October 2010

Israel’s identity problem

by Paul Woodward 10.15.2010

Michael Oren, Israel’s ambassador to the United States, is calling for an end to Israel’s invisibility. Whatever Israel suffers from, invisibility is not among its problems. A country like Lesotho might wish for greater visibility, but Israel already claims a share of the world’s attention that vastly outsizes its importance. Oren’s appeal for attention however, [...]

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Israeli forces train for Arab transfer riots

by News Sources 10.14.2010

Jonathan Cook reports: Israel secretly staged a training exercise last week to test its ability to quell any civil unrest that might result from a peace deal that calls for the forcible transfer of many Arab citizens, the Israeli media has reported. The drill was intended to test the readiness of the civil defence units, [...]

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Looting the Holy Land

by News Sources 10.14.2010

(H/t Pulse) Share

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Ahmadinejad in Lebanon

by Paul Woodward 10.14.2010

While the Iranian president’s visit to Southern Lebanon is being portrayed in the Western media largely in terms of an act of provocation directed at Israel by an antagonist and intruding regional power, the historical ties between that part of Lebanon and Iran span centuries. Nicholas Blanford writes: When Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad tours Lebanon’s [...]

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Nick Turse: making war by the book

by TomDispatch 10.14.2010

Reprinted with permission of TomDispatch.com On January 1, 1970, when Noam Chomsky’s essay “After Pinkville” was first published in the New York Review of Books, reading was still an antiwar activity, and often a transformative one.  Books and articles changed minds, altered lives, helped you mobilize, and then keep going.  And it almost seemed that everyone who was [...]

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How did 1938 turn out to be such a long year?

by Paul Woodward 10.13.2010

“It’s 1938 and Iran is Germany and it’s racing to arm itself with atomic bombs,” Benjamin Netanyahu declared four years ago. By 1942, Germany had snared itself in the disastrous Battle of Stalingrad — but let’s allow Netanyahu some latitude with his metaphor and assume that it’s still 1938 and that Iran’s race has merely [...]

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Might the US be holding a fugitive Mossad agent in secret detention?

by Paul Woodward 10.12.2010

Eight months after the murder of the Hamas commander, Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, in Dubai, two reports in the last few days present intriguingly contradictory pictures. First came a Wall Street Journal report on Friday with the headline, “In Global Hunt for Hit Men, Tantalizing Trail Goes Cold.” The Journal has followed this story more closely than [...]

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Israel is ceasing to be a Jewish state and turning into a state for some Jews

by Paul Woodward 10.12.2010

Carlo Strenger has an interesting op-ed in Haaretz. It’s worth reading the whole piece (part of which appears below). Comments of mine follow. There is nothing left to say about how bad, harmful and useless the new citizenship law is: Labor Party Minister Isaac Herzog has warned that it is another step towards fascism; legal [...]

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Pepe Escobar: Pipelineistan’s new Silk Road

by TomDispatch 10.12.2010

Reprinted with permission of TomDispatch.com Back before email, a world traveler who wanted to keep in touch and couldn’t just pop into the nearest Internet café might drop you a series of postcards from one exotic locale after another. Pepe Escobar, that edgy, peripatetic globe-trotting reporter for one of my favorite on-line publications, Asia Times, has [...]

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Pamela Geller’s English friends — Islamophobes united

by Paul Woodward 10.11.2010

(Update below) Pamela Geller — “hate monger and anti-mosque queen bee,” as she has been dubbed by Charles Johnson at the conservative blog where she got her start — has “helped bring into the mainstream a concept that after 9/11 percolated mainly on the fringes of American politics: that terrorism by Muslims springs not from [...]

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Tea Party teaming up with English fascists

by Paul Woodward 10.10.2010

The Observer reports: The English Defence League, a far-right grouping aimed at combating the “Islamification” of British cities, has developed strong links with the American Tea Party movement. An Observer investigation has established that the EDL has made contact with anti-jihad groups within the Tea Party organisation and has invited a senior US rabbi and [...]

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The Jewish Republic of Israel

by News Sources 10.10.2010

Haaretz reports: Israeli Arab MK Ahmed Tibi was quick Sunday to condemn the Cabinet’s approval of a controversial proposal requiring non-Jews seeking citizenship to pledge allegiance to Israel as a Jewish and democratic state. “The government of Israel has become subservient to Yisrael Beiteinu and its fascist doctrine,” said Tibi. “No other state in the [...]

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Andrew Bacevich: The U.S. military as quagmire specialists

by TomDispatch 10.10.2010

Reprinted with permission of TomDispatch.com Consider this: the number three book at Amazon.com at the moment is entitled Obama’s Wars, and yet the war that may most truly turn out to be the president’s seems only now to be gaining steam.  Is it a case of premature titling? I’m talking, of course, about the U.S. war [...]

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Israel’s human shields and live bait

by News Sources 10.09.2010

Sharmine Narwani writes: Logic dictates that the physical presence of half a million Jews in illegal settlements and outposts – connected through a maze of Jewish-only roads – has stealthily destroyed the possibility of a land-for-peace compromise. And Israel’s government has spent $17 billion on settlements since occupation began. But here’s something we don’t talk [...]

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Mearsheimer on the undiminished power of the Israel lobby

by Paul Woodward 10.09.2010

(H/t Pulse) How do we know the power of the lobby is undiminished? Each time President Obama pressed Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu on the issue of a settlement freeze, Obama was forced into a humiliating retreat. That would not have happened had it not been for the behind-the-scenes machinations of the lobby. That’s John Mearsheimer’s [...]

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Would-be spies should approach Israeli consulates with caution

by Paul Woodward 10.09.2010

In June 2006, Elliot Doxer, an employee at an internet company in Boston, sent an email to a foreign consulate. “I am a Jewish American who lives in Boston,” he allegedly wrote. “I know you are always looking for information and I am offering the little I may have.” He also wrote that he wanted [...]

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Obama desperate to please Netanyahu

by Paul Woodward 10.08.2010

How much is a two-month extension in the West Bank settlement slowdown really worth? The Obama administration is pursuing this paltry prize as if it was staving off another economic meltdown — even as hundreds of building projects have already been started. The Los Angeles Times reported: The U.S. has been wooing Netanyahu for weeks [...]

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Obama chooses new national security adviser who has ‘no credibility with the military’

by Paul Woodward 10.08.2010

Undaunted by the revelations from Bob Woodward’s book, Obama’s Wars, President Obama is replacing National Security Adviser Gen James Jones with his deputy, Tom Donilon. Last year, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Donilon would be a “disaster” in that position and Jones said Donilon had “no credibility with the military.” Was it Donilon’s performance as [...]

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The rock upon which our nation no longer rests

by Paul Woodward 10.07.2010

In a landmark case, the first trial of a former Guantánamo detainee, Judge Lewis A. Kaplan of United States District Court in Manhattan made a ruling that presents a major setback for the Department of Justice. He barred the key witness from testifying because he had been identified and located through torturing the accused, Ahmed [...]

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A real Afghan exit strategy

by Paul Woodward 10.07.2010

Anyone who carefully read the Washington Post‘s report on talks between the Karzai government and the Taliban should have been struck by this detail: “discussions with the Quetta Shura [Taliban leadership] do not include representatives of the Haqqani group.” The Waziristan-based Haqqani network has for some time been described as the most formidable element in [...]

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Stephan Salisbury: keeping an eye on everyone

by TomDispatch 10.07.2010

Reprinted with permission of TomDispatch.com Let H. David Kotz put American surveillance activities in context by focusing our attention on what this government hasn’t spent much time looking at while it was putting its 24/7 efforts into watching the rest of us.  Kotz is the inspector general for the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and [...]

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Chip Ward: A West raised by wolves

by TomDispatch 10.07.2010

Reprinted with permission of TomDispatch.com The long vacation season of 2010 is, by now, a distant memory.  But Chip Ward, who has covered everything from the aridifying of the West to the Tea Partying of the same territory for TomDispatch, reports from his tourist haven of a home in the backlands of Utah that, for the first time in [...]

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Did the Taliban clock just start ticking?

by Paul Woodward 10.06.2010

“You have the watches, but we have the time,” the Taliban like to say. But now the Washington Post reports that the Taliban’s top commanders are “very serious” about finding a way to end the war. Their eagerness is driven by fear that their power will be usurped. The leadership knows “that they are going [...]

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US undermining government in Pakistan

by Paul Woodward 10.06.2010

The editor’s of the Washington Post don’t need to pay any attention to commentary from bloggers in order to realize that their recommendations on Pakistan are way off target. All they have to do is read reports in their own newspaper. U.S. officials in Pakistan have spent much of the past year toiling to bolster [...]

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