Author: Mattes

Just thought you’ll like to know:

Blogs, YouTube: the new battleground of Gaza conflict

The recent battle in Gaza between Israel and Hamas wasn’t only fought with bullets, bombs, and missiles, but also with keystrokes. Observers say that through Facebook, YouTube, and other Web-based applications, the online community participated in shaping the news, and was enlisted in the effort to influence public opinion in an unprecedented – and sometimes worrisome – way.

“The blogosphere and new media are another war zone. We have to be relevant there,” the head of the IDF’s Foreign Press branch, Maj. Avital Leibovich, recently told The Jerusalem Post.

Just reminding people the IDF does not exactly play fair.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/0123/p04s03-wome.html

Meanwhile, the Israeli government has been working hard to utilize new media tools to press its case. At the beginning of the conflict in Gaza, the Israeli consulate in New York held what was described as the first “governmental” press conference using Twitter. The online event was open to anyone with a Twitter account.

The country’s Ministry of Immigrant Absorption, working together with the Foreign Ministry’s public relations department, has also announced that it is looking for a multilingual “army of bloggers” to help in the aftermath of the Gaza operation.

But some see the enlistment of the Internet in the Gaza battle as part of a troubling trend.

“We’ve been seeing the rise of what I refer to as citizen propaganda,” says Ethan Zuckerman, a research fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, who observed a similar online information battle during last summer’s conflict between Russia and Georgia.

“Rather than becoming the cafe of the world, where we interact on common ground, the Net has become a very effective place to rally people to your own cause and try to coordinate their actions.”

Adds Mr. Zuckerman: “I think what has become really interesting is that in an era when you have armed conflict between states, you now have people online looking to see how [they] can become part of that conflict without leaving their computers.”

…notice the use of “common ground”.

Since when has Israel wanted a dialogue on common ground, or any indication of evenhandedness.

John Kerry and Hillary Clinton are still repeating the falsehood that Hamas broke the ceasefire.

Gaza truce broken as Israeli raid kills six Hamas gunmen:

    * Rory McCarthy in Jerusalem
    * guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 5 November 2008

A four-month ceasefire between Israel and Palestinian militants in Gaza was in jeopardy today after Israeli troops killed six Hamas gunmen in a raid into the territory.

Hamas responded by firing a wave of rockets into southern Israel, although no one was injured. The violence represented the most serious break in a ceasefire agreed in mid-June, yet both sides suggested they wanted to return to atmosphere of calm.

snip

One Hamas gunman was killed and Palestinians launched a volley of mortars at the Israeli military. An Israeli air strike then killed five more Hamas fighters. In response, Hamas launched 35 rockets into southern Israel, one reaching the city of Ashkelon.

snip

In Gaza, a Hamas spokesman, Fawzi Barhoum, said the group had fired rockets out of Gaza as a “response to Israel’s massive breach of the truce”.

The attack comes shortly before a key meeting this Sunday in Cairo when Hamas and its political rival Fatah will hold talks on reconciling their differences and creating a single, unified government. It will be the first time the two sides have met at this level since fighting a near civil war more than a year ago.

snip

Ehud Barak, the Israeli defence minister, had personally approved the Gaza raid, the Associated Press said. The Israeli military concluded that Hamas was likely to want to continue the ceasefire despite the raid, it said. The ceasefire was due to run for six months and it is still unclear whether it will stretch beyond that limit.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/nov/05/israelandthepalestinians

I believe the Israel raid was intended to detail the Fatah/Hamas talks. As Israel knows a Unity government is the first step to a Palestinian state.

And notice the Israeli military was clear on the fact that Hamas wanted to extend the ceasefire. BUT this did not follow the plan to invade Gaza that had been planned for over a year. So Israel had to provoke Hamas into firing rockets since the Hamas commander Said had successfully stopped all rocket fire. And what better time for their raid than just before a Fatah/Hamas meeting.

And now the only Hamas commander able to successfully stop all rockets from splinter groups has been killed.

More derailing of the peace process.

What is there to say:

One by one the justifications given by Israel for its latest war in Gaza are unravelling.

The argument that this is a purely defensive war, launched only after Hamas broke a six-month ceasefire has been challenged, not just by observers in the know such as Jimmy Carter, the former US president who helped facilitate the truce, but by centre-right Israeli intelligence think tanks.

The Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center, whose December 31 report titled “Six Months of the Lull Arrangement Intelligence Report,” confirmed that the June 19 truce was only “sporadically violated, and then not by Hamas but instead by … “rogue terrorist organisations”.

Instead, “the escalation and erosion of the lull arrangement” occurred after Israel killed six Hamas members on November 4 without provocation and then placed the entire Strip under an even more intensive siege the next day.

According to a joint Tel Aviv University-European University study, this fits a larger pattern in which Israeli violence has been responsible for ending 79 per cent of all lulls in violence since the outbreak of the second intifada, compared with only 8 per cent for Hamas and other Palestinian factions.

Lies and liars.

http://english.aljazeera.net/focus/war_on_gaza/2009/01/2009110112723260741.html
Israel’s self-image

The claim that Hamas will never accept the existence of Israel has proved equally misinformed, as Hamas leaders explicitly announce their intention to do just that in the pages of the Los Angeles Times or to any international leader or journalist who will meet with them.

With each new family, 10, 20 and 30 strong, buried under the rubble of a building in Gaza, the claim that the Israeli forces have gone out of their way to diminish civilian casualties – long a centre-piece of Israel’s image as an enlightened and moral democracy – is falling apart.

Anyone with an internet connection can Google “Gaza humanitarian catastrophe” and find the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in the Occupied Territories and read the thousands of pages of evidence documenting the reality of the current fighting, and the long term siege on Gaza that preceded it.

The Red Cross, normally scrupulous in its unwillingness to single out parties to a conflict for criticism, sharply criticised Israel for preventing medical personnel from reaching wounded Palestinians, some of whom remained trapped for days, slowly starving and dying in the Gazan rubble amidst their dead relatives.

Meanwhile, the United Nations has flatly denied Israeli claims that Palestinian fighters were using the UNRWA school compound bombed on January 6, in which 40 civilians were killed, to launch attacks, and has challenged Israel to prove otherwise.

War crimes admission

Additionally, numerous flippant remarks by senior Israeli politicians and generals, including Tzipi Livni, the foreign minister, refusing to make a distinction between civilian people and institutions and fighters – “Hamas doesn’t … and neither should we” is how Livni puts it – are rightly being seen as admissions of war crimes.

snip

“We will wield disproportionate power against every village from which shots are fired on Israel, and cause immense damage and destruction. From our perspective these [the villages] are military bases,” he said.

“This isn’t a suggestion. This is a plan that has already been authorised.”

Read the whole thing….I just don’t what to say. Are our politicians blind deaf and dumb, or just blackmailed and bribed?

Causing “immense damage and destruction” and considering entire villages “military bases” is absolutely prohibited under international law.

Possible Obama envoy backs Hamas outreach

“If the cease-fire between Israel and Hamas continues to hold and a Hamas-P.A. reconciliation emerges, the Obama administration should deal with the joint Palestinian leadership and authorize low-level contact between U.S. officials and Hamas in Gaza,”

http://jta.org/news/article/2009/01/07/1002076/haass-backs-hamas-outreach#When:21:57:00Z

THIS was of course….BEFORE Israel started it’s latest round of scorched earth offensive.

Perle Explains

Don’t miss Richard Perle’s comprehensive but remarkably unpersuasive explanation in The National Interest Online of how neo-conservatives, least of all himself, really exercised very little influence over the Bush administration’s policies, even in the run-up to the Iraq invasion. Actually, you won’t find much of what he writes particularly new, and, if you were hoping for some insider insights, or even interesting personal anecdotes about his chairmanship of the Defense Policy Board, friendship with Dick Cheney, or how he persuaded Rumsfeld to hire Paul Wolfowitz as his deputy and Douglas Feith as his number three, there really aren’t any. In many ways, the article is a rehash of his complaints about the State Department and the CIA in the book he wrote with David Frum, An End to Evil, and an unenlightening condensation of Feith’s remarkably poorly received War and Decision.

With permission:

In several of my first posts (here, here and here) on this blog, I cited examples of Perle’s propensity for historical revisionism, but I was particularly struck in his latest effort by his assertion, “I know of no statement, public or private by any neoconservative in or near government, advocating the invasion of Iraq primarily for the purpose of of promoting democracy or advancing some grand neoconservative vision.” He dismisses the notion as well that neoconservatives may have promoted war with Iraq in hopes of bolstering what they thought were Israel’s interests.

I would just refer him to two letters drafted by Bill Kristol and signed by him, among many other neoconservatives close to the administration, and sent to the president under the auspices of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) which, in fact, did lay out a grand neoconservative vision for the region, one based on the conviction that Israel’s and U.S. enemies in the Middle East are one and the same and that “Israel’s fight against terrorism is our fight.” The first letter was published on September 20, 2001, and lays out the step-by-step blueprint for how the war on terror should be fought, including, of course, the necessity of ousting Saddam Hussein whether or not he was involved in the 9/11 attacks (although Perle, in his interactions with the media, never missed an opportunity to suggest that Saddam was indeed involved) followed by “appropriate measures of retaliation” against Iran and Syria if they did not end their support for Hezbollah. The second letter, published April 3, 2002, calls for breaking all ties with Yasser Arafat and for accelerating plans to remove Saddam as the first step toward realizing “a renewed commitment on our part, as you suggested in your State of the Union address, to the birth of freedom and democratic government in the Islamic world.” If those two letters (which, of course, echoed the arguments made by the hawks within the administration) didn’t constitute statements advocating the invasion of Iraq primarily for the purpose of of promoting democracy or advancing some grand neoconservative vision,” it’s hard to know what would.

It’s what I wrote for tompaine.com back in 2004: “Chutzpah: Thy Name is Perle.”

http://www.ips.org/blog/jimlobe/?p=214

Hamas stopped the rockets and mortars, but Israel only tighten it’s death grip.

From Israel’s own website:

Rockets:


Mortars:

http://www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/Terrorism-+Obstacle+to+Peace/Palestinian+terror+since+2000/Missile+fire+fr
om+Gaza+on+Israeli+civilian+targets+Aug+2007.htm

FOR the record, Israel broke the ceasefire:

Israel breaks Gaza ceasefire, assassinates six
Report,
5 November 2008

The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) condemns in the strongest possible terms the killing of six Palestinians carried out by the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) in the Gaza Strip yesterday evening and this morning. The victims were all killed by air strikes. This escalation is the first of its kind since the tahdia (the Egyptian-brokered truce between Palestinian resistance groups and Israel) entered into force on 19 June 2008.

 

4 November, an IOF infantry unit moved almost 400 meters into Wadi al-Salqa village, east of Deir al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip. IOF troops raided a house belonging to Mofeed Suleiman al-Rumaili. They held the family hostage in one room, and used the house as a military base. Additional IOF troops besieged a house belonging to Hassan Suleiman al-Humiadi, using a megaphone to order the 23 residents to leave the building.

snipAt approximately 10:30pm, an IOF aircraft fired a missile at members of the Izzedin al-Qassam Brigades, killing Mazen Nazmi Abu Sada (32). In the early hours of Wednesday, 5 November, IOF destroyed al-Humaidi’s house, razed 2.5 dunams (a dunam is the equivalent of 1,000 square meters) of agricultural land, and also arrested six members of the family, including four women.

In Khan Yunis, at approximately midnight on Wednesday, 5 November, an IOF aircraft fired two missiles at four members of the Izzedin al-Qassam Brigades in the east of al-Qarara village, near the border between the Gaza Strip and Israel. The four members of the Brigades were killed:

1. Mahmoud Taha Abdul Rahman Balousha (21);
2. Omar Saleem Khader al-Alami, (20);
3. Wajed Nizam Hamza Muhareb, (19);
4. Mohammed Abdullah Mohammed Awadh, (26).

http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article9937.shtml   

Beginning of Nov. Israel started starving people…to soften them up for another invasion that had been planned for 6 months.

Gaza: Power and water cuts and bread shortage

On 5 November, Israel closed the crossings into the Gaza Strip and blocked the entry of goods and supplies, including basic foodstuffs. Since 18 November, Israel has allowed the entry of goods, though much less than in October. LIES: According to government officials, the crossings were closed in response to the firing of more than 100 rockets and mortar shells from the Gaza Strip into Israel. Prior to the closing of the crossings, on 4 and 5 November, Israeli forces killed six Palestinians who were taking part in the hostilities.

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reported that, from 5-18 November, the Gaza power station received 24 percent of the industrial fuel needed to operate the station at full capacity. As a result, power supply to Gaza City and the central Gaza Strip was interrupted for 16 hours a day, leaving some 650,000 residents without electricity at any given time. The power breaks also affected water supply: 20 percent of all Gazans received running water once every five days, and then only for six hours; 40 percent received water once every four days; and the remaining residents received water once every three days.

http://www.btselem.org/English/Gaza_Strip/20081127_More_Sanctions_on_Gaza.asp

25 December 2008

The Gaza Strip, home to more than 1.5 million Palestinians, will soon be without its most basic commodity: bread.snip

Yesterday, after I finished my lecture at one of Gaza’s universities, my wife asked me to bring some bread from Gaza City. All bakeries in our area have stopped operating because of the lack of flour and cooking gas due to Israel’s 18-month siege of the territory.

I drove throughout Gaza City to try to find some bread for my four children, instead finding a miserable scene. On the drive back to my home in the Maghazi refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip, I saw dozens of people lining up in rows to get bread from al-Yazji Bakery. I quickly realized that it would take one or two hours until it would be my turn in line, by which time I might not find bread at all. So I continued my drive back to Maghazi, without bread.

http://www.uruknet.info/?p=49887

WHY you asked. Because Israel wants to provoke Iran into responding. Their temper tantrums DEMANDING that the United States bomb the shit out of Iran, just like we did in Iraq [per Jewish neo-cons] has not worked. And Hamas was close to controlling the chaos, [and stopping the rockets] that Israel had been creating by causing a civil war in Palestine. With a united Palestinian people, Israel would have been forced into a negotiated peace by the Obama administration. They had to act quickly to derail any chance the Palestinians had for peace.

Why…so they can keep the land they have stolen.

They stole it thousands of years ago, and they think it’s their god given right to steal it again, damn the rest of the world.

1000’s of Americans now have their pension funds in Israeli private investment firms:

The next shoe about to fall?

Quietly Markstone Capital Group has lost 50% of value [Prisma’s mutual fund assets under Markstone management have dropped from NIS 21.4b in June 2007 to only NIS 10.2b]as it begins to sell off assists:

History:
 May 4, 2006
    Unmasking Israel’s Mystery Benefactor

        The mystery man of the Israeli economy, as he was dubbed by the country’s media, is alive and well and living in Los Angeles.

        His name is Elliott Broidy, and in the last two years he has raised $800 million to boost private enterprise in the Jewish state.

        Broidy earned the “mystery man” label through his reticence to go public, in contrast to his more flamboyant peers.

        snip
        With the right connections and introductions, Broidy met with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and such top-level political figures as Ehud Olmert, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Amir Peretz, now head of the Labor Party.

        snip
        A longtime supporter of the Jewish state, Broidy said that “a strong and vital Israel is important to the United States, to American Jewry, and to me and my family.”

        Broidy’s proposal to establish a large private equity fund for investments in Israel’s “old” economy, agriculture, manufacturing, capital management, found a warm welcome among government officials at a time when most investors were shunning the strife-racked Jewish state.

        snip
        With the [American]pension funds as a solid base, corporate and private investors, foundations, banks and insurance companies in the United States and Israel swelled the pot, and Markstone raised its goal to $800 million, with a minimum investment of $1 million plus.

        snip
        Broidy’s first prospect was New York State Comptroller Alan Hevesi, and after several months of vetting Broidy’s proposal and meetings with Israeli business and political leaders, the New York State Common Retirement Fund signed on for $200 million.

        On the other coast, the California Public Employees Retirement System (CalPers) put in $50 million, and additional amounts came from similar funds in Oregon, New Mexico, North Carolina and New York City.
        snip
        “When you try to raise money for Israel investment from private people, particularly Jewish ones, you can appeal to both their heart and their head,” said Gunther. “But when you try to do business with public pension funds, these are hard-nosed people, who deal strictly from the head. Their investment decisions in this case represent a notable vote of confidence in Elliott and in the future of the Israeli economy.”[…sounds familar??]
        snip

        The $800 million figure, raised between 2003 and 2005, makes Markstone the largest private equity fund in Israel, with 90 percent coming from American investors and 10 percent from Israelis.

        snip
        He is a major donor to the United Jewish Fund and Friends of the Israel Defense Forces, a trustee of USC and USC Hillel, serves on the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion board of governors, and is an executive board member and former trustee of Wilshire Boulevard Temple.

        Much more here:

http://74.125.47.132/search?q=cache:koBAKxgpbv0J:www.jewishjournal.com/articles/item/unmasking_israe

ls_mystery_benefactor_20060505/+Elliott+Broidy&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=5&gl=us

Not too long ago, May 23, 2006:

    Markstone launches Israel’s largest investment firm

        Venture capital fund Markstone Capital Partners on Monday launched Israel’s largest investment firm “Prisma,” with assets of over NIS 50 billion under its management, resulting from key purchases it made from Bank Hapoalim and Bank Leumi last year.

        http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1148287845289&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

From 2005:

        The Markstone Capital Group investment fund recently finished raising another $200 million, with one of the major new pledges, $50 million, coming from the Oregon state employee pension fund.

        Prior to this, the American-Israeli fund had raised more than $500 million. The current round increases its capital to more than $700 million.[familar number] Over the past year, Markstone has invested some $200 million in four Israeli companies, including placing $50 million in the drip irrigation firm Netafim, which included an option to invest an additional $15 million. In exchange, Markstone will receive 20-25% of Netafim’s share capital.
        http://www.ivc-online.com/ivcWeeklyItem.asp?articleID=3283

    oh…the fund is now closed…so does anyone know how it’s doing??

    …and it seems recently to be selling assists:

   Markstone in talks to break up Prisma Investment House: Every scenario includes mass layoffs at Prisma.

    Sunday December 21, 2008

        Markstone Capital Partners Group LLC is breaking up Prisma Investment House Ltd. and is in talks to sell its units to various parties. Markstone, run by managing directors Ron Lubash and Amir Kess, is in advanced negotiations to sell Prisma’s provident funds to Psagot Investment House Ltd., and is also in talks with several investment houses to establish a new investment house that will consolidate and manage investment portfolios and short-term assets, including mutual funds and exchange-traded funds (ETFs). This new company will also take over Prisma’s Tel Aviv Stock Exchange (TASE) membership.

        The most serious talks about the new company are with Meitav Group and Gaon Capital Markets Ltd. Other names are also include Altshuler Shaham Ltd., Epsilon Investment House Ltd., Tamir Fishman & Co., and Yelin Lapidot Ltd.

        A capital market source said, “There was no company in the market that Markstone did not contact in the past month about cooperation.”

        http://www.quote.com/news/story.action?id=KRO356e7502

    Tons of stuff out there but most behind firewalls:

    Selling the pieces, will pensioners get a dime in the end?

    Markstone Capital Partners Makes First Full Exit With Sale of Zeraim Gedera to Syngenta

        Markstone Capital Partners, a leading private equity fund Chaired by Elliott Broidy, confirmed reports that Syngenta AG (NYSE: SYT) has agreed to acquire Markstone portfolio company Zeraim Gedera Ltd., a high quality Israeli vegetable seed company.

    http://www.propeller.com/story/2008/08/11/markstone-capital-partners-makes-first-full-exit-with-sale

-of-zeraim-gedera-to-syngenta/

    And now:

    Markstone dismantling Prisma

        Three years after founding the Prisma investment house, its owner, the Markstone Capital Group, has decided to dismantle Prisma. Markstone managing directors Ron Lubash and Amir Kess are in negotiations with Psagot over the sale of the provident funds, while also negotiating with a number of other investment houses, such as Meitav, over a merger of mutual funds.

        Markstone, or Prisma, will most likely receive shares in Psagot for the provident funds, while it is possible the mutual funds merger will remain part of a joint firm under the Prisma name. The main reason Prisma wants to sell the provident funds and merge the mutual funds is an attempt to avoid the huge expenses involved in running an entire investment firm, including advertising and marketing, personnel and operating expenses – especially as Prisma has very heavy bank debts it took out to buy the funds in the first place.

        Prisma’s mutual fund assets under management have dropped from NIS 21.4 billion in June 2007 to only NIS 10.2 billion in November of this year. The decline is actually even larger, since Prisma agreed to buy the PKN and Lahak funds originally when they had about NIS 40 billion in assets in them.

        http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1048079.html

Why are Americans being forced to invest in foreign countries instead of having a choice in investing right here at home??

In Seattle there was a court case trying to divest from Israel, it failed.

With permission, bold, my editting:

As was previously stated, there is a very good possibility that the World War III option  is an attempt to control the Internet by eliminating  Net Neutrality and  online free speech. It appears that the boundaries set between countries through treaties are vanishing due to the  exponential dissemination of information through the Internet. This is in conflict with the wishes of the oligarchy who are  willing to do anything  to maintain control.

The attack on the Internet is three-pronged, it involves  bandwidth throttling by ISP’s,  Internet censorship by governments, and the oligarchy trying to prevent  Network neutrality. Just a few examples of what is happening are:

   1. The Australian government is implementing plans for a no opt-out censored Internet.
   2. Britain’s de facto online censor, the Internet Watch Foundation, has been busy banning websites.
   3. The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission has allowed Bell to continue internet throttling. Unfortunately, this is just one of the issues facing Canadians. Harper’s Conservative Party have promised to re-introduce their version of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, in essence creating a Police State in Canada.
   4. “President-elect Barack Obama has spoken out in favor of Net Neutrality. But special interests in Washington are claiming to the press that Net Neutrality is a non-issue,” and
   5. “Senator Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut is trying to pressure YouTube to pull down videos he does not like, and a recent Senate report and a bill pending in Congress also raise the specter of censorship,” which brings us to the YouTube boycott.

The following two videos discuss censorship on YouTube, and the campaign that is taking place on December 19 (all the way to Dec. 21 for some) to bring awareness of this issue to the general public.

http://www.chycho.com/

It is not our place to tell Americans how they should vote. Their concerns are health plans, taxes and, suddenly, socialism. That’s their business. We can however tell them what America looks like to us, and it’s our business, because America is a 800-pound gorilla in our patch of jungle. We need the gorilla because it helps sustain our ecosystem by consuming stuff we make but can’t use ourselves. But for the past eight years our gorilla has been acting like a crazed thing, bringing wars and economic catastrophe. Its antics have made it a pariah and worse – a laughing stock
. It’s a gorilla that wears a big red nose, a frizzy wig and oversize shoes.

It looks to us like the gorilla has been trained by a bunch of clowns whose goal is universal domination rather than universal
good. Power for its own sake, at any price. It doesn’t seem to us that even Americans have benefited from their rule – we see your financial ruin, your war dead (the dead they don’t let you see), the wars you are still waging at monstrous cost and without a chance of winning, and we ask: Who has benefited? We see only a growing troop of militant Islamists, chittering with glee, a clan of America’s business elite whose greed and excesses have been rewarded with a free lunch, for which you are paying, and a tribe of military industrialists, enriched by your taxes.

These clowns are not stupid. They are experts in the arts of bamboozlement. They won and held power by cleverly manipulating you through sophisticated use of your media and political trickery. Fear and greed: they gave you the former and satisfied the latter, instilling in you fear of a bogeyman under your bed and allowing asset bubbles to inflate to bursting point. Having taken power, they understood they could lie to you with impunity, and so they threw in a few whoppers like Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction.

Now they are telling you that only they and their ilk can save you from the results of their own hubris. They have given you something new to fear: Barack Obama is a socialist! As if they themselves had not abandoned their free market doctrine when it no longer suited them and are now busy using their remaining time to redistribute wealth – giving your wealth to their buddies. The frightening thing, to us, is that so many of you are still listening to them without asking yourselves whether the trainers who cracked the whip at George W Bush are not the same ones who will crack it at John McCain.

Our plea from our patch of jungle to you is: Please look at the big picture. We are part of that big picture, and we need a sane, healthy gorilla, not a pathetic megalomaniac. It looks to us like you do, too.

Allen Quicke is Editor of atimes.com

(Copyright 2008 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.)

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Pag/JK05Aa01.html

Asia Times is must reading. It holds up a mirror to us. Today the world rejoices. Middle America needs to be lifted out of the dark ages. There is but one earth.

Celebrations around the world:

No copyright, great analysis of what is really going on:

Today I was driving to my parents’ place on Cape Cod and realized what an idiot I’ve been about what’s happening right now. It’s a really important moment, right down to Barack Obama putting a note into the Western Wall. It’s the true ideological drama of this election campaign, the great events of this campaign. It doesn’t get better than this, and it’s all about the Armageddon of the Neoconservatives and the Two State Solution.

Consider that the Washington Post is reporting that McCain is looking seriously at Virginia Congressman Eric Cantor to be his veep. Cantor is tied in with Christian Zionists (David Bloom tells me)(can’t do the link now). The Cantor nod would be McCain’s obeisance to Sheldon Adelson and the neoconservative warchest. Because this is their last gasp. If they can’t stop Obama, they can’t might not be able to stop the two-state solution.

All this is happening behind the scenes, but look at it this way. The last time Dennis Ross and the two-state solution came close to coming to pass was 2000, the last gasp of the Clinton Administration. The neocons and Adelson formed an organization called One Jerusalem out of a panic that Jerusalem might be divided. And the day after GW Bush won the election, at last, in December 2000, Adelson gave the Republican Party $100,000 and soon the neocons were in big jobs all over the Administration. And they put off the 2-state solution forever, and invaded Baghdad

This is all Obama is thinking about, and all that J Street and Dennis Ross and MJ Rosenberg and IPF and Ehud Olmert are thinking about too. This is our last shot. This is when we try and save Israel from becoming full-on apartheid, and maybe even elevating the cycle of violence to the next level, by getting the two-state solution to go thru. Israeli negotiator Tal Becker is thinking about this night and day, as I reported from AIPAC last month, because Israel is in an existential struggle. Its about to lose its identity.

And Obama knows all this. He’s no fool. He’s a political genius. Look what he did to the Clintons. He sees all the faultlines, and this is what he’s doing. He is working with the conservative-middle-left of the Israel lobby. That wide span that goes from Mel Levine, the hawkish former congressman from California, on the right, and maybe even Haim Saban too, to MJ Rosenberg and J Street on the left. He’s got them all together in the room on this. And he’s saying, I will put my heart and soul into this. It is why he talked to Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic this spring and Goldberg came out against the Israel lobby and the settlements. It is why Joe Klein came out against neocons with divided loyalties. It is why Connie Bruck attacked Sheldon Adelson in the New Yorker. I’m not saying these journalists are working in concert with Obama, I’m saying they are all in touch with this moment in history. This is our chance, and our horse is Obama. It’s now or never, and he can do it. So let him kiss the ring, let him do the dance, let him go to AIPAC and declare he’s for an undivided Jerusalem, but in fact we’re all in agreement here, now’s the time. Because even at AIPAC, they were cutting off the comments of the nuts in the audience who started saying the bible gave us Judea and Samaria.

And the neocons know it too. That’s why they’re nutso on Iran and nutso on Obama, inventing lies about him to try and head him off now.

I’m on the left, so I’m not wild about these powerful characters, even the liberals, I’m not wild about their statements about the Middle East. J Street has lame rhetoric. The Jews for Obama emails I get are sickening. Obama was nauseating when he went to AIPAC. I was sitting there shaking my head over his warlike rhetoric. But my friend Jack Ross says that his Iran hawk stuff is his silver bullet so he can go for a two-state solution. He knows that’s the Holy Grail. That’s the Nobel Prize, and more than that, it’s the key to American security and America moving forward, undoing this ugly narrative that is wrapped around our throats. He believes that just as much as I do. As much as Sarkozy and King Abdullah. This man doesn’t want to be Clinton or even Reagan, he wants to be Lincoln, he feels that in his soul. But he has his own way. And that’s to get in bed with these conservatives and lukewarm liberals now, to go for it, to get Jewish money, to get the presidency, and then get America forward. It’s our time, as he keeps saying, this moment is bigger than any of us.

So I have to hand it to J Street. It’s already done it, it’s split the Jewish world definitively, into neocons and non-neocons. It’s successfully lobbied the lobby. The lobby is now divided in two and each guy gets a piece. McCain is going for the dark half, Obama is going for the light half, and betting, correctly I think, that the light half is stronger. I may not like the deal they come up with for Palestine. The Palestinians may not like it either. But god knows, after he smashes the neocons in November, Obama may get the world behind a deal. That’s his game.

Posted at 12:15 AM in Obama | Permalink | Comments (16) | TrackBack (0)

http://www.philipweiss.org/mondoweiss/

When the IDF and Shin bet are not killing journalists outright here is how they are treated:

Israelis Assault Award Winning IPS Journalist

by Mel Frykberg

GAZA CITY – Mohammed Omer, the Gaza correspondent of IPS, and joint winner of the 2008 Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism, was strip-searched at gunpoint, assaulted and abused by Israeli security officials at the Allenby border crossing between Jordan and the West Bank on Thursday as he tried to return home to Gaza.

Omer, snip was returning from London where he had just collected his Gellhorn Prize, and from several European capitals where he had speaking engagements, including a meeting with Greek parliamentarians.

Omer’s trip was sponsored by The Washington Report, and the Dutch embassy in Tel Aviv was responsible for coordinating Omer’s travel plans and his security permit to leave Gaza with Israeli officials.

After being unable to produce the prize money, he was ordered to strip naked.

“At first I refused but then I had an M16 (gun) pointed in my face and my clothes were forcibly removed, even my underwear,” Omer said.

At this point Omer broke down and pleaded for an end to such treatment. He said he was told, “you haven’t seen anything yet.” Every cavity of his body was searched as one of the investigators pinned him down on the floor, placing his boot on Omer’s neck. Omer began vomiting, and fainted.

When he came round his eyelids were being forcibly opened and his eardrums probed by an Israeli military doctor, who was also armed. He was then dragged along the floor by his feet by the Shin Bet officials, with his head repeatedly banging on the floor, to a Palestinian ambulance which had been called.

“I eventually woke up in a Palestinian hospital with the doctors trying to reassure me,” Omer told IPS.
snip

“I’m not aware of the events that followed his detention, and we are not responsible for the behaviour of the Shin Bet.”

In the meantime, Omer is still traumatised and in pain. “I’m struggling to breathe and have pain in my head and stomach and will be going back to hospital for further medical examinations,” he said.

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/06/28/9959/

If a well known person gets treated like this can you imagine how normal Palestinians get treated?