November 12, 2009

Remember Daniel Pearl?

By Jenifer Dixon *
November 6, 2009

Daniel Pearl was an American Jewish journalist, who was assassinated by the Afghans in 2002. I looked his name up on the Internet, and after 55 references to him, I quit. Why do I bring this up? I do it because at that time, I remember hearing about Daniel Pearl 24/7 on more than one "mainstream" station. There are biographies of Daniel Pearl. There are celebrations of Daniel Pearl. There are endless stories about Daniel Pearl's assassination. There is a Daniel Pearl Foundation. Etc. etc. etc.

Now, here is some information that was never presented on "mainstream" media. According to Palestine Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow by Dr. Tareq M. Suwaidan there were 9 Palestinian journalists killed in the Intifada between 29 September 2000 to 30 December 2003 by the IDF. That is 9 journalists killed by the Israelis and not a word mentioned.

I was listening to an Internet broadcast from Global Research on the question of Palestine. Both the interviewer and interviewee were Jewish. Nonetheless, they expressed a concern about the "Israeli Palestinian conflict." They had on their show an interview with a Palestinian journalist from Gaza, but his accent was so thick as to be incomprehensible. They then decried the tragedy of the cycle of violence, but assured the audience that this too would end. However, I noticed that the woman being interviewed by Mr. Lendeman, a Rachel somebody, a professor at Emory University, was the author of of several books on "Islamic terrorism". I also noticed that they did not go into any detail on the situation in Gaza or in Palestine. They also told the audience that the censorship of these stories from the Occupied Territories originated high up in the chain of command in a "mainstream media."

They fail to mention that at the end of July of 2006 Israeli military forces attacked Al Manar TV in Beirut. In January of 2002, the Israeli military forces blew up a Palestinian broadcasting center in Ramallah. In April 2002, Israeli military forces inflicted devastating damage to the offices of the Palestine Monitor. In August of 2009 Israeli troops raided Radio Bethlehem and ordered the staff to stop broadcasting.

I then pulled a report that detailed, some 75 assaults from Israeli security forces on journalists working in the Occupied Territories, both Palestinian and foreign, in the year 2000 alone. Nine were attacked on the 1st day of the Intifada. 9 again? Ready for some numerology?

This obviously indicates an intended desire to squelch the truth on the ground as it happened, and the heavy-handed suppression of Palestinian press, indeed of all press.

Then to beat all, I found this item entitled "Israeli media mogul Haim Saban mulls stake in Al Jazeera." This story dated October 8, 2009 in Ha'aretz states that the Israeli businessman is negotiating for 50% of this "beacon" of the voice of the peoples of the Middle East. Okay. What more needs to be said? Or as Washington Post promotional copy puts it "if you don't got it, you just don't get it"

Remember Daniel Pearl? Of course, you do.

* Jenifer Dixon is a writer and former activist who lives in the Washington, DC area. She has published in the Washington Post, Voices of Women, WomenWise, Rainbow Visions, the Palestine Chronicle and Arab-American News. The website GlobalSpin was her contribution to the Net for three years. She was also a contributing writer to the book Challenge to Genocide: Let Iraq Live. The Holy Land Unveiled is her first book.

Buyer beware: Climate change and the Ventura case study

By Nikki Alexander
Online Journal
Nov 12, 2009

A seemingly wholesome local event recently led to some disturbing discoveries about a global GHG [greenhouse gas emissions] matrix that will affect people everywhere in all countries.

Students from The Bren School of Environmental Science and Management (University of California Santa Barbara) gave a presentation to city planners and citizens on their “Ventura Case Study.” Bren is working on this project for their client, AECOM, to calculate Ventura’s baseline greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) in preparation for compliance with federal and state regulations.

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has been leading the charge for state regulations while Senator Barbara Boxer is sponsoring federal climate change legislation. AECOM states in its proposal that California is a prime target for compulsory GHG reduction strategies because it has shown a willingness to conform, whereas some other states are rebelling.

The Bren School was endowed by and named after Donald Bren, whose Irvine Company developed suburban communities on 94,000 acres, encompassing one fifth of Orange County. Forbes, in its 2008 edition of The 400 Richest Americans, ranked Bren as the wealthiest real estate developer in the US with an estimated net worth of $12 billion. He does not build eco villages and strawbale cottages.

The Bren School website asserts the “need for a new kind of solution-oriented environmental professional with combined expertise in the political, economic, and social dimensions of environmental decision-making.” At least two of the rotating deans that control the curriculum are examples of this new “environmental” professional.

Dennis Aigner, dean from 2000-2005, specializes in litigation involving contract disputes, regulation of public utilities, government contracting, health care, insurance, banking and defense. His stated research interests include corporate environmental management, US competitiveness in global markets, foreign investment, state and local economic issues, and workers’ compensation. As chair of the California Workers’ Compensation Rate Study Commission, Aigner recommended deregulating the marketplace for workers’ compensation insurance.

Ernst von Weizsäcker, dean from 2005-2008, is a member of the Club of Rome, a group of global planners that annually release Armageddon scenarios based on predictions of overpopulation and famine. In their 1991 book, entitled The First Global Revolution, they state, “In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill.” (p.115) He also served on the World Commission on the Social Dimensions of Globalization and was a member of the Bundestag, the federal parliament of Germany.

The relationship between AECOM and the Bren School of Environmental Science and Management is a closed loop. AECOM’s 2008 “Global Thought Leadership” annual report states:

“We become an integrated part of our clients’ organizations . . . partner with technical academies and community schools.”

The Ventura Case study was initiated by three AECOM employees that are Bren graduates. The students are not allowed to interact with community residents and are restricted to working ONLY with policy-makers. That’s a Bren rule. One of the student presenters reported that collecting this data would be nearly impossible without help from someone inside the city government. The policy-maker within the City of Ventura Environmental Services that is feeding Ventura’s GHG data to the students is a Bren graduate.

With annual revenue of $6 Billion, AECOM is a multinational corporation with offices in 100 countries. Their 2008 Annual Report proudly announces that AECOM “helped Iraq join the World Trade Organization” and “helped bring Central Asia back into the world economy.” They provide mercenary soldiers in “conflict” areas and build infrastructure projects, much like Halliburton and KBR. Their contracts are largely taxpayer funded. AECOM’s annual report states that it is well positioned to receive lucrative government contracts: ”In response to the financial crisis, governments around the world are considering stimulus packages valued at more than $1 to $2 trillion.” Impending climate change mitigation regulations will be forcing states to “deliver new transportation systems, facilities, buildings and utility networks, a $5+ trillion a year industry.”

Will this taxpayer money be well spent by AECOM? Bloomberg reported that “a new Defense Department audit said AECOM billed the US Army $19 dollars apiece for 12-cent washers on one of the largest contracts in Iraq for training Iraqi security forces on depot maintenance. The Army paid $19,527 for $122 worth of washers.”

An extensive list of architecture and engineering firms have been swallowed up by AECOM’s “targeted acquisition” strategy to buy out the green competition and monopolize what they describe as a guaranteed “contract pipeline” from the Department of Homeland Security and Department of Defense, as well as federal stimulus funds and state taxpayer bonds. They are also working with FEMA “in their quest to create integrated water systems. Worldwide, we are actively involved in the supply, treatment, distribution and collection of water.” Their proposal states that Ventura was selected, among other reasons, for its potential to deliver energy from the ocean and hillsides.

Using Ventura as a case study, in tandem with a town in China, the Bren/Aecom project aims to standardize a software matrix that will quantify GHG emissions and the “political and economic feasibility” of reduction strategies. This protocol will also be used to quantify an entity’s standing in the emerging cap and trade carbon exchange market. “Emissions sources may not be well understood by those who are subject to GHG regulations or wish to participate in carbon trading markets.”

The cap and trade market will operate through the Chicago Climate Exchange, set up by Goldman Sachs and Al Gore’s company, Generation Investment Management, which is also staffed by Goldman Sachs executives. GIM and Goldman Sachs each have a 10 percent stake in the Chicago Climate Exchange which in turn has a 50 percent stake in the European Climate Exchange. Trading carbon credits is projected to become the new multi-trillion dollar commodity bubble.

Everyone -- businesses, towns, universities, farmers -- will be required to buy GHG permits -- a global tax on energy use. Those who exceed the “cap” on GHG emissions will pay a fine or “offset” their pollution by buying carbon ”credits” from entities that don’t exceed the cap. Al Gore is an example of how this cap and trade casino will work. His Nashville mansion consumes more than twice the electricity in one month than an average American family uses in an entire year, about $1,359, or more than 20 times the national average. Rather than reduce his personal carbon footprint, Gore “offsets” his mansion’s GHG emissions by purchasing credits on the CCX in which he owns a 10 percent stake.

If mortgage-backed securities appeared to be the ultimate Ponzi scheme, just ponder the scale of this gambling casino when everything on earth is entered into the global GHG database and converted to carbon default swaps, carbon-backed securities and collateralized GHG obligations. As global energy rationing requires incremental GHG reductions, credits will become increasingly scarce and therefore more lucrative. Those who can afford to keep playing the game will be the ultimate winners. The primary derivatives traders that recently paralyzed the credit markets and collapsed the global banking system have already positioned themselves on the Chicago Climate Exchange to cash in on the carbon commodity bubble -- Bank of America, Citigroup, the Rockefeller cartel and, of course, Goldman Sachs.

The major corporate polluters and destroyers of ecosystems have bought up the patents and technologies invented by green entrepreneurs and purchased the competition through acquisitions and mergers in order to corner the market in climate change mitigation -- an industry projected to exceed $5 trillion, not counting the cap and trade casino. As global unemployment rises in this “jobless recovery,” taxpayer-funded state bonds and federal contracts will be awarded to corporate contractors to capture and reroute water, reconfigure energy grids and transform land use to comply with GHG regulations.

At the residential level, homeowners will be subject to federal code enforcement policies that supersede state and local codes; workers will be required to reduce their vehicle miles traveled and cities will be required by law to reduce their overall energy consumption, potentially supplying water and electricity to far away towns through interconnected energy grids too big to fail. At the global level, nations will be required to alter their agriculture, domestic industries, imports and exports to comply with global GHG rationing, essentially surrendering political control of food, water and energy to external global authorities.

All of this social engineering is grounded in the premise that GHG emissions are a global threat that warrants supranational regulations. Some scientists attribute global warming to solar activity, some to cyclical electromagnetic polar shifts and others cite data demonstrating that the oceans and atmosphere have recently been cooling. Regardless of which theories are correct, the political exploitation of the GHG paradigm has shifted the responsibility for environmental destruction (for which we have hard evidence) from major corporate polluters to society at large, placing the cost of remediation on victims and innocent bystanders.

There are good reasons to live sustainably, regardless of climate change theories. The violent extraction of “natural resources” by profit-seeking corporations has destroyed or poisoned virtually all of the earth’s living systems, impoverished the global south and driven whole species into extinction. What matters is that we repair the damage, reforest the earth and decontaminate the air, soil and water.

To keep things in perspective, switching to fluorescent light bulbs will accomplish far less than prohibiting coal mining corporations from blowing up mountain tops in Appalachia and burying the surrounding areas in toxic sludge; or reigning in Pentagon GHG emissions from chemtrails, star wars missiles and predator drones, not to mention the huge volumes of energy squandered every time the Pentagon invades and destroys a country. How much oil does the US military burn up and what is the net damage to the atmosphere? What is the federal strategy for reversing depleted uranium contamination?

What regulations are being proposed to hold the World Bank accountable for massive water dislocations and environmental destruction? Why is Monsanto allowed to contaminate our food supply with GMOs and mutate the earth’s natural seeds on every continent? Corporate agribusiness, a life-threatening polluter, received total exemption from all GHG regulations in the Waxman-Markey climate change bill, demonstrating that financial interests trump social responsibility.

Has the federal government lifted its ban on California’s fuel efficiency standards or demanded that General Motors put its electric car back into production with the 25 billion dollars it just received from taxpayers? That would be more effective than allowing GM, one of the leading polluters, to crank out SUVs and hire The Nature Conservancy’s Green Police to protect their carbon credits by driving indigenous Brazilians off their ancestral lands. The natives who live there sustainably are being arrested, evicted and forced into starvation by GM, Chevron and American Electric Power -- corporations that own neither the Brazilian forest nor the land. They “own” the carbon credits the trees represent. In the US, private ownership of imaginary carbon credits in national and state parks will result in park closures to protect carbon “trades” while doing nothing to repair the damage caused by corporate clear-cutters and so-called “developers.” Genuine remediation policies would require polluters and developers to plant new forests using their own profits.

If environmental destruction by the most glaring offenders is not the primary target of remediation, the stated goal of this GHG dragnet is disingenuous. Corporate destruction of the planet will not be repaired by trading imaginary carbon credits, depriving indigenous populations of access to food, privatization of energy grids or by imposing global energy restrictions and taxes on the financial underclass. Taxpayer-financed federal stimulus funds and state bonds would be better spent on localizing sustainable agriculture, reforestation, repairing ecosystems, securing clean water for all the earth’s species and developing free energy.

It’s not too late to insist on appropriate remedies -- until the Senate approves the final climate change bill. Your representative needs to hear from you now.


See also:
October 05, 2009

US Climate Change Bill Promotes Nuclear Industry


Israeli forces detain nine internationals

12/11/2009 20:28

Bethlehem – Ma’an – Israeli forces detained two Palestinians and nine internationals working on the rehabilitation of agricultural lands within the project “Green Palestine” near the village of Umm Salamoneh south of Bethlehem on Thursday.

Ibrahim Awad, the coordinator of the Popular Committee against the Wall in the area said Israeli forces raided his land and detained him along with a member of the Village Council and nine internationals near the illegal Effrat settlement, while Deputy Director of Agriculture in Bethlehem Ibrahim Masha’leh said that Israeli forces detained "dozens of foreigners and the employees of the Palestinian Ministry of Agriculture in Umm Salamoneh village."

Bethlehem district is the second to embrace Project Green, after a successful debut in Tulkarem. The initiative is run by the Popular Committees in the area, and brings together local government, education professionals, and local councils for integrated solutions to providing a healthy living space for local residents.

The project is part of a larger national scheme governed primarily by the Ministry of Agriculture to aid not only farmers, but communities at large.

Hamas warns of another Israeli assault on Gaza

Source: Press TV

Ismail Haniyah cautions about Israeli plans for another military offensive against the Gaza Strip, reiterating that it is not the Islamic Hamas movement that is after a war.

Hamas is "not looking for more violence," the democratically elected Palestinian prime minster told a visiting delegation from the International Committee of the Red Cross in Gaza on Wednesday.

Haniyah said he was sure that Israel has plans to target the Gaza Strip once again, recalling the Israeli army's onslaught against the Hamas-run coastal sliver in January, which left more than 1,400 people, mostly civilians, dead and thousands more wounded.

The Palestinian leader, however, expressed hope that his prediction would not materialize, and that "the world will stop Israel from killing more children."

Haniyah also vowed that any Israeli incursion would face strong resistance on the part of the Palestinian nation.

The comments follow a new round of threats from the military officials in Tel Aviv who have said that Israel's next war would be in Gaza.

In one of his notable remarks, the Israeli military Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi declared that the Israeli troops would return to the Gaza Strip "to fight in the villages, cities, mosques, hospitals, kindergartens and schools because the enemies want to impose this method of fighting against Israel."

This is while Israel is struggling to forestall the prosecution in the International Criminal Court of those officials and officers who launched the Gaza war, as a damning UN report highlighting Israel's deliberate killing of civilians is finding its way to the UN Security Council.

Hamas has vowed retaliation against any Israeli attack. "Our people will not surrender; they will fight back," Prime Minister Haniyah's office said, in a statement.

Goa bombers tried to leave Muslim imprint

By Prashant Rangnekar
Indian Express
November 8, 2009

Investigators believe that the Sanatan Sanstha men who were killed while allegedly planting bombs in Goa during Diwali celebrations last month were hoping to fan communal tensions by misleading the police through items they wanted to leave behind at the site: a shopping bag from a shop in ‘Khan Market’, Delhi, a bottle of traditional perfume popular among Muslims and an empty bag of branded Basmati rice on which all the words were in Urdu.

The items were recovered by police from the site of the crude bomb blast in Margao on October 16 in which two Sanatan members, Malgounda Patil and Yogesh Naik, were killed. It was found after investigations and the subsequent arrest of two men suspected to be linked to Patil and Naik that they were allegedly carrying these items to leave them behind at the blast site and signal a Muslim hand.

“The material was enough to spark communal trouble in Margao and extremist elements from outside would have found it easy to aggravate it,” said an officer who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Margao, Goa’s main commercial city, is represented by Chief Minister Digambar Kamat in the state Assembly and has a large Muslim population. Kamat, incidentally, was near the site of the blast, taking part in the Diwali celebrations but was not hurt.

The alleged plan to indicate the bomb blast to be the handiwork of Muslim groups had echoes of the Malegaon bomb blast last year, the officer said. Members of Hindu extremist group Abhinav Bharat, who have been accused for that blast, had parked the motorbike packed with the bomb below the defunct first-floor office of the outlawed Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI).

Patil and Naik are accused of planting three bombs at the crowded Diwali celebrations in Margao and another at a celebration in Sancaole town 20 km away. Of these, only one of the bombs in Margao exploded, prematurely police say. While Patil died within hours, Naik succumbed to his injuries in hospital days later.

Patil worked as an administrator at the Ramnathi headquarters of Sanatan while Naik, a teacher at a school for mentally challenged students, supplied milk to the organisation and circulated its mouthpiece Sanatan Prabhat.

Subsequently, the Special Investigating Team constituted by the Goa police to probe the blast arrested Vinay Talekar and Vinayak Patil, alleging that they were linked to the conspiracy. Sanatan has denied it had anything to do with the blast.

BMW to Build New China Plant on Luxury-Car Demand

Nov. 12 (Bloomberg) -- Bayerische Motoren Werke AG, the world’s largest maker of luxury cars, plans to build a new China factory to meet rising demand for premium products in an economy that’s poised to surpass Japan in size.

The 5 billion yuan ($732 million) plant will have an initial capacity of 100,000 vehicles a year by 2012, eventually rising to 300,000, BMW’s Chief Financial Officer Friedrich Eichiner said today in Beijing. Capacity at BMW’s existing plant in northeastern China’s Shenyang will more than double to 75,000 by the end of 2010, he said.

BMW wants to make more 3-Series and 5-Series sedans in China as demand for top marques catches up with this year’s expected 28 percent growth in vehicle sales, enough for China to surpass the U.S. as the world’s largest vehicle market. Sales of China-made BMW cars and imported models including the Mini brand jumped 37 percent in the first 10 months.

“When the overall vehicle market grows, you can see an exponential growth in the premium segment of the market,” Eichiner said. “Our existing capacity just isn’t enough,” to meet that demand, he said.

Munich-based BMW lags behind Volkswagen AG’s Audi unit in China in the segment of vehicles that cost more than 280,000 yuan ($41,000) each. The company is also facing a challenge from Daimler AG, which assembles the Mercedes-Benz C-Class sedans in China. Daimler Chief Executive Officer Dieter Zetsche said yesterday he expects Mercedes to overtake BMW in China “soon.”

Happy Partners

BMW and its Chinese partner Brilliance China Automotive Holdings Ltd. will each contribute half of the expected investment to their new plant. The new factory will assemble a new 5-Series sedan with a longer wheel base, designed specially for Chinese buyers, who tend to be chauffer-driven in luxury vehicles rather than be owner-drivers.

“We are quite happy with our Chinese partner, so there’s no reason to look for a new partner,” Eichiner said at a press conference, in response to a question on whether BMW plans to make its flagship 7-Series luxury cars with SAIC Motor Co., China’s largest carmaker and a Volkswagen partner.

BMW sales were helped by a government mandate this year that allowed luxury marques to be procured by public offices including the central government and provincial agencies. The police escort that accompanied BMW executives to today’s press conference drove a BMW sedan, Eichiner said.

Chen Zhenggao, governor of Liaoning province where BMW’s China factory is based, said his government will “lead the way” to fit out its fleet with the German brand to support the venture.

In Jon we trust

By Maidhc Ó Cathail
Online Journal
November 12, 2009

Appalled by the Bush administration’s foreign policy, and feeling let down by a compliant news media, many young Americans turned to Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show for some critical insight into what had gone so terribly wrong with their country, as well as some light relief from the horror of it all.

Ironically, it seemed to many that the comedian’s fake news show was the only place where one could learn the truth about the “war on terror” and other disastrous Bush-era policies. Summarizing the phenomenon, author Gene Healy wrote, “An enormous chunk of Generation Y, those born roughly after 1977, gets its political information from Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, a comedy news program devoted to the idea that we’re led by fools.”

With Obama failing to bring the “change” that many believed in, the perceived need to tune in to The Daily Show is unlikely to waver anytime soon. But is the faith many Americans have in Stewart to help them understand their country’s problems justified? The recent interview of a Palestinian politician and a Jewish American peace activist suggests that that faith is seriously misplaced.

In the extended interview (not broadcast on Comedy Central but available on The Daily Show website) with Dr. Mustafa Barghouti and Anna Baltzer, Stewart made up to 20 factual errors. These can be broadly grouped into about half a dozen myths: Jews “returned” to Palestine after 2,000 years in exile; Israel provided a haven for Jews suffering persecution in Muslim countries; Iran is developing nuclear weapons, with which it wants to “wipe Israel off the map”; Israel is unfairly singled out for criticism, mainly due to Arab anti-Semitism; both sides are equally to blame for the conflict; and Palestinians can’t agree among themselves, so you can hardly blame Israel for not making peace with them.

Many of these myths -- all of which serve Zionist interests well -- are so transparently false that it is hardly necessary to debunk them all here. Instead, this article will focus on the last one: the question of Palestinian disunity. This will, it is hoped, also throw some light on the common source of America’s problems in the Middle East.

“It seems like to me that the Palestinians and the Israelis both have to fight a civil war almost,” Stewart opined, “before they can get a chance to then, I guess, fight each other.” While it is of course true that no nation is “homogenous,” his characterization of Palestinians overlooks a significant factor: the role played by Israel and its American devotees in promoting division among them.

Israel began supporting Hamas in the late 1970s as “a competing religious alternative,” a former CIA official explained, “to divide and dilute support for a strong, secular PLO.” Almost three decades later, after Hamas won the 2006 elections, a faction within the Bush administration sought to divide Palestinians again.

The covert operation to arm Fatah so they could seize power from the democratically elected Hamas was considered foolhardy by many, however. An exasperated Pentagon official asked rhetorically, “Who the hell outside of Washington wants to see a civil war among Palestinians?” More to the point, he might have asked, Who the hell inside of Washington wants to see a civil war among Palestinians?

David Rose’s 2008 article, “The Gaza Bombshell,” in the Si Newhouse owned Vanity Fair, gives the impression that Condoleezza Rice and George W. Bush were the main movers behind the plot. To emphasize the point, the caption below a photo illustration of Rice and Bush with a blood red Gaza City skyscape in the background reads: “Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and President George W. Bush, whose secret Palestinian intervention backfired in a big way.”

But there are reasonable grounds to doubt Rose’s credibility. Before the invasion of Iraq, citing a slew of unnamed intelligence sources, he suggested in a number of articles that Saddam Hussein had connections to Al-Qaeda, 9/11, and the anthrax attacks. Despite Rose’s pre-Iraq war disinformation, antiwar writer and activist Amy Goodman wasn’t deterred from featuring his Gaza article on her popular alternative news show, Democracy Now.

Digging a little deeper than Rose and Goodman, Alastair Crooke and Mark Perry, co-directors of Conflicts Forum, a London-based group dedicated to providing an opening to political Islam, locate the origins of the failed plot. In “Elliott Abrams’ Uncivil War” they write, “The Abrams program was initially conceived in February of 2006 by a group of White House officials. . . . These officials, we are told, were led by Abrams, but included national security advisors working in the Office of the Vice President, including prominent neoconservatives David Wurmser and John Hannah.”

In the popular consciousness, Dick Cheney came to be seen, particularly in the antiwar Left, as the Svengali who induced Bush to wage war in the Middle East in the interests of Big Oil. While Cheney’s ties to Halliburton make that narrative appear plausible, a closer examination of the facts reveals that the vice president had more intimate ties with a far more powerful and belligerent lobby.

An advisory board member of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), Cheney has long-standing ties with the Israel Lobby. Indeed, his staff was “hand-picked” by Paul Wolfowitz protégé Lewis Libby. Described as “almost part of Cheney’s brain” by Bob Woodward, Libby selected Cheney’s staff from neoconservative think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute, the Hudson Institute and WINEP.

It was these pro-Israel “scholars” not oil industry lobbyists who wrote the war propaganda for the executive branch. As Robert Dreyfuss points out in his American Prospect article on Cheney’s office, “Vice Squad,” Libby and Hannah produced “the most inflammatory and inaccurate speeches delivered by Cheney and Bush.”

David Wurmser, one of the main sources for David Rose’s Gaza article, is no stranger to propaganda either. In 1999, he wrote Tyranny’s Ally: America’s Failure to Defeat Saddam Hussein, in which he warned Americans about the growing threat of Iraq’s WMD.

His wife, Meyrav Wurmser, an Israeli citizen, co-founded the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) with Yigal Carmon, a former colonel in Israeli military intelligence. Widely considered to be a propaganda front for Israeli intelligence, MEMRI translates and distributes, in the words of journalist Jim Lobe, “particularly virulent anti-U.S. and anti-Israel articles appearing in the Arab press to key U.S. media and policymakers.” What better way to get Americans to believe that they and Israel face a common enemy?

Both Wurmsers worked with Richard Perle and Douglas Feith on writing the 1996 “Clean Break” strategy for Benjamin Netanyahu. The plan for remaking the Middle East in Israel’s interest had to wait until after 9/11 to be implemented, however, when Bush became more susceptible to the very same advisers and their associates.

It was this neoconservative cabal that put Abrams into the position where he could instigate the Gaza coup. Writing in Salon magazine, an “anonymous” veteran foreign service officer explained how Abrams, who had been convicted for unlawfully withholding information about the Iran-Contra scandal from Congress, came to be hired by Rice. In “The State Department’s Extreme Makeover,” he wrote: “In December 2002, Wolfowitz, Feith, Wurmser and Vice President Cheney’s national security advisor, I. Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby, acting together, maneuvered Condoleezza Rice into appointing Elliott Abrams to the position of special assistant to the president and senior director for the Middle East at the National Security Council.”

Considering Abrams’ extreme Likudnik views, former CIA political analysts Kathleen and Bill Christison wryly commented on his appointment, “Putting him in a key policymaking position on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is like entrusting the henhouse to a fox.”

In a revealing comment on who exactly was directing national security during Bush’s first term, “Anonymous” predicted that Rice would be the neocons’ second choice to replace Colin Powell as secretary of state. Since the Iraq debacle was likely to militate against their first choice, Wolfowitz, they planned “to again play behind Condoleezza Rice.”

It is worth noting that Abrams is the son-in-law of Norman Podhoretz. From his bully pulpit at Commentary magazine, the neocon godfather harangues Americans into waging “a very long war” against what he calls “Islamofascism” -- a disparate group of enemies that looks suspiciously like an Israeli hit list.

As to where Abrams’ own loyalty lies, his 1997 book, Faith or Fear: How Jews Can Survive in a Christian America, is unequivocal. Jews “are in a permanent covenant with God and with the land of Israel and its people,” he claims. “Their commitment will not weaken if the Israeli government pursues unpopular policies.”

Shouldn’t Americans be more wary of national security advisers with an avowed uncritical allegiance to a foreign country, especially one which seeks to induce the United States to fight an endless war with one-fifth of the world’s population?

And instead of poking fun at convenient scapegoats like Bush, Cheney and Rice for America’s disastrous Middle East policy -- as The Daily Show did for eight years to great acclaim -- hasn’t Jon Stewart a responsibility to his many fans to sift the merely plausible from the hard facts? When those facts point to a handful of other Jewish Americans whose “covenant” with their tribal God endangers all Americans, to do otherwise is to make fools of his audience.

This was originally published in Intifada: Voice of Palestine.

Maidhc Ó Cathail is a freelance writer who writes in Irish and English. He has written for Antiwar.com, Dissident Voice, The Palestine Chronicle, OpEd News, Media Monitors Network and many other publications.

Refugees and Zionist propaganda

By Ben White | Pulse Media | November 11, 2009

Agence France Press (AFP) reported the following today:

A draft law stipulating that any Middle East peace treaty must mention compensation for Jews forced to leave Arab states has passed a preliminary reading in the Israeli parliament, a spokesman said on Wednesday.The draft bill, presented by a member of the ultra-orthodox Shas party, a member of the government coalition, passed the preliminary vote 49 to 5 last week, said spokesman Giora Pordes.

The draft, which the Maariv daily called “a curious and provocative bill,” still has to pass three more votes before it becomes law.

It calls for the issue of Jewish refugees from Arab states to be raised whenever the question of Palestinian refugees comes up in Middle East negotiations.

“The government should raise the issue about payment of compensation to Jewish refugees for the loss of their property and about granting to Jewish refugees who fled persecution in Arab countries a status similar to that of Arab refugees who lost their property when the state (of Israel) was created,” the proposed law states.

Shas had initially wanted a tougher bill stating compensations for Jewish refugees must be agreed before any further peace negotiations are held. The paragraph, which would have made it virtually impossible to reach a peace accord, was eventually removed so the government could support the text…

‘Israel mulls draft law tying peace, Jewish refugee issue’, AFP, 11 November 2009

The following is an extract from the ‘Frequently Asked Questions’ section of my book, ‘Israeli Apartheid: A Beginner’s Guide‘:

People talk about the Palestinian refugees, but weren’t a similar number of Jewish refugees kicked out of Arab countries and welcomed by Israel? Couldn’t this be seen as a ‘fair swap’?

The creation of the state of Israel led to two substantial population movements in the Middle East. Between 700,000 to 800,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled from their homes, and forbidden from returning by the new Jewish state, while from 1948 through to the 1970s, around 850,000 Jews left Arab countries, with the majority moving to Israel. But the rough equality in scale is just about the only similarity.

Israeli professor Yehouda Shenhav once wrote that “any reasonable person” must acknowledge the analogy to be “unfounded”:

Palestinian refugees did not want to leave Palestine. Many Palestinian communities were destroyed in 1948, and some 700,000 Palestinians were expelled, or fled, from the borders of historic Palestine. Those who left did not do so of their own volition. In contrast, Jews from Arab lands came to this country under the initiative of the State of Israel and Jewish organizations. Some came of their own free will; others arrived against their will. Some lived comfortably and securely in Arab lands; others suffered from fear and oppression.

Some prominent Israeli politicians who themselves come from Arab countries, reject the ‘refugee’ label. Former Knesset speaker Yisrael Yeshayahu once said “‘We are not refugees. [Some of us] came to this country before the state was born. We had messianic aspirations’.” MK Ran Cohen, who emigrated from Iraq, made it clear: “‘I came at the behest of Zionism, due to the pull that this land exerts, and due to the idea of redemption. Nobody is going to define me as a refugee’.”

As well as the fact that Jews in Arab countries were actively encouraged by the Zionist movement to move to Israel, there is another big problem with the ‘swap’ theory – timescale. Dr. Philip Mendes points out how “the Jewish exodus from Iraq and other Arab countries took place over many decades, before and after the Palestinian exodus” and “there is no evidence that the Israeli leadership anticipated a so-called population exchange when they made their arguably harsh decision to prevent the return of Palestinian refugees”. Mendes also concludes his analysis by affirming that “the two exoduses…should be considered separately”.

But the ‘swap’ idea is anyway illogical. One refugee’s right – in the case of the Palestinians, a right affirmed by UN resolutions – can not be ‘cancelled out’ by another’s misfortune. Furthermore, “the Palestinians were not at all responsible for the expulsion of the Jews from Arab countries” – while “the Palestinian refugee problem was caused by the Zionist refusal to allow the Palestinians to return to their homes”.

Given the historical and logical flaws, the only way this analogy can be so tempting for some is its propaganda value. The World Organization of Jews from Arab Countries (WOJAC), for example, claim on their website that their mission is simply “to document the assets Jewish refugees lost as they fled Arab countries”. Professor Shenhav, however, describes how WOJAC “was invented as a deterrent to block claims harbored by the Palestinian national movement, particularly claims related to compensation and the right of return”.

Dismayingly, but perhaps unsurprisingly, the US House of Representatives was persuaded to pass a bill in April 2008 that not only equated Jewish and Palestinian refugees, but also urged “the administration to raise the issue every time the issue of Palestinian refugees is brought up”. The Economist magazine described the non-binding resolution as having “doubtful value”, as well as showing “once more the power of the pro-Israel lobby in Washington”.

November 11, 2009

Where "Global Warming" and "Peak Oil" meet

Not Sylvia Night - November 11, 2009

Where "Global Warming" and "Peak Oil" meet

That place, of course, is the world´s financial market.

"Human Caused Climate Change" is a financial scam, so is the "Peak Oil" paradigm of catastrophic energy shortages in the near future.

Oil and natural gas are not scarce, but actually abundant energy resources. They are also most likely of non-biological origin, as Russian scientists and oil companies have shown for over 50 years.

While the myth of "Global Warming" is used to create new revenues for the financial elites, the myth of a limited supply of "fossil fuels" had been used for creating large profits in the past.

The western financial elites hope to secure those profits in the future by regulating the use of oil, gas and coal through internationally agreed upon CO2 reduction measures, carbon trade agreements and by monopolizing tomorrow´s nuclear energy market. This is one reason why Iran´s civilian nuclear energy program is being so severely opposed by all the governments of the western world that seek to dominate export markets for nuclear installations from India to Brazil. A primary reason also is Israel's demand that it retain technological superiority.

As we have seen in the last post, the theory of "Catastrophic Human Caused Global Warming" neither originated from a large group of scientists nor from environmental grass-roots organizations. Instead it was a long discarded 19th century hypothesis, which was taken out of the dustbin and then proposed by the 1979 British UN Ambassador, who "tickled" the ambition-streak of Margaret Thatcher, the British Prime Minister at the time.

We also saw, that the main argument for a human caused Climate Change, the so-called "Hockey-Stick", has been scientifically discredited for years.

Using mostly official IPCC charts and other research done by the UN "Global Warming" scientists themselves, Dr.David Evans of Science Speak points out that, while there is evidence for some warming of the planet in the last century, there is indeed

No Evidence

that carbon dioxide emissions are the main cause of the recent global warming

And with this conclusion Evans stands in agreement with over 650 leading scientists who, while attending the UN Climate Conference in Poland,

scoffed at doomsday reports of man-made global warming - labeling them variously a lie, a hoax and part of a new religion.


Those international scientists are then quoted in a US-Senate EPW Minority report.

But in spite of more and more counter arguments by the scientific community, especially from climatologists, the "Climate Change" bills, mandating carbon reduction for individuals and industries are rammed through practically all parliaments in the industrialized world.

We once again have to look at the money trail to explain the reasons for this paradox:

The New York Times, reported on November 12, 2008

Goldman Sachs Buys Into Carbon Offsets

Goldman Sachs has recently bought pieces of two carbon-offset companies, in the latest sign of investment banks’ interest in the area......

Carbon offsets are projects that reduce greenhouse gas emissions — thus potentially counterbalancing a rise in emissions elsewhere. Planting trees are the most obvious offset; but other examples include capturing methane (a potent greenhouse gas) from a coal mine, or undertaking a qualified energy-efficiency project. Offsets are used in the European carbon dioxide cap-and-trade system, but have been slow to catch on in this country, where carbon trading is largely voluntary.

And on February 26, 2008 Chris Morrison from the Green Beat branch of the investment website Venture Beat writes:

Will carbon-trading happen? Goldman hopes so, backs APX

APX, a Silicon Valley company that certifies carbon and emissions offset certificates, and which is well-placed to support carbon-trading markets when they emerge, has gotten backing from Goldman Sachs in a $14 million investment, VentureBeat has learned.

Carbon trading is a growing business that could someday come to resemble the world’s largest financial markets.

Today’s emissions markets are generally small and fragmented. In regional U.S. energy markets, utilities are already required to buy electricity from alternative energy sources like geothermal, solar or wind. To prove their use of alternative energy, they’re required to file a certificate tracking their acquisition of the energy units. So this is the beginning of a “transfer” regime that could grow into more.

Meantime, carbon offsetting markets, that corporations buy credits from, are currently voluntary, but in anticipation of future government regulation, they often require similar certifying schemes. However, the source of offsets can vary widely, from alternative energy generation to tree planting projects.

APX acts as part of the intermediary chain between buyer and seller, doing the work of tracking serial numbers on these certificates and the accounts they go into. It’s not glamorous, but having an efficient, scalable back-end will be one of the requirements for building a multi-billion dollar market, as emissions trading may well become.

As today’s small, scattered emissions trading markets grow, they may come to resemble the complex business and regulatory ecosystems of the futures and equities markets, which include various behind-the-scenes businesses similar to APX.

Another indicator that some very serious businesses are becoming involved is one of the new investors in the company’s latest funding: Goldman Sachs, a heavyweight in the New York financial markets.

The largest financial corporation in the world buys into both the "carbon-offset" as well as into the "carbon-trading" market, which is expected to become a multi-billion dollar business.

The reduction of the use of hydro-carbon energy will make large profits to be funneled once again into the financial markets, which then will substitute for the profits the oil companies, in cohorts with the oil producing countries, used to make. While energy demand is fairly inelastic, a generalized increase in end user cost will enrich the well placed.

Why, if "human caused climate change" is a scam, is this substitution necessary?

Because slowly but certainly the knowledge emerges, that these large oil-profits of the past had also been based on a scam - the scam of "resource depletion" caused by over-exploitation of resources due to "exponential global population growth".

The myth of" increasing and catastrophic resource shortages" was initially promoted by the Rockefeller associated "Club of Rome".

Nowadays this scam is most often called the "Peak Oil" problem.

The "Peak Oil" propagandists tell us that oil, as well as natural gas-production, has either already peaked or will in the very near future. After reaching the peak of production a fast decline would make "cheap energy" increasingly scarce. As a consequence, the global economy, dependent on "cheap energy", would contract and eventually crash. This would then cause wide-spread devastation for most of us. And for billions of people all over the globe it would cause constant food-shortages and even starvation.

The catastrophic consequences to global food-production by shortages of oil and gas as energy resources is the first false paradigm promoted by the "Peak Oil" myth.

The second one is, that the world´s economic production is vitally dependent on energy being "cheap".

The reality is, that it isn´t the world´s real, physical economy but the global financial markets which are dependent on energy-resources being "cheap". For today´s actual consumers of energy, for private, industrial or public consumers, oil and gas aren´t actually that "cheap".

It is the large difference between production costs and consumer prices of oil and gas, which for a long time have kept the snake-oil sellers of the big financial corporations afloat. This high price/cost difference in oil production in the past was forced unto global consumers by the monopoly power the large oil-corporations had on the business and the coercive power their main shareholders had on governments all over the world.

The same "monopoly" game is now being started with nuclear energy production, as Dutch researcher Rudo de Ruijter points out in

US-Iran: Raid on nuclear fuel market

In the background of the political joust about Iran, a few countries are reshaping the world. They are taking possession of the global nuclear fuel market. New IAEA regulations should keep newcomers away.

The US, UK, France, Germany, Russia, China and Japan will become the world’s nuclear filling stations. Under the auspices of the IAEA these suppliers will dictate the rules, the prices and the currencies they want to get paid in.

Iran has become the pretext and test case for their plans.

However, like the "man-made Global Warming" myth, the "Peak-Oil" myth is now being contradicted by the facts, which even part of the mainstream media can no longer ignore:

On January 18, 2008 the British Times reports:

World not running out of oil, say experts

A landmark study of more than 800 oilfields by Cambridge Energy Research Associates (Cera) has concluded that rates of decline are only 4.5 per cent a year, almost half the rate previously believed, leading the consultancy to conclude that oil output will continue to rise over the next decade.

Peter Jackson, the report's author, said: “We will be able to grow supply to well over 100million barrels per day by 2017.” Current world oil output is in the region of 85million barrels a day.

But not only do western experts now concede, that there is far more oil in the ground, than they have previously admitted to, but there are also a growing number of western geologists who finally are starting to challenge the 18th century theory of "fossil" fuel, something the Russians have done over half a century ago.

William Engdahl writes about this in his "Confessions of an “ex” Peak Oil Believer"

Engdahl explains that for the Soviets it actually was "Necessity" which became "the mother of invention"

In the 1950’s the Soviet Union faced ‘Iron Curtain’ isolation from the West. The Cold War was in high gear. Russia had little oil to fuel its economy. Finding sufficient oil indigenously was a national security priority of the highest order.

Scientists at the Institute of the Physics of the Earth of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Geological Sciences of the Ukraine Academy of Sciences began a fundamental inquiry in the late 1940’s: where does oil come from?

In 1956, Prof. Vladimir Porfir’yev announced their conclusions: ‘Crude oil and natural petroleum gas have no intrinsic connection with biological matter originating near the surface of the earth. They are primordial materials which have been erupted from great depths.’ The Soviet geologists had turned Western orthodox geology on its head. They called their theory of oil origin the ‘a-biotic’ theory—non-biological—to distinguish from the Western biological theory of origins.

If they were right, oil supply on earth would be limited only by the amount of hydrocarbon constituents present deep in the earth at the time of the earth’s formation. Availability of oil would depend only on technology to drill ultra-deep wells and explore into the earth’s inner regions. They also realized old fields could be revived to continue producing, so called self-replentishing fields. They argued that oil is formed deep in the earth, formed in conditions of very high temperature and very high pressure, like that required for diamonds to form. ‘Oil is a primordial material of deep origin which is transported at high pressure via ‘cold’ eruptive processes into the crust of the earth,’ Porfir’yev stated. His team dismissed the idea that oil is was biological residue of plant and animal fossil remains as a hoax designed to perpetuate the myth of limited supply.

The Soviets then started to tailor their oil-explorations accordingly:

Following their a-biotic or non-fossil theory of the deep origins of petroleum, the Russian and Ukrainian petroleum geophysicists and chemists began with a detailed analysis of the tectonic history and geological structure of the crystalline basement of the Dnieper-Donets Basin. After a tectonic and deep structural analysis of the area, they made geophysical and geochemical investigations.

A total of sixty one wells were drilled, of which thirty seven were commercially productive, an extremely impressive exploration success rate of almost sixty percent. The size of the field discovered compared with the North Slope of Alaska. By contrast, US wildcat drilling was considered successful with a ten percent success rate. Nine of ten wells are typically “dry holes.”...

While the American oil multinationals were busy controlling the easily accessible large fields of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iran and other areas of cheap, abundant oil during the 1960’s, the Russians were busy testing their alternative theory. They began drilling in a supposedly barren region of Siberia. There they developed eleven major oil fields and one Giant field based on their deep ‘a-biotic’ geological estimates. They drilled into crystalline basement rock and hit black gold of a scale comparable to the Alaska North Slope.

They then went to Vietnam in the 1980s and offered to finance drilling costs to show their new geological theory worked. The Russian company Petrosov drilled in Vietnam’s White Tiger oilfield offshore into basalt rock some 17,000 feet down and extracted 6,000 barrels a day of oil to feed the energy-starved Vietnam economy. In the USSR, a-biotic-trained Russian geologists perfected their knowledge and the USSR emerged as the world’s largest oil producer by the mid-1980’s.

With the fall of the Iron Curtain the Russian oil-theory became far more available to scientists and lay people in the western world. Enthusiastically embracing free-market doctrines in the 1990s the Russian oil experts initially offered to share their expertise with the western world. But they were rebuffed in their overtures.

Obviously a theory which contradicts the scarcity myth would cut into the profits of the western oil-corporations.

The Russian oil-companies at home, however, kept on working the same way they had done for nearly half a century. Well after the dissolution of the USSR, in the early 1990’s, they went on using the a-biotic petroleum theory

to drill for oil and gas in a region believed for more than forty-five years, to be geologically barren—the Dnieper-Donets Basin in the region between Russia and Ukraine.

And while the well-paid scientists of the western oil-companies rejected the theory, others did not. Raymond J. Learsy quotes the western proponents of the abiotic oil-theory in the Huffington Post:

The modern Russian-Ukrainian theory of deep, abiotic petroleum origins recognizes that petroleum is a primordial material of deep origin which has been erupted into the crust of the Earth. In short, and bluntly, petroleum is not a "fossil fuel" and has no intrinsic connection with dead dinosaurs (or any other biological detritus) "in the sediments" (or anywhere else)...

The modern Russian-Ukrainian theory of petroleum is based upon rigorous scientific reasoning, consistent with the laws of physics and chemistry, as well as upon extensive geological observation, and rests squarely in the mainstream of modern physics and chemistry, from which it draws its provenance.
Much of the modern Russian theory of deep, abiotic petroleum genesis developed from the sciences of chemistry and thermodynamics, and accordingly the modern theory has steadfastly held as a central tenet that the generation of hydrocarbons must conform to the general laws of chemical thermodynamics, - as must likewise all matter.
In such respect, modern Russian-Ukrainian petroleum science contrasts strongly to what are too often passed off as "theories" in the field of geology in Britain and the U.S.A.

The wall western multinational oil-companies had put up against scientifically based research to save their scarcity paradigm is obviously crumbling as was to be expected at least since the fall of the Iron Wall. More and more western scientific research supporting the long established and well tested Russian theories is now being published, as in the right-wing WorldNetDaily, which cites geologist and researcher Giora Proskurowski who, in a study published in Science Magazine

presented new evidence supporting the abiotic theory for the origin of oil...
While organic theorists have posited that the material required to produce hydrocarbons in sedimentary rock came from dinosaurs and ancient forests, more recent argument have suggested living organisms as small as plankton may have been the origin.

The abiotic theory argues, in contrast, that hydrocarbons are naturally produced on a continual basis throughout the solar system, including within the mantle of the earth. The advocates believe the oil seeps up through bedrock cracks to deposit in sedimentary rock. Traditional petro-geologists, they say, have confused the rock as the originator rather than the depository of the hydrocarbons....

Lost City is a hypothermal field some 2,100 feet below sea level that sits along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge at the center of the Atlantic Ocean, noted for strange 90 to 200 foot white towers on the sea bottom.

In 2003 and again in 2005, Proskurowski and his team descended in a scientific submarine to collect liquid bubbling up from Lost City sea vents.

Proskurowski found hydrocarbons containing carbon-13 isotopes that appeared to be formed from the mantle of the Earth, rather than from biological material settled on the ocean floor.

Carbon 13 is the carbon isotope scientists associate with abiotic origin, compared to Carbon 12 that scientists typically associate with biological origin.

Proskurowski argued that the hydrocarbons found in the natural hydrothermal fluids coming out of the Lost City sea vents is attributable to abiotic production by Fischer-Tropsch, or FTT, reactions.

The Fischer-Tropsch equations were first developed by Nazi scientists who created methodologies for producing synthetic oil from coal.

"Our findings illustrate that the abiotic synthesis of hydrocarbons in nature may occur in the presence of ultramafic rocks, water and moderate amounts of heat," Proskurowski wrote.

The study also confirmed a major argument of Cornell University physicist Thomas Gold, who argued in his book "The Deep Hot Biosphere: The Myth of Fossil Fuels" that micro-organisms found in oil might have come from the mantle of the earth where, absent photosynthesis, the micro-organisms feed on hydrocarbons arising from the earth's mantle in the dark depths of the ocean floors.

Another piece of evidence for the abiotic origin of oil, are several experimental studies done recently:

Alexander Goncharov, a geophysicist at the Carnegie Institution ()
and his colleagues in Russia and Sweden have experimentally shown for the first time that ethane and heavier hydrocarbons can be produced under the pressure and temperature conditions of the upper mantle, the slightly viscous layer of the earth directly below the crust. Their research was published () in Nature Geoscience.

"Our results provide a link which was previously missing or was doubtful because of a lack of in situ measurements ... for the upper mantle conditions," Goncharov said. "Thus, our work suggests there is a possibility for the [abiogenic] oil formation in the deep earth and that there is a potential to find more oil fields than expected if one assumes that oil could be formed only biogenically."

The researchers used a diamond anvil cell and a laser heat source to subject methane -- a primary component of natural gas -- to conditions that mimic the earth at 40 to 95 miles deep...................

Under those conditions, the methane reacted and formed petrochemical feedstock ethane and propane and butane, which are used as fuels, as well as molecular hydrogen and graphite. When the ethane was subjected to the same conditions, it formed methane, suggesting heavier hydrocarbons could exist deep under the earth's surface.

Barry Katz, a geochemist at Chevron Corp., agreed.

"I don't disagree with the idea," Katz said. "I disagree with the idea of commercial quantities. There's no question that it's coming out of the system. However, it's not coming out in commercial quantities."

Katz is acting like a true corporate hack. Russian, Ukrainian and Vietnamese oil producers have proved that there is indeed oil to be found at great depth and in commercial quantities.

According to an interview with oil-expert Dr. Kenney

Russian and Ukrainian scientists found

that a continuous reaction occurs naturally at a depth of approximately 100 km at a pressure of approximately 50,000 atmospheres (5 GPa) and a temperature of approximately 1500°C, and will continue more or less until the ‘death’ of planet earth in millions of years’ time. The high pressure causes oil to continuously seep up along fissures in the earth’s crust into subterranean caverns, which we call oil fields.

As the "Global Warming" myth is designed to put a large economic burden on the world population and hinder developing countries from rising up from poverty, so would the acceptance of the "Peak Oil" myth become the justification for endless wars in the Middle East, South America or the Caucasus, where we in the West are told we need to protect the "scarce resources" from the grab of the Chinese.

Settlers 'stone' school children

By Phoebe Greenwood in Hebron, West Bank

Twaneh School in Hebron has seen some improvements since former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair paid it a visit as UN Middle East envoy last year.

The track leading from the school to the new main road joining Jerusalem to Israeli settlements on the south eastern slopes of Palestine is now paved. There are two new school rooms being built where pupils will be taught up to Grade 9, rather than having to leave after Grade 4. They now have a playground.

But for the 32 children who live in Tuba and Magher Al Abeed, Palestinian villages encircled by three Israeli settlements, getting to school remains problematic.

Frequent attacks by Israeli settlers on children from these villages as they make their way to and from school have pushed Israel to take the exceptional step of providing them a daily military escort.

Ali, 12, has been coming to Twaneh School for six years, and is among those who wait for the military attachment: "The soldiers are okay, they don't give us a hard time. It's just the settlers - whenever we walk by the settlements or past their land, they try to attack us.

"Sometimes they chase us with their horses, ride them at us and try to use them to hurt us. The horses are so fast we can't get away. It's very frightening. But they don't harass us nearly so much when the military are there."

Patrol not reliable

Unfortunately, the patrol is not always reliable. Last Monday, Ali and the other children waited as they do every morning at 7am for their Israeli escorts but they didn't come. Eventually, they decided to walk the long way, a 12km detour around the settlements, which took them two hours.

In the afternoon, the children waited again for the patrol they expected to collect them at 12:30pm. At 3pm they gave up waiting and set off on the 12km hike for the second time that day, arriving home after dark. On Tuesday, the children waited and when the escort failed to arrive, they simply went home, too exhausted to face the two-hour walk once again.

After the military's two-day absence, Twaneh School's Headmaster Mahmoud Makhamreh contacted the Ministry of Education who in turn called the Palestinian Authority who spoke to the Israeli authorities. On Wednesday, the patrol turned up to take the kids to school.

Makhamreh sees a clear difference in the pupils who travel with the military: "The kids who are escorted are weaker in their ability to study- their communication skills are poor and they don't mix well with other children.

"They are full of fear, they feel insecure. I can see it in their behaviour: Whenever the patrol is late, they become nervous, afraid that it won't turn up and they will have to walk home unprotected.

"Quite a few have dropped out because of the difficulties they face getting here, particularly the girls. Last year three dropped out, this year one: four in total since 2008."

Ali, 12, a pupil at Twaneh school in the occupied West Bank. [SAVE THE CHILDREN]
According to new research published by Save the Children UK this week, Palestinian families living in areas like Hebron that the UN identifies as ‘high risk' in the West Bank and Gaza are poorer, less protected and more vulnerable than anywhere else in the occupied Palestinian territory.

At least half of those living in these areas who spoke to the charity said they have been forced from their homes at least once since 2000, the last major period of conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.

Salam Kanaan, Save the Children UK's country director in the occupied Palestinian territory, states: "Without a secure future, the lives of Palestinian children living in high risk areas like the Hebron district are blighted. The daily struggle for basics like food, water and their physical safety has left children depressed and traumatised.

"Conditions in these areas make life so intolerable that many families are driven from their homes, leaving them even poorer and more vulnerable.

"These children need help and protection from the Israeli and Palestinian authorities as well as the international humanitarian community. Families need relief from the unrelenting pressures they face so they can raise their children."

Hurt by stones

Now he is 12, Ali says he worries less for himself than he does his little brother Mahmoud, 10, who walks to school with him: "We older kids always look out for the younger ones, try to protect them. When I was younger, in first and second grade, I was so scared of being beaten that I didn't want to come to school.

"Most of the kids I walk home with have been hurt by stones. We all have bruises on our legs from where rocks have hit us. Last year, one girl was sent to hospital because a stone hit her face and she was badly injured; she was 12 then.

"Of course, if I get hurt I'll tell my parents. I also tell them I'm afraid. They tell me that we need to stick together and never walk away from the military patrol truck."

While the military patrol has stemmed the attacks, it has done little to lessen the impact of the occupation on Hebron's children. Like the playground, the extra classroom and the paved road, this precaution is a cosmetic treatment for the deep wounds of conflict.

Twaneh School has had a demolition order on it since 1999. Headmaster Makhmareh says Israeli peace activists have championed their case in the courts and the demolition has been delayed, but it could still be carried out at any time.

The children, however, continue to walk to school, carrying on life almost as normal. Ali explains that he has little choice: ‘They throw stones at us because they want us to leave this area. But I will never leave here, I was born here. I belong to this land."

Phoebe Greenwood works for Save the Children UK, a global children's charity.

Al Jazeera is not responsible for the content of external websites. The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.

Source