Why They Hate Us? It's Not a Secret
Ron Smith -- The Baltimore Sun
You'll remember that shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, President George W. Bush said the motivation of the hijackers was that they hated freedom. Hating freedom seemed then and now to be a pretty weak reason to give up one's own life to inflict death and destruction on others. People who had been paying attention knew what the real reasons for the Islamist radicals' actions were -- Osama bin Laden himself had laid them out in detail. They included America's support of Israel in its subordination of the Palestinians and its attacks on Lebanon; the propping up of pro-American kleptocracies in Muslim lands; and the presence of U.S. forces on the "sacred soil" of Saudi Arabia after the first Gulf War.
Accepting Various Truths
Helen Thomas
No one in the Obama administration is going to acknowledge that our foreign policy in the Middle East has alienated many Arabs. The U.S. pro-Israel policy and our shocking neglect of the beleaguered Palestinians underlie almost every initiative or tactical tilt that comes out of Washington ... The United States spends more for its arsenal than any other 10 countries combined. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, the U.S. accounts for more than 40 percent of the world's total military spending. China is in second place, at a relatively puny 5.8 percent.
Obama's Alternate Universe
Scott Ritter -- Truthdig
... The "war on terror" has the United States combing the world in search of enemies ... So long as American politicians find themselves constrained by a pro-Israeli lobby that refuses to permit the inclusion of either the concept or reality of Palestine into the lexicon of American foreign policy considerations (beyond simplistic "dual-state" and other demeaning and dishonest formulations), then there can and will be no long-term solution to any other modern Middle Eastern problem.
Debunking of Myths?: Willmott's History of World War II
James V. Koch -- H-Net
.. .. On occasion, Willmott [in his book, The Great Crusade] offers conclusions that undermine his own position, as when he offers the judgment that the Wehrmacht exhibited "a technique, initiative and flair at both tactical and operational levels that enabled German ground formations to outfight consistently superior enemy forces -- at least until 1944," even as he argues that German military excellence is a "pernicious myth." Apparently he discounts the work of Trevor N. DuPuy and others, which suggests that the typical German infantryman was approximately 25 percent more effective than the comparable British or American.
More States on Budget Brink
CNN
California is hurtling into the budgetary abyss - and it's not alone. Across the nation, state tax collections in the first three quarters of 2009 posted their steepest decline in at least 46 years, according to a report this month from the public policy research arm of the State University of New York .. .. Like California, Arizona and Illinois face budget gaps above 40% of projected general fund spending, according to Pew data .. .. Alaska, Nevada, New Jersey and New York face gaps of at least 30% of their planned general fund spending by the end of this fiscal year. A dozen more states face a fiscal 2010 budget gap of between 20% and 29%.
California: Too Big Not to Fail?
Jeffrey M. O'Brien -- CNN
.. .. Name almost any serious malady and the state of California has it: the nation's highest marginal tax rate coupled with an abysmal public education system; the most home foreclosures; a free-falling commercial real estate sector; lame-duck governor with no legislative support and a disdain for an annual budget process that he refers to as kabuki theater; unemployment somewhere between the official number of 12% and the whisper number of 18%; a 20% drop in year-over-year revenue; municipalities that have either declared bankruptcy (Vallejo) or are on the verge (Los Angeles); and a black-box permitting process that scares away business investment even while every week, 3,000 more taxpayers migrate to greener pastures.
Is A U.S. Default Inevitable
Patrick J. Buchanan
.. .. Today, there are those warning that the United States, with consecutive deficits running 10 percent of gross domestic product, is risking an eventual default on its national debt .. .. With that share of the U.S. national debt held by individuals, corporations, pension funds and foreign governments having risen in 2009 from 41 percent to 53 percent of GDP, Penner and Walker believe it imperative to get the deficit under control. Unfortunately, it is not possible to see how, politically, this can be done. .. .. What the looming fiscal crisis of this country portends is nothing less than a test of whether this democratic republic is sustainable.
Montgomery vs. Eisenhower: Two Generals at War
The Times (Britain)
... It would be hard to imagine two more contrasting characters. The American general: likeable, diplomatic, balanced and gregarious. The British general: egotistical, prickly, brilliant and caustic. Yet despite their very different personalities, and frequent disagreements, they managed to work together, and won a war together ... There was continual bickering among the top Allied brass. The American generals George Patton and Omar Bradley both detested Montgomery, who responded in kind. Patton on Monty: "That cocky little limey fart"; Monty on Patton: "A foul-mouthed lover of war"; Bradley on Monty: "All-out, right-down-to-the-toes mad".
General Patton's Warning
National Vanguard
... It was only in the final days of the war and during his tenure as military governor of Germany -- after he had gotten to know both the Germans and America's "gallant Soviet allies" -- that Patton's understanding of the true situation grew and his opinions changed. In his diary and in many letters to his family, friends, various military colleagues, and government officials, he expressed his new understanding and his apprehensions for the future ... In his diary that night he wrote: "There is a very apparent Semitic influence in the press. ... They have utterly lost the Anglo-Saxon conception of justice and feel that a man can be kicked out because somebody else says he is a Nazi."
Rabbinic Text or Call to Terror?
Forward (New York)
The marble-patterned, hardcover book embossed with gold Hebrew letters looks like any other religious commentary you'd find in an Orthodox Judaica bookstore -- but reads like a rabbinic instruction manual outlining acceptable scenarios for killing non-Jewish babies, children and adults. "The prohibition 'Thou Shalt Not Murder'" applies only "to a Jew who kills a Jew," write Rabbis Yitzhak Shapira and Yosef Elitzur of the West Bank settlement of Yitzhar. Non-Jews are "uncompassionate by nature" and attacks on them "curb their evil inclination," while babies and children of Israel's enemies may be killed since "it is clear that they will grow to harm us."
States Lower School Exit Test Standards
The New York Times
... The situation in Pennsylvania mirrors what has happened in many of the 26 states that have adopted high school exit exams. As deadlines approached for schools to start making passage of the exams a requirement for graduation, and practice tests indicated that large numbers of students would fail, many states softened standards, delayed the requirement or added alternative paths to a diploma ... In 2008, state officials in Alabama, Arizona and Washington delayed the start of the exit exam requirement and lowered standards after seeing that many students, including a disproportionate number of minorities, would fail the tests.
Revisionism for Our Time
Murray N. Rothbard (1966)
... Revisionism teaches us that this entire myth, so prevalent then and even now about Hitler, and about the Japanese, is a tissue of fallacies from beginning to end. Every plank in this nightmare evidence is either completely untrue or not entirely the truth. If people should learn this intellectual fraud about Hitler's Germany, then they will begin to ask questions, and searching questions, about the current World War III version of the same myth. Nothing would stop the current headlong flight to war faster, or more surely cause people to begin to reason about foreign affairs once again, after a long orgy of emotion and cliché.
Jewish Group Condemns Oliver Stone's Remark That Hitler is a Scapegoat
Ynet News (Israel)
The Simon Wiesenthal Center rebuked remarks made by director Oliver Stone during a press conference for his new history documentary. Stone said, "Hitler is an easy scapegoat throughout history and it's been used cheaply. He's the product of a series of actions. It's cause and effect." The director is using the series to expose what he calls lies and biases behind the conventional interpretation of American history and that would include reexamining WWII history and putting Hitler "into context." "To talk about 'placing Adolf Hitler in context' is like placing cancer in context, instead of recognizing cancer for what it really is - a horrible disease, just as we must recognize Hitler as the ultimate expression of evil," said Rabbi Marvin Hier ...
Popular Music in Germany, 1934-1944
Some Third Reich "hits," by Marika Rökk, Rudi Schuricke, Zarah Leander, Ilse Werner, Heinz Rühmann, Lale Andersen, and others.
In France, New Interest in Churchill, the `Old Lion'
The Times (Britain)
... France has just fallen for the charms of another British leader -- Sir Winston Churchill. "Le Vieux Lion," as the British leader was known, has found new popularity thanks to two bestselling books -- a fresh translation of his Second World War memoirs and a prize-winning biography. Enthusiasm for Churchill is being fed by new interest in the war era among a generation born since France preferred to forget the trauma of the Nazi occupation. Recent war documentaries, including a spectacular colour series on the France2 channel last autumn, have brought the period closer to modern France, said François Kersaudy, author of the new biography Winston Churchill.
Winton Churchill: An Unsettled Legacy
Mark Weber
The well-entrenched idealization of Churchill is part and parcel of a drastically misleading view of the Second World War that Americans have been fed for decades. One common deceit is to give the impression that Hitler sought war against Britain and France, and that Germany aggressively attacked those two countries ... Churchill's enduringly stellar image is all the more remarkable considering that his views on a range of issues were, by today's standards, hopelessly backward and politically incorrect ... Along with most Britons (and Americans) of his era, he was also an unabashed racist.
The Real Churchill
Adam Young
... With his lack of principles and scruples, Churchill was involved in one way or another in nearly every disaster that befell the 20th century. He helped destroy laissez-faire liberalism, he played a role in the Crash of 1929, he helped start World War I, and by bringing in America to help, prolonged the war and created the conditions for the rise of Nazism, prolonged World War II, laid the groundwork for Soviet domination, helped involve America in a cold war with Russia, and pioneered in the development of total war and undermining western civilized standards.
Welcome to Orwell's World: Obama's Lies About Afghanistan
John Pilger -- New Statesman (Britain)
... Obama's most audacious lie is that Afghanistan today is a "safe haven" for al-Qaeda's attacks on the west. His own national security adviser, James Jones, said in October that there were "fewer than 100" al-Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan. According to US intelligence, 90 per cent of the Taliban are hardly Taliban at all, but "a tribal localised insurgency [who] see themselves as opposing the US because it is an occupying power". The war is a fraud. Only the terminally gormless remain true to the Obama brand of "world peace" ... Behind much of this are the Israelis, who have long advised the Americans in both the Iraq and the Afghanistan adventures.
Is Anyone Telling Us The Truth?
Paul Craig Roberts
... The U.S. and its puppet state allies were led to war in the Middle East and Afghanistan entirely on the basis of lies and deception. Iraqi weapons of mass destruction did not exist and were known by the U.S. and British governments not to exist ... Now the same thing is happening in regard to the nonexistent Iranian nuclear weapons program. Forged documents leaked to The Times (London) that indicated Iran was developing a "nuclear trigger" mechanism have been revealed as forgeries. Who benefits? Clearly, attacking Iran is on the Israeli-U.S. agenda, and someone is creating the "evidence" to support the case ...
Why Are They At War With Us?
Patrick J. Buchanan
... To Osama, we started the war. Muslims, the ulema, must fight because America, with her "brutal crusade occupation of the (Arabian) Peninsula" and support for "the Jews' petty state" and "occupation of Jerusalem and murder of Muslims there" was waging war upon the Islamic world. Terrorism, the direct killing of civilians for political ends, is al-Qaida's unconventional tactic, but its war aims are quite conventional. Al-Qaida is fighting a religious war against apostates and pagans in their midst, a civil war against collaborators of the Crusaders and an anti-colonial war to drive us out of the Dar al-Islam. On Sept. 11, they were over here -- because we are over there.
Helen Thomas Deviates From the Terrorism Script
Glenn Greenwald -- Salon
... At a White House press conference yesterday with Janet Napolitano and John Brennan, Helen Thomas shows -- yet again -- that she's one of the very few White House reporters willing to deviate from approved orthodoxy scripts. She asks the prohibited question about the motives of Terrorists, and keeps asking as she receives complete non-responses, until they all just decide to ignore her: Brennan's answer -- they do this because they're Evil and murderous -- is on the same condescending cartoon level as the "They-Hate-us-For-Our-Freedom" tripe we endured for the last eight years.
Goebbels' Place in History
Mark Weber
No other name is so firmly associated with the term propaganda, conjuring lies and deceit, than that of Joseph Goebbels. But the popular image of this man, particularly in the United States, is a crude caricature ... Contrary to popular belief, Goebbels was successful as a propagandist not because he was a master of the "Big Lie," but rather as a result of his fidelity to facts and truth ... It is also common to imagine that, however skilled, Goebbels was little more than a clever ranter who won support from his countrymen by appealing to base feelings of envy, revenge, conceit and arrogant pride.
Revealed: Jack Straw's Secret Warning to Tony Blair on Iraq
The Times (Britain)
A "Secret and Personal" letter from Jack Straw, the then foreign secretary, to Tony Blair reveals damning doubts at the heart of government about Blair's plans for Iraq a year before war started. The letter, a copy of which is published for the first time today, warned the prime minister that the case for military action in Iraq was of dubious legality and would be no guarantee of a better future for Iraq even if Saddam Hussein were removed.
Settlement for Black Students Harassed by Other Blacks For `Acting White'
South Carolina Lawyers Weekly
Two Williamsburg County students and members of their family have reached a $150,000 settlement in what may be the first Title VI lawsuit based on claims of intra-racial discrimination in South Carolina public schools ... "Y ou have a culture where to act like you want to do well in school is considered acting white. And that is part of why we're saying that it was racial, even though the students were all of the same race because they weren't acting how the others thought they should be acting as members of that race," Kobrovsky said ... "You see, it's a crime to act white, or it's a crime to be white," the uncle testified.
Deconstructing Simon Wiesenthal
Lawrence Swaim
... In any case, it is now known that Wiesenthal, a born story-teller, rarely let the facts get in the way of a good story -- in fact many of the things he claimed to have done were fabrications. This recently came to light with the publication, in June of 2009, of Hunting Evil, by British Author Guy Walters, in which he characterizes Simon Wiesenthal as "a liar -- and a bad one at that." ... Wiesenthal's scant regard for the truth makes it possible to doubt everything he ever wrote or said." ... The Simon Wiesenthal Center is, rather, committed to using the Holocaust to raise money, and using the trauma associated with it to promote the Center's extremist political perspectives.
Simon Wiesenthal: Fraudulent `Nazi Hunter'
Mark Weber (1995)
.. .. Wiesenthal's reputation as a moral authority is undeserved. The man whom The Washington Post has called the "Holocaust's Avenging Angel" has a little known but well-documented record of reckless disregard for truth. He has lied about his own wartime experiences, misrepresented his postwar "Nazi-hunting" achievements, and has spread vile falsehoods about alleged German atrocities.
Past War Offers Afghanistan Lessons. And It's Not Vietnam
CNN
... The Philippine-American War, which lasted from 1899 to 1902. The war is largely forgotten today, but it was a bloody preview of the type of warfare that the U.S. military faced in Asia and now in Afghanistan, historians say. "It was the 19th century version of Vietnam," said Edward Sheehy, a professor of military history at La Salle University in Pennsylvania ... Yet the United States won, in part, because it was willing to be brutal, some military historians say. According to an official State Department account of the war, at least 4,200 American soldiers, 20,000 Filipino combatants and as many as 200,000 Filipino civilians died from violence and famine during the war.
The US Becomes an Imperial Power: 1898 and the Great Debate Over Overseas Expansion
John Ries and Mark Weber - Institute for Historical Review
Until the 1890s, America followed its traditional foreign policy of non-interventionism. The year 1898 was a landmark in the transition of the United States from a republic to an imperial power. Today, as Americans debate the merits of new military intervention in foreign lands, many of the arguments for and against such actions echo those made nearly a century ago, but with some interesting differences.
December Budget Deficit Sets Record
The Associated Press
The federal budget deficit hit an all-time high for the month of December, and the red ink for the first three months of the current budget year is rising at a more rapid pace than last year's record clip. The massive tide of red ink, reflecting the continued fallout from a deep recession and a severe financial crisis, highlights the challenge facing President Barack Obama as he pledges to get control of runaway deficits. The Treasury Department said Wednesday that the deficit last month totaled $91.85 billion, the largest December deficit on record.
Why Osama is Winning
Eric Margolis
... Today, as we witness hysteria and chaos engulf America's air travel system, and the war party in Washington demands the US invade Yemen and attack Iran, we should recall Osama's ominous warning, "there will be no peace in America until there is peace in Palestine." ... The American colossus continues to stumble ever deeper into the Muslim world's violent, tangled affairs at a time when Washington is bankrupt and only runs on Chinese loans. In 2009, the US deficit was US $1.4 trillion ... America still refuses to face the hard reality that what drives anti-western violence is not Islam, as neocons claim, but Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan.
One In Eight Americans Receives Food Stamps
Reuters
Some 37.9 million people -- one in eight Americans -- received food stamps to help buy food at latest count, the government said on Tuesday as enrollment set a record for the ninth month in a row. Participation has surged since the financial-market turmoil more than a year ago and has set a record each month since December 2008. The Agriculture Department said enrollment reached 37.9 million in October, the latest month for which figures are available, up 746,000 from the previous month. One in eight Americans "is the highest share of the U.S. population" ever in the program.
Wilhelm Marr's Seminal `Anti-Semitic' Booklet
Kevin MacDonald
Wilhelm Marr (1819-1904) has gone down in history as the first racial anti-Semite. His signature work, The Victory of Judaism over Germanism: Viewed from a Nonreligious Point of View, expresses Marr's views on the conflict between Germans and Jews in a strikingly modern manner ... Marr's pamphlet contains a number of ideas that agree with modern theories and social science research on Jews, as well as some ideas that are less supported but interesting nonetheless. His ideas on future events are fascinating with the 20/20 hindsight of 130 years of history.
The Holocaust We Will Not See: Genocide in the Americas
George Monbiot
... Europe was massively enriched by the genocides in the Americas; the American nations were founded on them ... As genocide spread westwards, it was endorsed at the highest levels. George Washington ordered the total destruction of the homes and land of the Iroquois. Thomas Jefferson declared that his nation's wars with the Indians should be pursued until each tribe "is exterminated or is driven beyond the Mississippi". ... The final solutions pursued in the Americas were far more successful. Those who commissioned or endorsed them remain national or religious heroes. Those who seek to prompt our memories are ignored or condemned.
Obama Wants Record $708 Billion for Military Next Year
The Associated Press
President Barack Obama will ask Congress for an additional $33 billion to fight unpopular wars in Afghanistan and Iraq on top of a record $708 billion for the Defense Department next year, The Associated Press has learned -- a request that could be an especially hard sell to some of the administration's Democratic allies. The extra $33 billion in 2010 would mostly go toward the expansion of the war in Afghanistan. Obama ordered an extra 30,000 troops for that war as part of an overhaul of the war strategy late last year.
US Military Spending: $700 Billion a Year, and We're Still Not Safe
David Wood - Politics Daily
On Dec. 19, 2009, President Obama authorized a military budget plan for a record $663 billion to defend the United States, the highest since World War II -- higher, adjusted for inflation, even than during the Korean and Vietnam wars ... Everywhere, it seems, Uncle Sam is struggling to regain its footing -- despite its vast spending on security. Counting outlays for the military, homeland defense, airport security, nuclear weapons, and other facets of defense, the United States will spend well over $700 billion for security this year, more than the rest of the world combined.
America is Losing the Free World
Gideon Rachman -- The Financial Times (Britain)
Ever since 1945, the US has regarded itself as the leader of the "free world". But the Obama administration is facing an unexpected and unwelcome development in global politics. Four of the biggest and most strategically important democracies in the developing world - Brazil, India, South Africa and Turkey - are increasingly at odds with American foreign policy. Rather than siding with the US on the big international issues, they are just as likely to line up with authoritarian powers such as China and Iran. The US has been slow to pick up on this development, perhaps because it seems so surprising and unnatural. Most Americans assume that fellow democracies will share their values and opinions on international affairs.
Another God That Failed: `Democratism'
Patrick J. Buchanan
... If democracy, from Latin America to Africa to the Middle East, brings to power parties and politicians who, for reasons religious, racial or historic, detest the "white, rich Western world," why are we pushing democracy in these regions? ... If one-person, one-vote democracy in multiethnic countries leads to dispossession and persecution of the market-dominant minority, why would we promote democracy there? Why would we promote a system in an increasingly anti-American world that empowers enemies and imperils friends? Is democratism our salvation -- or an ideology of Western suicide?
Israel's Crisis
Philip Weiss
Just back from Israel/Palestine, the overwhelming sense I carry away is that the present state cannot last. Just how it goes down I have no idea. But conditions are so obviously discriminatory, and the knowledge of these conditions now so widespread- among the Christian pilgrims in my Jerusalem guesthouse, among European leaders, and now too among the Israeli elite and American left - that the situation is reminiscent of the delegitimizing of communism in the 70s and 80s. The period of apartheid struggle that Ehud Olmert warned of two years ago is upon us. So too his warning of possible "national suicide."
Prime Minister Blair's Private Pact with President Bush on Iraq
Guardian News Service (Britain)
Tony Blair privately assured President George Bush in letters written a year before the invasion of Iraq that Britain would "be there" in any US-led attack on the country, it was revealed at the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq war in London Tuesday ... The inquiry has also heard from senior British diplomats that regime change was being discussed by Mr. Blair in the US in 2002 even though, according to leaked documents, Lord Goldsmith, the then attorney general, warned Mr. Blair that military action aimed at regime change, as opposed to disarmament, would be unlawful.
Recording of German Officers Who Found Hitler's Body is Made Public
The Telegraph (Britain)
A tape recording of Nazi officers describing the moment they found Adolf Hitler's body in his Berlin bunker has been discovered. The recording was made on October 25, 1956, in a courtroom in Berchtesgaden, site of the Fuehrer's mountaintop home in Bavaria. The court was convened to officially declare the former leader of Nazi Germany dead so that his fortune and rights to his book "Mein Kampf" could be seized by the state government. Among those giving evidence that day were Otto Guensche, an SS officer, and Heinz Linge, a valet, who first discovered the corpses of Hitler and his new bride Eva Braun.
The US and China: One Side is Losing, the Other is Winning
James Petras
... China has created scores of millions of manufacturing jobs, reduced poverty faster and for more people in the shortest time span in history. Its banks mostly finance production. China doesn't bomb, invade or ravage other countries. In contrast, US capitalism has been harnessed to a monstrous global military machine that drains the domestic economy and lowers the domestic standard of living in order to fund its never-ending foreign wars ...China's diversified growth is linked to dynamic economic partners; US militarism has tied itself to narco-states, warlord regimes, the overseers of banana republics and the last and worst bona fide racist colonial regime, Israel.
Israeli Brigadier-General Denies Iran is Nuclear Threat
The Times (Britain)
A general who was once in charge of Israel's nuclear weapons has claimed that Iran is a "very, very, very long way from building a nuclear capability". Brigadier-General Uzi Eilam, 75, a war hero and pillar of the defence establishment, believes it will probably take Iran seven years to make nuclear weapons. The views expressed by the former director-general of Israel's Atomic Energy Commission contradict the assessment of Israel's defence establishment and put him at odds with political leaders ... Eilam, who is thought to be updated by former colleagues on developments in Iran, calls his country's official view hysterical. "The intelligence community are spreading frightening voices about Iran," he said.
Can Oliver Stone Show Us the Human Side of Hitler?
The Independent (Britain)
Oliver Stone has never been one to spot a historical controversy without steaming towards it, but the latest project from the film-maker behind JFK and W threatens to pitch him into more dangerously hot water than ever before. The director is battening down the hatches already, saying he fully expects "ignorant attacks" on a new documentary series in which he is promising to "liberalise" Hitler and to finger US corporations for their role in the rise of National Socialism in Germany ... "I've been able to walk in Stalin's shoes and Hitler's shoes to understand their point of view. We're going to educate our minds and liberalise them and broaden them. We want to move beyond opinions ... "
Hitler Had Leadership Potential, Said World War I Military Evaluation
The Associated Press
Adolf Hitler was only a lance corporal during World War I but his commanders saw the future German dictator's leadership potential as "very good". That's according to Bavarian military records added on Tuesday to the genealogy website Ancestry.com's database. The handwritten pages note the future Fuehrer's occupation as "artist" and say he was his regiment's bicycle dispatch rider at one point. He volunteered for service only about two weeks after the outbreak of hostilities in 1914 and fought in several battles before being gassed in 1918 and hospitalised. Hitler received both the Iron Cross 1st Class and 2nd Class for bravery.
In Ukraine, New Move to Honor World War II Nationalist Insurgents
The Washington Post
In World War II, members of the Ukrainian underground fought to make their vision of an independent nation real. They battled Hitler and Stalin. Ultimately they lost, and the Soviets took control of most of Eastern Europe after the war. The Ukrainians finally achieved independence when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. Now many in this fledgling nation would like to formally recognize those earlier nationalists -- the "brave defenders of the Motherland," as President Viktor Yushchenko has called them. ... Many say the underground collaborated with the Nazis, killed thousands of Jews and perpetrated a campaign of ethnic cleansing against Poles.
Cancer: The Deadly Legacy of the Invasion of Iraq
New American Media
Forget about oil, occupation, terrorism or even Al Qaeda. The real hazard for Iraqis these days is cancer. Cancer is spreading like wildfire in Iraq. Thousands of infants are being born with deformities. Doctors say they are struggling to cope with the rise of cancer and birth defects, especially in cities subjected to heavy American and British bombardment. Here are a few examples. In Falluja, which was heavily bombarded by the US in 2004, as many as 25 percent of new-born infants have serious abnormalities, including congenital anomalies, brain tumors, and neural tube defects in the spinal cord.
In Uganda, Witch Doctors Reveal Extent of Child Sacrifice
BBC News
A BBC investigation into human sacrifice in Uganda has heard first-hand accounts which suggest ritual killings of children may be more common than authorities have acknowledged. One witch-doctor led us to his secret shrine and said he had clients who regularly captured children and brought their blood and body parts to be consumed by spirits. Meanwhile, a former witch-doctor who now campaigns to end child sacrifice confessed for the first time to having murdered about 70 people, including his own son. The Ugandan government told us that human sacrifice is on the increase ...
A Decade Of High Unemployment Is Looming
The Associated Press
Call it the Terrible Teens. The decade ahead could be a brutal one for America's unemployed -- and for people with jobs hoping for pay raises. At best, it could take until the middle of the decade for the nation to generate enough jobs to drive down the unemployment rate to a normal 5 or 6 percent and keep it there. At worst, that won't happen until much later -- perhaps not until the next decade. The deepest and most enduring recession since the 1930s has battered America's work force. The unemployed number 15.4 million. The jobless rate is 10 percent. More than 7 million jobs have vanished. People out of work at least six months number a record 5.9 million. And household income, adjusted for inflation, has shrunk in the past decade.
Nazis Left Dutch Gays Untouched, Says Historian
NRC Handelsblad (The Netherlands)
... In fact, very few of those people were persecuted in the Netherlands, says historian Anna Tijsseling, who obtained her doctoral degree at Utrecht University on Wednesday for her thesis Guilty Sex: Homosexual indecency offences around the German occupation. Actually, the legal prosecution of homosexuals was more intense before and immediately after the war, her research shows. Her conclusions counter the generally accepted view of Dutch homosexuals as victims of the Nazis. Tijsseling calls this image "a persistent fiction, created by the gay-emancipation movement in the 1970s."
Iran's President Calls For Compensation For Allies' World War II Invasion
Fox News
Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said his country suffered after invasions during World War II and he will "stand to the end" to get full compensation, the Jerusalem Post reported. Ahmadinejad said he'd write to U.N. secretary General Ban Ki-moon to ask for compensation for damages caused to Iran during the war, and for use of its territory and resources by allied powers, the Post reported. Britain and the Soviet Union invaded Iran on August 26, 1941, to secure oil fields and supply lines for the Soviets. The Post notes the Iranians suffered when food, fuel, and other essentials were given to the invading powers.
Egypt Tombs Suggest Pyramids Not Built By Slaves
Reuters
New tombs found in Giza support the view that the Great Pyramids were built by free workers and not slaves, as widely believed, Egypt's chief archaeologist said on Sunday. Films and media have long depicted slaves toiling away in the desert to build the mammoth pyramids only to meet a miserable death at the end of their efforts. "These tombs were built beside the king's pyramid, which indicates that these people were not by any means slaves," Zahi Hawass, the chief archaeologist heading the Egyptian excavation team, said in a statement. "If they were slaves, they would not have been able to build their tombs beside their king's."
China Overtakes US in Car Sales
BBC News
China has said it overtook the United States to become the world's biggest car and van market in 2009. The China Association of Automobile Manufacturers said 13.6 million vehicles were sold within the country last year. That compares with just over 10 million vehicles in the US, which was previously the world's largest market. Unlike the US, China's figures include heavy trucks, but they added just 650,000 to the total. That meant China was still comfortably ahead in terms of private car sales, which were 53% higher than in 2008.
America's Can't Do List
Orville Schell -- Los Angeles Times
... In China today, you feel an unmistakable sense of energy and optimism in the air that, believe me, is bittersweet for an American pondering why the regenerative powers of his own country have gone missing. As I've traveled from China's gleaming, efficient airports to our often-chaotic and broken-down versions of the same, or ridden on Europe's high-speed trains that so sharply contrast with our clunky, slowly vanishing passenger rail system, I keep expanding my list of what works here at home and what doesn't ... American prowess and promise, once seemingly as much a permanent part of the global landscape as glaciers, mountains and oceans, seems to be melting away by the day, just like the great Himalayan ice fields.
Japan to Come Clean on Secret Nuke Deals With U.S.
The Associated Press
To the government's critics, it was a long and shocking act of official stonewalling: Agreements long hidden in Foreign Ministry files allowed nuclear-armed U.S. warships to enter Japanese ports, violating a hallowed principle of postwar Japan. Yet their very existence was officially denied. Now, in a clear break from the past, a new prime minister has gone where none of his predecessors dared go: He has ordered a panel of ministry officials and academics to investigate the secret agreements. The findings, due out this month, are part of Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama's wide-ranging campaign to wrest power from the bureaucracy and make government more open ...
US Playing Al-Qaeda's Game
William Pfaff
... The real reason for attacking Westerners in the West, or in airplanes on the way there, is to provoke the Western governments to send more Western soldiers to Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere in the Muslim world to attack Muslim jihadists on the Islamists' own ground, where the latter have tactical and human advantages that Western soldiers can never overcome. Instead, attack by Western soldiers and the building of Western military bases on the soil of Muslim countries radicalize and scandalize ordinary people, and undermine the governments of those countries that choose to align themselves with the invaders -- thereby, in the eyes of Islamic true believers, revealing themselves as traitors to orthodox Muslim belief.
Hitler's Grand Error at Dunkirk: Why?
Virtue magazine
... Why the nonsensical halt order [by Hitler], when the enemy was beaten, and with no chance of stopping the powerful German army? ... But on May 24th, 1940, while the campaign was still in progression, Hitler expressed a deeper, more political motive, to members of Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt's staff ... "He then astonished us by speaking with admiration of the British Empire, of the necessity for its existence, and of the civilization that Britain had brought into the world ... He concluded by saying that his aim was to make peace with Britain on a basis that she would regard as compatible with her honor to accept." An incredible tale, and yet, it fits with the admiration Hitler expressed for Britain in Mein Kampf. Hitler offered peace to the British twice during World War Two ...
Interviews With Some Men Who Knew Hitler
PBS television
Several prominent Germans recall Hitler, including an outstanding World War II fighter pilot. Adolf Galland relates that Hitler emphasized to him, in a private conversation, how much he detested having to fight the English, whom he admired. (Britain declared war against Germany in 1939, and rejected Hitler's repeated offers of peace.) From the PBS television series "How Hitler Lost the War." Runtime: 2:00 mins.
A `Blatantly Anti-Semitic' Exchange on C-Span
Israel National News
A caller on a C-Span [US cable television] interview program Monday complained about "all these Jews" having "way too much power" in America and pushing the U.S. into wars with the Muslim world. He found his comments echoed and expanded upon by the studio guest. Michael Scheuer, the former director of a CIA unit assigned to track down Osama Bin-Laden, calmly expressed the view that American soldiers are now dying in Iraq for the sake of Israelis. He further claimed that any debate of American support for Israel is squelched in the public sphere. The interviewer for C-Span's Washington Journal program did not react to the blatantly anti-Semitic exchange.
Myths of the American Revolution
John Ferling -- Smithsonian Magazine
We think we know the Revolutionary War. After all, the American Revolution and the war that accompanied it not only determined the nation we would become but also continue to define who we are ... Yet much of what we know is not entirely true. Perhaps more than any defining moment in American history, the War of Independence is swathed in beliefs not borne out by the facts. Here, in order to form a more perfect understanding, the most significant myths of the Revolutionary War are reassessed ... In reality, Britain might well have won the war. The battle for New York in 1776 gave England an excellent opportunity for a decisive victory. France had not yet allied with the Americans. Washington and most of his lieutenants were rank amateurs.
Murray Rothbard, 1926-1995
Mark Weber
Uncompromisingly hostile to war and war propaganda, Rothbard was one of the few who remained true to his convictions even during the stifling Cold War era. Along with Garet Garrett, John T. Flynn and Harry Elmer Barnes, he continued steadfastly to oppose the US military-industrial complex and the military adventurism that is an integral part of its "perpetual war for perpetual peace" policy. Rothbard embraced historical revisionism in all its facets, including taboo issues of the Second World War.
Israeli Officers Cancel Visit to Britain for Fear of Arrest
The Associated Press
An Israeli military delegation has canceled an official visit to Britain, officials said Tuesday, the latest in a string of politicians and army officials to put off travel to the U.K. because of fears of war crimes prosecution. Israel complained that the practice, spearheaded by pro-Palestinian activists, is harming relations, and Britain's visiting attorney general said an urgent solution must be found. The Israelis called off their trip because their British army hosts could not guarantee they would not be arrested, the Israeli officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter. Neither the Israeli military nor the British government would comment.
Americans' Job Satisfaction Falls to Record Low
The Associated Press
We can't get no job satisfaction. Even Americans who are lucky enough to have work in this economy are becoming more unhappy with their jobs, according to a new survey that found only 45 percent of Americans are satisfied with their work. That was the lowest level ever recorded by the Conference Board research group in more than 22 years of studying the issue. In 2008, 49 percent of those surveyed reported satisfaction with their jobs. The drop in workers' happiness can be partly blamed on the worst recession since the 1930s, which made it difficult for some people to find challenging and suitable jobs. But worker dissatisfaction has been on the rise for more than two decades.
Obama Does a Louis XVI
Eric S. Margolis
...Thus the real cost of Afghanistan and Iraq are much higher than $200 billion annually. Yet President Obama, heedless of such costs, appears determined to expand the Afghan War. It seems clear that Obama has fallen increasingly under the influence of America's powerful military-industrial-financial complex and neoconservative war party. In short, the same calculus of forces that guided the Bush administration. Even America's mighty economy cannot for long support waging wars across the Muslim world. Unaffordable wars have been the ruin of many an empire, and the American Raj seems headed in the same direction as Nobel Peace Prize winner Barack Obama plunges ever deeper into the Afghan quagmire.
Ben Stein Drops the A Bomb
Wikitopian -- Occidental Dissent
Larry King hosted a discussion between Ben Stein and Ron Paul on Monday that was ostensibly about the airline security fiasco. The discussion quickly turned into a heated debate between Stein and Paul about the root cause of the terrorist attack ... Stein may have merely slipped up and admitted the obvious: that the entire thing is about Jewish influence on our foreign policy. Rejecting Middle Eastern imperialism is anti-Semitic. The truth is anti-Semitic. But I don't think a man as intelligent and poised as he is would do something that consequential by accident. I believe this is the beginning of a sea change in political strategy, one in which a direct campaign tries to bury the Ron Paul Revolution and its Tea Party Movement under a tidal wave of negative publicity and accusations of neoheresy. Anti-Imperialism = Anti-Semitism.
Bended Knees: Zionist Power in American Politics
James Petras
... The major potential counterweight to Zionist Israel First hegemony in the US would be in a revival of patriotic working class consciousness. America's "special relation" with Israel has been at an enormous cost to the working class, amounting to over $1.5 trillion dollars in foreign aid, loan guarantees, hijacked technological innovations, lost overseas investment opportunities, not to mention the wars on Israel's behalf and the lost lives in fighting Israel's war in Iraq. There is a 'material base' for a mass patriotic working people's revolt against the crass submission of the entire political class to the ZPC and its patrons in Tel-Aviv.
A Look At the Jewish Lobby
Mark Weber (Audio MP3 file)
A factual, reasoned talk on the power of the "Jewish lobby" in America, and its harmful role, especially in directing US Middle East policy. Runtime:15:45 mins. "As long as the `very powerful' Jewish lobby remains entrenched, there will be no end to the systematic Jewish distortion of current affairs and history, the Jewish-Zionist domination of the U.S. political system, Zionist oppression of Palestinians, the bloody conflict between Jews and non-Jews in the Middle East, and the Israeli threat to peace."
Fascist Mothers: Children of British Blackshirt Women Cope With the Past
BBC News
Children of Blackshirt women, who joined Oswald Mosley's pro-Nazi British Union of Fascists, often feel that they have had to live with the burden of the guilt and shame caused by their mother's fascist sympathies ... In documentaries about the Blackshirts, the pictures I have seen are only of men, marching in the streets in their paramilitary uniforms. I knew about the daughters of the aristocracy, like Diana Mitford who married Oswald Mosley, but I had not realised that young girls, like my own mother, could have been sucked in too. But speaking to the historian Julie Gottlieb (author of Feminine Fascism) I was surprised to learn that the first fascist political organisation in Britain was actually founded by a woman.
Why `Holocaust Denial' is On the Rise in the Arab World
Gilbert Achcar -- Mediapart
... Within the Arab world where denial is riding high, there's not a single author who has produced anything original on that theme. All the Arab deniers do is pick up theories produced in the West ... At that level, there are two different aspects: the one that we've talked about, the war over the instrumentalization of the Holocaust, and there is what you could call the local version of competition between victims: "My tragedy is more important than yours." On the Palestinian side, one may often read statements that assert that the fate of the Palestinian people has been worse than that of the Jews under Nazism.
Revisionism and the Arab World
Dr. Ibrahim Alloush -- The Journal of Historical Review (2001)
... The "Holocaust" ceased long ago to be about the Jews who died in that war. The "Holocaust" is about Zionist power and policies. As stated, the "Holocaust" myths serve specific objectives: justifying Zionist settlement in Palestine; cultivating a guilt complex in the West over the "Holocaust" as the result of Western anti-Semitism; mobilizing Western public opinion behind financial, political, and military support for the Zionist movement; and condoning Zionist infractions of international law under the pretext that the wartime deaths of the Jews were unique and unparalleled in human history.
--
Peace.
Michael Santomauro
Editorial Director
Call anytime: 917-974-6367
ReporterNotebook@Gmail.com
New Release: Debating The Holocaust by Thomas Dalton
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