Sweden,” he says, touching the contours of the pendant. A man called out to me, and said, ‘Are you Saadi Youssef?’
“He asked me to have coffee with him and took me to his jewelry shop. Here, I thought, an Iraqi in Sweden with a jewelry shop? But, yes, it was true, and for that time we became brothers. He saw that I was wearing this empty gold chain, and so he went to his jewelry case and found this pendant.”
‘I will give you this,’ the jeweler said.

In Need of an Economic Model to serve All of Society

By Ray Bergmann, Brisbane, Australia. 15 November 2008

Free-market economists and the governments that promote free-market and Neo-classical growth economic models have claimed that the market is efficient, but this idea has been challenged in Spiegel Online International’s 10 October 2008 interview with Prof Noam Chomsky who states the opposite: “Markets are always inefficient.”

Down for the Count

on 26 October, 2008

“The Whole System is Contracting”

Down for the Count

By MIKE WHITNEY

“The great inter-war slumps were not acts of God or of blind forces. They were the sure and certain result of the concentration of too much economic power in the hands of too few men (who) felt no responsibility to the nation.”

The Pentagon’s cubicle mercenaries

“The Pentagon spent more contracting for services with private companies than on supplies and equipment – including major weapons systems.” “In fiscal year 2006, those services contracts totaled more than $151 billion.”

By Frida Berrigan

Seven years into George W Bush’s global “war on terror”, the Pentagon is embroiled in two big wars, a potentially explosive war of words with Tehran, and numerous smaller conflicts – and it is leaning ever more heavily on private military contractors to get by.

Once upon a time, soldiers did more than pick up a gun. They picked up trash. They cut hair and delivered mail. They fixed airplanes and inflated truck tires.

Not anymore. All of those tasks are now the responsibility of private military corporations. In the service of the Pentagon, their employees also man computers, write software code, create
integrating systems, train technicians, manufacture and service high-tech weapons, market munitions, and interpret satellite images.

People in ties or heels, not berets or fatigues, today translate documents, collect intelligence, interpret for soldiers and interrogators, approve contracts, draft reports to Congress, and provide oversight for other private contractors. They also fill prescriptions, fit prosthetics, and arrange for physical therapy and psychiatric care. Top to bottom, the Pentagon’s war machine is no longer just driven by, but staffed by, corporations.

Consider the following: In fiscal year 2005 (the last year for which full data is available), the Pentagon spent more contracting for services with private companies than on supplies and equipment – including major weapons systems. This figure has been steadily rising over the past 10 years. According to a recent Government Accountability Office report, in the last decade the amount the Pentagon has paid out to private companies for services has increased by 78% in real terms. In fiscal year 2006, those services contracts totaled more than $151 billion.

Oil for Iraqi Citizens

Al-Ahram; By Hana Al-Bayaty

“Precedent exists in international law that could explode the US occupation of Iraq, its genocidal strategy, and be a step towards healing the wounds of the Iraqi nation.”

Some 4.7 million Iraqi citizens — one fifth of the population — have been forcibly displaced, within and outside their country, by the US occupation and the policies of the sectarian governments it installed since the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003. It is a human catastrophe, a national tragedy, and a destabilising factor for the region.

World Beat: The Financial Crisis and War

“When we hear about the consequences of the $700-plus Wall Street bailout, we hear a lot about inevitable cuts in other budget items,” writes Phyllis Bennis. But “the military budget – not to mention the supplemental budgets to continue fighting illegal and useless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – is somehow never on the list of those items that could be cut.”

 By John Feffer, 21October  2008

The Financial Crisis and War

The financial bailout package is certainly huge: $700 billion or so. But the economic analysts are quick to reassure us that the money will come back to the government once it sells off all those faulty mortgages.

THE END OF ARROGANCE: America Loses Its Dominant Economic Role

 By SPIEGEL Staff: 30 September 2008

 

The banking crisis is upending American dominance of the financial markets and world politics. The industrialized countries are sliding into recession, the era of turbo-capitalism is coming to an end and US military might is ebbing. Still, this is no time to gloat.

The Russians are coming … with cash

Daily Times: 14 October 2008, by Sergei Guriev & Aleh Tsyvinski

Consider Russia’s elites, who buy houses in London, ski in the Alps, and educate their children in Switzerland. They have too much to lose from a worsening political climate between Russia and the West. It is time to make Russia’s big business – and its government – stakeholders in the world economy

Russia’s government is sitting on a giant pile of cash that it plans to invest in foreign assets. The glimpse of its economic muscle was revealed this week when the Prime Minister of Iceland announced that Russia may come with about $5 billion to save its troubled economy.

U.S. ORGY OF DEBT

Eric Margolis, 22 September  2008

The financial panic sweeping the globe is maddeningly complex, but the cause of the worst financial crisis since the 1930’s Great Depression is clear.

America has revelled for two decades in an orgy of debt. The US national debt is now twice its net worth. From Wall Street’s `masters of the universe’ financial powerhouses, like Goldman Sachs, Merril Lynch, Lehman, and Morgan Stanley, to the humblest homeowners, America’s national motto became `borrow to the hilt and bet.’

Impact of global financial turmoil on China seen as limited

Xinhua: 05 October 2008

The ongoing global financial turbulence will have a limited impact on China’s banks and financial system in the short run, according to officials and experts.

“We feel China’s financial system and its banks are, to the chaos developed in the U.S. and other parts of the world, relatively shielded from those problems,” said senior economist Louis Kuijs at the World Bank Beijing Office.

Lessons from the Collapse of Wall Street

James Petras, Axis of Logic, October 4, 2008

The ongoing collapse of the stock market and the loss of hundreds of billions of dollars managed by Wall Street investment banks illustrate the pitfalls and danger of free market capitalism facing the entire working population of the United States.

Biden’s 700 Years and the Dangerous Road to a “Settlement” in Iraq

By Reidar Visser (www.historiae.org)

3 October 2008

During yesterday’s vice-presidential debate, Joe Biden repeated the basic thrust of Barack Obama’s comments on Iraq one week ago. According to Biden, “John McCain was saying the Sunnis and Shiites got along with each other without reading the history of the last 700 years.”

Failure on all fronts is Bush legacy

Gulf News 30/09/2008

By Linda S. Heard

Americans should be admired for their patience and fortitude. In a matter of less than eight years, the misguided policies and ineptitude of their not so great leader have damaged their country’s reputation and their pockets, perhaps irreparably.

Pakistan first…It is time to bring Bush before International Court of Justice

Pakistan Observer, 27 September 2008
by Rizwan Ghani
It is public that Bush signed a special order authorising attacks in sovereign Pakistan. It is a gross violation of international law, UN laws, EU laws and understandings between US, Pakistan, Afghanistan and NATO member states backed by EU. It is therefore time that Islamabad registers a case against Bush in International Court of Justice, for authorising killing of innocent Pakistanis. It is war crime.

Record number of US contractors in Iraq

By Peter Grier

The Christian Science Monitor: 18 August 2008

Some 190,000 private personnel were working in the Iraq theater as of early this year, a new report says.

The American military has depended on private contractors since sutlers sold paper, bacon, sugar, and other small luxuries to Continental Army troops during the Revolutionary War.

But the scale of the use of contractors in Iraq is unprecedented in US history, according to a new congressional report that may be the most thorough official account yet of the practice.