Ms. Helen Thomas...
Noam Chomsky: Israel and Palestine (Full Lecture)
MIENTRAS EL GOBIERNO DE ISRAEL OBSTINADO E INMISERICORDE RECRUDECE LA MASACRE EN AGRAVIO DEL PUEBLO PALESTINO*, BARACK OBAMA AMAGA EXPRESA Y PúBLICAMENTE A DETRACTORES (AS) QUE SE OPONEN A QUE SUSAN RICE SUCEDA A HILLARY CLINTON EN LA TITULARIDAD DEL DEPARTAMENTO DE ESTADO…
Vuelven a aflorar las mentiras, el doble discurso y la no credibilidad
de algunos (as) en alcanzar la paz…
10:25-37
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fu8ddlXr9MM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ArjEq3vocOE
http://cdn.geolocation.ws/geolocation_media/panoramio/04458/p-044584256.jpg
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10:25-37
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fu8ddlXr9MM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ArjEq3vocOE
http://cdn.geolocation.ws/geolocation_media/panoramio/04458/p-044584256.jpg
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"ISRAELIS LAUNCH MAJOR ASSAULT ON GAZA
Join Protests Nationwide!
 |
| Omar jihad Mashrawi, a Palestinian from Al Zeitoun, holding his one-year-old son who just died from his injuries at Al Shifahospital, city of Gaza, on November 14, 2012. (Photo by Anne Paq/Activestills.org) |
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After getting the go-ahead from the Obama administration in a meeting at the White House on Monday, Israel has launched another major assault against the Palestinian people in Gaza. Israeli troops have been assembled at the border and are poised to invade Gaza again.
In an act designed to provoke a wider war, missiles from Israel assassinated a top Hamas official and killed and wounded many others as its planes and warships have struck more than 20 targets in an ongoing assault. Reports of the bombardment of Gaza are continuing as bodies, including those of children, are being brought to the hospital and morgue.
The ANSWER Coalition joins with people all over the world to condemn this act of wanton aggression and murder, and has issued the following statement:
“All U.S. aid to Israel should be ended once and for all. The people of the United States stand against the government that speaks in our name and sends $3 billion of our tax dollars every year so that Israel can kill and colonize the people of Palestine. The fact that the Obama administration was briefed on Monday prior to the attack shows that these latest crimes are a joint U.S.-Israeli operation. The Pentagon immediately announced after the first wave of murderous assaults today that Israel was its 'partner.' Israel may be a partner of U.S. imperialism as it acts as an extension of Pentagon and CIA power in the Middle East. But it is absolutely not the partner of the people of this country who are horrified by its policy of endless war against the Palestinian people and all the peoples of the region.”
The ANSWER Coalition urges everyone to go into the streets and join and organize a demonstration in your area. Click here for a list of actions. "
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0dpK5O72bI
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Saturday, November 5, 2011
"OBAMA Y NETANYAHU CHANTAJEAN A LA UNESCO"
RESISTENCIA DE LA COMUNIDAD INTERNACIONAL IN CRESCENDO CONTRA EL BLOQUEO ECONÓMICO DE ESTADOS UNIDOS (USA) E ISRAEL EN AGRAVIO DE LA UNESCO...
http://fideiius.blogspot.com/2011/11/obama-y-netanyahu-chantajean-la-unesco.html---
Obama warns McCain: Go after U.N. Ambassador Rice? ‘You have a problem with me’
By Olivier Knox, Yahoo! News | The Ticket – Wed, Nov 14, 2012
President Barack Obama bluntly told Sen. John McCain and other Republicans to lay off their attacks against U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice over the Benghazi assault, telling lawmakers that if they go after her "then you have a problem with me." And Obama, speaking at his first postelection press conference, vowed that Republican opposition would not dissuade him from nominating Rice to replace departing Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
"I don't think there's any debate in this country that when you have four Americans killed that's a problem," he told reporters in the East Room of the White House. "And we've got to get to the bottom of it, and there needs to be accountability. We've got to bring those who carried it out to justice—they won't get any debate from me on that.
"But when they go after the U.N. ambassador, apparently because they think she's an easy target, then they've got a problem with me," he warned.
McCain, Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and other Republicans have signaled they will oppose Rice's confirmation if Obama nominates her. Their numbers thus far seem far short of the 40 needed to block it, and some Republican senators have signaled that she should get a fair hearing.
"Let me say specifically about Susan Rice: She has done exemplary work. She has represented the United States and our interests in the United Nations with skill and professionalism and toughness and grace," Obama said.
"And should I choose, if I think that she would be the best person to serve America in the capacity of the State Department, then I will nominate her," he vowed. "That's not a determination that I've made yet."
Rice and Democratic Sen. John Kerry, who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, are seen as the front-runners in the race to succeed Clinton.
Conservatives have assailed Rice, who is close to Obama, ever since she made the rounds of the Sunday morning talk shows and said that American intelligence believed the attack on the American compound in Benghazi, which claimed the lives of U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans, grew out of demonstrations against an Internet video that ridicules Islam.
"As that unfolded, it seems to have been hijacked, let us say, by some individual clusters of extremists who came with heavier weapons, weapons that, as you know, in the wake of the revolution in Libya are quite common and accessible. And it then evolved from there," she told ABC.
White House aides have said Rice was speaking based on the best available intelligence at the time.
"She made an appearance at the request of the White House in which she gave her best understanding of the intelligence provided to her," Obama said Wednesday. "If Sen. McCain and Sen. Graham want to go after somebody, they should go after me.
"But for them to go after the U.N. ambassador, who had nothing to do with Benghazi and was simply making a presentation based on intelligence that she had received, and to besmirch her reputation is outrageous," he said.
"We're after an election now," he scolded. "I think it is important for us to find out exactly what happened in Benghazi, and I'm happy to cooperate in any ways that Congress wants. We have provided every bit of information that we have and we will continue to provide information, and we've got a full-blown investigation. And all that information will be disgorged to Congress."
McCain and Graham hit back quickly.
"I have always said that the buck stops with the President of the United States," the Arizona senator said in a written statement. McCain accused Obama of "contradictory statements" about the attack, labeling it an "act of terror" the day after it happened and then resisting the use of the word "terrorism" for roughly a week afterward.
"We owe the American people and the families of the murdered Americans a full and complete explanation, which for two months the President has failed to deliver," said McCain, who has called for Congress to create a "select committee" to investigate.
"Mr. President, don't think for one minute I don't hold you ultimately responsible for Benghazi. I think you failed as commander in chief before, during and after the attack," Graham said in a statement released by his office.
"We owe it to the American people and the victims of this attack to have full, fair hearings and accountability be assigned where appropriate. Given what I know now, I have no intention of promoting anyone who is up to their eyeballs in the Benghazi debacle," Graham said.
Obama opened what was his first press conference in months with a vow to work with both parties in Congress to tackle the so-called fiscal cliff and revive the economy. He also said he had "no evidence" that the scandal that led David Petraeus to resign in disgrace from his job as CIA director had led to breaches in classified national security material.
"Right now our economy is still recovering from a very deep and damaging crisis, so our top priority has to be jobs and growth," Obama said in opening remarks in the East Room of the White House.
"Both parties can work together" to address the fiscal challenges "in a balanced and responsible way," he said, before pushing Republicans to sign on to his call for raising taxes on the richest Americans.
Asked whether the scandal that drove Petraeus from office had led to national security breaches, Obama replied: "I have no evidence at this point, from what I've seen, that classified information was disclosed that in any way would have had a negative impact on our national security." And the president praised the retired general, saying, "We are safer because of the work Dave Petraeus has done."
Asked for his appraisal of the FBI's work in bringing to light the marital infidelity that Petraeus cited in his resignation message, and why he and the American public learned of the probe only earlier this month, Obama said, "I am withholding judgment" on that process but expressed "a lot of confidence generally in the FBI."
Turning to his tax battle with Republicans, Obama stuck by his vow to oppose any legislation that extends the Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans. The president, asked why he had agreed to extend them in the 2010 lame-duck session of Congress, said that "was a one-time proposition" and that "we cannot afford" to do so again.
Obama said he would be willing to look at raising tax revenue by closing loopholes. But he warned that doing so would probably not outweigh an estimated trillion dollars lost by extending tax cuts on income above $250,000. "The math tends not to work," he said.
"I just want to emphasize: I am open to new ideas," Obama underlined. "If the Republican counterparts or some Democrats have a great idea for us to raise revenue, maintain progressivity, make sure the middle class isn't getting hit, reduces our deficit, encourages growth, I'm not going to just slam the door in their face. I want to hear ideas from everybody."
And he reiterated that he does not want just a stopgap agreement with Congress.
"I want a big deal, I want a comprehensive deal," he said. "Fair-minded people can come to an agreement."
Obama, who won the Latino vote by a lopsided margin, also vowed to pursue comprehensive immigration reform in his second term. He said it should include border enforcement and penalties for companies that knowingly hire undocumented workers, while providing "a pathway for legal status" for those who pay their taxes and learn English. He also said it should lock in his presidential determination that undocumented immigrants brought here as children should not be deported but have a potential path to citizenship.
"We need to seize the moment," he said, predicting that "we will have a bill introduced and we begin the process in Congress very soon after my inauguration."
Obama addressed a handful of other issues.
- On the standoff over Iran's suspect nuclear program:
Obama pledged to "try to make a push in the coming months to see if we can open up a dialogue between Iran and not just us but the international community, to see if we can get this thing resolved. ... I can't promise that Iran will walk through the door that they need to walk through, but that would be very much the preferable option" to military action, he said.
- On the possibility of working with Republican rival Mitt Romney:
Obama said that "we haven't scheduled something yet."
"I think everybody needs to catch their breath," he said. "I'm sure that Gov. Romney is spending some time with his family. And my hope is, before the end of the year, though, that we have a chance to sit down and talk."
- On whether he has a mandate:
"I don't presume that because I won an election, that everybody suddenly agrees with me on ... everything. I'm more than familiar with all the literature about presidential overreach in second terms," Obama said. "We are very cautious about that.
"On the other hand, I didn't get re-elected just to bask in re- election," he went on to say. "I got elected to do work on behalf of American families and small businesses all across the country who are still recovering from a really bad recession but are hopeful about the future. And I am, too."
- On climate change:
Obama said he would embark "over the next several weeks, next several months" in a "wide-ranging discussion" with scientists, engineers, elected officials and others about "short-term" steps to reduce the carbon emissions that are blamed for global warming. But he seemed pessimistic about any broad response.
"I don't know what either Democrats or Republicans are prepared to do," he said. "There's no doubt that for us to take on climate change in a serious way would involve making some tough political choices.
"And you know, understandably, I think the American people right now have been so focused and will continue to be focused on our economy and jobs and growth that, you know, if the message is somehow we're going to ignore jobs and growth simply to address climate change, I don't think anybody's going to go for that. I won't go for that."
- On relations with the news media:
Bloomberg reporter Hans Nichols shouted out a question about taxes after Obama had indicated that he had already taken his final query.
"I don't think there's any debate in this country that when you have four Americans killed that's a problem," he told reporters in the East Room of the White House. "And we've got to get to the bottom of it, and there needs to be accountability. We've got to bring those who carried it out to justice—they won't get any debate from me on that.
"But when they go after the U.N. ambassador, apparently because they think she's an easy target, then they've got a problem with me," he warned.
McCain, Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and other Republicans have signaled they will oppose Rice's confirmation if Obama nominates her. Their numbers thus far seem far short of the 40 needed to block it, and some Republican senators have signaled that she should get a fair hearing.
"Let me say specifically about Susan Rice: She has done exemplary work. She has represented the United States and our interests in the United Nations with skill and professionalism and toughness and grace," Obama said.
"And should I choose, if I think that she would be the best person to serve America in the capacity of the State Department, then I will nominate her," he vowed. "That's not a determination that I've made yet."
Rice and Democratic Sen. John Kerry, who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, are seen as the front-runners in the race to succeed Clinton.
Conservatives have assailed Rice, who is close to Obama, ever since she made the rounds of the Sunday morning talk shows and said that American intelligence believed the attack on the American compound in Benghazi, which claimed the lives of U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans, grew out of demonstrations against an Internet video that ridicules Islam.
"As that unfolded, it seems to have been hijacked, let us say, by some individual clusters of extremists who came with heavier weapons, weapons that, as you know, in the wake of the revolution in Libya are quite common and accessible. And it then evolved from there," she told ABC.
White House aides have said Rice was speaking based on the best available intelligence at the time.
"She made an appearance at the request of the White House in which she gave her best understanding of the intelligence provided to her," Obama said Wednesday. "If Sen. McCain and Sen. Graham want to go after somebody, they should go after me.
"But for them to go after the U.N. ambassador, who had nothing to do with Benghazi and was simply making a presentation based on intelligence that she had received, and to besmirch her reputation is outrageous," he said.
"We're after an election now," he scolded. "I think it is important for us to find out exactly what happened in Benghazi, and I'm happy to cooperate in any ways that Congress wants. We have provided every bit of information that we have and we will continue to provide information, and we've got a full-blown investigation. And all that information will be disgorged to Congress."
McCain and Graham hit back quickly.
"I have always said that the buck stops with the President of the United States," the Arizona senator said in a written statement. McCain accused Obama of "contradictory statements" about the attack, labeling it an "act of terror" the day after it happened and then resisting the use of the word "terrorism" for roughly a week afterward.
"We owe the American people and the families of the murdered Americans a full and complete explanation, which for two months the President has failed to deliver," said McCain, who has called for Congress to create a "select committee" to investigate.
"Mr. President, don't think for one minute I don't hold you ultimately responsible for Benghazi. I think you failed as commander in chief before, during and after the attack," Graham said in a statement released by his office.
"We owe it to the American people and the victims of this attack to have full, fair hearings and accountability be assigned where appropriate. Given what I know now, I have no intention of promoting anyone who is up to their eyeballs in the Benghazi debacle," Graham said.
Obama opened what was his first press conference in months with a vow to work with both parties in Congress to tackle the so-called fiscal cliff and revive the economy. He also said he had "no evidence" that the scandal that led David Petraeus to resign in disgrace from his job as CIA director had led to breaches in classified national security material.
"Right now our economy is still recovering from a very deep and damaging crisis, so our top priority has to be jobs and growth," Obama said in opening remarks in the East Room of the White House.
"Both parties can work together" to address the fiscal challenges "in a balanced and responsible way," he said, before pushing Republicans to sign on to his call for raising taxes on the richest Americans.
Asked whether the scandal that drove Petraeus from office had led to national security breaches, Obama replied: "I have no evidence at this point, from what I've seen, that classified information was disclosed that in any way would have had a negative impact on our national security." And the president praised the retired general, saying, "We are safer because of the work Dave Petraeus has done."
Asked for his appraisal of the FBI's work in bringing to light the marital infidelity that Petraeus cited in his resignation message, and why he and the American public learned of the probe only earlier this month, Obama said, "I am withholding judgment" on that process but expressed "a lot of confidence generally in the FBI."
Turning to his tax battle with Republicans, Obama stuck by his vow to oppose any legislation that extends the Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans. The president, asked why he had agreed to extend them in the 2010 lame-duck session of Congress, said that "was a one-time proposition" and that "we cannot afford" to do so again.
Obama said he would be willing to look at raising tax revenue by closing loopholes. But he warned that doing so would probably not outweigh an estimated trillion dollars lost by extending tax cuts on income above $250,000. "The math tends not to work," he said.
"I just want to emphasize: I am open to new ideas," Obama underlined. "If the Republican counterparts or some Democrats have a great idea for us to raise revenue, maintain progressivity, make sure the middle class isn't getting hit, reduces our deficit, encourages growth, I'm not going to just slam the door in their face. I want to hear ideas from everybody."
And he reiterated that he does not want just a stopgap agreement with Congress.
"I want a big deal, I want a comprehensive deal," he said. "Fair-minded people can come to an agreement."
Obama, who won the Latino vote by a lopsided margin, also vowed to pursue comprehensive immigration reform in his second term. He said it should include border enforcement and penalties for companies that knowingly hire undocumented workers, while providing "a pathway for legal status" for those who pay their taxes and learn English. He also said it should lock in his presidential determination that undocumented immigrants brought here as children should not be deported but have a potential path to citizenship.
"We need to seize the moment," he said, predicting that "we will have a bill introduced and we begin the process in Congress very soon after my inauguration."
Obama addressed a handful of other issues.
- On the standoff over Iran's suspect nuclear program:
Obama pledged to "try to make a push in the coming months to see if we can open up a dialogue between Iran and not just us but the international community, to see if we can get this thing resolved. ... I can't promise that Iran will walk through the door that they need to walk through, but that would be very much the preferable option" to military action, he said.
- On the possibility of working with Republican rival Mitt Romney:
Obama said that "we haven't scheduled something yet."
"I think everybody needs to catch their breath," he said. "I'm sure that Gov. Romney is spending some time with his family. And my hope is, before the end of the year, though, that we have a chance to sit down and talk."
- On whether he has a mandate:
"I don't presume that because I won an election, that everybody suddenly agrees with me on ... everything. I'm more than familiar with all the literature about presidential overreach in second terms," Obama said. "We are very cautious about that.
"On the other hand, I didn't get re-elected just to bask in re- election," he went on to say. "I got elected to do work on behalf of American families and small businesses all across the country who are still recovering from a really bad recession but are hopeful about the future. And I am, too."
- On climate change:
Obama said he would embark "over the next several weeks, next several months" in a "wide-ranging discussion" with scientists, engineers, elected officials and others about "short-term" steps to reduce the carbon emissions that are blamed for global warming. But he seemed pessimistic about any broad response.
"I don't know what either Democrats or Republicans are prepared to do," he said. "There's no doubt that for us to take on climate change in a serious way would involve making some tough political choices.
"And you know, understandably, I think the American people right now have been so focused and will continue to be focused on our economy and jobs and growth that, you know, if the message is somehow we're going to ignore jobs and growth simply to address climate change, I don't think anybody's going to go for that. I won't go for that."
- On relations with the news media:
Bloomberg reporter Hans Nichols shouted out a question about taxes after Obama had indicated that he had already taken his final query.
"That was a great question, but it would be a horrible precedent for me to answer your question just because you yelled it out," Obama said. "So thank you very much, guys."
http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/ticket/live-video-watch-obama-first-press-conference-election-153317135--election.html
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"Published on Thursday, December 30, 2010 by CommonDreams.org
Media Hit Job of the Year: Punishing Helen Thomas For Criticizing Israel
Our Media Experienced A Few Highs and Many Lows in 2010; None As Disgraceful As The Vitriol Against Helen Thomas
In 1960, I co-founded a student magazine at Cornell University called Dialogue. I was a wannabe journalist, fixated on emulating the courageous media personalities of the times from Edward R. Murrow to a distinctive figure I came to admire at Presidential press conferences, a wire service reporter named Helen Thomas.
In recent years, my faith in the power of dialogue in politics has been severely teste—as, no doubt has hers—in an age where diatribes and calculated demonization chills debate and exchanges of opposing views.
Once you are labeled and stereotyped, especially if you are denounced as an anti-Semite, you are relegated to the fringes, pronounced a hater beyond redemption, even beyond explanation.
You have been assigned a scarlet letter as visible as the Star of David the Nazis made Jews wear.
My career path took me from covering civil rights activism in the streets to later working in the suites of network power. I went from the underground press to rock and roll radio to TV reporting and producing at CNN and ABC.
As a member in good standing of an activist generation, I saw myself more as an outsider in contrast to Helen’s distinctive credentials as an insider, as a White House bureau chief and later as the dean of the White House Correspondents Association.
Yet, beneath her establishment credentials and status, she was always an outsider too—one of nine children born to a family of Lebanese immigrants in Winchester Kentucky, who despite their Middle East origins, were Christians in the Greek Orthodox Church.
She became a pioneering woman, a modern day Helen of Troy, who broke the glass ceiling, infiltrating the clubby, mostly male, inside the beltway world of big egos and self-important media prima donnas; most supplicants to power, not challengers of it.
Her origins were more modest. She grew up in an ethnic neighborhood in Detroit. Helen received her batchelor’s degree from Wayne State University in 1942, the year I was born. Earlier this year, her alma mater which had taken so much pride in her achievements, withdrew an award in her name in a striking gesture of cowardice and submission to an incident blown out of all proportions that instantly turned Helen from a shero to a zero in a quick media second.
The Simon Wiesenthal Center—not, by the way, linked to the legendary Nazi Hunter (who was unhappy with its work), put her on their top-ten list of anti-Semites after angry remarks she made about Israel went viral and blew up into one of the major media stories of 2010.
President Barack Obama who cheerfully brought her a birthday cake, hailing her long years of service to the American people, later labeled her remarks “reprehensible.” You would think that given all the vicious slurs, Hitler comparisons and putdowns directed at him, he would be more cautious tossing slurs at others.
But no, all politicians pander to deflect criticism whenever they fear the winds of enmity will blow their way.
But now it was Helen who was being compared to Hitler in a new furor over the Fuhrer even though she says she grew up in a home that despised him, and from which her two brothers joined the army in World War ll. She says now “We didn’t do enough to expose Hitler early on. He was not just anti-Jewish. He was anti-American!”
I might add if I considered it necessary, that I grew up in a Jewish family and am proud of that identity, our culture and traditions. But that was no big thing to Helen who worked alongside Jews all of her life in the media world, many as close friends. Her main concern as a child was with non-Jews who baited her in school as a “garlic eater,” a foreigner.
She may be a critic of Israel but never a hater of Jews, a distinction the world recognizes, but that right-wing backers of the Israel lobby (and the media that backs it) refuse to accept in the name of a black/white ‘you are with us or ag’in us” ideological agenda which has no tolerance for critics, differences of opinion or the anger of the dispossessed.
They only see themselves as victims, never the people they victimize. Prejudice often infects those who live in glass houses and who are quick to condemn others.
For many years, I admired Helen from afar, and later gave her an award for Truth In Media voted by my colleagues on Mediachannel.org. She was an institution, an icon of honor. We were impressed by her history of asking tough questions even when they embarrassed Presidents.
Then, suddenly, last June, I like everyone in the world of media, was stunned to witness her public fall from grace, partly self-inflicted, perhaps because of inelegant language used in response to an ambush interview by provocateur father-son Israeli advocates posing as journalists
They were following in the footsteps of the vicious comments by Ann ("You will find liberals always rooting for savages against civilization”) Coulter who earlier denounced her as an “old Arab” sitting yards from the President as if she was threatening him. She refused to dignify that smear with a response.
I didn’t know until she told me that she had also been hounded for years by Abe Foxman, a leader of the Anti-Defamation League, who demanded she explain 25 questions she asked Presidents over the decades, “I didn’t answer,” “she told me, “because I don’t respond to junk mail.”
Foxman then sent the questions to her employer trying to get her fired, she says. Later, he recruited former Bush Press Secretary Ari Fleisher in his crusade against her. Ari and his boss disliked her “hostile” questions about Iraq on official claims that have since been unmasked as lies.
Helen always stuck to her guns. She was considered the granddame of White House journalists. Presidents respected her. She went to China with Nixon. You don’t survive in that highly visible pit of presidential polemics for as long as she did by backing down. Many correspondents assigned there turn into bulldogs for the camera. Maybe that’s why Helen can appear abrupt at times.
She has, however, always been polite enough to try to answer questions from strangers without always realizing who she was dealing with in a new world of media hit jobs, where “GOTCHA” YouTube videos thrive on recording embarrassing moments, what we used to call “bloopers.’
In her senior years, she was brought down by a kid looking for a marketable soundbyte like the one he extracted -- as if he was a big game hunter in Africa who bagged a lioness. She had been baited and took the bait. Unaware of how the video could be used, she ventilated and then regretted doing so. It was too late. That one media hit job triggered millions of online video hits.
Helen later apologized for how she said what she did without retracting the essence of her convictions. But by then, it was too late. Her long career was instantly terminated. The perception became everything; the context nothing.
She tried to be conciliatory, saying, “I deeply regret my comments I made last week regarding the Israelis and the Palestinians. They do not reflect my heart-felt belief that peace will come to the Middle East only when all parties recognize the need for mutual respect and tolerance. May that day come soon.”
Those remarks were derided and dismissed, with the pundits and papers demanding her scalp. She had no choice but to resign after her company, her agent, her co-author and many “friends” started treating her like a pariah.
“You cannot criticize Israel in this country and survive,” she says now. She believes the Israel lobby controls the discourse on Israel. She cited, as an example, CNN firing a veteran editor in Lebanon for praising a popular cleric for his support for woman after he died. (CNN had no problems hiring Wolf Blitzer, a former executive director of AIPAC.)
I didn’t ask her but I am sure she is sympathetic to President Carter for speaking out on the issue the way he has, despite the way he was later dumped on. Once under predictable vitriolic attack began, even he was forced to back down away from some of his positions.
She was forced into retirement and thrown to the wolves in a media culture that relishes stories of personal destruction and missteps. It’s the old ‘the Media builds you up before they tear you down’ routine.
As blogger Jamie Frieze wrote, “I don't think she should have been forced to resign. After all, the freedom of speech doesn't come with the right to be comfortable. In other words, the fact that you're uncomfortable doesn't trump my free speech. Thomas made people uncomfortable, but that doesn't mean her speech should be punished.”
But punished she was
As a veteran of one kind of real journalism, she may have been inexperienced in dealing with our volatile media culture that now thrives on hostile ‘drive by’ attacks and putdowns.
When I called Helen Thomas to ask if she might be willing to share some of her thoughts on what happened, I found her as eloquent as ever, supportive of Wikileaks, critical of Grand Jury harassment in the Middle West against Palestinian supporters and angry with President Obama for his many right turns and spineless positions.
This clearly was not a mea culpa moment for her, but what has she learned from this ordeal?
While she hasn’t written about the incident she did speak to me about it for publication.
I first asked her for her view about what happened?
She was, she said, on a path outside the White House on a day in which Jewish leaders were being honored inside, at American Jewish Heritage Celebration Day, an event she said she was unaware of. A Rabbi, David Nesenoff, asked to speak to her, and introduced his two sons who he said wanted to become Journalists. (One was actually a friend of his son Adam, also his webmaster.)
“People seeking advice come to me a lot,” she explained, “and I told them about my love of journalism and that they should pursue their goals. I was gracious, and told them to go for it.”
Then the subject abruptly changed. “What you think of Israel they asked next. It was all very pleasant and I don’t blame them for asking,” she told me. But, then, she admitted, she didn’t know the people who she then said, “shoved a microphone in my face like a jack knife.”
It wasn’t just any Rabbi making conversation. Nessensoff is an ardent pro-Israel supporter who runs a website called Rabbi Live and can be a flamboyant self-promoter. He says, “even though I was born in Glen Cove and grew up in Syosset Long Island, Israel is my Jewish homeland. It is the homeland for all Jewish people.”
The Jewish Forward newspaper would later report, “Nesenoff came under scrutiny for appearing in a video depicting a man of Mexican descent pretending to give a weather forecast while a bearded rabbi in a black hat and coat stands nearby.
The four-and-a-half-minute video, titled “Holy Weather,” features Nesenoff dressed as “Father Julio Ramirez,” an outsize caricature of a Mexican priest. The rabbi makes statements that fuel stereotypes, painting Mexican laborers as dishwashers. He speaks in an exaggerated rasp of a Mexican accent, saying, among other things: “The last time I saw a map like that I was in an immigration office with three gringos down on the Mexican border, you know, right near New Mexico.” Fractured Spanish pops up from time to time, as when Nesenoff says the rabbi’s tendency to get better assignments is “no mucho bueno picnic.”
Though some critics used the skit as ammunition to portray him as a hypocrite and a racist, Nesenoff said he was dressed up because it was Purim.” God, he said, likes humor.
Israeli officials were not in a laughing mood during this period for other reasons. Fox News reported: “A senior Israeli politician tells Fox News that Israel is currently in the midst of its worst international crisis since the creation of the Jewish state. The politician, who asked not to be named in order to speak more candidly, added that for the first time Israel's legitimacy is being questioned by many in the international community.
“The official believes the lack of a viable peace process, combined with last week's Gaza-bound flotilla incident, which killed nine, has brought Israel to this situation. The Israeli public doesn't understand the severity of the situation, according to the politician. The official believes that Israelis should not react in a nationalistic way to recent events, because it is only weakening the Jewish state in this process.”
I don’t know If any of this was weighing on Helen’s mind but I do know that criticism of Israel was soon at an all time fever pitch because of the Gaza Aid Flotilla which left Turkey on the day of the “interview.”
Supporters of the humanitarian project feared Israel would attack the ships as they soon did. For media spin, Tel Aviv righteously and loudly defended its violent interception of the non-violent convoy as an act of legitimate self-defense but, later, quietly, paid compensation to the victims when the world media turned against them.
Soon, there would protests worldwide and furious exchanges in the media. Much of it was very emotional. There was also anger at President Obama for not denouncing Israel’s intervention on the high seas. But, by that time, Helen Thomas was silenced and silent.
(In some outlets, the incident “outing” Helen was used, bizarrely, as pro-Israel “balance” to show why Israel must act tough.)
Back at the North Lawn that day at the White House, Helen, who must have been following these evolving events, blew a fuse, or at least lost her usually professional demeanor. Here’s the now infamous exchange videotaped by an amateur cameraman, offering a deliberately unflattering and extreme tight close up of an 89 year-old woman.
Clearly, the question triggered something deeper in Helen, feelings that she had perhaps bottled up for many years in the White House where every reporter has a built in radar that teaches them to be careful about what they say and how they say it, especially on a subject like Israel that Helen considers a “third rail,” almost an “untouchable issue.” She earlier told one college audience, “I censored myself for 50 years when I was a reporter.” (She was then an opinion columnist and perhaps freer to speak her mind,)
Israel was not a new subject for her to comment on either. Anyone from the Arab world tends to have a very different understanding of the history there, a perspective that we rarely hear or see. It’s a narrative driven by anger ar unending Palestinian victimization.
She told me she had been in Israel in 1954 and visited the Palestinian village of Kibia that was invaded by Israel in which local residents were driven out and many killed. She told me she personally met many Palestinians forced from their homes. She is not the only one angry about this often hidden legacy, especially because many Israelis justify expelling Palestinians in biblical terms and are supported by Christian Evangelicals in saying so.
That’s ironic, isn’t it, because in our media, fanatical fundamentalists are only pictured as Muslims, rarely as Jews.
Her historic memory was clearly triggered although her views are hardly extreme. She says Israel has a right to exist, and so do Jews “like all people. But not the right to seize others lands.” She says Israel has defied 65 UN resolutions on these issues. She was frustrated when so many Presidents danced around the issues and in her view, “caved” on human rights.
To Nesenoff and many viewers oriented to see the world only through a unflinching pro-Israel narrative, Helen had crossed the line in their view from being anti-Israel to being anti-semetic. The reason: the inclusion of Poland and Germany into the mix were considered “obviously anti-Semetic.”
She agrees that by citing Germany, she opened the door to accusations of insensitivity, lumping her in with holocaust deniers, but denies being one or hating Jews. She says she was startled by that charge because she is, she says, a Semite so how can she be anti-Semetic? (Another irony: Jewish emigration to today’s Germany has increased 10 fold since the fall of the Berlin Wall to 200,000 with many leaving Israel. This “reverse exodus” troubles Israeli officials.)
Helen told me her thinking on this subject goes back to being moved by a Rabbi who spoke alongside Martin Luther King Jr at the March on Washington in 1963. I was there also, and heard him speak too, and so I looked him up.
It was Joachim Prinz of the American Jewish Congress who made a speech that influenced a younger Helen Thomas. He said, “When I was the rabbi of the Jewish community in Berlin under the Hitler regime, I learned many things. The most important thing that I learned under those tragic circumstances was that bigotry and hatred are not the most urgent problem. The most urgent, the most disgraceful, the most shameful and the most tragic problem is silence.”
Helen says her whole career has been about combating the sin of silence. She says she has now been liberated to speak out. And “all I would like is for people to know what I was trying to say, that Palestinians are living under tyranny and that their rights are being violated. All I want is some sympathy for Palestinians.”
Had she said it like that, if she had perhaps made a distinction between Israel as a State and its settlers on occupied lands, she might still have her job. Unfortunately, what she did say, and how she said it, brought all the attention on her, not the issues she was trying to expose.
Now it’s the holiday season, allegedly a time of peace and forgiveness when Presidents issue pardons to convicted criminals and reflection is theoretically permitted, a time when its been suggested that even a State Department hawk like Richard Holbrooke could, on his deathbed call for an end to the Afghan war that he had dogmatically supported.
We have watched the rehabilitation of so many politicians over recent years who have stumbled, taken money or disgraced themselves in sex scandals, including Senators, even Presidents.
Helen Thomas is not in that category.
Yet, many of those “fallen” are back in action, tarnished perhaps, but allowed to recant, to work and then appear in the media.
But, to this day, there has been almost no compassion, empathy or respect shown for one of our great journalists, Helen Thomas, who has been presumed guilty and sentenced to oblivion with barely a word spoken in her defense. She admittedly misspoke and is now officially “Missing” like some disappeared priest in Argentina
A whole world may be critical of Israel. Millions may believe that the occupiers should withdraw or that that Israeli rejectionism of the peace process must end. But when a “mainstream” American reporter of great stature touches these sentiments, she is consigned to Dante’s inferno, and turned into a non-person.
How can we expect Israelis and Palestinians to reconcile if our media won’t set an example by reconciling with Helen Thomas?
In recent years, my faith in the power of dialogue in politics has been severely teste—as, no doubt has hers—in an age where diatribes and calculated demonization chills debate and exchanges of opposing views.
Once you are labeled and stereotyped, especially if you are denounced as an anti-Semite, you are relegated to the fringes, pronounced a hater beyond redemption, even beyond explanation.
You have been assigned a scarlet letter as visible as the Star of David the Nazis made Jews wear.
My career path took me from covering civil rights activism in the streets to later working in the suites of network power. I went from the underground press to rock and roll radio to TV reporting and producing at CNN and ABC.
As a member in good standing of an activist generation, I saw myself more as an outsider in contrast to Helen’s distinctive credentials as an insider, as a White House bureau chief and later as the dean of the White House Correspondents Association.
Yet, beneath her establishment credentials and status, she was always an outsider too—one of nine children born to a family of Lebanese immigrants in Winchester Kentucky, who despite their Middle East origins, were Christians in the Greek Orthodox Church.
She became a pioneering woman, a modern day Helen of Troy, who broke the glass ceiling, infiltrating the clubby, mostly male, inside the beltway world of big egos and self-important media prima donnas; most supplicants to power, not challengers of it.
Her origins were more modest. She grew up in an ethnic neighborhood in Detroit. Helen received her batchelor’s degree from Wayne State University in 1942, the year I was born. Earlier this year, her alma mater which had taken so much pride in her achievements, withdrew an award in her name in a striking gesture of cowardice and submission to an incident blown out of all proportions that instantly turned Helen from a shero to a zero in a quick media second.
The Simon Wiesenthal Center—not, by the way, linked to the legendary Nazi Hunter (who was unhappy with its work), put her on their top-ten list of anti-Semites after angry remarks she made about Israel went viral and blew up into one of the major media stories of 2010.
President Barack Obama who cheerfully brought her a birthday cake, hailing her long years of service to the American people, later labeled her remarks “reprehensible.” You would think that given all the vicious slurs, Hitler comparisons and putdowns directed at him, he would be more cautious tossing slurs at others.
But no, all politicians pander to deflect criticism whenever they fear the winds of enmity will blow their way.
But now it was Helen who was being compared to Hitler in a new furor over the Fuhrer even though she says she grew up in a home that despised him, and from which her two brothers joined the army in World War ll. She says now “We didn’t do enough to expose Hitler early on. He was not just anti-Jewish. He was anti-American!”
I might add if I considered it necessary, that I grew up in a Jewish family and am proud of that identity, our culture and traditions. But that was no big thing to Helen who worked alongside Jews all of her life in the media world, many as close friends. Her main concern as a child was with non-Jews who baited her in school as a “garlic eater,” a foreigner.
She may be a critic of Israel but never a hater of Jews, a distinction the world recognizes, but that right-wing backers of the Israel lobby (and the media that backs it) refuse to accept in the name of a black/white ‘you are with us or ag’in us” ideological agenda which has no tolerance for critics, differences of opinion or the anger of the dispossessed.
They only see themselves as victims, never the people they victimize. Prejudice often infects those who live in glass houses and who are quick to condemn others.
For many years, I admired Helen from afar, and later gave her an award for Truth In Media voted by my colleagues on Mediachannel.org. She was an institution, an icon of honor. We were impressed by her history of asking tough questions even when they embarrassed Presidents.
Then, suddenly, last June, I like everyone in the world of media, was stunned to witness her public fall from grace, partly self-inflicted, perhaps because of inelegant language used in response to an ambush interview by provocateur father-son Israeli advocates posing as journalists
They were following in the footsteps of the vicious comments by Ann ("You will find liberals always rooting for savages against civilization”) Coulter who earlier denounced her as an “old Arab” sitting yards from the President as if she was threatening him. She refused to dignify that smear with a response.
I didn’t know until she told me that she had also been hounded for years by Abe Foxman, a leader of the Anti-Defamation League, who demanded she explain 25 questions she asked Presidents over the decades, “I didn’t answer,” “she told me, “because I don’t respond to junk mail.”
Foxman then sent the questions to her employer trying to get her fired, she says. Later, he recruited former Bush Press Secretary Ari Fleisher in his crusade against her. Ari and his boss disliked her “hostile” questions about Iraq on official claims that have since been unmasked as lies.
Helen always stuck to her guns. She was considered the granddame of White House journalists. Presidents respected her. She went to China with Nixon. You don’t survive in that highly visible pit of presidential polemics for as long as she did by backing down. Many correspondents assigned there turn into bulldogs for the camera. Maybe that’s why Helen can appear abrupt at times.
She has, however, always been polite enough to try to answer questions from strangers without always realizing who she was dealing with in a new world of media hit jobs, where “GOTCHA” YouTube videos thrive on recording embarrassing moments, what we used to call “bloopers.’
In her senior years, she was brought down by a kid looking for a marketable soundbyte like the one he extracted -- as if he was a big game hunter in Africa who bagged a lioness. She had been baited and took the bait. Unaware of how the video could be used, she ventilated and then regretted doing so. It was too late. That one media hit job triggered millions of online video hits.
Helen later apologized for how she said what she did without retracting the essence of her convictions. But by then, it was too late. Her long career was instantly terminated. The perception became everything; the context nothing.
She tried to be conciliatory, saying, “I deeply regret my comments I made last week regarding the Israelis and the Palestinians. They do not reflect my heart-felt belief that peace will come to the Middle East only when all parties recognize the need for mutual respect and tolerance. May that day come soon.”
Those remarks were derided and dismissed, with the pundits and papers demanding her scalp. She had no choice but to resign after her company, her agent, her co-author and many “friends” started treating her like a pariah.
“You cannot criticize Israel in this country and survive,” she says now. She believes the Israel lobby controls the discourse on Israel. She cited, as an example, CNN firing a veteran editor in Lebanon for praising a popular cleric for his support for woman after he died. (CNN had no problems hiring Wolf Blitzer, a former executive director of AIPAC.)
I didn’t ask her but I am sure she is sympathetic to President Carter for speaking out on the issue the way he has, despite the way he was later dumped on. Once under predictable vitriolic attack began, even he was forced to back down away from some of his positions.
She was forced into retirement and thrown to the wolves in a media culture that relishes stories of personal destruction and missteps. It’s the old ‘the Media builds you up before they tear you down’ routine.
As blogger Jamie Frieze wrote, “I don't think she should have been forced to resign. After all, the freedom of speech doesn't come with the right to be comfortable. In other words, the fact that you're uncomfortable doesn't trump my free speech. Thomas made people uncomfortable, but that doesn't mean her speech should be punished.”
But punished she was
As a veteran of one kind of real journalism, she may have been inexperienced in dealing with our volatile media culture that now thrives on hostile ‘drive by’ attacks and putdowns.
When I called Helen Thomas to ask if she might be willing to share some of her thoughts on what happened, I found her as eloquent as ever, supportive of Wikileaks, critical of Grand Jury harassment in the Middle West against Palestinian supporters and angry with President Obama for his many right turns and spineless positions.
This clearly was not a mea culpa moment for her, but what has she learned from this ordeal?
While she hasn’t written about the incident she did speak to me about it for publication.
I first asked her for her view about what happened?
She was, she said, on a path outside the White House on a day in which Jewish leaders were being honored inside, at American Jewish Heritage Celebration Day, an event she said she was unaware of. A Rabbi, David Nesenoff, asked to speak to her, and introduced his two sons who he said wanted to become Journalists. (One was actually a friend of his son Adam, also his webmaster.)
“People seeking advice come to me a lot,” she explained, “and I told them about my love of journalism and that they should pursue their goals. I was gracious, and told them to go for it.”
Then the subject abruptly changed. “What you think of Israel they asked next. It was all very pleasant and I don’t blame them for asking,” she told me. But, then, she admitted, she didn’t know the people who she then said, “shoved a microphone in my face like a jack knife.”
It wasn’t just any Rabbi making conversation. Nessensoff is an ardent pro-Israel supporter who runs a website called Rabbi Live and can be a flamboyant self-promoter. He says, “even though I was born in Glen Cove and grew up in Syosset Long Island, Israel is my Jewish homeland. It is the homeland for all Jewish people.”
The Jewish Forward newspaper would later report, “Nesenoff came under scrutiny for appearing in a video depicting a man of Mexican descent pretending to give a weather forecast while a bearded rabbi in a black hat and coat stands nearby.
The four-and-a-half-minute video, titled “Holy Weather,” features Nesenoff dressed as “Father Julio Ramirez,” an outsize caricature of a Mexican priest. The rabbi makes statements that fuel stereotypes, painting Mexican laborers as dishwashers. He speaks in an exaggerated rasp of a Mexican accent, saying, among other things: “The last time I saw a map like that I was in an immigration office with three gringos down on the Mexican border, you know, right near New Mexico.” Fractured Spanish pops up from time to time, as when Nesenoff says the rabbi’s tendency to get better assignments is “no mucho bueno picnic.”
Though some critics used the skit as ammunition to portray him as a hypocrite and a racist, Nesenoff said he was dressed up because it was Purim.” God, he said, likes humor.
Israeli officials were not in a laughing mood during this period for other reasons. Fox News reported: “A senior Israeli politician tells Fox News that Israel is currently in the midst of its worst international crisis since the creation of the Jewish state. The politician, who asked not to be named in order to speak more candidly, added that for the first time Israel's legitimacy is being questioned by many in the international community.
“The official believes the lack of a viable peace process, combined with last week's Gaza-bound flotilla incident, which killed nine, has brought Israel to this situation. The Israeli public doesn't understand the severity of the situation, according to the politician. The official believes that Israelis should not react in a nationalistic way to recent events, because it is only weakening the Jewish state in this process.”
I don’t know If any of this was weighing on Helen’s mind but I do know that criticism of Israel was soon at an all time fever pitch because of the Gaza Aid Flotilla which left Turkey on the day of the “interview.”
Supporters of the humanitarian project feared Israel would attack the ships as they soon did. For media spin, Tel Aviv righteously and loudly defended its violent interception of the non-violent convoy as an act of legitimate self-defense but, later, quietly, paid compensation to the victims when the world media turned against them.
Soon, there would protests worldwide and furious exchanges in the media. Much of it was very emotional. There was also anger at President Obama for not denouncing Israel’s intervention on the high seas. But, by that time, Helen Thomas was silenced and silent.
(In some outlets, the incident “outing” Helen was used, bizarrely, as pro-Israel “balance” to show why Israel must act tough.)
Back at the North Lawn that day at the White House, Helen, who must have been following these evolving events, blew a fuse, or at least lost her usually professional demeanor. Here’s the now infamous exchange videotaped by an amateur cameraman, offering a deliberately unflattering and extreme tight close up of an 89 year-old woman.
Nesenoff: Any comments on Israel? We're asking everybod today, any comments on Israel?Nesenoff does not repeat her use of America, but only to Poland and German. He has nothing to say about her reference to occupation.
Thomas: Tell them to get the hell out of Palestine.
Nesenoff: Oooh. Any better comments on Israel?
Thomas: Remember, these people are occupied and it's their land. It's not German, it's not Poland ...
Nesenoff: So where should they go, what should they do?
Thomas: They go home.
Nesenoff: Where's the home?
Thomas: Poland, Germany and America and everywhere else.
Nesenoff: So you're saying the Jews go back to Poland and Germany?
Thomas: And America and everywhere else. Why push people out of there who have lived there for centuries? See?
Clearly, the question triggered something deeper in Helen, feelings that she had perhaps bottled up for many years in the White House where every reporter has a built in radar that teaches them to be careful about what they say and how they say it, especially on a subject like Israel that Helen considers a “third rail,” almost an “untouchable issue.” She earlier told one college audience, “I censored myself for 50 years when I was a reporter.” (She was then an opinion columnist and perhaps freer to speak her mind,)
Israel was not a new subject for her to comment on either. Anyone from the Arab world tends to have a very different understanding of the history there, a perspective that we rarely hear or see. It’s a narrative driven by anger ar unending Palestinian victimization.
She told me she had been in Israel in 1954 and visited the Palestinian village of Kibia that was invaded by Israel in which local residents were driven out and many killed. She told me she personally met many Palestinians forced from their homes. She is not the only one angry about this often hidden legacy, especially because many Israelis justify expelling Palestinians in biblical terms and are supported by Christian Evangelicals in saying so.
That’s ironic, isn’t it, because in our media, fanatical fundamentalists are only pictured as Muslims, rarely as Jews.
Her historic memory was clearly triggered although her views are hardly extreme. She says Israel has a right to exist, and so do Jews “like all people. But not the right to seize others lands.” She says Israel has defied 65 UN resolutions on these issues. She was frustrated when so many Presidents danced around the issues and in her view, “caved” on human rights.
To Nesenoff and many viewers oriented to see the world only through a unflinching pro-Israel narrative, Helen had crossed the line in their view from being anti-Israel to being anti-semetic. The reason: the inclusion of Poland and Germany into the mix were considered “obviously anti-Semetic.”
She agrees that by citing Germany, she opened the door to accusations of insensitivity, lumping her in with holocaust deniers, but denies being one or hating Jews. She says she was startled by that charge because she is, she says, a Semite so how can she be anti-Semetic? (Another irony: Jewish emigration to today’s Germany has increased 10 fold since the fall of the Berlin Wall to 200,000 with many leaving Israel. This “reverse exodus” troubles Israeli officials.)
Helen told me her thinking on this subject goes back to being moved by a Rabbi who spoke alongside Martin Luther King Jr at the March on Washington in 1963. I was there also, and heard him speak too, and so I looked him up.
It was Joachim Prinz of the American Jewish Congress who made a speech that influenced a younger Helen Thomas. He said, “When I was the rabbi of the Jewish community in Berlin under the Hitler regime, I learned many things. The most important thing that I learned under those tragic circumstances was that bigotry and hatred are not the most urgent problem. The most urgent, the most disgraceful, the most shameful and the most tragic problem is silence.”
Helen says her whole career has been about combating the sin of silence. She says she has now been liberated to speak out. And “all I would like is for people to know what I was trying to say, that Palestinians are living under tyranny and that their rights are being violated. All I want is some sympathy for Palestinians.”
Had she said it like that, if she had perhaps made a distinction between Israel as a State and its settlers on occupied lands, she might still have her job. Unfortunately, what she did say, and how she said it, brought all the attention on her, not the issues she was trying to expose.
Now it’s the holiday season, allegedly a time of peace and forgiveness when Presidents issue pardons to convicted criminals and reflection is theoretically permitted, a time when its been suggested that even a State Department hawk like Richard Holbrooke could, on his deathbed call for an end to the Afghan war that he had dogmatically supported.
We have watched the rehabilitation of so many politicians over recent years who have stumbled, taken money or disgraced themselves in sex scandals, including Senators, even Presidents.
Helen Thomas is not in that category.
Yet, many of those “fallen” are back in action, tarnished perhaps, but allowed to recant, to work and then appear in the media.
But, to this day, there has been almost no compassion, empathy or respect shown for one of our great journalists, Helen Thomas, who has been presumed guilty and sentenced to oblivion with barely a word spoken in her defense. She admittedly misspoke and is now officially “Missing” like some disappeared priest in Argentina
A whole world may be critical of Israel. Millions may believe that the occupiers should withdraw or that that Israeli rejectionism of the peace process must end. But when a “mainstream” American reporter of great stature touches these sentiments, she is consigned to Dante’s inferno, and turned into a non-person.
How can we expect Israelis and Palestinians to reconcile if our media won’t set an example by reconciling with Helen Thomas?
---
"President Obama defends Susan Rice against criticism from John McCain, Lindsey Graham and Kelly Ayotte
As Obama’s longest-serving foreign policy adviser,
Susan Rice, 47, is reportedly under consideration to succeed Secretary of State
Hillary Rodham Clinton. (Stephen Chernin — AFP/Getty Images)
President Obama strongly defended U.N.
Ambassador Susan Rice against attacks Wednesday by a trio of Republican
senators who said she is ill-qualified to serve as secretary of state because of
how she explained the roots of the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. consulate in
Benghazi, Libya.
Bristling with evident indignation during
a news conference, Obama said Rice has “done exemplary work” with “skill,
professionalism and toughness and grace.”
He then made a pointedly and almost personal challenge to Sens. John McCain
(R-Ariz.), Lindsey
Graham (R-S.C.) and Kelly Ayotte
(R-N.H.) who earlier Wednesday said Rice is unqualified to lead the State
Department because she appeared either misinformed or ill-prepared to discuss
the attack on the U.S. diplomatic post in Benghazi, on national political talk
shows a few days after the attack.
“If Sen. McCain and Sen. Graham and others want to go after somebody they
should go after me,” Obama said. “For them to go after the UN ambassador who had
nothing to do with Benghazi…to besmirch her reputation is outrageous.”
Obama said he hasn’t made any final decisions on who to nominate to Cabinet
posts in his second term, but said that he would not hesitate to nominate Rice
even in the face of Republican opposition.
Graham responded to Obama’s comments by e-mail just as the press conference
concluded. “Mr. President, don’t think for one minute I don’t hold you
ultimately responsible for Benghazi,” Graham said in a statement. “I think you
failed as Commander in Chief before, during, and after the attack.”
Graham joined with McCain and Ayotte Wednesday to call for Watergate-style
hearings on the Libya attack, while also saying they would block Rice’s
nomination, if it occurs.
“I am dead-set on making sure that we don’t promote anybody who was an
essential player in the Benghazi debacle,” Graham told reporters.
McCain added later that they would not rule out mounting a filibuster of the
nomination.
Obama is reportedly
considering Rice to succeed Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton as
head of the State Department as part of a series of moves that might also send
Sen. John
F. Kerry (D-Mass.) to lead the Pentagon. Rice, 47, served as an adviser to
Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign and was later tapped to represent the United
States at U.N. headquarters in New York. Rice makes few television appearances
to discuss the administration’s foreign policy, but she appeared on all five
major-network Sunday morning political talk shows less than a week after the
Benghazi attack.
During those interviews, Rice said that the attack grew out of a spontaneous
demonstration against an anti-Muslim video. But reports from the ground and
statements by administration officials since Rice’s comments have varied
Graham was especially critical of Rice on Wednesday and said her comments on
the shows were “so disconnected to reality, I don’t trust her. And the reason I
don’t trust her is because I think she knew better, and if she didn’t know
better, she shouldn’t be the voice of America. Somebody has got to start paying
a price around this place.”
Ayotte agreed: “You don’t end up on every single major Sunday show without
affirmatively putting yourself out there of wanting to carry forward a message
on behalf of the administration. I think that there’s a certain responsibility
with the current position that she has to ask proper questions about what we did
and didn’t know at that point before she affirmatively puts herself out there on
every major network to communicate to the American people.”
The senators said they want a special joint committee to investigate the
attack and hear testimony from the administration’s top national security
officials, including former
CIA director David Petraeus, because separate ongoing investigations by the
Senate’s armed services, foreign relations and intelligence committees will only
yield partial information.
“The three committees will not be able to hear what the other groups are
saying,” Graham said. “I’d like to ask Gen.Petraeus some questions, and I’m sure
there are some people on the [Intelligence Committee] that would like to hear
what the Department of Defense has to say about their handling of the Benghazi
attack. And when it comes to the State Department, all of us would like to know,
why were there so many requests for additional security denied.”
“If you have these people in separate rooms, telling separate stories, trying
to blame each other, it’s going to fall through the cracks,” Graham added.
But Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) said Wednesday that he
would not bring the senators’ resolution up for a vote. And Senate
Intelligence Committee Chairman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) also said
Wednesday that she wouldn’t support establishing a select committee: “We’re
doing our inquiry, that’s already underway.”
In his remarks, Obama also denied that the military or CIA held back any
assets or effort in attempts to rescue the Americans under attack. “My orders to
my national security team were to do whatever we need to do to make sure they
are safe,” Obama said.
Greg Miller contributed to this report.
Share your thoughts in the comments section below.
Follow Ed O’Keefe on Twitter: @edatpost "
"Obama offers fierce defense of Susan Rice"
http://wavenewspapers.com/news/national_world/article_9af1a854-2e32-11e2-bf39-0019bb30f31a.html
---
"Violencia en la franja de Gaza
---
"Violencia en la franja de Gaza
Gaza. Los ataques aéreos de Israel contra objetivos
palestinos de las últimas horas han dejado al menos 13 muertos y 145 heridos; en
tanto, un cohete palestino lanzado desde la franja impactó un edificio de
viviendas en la población israelí de Kiriat Malachi, con un saldo de tres
fallecidos. Reuters" (La Jornada, Jueves 15 de noviembre de 2012).
"Mueren 13 palestinos y 3 israelíes en ataques tras muerte de líder de Hamas
Tras lanzamiento de cohetes desde Gaza, Tel Aviv ha
atacado más de 160 puntos en la Franja.
Dpa
Publicado: 15/11/2012 07:51
Publicado: 15/11/2012 07:51
Gaza/Tel Aviv. La escalada de violencia entre Israel y
las organizaciones armadas palestinas en la Franja de Gaza dejo hoy al menos 16
muertos y más de un centenar de heridos, un día después de la ejecución
selectiva del líder del brazo militar de Hamas por parte del ejército
israelí.
Un cohete palestino lanzado desde la franja alcanzó un edificio
de viviendas en la localidad israelí de Kiriat Malachi, causando tres muertos.
En contraposición, los reiterados ataques aéreos israelíes contra objetivos
palestinos en el marco de su nueva ofensiva bautizada como Pilar de
Defensa dejaron 13 muertos y al menos 145 heridos, según fuentes del
Ministerio de Salud de Gaza, territorio controlado desde 2007 por la
organización islamista Hamas.
Entre las víctimas palestinas se encontraban al menos cuatro
civiles, entre ellos dos niños de tres y 11 años y una mujer embarazada, indicó
el portavoz del Ministerio, Ashraf al Qedra. Hamas reconoció por su parte la
muerte de seis de sus militantes, todos miembros de su brazo militar, las
llamadas Brigadas de Al Qassam. Por el momento no se revelaron las identidades
de los tres muertos restantes, todos hombres jóvenes.
El ejército israelí comenzó a llamar a filas a sus reservistas,
lo que hizo aumentar la especulaciones sobre una posible incursión terrestre en
la franja palestina. Según una portavoz militar en Tel Aviv, desde el comienzo
de Pilar de Defensa han sido atacados desde el aire o desde el mar más
de 160 objetivos en la Franja de Gaza.
Por su parte, Hamas asegura haber lanzado más de 120 cohetes
contra territorio israelí. Israel habla por su parte de 135. En grandes ciudades
como Beersheva, Ashkelon y Ashdod sonaban hoy una y otra vez las sirenas de
alarma. Una cuarta parte de los cohetes pudo ser derribado por el sistema de
defensa anticohetes. El ejército desmintió sin embargo afirmaciones de Hamas de
que lanzó por primera vez un cohete Fajr 5 de fabricación iraní contra Tel
Aviv.
Mientras tanto, decenas de miles de palestinos se concentraron
hoy en la capital de la franja para asistir al funeral del jefe militar de
Hamas, Ahmed al Yaabari, alcanzado el miércoles por un cohete israelí mientras
conducía. Hamas calificó su asesinato de “declaración de guerra” por parte de
Israel y anunció venganza.
Durante el funeral de Al Yaabari y su guardaespaldas, también
abatido en el acto, el hijo del fallecido líder de Hamas, Muaz, aseguró que los
palestinos no abandonarán la resistencia. “Seguiremos levantando los rifles y
seguiremos a mi padre y continuaremos con su mensaje”, dijo el joven de 20 años
a la prensa.
“La guerra contra la ocupación continuará. Esta guerra será
gradual y se dirigirá paso a paso contra los sionistas hasta que consiga sus
objetivos”, afirmó por su parte el portavoz de Hamas en Gaza, Fawzi Barhoum,
quien también participó en el funeral, al contrario que los mayores líderes
políticos de la organización, Ismail Haniya y Mahmud al Zahar, quienes se
ausentaron ante los temores a ser víctimas también de un asesinato
selectivo.
El primer ministro israelí, Benjamin Netanyahu, aseguró en la
noche del miércoles que la operación militar contra militantes palestinos podría
ser ampliada en caso de necesidad.
Por su parte, el ministro de Defensa, Ehud Barak, habló de
cuatro objetivos de Pilar de Defensa: reforzar la disuasión israelí,
destrozar la infraestructura de cohetes en la Franja de Gaza, debilitar a grupos
terroristas y proteger a la población ante posibles lanzamientos futuros de
cohetes. También la oposición mostró su apoyo a la operación.
La nueva ronda de violencia comenzó el sábado, después de que
un jeep israelí fuera alcanzado por un cohete lanzado desde la franja.
En el ataque resultaron heridos cuatro soldados, algunos de
gravedad.
http://www.jornada.unam.mx/ultimas/2012/11/15/75117124-mueren-tres-personas-en-israel-por-cohete-lanzado-desde-gaza
---
Eligio Del Awiizotl
ObamaWarnsMcCain:GoAfterU.N.Ambassador Rice? ‘You have a problem with me.’ | http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/ticket/live-video-watch-obama-first-press-conference-election-153317135--election.html … via @Palestinereport @un @scotsforfreedom
---
Sunday, June 26, 2011
¿QUIÉN MIENTE O CAE EN DOBLE DISCURSO* EN TOTAL AGRAVIO DEL PUEBLO PALESTINO:
BARACK OBAMA O SUSAN RICE...?
http://fideiius.blogspot.com/2011/06/quien-miente-o-cae-en-doble-discurso.html
---
*)
Tuesday, December 13, 2011
"LA BANDERA DE PALESTINA YA ONDEA EN LA UNESCO"
http://fideiius.blogspot.com/2011/12/la-bandera-de-palestina-ya-ondea-en-la.html
Sunday, September 16, 2012
UNPLEASANT IMPERIAL "GAMES"... "FRIENDS OF 'SAM BACILE': A WHO'S WHO OF THE INNOCENCE OF MUSLIMS FILM"
http://fideiius.blogspot.com/2012/09/friends-of-sam-bacile-whos-who-of.html
Thursday, October 18, 2012
"CHOMSKY HACE SU PRIMERA VISITA A LA FRANJA DE GAZA"
http://fideiius.blogspot.com/2012/10/chomsky-hacesu-primera-visita-la-franja.html
---
"Linguists including Noam Chomsky condemn "reprehensible" Gaza coverage
The Electronic Intifada received today the following statement from international academics who recently particpated in a conference on linguistics at the Islamic University of Gaza which decries major media outlets’ failure to report on recent killings of Palestinian civilians by Israeli forces in Gaza. I wrote about this pattern of omission and bias on my blog earlier today, focusing on The New York Times’ omission of Palestinian civilian casualties and its privileging of Israeli military and government officials in its report on today’s attacks.
---
*)
Tuesday, December 13, 2011
"LA BANDERA DE PALESTINA YA ONDEA EN LA UNESCO"
http://fideiius.blogspot.com/2011/12/la-bandera-de-palestina-ya-ondea-en-la.html
Sunday, September 16, 2012
UNPLEASANT IMPERIAL "GAMES"... "FRIENDS OF 'SAM BACILE': A WHO'S WHO OF THE INNOCENCE OF MUSLIMS FILM"
http://fideiius.blogspot.com/2012/09/friends-of-sam-bacile-whos-who-of.html
Thursday, October 18, 2012
"CHOMSKY HACE SU PRIMERA VISITA A LA FRANJA DE GAZA"
http://fideiius.blogspot.com/2012/10/chomsky-hacesu-primera-visita-la-franja.html
---
"Linguists including Noam Chomsky condemn "reprehensible" Gaza coverage
Submitted by Maureen Clare Murphy on Wed, 11/14/2012 - 23:43
A Palestinian man carries his wounded son into the treatment room of al-Shifa hospital following an Israeli airstrike in Gaza City, 14 November.
(Majdi Fathi / APA images)
(Majdi Fathi / APA images)
Media reporting on Gaza: Nous accusons.
While countries across Europe and North America commemorated military casualties of past and present wars on November 11, Israel was targeting civilians. On November 12, waking up to a new week, readers at breakfast were flooded with heart rending accounts of past and current military casualties. There was, however, no or little mention of the fact that the majority of casualties of modern day wars are civilians. There was also hardly any mention on the morning of November 12 of military attacks on Gaza that continued throughout the weekend. A cursory scan confirms this for Canada’s CBC, the Globe and Mail, Montreal’s Gazette, and the Toronto Star. Equally, for the New York Times and for the BBC.
According to the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) report on Sunday November 11, five Palestinian civilians including three children had been killed in the Gaza strip in the previous 72 hours, in addition to two Palestinian security personnel. Four of the deaths occurred as a result of Israeli military firing artillery shells on youngsters playing soccer. Moreover, 52 civilians had been wounded, of which six were women and 12 were children. (Since we began composing this text, the Palestinian death toll has risen, and continues to rise.)
Articles that do report on the killings overwhelmingly focus on the killing of Palestinian security personnel. For example, an Associated Press article published in the CBC world news on November 13, entitled Israel mulls resuming targeted killings of Gaza militants, mentions absolutely nothing of civilian deaths and injuries. It portrays the killings as ‘targeted assassinations’. The fact that casualties have overwhelmingly been civilians indicates that Israel is not so much engaged in “targeted” killings, as in “collective” killings, thus once again committing the crime of collective punishment. Another AP item on CBC news from November 12 reads Gaza rocket fire raises pressure on Israel government. It features a photo of an Israeli woman gazing on a hole in her living room ceiling. Again, no images, nor mention of the numerous bleeding casualties or corpses in Gaza. Along the same lines, a BBC headline on November 12 reads Israel hit by fresh volley of rockets from Gaza. Similar trend can be illustrated for European mainstream papers.
News items overwhelmingly focus on the rockets that have been fired from Gaza, none of which have caused human casualties. What is not in focus are the shellings and bombardments on Gaza, which have resulted in numerous severe and fatal casualties. It doesn’t take an expert in media science to understand that what we are facing is at best shoddy and skewed reporting, and at worst willfully dishonest manipulation of the readership.
Furthermore, articles that do mention the Palestinian casualties in Gaza consistently report that Israeli operations are in response to rockets from Gaza and to the injuring of Israeli soldiers. However, the chronology of events of the recent flare-up began onNovember 5, when an innocent, apparently mentally unfit, 20-year old man, Ahmad al-Nabaheen, was shot when he wandered close to the border. Medics had to wait for six hours to be permitted to pick him up and they suspect that he may have died because of that delay. Then, on November 8, a 13-year old boy playing football in front of his house was killed by fire from the IOF that had moved into Gazan territory with tanks as well as helicopters. The wounding of four Israeli soldiers at the border on November 10 was therefore already part of a chain of events where Gazan civilians had been killed, and not the triggering event.
We, the signatories, have recently returned from a visit to the Gaza Strip. Some among us are now connected to Palestinians living in Gaza through social media. For two nights in a row Palestinians in Gaza were prevented from sleeping through continued engagement of drones, F16s, and indiscriminate bombings of various targets inside the densely populated Gaza strip. The intent of this is clearly to terrorise the population, successfully so, as we can ascertain from our friends’ reports. If it was not for Facebook postings, we would not be aware of the degree of terror felt by ordinary Palestinian civilians in Gaza. This stands in stark contrast to the world’s awareness of terrorised and shock-treated Israeli citizens.
An extract of a report sent by a Canadian medic who happened to be in Gaza and helped out in Shifa hospital ER over the weekend says: “the wounded were all civilians with multiple puncture wounds from shrapnel: brain injuries, neck injuries, hemo-pneumo thorax, pericardial tamponade, splenic rupture, intestinal perforations, slatted limbs, traumatic amputations. All of this with no monitors, few stethoscopes, one ultrasound machine. …. Many people with serious but non life threatening injuries were sent home to be re-assessed in the morning due to the sheer volume of casualties. The penetrating shrapnel injuries were spooky. Tiny wounds with massive internal injuries. … There was very little morphine for analgesia.”
Apparently such scenes are not newsworthy for the New York Times, the CBC, or the BBC.
Bias and dishonesty with respect to the oppression of Palestinians is nothing new in Western media and has been widely documented. Nevertheless, Israel continues its crimes against humanity with full acquiescence and financial, military, and moral support from our governments, the U.S., Canada and the EU. Netanyahu is currently garnering Western diplomatic support for additional operations in Gaza, which makes us worry that another Cast Lead may be on the horizon. In fact, the very recent events are confirming such an escalation has already begun, as today’s death-count climbs. The lack of widespread public outrage at these crimes is a direct consequence of the systematic way in which the facts are withheld and/or of the skewed way these crimes are portrayed.
We wish to express our outrage at the reprehensible media coverage of these acts in the mainstream (corporate) media. We call on journalists around the world working for corporate media outlets to refuse to be instruments of this systematic policy of disguise. We call on citizens to inform themselves through independent media, and to voice their conscience by whichever means is accessible to them.
Hagit Borer, linguist, Queen Mary University of London (UK)
Antoine Bustros, composer and writer, Montreal (Canada)
Noam Chomsky, linguist, Massachussetts Institute of Technology, US
David Heap, linguist, University of Western Ontario (Canada)
Stephanie Kelly, linguist, University of Western Ontario (Canada)
Máire Noonan, linguist, McGill University (Canada)
Philippe Prévost, linguist, University of Tours (France)
Verena Stresing, biochemist, University of Nantes (France)
Laurie Tuller, linguist, University of Tours (France)
Tags: Noam ChomskyHagit BorerAntoine BustrosDavid HeapStephanie KellyMáire NoonanPhilippe PrévostVerena StresingLaurie Tuller#GazaUnderAttackmedia biasmainstream media "
http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/maureen-clare-murphy/linguists-including-noam-chomsky-condemn-reprehensible-gaza-coverage
EN LA ONU... "CUBA: ASAMBLEA GENERAL PIDE UNA VEZ MÁS FIN DEL EMBARGO"
http://fideiius.blogspot.com/2012/11/en-la-onu-cuba-asamblea-general-pide.html
THE TEXAS' MUSCLE... "TEXAS SECESSION PETITION RACKS UP MORE THAN 80,000 SIGNATURES, QUALIFIES FOR WHITE HOUSE RESPONSE"
http://fideiius.blogspot.com/2012/11/blog-post_14.html
---
Eligio Del Awiizotl@EligioAwiizotl
@answercoalition @SenJohnMcCain @GrahamBlog @KellyAyotte @barackobama @daily_chomsky @edatpost @DesmondTutuPF @hrw ◄ http://fideiius.blogspot.com/2012/11/mientras-la-inmisericorde-masacre-de.html …
@_CICC @IntlCrimCourt #UNASUR @MuslimMatters @UN @scotsforfreedom @UNESCO #Palestine @UNICEF @UNAM_MX @HuffPostPol ◄ http://fideiius.blogspot.com/2012/11/mientras-la-inmisericorde-masacre-de.html …
---
---
The European Union is not “merely hypocritical” in its relationship with Israel, it is “complicit in crimes against the Palestinian people.” This is one of the main conclusions of David Cronin’s compellingly-argued book Europe’s Alliance With Israel: Aiding the Occupation.
In fact, the European Union is steadily upgrading its relations with Israel while overwhelming, and growing, public majorities across Europe’s largest nations view Israel “mostly negatively.” According to a recent BBC GlobeScan poll, Israel is on a par with North Korea as the third worst perceived country in the world (“Views of Europe slide sharply in global poll, while views of China improve,” GlobeScan, 10 May).
With the entrenchment of its occupation, colonization and apartheid against the Palestinians, its fanatic-right government’s hubristic and bellicose policies, and the impressive growth of the non-violent Palestinian-led, global boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement for Palestinian rights, Israel is gradually losing hearts and minds across the world and becoming the world pariah, as South Africa once was, during apartheid.
Desmond Tutu, the South African archbishop, is particularly eloquent in accusing Israel of the crime of apartheid (“Tutu condemns Israeli ‘apartheid’,” BBC News, 29 April 2002). The Russell Tribunal on Palestine — at its 2011 Cape Town session — determined that Israel is practicing apartheid against the entire Palestinian people, according to the definition of apartheid adopted by the UN in 1973 (“Findings of the South African session,” Russell Tribunal on Palestine, 5-7 November 2011 [PDF]).
Increasingly, international jurists, human rights organizations and activists, as well as international public opinion are recognizing Israel’s unique regime of oppression against the Palestinians as encompassing the crime of apartheid, in addition to occupation, ethnic cleansing and settler colonialism.
With its continued siege of Gaza; its untamed construction of illegal colonies and an apartheid wall in the occupied West Bank, especially in and around Jerusalem; its “strategy of Judaization” in Jerusalem, the Galilee, the Jordan Valley and the Naqab (Negev); its adoption of new racist laws and its denial of the UN-stipulated right of the Palestinian refugees to return to their homes from which they were ethnically cleansed during the Nakba, Israel has embarked on a more belligerent and violent phase in its attempt to extinguish the question of Palestine through literally “disappearing” the Palestinians, as Edward Said would say.
A 2009 report by Amnesty International affirmed that, “90–95 percent of the water supply [in Gaza] is contaminated and unfit for human consumption” (“Troubled waters: Palestinians denied fair access to water,” October 2009 [PDF]).
The report cites an earlier study by the UN Environmental Programme which correlates the widespread contamination of Gaza’s water resources to the rise in nitrate levels in the groundwater “far above the WHO [World Health Organization] accepted guideline,” inducing a potentially lethal blood disorder in young children and newborns called methemoglobinaemia, or the “blue babies” phenomenon.
Some of the detected symptoms of this disease in Gaza infants include “blueness around the mouth, hands and feet,” “episodes of diarrhea and vomiting,” and “loss of consciousness.” “Convulsions and death can occur” at higher levels of nitrate contamination, the report concludes (“Environmental assessment of the Gaza Strip following the escalation of hostilities in December 2008-January 2009,” September 2009 [PDF].)
At the conclusion of Israel’s war of aggression on Gaza in late 2008 and early 2009, which led to more than 1,400 deaths, mostly civilians, EU leaders dashed to occupied Jerusalem to celebrate with Israel’s then prime minister Ehud Olmert, promising to support Israel in fighting “terror” (“World leaders push for lasting truce in Gaza,” The New York Times, 18 January 2009).
So, when the European Union, which is still actively colluding to maintain the Gaza siege, launches a relatively expensive public relations campaign all over Gaza — and the West Bank — with its main slogan, “Your Priorities are ours,” without a hint of sarcasm, it seems to be sending the Palestinians under occupation two blunt messages: first, we could not care less about your loss of human lives, freedoms and dignity, and second, “We set the priorities, you adopt them as yours, or else we cut funding” (“The priorities of the European Union are not ours,” MWC News, 18 July 2011).
Most crucially, such a funder-driven, unjust political settlement would perpetuate Israel’s denial of the basic rights of the great majority of the Palestinian people, those in exile as well as in Israel. Foremost among those rights is the inalienable right to participate in exercising self determination. It has been declared by the UN as a prerequisite for any nation under colonial rule to enjoy the full set of rights, political, cultural, economic and other fundamental rights.
Arabs in general and Palestinians in particular were effectively forced to pay the price for a genocidal crime that they had no role in, and are now being bribed to accept injustice as fate, so that this dark chapter in Western history can finally reach closure.
But Europe’s collusion with Israel is too intricate to reduce to sheer Holocaust guilt. Economic interest, US influence, Islamophobia, the prevalence of a security mentality and the corresponding growth of the military-security industry, are all very relevant factors, too, in understanding this relationship.
Ever coveting artificially low-priced energy resources and open access to a large, under-developed, structurally dependent market, various Western powers, after all, were the ones who played the most important role in establishing and nourishing Israel as a colonial outpost in the region. Today, the EU’s governments and institutions continue to support Israel economically, diplomatically, academically and politically to maintain its domination and their interests.
A translated version of this article will be published as a preface to the forthcoming French-language edition of David Cronin’s book Europe’s Alliance With Israel: Aiding the Occupation.
Omar Barghouti is an independent Palestinian human rights activist. He is a co-founder of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) Movement and the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israeli (PACBI)."
"More like this
http://electronicintifada.net/content/eu-support-israeli-crimes-makes-it-unworthy-nobel-peace-prize/11771
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"Why Obama won’t take on Israel
Barack Obama’s victory in the US presidential election last week was greeted with general unease in Israel.
Surveys conducted outside the US shortly before polling day showed Obama was the preferred candidate in every country but two — Pakistan and Israel. But unlike Pakistan, where the two candidates were equally unpopular, he scored just 22 percent in Israel against a commanding 57 percent for Mitt Romney.
Given these figures, it is unsurprising that Israel’s right-wing prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, made little effort to conceal his political sympathies, laying on a hero’s welcome for Romney when he visited Jerusalem in the summer and starring in several of his TV campaign ads.
Ehud Olmert, a former Israeli prime minister, accused Netanyahu of “spitting” in the president’s face, warning that Israel would now be exposed to Obama’s second-term wrath (“Olmert blasts Bibi on Iran, relationship with Obama,” The Daily Beast, 6 November).
The general wisdom is that the president, freed of worries about being re-elected, will seek his revenge, both for Netanyahu’s long-term intransigence in the peace process and for interfering in the US campaign.
Newspaper cartoons summed up the mood last week. The liberal Haaretz showed a sweating Netanyahu gingerly putting his head into the mouth of an Obama-faced lion, while the right-wing Jerusalem Post had Netanyahu exclaiming “Oh bummer!” as he read the headlines.
The speculation among Israelis and many observers is that an Obama second term will see much greater pressure on Israel both to make major concessions on Palestinian statehood and to end its aggressive posturing towards Iran over its supposed ambition to build a nuclear warhead.
Netanyahu’s bullish mood was certainly on display as voting in the US election was under way: his government announced plans to build more than 1,200 homes for Jewish settlers in East Jerusalem, the presumed capital of a future Palestinian state (“Israel pushes forward with 1,200 homes in East Jerusalem settlements,” Guardian, 6 November).
The reality, as Netanyahu understands well, is that Obama’s hands are now tied as firmly in the Middle East as they were during his first term.
Obama got burnt previously when he tried to impose a settlement freeze. There are no grounds for believing that Israel’s far-right lobbyists in Washington, led by AIPAC, will give the president an easier ride this time.
And as Ron Ben Yishai, a veteran Israeli commentator, noted, Obama will face the same US Congress, one that has “traditionally been a stronghold of near-unconditional support for Israel” (“Obama better for Israel,” Ynet, 6 November).
Obama may not have to worry about re-election but he will not want to hand a poisoned legacy to the next Democratic presidential candidate, nor will want to mire his own final term in damaging confrontations with Israel. Memories are still raw of Bill Clinton’s failed gamble to push through a peace deal — one that, in truth, was a far-more generous to Israel than the Palestinians — at Camp David in the dying days of his second term.
And whatever his personal antipathy towards the Israeli prime minister, Obama also knows that, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict aside, his policies in the Middle East are either aligned with Israel’s or dependent on Netanyahu’s cooperation to work.
And, of course, both want to box in Iran on its nuclear ambitions. So far Netanyahu has reluctantly toed the US line on “giving sanctions a chance,” toning down his rhetoric about launching an attack. The last thing the White House needs is a sulking Israeli premier priming his cohorts in Washington to undermine US policy.
A sliver of hope for Netanyahu’s opponents is that a disgruntled US president might still take limited revenge, turning the tables by interfering in the Israeli elections due in January. He could back more moderate challengers such as Olmert or Tzipi Livni, if they choose to run and start to look credible.
But even that would be a big gamble.
The evidence shows that, whatever the makeup of the next Israeli governing coalition, it will espouse policies little different from the current one. That simply reflects the lurch rightwards among Israeli voters, as indicated in a poll this month showing that 80 percent now believe it is impossible to make peace with the Palestinians.
In fact, given the mood in Israel, an obvious attempt by Obama to side with one of Netanyahu’s opponents might actually harm their prospects for success. Netanyahu has already demonstrated to Israelis that he can defeat the US president in a staring contest. Many Israelis are likely to conclude that no one is better placed to keep an unsympathetic Obama in check in his second term.
Faced with a popular consensus in Israel and political backing in the US Congress for a hard line with the Palestinians, Obama is an unlikely champion of the peace process – and even of the Palestinians’ current lowly ambition to win observer status at the United Nations. A vote on this matter is currently threatened for 29 November, with the Palestinian Authority’s President Mahmoud Abbas apparently hoping that the anniversary of the 1947 UN partition plan for Palestine will provide emotional resonance.
Meanwhile, all Israel’s main parties are battling for the large pool of right-wing votes. Shelly Yacimovich, leader of the opposition Labor party, last week denied her party was “left-wing,” in a sign of how dirty that word has become in Israel. She has studiously avoided mentioning the Palestinians or diplomatic issues.
And the great new hope of Israeli politics, former TV star Yair Lapid, has rapidly come to sound like a Netanyahu-lite. Last week he publicly opposed giving up even the Palestinian parts of East Jerusalem, arguing that the Palestinians could be browbeaten into surrendering their putative capital (“Lapid: If Israel stands firm Palestinians will give up on East Jerusalem,” Haaretz, 8 November).
The reality is that the White House is stuck with an Israeli government, with or without Netanyahu, that rejects an agreement with the Palestinians. As violence flares again in Gaza — as occurred in the run-up to the last Israeli election — it looks disturbingly like four more years of the same.
Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books are Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (Pluto Press) and Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair (Zed Books). His new website is www.jonathan-cook.net.
A version of this article originally appeared in The National (Abu Dhabi).
---
http://www.jonathan-cook.net/2012-11-02/israeli-ministry-of-tourism-map-annexes-over-60-of-the-west-bank/
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El gobierno de Benjamin Netanyahu trata de legitimar los bombardeos sobre Gaza como una acción
Hoy día, mientras las fuerzas israelíes lanzan decenas de misiles aire-tierra sobre Gaza, el régimen de Tel Aviv pretende impedir a toda costa que el gobernante cisjordano Mahmud Abbas acuda a la ONU para lograr el reconocimiento de Palestina como Estado observador, hasta el punto de que el canciller israelí, Avigdor Lieberman, amenazó al titular de la Autoridad Nacional Palestina con
En tal circunstancia, los lanzamientos de cohetes artesanales desde Gaza hacia territorio israelí constituyen la respuesta de un pueblo despojado, masacrado, sometido al terror permanente y confinado en lo que ha sido descrito como la mayor cárcel al aire libre en el mundo. El que esa respuesta sea ineficaz y hasta contraproducente no justifica que se le convierta en argumento para la consumación de nuevas masacres. La pretensión de aplicar criterios simétricos para la violencia de los oprimidos y la de los opresores conlleva una inmoralidad mayúscula, por cuanto pretende ignorar la condición de víctimas de los primeros y la de victimarios de los segundos. Es tan grotesca como lo habría sido la condena a los habitantes del gueto de Varsovia que en enero de 1943 se alzaron en armas contra los nazis.
En el momento presente, cuando se perfila el peligro de una nueva lluvia de plomo endurecido sobre la población inerme de Gaza, resulta impostergable que las sociedades de Estados Unidos y Europa occidental se movilicen y presionen a sus respectivos gobiernos para que éstos, a su vez, impongan al régimen de Tel Aviv una mínima contención antes de que el planeta asista a otra masacre de palestinos."
http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2012/11/16/edito
Los artefactos hicieron blanco en Tel Aviv, por primera vez en 20 años. Horas
antes, un proyectil lanzado por el grupo Hamas mató a tres israelíes al norte de
Gaza. Aviones de guerra continuaron sus bombardeos contra blancos dentro y
alrededor de esta última ciudad, al continuar la escalada de violencia que ya
cobró la vida de 19 palestinos. Las fuerzas militares israelíes dijeron que ya
hay luz verde para llamar a 30 mil soldados reservistas ante una posible
incursión terrestre. Egipto e Irán condenaron el ataque del gobierno de
Netanyahu. En la imagen, un civil corre entre nubes de gas lacrimógeno durante
las protestas frente a la prisión de Ofer, cerca de la ciudad cisjordana de
Ramallá Foto AP
Palestinos disparan cohetes contra Tel Aviv por primera vez en 20 años"
---
"8:00Hamas dispara cohete contra Tel Aviv; cae en zona deshabitada."
http://aristeguinoticias.com/1611/mundo/video-asi-se-lanzo-uno-de-los-primeros-cohetes-contra-gaza/
"David Petraeus Testifies in Closed Door Benghazi Hearing"
http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/video/david-petraeus-testifies-closed-door-benghazi-hearing-17743698
http://abcnews.go.com/topics/news/whitehouse/susan-rice.htm
EN LA ONU... "CUBA: ASAMBLEA GENERAL PIDE UNA VEZ MÁS FIN DEL EMBARGO"
http://fideiius.blogspot.com/2012/11/en-la-onu-cuba-asamblea-general-pide.html
THE TEXAS' MUSCLE... "TEXAS SECESSION PETITION RACKS UP MORE THAN 80,000 SIGNATURES, QUALIFIES FOR WHITE HOUSE RESPONSE"
http://fideiius.blogspot.com/2012/11/blog-post_14.html
---
Eligio Del Awiizotl
---
También lanza serie de bombardeos sobre Gaza: 9
muertos y 50 heridos
Netanyahu
abrió las puertas del infierno, dice la organización palestina"
---
"EU support for Israeli crimes makes it unworthy of Nobel Peace Prize
15 October 2012
Israeli foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman at an EU press conference
(Ye Pingfan / Xinhua/Zumapress)
(Ye Pingfan / Xinhua/Zumapress)
In fact, the European Union is steadily upgrading its relations with Israel while overwhelming, and growing, public majorities across Europe’s largest nations view Israel “mostly negatively.” According to a recent BBC GlobeScan poll, Israel is on a par with North Korea as the third worst perceived country in the world (“Views of Europe slide sharply in global poll, while views of China improve,” GlobeScan, 10 May).
With the entrenchment of its occupation, colonization and apartheid against the Palestinians, its fanatic-right government’s hubristic and bellicose policies, and the impressive growth of the non-violent Palestinian-led, global boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement for Palestinian rights, Israel is gradually losing hearts and minds across the world and becoming the world pariah, as South Africa once was, during apartheid.
Desmond Tutu, the South African archbishop, is particularly eloquent in accusing Israel of the crime of apartheid (“Tutu condemns Israeli ‘apartheid’,” BBC News, 29 April 2002). The Russell Tribunal on Palestine — at its 2011 Cape Town session — determined that Israel is practicing apartheid against the entire Palestinian people, according to the definition of apartheid adopted by the UN in 1973 (“Findings of the South African session,” Russell Tribunal on Palestine, 5-7 November 2011 [PDF]).
Worse than South Africa
South African Christian leaders who played a decisive role in fighting apartheid have condemned Israel’s apartheid as “even worse than South African apartheid” (“An Easter message from South Africa to Palestine,” Oikumene, 31 March 2010). And the publisher of Haaretz, an influential Israeli daily, has recently described a fanatic Israeli ideology of “territorial seizure and apartheid” (“The necessary elimination of Israeli democracy,” 25 November 2011).Increasingly, international jurists, human rights organizations and activists, as well as international public opinion are recognizing Israel’s unique regime of oppression against the Palestinians as encompassing the crime of apartheid, in addition to occupation, ethnic cleansing and settler colonialism.
With its continued siege of Gaza; its untamed construction of illegal colonies and an apartheid wall in the occupied West Bank, especially in and around Jerusalem; its “strategy of Judaization” in Jerusalem, the Galilee, the Jordan Valley and the Naqab (Negev); its adoption of new racist laws and its denial of the UN-stipulated right of the Palestinian refugees to return to their homes from which they were ethnically cleansed during the Nakba, Israel has embarked on a more belligerent and violent phase in its attempt to extinguish the question of Palestine through literally “disappearing” the Palestinians, as Edward Said would say.
Prison camp
The most criminal and pressing aspect of Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians is without doubt its Western and Egyptian-backed hermetic siege of the occupied Gaza Strip, which even British Prime Minister David Cameron has described as a “prison camp” (“David Cameron: Israeli blockade has turned Gaza Strip into a ‘prison camp’,” The Guardian, 27 July 2010). The systematic Israeli targeting of Gaza’s water and sanitation facilities has compounded an already “severe and protracted denial of human dignity,” according to Maxwell Gaylard, the UN humanitarian coordinator for the occupied Palestinian territory, causing “a steep decline in standards of living for the [Palestinians] of Gaza, characterized by erosion of livelihoods, destruction and degradation of basic structure, and a marked downturn in the delivery and quality of vital services in health, water and sanitation” (“Humanitarian organizations deeply concerned about the ongoing water and sanitation crisis in Gaza,” Association of International Development Agencies, 3 September 2009).A 2009 report by Amnesty International affirmed that, “90–95 percent of the water supply [in Gaza] is contaminated and unfit for human consumption” (“Troubled waters: Palestinians denied fair access to water,” October 2009 [PDF]).
The report cites an earlier study by the UN Environmental Programme which correlates the widespread contamination of Gaza’s water resources to the rise in nitrate levels in the groundwater “far above the WHO [World Health Organization] accepted guideline,” inducing a potentially lethal blood disorder in young children and newborns called methemoglobinaemia, or the “blue babies” phenomenon.
Some of the detected symptoms of this disease in Gaza infants include “blueness around the mouth, hands and feet,” “episodes of diarrhea and vomiting,” and “loss of consciousness.” “Convulsions and death can occur” at higher levels of nitrate contamination, the report concludes (“Environmental assessment of the Gaza Strip following the escalation of hostilities in December 2008-January 2009,” September 2009 [PDF].)
At the conclusion of Israel’s war of aggression on Gaza in late 2008 and early 2009, which led to more than 1,400 deaths, mostly civilians, EU leaders dashed to occupied Jerusalem to celebrate with Israel’s then prime minister Ehud Olmert, promising to support Israel in fighting “terror” (“World leaders push for lasting truce in Gaza,” The New York Times, 18 January 2009).
So, when the European Union, which is still actively colluding to maintain the Gaza siege, launches a relatively expensive public relations campaign all over Gaza — and the West Bank — with its main slogan, “Your Priorities are ours,” without a hint of sarcasm, it seems to be sending the Palestinians under occupation two blunt messages: first, we could not care less about your loss of human lives, freedoms and dignity, and second, “We set the priorities, you adopt them as yours, or else we cut funding” (“The priorities of the European Union are not ours,” MWC News, 18 July 2011).
Atoning for the Holocaust?
This leads most sober Palestinians to conclude that the Holocaust-guilt-ridden European establishment wishes to wash its hands of its genocide against European Jews, among others, by imposing on the Palestinian people an unjust “peaceful” settlement of this essentially colonial conflict that would leave Israel with almost full control over the West Bank, including Jerusalem, and over the Palestinians’ economy, most fertile lands, water aquifers, borders and their very destiny.Most crucially, such a funder-driven, unjust political settlement would perpetuate Israel’s denial of the basic rights of the great majority of the Palestinian people, those in exile as well as in Israel. Foremost among those rights is the inalienable right to participate in exercising self determination. It has been declared by the UN as a prerequisite for any nation under colonial rule to enjoy the full set of rights, political, cultural, economic and other fundamental rights.
Arabs in general and Palestinians in particular were effectively forced to pay the price for a genocidal crime that they had no role in, and are now being bribed to accept injustice as fate, so that this dark chapter in Western history can finally reach closure.
But Europe’s collusion with Israel is too intricate to reduce to sheer Holocaust guilt. Economic interest, US influence, Islamophobia, the prevalence of a security mentality and the corresponding growth of the military-security industry, are all very relevant factors, too, in understanding this relationship.
Ever coveting artificially low-priced energy resources and open access to a large, under-developed, structurally dependent market, various Western powers, after all, were the ones who played the most important role in establishing and nourishing Israel as a colonial outpost in the region. Today, the EU’s governments and institutions continue to support Israel economically, diplomatically, academically and politically to maintain its domination and their interests.
A translated version of this article will be published as a preface to the forthcoming French-language edition of David Cronin’s book Europe’s Alliance With Israel: Aiding the Occupation.
Omar Barghouti is an independent Palestinian human rights activist. He is a co-founder of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) Movement and the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israeli (PACBI)."
"More like this
http://electronicintifada.net/content/eu-support-israeli-crimes-makes-it-unworthy-nobel-peace-prize/11771
"Why Obama won’t take on Israel
15 November 2012
Surveys conducted outside the US shortly before polling day showed Obama was the preferred candidate in every country but two — Pakistan and Israel. But unlike Pakistan, where the two candidates were equally unpopular, he scored just 22 percent in Israel against a commanding 57 percent for Mitt Romney.
Given these figures, it is unsurprising that Israel’s right-wing prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, made little effort to conceal his political sympathies, laying on a hero’s welcome for Romney when he visited Jerusalem in the summer and starring in several of his TV campaign ads.
Ehud Olmert, a former Israeli prime minister, accused Netanyahu of “spitting” in the president’s face, warning that Israel would now be exposed to Obama’s second-term wrath (“Olmert blasts Bibi on Iran, relationship with Obama,” The Daily Beast, 6 November).
The general wisdom is that the president, freed of worries about being re-elected, will seek his revenge, both for Netanyahu’s long-term intransigence in the peace process and for interfering in the US campaign.
Newspaper cartoons summed up the mood last week. The liberal Haaretz showed a sweating Netanyahu gingerly putting his head into the mouth of an Obama-faced lion, while the right-wing Jerusalem Post had Netanyahu exclaiming “Oh bummer!” as he read the headlines.
The speculation among Israelis and many observers is that an Obama second term will see much greater pressure on Israel both to make major concessions on Palestinian statehood and to end its aggressive posturing towards Iran over its supposed ambition to build a nuclear warhead.
Bullish mood
Such thinking, however, is fanciful. The White House’s approach towards Netanyahu and Israel is unlikely to alter significantly.Netanyahu’s bullish mood was certainly on display as voting in the US election was under way: his government announced plans to build more than 1,200 homes for Jewish settlers in East Jerusalem, the presumed capital of a future Palestinian state (“Israel pushes forward with 1,200 homes in East Jerusalem settlements,” Guardian, 6 November).
The reality, as Netanyahu understands well, is that Obama’s hands are now tied as firmly in the Middle East as they were during his first term.
Obama got burnt previously when he tried to impose a settlement freeze. There are no grounds for believing that Israel’s far-right lobbyists in Washington, led by AIPAC, will give the president an easier ride this time.
And as Ron Ben Yishai, a veteran Israeli commentator, noted, Obama will face the same US Congress, one that has “traditionally been a stronghold of near-unconditional support for Israel” (“Obama better for Israel,” Ynet, 6 November).
Obama may not have to worry about re-election but he will not want to hand a poisoned legacy to the next Democratic presidential candidate, nor will want to mire his own final term in damaging confrontations with Israel. Memories are still raw of Bill Clinton’s failed gamble to push through a peace deal — one that, in truth, was a far-more generous to Israel than the Palestinians — at Camp David in the dying days of his second term.
And whatever his personal antipathy towards the Israeli prime minister, Obama also knows that, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict aside, his policies in the Middle East are either aligned with Israel’s or dependent on Netanyahu’s cooperation to work.
Limited revenge?
Both Obama and Netanyahu want the Israel-Egypt peace agreement to hold. Both need to ensure the civil war in Syria does not spiral out of control, as the cross-border salvos in the Golan Heights have indicated in the past few days. Both prefer repressive West-friendly dictators in the region over Islamist gains.And, of course, both want to box in Iran on its nuclear ambitions. So far Netanyahu has reluctantly toed the US line on “giving sanctions a chance,” toning down his rhetoric about launching an attack. The last thing the White House needs is a sulking Israeli premier priming his cohorts in Washington to undermine US policy.
A sliver of hope for Netanyahu’s opponents is that a disgruntled US president might still take limited revenge, turning the tables by interfering in the Israeli elections due in January. He could back more moderate challengers such as Olmert or Tzipi Livni, if they choose to run and start to look credible.
But even that would be a big gamble.
The evidence shows that, whatever the makeup of the next Israeli governing coalition, it will espouse policies little different from the current one. That simply reflects the lurch rightwards among Israeli voters, as indicated in a poll this month showing that 80 percent now believe it is impossible to make peace with the Palestinians.
In fact, given the mood in Israel, an obvious attempt by Obama to side with one of Netanyahu’s opponents might actually harm their prospects for success. Netanyahu has already demonstrated to Israelis that he can defeat the US president in a staring contest. Many Israelis are likely to conclude that no one is better placed to keep an unsympathetic Obama in check in his second term.
Faced with a popular consensus in Israel and political backing in the US Congress for a hard line with the Palestinians, Obama is an unlikely champion of the peace process – and even of the Palestinians’ current lowly ambition to win observer status at the United Nations. A vote on this matter is currently threatened for 29 November, with the Palestinian Authority’s President Mahmoud Abbas apparently hoping that the anniversary of the 1947 UN partition plan for Palestine will provide emotional resonance.
Meanwhile, all Israel’s main parties are battling for the large pool of right-wing votes. Shelly Yacimovich, leader of the opposition Labor party, last week denied her party was “left-wing,” in a sign of how dirty that word has become in Israel. She has studiously avoided mentioning the Palestinians or diplomatic issues.
And the great new hope of Israeli politics, former TV star Yair Lapid, has rapidly come to sound like a Netanyahu-lite. Last week he publicly opposed giving up even the Palestinian parts of East Jerusalem, arguing that the Palestinians could be browbeaten into surrendering their putative capital (“Lapid: If Israel stands firm Palestinians will give up on East Jerusalem,” Haaretz, 8 November).
The reality is that the White House is stuck with an Israeli government, with or without Netanyahu, that rejects an agreement with the Palestinians. As violence flares again in Gaza — as occurred in the run-up to the last Israeli election — it looks disturbingly like four more years of the same.
Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books are Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (Pluto Press) and Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair (Zed Books). His new website is www.jonathan-cook.net.
A version of this article originally appeared in The National (Abu Dhabi).
Tags: Barack ObamaBenjamin Netanyahu2013 Israeli electionMitt Romney2012 US presidential electionAIPACIranShelly YacimovichYair Lapid"
"Mueren 13 palestinos y 3 israelíes en ataques tras muerte de líder de Hamas Tras lanzamiento de cohetes desde Gaza, Tel Aviv ha atacado más de 160 puntos en la Franja."
http://www.jonathan-cook.net/2012-11-02/israeli-ministry-of-tourism-map-annexes-over-60-of-the-west-bank/
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"Gaza: violencia asimétrica
Tras el asesinato del líder militar de Hamas, Ahmed Jaabari,
perpetrado el miércoles pasado en Gaza por la aviación israelí, y luego del
lanzamiento continuo de explosivos caseros desde ese cercado territorio
palestino, las fuerzas de Tel Aviv efectuaron una primera oleada de bombardeos
masivos que, según un primer recuento, dejó cerca de 20 muertos y centenas de
heridos en Gaza, en tanto que tres israelíes murieron y otro resultó herido en
la localidad de Kyryat Malaji. Esta nueva escalada hace temer que se repita algo
similar a la operación Plomo endurecido lanzada por Israel sobre Gaza a
finales de 2008 y principios de 2009, que costó la vida a centenares de hombres,
mujeres y niños.
El gobierno de Benjamin Netanyahu trata de legitimar los bombardeos sobre Gaza como una acción
defensiva, postura que ha recibido el respaldo del gobierno estadunidense. En la versión de ambos, los bombardeos son una respuesta justa a los ataques con misiles improvisados lanzados desde Gaza sobre territorio isrsaelí. Tal discurso omite, sin embargo, el contexto y los antecedentes de los enfrentamientos actuales. Pretende ignorar el hecho de que Israel se ha negado durante casi medio siglo a devolver a los palestinos los territorios que ocupó de manera ilegal en 1967, a pesar de que se lo ordenan dos resoluciones del Consejo de Seguridad de la ONU –la 242 y la 338–; por el contrario, el régimen de Tel Aviv ha practicado desde entonces en Cisjordania y Jerusalén oriental una política de arrasamiento de la población y colonización. Ha despojado a los palestinos de sus derechos humanos y políticos básicos, de sus recursos hídricos y de extensos territorios, y ha controlado esas zonas, además de Gaza, mediante el terror militar y los asesinatos selectivos o colectivos. Desde hace años, y con la complicidad o al menos con la complacencia de la comunidad internacional, el régimen israelí mantiene sobre Gaza un bloqueo implacable y no ha dudado en ordenar el asesinato de activistas extranjeros que han buscado romper ese cerco de manera pacífica para llevar víveres y medicinas a los habitantes de la franja.
Hoy día, mientras las fuerzas israelíes lanzan decenas de misiles aire-tierra sobre Gaza, el régimen de Tel Aviv pretende impedir a toda costa que el gobernante cisjordano Mahmud Abbas acuda a la ONU para lograr el reconocimiento de Palestina como Estado observador, hasta el punto de que el canciller israelí, Avigdor Lieberman, amenazó al titular de la Autoridad Nacional Palestina con
una respuesta extrema de nuestra parte. A la vista de lo que ocurre en Gaza no es difícil imaginar a qué clase de respuesta se refiere el funcionario.
En tal circunstancia, los lanzamientos de cohetes artesanales desde Gaza hacia territorio israelí constituyen la respuesta de un pueblo despojado, masacrado, sometido al terror permanente y confinado en lo que ha sido descrito como la mayor cárcel al aire libre en el mundo. El que esa respuesta sea ineficaz y hasta contraproducente no justifica que se le convierta en argumento para la consumación de nuevas masacres. La pretensión de aplicar criterios simétricos para la violencia de los oprimidos y la de los opresores conlleva una inmoralidad mayúscula, por cuanto pretende ignorar la condición de víctimas de los primeros y la de victimarios de los segundos. Es tan grotesca como lo habría sido la condena a los habitantes del gueto de Varsovia que en enero de 1943 se alzaron en armas contra los nazis.
En el momento presente, cuando se perfila el peligro de una nueva lluvia de plomo endurecido sobre la población inerme de Gaza, resulta impostergable que las sociedades de Estados Unidos y Europa occidental se movilicen y presionen a sus respectivos gobiernos para que éstos, a su vez, impongan al régimen de Tel Aviv una mínima contención antes de que el planeta asista a otra masacre de palestinos."
http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2012/11/16/edito
Palestinos disparan cohetes contra Tel Aviv por primera vez en 20 años"
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"8:00Hamas dispara cohete contra Tel Aviv; cae en zona deshabitada."
http://aristeguinoticias.com/1611/mundo/video-asi-se-lanzo-uno-de-los-primeros-cohetes-contra-gaza/
"David Petraeus Testifies in Closed Door Benghazi Hearing"
http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/video/david-petraeus-testifies-closed-door-benghazi-hearing-17743698
http://abcnews.go.com/topics/news/whitehouse/susan-rice.htm
https://www.google.com/#hl=en&tbo=d&sclient=psy-ab&q=FIDEIIUS+UNESCO&oq=FIDEIIUS+UNESCO&gs_l=serp.3...233936.236330.4.236589.15.14.0.1.1.1.329.2326.1j10j1j2.14.0.les%3B..0.0...1c.1.4d5k2O-UuW0&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_qf.&fp=49c8e43fb5664782&bpcl=38625945&biw=1024&bih=640
https://www.google.com/#hl=en&tbo=d&output=search&sclient=psy-ab&q=FIDEIIUS+Helen+Thomas&oq=FIDEIIUS+Helen+Thomas&gs_l=hp.3..33i21.2002.6382.0.6448.21.20.0.1.1.1.208.2800.0j18j1.19.0.les%3Bcrnk_timediscounta..0.0...1c.1.t0HXUpoEPwQ&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_qf.&fp=49c8e43fb5664782&bpcl=38625945&biw=1024&bih=640
https://www.google.com/#hl=en&tbo=d&sclient=psy-ab&q=FIDEIIUS+Noam+Chomsky&oq=FIDEIIUS+Noam+Chomsky&gs_l=hp.3...5067.10114.0.10464.21.21.0.0.0.0.1088.6135.11j5j5-1j2j2.21.0.les%3B..0.0...1c.1.10j92A-ncaI&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_qf.&fp=49c8e43fb5664782&bpcl=38625945&biw=1024&bih=640
https://www.google.com/#hl=en&sugexp=les%3B&gs_nf=3&gs_mss=FIDEIIUS%20&tok=qJuPj2b3rN-GIzam_ruqUg&pq=fideiius%20noam%20chomsky&cp=19&gs_id=4s&xhr=t&q=FIDEIIUS%20Rapido%20y%20Furioso&pf=p&tbo=d&sclient=psy-ab&oq=FIDEIIUS+Rapido+y+Furioso&gs_l=&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_qf.&fp=49c8e43fb5664782&bpcl=38625945&biw=1024&bih=640
https://www.google.com/#hl=en&sugexp=les%3B&gs_nf=3&gs_mss=FIDEIIUS%20&tok=qJuPj2b3rN-GIzam_ruqUg&pq=fideiius%20rapido%20y%20furioso&cp=26&gs_id=a7&xhr=t&q=FIDEIIUS%20Fasta%20and%20Furious&pf=p&tbo=d&sclient=psy-ab&oq=FIDEIIUS+Fasta+and+Furious&gs_l=&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_qf.&fp=49c8e43fb5664782&bpcl=38625945&biw=1024&bih=640
https://www.google.com/#hl=en&tbo=d&sclient=psy-ab&q=FIDEIIUS+consigna+un+letrero&oq=FIDEIIUS+consigna+un+letrero&gs_l=hp.3...5804.7200.5.8108.9.9.0.0.0.4.153.1138.0j9.9.0.les%3B..0.0...1c.1.zILZCbLi7hw&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_qf.&fp=49c8e43fb5664782&bpcl=38625945&biw=1024&bih=640
https://www.google.com/#hl=en&sugexp=les%3Bcrnk_timediscounta&gs_nf=3&gs_mss=FIDEII&tok=pXY7FtZVLYyXlcs0cu_GNA&cp=24&gs_id=2q&xhr=t&q=FIDEIIUS+nuclear+weapons&pf=p&tbo=d&sclient=psy-ab&oq=FIDEIIUS+nuclear+weapons&gs_l=&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_qf.&fp=49c8e43fb5664782&bpcl=38625945&biw=1024&bih=640
-----------------------
Centro de Alerta para la Defensa de los Pueblos Investigación, análisis, documentación y denuncias sobre la injerencia y subversión contra los pueblos de América Latina
http://www.centrodealerta.org/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cec34OOdnRA
http://www.cubadebate.cu/series/resistencia-palestina/
The United States is a Leading Terrorist State
Noam Chomsky interviewed by David Barsamian
Monthly Review, vol. 53, no. 6, November, 2001
http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/200111--02.htm
"Noam Chomsky*: Estados Unidos es el mayor terrorista del mundo..." Institute Professor and professor emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology*
http://www.semana.com/noticias-mundo/parte-colombia-robada-roosevelt/142043.aspx
http://eligio-del-awiizotl.blogspot.com/2010/07/noam-chomsky-estados-unidos-es-el-mayor.html
http://www.chomsky.info/
http://www.cubadebate.cu/categoria/autores/eva-golinger/
http://www.patriagrande.com.ve/temas/internacionales/los-gringos-se-robaron-el-dinero-de-las-ventas-de-petroleo-en-irak/
EEUU despilfarró miles de millones de dólares del area social de Irak
http://www.aporrea.org/tiburon/n164470.html
http://www.josecouso.info/
http://eligio-del-awiizotl.blogspot.com/2010/07/httpwikileaksorg-could-become-as.html
http://www.iraqbodycount.org/
“We don’t do body counts”.-General Tommy Franks
http://www.icasualties.org/
http://www.cubadebate.cu/reflexiones-fidel/2010/08/03/emplazamiento-al-presidente-de-estados-unidos/
"Hey, bad guys: If it is certain that you in God trust, you should not be afraid, just let the music play…!”.FIDEIIUS (Fideiius).
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