In the wake of a recent article on Tor ((Bill Blunden, “The NSA Wants You to Trust Tor, Should You?” Counterpunch, Weekend Edition July 18-20, 2014)) your author received an e-mail from Shava Nerad, the founding executive director of the Tor Project. Putting aside certain rhetorical devices that have cropped up in this debate, like name-calling or guilt-by-association, let’s examine some of Shava’s points to see if we can take the conversation in a constructive direction.
Choosing Sides
For example, Nerad asks me which side I’m on, commenting that my article “seems more aimed to throw fear and darkness” in a …
Israeli propaganda has hit a new low. While the world was still trying to come to terms with the mass deaths in Shuja’iyeh, Benjamin Netanyahu went on CNN to state that Hamas uses the “telegenically dead” to further “their cause.” He added that for Hamas: “The more the dead, the better.” Even while Netanyahu followed the propaganda script, which is to first show sympathy and express remorse, by reducing dead Palestinians to a photo-op he showed how his own mind works.
There is a standard script for how to deal with Palestinian casualties. After Israel killed four boys …
Q: Why is Egypt preventing medical aid to Gaza?
A: So that Israel can use it as a weapon, that’s why.
This explains why dozens of volunteer medical personnel cannot reach the desperately understaffed hospitals in Gaza. It explains why Egypt turned away a convoy of desperately needed medical supplies.
In this time of crisis, Egypt has sealed the border with Gaza, except occasionally to Palestinians who are registered with Israel as residents of Gaza. For anything else, please apply to Israel.
That’s fine for UNRWA, ANERA, UPA and other groups Israel has approved as relief agencies and …
On the 13th day of Israel’s so-called Operation Protective Edge, stories of entire families collectively pulverized, women and children keenly targeted by Israeli soldiers, saturate the media. Until now, 430 Palestinians have been killed, mostly women and children, and 18 Israel soldiers been killed at the hands of the Resistance. In Shejaiya, elders, mothers and children scrambled for cover as shells mercilessly rained down, stealing the souls of countless innocents.
The destruction is overwhelming, and everywhere, Palestinians lament there is nowhere that is safe. Regardless, resolve is strong and the people of Gaza will not resign themselves to surrender.
On 26 November 1947, when it became apparent to Zionists and their supporters that the UN vote on the Partition of Palestine would be short of the required two thirds majority in the General Assembly, they filibustered for a postponement until after Thanksgiving thereby gaining time to threaten the loss of aid to nations such as Greece — which planned on voting against — into changing their votes. U.S. President Truman — also threatened with loss of Jewish support in the upcoming Presidential election — later noted that:
The facts were that not only were there pressure movements around the United …
Israel’s current attack on a basically defenseless population in Gaza is a repeat of its massacres of Palestinians in November 2012, December 2008-January 2009 and June-July 2006. This time Israeli forces have already slaughtered over 500 Palestinians, overwhelmingly civilians, while about 20 Israelis, almost all soldiers, have been killed. The imbalance of these death tolls is staggering but not surprising. I say not surprising because Israel has one of the strongest militaries in the world, supplied with the latest US weapons and technology, whereas Palestinians have no real army nor any defense against Israeli plane or
missile attacks.
Britain’s newly-minted foreign secretary Philip Hammond has lost his shine already. A few days ago he warmly welcomed Egypt’s bogus ceasefire proposal which hadn’t even been shown to Hamas.
Yesterday he was asked three times on the the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show whether Israel’s military operations in Gaza were a proportionate response and he ducked the question every time.
However he did say: “We will be looking very carefully at what is happening on the ground to make sure that it is proportionate, that civilian lives are being protected in a proper way.”
The continuing carnage suggests otherwise. Would Mr Hammond care …
Part 5: IMF, World Bank, Giant Consultants Admit The Storm Is Coming
by Andrew Gavin Marshall / July 21st, 2014
Following Parts 1, 2, 3 and 4 of the World of Resistance Report, in this fifth installment I examine the warnings of social unrest and revolution emanating from the world’s major international financial institutions like the IMF and World Bank, as well as the world’s major consulting firms that provide strategic and investment advice to corporations, banks and investors around the world.
These two groups – financial institutions and the consultants that advise them – play key roles in the spread of institutionalized corporate and financial power, and as such, warnings from these groups about the threat posed by “social unrest” carry particular …
Empires are not easy to sustain given the multiple enemies that they provoke: at the international level (imperial rivals and emerging new powers), at the national level (national resistance movements, unreliable clients and untrustworthy ‘Sepoy’ armies) and at the local level (boycotts, sabotage and strikes). Imperial difficulties are multiplied when an empire is in economic decline, (loss of market shares with growing debt), facing domestic unrest as the economic costs to the taxpayers exceed the returns by a substantial margin; and when the political elite is internally divided between ‘militarists’ and ‘free market’ advocates.
How can we bring about an awareness that sharing is the solution to a planetary crisis, and our last remaining hope for rehabilitating a divided world? Central to this question is the problem of ‘isms’, in which our complacency has intellectualised itself in order to justify its existence as being normal.
The problems of humanity have reached such an apex that it is now critical for governments to implement the principle of sharing within and between every single country. It is critical on several counts: firstly, to release the joy and creativity that is inherent in every human being but widely …
In his speech to the nation Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu acknowledged yesterday that the war on Gaza is a battle for the existence of the Jewish State. Netanyahu is correct. And Israel cannot win this battle; it cannot even define what a victory might entail. Surely the battle is not about the tunnels or the militants’ underground operation, the tunnels are just weapons of resistance rather than the resistance itself. The Hamas and Gaza militants lured Israel into a battle zone in which it could never succeed and Hamas set the conditions, chose the ground and has written the terms …
There are many things that can be done while one is asleep. Bellini wrote a delightful opera about somnambulism. However, it is difficult to share the same sense of fascination or repose even a century after the outbreak of the Great War. Somehow it defies any standard of human sensitivity to allude to the acts and omissions leading to the millions of slaughtered men and boys at the hands of the greediest financial and industrial elites known to recorded history as the result of “sleepwalking”.
Consider the most peculiar omission in this prize-winning story, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in …
The California Division of Oil, Gas, and Geothermal Resources temporarily shut down as of July 18th, several oil and gas wastewater injection wells over concerns about contamination of the state’s aquifers.
That fact alone leads to one inescapable conclusion: Will humanity ever break away from the darkness of Dick Cheney (the subtext to this article)?
As it happened, because of Darth Vader Cheney’s tricky maneuvers a decade ago whilst serving as VP of the United States of America, today the “Halliburton Loophole” is haunting California’s tenuous water situation.
The Halliburton Loophole is a reference to the 2005 Federal Energy Bill, which stripped the …
No moral outrage, collectively, in the streets, at work, in seats of power? What a sick-sick little world the white Jewish-Christian species have become. Blowing up a facility, hospital blatantly, with patients bedridden, in rehab. I have clients with ID, DD and PD – you know, intellectual, developmental and psychiatric disabilities. The Obamas, Jews in Israel, and the military-poison-bomb-jet-drone complex, they are the ones with severe ID, DD, PD.
From what is becoming in my mind (don’t cast aspersions onto me for my daily listening to DN and understanding how Amy speaks to a rarefied elite of Jewish intellectuals) Jewish Democracy …
The people of the United States must work to end the interventionist violence of the U.S. Empire
by Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers / July 20th, 2014
This is Part I of a two part series on American Empire. Part II will focus on the Empire Economy and his it is failing to work for most Americans as well as most people of the world.
The historian who chronicles US Empire, William Blum, issued his 130th Anti-Empire Report this week. In it he notes that the US, by far, is seen by the people of the world as “the greatest threat to peace in the world today” with 24% taking that view. Only 2% see Russia as such a threat, and 6% see China.
One of Britain’s best-known purveyors of misinformation, The Times, had the following words splashed across the front page of its July 19 edition: “MH17 lost after rebels shot down wrong jet”.
The story refers to the terrible tragedy of the mysterious crash of yet another Malaysia Airlines passenger plane two days earlier.
The subheading of the story in the Times reads: “World rounds on Russia for fomenting violence”.
The next ten pages of the paper were filled with the careful blend of fact and fiction which represents the state of the art of western propaganda. There is so much misinformation contained …
On Friday afternoon, hundreds of people gathered in front of the building which houses Canada’s state media, the CBC. An article in the CBC of the same day explains why the people of Halifax were disgusted; its subtitle quotes United States president Barack Obama: “’No nation should accept rockets fired into its borders,’ Obama says of Israel’s ground push.”
How should the nations where the United States carries out drone missile attacks respond to such an utterance from Obama? How should Korea which never attacked the US feel about the barrage of US rockets that obliterated so many Korean …
During the 1967 Six Day War, my youthful ignorance and gullibility made me completely swallow pro-Israeli propaganda regarding that conflict, plus the overall glorification of Tel Aviv’s purpose relating to Palestinians. I remember a paperback book, Strike Zion, which prominently appeared on newsstands, extolling especially the Israeli military, while thoroughly demonizing Arabs.
I’ve since become a passionate supporter of Palestinian independence, based on irrefutable evidence that Israel, for many cruel decades, has built its own state via an ongoing genocidal effort to extirpate Palestinian rights and sovereignty by means not unlike how European colonists took America from its indigenous people.
The simple fact that China has grown by at least eight percent per capita annually, and for the last few decades, irks many pro-Washington, pro-European Union financial lackeys. Notwithstanding the prevailing wisdom espoused by many pro-establishment economics experts, China’s growth has largely made it the most successful economy in the world since 1978. Even renown Harvard economist Jeffrey Sachs admits as much. Despite many fringe complaints, China’s growth has not ceased. To dismiss China’s potential to boost struggling economies the world over is terribly ignorant, and possibly detrimental to millions in the Third World who stand to gain so much …
On 17 July 2014 Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 departed from Amsterdam with approximately 300 passengers and was headed toward Kuala Lumpur before it was blasted out of the sky in Ukrainian air space. Nobody survived.
Within hours of the disaster, Petro Poroshenko’s coup regime in Kiev boldly asserted that the plane had been shot down — either by the separatists in eastern Ukraine or by Russia.
The separatists quickly denied having any role in the disaster, claiming that their weapons were capable only of reaching targets flying below 4,000 feet – which was well below the 33,000 feet at which Flight 17 …
Wars of aggression are ripping the planet apart from one end to the other. Nuclear weapons are on the table. A politically self-anointed elite believe they are about to squash the last few remaining independent states. When their New World Order reaches lockdown, freedom will have nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.
So, how did we get here? Is there any way out of our predicament? Simplistic solutions are offered across the spectrum—from shenanigan preachers to Wall Street gangsters. Here’s another one, kindled in the fear that little time is left, …
You have to give him some credit. The soul of the prison warder who inhabits the public school boy is not always easy to contain. Unrestrained, and lacking sound judgment, he is bound to spring out, however democratic, or liberal, a system can be. Prime Minister David Cameron, on the issue of jamming through bills connected with increased surveillance powers, has just about gotten what he wants. The rule in his playbook here: call anything you don’t want looked at a matter of emergency.
For Cameron, “No government introduces fast track legislation lightly. But the consequences of not acting …
What else is there to say? After the final annihilation of consciousness. After the Big Bang in reverse. After the last hint of freedom is snuffed out. After the lights go down. Does it all start over again? Is existence an eternally recurring cycle? Do we get second chances on such a large scale as that of universal rebirth? Or does it all stay dead?
Find out the answers to these questions as well as many others on the next episode of Existential Pondering on the Status of God’s Whereabouts. A daily television show broadcast directly into the …
They want war? Then launch a full-blown BDS assault on Israel and its supporters
by Stuart Littlewood / July 18th, 2014
There was never a better moment for the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) movement to mass-mobilise for a mega-campaign to not only impact more heavily on the lawless Israeli state but also unmask those in business and public life who shamelessly support the criminal programme that was embedded in its DNA while on the Zionists’ drawing board.
This could include politicians, businesspeople, entertainers, sports stars, churchmen and the many organisations and fan clubs that nourish the thuggish vanity and horrendous cruelty of the Zionist regime. Zero tolerance is needed. Those who fund or support the inhuman behaviour we have witnessed, not …
I was not sure I would like a book called Worth Fighting For by a former soldier who walked across the United States to raise money for the Pat Tillman Foundation. The website of that foundation celebrates military “service” and the “higher calling” for which Tillman left professional football, namely participation in the U.S. war on the people of Afghanistan and Iraq. Rather than funding efforts to put an end to war, as Tillman actually might have wished by the end of his life, the foundation hypes war participation, funds veterans, and to this day presents Tillman’s death …
Ever more antiwar voices are clamoring for a Stop Hillary Clinton movement in the Democratic primaries – and with very good reason. There are many alarming, indeed frightening, indictments of her tenures as one-half president in the 90s and then as Senator and Secretary of State. Her estranged relationship with truth, her callousness toward human life and her love for every imperial military adventure and regime change scheme are beyond worrisome. They are downright scary.
But the most damning indictment yet of the Clintons on the world stage comes in the book Superpower Illusions by former Ambassador …
The unilateral US sanctions announced by Obama on July 16 blocking Russian weapons and energy companies access to US bank loans demonstrate Washington’s impotence. The rest of the world, including America’s two largest business organizations, turned their backs on Obama. The US Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers placed ads in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post protesting US sanctions. NAM said that the manufacturer’s association is “disappointed that the US is extending sanctions in increasingly unilateral ways that will undermine US commercial engagement.” Bloomberg reported that “meeting in Brussels, leaders of the …
The IDF launched a vast ground operation in Gaza last night. Until now, Israel has failed to articulate its military objectives. No one in Israel is willing to commit to a definition of what a victory would look like. I am afraid that the military objective is obvious: saving Netanyahu’s political career.
Prime Minister Netanyahu and his defense minister Moshe Ya’alon have no other options. The two have tried to avoid a ground operation. Like most IDF leaders, Netanyahu and Ya’alon know that the Israeli army lacks the capability to counter Gaza’s ballistic defiance. Israel lost its power of deterrence a …
According to the Assessment of Southwest Climate Change (Arizona Institute of the Environment), the five decades from 1950 to 2000 were the warmest in over 600 years. The report predicts that reduced snowfall and increased evaporation from global warming will lead to more droughts over the next 90 years.
Droughts are a natural part of the climate cycle. As a matter of fact, studies of tree rings going back 1,000 years show mega droughts lasting for decades. Then, nature alone was the culprit, but what happens now when global warming/climate change is superimposed onto nature’s handiwork?
