Israel's Crime of the Week - Border Police Deliberately Destroy Crops

Sorry - for some reason the video doesn't work on the main blog. Click to the title to go the individual subject.


Israeli border police destroyed several Palestinian fields in Al Baqa'a Valley just east of Hebron on July 6, 2010, directly impacting the livelihood of more than one hundred Palestinians. Landowners said that Israeli border police and the Israeli District Coordinating Office (DCO), responsible for the coordination of Palestinian civilian affairs in Area C, began implementing the destruction at around 8:30am. Israeli authorities, with the assistance of hired labor, damaged fields of vegetables and destroyed the irrigation systems of those fields.

US taxpayers’ Afghan aid money buys rich Afghans’ Dubai villas

Villa Price in Dubai - $2,000,000 up You already might have heard that it costs the United States $1 million for each solider per year in Afghanistan, to cover the cost of the soldiers' benefits, troop transports and other material. What you might not have heard is that your hard earned taxpayer dollars are also being used to buy well-connected Afghans posh villas in Dubai.

Israeli Settlements Cover 42 Percent Of West Bank

Matti Friedman Huffington Post
07/ 6/10 02:21 PM
This report deals with two separate subjects, so I have split it into two:
[The original post has been taken down by Huffington Post; can't imagine why]
Also Tuesday, as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu landed in Washington for talks with President Barack Obama, B'Tselem released a report showing that much of the West Bank, where Palestinians want to establish a state, is under the control of Israeli settlements.
Although the actual buildings of the settlements cover just 1 percent of the West Bank's land area, they have jurisdiction over more than 42 percent, the B'Tselem report said. Much of that land was seized from Palestinian landowners in defiance of an Israeli Supreme Court ban, the group said.
The Palestinians claim all of the West Bank, captured by Israel in the 1967 Mideast war, as part of a future state.
Dani Dayan, chairman of a settler umbrella group, disputed the report, saying settlements control just 9.2 percent of the West Bank, and charged that the report was aimed to sabotage the Netanyahu-Obama meeting.
Israeli government officials would not comment.

The Quagmire in Afghanistan

To magnify map go to: http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/afghanistan/images/afghanistan_conflict_vulnerable_population.jpg

Counter-insurgency down for the count
By Ann Jones
Asia Times July 3 2010
United States President Barack Obama's Afghanistan strategy isn't working. So said a parade of Afghanistan watchers during the flap over war commander General Stanley McChrystal's firing. But what does that phrase, so often in the media these days, really mean? And if the strategy really isn't working, just how can you tell?

The answers to these questions raise even more important ones, including: Why, when Obama fires an insubordinate and failing general, does he cling to his failing war policy? And if our strategy isn't working, what about the enemy's? And if nothing much is working, why does it still go on non-stop this way? Let's take these one at a time.

Israel Goes After Its 'Bad Apples'

Matti Friedman Huffington Post
[The original post on Huffington Post has been taken down; can't imagine why]
Matti Friedman's report deals with two separate subjects, so I have split it into two; this is the second half:

The Israeli military indicted a soldier Tuesday on a charge of manslaughter during last year's war in the Gaza Strip – the most serious criminal charge to come out of an internal investigation into the devastating offensive in the Hamas-ruled territory.
The soldier was among three troops, including a field commander, to face new disciplinary action stemming from their conduct during the offensive, which has drawn international condemnation for its civilian death toll. An Israeli human rights group praised the announcement, but said the disciplinary measures announced by the army so far were insufficient.

Banality of Methodist Evil - A Bit of the Usual Hasbara

By ROBIN SHEPHERD
07/04/2010 23:45
Boycott against goods emanating from [illegally occupied - RP] settlements shows where the rancid, global campaign against the Jewish state is heading.
The boycott will involve transactions of the church itself, and extends to encouraging all affiliated Methodists to follow suit. The Methodists boycott no other country.
The fact that an institution professing allegiance to values of love, truth and justice should have succumbed to an agenda of hatred, hypocrisy and barbarism is sadly emblematic of the degraded spirit of our times, and of the moral inversions which blow through them.

Turkey, America, and Empire’s Twilight

by Conn Hallinan, Antiwar.com July 06, 2010
When U.S. forces found themselves beset by a growing insurgency in Iraq following their lightning overthrow of Saddam Hussein, the most obvious parallel that came to mind was Vietnam: an occupying army, far from home, besieged by a shadowy foe.

When honesty gets dangerous, liars succeed

by Paul Woodward on July 9, 2010

No, Ariel Sharon has not just died. But when he does, will Wolf Blitzer lose his job if he writes a tweet like the one above (a fake of course, created by Paul Woodward)?
Certainly not, because as Glenn Greenwald correctly noted yesterday: “The speech prohibitions and thought crimes on the Middle East all run in one direction: to enforce ‘pro-Israel’ orthodoxies.”

Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah: Prominent Shi'a cleric who survived several assassination attempts

The photograph shows Fadlallah just after he survived a CIA-placed 1985 car bomb that missed him but killed 'about 80 innocent people'. No wonder he looks pissed-off in the photo, which typically, is edited, cut and shown in B&W to show his worst possible aspect as a 'major terrorist'.

Independent - Martin Childs Friday, 9 July 2010
As Lebanon's leading Shia cleric, Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah was revered in Shia communities in the Gulf and Central Asia and helped to spark increased political awareness among Lebanon's Shia Muslim population. He was also the target of a number of assassination attempts. He had advocated armed resistance by Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shiite party and militia, to Israel's 18-year occupation of southern Lebanon, which ended with the Israeli withdrawal in 2000.

Echoes of Steve Biko - 4th Floor Defenestration

Police brutality continues as detainee is flung from fourth floor
In a new bout of police brutality Nadim Center for the Rehabilitation of Victims of Violence and Torture has reported that two police officers persecuted a Mansoura man before flinging him from the fourth floor of the police station.

Gaza Ghetto Meets Warsaw Ghetto

...Israeli and Polish activists met in the ruins of Warsaw’s old Jewish Ghetto.

The activists sprayed ‘Liberate All Ghettos’ in Hebrew, followed by ‘Free Gaza and Palestine’ in English on a wall of an original block in the ghetto. The block is across the street from the last fragment of the remaining perimeter wall of the Ghetto. They also hung Palestinian flags from the wall.

This was first time such an action took place in the ghetto.

Differences in U.S. and Israeli law means it is easier to fund illegal outposts through donations from New York than from Jerusalem

Report: U.S. tax breaks aiding illegal outposts in West Bank

Findings could embarrass Obama as he seeks to persuade Netanyahu to extend settlement building freeze, New York Times reports.
U.S. Treasury tax breaks have helped West Bank settlers to receive $200 million in tax-free funding from American donors, according to a report published in the United States on Tuesday.
Differences in U.S. and Israeli law means it is easier to fund illegal outposts through donations from New York than from Jerusalem, according to an investigation by the New York Times.