Saturday 6 November 2010

Hezbollah has UAVs and attack aircraft

Via Friday-Lunch-Club

"...The sources say that these are the "surprises" that Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah promised his organization would use in any future conflict with Israel. Iran's Revolutionary Guard is responsible for the transfer of the aircraft to Hezbollah, sources say, and dozens of Iranian experts were allegedly sent to Lebanon to aid Hezbollah in building the aerial array and to train militants. According to the report, Tehran allocated a very high budget for the project. Western sources responded to the report, saying that they fear the aircraft could be an "important card" in a possible future conflict between Israel and Hezbollah. ..." (alas it's all from AsSiyassah!)
Posted by G, Z, or B at 12:23 PM
River to Sea Uprooted Palestinian

Palestinian Resistance vs. Israeli Barbarism


Wednesday, November 3, 2010 at 7:49AM Gilad Atzmon

Here are just a few:






















































































Thought crimes in Israel

Redress


By Neve Gordon
5 November 2010

Neve Gordon looks at a raft of draft laws making their way through the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, which if passed will seal Israel’s transformation into a fully fascist state that persecutes and marginalizes everyone who does not subscribe to the official racially-oriented ideology.

Would Meryl Streep, Spike Lee, Tim Robbins or Susan Sarandon be willing to swear an oath of loyalty to the United States and its policies in order to receive public funding for feature films that they star in, direct or produce? In Israel, the far-right Knesset member Michael Ben Ari has proposed a bill that would require entire film crews to pledge allegiance to Israel as a Jewish and democratic state, and to declare loyalty to its laws and symbols, as a condition for receiving public funding. It's just one of more than 10 bills to be discussed during the Knesset's winter session that several commentators in the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz have characterized as proto-fascist.

As in most countries, all new Israeli citizens must declare loyalty to the state and its laws, but the cabinet last month decided to support (22 in favour, eight against) an amendment to Israel's citizenship law that would require all newly naturalized citizens to declare loyalty to the Jewish character of the state. In Britain, this would be like requiring Jews, Muslims and atheists who wish to become citizens to declare loyalty not only to the laws of the United Kingdom but also to the Church of England.

The Association for Civil Rights in Israel has warned that this amendment, which will soon become law, is the tip of an iceberg. Some of the bills now going through the Knesset, which have a good chance of being ratified, would make support for an alternative political ideology, such as the idea that Israel should be a democracy for all its citizens, a crime.

A proposed amendment to the existing anti-incitement bill, for instance, stipulates that people who deny Israel's Jewish character will be arrested. This extension to the penal code, which has already passed its preliminary reading, incriminates a political view. Another bill lays the groundwork for turning down candidates for membership in communal settlements built on public land if they do not concur with the settlement committee's political views or are adherents of a different religion. The point of this is to make it legal to deny Palestinian citizens of Israel access to Jewish villages.

Still another bill that has already passed its first reading stipulates that institutions marking the Palestinian Nakba of 1948 will be denied public funds. This is like denying public funding to schools in the United States that wish to commemorate slavery or to memorialize the crimes perpetrated against Native Americans.

Then there is a bill against people who initiate, promote, or publish material that might serve as grounds for imposing a boycott against Israel. According to this proposed law, which has also passed a preliminary reading, anyone proven guilty of supporting a boycott will be ordered to pay affected parties about 8000 US without the plaintiff's need to demonstrate any damages.

Finally, eight Knesset members are proposing a bill to ban residents of East Jerusalem from operating as tour guides in the city, potentially putting hundreds out of work. The rationale behind this is that Palestinian residents of Jerusalem should not be certified guides because they do not represent Israel's national interest well enough “and in an appropriate manner”.

The sudden spate of these bills at this historical juncture is no coincidence. The struggle between the democratic demand that all citizens be treated equally and Zionism's hyper-nationalist ideal seems to have been determined once and for all: Zionism's aspiration to promote democratic values is giving way to its nationalist ethos.

River to Sea Uprooted Palestinian

Hezbollah: False Witnesses to Be Transferred to Judicial Council

06/11/2010 Hezbollah renewed on Saturday calls for transferring the file of the false witnesses in the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri’s case to the Judicial Council, wondering about the reasons preventing some Lebanese politicians from taking such decision.

In this context, member of the Loyalty to the Resistance parliamentary bloc MP Hussein Moussawi said that Hezbollah was determined to transfer the false witnesses to the Judicial Council as soon as possible in order to sue the ones who harmed the country and hurted its relations with brothers. He accused those who’re seeking to cover the false witnesses and protect them of being additional false witnesses.

Moussawi’s colleague in the Loyalty to the Resistance parliamentary bloc, MP Ali Ammar, said in turn that those who don’t want to sue the false witnesses are seeking to lose the truth. He spoke about international and local false witnesses who contributed in fabricating false testimonies, saying that what prevents the transfer of the false witnesses to the Judicial Council is the fear of uncovering the real false witnesses, including politicians and journalists.

For his part, Hezbollah official Sheikh Mohamad Yazbek wondered about the reasons pushing the Lebanese to reject the transfer of the false witnesses to the Judicial Council. He called on Lebanese to remember that the reason of cancelling the last cabinet session was the first item on the agenda, the false witnesses file. “Are they scared of uncovering the truth? Are they scared the United States’ plot to undermine and defame the Resistance would be uncovered?” he wondered.


River to Sea Uprooted Palestinian

Bush: Olmert Asked Me to Bomb Suspected Syria Nuclear Plant

06/11/2010 Former United States President George W. Bush wrote in his recently published memoirs that he considered ordering a U.S. military strike against a suspected Syrian nuclear facility at Israel's request in 2007, but ultimately opted against it, Reuters revealed on Friday.

Israel eventually destroyed the facility, which Syria denied was aimed at developing nuclear weapons.

In his memoir, "Decision Points," to hit bookstores Tuesday, Bush says that shortly after he received an intelligence report about a "suspicious, well-hidden facility in the eastern desert of Syria," he spoke by phone with former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.

"George, I'm asking you to bomb the compound," Olmert told Bush, according to the book, a copy of which was obtained by Reuters.

Bush says he discussed options with his national security team. A bombing mission was considered "but bombing a sovereign country with no warning or announced justification would create severe blowback," he writes.

A covert raid was discussed but it was considered too risky to slip a team in and out of Syria undetected.

Bush received an intelligence assessment from then-CIA Director Mike Hayden, who reported that analysts had high confidence the plant housed a nuclear reactor, but low confidence of a Syrian nuclear weapons program.

Bush writes that he told Olmert, "I cannot justify an attack on a sovereign nation unless my intelligence agencies stand up and say it's a weapons program."

Olmert was disappointed with Bush's decision to recommend a strategy of using diplomacy backed up by the threat of force to deal with Syria over the facility. "Your strategy is very disturbing to me," Olmert told Bush, according to the book.

Bush denies charges that arose at the time that he had given a "green light" for Israel to attack the installation. "Prime Minister Olmert hadn't asked for a green light, and I hadn't given one. He had done what he believed was necessary to protect Israel," Bush writes.

Bush writes that Olmert's "execution of the strike" against the Syrian compound made up for the confidence he had lost in the Israelis during their 2006 war against Lebanon, which Bush feels was bungled.

River to Sea Uprooted Palestinian

How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less


Posted on November 6, 2010 by rehmat1|

The young American-Jewish cartoonist Sarah Glidden’s comic novel titled, How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less, is expected to be available at the bookstores this month.

She wrote the book after her fully-paid trip to the Occupied Palestine by Israel Hasbara (propaganda) agency, the Taglit-Birthright Israel, which is funded by the Israeli government and several racist Jewish individuals and organizations.

The concept behind the project is that a born-Jew, no matter which part of the world he/she lives and no matter whether he/she has Asiatic Khazarian or North African Berber or Low-caste Hindu blood-line – they all have the god-given right to settle in Israel on the land stolen from its Native Semite Muslims and Christians.

The Taglit-Birthright Israel provides a 10-day trip to Jews between the ages 18-25. The trip is used to brainwash the Diaspora (Jews living outside Occupied Palestine) with the Zionists’ distortion of the Bible and Middle East history.

Zionist-regime want to hide the myths based on which they occupied Palestine. The main aim of the Taglit-Birthright Israel is prepare a hard-core pro-Israel fifth column within the western world for the West to keep supporting the Zionist entity through taxpayers’ money and political backing at the international forums.

Sarah Glidden in a recent interview admitted:

“You grow up being told ‘Israel is your country, you can go there, you can live there, it’s for you. We have to support Israel, we have to plant a tree in Israel.’ No one ever told us about the conflict when we were kids. So then you get older and you find out about the conflict and it feels like its something that your family’s doing that you don’t like, like ‘This is my country?

But I don’t want them to do this! I don’t them to hurt people.

I don’t want anyone that I’m affiliated with to hurt anybody.’

When you try to put it in the context of self-defense, or the reasons why Israel would do these things, it just got so complicated and so upsetting that I just almost had to ignore it and just kind of read the paper, but not think about it.”

Before Sarah took the trip, she, like most of Jewish youth in the West, thought she knew all about Isreal (as told by parents and Jewish-owned mainstream media).

However, when she was given the government guided tour of Tel Aviv (famous for it 280 Jewish brothels), Jerusalem, Masada, the Golan Heights and other famous Arab towns occupied by the alien Jewish settlers – her preconceived notions about Israel (the so-called ‘only democracy’ in the Middle East and Jewish religious tolerance toward non-Jewish citizens) were shattered.

Sarah learned the real ugly face of Zionism when she took the non-chaperoned trip into the West Bank (though ruled by USrael’s favorite Mahmoud Abbas). That’s where she started to question first her political beliefs and, ultimately, her own sense of identity – that’s to understand Israel, she first have to understand herself as a true Jew.

Sarah in an interview with ‘The Faster Times’ (November 3, 2010), Said:

“When I got older and started paying attention to the news more and I learned more about what was going on in Israel it felt really personal. Whenever I would hear about something that the Israeli government did that was oppressive or violent towards the Palestinians, I felt like I was partly responsible. I was a really sensitive kid and I turned into a sensitive adult and it really upset me to hear about everything that was going on over there. Violence and exploitation anywhere get to me. But with Israel I felt really torn because I was angry at the country for being part of the problem but I simultaneously wanted to defend it when people started talking about what it was doing wrong. I talk about this in the book, but Israel to an American Jew is like family. You are born into your connection to it and sometimes you get really pissed off at it, but when other people start attacking it you take it personally.

“Don’t you say that about my uncle! You have no idea what he’s been through!”
River to Sea Uprooted Palestinian