Category Archives: International

Israel’s Latest Assault on Gaza – What Really Happened

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Israel’s Latest Assault on Gaza – What Really Happened

Saturday, 01 December 2012 12:07

By Norman Finkelstein, New Left Project | News Analysis

The official storyline is that Israel launched Operation Pillar of Defence on 14 November, 2012 because, in President Barack Obama’s words, it had “every right to defend itself.”

In this instance, Israel was allegedly defending itself against the 800 projectile attacks emanating from Gaza since January of this past year.

The facts, however, suggest otherwise.

From the start of the new year, one Israeli had been killed as a result of the Gazan attacks, while 78 Gazans had been killed by Israeli strikes.   The ruling power in Gaza, Hamas, was mostly committed to preventing attacks.  Indeed, Ahmed al-Jaabari, the Hamas leader whose assassination by Israel triggered the current round of fighting, was regarded by Israel as the chief enforcer of the periodic ceasefires, and was in the process of enforcing another such ceasefire just as he was liquidated.

Hamas occasionally turned a blind eye, or joined in to prevent an escalation, when Israeli provocations resulted in retaliatory strikes by Hamas’s more militant Islamist rivals.  It recoiled at being cast as Israel’s collaborator in the image of the Palestinian Authority.

via Israel’s Latest Assault on Gaza – What Really Happened.

On the News With Thom Hartmann: Thanks to Citizens United, Foreign Entities Are Meddling in Our Elections, and More

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In screwed news…because of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, our worst fears have been realized: foreign entities are meddling in our elections. As investigative reporter Lee Fang of The Nation uncovered, the nation’s largest oil lobby group – the American Petroleum Institute – which spends heavily in our elections, is receiving much of its money from agents of the Saudi government. According to disclosure documents, hundreds of thousands of dollars spent by the API this election cycle actually came from foreign oil companies like Aramco, which is a subsidiary of the Saudi state-run oil company and is headed up by Tofiq Al-Gabsani – one of the directors of API and a registered foreign agent for the Saudi government. Nearly all of the Saudi money spent by the API this election cycle went toward defeating President Obama and Democrats and trying to help Republicans like Scott Brown in Massachusetts. This would have been criminal before the Citizens United decision, but now trade groups like the API can spend unlimited foreign money buying our elections and never have to disclose those sources. This is one of the biggest threats to our democracy. Join the movement to overturn Citizens United and get corporate and foreign money out of our elections by going to http://www.MoveToAmend.org.

 

via On the News With Thom Hartmann: Thanks to Citizens United, Foreign Entities Are Meddling in Our Elections, and More.

Glen Ford: Susan Rice’s Political Legacy-’Genocide in Africa on Her Watch’ | Davey D’s Hip Hop Corner

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Glen Ford: Susan Rice’s Political Legacy-’Genocide in Africa on Her Watch’

Over the past couple of weeks there’s been a lot of controversy surrounding UN Ambassador Susan Rice. She’s been under fire, accused of misleading the American public about the circumstances that led up to the slaughter 4 Americans including Libyan Ambassador Christopher Stevens in Benghazi, Libya on September 11th of this year.

Hard Knock Radio weighed in on this issue with an insightful conversation featuring long time journalist Glen Ford of the Black Agenda Report….He breaks down the political legacy of Rice and whats she’s been about long before most of us were introduced to her via the work she’s done under President

via Glen Ford: Susan Rice’s Political Legacy-’Genocide in Africa on Her Watch’ | Davey D’s Hip Hop Corner.

Why Susan Rice Will Be Confirmed As Secretary of State — New York Magazine

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State of War

The Republicans have thrown down the gauntlet over the possibility that Susan Rice will replace Hillary Clinton. But the winner is already clear.

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By John Heilemann Published Nov 22, 2012 ShareThis

Illustration by Thomas Fuchs

It was Tuesday morning in Phnom Penh when Barack Obama decided to dispatch Hillary Clinton to the Middle East to try to help defuse the mounting conflict in Gaza. Clinton had been traveling at Obama’s side on his swing through Thailand, Burma, and Cambodia—but now duty called, and she was off to Jerusalem, Ramallah, and Cairo. So peripatetic has Clinton been as secretary of State that it seemed perversely fitting that what was billed as her final foreign trip with her boss would be cut short this way. And while news of cease-fire talks in Gaza came hours before she touched down in the region, the sequence of events was a vivid reminder of the stature that Clinton has gained in the job: For the past four years, she has been Obama’s go-to gal in any global crisis.

via Why Susan Rice Will Be Confirmed As Secretary of State — New York Magazine.

Congo’s hidden war for natural resources – New York Amsterdam News: African

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Congo’s hidden war for natural resources

Posted: Wednesday, November 28, 2012 11:31 am

Nov. 27 (GIN) – Power brokers in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Uganda and western countries are putting their money on one or another of the armed groups now patrolling Goma and Bukavu. A victory by the rebel M23, Mai Mai or Congolese Army could mean unlimited access for the lucky broker to the Eastern Congo’s great natural wealth, with its mineral deposits worth trillions of dollars.

The area holds about 70 percent of the world’s supply of tantalum, a metal used in cellphones, tablets, laptops and other computers, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. The eastern region also has massive amounts of gold, tin, tungsten, copper, coltan and cobalt. Some 450,000 artisanal miners work in eastern Congo, according to the Survey.

via Congo’s hidden war for natural resources – New York Amsterdam News: African.

Can We Hold Israel Accountable? – Politics – Utne Reader

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To read Breaking the Silence testimonies by Israeli soldiers on the ongoing occupation and blockade of Palestine, check out “It’s Mostly Punishment,” by Oded Na’aman.

A version of this article appeared at YesMagazine.org.

The great wish of the early Zionist leader Theodor Herzl was that Israel would be treated like “any other state.” Were that the case, there might be more rational and productive discourse regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which is particularly critical in light of Israel launching yet another devastating attack against civilian-populated areas of nearby Arab lands.

via Can We Hold Israel Accountable? – Politics – Utne Reader.

The World According To Kagame: People Who Have Power, A Lot Of Power, Should Use It Wisely (And Who He’d Like To Succeed Him)

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The World According To Kagame: People Who Have Power, A Lot Of Power, Should Use It Wisely (And Who He’d Like To Succeed Him)

 So what does Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame REALLY think about accusations (which he denies) that he, or at least some key figures in the Rwandan government and military, are the patrons of the Democratic Republic of Congo rebel group M23 that recently captured the eastern city of Goma?

What does he think of “international justice”? Is Rwanda going to blink over aid cuts and the threat of sanctions for its alleged support for the M23 rebels? Does Kagame and the ruling Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF) see the history of the Great Lakes the way we outsiders do, or do they have a totally different take?

President Kagame, Rwanda’s Foreign minister Louise Mushikiwabo, and the country’s Defence minister Gen. James Kaberebe, to name a few, have said a lot in recent months at home and abroad (especially the UN) in defence of Rwanda.

Kagame came out swinging (New Times photo).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The World According To Kagame: People Who Have Power, A Lot Of Power, Should Use It Wisely (And Who He’d Like To Succeed Him).

Goree Slave Trade Island: A Tragic History, Beggars In The Water, And The Shame Of Africa | naked chiefs

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Goree Slave Trade Island: A Tragic History, Beggars In The Water, And The Shame Of Africa

Goree Slave Trade Island: A Tragic History, Beggars In The Water, And The Shame Of Africa

The “Door of No Return” on Goree Island.

Goree Island, Senegal: The former slave outpost of Goree Island is a troubling place. From here, over one million slaves were shipped to the Americas over a period of nearly 200 years.

The slave trade itself lasted longer, nearly 350 years, during which time it’s estimated that nearly 25 million slaves were shipped from Africa. A shocking 6 million of them died on the journey. Scholars of the African slave trade estimate that roughly 6.3 million slaves were shipped from West Africa. The rest came mostly from Central and Southern Afric

via Goree Slave Trade Island: A Tragic History, Beggars In The Water, And The Shame Of Africa | naked chiefs.

Does Obama Have a Mandate to Save Palestinian Children?

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Does Obama Have a Mandate to Save Palestinian Children?

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Barack Obama 

 

Does Obama Have a Mandate to Save Palestinian Children?

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Barack Obama

via Does Obama Have a Mandate to Save Palestinian Children?.

Elites Will Make Gazans of Us All

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Palestinian men carry an injured woman out of a destroyed house after an Israeli airstrike, in Gaza City, November 18, 2012. (Photo: Wissam Nassar / The New York Times)Palestinian men carry an injured woman out of a destroyed house after an Israeli airstrike, in Gaza City, November 18, 2012. (Photo: Wissam Nassar / The New York Times)Gaza is a window on our coming dystopia. The growing divide between the world’s elite and its miserable masses of humanity is maintained through spiraling violence. Many impoverished regions of the world, which have fallen off the economic cliff, are beginning to resemble Gaza, where 1.6 million Palestinians live in the planet’s largest internment camp. These sacrifice zones, filled with seas of pitifully poor people trapped in squalid slums or mud-walled villages, are increasingly hemmed in by electronic fences, monitored by surveillance cameras and drones and surrounded by border guards or military units that shoot to kill. These nightmarish dystopias extend from sub-Saharan Africa to Pakistan to China. They are places where targeted assassinations are carried out, where brutal military assaults are pressed against peoples left defenseless, without an army, navy or air force. All attempts at resistance, however ineffective, are met with the indiscriminate slaughter that characterizes modern industrial warfare.

 

Elites Will Make Gazans of Us All.