Thousands protest Peres' visit to Argentina

Press TV - November 17, 2009 09:03:17 GMT

Protestors rally against the visit of Israel's President Shimon Peres to Argentina outside the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires, November 16, 2009.

Thousands of anti-Israel demonstrators gathered in the square opposite the Argentinean parliament in Buenos Aires to protest President Shimon Peres' visit to Argentina.

"It's a disgrace that the president of our country is meeting today with the child-murderer, Shimon Peres... There are thousands of people who came here today to protest against the hospitality shown to a representative of an occupying and oppressive government," one of the protestors said.

The protestors carried pictures and placards glorifying Hezbollah Secretary General Seyyed Hassan Nasrallah, and the Leader of Iran's Islamic Revolution, Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei.

The signs read "Get out of Argentina, murderer Shimon Peres", while others said "Death to Zionist-fascist Israel, officer of American imperialism in the Middle East, murderers of the Palestinian people!" the signs also included pictures of Palestinian children killed during Israel's Operation Cast Lead at the beginning of the year.

CNN on our new "huge, huge bomb" to use against Iran

What could possibly lead Iran to want to hide their nuclear facilities?

By Glenn Greenwald
November 17, 2009

Here is Wolf Blitzer and Barbara Starr talking last night on CNN about the Iranians and what the U.S. might to do them; it's really pitch-perfect:

BLITZER: Regarding Iran, a new report raises some disturbing possibilities about its nuclear program, and that's prompting fears from the United States over how to respond.

Let's bring in our Pentagon correspondent, Barbara Starr.

Barbara, what are you learning?

BARBARA STARR, CNN PENTAGON CORRESPONDENT: Well, Wolf, the latest report from the International Atomic Energy Agency suggests Iran could -- could be hiding more secret nuclear sites, and that is raising the stakes on all sides.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

STARR (voice-over): Iran's once secret underground nuclear fuel enrichment plant. The Pentagon is worried Iran is now burying weapons factories so deep, that the current arsenal of bombs can't reach them, leaving the U.S. with no viable military option if a strike was ever ordered.

This new Air Force 15-ton bomb may change that calculation.

JOHN PIKE, GLOBALSECURITY.ORG: We'd certainly be able to take this out with a massive ordnance penetrator, the 30,000-pound boss.

STARR: This is the massive ordnance penetrator, or MOP, now being rushed into development to be carried on B-2 and B-52 bombers. The most likely targets? Iran and North Korea, which are believed to have buried weapons facilities hundreds of feet underground or into the sides of mountains.

PIKE: Some of those would probably require this massive ordnance penetrator simply because they are buried so deep and no other bomb would be able to certainly destroy them.

STARR: At 30,000 pounds, the MOP, some experts say, will be able to penetrate 650 feet of concrete, a significant boost over current bunker-busting bombs like the 2,000-pound BLU-109, which can penetrate just six feet of concrete, and the 5,000-pound GBU-28 which can go through about 20 feet of concrete.

GEOFF MORRELL, PENTAGON SPOKESMAN: This has been a capability that we have long believed was missing from our quiver, our arsenal, and we wanted to make sure we've filled in that gap.

STARR: No air strikes against North Korea or Iran appear to be in the works, but Iran says it could start enriching uranium here in the next two years, and both the U.S. and Israel want to ensure that Iran cannot manufacture and assemble a nuclear weapon.

All of this has now led to more funding for the MOP. The Pentagon plans to have the first bombs available by December 2010, two years earlier than planned.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

STARR: Now, the Pentagon likes to say it's not helpful to speculate on future military targets, but certainly this weapon gives the Pentagon, Wolf, an option it hasn't had before -- Wolf.

BLITZER: It's a huge, huge bomb, Barbara. Thanks very much for that.

• Continue Reading

Wolf was practically breathless with excitement as he marveled there at the end about what a big, big, powerful bomb that is. He looked like he was in need of CPR or some other type of relief. "It's a huge, huge bomb, Barbara."

What possible reason could those crazy, irrational Iranians have for wanting to hide their nuclear facilities? It's not like anyone's threatening them or anything. And remember: the proof that Iran is a unique, Nazi-like threat is that they allegedly have people in their government that threaten other countries with military attacks. No responsible, civilized country would do that.

Iran's evil intent is also demonstrated by their recent decision to allow IAEA inspectors to examine their Qom facility, which proved that there were no active centrifuges there, just as Iran said. Truly peaceful countries would never allow such inspections. So thankfully, we're about to have "a huge, huge bomb" -- bigger and better than all the ones we had before -- that can take care of the Iranian menace once and for all.

500 Million New Terrorists!

By Hans Vogel
16.11.2009

The world is becoming unsafer by the day. Before the end of November, half a billion new terrorists will be added to the list kept by the US government.

On November 30, one day before the Lisbon Treaty is scheduled to take effect, the ministers of justice of the EU's 27 member states will sign yet another security agreement with the US. It is supposed to be an essential weapon in the global “War on Terror” the US claims to be fighting.

Under the new agreement, the US government will get access to all the banking data of all Europeans. This means that from December 2009, every single financial transaction done by every single European banking customer will come under the scrutiny of the US authorities. Henceforth, whenever the US government suspects a European “citizen” of supporting terrorism, it can request all his or her banking data, including all bank statements as well as any and all personal data connected with the account.

No doubt, many people will fail to see much harm in this, because “they have nothing to hide.” But such an attitude is based on the assumption the US is governed by benign, rational individuals, controlled by an elaborate system of checks and balances.

In fact, this is obviously not the case. If any conclusion can be drawn from recent history, it is that the US government does not act benignly, neither towards it own citizens nor to those of other nations. Especially not toward those of other nations, one should say. US policies are vindictive, vicious, ruthless, deceitful, destructive and murderous. Since the end of World War II, the number of people killed worldwide by the US government, directly or indirectly, runs in the millions. It is safe to say the US government finds itself in the same league as the Nazis and the Stalinists. And don't let anybody retort that the millions of victims of US violence have died to make the word safe for democracy, or that their deaths were somehow necessary or inevitable or some such nonsense.

Today, under the very eyes of an indifferent world, hundreds of innocent Afghans, Pakistanis and Iraqis are being slaughtered every day by US bullets, bombs and missiles, just like during the 1960s and 70s every day hundreds were being killed directly or indirectly by US violence in Indochina and Latin America.

Within a few weeks, US authorities will gain full access to some of the most private data of all inhabitants of the European Union and this should be cause for alarm. After all, from a moral point of view the EU leadership (and of the 27 member states) is just as evil and corrupt as the US government.

With the list of organizations that the US whimsically qualifies as terrorist constantly growing, the likelihood of a European “citizen” making a donation to such a group likewise increases. By the same token, the list of individuals the US has been putting on terrorist lists already runs in the millions. In fact, by employing the usual mix of lies, cajoling, blackmail and bullying in order to impose its paranoid rules on air traffic worldwide, the US government has already turned every airline passenger into a terrorist suspect.

Anybody who believes this is normal or acceptable should do some serious soul searching.

Heaven knows how the US has managed to persuade the Europeans to go along and sign the newest agreement. It is a mystery why the Europeans should have lent a willing ear at all to the US fairy tales about terrorism, because it means they will be sacrificing their sovereignty, or rather, what remains of it.

The only explanations one could possibly offer is that European politicians have no idea who they are dealing with, and are weak kneed. Or they are being blackmailed. There is no other logical explanation why European nations, some of them proud states with a long history of fiercely defending their sovereignty, would sign away their sovereign rights and hand them to a rogue state like the US.

Given that under previous agreements, European governments have already approved extraditing their own citizens to the US and given that all European governments collaborate with the secret CIA rendition flights taking kidnapped individuals to US-controlled or operated torture centers all over the world, all Europeans will soon be fair game.

The true purpose of the entire “War on Terror” can only be to terrorize peaceful, law-abiding citizens and to browbeat them in order to impose harmful legislation. For thousands of years governments have had to face underground opposition, some of it well-organized and with a propensity to violence. The best way to counter such a threat is to go about it in utter secrecy. Mind you, secret services are supposed to do their work in secret, so that no one will notice. Indeed that is what they have been doing throughout history in most of the world, especially in democratic countries. However, the US and its acolytes have been bombarding the world on a daily basis with alarmist fairy tales for almost a decade now. According to all official US reports, the increase of terrorism outpaces any efforts to combat it. However, despite having the biggest military and security budgets in history, with unlimited technological resources at its disposal and a staggering panoply of legal controls on every single activity by every single citizen, the US still claims to be losing the struggle.

This is clearly a lie. Because, whenever nations are losing a war, they will publicly deny this in the most emphatic manner. Conversely, when nations are claiming for years on end that they are losing, it has got to be be a lie. Therefore it can be safely said the “War on Terror” is a hoax.

The danger of the new agreement between the US and the EU is that nobody will know if what he or she is doing may land him in a US jail or in some distant torture center. Suppose you sympathize with a European group giving aid to the civilian victims of NATO bombing campaigns in Afghanistan. You buy a T-shirt for 20 Euros and you forget about it. Then the US government puts the group (whose T-shirt you are wearing) on the list of terror organizations and requests its banking details. As soon as the US government gets these, it has the names of everyone who has ever made donations to the group. Then your name appears and together with all the other names coming up, it is put on the terror suspect list. In the eyes of the US government, you have become a supporter of terrorism and an enemy of the (US) state. Now, nothing stands in the way of your being extradited to the US by your own (European) government. If you are lucky, that is. If not, you may end up in the worldwide US Gulag. You may get kidnapped and put on a rendition flight to a dungeon in Uzbekistan or some other hell hole, where you will be tortured in the most horrible way. Neither your government nor the European Commission will lift a finger to prevent this.

You can be sure this sort of thing is going to happen. Not systematically, but it will inevitably. Soon, rumors will start circulating, and fear will come to dominate the everyday lives of all EU citizens.

However there may be a lighter side to it all. Since your government no longer protects your life and liberty, but on the contrary has betrayed you and given the US (with its abysmal human rights record) the right to prosecute you on trumped up and false charges, you are no longer bound by any obligations to your government. It could mean, for instance, you now have sound legal grounds to stop paying taxes.

You have in fact been turned into a terrorist and an outlaw and you may thank the EU Commission and your national government for that. However, it may be a consolation to realize you are not alone. All the other 500 million inhabitants of the EU have become terrorists just like you.

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The destruction of Iraq was for Israel, not oil

Not Sylvia Night
November 16, 2009

When the US invasion of Iraq started in 2003 how often did we hear the slogan "No Blood for Oil" proclaimed loudly by the anti-war movement?

How often did we hear the accusation that the "insatiable thirst" for oil of the American economy and the American consumer had caused this drive for war against an oil-rich country?

But is this really what we should be focused on?

Ahmed Janabi of Al-Jazeera has good reason, supported by new documentary evidence, to see a far more important motive for the US war-policy.

On November 9, 2009 Janabi wrote:

New Iraq going "soft on Israel"

In 1951 the Arab League established the Bureau for Boycotting Israel. Based in Damascus, Syria, the bureau has lost much of its authority since Egypt, Jordan and the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) signed peace treaties with Israel...

Before the US-led invasion, Iraq adhered closely to the instructions of the bureau. Israeli companies, those with Israeli shareholders and companies with dealings with Israel were banned in Iraq....

Before the 2003 invasion, Iraq endured 13 years of UN sanctions. During this time speculation was rife that one of the aims of the sanctions was to force Iraq into a peace process with Israel...

Al Jazeera has obtained a document written by Saddam Hussein's secretary, which conveys Hussein's rejection of an offer to partake in a peace process with Israel in exchange for the lifting of sanctions....

Badi Rafaia, a spokesman for the Federation of Anti-Normalisation with Israel Unions Committee in Jordan, said the US-led invasion of Iraq removed one of the last remaining obstacles to Israel's denial of Palestinian rights.

"[Before the war] Iraq was the main obstacle to Israel's plan to establish ties with Arab countries and subsequently swallow Palestinians' rights and demands," he said.

"We believe that Iraq's decision to allow companies with ties to Israel to work in the country is the fruit of American strategy in the region."

Before the the first Gulf war in 1991, Saddam Hussein was actually a US ally:

'Former National Security Council official, Roger Morris, says': CIA helped Baath party to power

'... in 1963, two years after the ill-fated U.S. attempt at overthrow in Cuba known as the Bay of Pigs, the CIA helped organize a bloody coup in Iraq that deposed the Soviet-leaning government of Gen. Abdel-Karim Kassem. [...] Kassem, who had allowed communists to hold positions of responsibility in his government, was machine-gunned to death. And the country wound up in the hands of the Baath party.'

'At the time () Saddam was a Baath operative studying law in Cairo, one of the venues the CIA chose to plan the coup. [Saddam] was actually on the CIA payroll in those days .

"There's no question," Morris says. "It was there in Cairo that (Saddam) and others were first contacted by the agency."

In 1968 () the CIA encouraged a palace revolt among Baath party elements led by long-time Saddam mentor Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr, who would turn over the reins of power to his ambitious protégé [Saddam] in 1979.

"It's a regime that was unquestionably midwived by the United States, and the (CIA's) involvement there was really primary," Morris says.

But the American involvement with the Baath party and Saddam Hussein himself didn´t end there.

In the same year as Saddam was elevated into full power in Iraq, the Islamic revolution in Iran succeeded and the Shah, the American puppet, and his brutal torture regime were ousted, the American embassy was occupied and it´s personnel held hostage by angry Iranians.

Saddam was then encouraged to attack Iran over a border conflict. Without American support, the war would have been over in no time. Iraq, a country with a much smaller population didn´t stand a chance.

'To prevent Iraqi defeat in the war, which in the end lasted from 1980 to 1988,

the Reagan Administration began supplying Saddam with battlefield intelligence on Iranian troop movements. By the end of the decade, Washington had authorized the sale to Iraq of numerous items that had both military and civilian applications. These included poisonous chemicals and biological viruses, among them anthrax and bubonic plague.'

Contacts between Saddam Hussein and the American government proceeded throughout that war on the highest levels. The Washington Post wrote on December 30, 2002:

'Declassified documents show that Rumsfeld traveled to Baghdad at a time when Iraq was using chemical weapons on an "almost daily" basis in defiance of international conventions.'

But the end of the Iran-Iraq war wasn´t the end of the US-Iraqi connivance either. Eight days before his Aug. 2, 1990, invasion of Kuwait, Saddam Hussein met with April Glaspie, then America's ambassador to Iraq. It was the last high-level contact between the two countries before Iraq went to war.

From a translation of Iraq's transcript of the meeting it seemed quite obvious, that Ms. Glaspie had (in effect) given Saddam a green light to invade.

"We have no opinion on your Arab-Arab conflicts," the transcript reports Glaspie saying, "such as your dispute with Kuwait. Secretary [of State James] Baker has directed me to emphasize the instruction ... that Kuwait is not associated with America."

Why would the American ambassador lead a loyal American ally, a man brought to power by the CIA, into such a trap?

Why, after the attack, where the Iraqi army had been decimated, would the whole Iraqi people subsequently be punished by brutal sanctions costing millions of lives?

Was this really in the interest of the American economy or the American oil-companies?

Economist Ismael Hossein-zadeh has written that the desired policy from the perspective of the oil companies had actually been support for local strong-men, like Saddam Hussein, who would guarantee the stability needed for their business, not demolish them.

Hossein-zadeh sees the claim of the anti-war movement, that the American motivation to go to war in Iraq, was to seek the control of oil, as contradicted by observed modern history and as a contradiction in itself.

While some of these (war-) opponents argue that the war is driven by the U.S. desire for cheap oil, others claim that it is prompted by big oil’s wish for high oil prices and profits. Interestingly, most antiwar forces use both claims interchangeably without paying attention to the fact that they are diametrically-opposed assertions.

Hossein-zadeh then points out that oil-prices aren´t actually controlled by the producers, either the oil-corporations or the oil-producing countries, neither is the access to oil:

Today, oil prices (like most other commodity prices) are determined largely by the forces of supply and demand in competitive global energy markets; and any country or company can have as much oil as they wish if they pay the going market (or spot) price

To the extent that competitive oil markets and/or prices are occasionally manipulated, such subversion of competitive market forces are often brought about not so much by OPEC or other oil producing countries as by manipulative speculations of financial giants in New York and London.

.... Wall Street financial institutions have accomplished this feat through “innovative” financial instruments such as establishment of energy hedge funds and speculative oil futures markets in New York and London....

Most of the current theories of imperialism and hegemony that continue invoking that old pattern of Big Oil behavior tend to suffer from an a-historical perspective. Today, as discussed earlier, even physically occupying and controlling another country’s oil fields will not necessarily be beneficial to oil interests. Not only will military adventures place the operations of current energy projects at jeopardy, but they will also make the future plans precarious and unpredictable....

Big Oil interests also know, that not only is war no longer the way to gain access to oil, it is in fact an obstacle to gaining that access.

Exclusion of U.S. oil companies from vast oil resources in countries such as Russia, Iran, Venezuela, and a number of central Asian countries due to militaristic U.S. foreign policy is a clear testament to this fact.

Many of these countries (including, yes, Iran) would be glad to have major U.S. oil companies invest, explore and extract oil from their rich reserves. Needless to say that U.S. oil companies would be delighted to have access to those oil resources.

But U.S. champions of war and militarism have successfully torpedoed such opportunities through their unilateral wars of aggression and their penchant for a Cold War-like international atmosphere.

If the American oil-companies did not expect any advantages from a war against Iraq, who did?

Anti-Zionist-activist Mark Green analyzes a 60 MINUTES segment which aired on Sunday February,18 in 2007. The program claimed:

that Iraq is indeed disintegrating as a nation. But according to host Bob Simon, this isn't altogether unreasonable or, for that matter, even unfortunate.

The Kurds of Iraq, explained Simon, are the world's "largest nation without a country". Simon lends subtle support to the idea that an irredentist "ethic minority" (Kurds) deserve their own separate nation which, like Israel, is poised to spring suddenly into being out of a battered nation of extremist Arabs....

Indeed, a major part of the 'Kurdistan' story which was basically ignored by '60 MINUTES' is how the Jewish State will benefit enormously by the creation of a brand new, ardently pro-Zionist, and oil-rich ally operating right inside of what's now Northern Iraq....

Indeed, while Baghdad burns, there's an economic boom, observes Simon on '60 MINUTES', going on right now inside Iraq's Kurdish region....

Cutting Iraq into pieces, separating a Sunni from a Shiite region and creating an independent Israel-friendly Kurdistan has been on Israel´s policy agenda for at least since the 1980´s, wrote the late Israeli human-rights activist Israel Shahak in his translation of the Oded Yinon policy paper: “A Strategy for Israel in the Nineteen Eighties”.

In 1996 some of the authors of the American Iraq-war strategy within the Bush administration reiterated Yinon´s plan about bombing and cutting Iraq to pieces in their own policy paper : A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm

The paper was written 4 years before Bush the younger brought the Neocon gang with him to power. It was written for Benyamin Netanyahu, then Prime Minister of Israel. The authors were Richard Perle, James Colbert, Charles Fairbanks, Jr., Douglas Feith, Robert Loewenberg, David Wurmser, and Meyrav Wurmser.

The destruction of Iraq, a multi-ethnic and multi-religious nation that sympathizes with the Palestinian people and also the most advanced Arab nation, has been on the Israeli wish list for quite some time. Using the Oded Yinon/PNAC goals of securing the Middle East for Israel, the Iraq war has been an astonishing success. Whereas the outcome for U.S. based oil companies has been far from impressive.

Video: Mandela's cellmate says Israeli apartheid worse than South Africa

Suppressed News

November 16, 2009



Achmad Cassiem is a veteran of the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. He joined the armed struggle for justice at age 15, and at the age of 17 he became one of the youngest people to be imprisoned on Robben Island alongside Nelson Mandela, where he served a total of 11 years. He is a teacher by profession, a founder of the Islamic Unity Convention and an adviser to the Islamic Human Rights Commission. He says that Israeli apartheid is worse than South Africa ever was (and he would know).

Free Palestine. Boycott Israel! Smash Zionism!

Campus Watch copycats close in on Israeli professors

Right hopes to silence boycott call from academics

By Jonathan Cook
November 16, 2009

(Nazareth) -- Right-wing groups in Israel want to create a climate of fear among left-wing scholars at Israeli universities by emulating the "witch-hunt" tactics of the US academic monitoring group Campus Watch, Israeli professors warn.

The watchdog groups IsraCampus and Israel Academia Monitor are believed to be stepping up their campaigns after the recent publication in a US newspaper of an Israeli professor's call to boycott Israel.

Both groups have been alerting the universities' external donors, mostly US Jews, to what they describe as "subversive" professors as a way to bring pressure to bear on university administrations to sanction faculty staff who are critical of Israeli policies.

"I have no hesitation in calling this a McCarthyite campaign," said David Newman, a politics professor at Ben Gurion University, in Israel's southern city of Beersheva. "What they are doing is very dangerous."

Last month, in what appeared to be a new tactic, IsraCampus placed a full-page advertisement in an official diary issued to students at Haifa University, urging them to visit its website to see a "rogues' gallery" of 100 Israeli scholars the group deems an "academic fifth column".

"The goal is to transform our students into spies in the classroom to gather information and intimidate us," a senior Israeli lecturer said. "It's a model of 'policing' faculty staff that has been very successful in stifling academic freedom in the US."

Both Israel Academia Monitor, established in 2004, and the later IsraCampus, model themselves on Campus Watch, a US organisation founded by Daniel Pipes, an academic closely identified with the US neoconservative movement.

Campus Watch has been widely accused of intimidating US scholars who have expressed views critical of US and Israeli policies in the Middle East. The organisation's goal, according to critics, is to pressure US universities to avoid hiring left-wing lecturers or awarding them tenure.

The advertisement placed by IsraCampus, and seen by Haifa University students as they returned from their summer break, warned that a number of their professors "openly support terrorist attacks against Jews, initiate an international boycott of Israel, exploit their status in the classroom for anti-Israeli incitement and anti-Zionist brainwashing, collaborate with known anti-Semites ... who publicly call for Israel's destruction".

Publication of the advert was supported by the head of Haifa's student union, Felix Koritney: "Students who study here need to know who their lecturers are, and if there are lecturers who oppose the state of Israel it is important to publish their names."

In a statement, Haifa University officials also defended the advetisement - after receiving a complaint from a student who called the advertisement incitement - justifying it on the grounds of "freedom of speech".

IsraCampus is associated with Steven Plaut, an economics professor at Haifa University, who was reported to have paid for the advertisement. On the group's site and on his personal blog, Mr Plaut has lambasted many Israeli left-wing academics.

IsraCampus and Israel Academia Monitor have targeted professors for criticising the occupation, joining protests against Israel's separation wall, signing petitions or attending conferences critical of Israel, defending the UN report of Judge Richard Goldstone on last winter's attack on Gaza, or calling for a boycott of Israel.

Both groups have focused their efforts on the staff at Ben Gurion and Haifa universities, two regional campuses that have attracted more outspoken dissidents.

Ilan Pappe, a former history professor at Haifa University and the author of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, admitted he abandoned his academic career in Israel and relocated to the UK after a campaign of vilification.

But, according to Mr Newman, Ben Gurion University had become the groups' "public enemy No 1" after publication by Neve Gordon, a colleague of Mr Newman, of an article in the Los Angeles Times calling for a boycott of Israel.

Despite having tenure, observers say, Mr Gordon has come under increasing pressure from the university to resign his position as chair of the university's politics department over his published views.

Rivka Carmi, president of Ben Gurion University, issued a statement shortly after Mr Gordon's article was printed, condemning his opinions as "morally repugnant" and warning that he was "welcome to search for a personal and professional home elsewhere".

Dana Barnett, founder of Israel Academia Monitor, has launched a petition demanding that Mr Gordon be sacked from his position as chair, that his courses be treated as elective rather than compulsory for his students, and that he be denied travel and research funding.

Mr Newman said decisions about hiring and retaining staff at Ben Gurion were still being taken on academic grounds but that the monitoring groups were seeking to change that by calling for donor boycotts of universities seen to be harbouring anti-Zionist professors.

Yaakov Dayan, the Israeli consul in Los Angeles, sent a letter to Ben Gurion University after publication of Mr Gordon's article, warning that private benefactors "were unanimous in threatening to withhold their donations to your institution".

Although the universities are chiefly backed by government money, external donations account for about five per cent of their funding. With universities struggling with large debts, donations can be seen as leverage over the universities.

Mr Newman said the monitoring groups hoped to redirect donations to right-wing academic institutions and think tanks, such as the Shalem Centre in Jerusalem, whose founding president is the US neoconservative scholar Martin Kramer, and Ariel College, located in a West Bank settlement near Nablus.

On his website, Mr Plaut credited IsraCampus with forcing Tel Aviv University last week to investigate claims by one of its professors, Nira Hativa, that some right-wing students were afraid to speak out in class because of fears that they would be penalised by their lecturers.

Under questioning from the Haaretz newspaper, Ms Hativa admitted that her allegations were based only on "intuition and personal impressions".

Both IsraCampus and Israel Academia Monitor have been incensed by the support offered to Mr Gordon's call for a boycott of Israel by a small number of Israeli academics.

One such professor, Anat Matar, who teaches philosophy at Tel Aviv University, said the atmosphere both within the universities and more widely in Israeli society was changing rapidly and becoming increasingly "intolerant" of dissent. "We've become a little more fascistic as a society," she said.

Mr Plaut has been at the centre of a libel battle with Mr Gordon since 2002 after he called him a "Judenrat wannabe" - a reference to Jewish collaborators with the Nazis.

Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His latest books are "Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East" and "Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair". His website is www.jkcook.net.

A version of this article originally appeared in The National (www.thenational.ae), published in Abu Dhabi.

Source

Email surveillance: ditch it for good

Labour is right to think plans to snoop on our internet use will harm its election chances – but have they really been shelved?

By Simon Davies | The Guardian | November 14, 2009

The government is playing a two-handed game over its plan to snoop on all our communication and internet activity. On the one hand, officials have put it about that the scheme has been indefinitely shelved because of concerns raised in the public consultation on the proposals. On the other, Home Office insiders assure me that the government has no intention of putting the scheme on hold. Any statements to the contrary are designed to mitigate the risk of a negative campaign in the run-up to the general election.

The government quite rightly perceives an election risk because of its surveillance plans. It is, after all, proposing to reach deep into the private life of everyone in the nation. From your phone records and emails to your activity on social networking sites such as Facebook, the government wants to know everything you do.

The scheme is a political disaster in the making. Both the Tories and the Lib Dems have positioned themselves with a reform agenda on privacy. The mere existence of a surveillance plan of this magnitude would have created the sort of clear blue water that no government would want. Bad enough that it has already created a surveillance society second to none in the democratic world; even worse if it was seen to be moving toward a North Korean model.

The consultation in this scheme was a disreputable piece of work. The government tried to sell the snooping plans as if they were a range of vacuum cleaners. It offered a "do nothing" option, already dismissed by ministers; a ridiculously complex and unlawful option; and a "middle ground" option. The document offered no specific detail, primarily because officials and ministers had no clue what technology or techniques are available to spy on the public. It said nothing about safeguards, principally because the Home Office had no idea what it had to safeguard. And it was mute on specifics about risks, again because the government had no clue what it was trying to "protect" us from.

In other words, what was proposed was a nebulous scheme dreamed up on non-existent technology to combat unspecified threats. Little wonder that the majority of responses to the consultation dismissed the plans as sheer nonsense.

But the true litmus test of the viability of the government's scheme happened in Madrid recently. There, more than a thousand of the world's leading technical experts, lawyers, privacy regulators and corporations gathered at the International Conference of Data Protection and Privacy Commissioners to consider the best and the worst information projects in the world. The government's scheme sat magnificently at the top of the pile of bad ideas, attracting a uniquely harsh assessment from the experts at the meeting.

To give you a flavour of the considered expert view of the scheme, I could not find a single supporter of the proposals. The technology companies told me they were fantasy, the privacy commissioners said they were probably unlawful, and civil society groups said they are obnoxious. On the basis of my straw poll at the event, I could write a slogan for this scheme: "Eight out of ten of the world's biggest corporations think the government's plan is insane."

This scheme is a break point for this government. If it had any mind to assure the public that it cares about rights, it will make an unequivocal commitment in parliament to withdraw the plans. At least then we can have some assurance that some shred of privacy remains in our surveillance-infested world.

If it was a war for oil, the US lost

The "no war for oil" mantra only made average Americans stakeholders in the wars for Israel

By Jeffrey Blankfort
November 15, 2009

Although the Bush administration denied it, the conventional wisdom on the part of the anti-war movement was that the war on Iraq was launched in order for the US to take over Saddam’s oil supplies which would give Washington an even more dominant position in the region. That there was no concrete evidence that the war was supported by the oil companies was discounted and, as it had been in 1991 during the first Gulf War, "No blood for oil!" became the battle cry.

If the war was indeed about oil, then, as the NY Times reported on Friday, the US lost.

Those espousing that theory had company, however. It was the view held by most Iraqis.

"If true," writes the Times’ Rod Nordland. "then the war failed in more ways than some critics charge."

"It wasn’t until last week that the first major oil field exploitation contract was signed with a foreign company–BP in a joint deal with China’s state-run China National Petroleum Corporation.

"Exxon Mobil… has an oil field deal awaiting final approval from Iraq’s oil ministry. The Italian oil giant Eni, whose junior partner is the American-owned Occidental Petroleum is expected to sign a similar deal. These, however, are service contracts so the foreign oil companies don’t actually own the rights to any new oil they may find."

Pro-Israel lobby group bankrolling Tories, film claims

50% of MPs in the shadow cabinet are Conservative Friends of Israel members, according to Channel 4's Dispatches

By Ian Black
The Guardian
November 16, 2009

Channel 4's film alleges that William Hague faced threats of a withdrawal of funding from CFI after he described a retaliatory attack by Israel on Lebanon in 2006 as 'disproportionate'. Photograph: Martin Godwin

Pro-Israeli organisations in Britain look set to see their influence increase if the Conservatives win the next election, a film scrutinising the activities of a powerful but little-known lobby warns today.

At least half of the shadow cabinet are members of the Conservative Friends of Israel (CFI), according to a Dispatches programme being screened on Channel 4. The programme-makers describe the CFI as "beyond doubt the most well- connected and probably the best funded of all Westminster lobbying groups".

Inside Britain's Israel Lobby claims that donations to the Conservative party "from all CFI members and their businesses add up to well over £10m over the last eight years". CFI has disputed the figure and called the film "deeply flawed".

The programme also describes how David Cameron allegedly accepted a £15,000 donation from Poju Zabludowicz, a Finnish billionaire who chairs Bicom (the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre). Zabludowizc, the film reveals, has business interests in an illegal West Bank settlement. He also gave £50,000 to Conservative Central Office. Zabludowicz says his contributions "are a matter of public record".

William Hague allegedly accepted personal donations from CFI board members totalling tens of thousands of pounds after being appointed shadow foreign secretary. More than £30,000 from CFI supporters went to the campaign funds of members of Cameron's team who were first elected in 2005, the film claims, using publicly available information.

The programme-makers say that while this is legal, it is not well-known.

The CFI director, Stuart Polak, told the Guardian the figure of more than £10m is not supported by any facts. "It is fictitious, misleading and damaging to the reputation of CFI and its supporters," he said.

"CFI as an organisation has donated only £30,000 since 2005. Each of these donations has been made transparently and publicly registered. In addition to this £30,000, it is undoubtedly the case that some of our supporters have also chosen, separately, to donate to the party as individuals."

Two years ago a controversial study by American academics Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer explored the influence of the Israel lobby over US foreign policy. But Britain's pro-Israel organisations have been subjected to far less scrutiny.

"The pro-Israel lobby … is the most powerful political lobby," Michael Mates, a Conservative MP and privy councillor, told the film-makers. "There's nothing to touch them."

Full article

Gordon Brown: Britain can lead new world order

"When Britain is bold, when Britain is engaged, when Britain is confident and outward-looking, we have shown time and again that Britain has a power and an energy that far exceeds the limits of our geography, our population, and our means."

- Gordon Brown

Britain must play key Afghan role

Nov 16, 2009

LONDON - PRIME Minister Gordon Brown said on Monday Britain must play a comprehensive role in 'changing the world' as he defended the country's military mission in Afghanistan.

Mr Brown also said more has been planned in 2009 and 'enacted with greater success' to cripple Al-Qaeda than in any year since the US-led invasion of Afghanistan to oust the Taleban regime in 2001.

The premier is facing mounting pressure at home over Britain's involvement in the war amid waning public support as the number of soldiers killed grows. An increasing majority of Britons want the country's 9,000 troops out of Afghanistan within 12 months, according to the latest opinion poll.

Mr Brown, who is tipped to lose a general election to the opposition Conservatives due by June, said Britain must not retreat 'into isolation' on foreign policy, but be both 'patriotic and internationalist'.

'I believe that Britain can inspire the world. I believe that Britain can challenge the world. But most importantly of all I believe that Britain can and must play its full part in changing the world,' he said in a speech, extracts of which have been released by Downing Street.

'To do so we must have confidence in our distinctive strengths: our global values, global alliances and global actions: because with conviction in our values and confidence in our alliances, Britain can lead in the construction of a new world order.' -- AFP

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