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by Pax Christi International
Pax Christi International is a global Catholic peace movement working with and for partners and Member Organisations throughout the countries in the Middle East and northern Africa regions. Pax Christi International wishes to express its concerns about the double standards the international community applies when it comes to violations of civil and political rights, and the human rights of Islamic activists, in particular in the Middle East.
As an international peace movement active in many conflict areas in the world, Pax Christi believes in human dignity as a central value that is the basis of the equality of all human beings, regardless of their political, ideological or other affiliation. Universal application of these rights is a necessary condition for a peaceful society.
It's time for Palestinians and Israelis to share a just peace.
It's time to respect human lives in the land called holy.
It's time for healing to begin in wounded souls.
It's time to end 60 years of conflict, oppression and fear.
It's time for freedom from occupation.
It's time for equal rights.
It's time to understand pent-up anger and begin to set things right.
It's time for those with blood on their hands to acknowledge what they have done.
It's time to seek forgiveness between communities and to repair a broken land together.
It's time to move forward as human beings who are all made in the image of God.
All who are able to speak truth to power must speak it.
All who would break the silence surrounding injustice must break it.
All who have something to give for peace must give it.
For Palestine, for Israel and for a troubled world,
It's time for peace.
At the heart of any critique of the current direction of globalization must be a concern for the dignity of the human person and the well being of all creation. In order to properly evaluate the process of globalization we believe that four questions need to be raised.
What does globalization do for people?
What does globalization do to people, especially to people made poor and marginalized?
How do people participate in the development and direction of globalization?
What does globalization do to Earth's many ecosystems and how does it reverence creation as God's primary revelation?
...We note that the values which often guide the process of globalization are the search for economic profit as the highest human goal and the primary definition of humans as consumers and producers. While profit is a proper goal of economic activity, Catholic Social Teaching makes it clear that it cannot be the highest goal.
We believe that to value human beings primarily in the light of how much they consume or produce represents an unacceptable diminishment of the human person.
In their economic pastoral, the U.S. Catholic bishops state clearly,
"Decisions must be judged in light of what they do for the poor, what they do to the poor, and what they enable the poor to do for themselves. The fundamental moral criterion for all economic decisions, policies, and institutions is this:
They must be at the service of all people, especially the poor."
..The profound paradoxes of globalization: Despite its potential to improve life for all, it has, at least to this point, widened the gap between a few immeasurably wealthy groups and individuals and the ever-greater number of people imprisoned in economic hardship or even misery. The gap between the rich and the poor, both economically and technologically, is growing wider rather than narrowing.
Another result has been the plundering of the earth's resources and the destruction of the environment to increase profits, especially for transnational corporations, and to provide more and more for the rich.
This global market economy limits government control, reducing the importance and power of citizen participation through their governments.Additionally, economic agreements between nations have created blocs that undercut national sovereignty
By Mohammed Omer
Young Maria Ismail Abu Jaser holds a picture of her imprisoned father at a Dec. 3 demonstration in front of the International Red Cross office in Gaza City.
Stretching her short arms above her head while balancing on a chair, 7-year-old Jumana Abu Jazar struggles to loop the picture wire around a rusty nail protruding from the wall. Shifting her weight, she spoke, her delicate voice amplified as it bounced off the wall.
“My mother died and I have no brothers and sisters,” she stated matter-of-factly, biting her lower lip and cocking her head to match the picture’s tilt. “My father is in jail, in an Israeli jail where he is forced to live in a dark cell.”
Administrative Detention vs. Habeas Corpus
The principle of habeas corpus (literally “bring forth the body”) is a right guaranteed by the Geneva Convention regarding prisoners of war—which is why Israel describes the thousands of Palestinians it has detained as security threats.
Israel circumvents granting the right of habeas corpus to Palestinian prisoners via a draconian measure euphemistically described as administrative detention, whereby it can arrest, torture and imprison a person without cause, without trial and without conviction. A person can be held for six months under administrative detention—but the sentence can be renewed indefinitely. Currently 863 Palestinians have been held for 15 years or more under administrative detention.
Torture
Torture and confessions obtained through torture are still common practice in Israel. According to Israeli human rights groups, Shin Bet security forces regularly use torture on Palestinian prisoners. A report published recently by B’Tselem and HaMoked, The Center for Defense of Individuals, documented the experiences of 73 prisoners arrested between July 2005 and March 2006. It found that the Shin Bet routinely used “beatings, painful binding, back bending, body stretching and prolonged sleep deprivation” on Palestinian prisoners. Each of these tactics, according to the report, constitutes torture under international law.
A Christmas Reflection on Palestine
By SONJA KARKAR
As Christmas approaches this year, the thoughts of Christians all over the world will once again turn to Bethlehem, the holy town where Jesus was born over two millennia ago. Voices will be raised in joyful celebration and children everywhere will re-create the Christmas story to help us remember the circumstances in which the Christ child was born.
Such a momentous occasion in such humble surroundings heralded a new way of thinking about people's relationship with God and with each other. It shook the foundations of an unforgiving society presided over by an unforgiving God and proclaimed peace and goodwill on earth amongst all people. There was indeed much to hope for.
However, the tranquil pastoral scene so familiar to us is not at all evident in Bethlehem today. Bethlehem does not lie still, and peace on earth and goodwill towards all is as elusive as ever. The tyranny of Israel's occupation and its colonial expansionism is crippling the lives of both Palestinian Christians and Muslims alike. Yet, many Christians will again ignore the misery suffered by the Palestinians in the Holy Land and will celebrate Christmas without remembering that it was amongst this people and in their land that Jesus was born. Priests will chant, masses will be said, carols will be sung and nativity scenes will be created, but it is unlikely that many sermons will urge Christian congregations to speak out against the crimes being committed in Palestine...
by Ramy Abdu
About 60 years have passed since our Palestinian
catastrophe (Nakba). Palestinian people have
passed through and tasted several sufferings and
calamities, and the Gaza Strip, which includes
about 1.5 million people, 75% of them refugees,
got a big share of this suffering.
...the harsh siege imposed on the
Gaza Strip has been continuing for the past seven
months, but with more cruelty. Accordingly, the
Gaza Strip has turned into a big "Ghetto".
All Gaza houses carry stories of pain and suffering!
Since PCAS started working to face this siege, it
has contacted many figures and parties. Yet, we
have not heard any position or stance that has
been taken. There are no factual actions to
alleviate the suffering of people.
Thus, we call upon you and we ask persons of conscious to move on and please do something, even by words, in order to help tens of thousands to avoid a crisis that seems inevitable.
by Steve Watson
We have previously documented the elite’s hideous interest in depopulation techniques, an interest that mirrors the nightmare eugenics visions of Nazi scientists in the 1940s.
Calls to begin sterilizing the human population have previously been put forward by former secretary of State and high ranking Bilderberger Henry Kissinger in a declassified document of the National Security Council (1974) entitled “The Implications of World-wide Population Growth on the Security and External Interests of the United States”.
Such calls to depopulate are echoed within the western scientific community by prominent figures such as Dr. Eric R. Pianka, who travels around the US speaking of the need to exterminate 90% of the population in order to save the planet. He suggests using the airborne ebola virus to do the job, choosing it over AIDS because of its faster kill period. Ebola victims suffer the most tortuous deaths imaginable as the virus kills by liquefying the internal organs. The body literally dissolves as the victim writhes in pain bleeding from every orifice.
Pianka was presented with a distinguished scientist award by the Texas Academy of Science in 2006. Pianka is no crackpot. He has given lectures to prestigious universities worldwide. His chilling comments, and their often enthusiastic reception, again underscore the elite’s agenda to enact horrifying measures of population control.
These views have also been famously perpetuated by control freaks such as Ted Turner, Jacques-Yves Cousteau and Prince Philip.
“The simplest answer is that the world’s population should be about two billion, and we’ve got about six billion now,” Turner told E Magazine, an environmentalist publication. Turner went even further in an interview with Audubon magazine, stating that “A total world population of 250-300 million people, a 95% decline from present levels, would be ideal.”
In a 1991 interview with the UNESCO Courier, Jacques-Yves Cousteau, the famous Emmy award winning film producer who went on to be a kingpin of the environmental movement said, “It’s terrible to have to say this. World population must be stabilized and to do that we must eliminate 350,000 people per day.”
In the foreword to his 1986 book If I Were an Animal, Prince Philip wrote, “In the event that I am reincarnated, I would like to return as a deadly virus, in order to contribute something to solve overpopulation.”
The doomsday warning of the population bomb consistently referred to as justification for depopulation is also complete pseudo-science. Populations in developed countries are declining and only in third world countries is it expanding dramatically. Industrialization itself levels out population trends and even despite this world population models routinely show that the earth’s population will level out at 9 billion in 2050 and slowly decline after that. “The population of the most developed countries will remain virtually unchanged at 1.2 billion until 2050,” states a United Nations report. The UN population policies seem to be in direct contradiction to THEIR OWN FINDINGS.
Conservation International’s own study revealed that 46% of the earth’s surface was an untouched wilderness, that is land areas not including sea. It is commonly accepted that the entire world population could all fit into the state of Texas and each have an acre of their own land.
We are being bombarded daily with idiotic notions that the human race and life itself is a virus that has spread all over the planet and that we must consider stemming our own progression to counter it.
Meanwhile, as we ludicrously debate culling ourselves, real environmental problems are doing the job for us.
Genetically modified garbage is poisoning our very food supply, chemical pollutants are flowing into our water supplies, the disappearance of huge swathes of the bee populations across the world is threatening crop production, deforestation, toxic waste dumping, the list goes on. All these real important issues are being buried in a sea a frothing bullshit.
The Association for Civil Rights in Israel said in its annual report, released this week, that "racism was so rife in Israel that it was damaging civil liberties and human rights."...
According to the Hebrew press, the report's key point includes a 26-percent rise in the number of racist incidents against Arabs and twice as many Jews reporting a feeling of hate toward Arabs....
Today, hundreds of thousands of Israeli youngsters receive inherently racist education and indoctrination, whether in their schools or in their synagogues or through the media.
A few days ago, an Israeli talk-show host told this writer during an interview."Arabs are animals" and that "you should go back to your donkey room."
More to the point, it is imperative to remember that this racist indoctrination is by no means confined to the rabbles and the uneducated class. In truth, the entire Israeli society is based on racism. Racism is Israel's modus operandi, and human and social equality is markedly incompatible with being Zionist....
Opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu has been proposing ways and means to check the comparatively high birth rates among Israel's non-Jewish citizens while boosting birth rates among Jews. And then there are the gurus of messianic Zionism, the Gush Emunim people, who openly call for "a Jewish solution" and are still relating to non-Jews in Israel in terms of "water carriers" and "wood hewers."
Do people in Europe and North America understand what is being implied by a Jewish solution? A few years ago, I pressed a Gush Emunim (block of the faithful) Zionist rabbi to explain his concept of the Jewish solution. The rabbi uttered three words: enslavement, expulsion or annihilation...
Today in Israel, if any politician wants to get elected or increase his popularity, he or she will have to demonstrate in ample manner his hatred of and sullen hostility toward the Palestinians and Islam.
by Mike Whitney
On Sunday, Putin’s party, United Russia, stormed to victory in the country’s parliamentary elections with 63 per cent of the vote...
Vladamir Putin is arguably the most popular leader in Russian history, although you’d never know it by reading the western media. According to a recent survey conducted by the Wall Street Journal, Putin’s personal approval rating in November 2007 was 85 per cent, making him the most popular head of state in the world today. Putin’s popularity derives from many factors. He is personally clever and charismatic. He is fiercely nationalistic and has worked tirelessly to improve the lives of ordinary Russians and restore the country to its former greatness.
He has raised over 20 million Russians out of grinding poverty, improved education, health care and the pension system, (partially) nationalized critical industries, lowered unemployment, increased manufacturing and exports, invigorated Russian markets, strengthened the ruble, raised the overall standard of living, reduced government corruption, jailed or exiled the venal oligarchs, and amassed capital reserves of $450 billion...
Russia is no longer up for grabs like it was after the fall of the Soviet Union. Putin put an end to all of that. He reasserted control over the country’s vast resources and he’s using them to improve the lives of his own people.
As for Kasparov and his silly accusations; he should be glad that he lives in Putin’s Russia rather than Stalin’s or he’d be in leg-irons right now boarding a northbound train to the Siberian outback...Kasparov’s party, the “Other Russia” couldn’t manage even a 2 per cent rating in the polls. The party is a complete dud. In fact, Reuters even (reluctantly) admits as much in its article.
Although Kasparov has garnered little public support in Russia, he appears to have a loyal following among the Washington elite. According to Wikipedia: “In 1991, Kasparov received the Keeper of the Flame award from the Center for Security Policy (a US think tank), for anti-Communist resistance and the propagation of democracy. Kasparov was an exceptional recipient since the award is given to “individuals for devoting their public careers to the defense of the United States and American values around the world”.
Hmmmm….”For devoting their public careers to the defense of the United States and American values around the world”? Isn’t that a definition of an American agent?
By Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich
The NIE claims that ‘Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003’. This report now in circulation, and being repeated by every media outlet, and as importantly, by way of word of mouth, is giving credibility to the warmongers that Iran actually had a nuclear weapons program, with the idea that ‘repetition begets belief’.
Drumming home a false message, the White House will get the justification it needs to impose further sanctions, with the idea of escalating into a war.
In December 2002, an Iranian terrorist group, the Mojahedeen-e Khalg (MEK), listed on the State Department’s list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations, informed the U.S. government of the existence of two nuclear sites in Iran. Sy Hersh later revealed in *The New Yorker* that Israel had provided them with this information...
Iran suspended its enrichment activities for two and half years, but each time under pressure from the U.S., the burden of proof was transferred to Iran knowing the negative could not be proved. Instead of Iran getting the full cooperation of the IAEA for the development of nuclear technology, it was ordered to stop preparations for large-scale uranium enrichment...
No country has allowed as many inspection hours as Iran. In the meanwhile, it proposed to operate Iran’s enrichment program as joint ventures with private and public sector firms from other countries; this would ensure that the program remained transparent and could not be secretly diverted for military purposes, at the same time it would maintain Iran’s sovereignty by having an indigenously enriched uranium cycle. Although this was rejected, Iran continued to cooperate...
The IAEA had reported that all declared fissile material in Iran had been accounted for, and none has been diverted...
Word is being circulated that sanctions were effective in curbing Iran’s nuclear weapons program.
First, as discussed above, Iran did not have a nuclear weapons program, and second, Iran voluntarily halted its enrichment program two years BEFORE sanctions were imposed on it.
The international community must put pressure on world leaders to lift current sanctions on Iran. It cannot be emphasized strongly enough that sanctions are a form of long warfare. How can we forget the 500,000 Iraqi children who died as a result of our sanctions?We shamelessly overlook the other Iraqis whose lives we took with our sanctions.
As citizens of the country we live in and as members of a global community, each one of us must be reminded of the “Universal Declaration of Human Rights” and act on it:
Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world, Whereas it is essential to promote the development of friendly relations between nations, Whereas the peoples of the United Nations have in the Charter reaffirmed their faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person and in the equal rights of men and women and have determined to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom, Whereas Member States have pledged themselves to achieve, in cooperation with the United Nations, the promotion of universal respect for and observance of human rights and fundamental freedoms.
by The Bilin Friends of Freedom and Justice society
December,08,2007
Three Palestinians, five Israelis, and three international (Swedish) activists were forcibly evicted from a Palestinian house and arrested today in the E-1 area. They have now been taken to Ma´ale Adumim police station. Early this morning Palestinians built a house in the controversial E-1 area. Palestinians are routinely denied permits to build on their own land, and homes that have been built are demolished. The Human Rights activists stayed inside for a few hours before a large police and army presence evicted them through use of force.
The E-1, or East-1 area, is between Ma´ale Adumim and Jerusalem, on lands from nearby Palestinian villages. The Israeli government plans to build a settlement of 3,500 apartments and an industrial park in this area. This will effectively connect the Ma´ale Adumim settlement with Occupied East Jerusalem, dividing the West Bank in two while separating Jerusalem from all of it.
by Rev. David B. Smith
Is it appropriate for me to refer to my Islamic friends as my 'brothers' and 'sisters' or should I reserve this language for fellow Christians? Is it only right to exclude some people from 'the family'? What does the New Testament have to say?
In the New Testament the words ‘brother’ and ‘sister’ are used quite specifically to refer to other members of the Christian community. The terms are not used indiscriminately, and we likewise should be guarded in our use of them...
My critics were quite right in pointing out that the terms ‘brother’ and ‘sister’ are generally reserved for persons who are on the inside of the faith community. What they overlooked though, I think, was the way in which the Lord Jesus Himself continually blurred the border between those on the inside and those on the outside - between us and them...
...Jesus repeatedly and deliberately blurred the borders between saved and unsaved, between insiders and outsiders. He openly fraternized with the great unwashed within Israel, and he regularly moved beyond ethnic and religious boundaries - communicating with Romans, Greeks, and even a Samaritan woman!
...Jesus defines membership of the household of faith dynamically. It is obedience to God that makes someone part of the family - not their synagogue membership nor their ethnicity...
Christ reserves for Himself the role of separating the nations into sheep and goats. It is not our role. So does this mean that all Islamic people are my brothers and sisters, in terms of the language of the New Testament? The answer is simple:
“Whoever does the will of our Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother.”
(Matthew 12:48-50)
About This Video:
A critical examination of Iran's nuclear ambitions and US manipulations of the facts.
by Yussuf Islam (aka Cat Stevens)
Do you believe the lies and disinformation sown by the US and Israeli governments?
Do you believe that Iran is a closed, fundamentalist Islamic dictatorship?
A country full of potential terrorists eager to attack American citizens?
If you believe this, will you be more likely to turn a blind eye to the predicted US and Israeli attack on the citizens of that country?
But what if Iran and the Iranian people are not as they have been portrayed?
What if there is no threat from Iran?
What if Iran is just a Middle Eastern country with 69 million people - people just like you and me?
What then?
Would you stand up for your fellow human beings against the predations of a small cabal of psychopaths in power and say "NO MORE!"
Between past and present, nature and architecture, diversity and beauty.
A song and postcards from Tehran , Isfahan , Kish and the Persian Gulf
A short video for those who miss the country and others who know little about the diverse beauty of Iran: a song and impressions from Tehran, Fasham, Caspian, Azarbaijan and Khamneh.
by Allan C. Brownfeld
It has, for many years, been a tactic of those who seek to silence open debate and discussion of US Middle East policy to accuse critics of Israel of "anti-Semitism."...
What few Americans understand is that there has been a long historical alliance -- from the end of the 19th century until today -- between Zionism and real anti-Semites -- from those who planned pogroms in Czarist Russia to Nazi Germany itself. The reason for the affinity many Zionist leaders felt for anti-Semites becomes clear as this history emerges.
Theodor Herzl's book Der Judenstaat ("The Jewish State"), was widely disparaged by the leading Jews of the day, who viewed themselves as French, German, English or Austrian citizens and Jews by religion -- with no interest in a separate Jewish state. Anti-Semites, on the other hand, eagerly greeted Herzl's work.
Dr. Joachim Prinz, a German Zionist rabbi who subsequently emigrated to the United States, where he became vice-chairman of the World Jewish Congress and a leader in the World Zionist Organization, published in 1934 a book Wir Juden ("We Jews") to celebrate Hitler's so-called German Revolution and the defeat of liberalism. He wrote:
The victory of Nazism ruled out assimilation and inter-religious marriage as an option for Jews. "We are not unhappy about this,".
In the fact that Jews were being forced to identify themselves as Jews, he saw "the fulfillment of our desires." Further, he states,
"We want assimilation to be replaced by a new law: the declaration of belonging to the Jewish nation and the Jewish race. A state built upon the principle of the purity of nation and race can only be honored and respected by a Jew who declares his belonging to his own kind"...
In its extreme formulation, political Zionists agreed with resurgent anti-Semitism in the following propositions:
1. That the emancipation of the Jews in Europe was a mistake.
2. That the Jews can function in the lands of Europe only as a disruptive influence.
3. That all Jews of the world were one "folk" in spite of their diverse political allegiances.
4. That all Jews, unlike other peoples of Europe, were unique and unintegratible.
5. That anti-Semitism was the natural expression of the folk-feeling of European nations, hence, ineradicable.
by Stephen Lendman
In July, 2004, the IMF and World Bank commemorated the 60th anniversary of their founding at Bretton Woods
From inception, their mission was to integrate developing nations into the Global North-dominated world economy and use debt repayment as the way to transfer wealth from poor countries to powerful bankers in rich ones.
The scheme is called debt slavery because new loans are needed to service old ones, indebtedness rises, and borrowing terms stipulate harsh one-way "structural adjustment" provisions...
Last December, Hugo Chavez announced his idea for a Banco del Sur, or Bank of the South, as part of his crusade against the institutions of international capital he calls "tools of Washington."..
Finance ministers from the founding countries met in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil October 8 to finalize the Bank's Founding Document.
Venezuelan finance minister Rodrigo Cabeza explained the bank will help develop the region by offering South Americans more credits. It's being "created to build a new architecture that assumes an improved relationship of the bank and its capacity to offer credits for its people." It also aims to increase liquidity and revive socioeconomic development and infrastructure investments in participating countries and keep them outside the restrictive control of the IMF and World Bank that are fast losing influence and being phased out of the region.
The Voice of Palestine
NEW YORK, (PIC)-- Jean Ziegler, the UN special rapporteur on right to food, castigated the Israeli occupation and described it as the only "colonial regime" which refuses to abide by any international law, calling on the UN to adopt an effective policy forcing Israel to respect human rights and the Geneva Convention.
The UN official underlined that the Israeli occupation is causing starvation, physical and psychological oppression to the Palestinian people...
The rapporteur described the EU countries as completely "hypocritical" because they refused the results of democratic elections supervised by them after they saw that the winner is Hamas, pointing out that the Europeans should have the bare minimum of principles.
We know who jump-started the Evangelical movement, we call nowadays Christian Zionism and we know for what purpose it was started:
The Origins of Christian Zionism
Now it looks like the people of Islam are getting a similar cult pressed upon them.
Here the end of the world is also near and all the signs are there.
Oh yes, and they even have an Anti-Christ like Christian Zionists.
And while main-line Islam respects and tolerates Christianity as a Divine religion, this sect wants to fight Christians.
And to top it all of, this sect also proposes that the Islamic countries and believers should return to preindustrial times.
So who would be interested in promoting an Islamic cult like that?
British converts!!!
The most prosperous economies, says Aisha Bewley, an Islamic economist, are the ones based on the producing and the exchange of goods, not the ones based on credit exchange for the purpose of making money through money.
As I understand this paper, the source of the current monetary problems in the world is not the lack of gold backing of currencies, but the interest and debt based money of todays world economy.
Shaykh Dr. Abdalqadir as-Sufi, is an Islamic scholar who proposes an interest-free money policy according to Islamic law, but backed by gold.
Shaykh Dr. Abdalqadir as-Sufi was born 1930 under the name Ian Dallas in Ayr, Scotland and is a Shaykh of Tarbiyah (Instruction). According to Wikipedia he was a playwright and actor before he accepted Islam in 1963 in Fes, Morocco.
He also is the scholar who issued a fatwah against Pope Benedict XVI
I do not know Islamic law well enough, but does he, as a British Scotsman, have the right to issue a fatwah, which is somehow relevant for the rest of the Islamic world?
But going back to the economic teachings of Abdalqadir as-Sufi,what I find also rather particular is his insistence, that an Islamic non-interest-based currency system must be backed by Silver and Gold-Dinar.
Think about it, we know for a fact, the Rothschild bank of London has enormous reserves of gold stored in their vaults. It´s the Rothschild bank which declares the falling or rising value of gold twice every single day.
It might not matter for a Scotsman, but should I really believe, that the whole of the Islamic world would be happy to buy part, most or all of their backing currency directly from the Rothschilds?
Together with some Historical Illustrations
by Aisha Bewley
There are several things that we notice in this cycle. First there is the growth of commodity trade. This upsurge in prosperity brings in the money men, the credit brokers who can make money from money without trading in real goods. At this point, paper and transactions in money without goods, come into play to maximise profits for the credit broker.
This system is not in the best interests of the people and this is recognised by the financiers themselves. There is a letter from the Rothschild Bros. to the firm of Ikieheimer, Morton and Van Der Gould (25 Jan. 1863) in which John Sherman (future secretary of the Treasury of the USA) is quoted as saying:
"Those few who can understand the system will be busy getting profits while the general public will probably never suspect that the system is absolutely against their interests."...
On the other hand, the system in which we saw real prosperity and growth were based on trade in commodities, rather than on making money out of money and creating money out of nothing. In those societies, partnerships with shared risk proved to be an effective way of obtaining credit. Also we note that the governments in these systems had strong controls over what went on in their markets. They were not, by any means, laissez-faire.
BBC-News
More than 130 Muslim scholars have written to Pope Benedict XVI and other Christian leaders urging greater understanding between the two faiths.
The letter says that world peace could depend on improved relations between Muslims and Christians.
It identifies the principles of accepting only one god and living in peace with one's neighbours as common ground between the two religions.
It also insists that Christians and Muslims worship the same god.
With Muslims and Christians making up more than half the world's population, the letter goes on, the relationship between the two religious communities is "the most important factor in contributing to meaningful peace around the world".
It adds: "To those who nevertheless relish conflict and destruction for their own sake or reckon that ultimately they stand to gain through them, we say our very eternal souls are all also at stake if we fail to sincerely make every effort to make peace and come together in harmony."
By Jerry Mazza
The crowds were mainly pro-Israel groups from Columbia and bussed in from neighboring colleges. They were out for blood. They didn’t want the “holocaust denier” to speak in the first place. He was a sponsor of "terror," unlike, of course, the United States and its 160,000 troops plus mercenaries in Iraq. Also, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was an “anti-Semite” because he did not approve of the state of Israel, which had inhaled Palestine, as the Nazis had the ghettos of Lodz, Krakow and Warsaw, not to mention most of Europe....
In answer to what would it take for Iran to engage in talks with the United States, Ahmadinejad said, “If the US government recognizes the rights of the Iranian people, respects all nations and extends a hand of friendship to all Iranians, they will see that Iranians will be among their best friends.” I would say that is a very generous response from the president of a nation who had its democratically elected President Mossadeq taken down by a violent coup in 1953. Why? Because he wanted to nationalize Iran’s oil and spread the wealth among his people.
As Iran stood then, 4 percent of its population controlled the majority of its wealth. Of course, Mossadeq was politically neutered by no less than Kermit Roosevelt and the CIA, so that the young Shah and his royal court could resume power and inhale the wealth and America could continue to get its oil. It was the oppression, the torture squads, the murders of the Shah’s retinue that led to his deposing in 1979, his statue pulled down by protestors as Saddam Hussein’s was by US soldiers.
In that year, the US-backed Shah and family flew the coop and exiled cleric Ayatollah Khomeini returned to establish the Islamic Republic of Iran. Does that sound so cruel and unreasonable?
by George Washington´s blog
It is well-known that people who are crazy may have a very strong drive to silence those who are sane. Why? Because the very words of a sane person challenge the psychotic beliefs of the crazy person, and are thus "dangerous" to his or her world view.
One well-known example of this is Mark David Chapman, who shot John Lennon because he thought that he was John Lennon. He killed Lennon because Lennon's very presence threatened his crazy world view.
Similarly, a judge in Cleveland has just ordered that an anti-war activist be sent for an involuntary psychiatric examination because of her beliefs that the Administration's war in Iraq was illegal...
We -- the sane people who know what reality is -- have to act boldly to ensure that sanity prevails. The Mark David Chapmans of the world might not want to hear it, but we must force them to listen, and take away their ability to lash out against the truthtellers.
by Naomi Wolf
The good news is that Americans are already awake: I thought there would be resistance to or disbelief at this message of gathering darkness — but I am finding crowds of people who don’t need me to tell them to worry; they are already scared, already alert to the danger and entirely prepared to hear what the big picture might look like. To my great relief, Americans are smart and brave and they are unflinching in their readiness to hear the worst and take action. And they love their country.
It is clear from this inundation of personal stories of abuse and retribution against ordinary Americans that a network of criminal behavior and intention is catching up more and more mainstream citizens in its grasp. It is clear that this is not democracy as usual — or even the corruption of democracy as usual. It is clear that we will need more drastic action than emails to Congress.
The people I am hearing from are conservatives and independents as well as progressives. The cardinal rule of a closing or closed society is that your alignment with the regime offers no protection; in a true police state no one is safe.
If we go any further down this road the tears will be those of conservatives as well as progressives. They will be American tears.
The time for weeping has to stop; the time for confronting must begin.
Most people have lied in their lives for different reasons. And in modern society, especially in the media, lies are no longer portrayed as unethical.
This is consequence of a certain way of thinking, which makes everything conditional to interests and denies universal ethics.
We all are influenced by this kind of thinking occasionally, but still, deep down in ourselves, we know, that lies are wrong. Lying destroys trust. Too much broken trust destroys a society.
Maybe the upper class and their intellectual lackeys can reason these facts away. And they try to push their twisted reasoning down out throats.
But I´ve noticed that their propaganda works less and less, even with very young people. There is a thirst for truth and honesty growing in the population.
Somehow we, the little people, know intuitively, that lying is destructive. And this is, what we teach out children, it´s ancient truth, religious, yes, and very valid...
And from the realization that 9/11 was an inside job, over the stubborn denial of all main-line media to connect the dots and print or voice the facts, to the realization for the little people, that they can no longer trust those media pundits, from there, the step to new and more independent thinking is but a small one.
Iran is not the found again paradise, I´m well aware of that.
But I still dare to defend this country and it´s government.
For the sake of peace, truth and justice, I see it as absolutely necessary, that people of conscience show their fellow western citizens the positive sides of Iran, which in my opinion, far outnumber the negative ones.
But while Saddam indeed was an often muderous dictator, all the allegations made in our western media against Ahmadinejad and the clerical regime of Iran are false. Every single one of those allegations can be proven as either an outright lie or a spin-job, turning and twisting events and words out of context and out of proportion.
What I have found out about Iran has led me to the conclusion, that we should neither support a violent overthrow of the Iranian government, nor hope for or actively help to instigate a "peaceful" one.
Iran Khodro Company has Started Production of Dual-Fuel Cars in July 2007;
National Push for Natural Gas Fuel
Iran Khodro Company (IKCO) has begun the production of dual-fuel gasoline-compressed natural gas cars in late July. IKCO is the largest vehicle manufacturer in Iran and the Middle East, and builds cars and commercial vehicles for domestic use and for export.
From June 22, Iran began rationing petrol and the Oil Ministry has allocated each private motorist 100 liters per month at about 10 cents per liter.
On Sep 30, 2007 the Iranian Parliament voted against giving priority to a double urgency bill requiring the government to offer gasoline at free market rate.
Parliamentarians opposed to the bill maintained that if gasoline is offered at free market price, it would contribute to inflation.
Sale of non-rationed gasoline also contradicts the main objective of the plan which is cut in gasoline consumption and import.
Although Iran is the second-largest OPEC producer of crude oil (behind Saudi Arabia), its refinery infrastructure is inadequate to meet domestic transportation needs. With a combined capacity of 1.6 million barrels per day, the Iranian refineries currently produce just 16% gasoline, according to the Energy Information Administration.
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called for a nationwide focus on reducing fuel consumption, and also described an increasing focus on switching transportation to natural gas fuel.
"National income from sales of oil, gas and other oil products is about 50 billion dollars annually while country’s total energy consumption is about 55 billion dollars.”
He added,
“If we can change our automobiles fuel from gasoline to gas during the next 3-4 years, we won’t need gasoline anymore.”
By Sara Flounders
The significance of oil production and oil reserves in Iran is well known. Every news article, analysis or politician's threat makes mention of Iran’s oil. But the impact of Iran’s nationalization of its oil resources is not well known.
The corporate owners in the U.S. want to keep it a secret from the people here. They use all the power of their media to demonize the Iranian leadership and caricature and ridicule the entire population, their culture and religion.
The focus of media coverage here is to describe Iran as medieval, backward and feudal while somehow becoming a nuclear power.
It is never mentioned that more than half the university students in Iran are women, or that more than a third of the doctors, 60 percent of civil servants and 80 percent of all teachers in Iran are women. At the time of the 1979 Iranian Revolution, 90 percent of rural women were illiterate; in towns the figure was over 45 percent.
Iran has made the most progress in eliminating gender disparities in education. Large numbers of increasingly well-educated women have entered the work force.
Iran’s comprehensive social protection system includes the highest level of pensions, disability insurance, job training programs, unemployment insurance and disaster-relief programs. National subsidies make basic food, housing and energy affordable to all.
An extensive national network going from primary health and preventive care to sophisticated hospital care covers the entire population, both urban and rural. More than 16,000 "health houses" are the cornerstone of the health care system. Using simple technology, they provide vaccines, preventive care, care for respiratory infections, diarrheal diseases, family planning and contraceptive information, and pre-natal care. And they monitor children’s nutrition and general health...
Iran-Daily:
Mon, Oct 08, 2007
For the first time in a decade, Iran’s unemployment rate has reached a single-digit figure.
Announcing this, head of Statistics Center, Mohammad Maddad said that the unemployment rate in the country has reached 9.9 percent after being above 10 percent for more than a decade.
The number of jobless dropped from about three million in recent years to 2.5 millions this summer, he stated, adding that this is while one million people joined the working age group, IRIB reported...
Meanwhile, policymakers predict that unemployment rate will reach five percent in 2011, if the number of job seekers remains at the present level.
Foreign Investment At Record Level
Iran Daily
Foreign investment hit a record $10.2 billion in the Iranian year to March 20 from $4.2 billion in 2005 and $2 million in 1994, the Persian daily Iran reported on Monday.
Asian entrepreneurs made the largest investments in the Islamic state by investing in 40 out of 80 projects funded by foreigners.
The daily cited figures by the Organization for Investment, Economic and Technical Assistance of Iran based on which the largest amount of foreign investment was in the industrial sector, including food and beverage, tobacco, textiles, clothing, leather, chemical, oil derivates, etc. The figure exceeded $8.76 billion. Water, electricity and gas sector ranked second, attracting $874.83 million, it added...
A report by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development indicates that Iran attracted more foreign direct investment (FDI) in 2006 compared to the year earlier...
Foreign investors, particularly giant oil and gas companies have defied US pressure and continued to invest in this hydrocarbon-rich country in recent years.
The Islamic Republic has also boosted economic ties with South countries. Iran currently has cordial ties with China--the Asian economic giant with double-digit growth and Venezuela--the world’s fourth largest oil exporter.
The tools of the war- and hate-mongers are turning themselves against their makers.
If the the Zionist Israelis had not been so over the top violent in their treatment of Palestinians,if they had instead seriously worked on a peace treaty and had offered and paid compensations for the loss of life and for lost and damaged property already a few decades ago, very few Christians would nowadays question the "right of Israel to exist".
If Zionist Neocons would not have been responsible for the murderous war in Iraq, they would not be seen by most everybody nowadays as the ruthless monsters, they have been for decades already.
If Israel and the Neocons would not push for even a larger war in Iran, very few Christians or Seculars would have taken the time to really look into the Iranian reality, which is by far different from the way it is presented to us in our mass-media.
If Iran would not been threatened by western Imperialists and deprived of it´s legal rights, Iranian president Ahmadinejad would not have become a hero for many people in the developing world, Islamic and Christian alike.
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Top Posts
by Rudo de Ruijter,
Iran and the Non-Proliferation Treaty
US President Bush wants us to believe that Iran has plans for nuclear weapons. Well, we remember, in 2002 he accused Iraq of having weapons of mass destruction. That turned out to be a lie, so let us look more closely at the facts...
On June 16 2003 the International Atomic Energy Agency announced, that Iran had not reported an importation of uranium in 1991 and its subsequent stocking and processing. That is true. But from a confidential IAEA document of June 6 2003 we learn, it contained just 130 gram of uranium. According to article 37 of the official agreement between the IAEA and Iran, in force since May 15 1974, nuclear materials containing less than 1 kilo of uranium are exempted from the IAEA safeguards.
During the talks about new commercial deals with the Europeans Iran voluntarily agreed to suspend its research program for uranium enrichment and to grant additional rights to the IAEA for extended checking of their nuclear facilities. However, after repeated Iranian requests it became clear, that the E3 countries had no intention of following through on the incentives they had promised. They just wanted to keep the talks going on indefinitely, meantime preventing Iran from enriching uranium. So, Iran resumed the program it had voluntarily suspended and re-established the contractual conditions for the IAEA controls. This resulted in the attempt by the US and E3 to have the UN Security Council condemn Iran.
by erlenda
Last spring I went to Palestine and what I have seen and heard there still haunts me at night...
At dinner I met with an expatriate Palestinian who was visiting his family in Jerusalem, and with a lady who worked for an UN relief organization.
She told me that there was no way whatsoever for foreigners to get into Gaza right now, not even for international relief workers, officially because it was too dangerous for foreigners. But I had heard rumors that another major attack on Gaza was imminent and the Israeli army planned to possibly reoccupy Gaza again.
I guess they do not want any foreign witnesses.
The UN relief worker also told me that food help for Gazan families was now calculated as 900 Calories per family member, which is about 60% of normal nutritional need.
Well, the Israeli government members had stated that they wanted to put the Palestinians on a diet.
So with "diet" and attacks, the suffering of Gaza goes on.
Business as usual...
The next day I went to Ramallah together with my Palestinian friends.
I saw the Wall for the first time and the checkpoints. This wall looks so very much like the Berlin and East-German wall, including those menacing watch-towers and the graffiti of defiance on the Palestinian side- for a German it is eerily reminiscent....
At first glance Jerusalem seems calm and normal, at least for a tourist.
But then all of a sudden the normality broke down. We stopped at the 8.th station. A group of people came from the opposite direction, the first one was a woman who wanted to pass. She was definitely no Muslim or Catholic. One of the monks gestured her to wait for a second until we could clear a path. Then she attacked him with her fists and hit him several times. Seeing this was kind of a shock for me.
Who would hit a monk, just because he was not getting fast enough out of her way?
Sunday afternoon I went to Hebron to join a group of Internationals.
While Jerusalem seems normal, if you don´t look closely, nothing is normal in Hebron.
Several hundred thousand Palestinians live there. But a big part of the inner city is closed down to all Palestinian cars for the security of just 400 Israeli settlers.
Those settlers are protected by 1800 Israeli soldiers.
But while Palestinians are humiliated and deprived of rights and comforts for "security reasons", the Israeli settlers can do whatever they want. They can drive their cars everywhere. While everything that looks even remotely like a stick or a metal pipe is being confiscated from Palestinians, many Israeli settlers wear constantly handguns in belts around their hips, others have big guns strapped over their shoulders.
They can harass, hit or stone whoever they want, or destroy Palestinian property whenever they want. Unless they seriously hurt somebody they never get arrested.
They see themselves as superior to their Palestinian neighbors and they show it.
As I said before, Saturdays, the Jewish Sabbaths, are the most difficult days here in Hebron.
On Saturdays the Israeli settler kids are not in school and they do not drive cars for religious reasons. So they walk around Palestinian neighborhoods more often than usual.
This is what happened my first Saturday in Hebron:...
When a Palestinian lady came, some of the (Israeli settler-)kids would not let her pass, so I went
into the circle of kids and teacher and helped her through, while my colleague was filming.
Then the kids got really mad and started screaming at us and coming towards us.
No pictures, no pictures, they screamed, so my colleague put away the camera to not provoke them any more.
Big mistake!
As soon as the camera was off they attacked us, kicking us in the legs and pressing us against the fence, my colleague was even kicked in the stomach. The kid's teacher stood by and said nothing. Many other kids from the settlements came running up the staircase, so we had no way to get out....
In the evening the Israeli settlers of Hebron had a big celebration with bonfires...
When the bonfire started we could watch it from a distance out of the families' garden. When the fire had become real big, the settlers started their celebration by burning a Palestinian flag...
Even while I have seen and experienced quite a bit of harrassment in Hebron, nothing could have prepared me, for Bil´in...
I have never experienced physical violence by the authorities. I never thought any authority would see me as enough of an enemy or a threat to use violence against me...
But here in Palestine everything is different. Everybody who opposes injustice and oppression is a dangerous threat, Palestinians, Internationals, even progressive Israelis, women and children included. And how Israel deals with those threats you can see every Friday in Bil´in.
By Simon Kirby
MANKIND is naive to think it can influence climate change, according to a prize-winning Australian geologist.
Solar activity is a greater driver of climate change than man-made carbon dioxide, argues Ian Plimer, Professor of Mining Geology at the University of Adelaide and winner of several notable science prizes...
There had even been periods in history with hundreds of times more atmospheric carbon dioxide than now with “no problem”, he said.
The professor, a member of the Australian Skeptics, an organisation devoted to debunking pseudo-scientific claims, denied his was a minority view.
“You'd be very hard pushed to find a geologist that would differ from my view,” he said.
by Neve Gordon
During the past few months, political activists and members of the Palestinian intellectual elite within Israel, all of whom are Israeli citizens, have drafted four documents that articulate how they conceive the state's future. The underlying assumption of all of these documents is that as long as Israel is defined as a Jewish state, its laws will always fall short of basic democratic principles and, more particularly, the right of all its citizens to full equality.
The authors of the document called "The Democratic Constitution" maintain that the Arab citizens of Israel should be considered a "homeland minority" with national rights. The idea is to transform Israel into a bilingual and multicultural democracy for all its citizens, rather than a Jewish democracy, which they argue is an oxymoron. Such transformation would inevitably mean changing the laws of citizenship and immigration so that citizenship would no longer be granted automatically to any Jew wishing to immigrate but rather to anyone born within Israel's territory or whose parent or spouse is a citizen, or to people persecuted due to their political beliefs.
Not long after the documents' publication, Israel's second-largest newspaper, Ma'ariv, reported a meeting between the head of the security agency, Yuval Diskin, and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. During the meeting Diskin warned Olmert that the radicalization of Israel's Arab citizens constitutes a "strategic threat to the state's existence." Diskin added that "the proliferation of the visionary documents published by the different Arab elites in Israel is particularly worrisome, [since] the documents are united by their conception of Israel as a state for all its citizens and not a Jewish state."
Balad sent a letter protesting Diskin's assertions, arguing that legitimate political activity whose aim is to change the state's character should not be considered subversive or dangerous. According to Ha'aretz, the Israeli Security Agency replied that it "would foil the activity of anyone seeking to harm Israel's Jewish or democratic character, even if that activity was carried out by legal means."
By Rudo de Ruijter
Those who use dollars outside the US continuously pay a contribution to the US. It comes in the form of an inflation of 1.25 million dollars per minute. This is the result of the fast increase of the US foreign debt. Half of all USA's imports are simply added to the foreign debt and paid for by the foreign dollar holders through inflation.
Moreover these dollar holders do not seem to realize, that the dollar rate they are looking at, is nothing more than a dangerous facade. If they don’t understand what is still keeping it upright, the facade may hit them by surprise.
Meanwhile, well camouflaged, the dollar is at the center of several US’ conflicts.
The conflict is always camouflaged. And to do so, always an emotional theme is chosen. In times gone by this was the danger for communists, today it is the danger for terrorists, fundamentalists and other popular bogies, like “the enemy has weapons of mass destruction” or “the enemy tries to make nukes.”
The fact that there is, rationally, not a single proof, does not matter. The emotions always win.
Bethlehem - Ma'an -
The UN's Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, John Dugard, has issued a harshly critical report on Israel's human rights record in regards to its treatment of the Palestinians in the occupied Palestinian territories of East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
"The international community, speaking through the United Nations, has identified three regimes as inimical to human rights - colonialism, apartheid and foreign occupation," Dugard says.In his 24-page report, which will be presented to the United Nations General Assembly for debate on 15 March 2006, the South African lawyer accuses Israel of all three...
Dugard concludes that the case of human rights violations in the occupied Palestinian territory has come to resemble a 'test' for the West, by which its commitment to human rights is to be judged. He recognises that numerous other nations in the developing world suppress human rights, but Israel is the only "Western-affiliated regime" allowed to get away with it. Dugard warns, "If the West fails this test, it can hardly expect the developing world to address human rights violations seriously in its own countries, and the West appears to be failing this test."
by Brian Ross and Christopher Isham
A Pakistani tribal militant group responsible for a series of deadly guerrilla raids inside Iran has been secretly encouraged and advised by American officials since 2005, U.S. and Pakistani intelligence sources tell ABC News.
It has taken responsibility for the deaths and kidnappings of more than a dozen Iranian soldiers and officials.
Most recently, Jundullah took credit for an attack in February that killed at least 11 members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard riding on a bus in the Iranian city of Zahedan.
Last month, Iranian state television broadcast what it said were confessions by those responsible for the bus attack.
They reportedly admitted to being members of Jundullah and said they had been trained for the mission at a secret location in Pakistan.
Some former CIA officers say the arrangement is reminiscent of how the U.S. government used proxy armies, funded by other countries including Saudi Arabia, to destabilize the government of Nicaragua in the 1980s.
by Jesse@TvNewsLies.org
Let’s understand one thing: the 9/11 truth movement is doing nothing but growing. People who have been exposed to the actual evidence and understand the ramifications of what it reveals are not waking up one morning and suddenly deciding that they believe the official story. The dynamic works like this: those who are not aware of the evidence believe the official story. Once they start poking around they realize that the official story about the attacks could not possibly be true, and they discover the plethora of evidence that was hidden and misrepresented by the Bush administration, the 9/11 Commission and the corporate media. 9/11 truthers are not suddenly coming across new information that causes them to suddenly believe the official story. It’s a one way flow. The evidence speaks for itself...
Maybe 9/11 can serve as an eye opener and jolt the people into recognizing the US corporate media as the enemy. We don’t need media reform in this nation, we need media replacement. We need a real news industry, one that understands why its vocation is the only one protected by thy US Constitution. We don’t need a media with incestuous connections to the CIA or nefarious secret organizations such as the Council on Foreign Relations and the Bilderberg Group). We don’t need journalists who report American Idol scandals; we need journalists to keep an eye on our government and show us every last piece of evidence they uncover about their misdeeds...
The 9/11 truth movement can only grow. It’s not about theories. It’s not about accusations. It’s not about speculation. It’s about the official public body of evidence and how much of it has been kept from us, misrepresented and in some cases totally fabricated. You don’t have to convince people of a theory; all you have to do is show them the evidence. And the longer the criminal corporate media continue to withhold evidence, the harder it will be to explain to the growing body of very angry Max Cadys out there, why they have done so. Think about it.
by Denis G. Rancourt
First published on Activist Teacher
I argue: (1) that global warming (climate change, climate chaos, etc.) will not become humankind’s greatest threat until the sun has its next hiccup in a billion years or more (in the very unlikely scenario that we are still around), (2) that global warming is presently nowhere near being the planet’s most deadly environmental scourge, and (3) that government action and political will cannot measurably or significantly ameliorate global climate in the present world.
I also advance that there are strong societal, institutional, and psychological motivations for having constructed and for continuing to maintain the myth of a global warming dominant threat (global warming myth, for short). I describe these motivations in terms of the workings of the scientific profession and of the global corporate and finance network and its government shadows.
I argue that by far the most destructive force on the planet is power-driven financiers and profit-driven corporations and their cartels backed by military might; and that the global warming myth is a red herring that contributes to hiding this truth. In my opinion, activists who, using any justification, feed the global warming myth have effectively been co-opted, or at best neutralized...
by erlenda
The purpose of this website is a search for truth in order to find a way for peace.
I truly believe that only truth can set us free.
It is absolutely essential to have the courage to face up to the truth, especially to face up to the truth about 9/11 and recognize the lies on which this "War on Terrorism" is built upon.
It is now a fact no longer to be denied, that the "War on Terror" is a tool to propagate a long-wearing war,lasting possibly for generations; a "Clash of Civilisations" of the Western against the Muslim world.
The initiators of this war are an elitist group in or connected to the Bush government, whose world-view is Nihilist, Social Darwinist built on the philosophies of Machiavelli, Nietzsche and Leo Strauss.
Their motives and future plans are partly written down in a paper developed by their most prominent think tank the "PNAC".
Here is an excerpt of Bette Stockbauer's compilation:
"Rebuilding America's Defenses (RAD)" is a policy document published by a neoconservative Washington think tank called the Project for the New American Century (PNAC). Its pages have been compared to Hitler's Mein Kampf in that they outline an aggressive military plan for U.S. world domination during the coming century.....
The building of Pax Americana has become possible, claims "RAD," because the fall of the Soviet Union gave the United States status as the world's preeminent superpower. Consequently the US must now work hard, not only to maintain that position, but to spread its military might into geographic areas that are ideologically opposed to its influence, waging "multiple simultaneous large-scale wars" to subdue countries that may stand in the way of US global preeminence. Rationales offered for going to war with other nations are the preservation of the "American peace" and the spread of "democracy."
On Preserving American Preeminence
"It is not a choice between preeminence today and preeminence tomorrow. Global leadership is not something exercised at our leisure, when the mood strikes us or when our core national security interests are directly threatened; then it is already too late. Rather, it is a choice whether or not to maintain American military preeminence, to secure American geopolitical leadership, and to preserve the American peace" (p. 76).
"The Cold War world was a bipolar world; the 21st century world is – for the moment, at least – decidedly unipolar, with America as the world's 'sole superpower.' America's strategic goal used to be containment of the Soviet Union; today the task is to preserve an international security environment conducive to American interests and ideals. The military's job during the Cold War was to deter Soviet expansionism. Today its task is to secure and expand the 'zones of democratic peace;' to deter the rise of a new great-power competitor; defend key regions of Europe, East Asia and the Middle East; and to preserve American preeminence through the coming transformation of war made possible by new technologies" (p. 2).
Policies advocated in "RAD" are being enacted with terrifying speed, such as denigration of the UN, importance of Homeland Security, abrogation of international agreements, revamping of the US nuclear program and the spread of American military power into all corners of the globe by preemptive engagement. In Iraq we have seen the embodiment of "RAD" directives that call for the subjugation of regimes considered hostile to US interests and the prevention of military build-up in countries that may challenge US power. Bush's "Axis of Evil" nations Iraq, Iran and North Korea are mentioned numerous times as potential trouble spots and there is repeated insistence that the US establish military outposts in the Middle East and East Asia.
Most frightening is its complete isolation from any ideas of world unity and cooperative action. The authors appear to be intent on waging war as an answer to the problems of our planet, tragically imagining that peace can be won by enforcing American values on every other nation. A more chilling statement of the PNAC devotion to militaristic domination cannot be found than in Richard Perle's concept of "total war". "No stages," he said, "This is total war. We are fighting a variety of enemies. There are lots of them out there. All this talk about first we are going to do Afghanistan, then we will do Iraq... this is entirely the wrong way to go about it. If we just let our vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it entirely and we don't try to piece together clever diplomacy, but just wage a total war... our children will sing great songs about us years from now."........
Four Vital Missions
"RAD" lists four vital missions "demanded by US global leadership":
"Homeland Defense. . . . the United States . . . must counteract the effects of the proliferation of ballistic missiles and weapons of mass destruction that may soon allow lesser states to deter US military action by threatening US allies and the American homeland itself. Of all the new and current missions for US armed forces, this must have priority.
"Large Wars. Second, the United States must retain sufficient forces able to rapidly deploy and win multiple simultaneous large-scale wars and also to be able to respond to unanticipated contingencies in regions where it does not maintain forward-based forces.
"Constabulary Duties. Third, the Pentagon must retain forces to preserve the current peace in ways that fall short of conducting major theater campaigns. . . . These duties are today's most frequent missions, requiring forces configured for combat but capable of long-term, independent constabulary operations.
"Transform US Armed Forces. Finally, the Pentagon must begin now to exploit the so-called 'revolution in military affairs,' sparked by the introduction of advanced technologies into military systems; this must be regarded as a separate and critical mission worthy of a share of force structure and defense budgets" (p. 6).
". . . the failure to provide sufficient forces to execute these four missions must result in problems for American strategy. And the failure to prepare for tomorrow's challenges will ensure that the current Pax Americana comes to an early end" (p. 13)........"
Other motives for the "War on Terror" are:
- Enrichment of the "Military Industrial Complex" and its main share-holders
- Power over the planet's oil resources and so gaining decisive influence on the European and Asian economy
- and the restructuring of Middle Eastern Countries into small units fractured along ethnic and sectarian religious lines, to make the area safe for Israel, as lined out by the policy paper: "Securing the Realm" for former right-wing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. This paper was also written by some members of the PNAC think-tank.
9/11 was the "New Pearl Harbour" the major decisive, mentioned in the RAD strategy paper, to initiate this process.
by "Wake up from your Slumber"
He (John Steinbach of the Centre for Research on Globalisation), concludes that "The Israeli arsenal of weapons of mass destruction clearly dwarfs the actual or potential arsenals of all other Middle Eastern states combined, and is vastly greater than any conceivable need for 'deterrence.'" Thereby establishing that the gravest threat to Israel from Iran is not the threat of attack, as Efriam Inbar would have it, but the threat to its "regional hegemony:" the loss of atomic leverage.
As for Israel's strategic posture re nuclear weapons, the main doctrine has been that Israeli WMD's are a deterrence against conventional and unconventional attacks. Failing that the next strategic choice would be the "Samson Option," i.e. "an all-out attack against an adversary should defenses fail and population centers be threatened." According to Seymour Hersh the title stems from "Israel's notion that once they have the Bomb, they are in a position to bring it all down on everyone if ever they feel cornered." Much like the biblical Samson who "commits suicide by pushing down the temple pillars, in order to kill as many of the Philistine leaders as he can."
by Mark and Louise Zwick
At that time Bishop Bertone not only denounced the critical aspects of usury, but also "the problem of loans among nations which ends up by creating the problem of international debt." His recent interview echoes these criticisms of usury and the international financial institutions:
“I've repeated many times the judgment of experts and entire bodies of bishops: the international loans made by the World Bank and the Inter-national Monetary Fund, as well as bilateral loans, are by now a form of usury and should be declared illegal," Bertone said.
by J. Plummer
There was a time, not long ago, when daring to question the official account of 9/11 was risky business. One was almost guaranteed to be attacked as a "crazy person" or a "traitor" or a "terrorist sympathizer." Times have changed. At this point, less than 20% of the population believes they were given the full truth regarding 9/11. Logically one might ask: "Why is that?"
It wasn't for lack of trying that the government failed in its propaganda campaign. It wasn't for lack of "helping hands" in the mainstream media. (Tho | |
