The secret to happiness–is it good for the Jews? "Before Professor Dershowitz accused me of being an anti-Semite (news to me), I was a happy person. Since then, I'm still a happy person". –Michael Santomauro
"Correcting a Mistake - Jews and Arabs in Palestine/Israel, 1936-1956," by Benny Morris, Am Oved Publishers, 241 pages, NIS 64
Oh, we were so good (and did so many bad things). We were so right (and caused so many injustices). We were so beautiful (and our actions resulted in so much ugliness). And oh, we were so innocent and spread so many lies - lies and half-truths that we told ourselves and the rest of the world.We, who were born afterward, weren't told the whole truth; they only taught us the good parts, of which there were many. But, after all, there were also dark chapters which we heard nothing about. Instead, we were fed lies - there's just no other word for it.
They lied when they told us that the Arabs of Lod and Ramle "asked to leave their cities" (the head of the history department of the Israel Defense Forces). They lied when they told us that the murderous Kibiya operation was carried out by "enraged residents" (David Ben-Gurion). They lied when they told us that all the "infiltrators" were bloodthirsty terrorists, that all the Arab states wanted to destroy us and that we were the only ones who simply wanted peace all the time.
They lied; oh, how they lied. We didn't hear a thing about the horrific massacre in Safsaf; and not a syllable was uttered about the deportation plans.
The Arabs were always the bad guys. We were the absolute righteous, or the exclusive victims - or so we were told. Perhaps they didn't want to spoil it for us; perhaps they didn't want to ruin it for themselves. The huge celebration of a nation without a country that came to a country without a nation, settled it, caused its barren wilderness to blossom and established a glorious state - with exemplary, impeccable morality - should have been complete. As large, true and deserving as it may be, however, this celebration cannot be complete without recounting its entire history.
Historical mud-slinging
The time for telling the whole truth is well upon us. Over the past 12 years or so - and much to the distress of the "old" historians, whose enterprises are developing cracks - a number of "new" historians have taken up the challenge.
The rage with which the old historians are responding to the new historical enterprise is, perhaps, the entire story: If they had questioned their truths, which are beginning to crumble before their denying, repressive eyes, it is doubtful whether they would be so angry. After all, if they are so sure of themselves, why are they reacting so vociferously and making such a fuss? History, as the saying goes, will be the judge ... won't it?
As the doubts begin to surface, with Yitzhak Rabin, the banisher of the Arabs of Lod and Ramle, admitting his deeds even before the historian who tried to ignore and cover them up did, it is easy to understand the mud-slinging campaign that the old historians are waging against their new colleagues. With nowhere else to turn, this is their last resort. With no other sanctuary available, patriotism, as per usual, becomes the safe harbor.
Benny Morris certainly has a large stake in the new historical enterprise, even if it would have been better if he had let others determine that, "The turning point ... came in 1988, heralded, inter alia, in the first article in this compilation" (page 12). Morris' two earlier books - "Israel's Border Wars, 1949-1956: Arab Infiltration, Israeli Retaliation and the Countdown to the Suez War" (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1993), and "The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1948" (Cambridge Middle East Library, 1987) - are foundations for an understanding of the roots of the Israeli-Arab conflict.
If you want to understand the Palestinian uprising in the territories, go to these two books. If you want to understand why a settlement is impossible without a solution to the refugee problem, go to Morris. All the early-warning signs appear in his works. They show how our relationship with the Arabs began. Everything that followed, up until this very day, is anchored in their - and particularly our - original sins, which Morris and his colleagues have exposed.
Don't get me wrong. Among his colleagues, the new historians, Morris is certainly the least political and most Zionistic. His name doesn't appear on the protest petitions of the extreme left, and he defines himself as a Zionist, without reservations. He is more concerned with his historical findings than he is with their political and moral implications. Sometimes, his findings appear to cause him a certain discomfort, but you won't catch him voicing unequivocal moral assessments of his revelations, as chilling as they may be, particularly not to anyone who didn't know an Avraham (or Ibrahim) of those days.
He hasn't written ideological articles either. As assiduous a researcher, and as hard-working an in-the-field reporter (Morris began his professional life as a journalist) as he was, he presents the story and leaves us to draw most of the conclusions.
Morris' conclusions, one can safely assume, are a lot more forgiving than one would expect, and in this, lies his strength: Despite the claims leveled against the new historians, Morris does not home in on a target before embarking on his research. Neither does he hesitate to present findings that contradict or weaken his basic theories. For Morris, the experience determines the consciousness, and not vice-versa. A small ideologist and a significant historian - that's Morris in a nutshell.
His new book, "Correcting a Mistake," is a collection of articles that come together to form a gripping, infuriating collage of injustices committed between 1936-1956 by the Jewish community of Palestine, and thereafter, the state, against the native Palestinians.
No contrition
This time, in contrast to his other books, Morris doesn't focus on one particular issue. Contrary to the connotations stemming from the name of the book, this is not an expression of contrition. Morris doesn't present new findings to sweeten the previous bitter pills he asked us to swallow. Quite the opposite: Regrettably, the opening of the archives, which had been closed for some 50 years, and the exposure of new material has shed more light on the picture, which Morris had painted, in shadow, and which now, stirs up more fury than he first imagined.
"The Deportations of the Hiram Operation: Correcting a Mistake" is the title of the article from which the collection takes its name. "Sometimes a historian must correct a mistake," Morris writes, and the reader is riveted. Perhaps it never happened? Perhaps there were no deportations or massacres? Perhaps Morris was wrong and everything was done by the book?
Not a chance! Over a decade after the publication of "The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1948," Morris reveals that he did, indeed, make a mistake, but errors and omissions accepted. He believed Major General (res.) Moshe Carmel and other sources, who told him that no deportation orders were issued during the course of Operation Hiram, to be the dirtiest there was.
And now, the IDF archives have been opened and there we find a cable dated October 31, 1948, signed by Major General Carmel and addressed to all the division and district commanders under his command: "Do all you can to immediately and quickly purge the conquered territories of all hostile elements in accordance with the orders issued. The residents should be helped to leave the areas that have been conquered."
Perhaps this was the right thing to do; perhaps there was no alternative. But why lie all these years? Why didn't they say: "Righteousness encountered righteousness; a victim encountered a victim; and this was the inevitable result. We had to deport them. It was either them or us." It's a lot more convincing than lying about it. The only thing is, Carmel's deportation order isn't the whole truth which Morris reveals in "Correcting a Mistake."
Apparently, Carmel's troops carried out massacres in no less than 10 (!) villages in the north of the country. They would gather the men of these villages in the square, choose a few of them, sometimes dozens, stand them up against a wall and shoot them. Because the IDF has kept the relevant document under wraps, we know nothing about these massacres. We can only hope that this nonsense, this outrageous practice of keeping things confidential, passes from the world and that 52 years on, we will eventually learn everything - where we went wrong and the evil things we did.
Blood-chilling testimonies
In any event, Morris presents a number of blood-chilling testimonies, first hand, about the massacres carried out during Operation Hiram, the numbers of which are different to and far more serious than any other operation. No, he doesn't say that Carmel ordered the massacres; who knows, perhaps there's another confidential document that does, and Morris will have to correct another mistake. But, he deduces - based on the large number of incidents in this particular operation, their similar nature, and the fact that no one was punished in their wake - that the commanders understood Carmel's orders to be a stamp of approval for acts of murder that would make the residents of the villages flee.
Up until a short while ago, one could have run into the pleasant-mannered Carmel, who served as a government minister on behalf of the now-defunct Achdut Ha'avoda and Ma'arach parties, sitting in the Beit Ariella municipal library in Tel Aviv, seven days a week, and browsing through the newspapers like one of the pensioners. He was also among the very good people who did a number of very bad things.
Terrible things were done after the War of Independence, too; for example, in the town of Majdal in 1950. At that stage, Israel was already quite sure of itself - big, but not big enough, as far as it was concerned.
Some 10,000 Palestinians lived in Majdal before the war and, in October 1948, thousands more refugees from nearby villages joined them. Majdal fell in November and most of its residents and refugees fled wherever they could, leaving some 3,000 inhabitants, mostly women and the elderly. Orders in Hebrew and Yiddish were posted in the streets of the town, warning the soldiers to be aware of "undesirable" behavior on the part of the town's residents. "As was customary in such instances," the Israeli intelligence officer wrote, "the behavior of the population was obsequious and adulatory."
Majdal was too close to Gaza for Israel's liking. In December 1948, IDF soldiers "swept through" the town and deported some 500 of its remaining inhabitants. In 1949, Yigal Allon demanded "to transfer all the Arab inhabitants." Ben- Gurion objected. An inter-ministerial committee for the "transfer of Arabs from place to place" - yes, we had one of those as well - decided to thin out the population somewhat; another ministerial committee - "on abandoned property" - decided to settle Majdal with Jews.
From committee to committee, Majdal was "Judaized," until, with 2,500 Jewish residents, it became known as Migdal-Ad.
In December 1949, more Arabs were deported so as to vacate a few more houses - "abandoned property" - for a few more discharged soldiers. The IDF made the life of those Arab who remained a misery, hoping they'd get the message. The new commanding officer of the Southern Command, Moshe Dayan, rekindled the ideas of his predecessor, Yigal Allon.
"I hope that perhaps in the coming years, there will be another opportunity to transfer these Arabs [170,000 Israeli Arabs - G.L.] out of the Land of Israel," he said at a meeting of the Mapai faction, outlining its ideas while in uniform. Dayan backed up his words with actions: He submitted a detailed proposal for "the evacuation of the Arab inhabitants of the town of Majdal." The chief of staff agreed and Ben-Gurion authorized the plan. The government was circumvented, the Histadrut labor federation objected, and Rabin informed the residents.
The transfer began at the beginning of 1950, although the "official operation" took off in June. There were still those who spoke of dispersing the Arabs around the country; in the end, they were deported to Gaza. They were loaded onto trucks and dropped off at the border - "deliveries," as they were termed. Just to remind you again, the state already existed. The last delivery of 229 people left for Gaza on October 21; the Egyptians didn't bat an eyelid.
Back in Israel, the officials pondered over how to distribute the "abandoned" houses, most of which went to individuals who had some political clout. In 1956, Migdal-Ad changed its name to Ashkelon. To this very day, the former residents of Majdal live in the shacks and shanties of the refugee camps in Gaza.
How many Israelis know this story? How many have heard it before? How many have ever thought of the refugees on whose destroyed homes the city of Ashkelon was founded?
'Tearful assassin'
But the most enlightening and probably most significant document presented in the book is the journal of concerned-citizen Yosef Nachmani, perhaps the original tearful assassin, certainly not the last.
For 40 years, Nachmani spearheaded the Zionist enterprise in the Land of Israel - a high-ranking member of the pre-independence underground, Haganah; the director of the offices of the Jewish National Fund in Tiberias; and the man responsible for purchasing and settling land throughout the Galilee and Jezreel Valley regions.
Nachmani's beliefs underwent numerous upheavals all through his life: At first, he supported the transfer; then, he sobered up. At first, he was in favor of adopting a harsh approach; then, his conscience started eating away at him. At first, he dispossessed; then, he denounced. At first, he fired; then, he cried.
But above all, he was a fascinating observer. At least one particular portion of his journal requires repeating here: " ... the acts of cruelty committed by our soldiers. After they went into Safsaf, the village and its people raised a white flag. They separated the men from the women, tied the hands of some 50 to 60 peasants and shot and killed them, burying them in a single hole. They also raped a number of the women from the village. Alongside the wood, he [probably an eye-witness by the name of Freedman - G.L.] saw a few dead women, among them one who was holding her dead child in her arms ...
"In Salha, which raised a white flag, they carried out a real massacre, killing men and women, about 60 to 70 people. Where did they find such a degree of cruelty like that of the Nazis? They learned from them."
Bosnia? Kosovo? Chechniya? Rwanda? No, not at all; right here, and not that long ago.
Morris, as calculated as ever, concludes: "The fundamental change in the thoughts and actions of Nachmani between 1947-1949 leaves the observer with a sense of paradox and admiration and gives him a key to understanding Zionism and its success. Zionism has always had two faces: a constructive, moral, compromising and considerate aspect; and a destructive, selfish, militant, chauvinistic-racist one. Both are sincere and real ... The simultaneous existence of these two facets was one of the most significant keys to the success of Zionism" - shooting and weeping.
But, there were also incidents in which they shot - oh, and how they shot - and didn't weep at all. And lied. This is the picture that emerges from the chapter about the Israeli press at the time of the Kibiya affair, which expresses the dark side of the then already five-year-old state: no longer a community struggling to establish a country, but an orderly, victorious state, thought of as a democracy, with David Ben-Gurion, who lies, poker-faced, and its press, which brazenly conceals scandalous information from its readers and even lies knowingly - all for the glory of the State of Israel.
"First of all, the facts," as Morris writes. On the night of October 12-13, 1953, a group of infiltrators crossed the border into Israel, reached Yehud and threw a grenade into the home of the Kanias family. The mother and her two young children were killed. Retribution was two days in coming: Soldiers from the IDF commando unit (Unit 101) raided Kibiya, going from house to house, throwing in grenades and shooting indiscriminately. The result: 60 dead, most of them women and children.
The Israeli leaders did not make mention of most of these facts to the public, but worse still - a thousands times worse - neither did the Israeli press. The Mapai newspaper, Ha'dor, tried, at first, not to refrain from reporting a thing about the massacre; the other newspapers offered partial and even blatantly false versions of the story.
Morris, on the article in Ma'ariv by the legendary Azriel Carlibach: "There is hardly one sentence among Carlibach's words that does not defile, distort or twist the truth, either explicitly or implicitly; whereas the words of Radio Ramallah, as quoted in the Hebrew press, were almost all the simple truth."
Most of the press - aside from Kol Ha'am, and later Ha'aretz and Al Hamishmar, all of which expressed reservations - reported that the Kibiya killers weren't IDF conscripts, but rather outraged residents that went out to seek vengeance. Unit 101 or outraged residents? The press and then prime minister David Ben-Gurion knew, Morris writes, that this was a propaganda-like lie.
I read this chapter twice - once, before the outbreak of the "Al-Aqsa Intifada"; and then again, a short while thereafter. After my first reading, I was incensed by the Israeli press of old - a collaborator and distorter - and I took pride in the long way it has come since then.
After my second reading, and in the wake of the way in which the new Intifada has been covered by sections of the Israeli media, I was faced with the following question: Have we really changed, or perhaps, in testing times, does the Israeli press return to its bad old place of being the state's trumpet, just as it was in Kibiya, just as Morris describes? Then, the press inflamed passions by giving prominence to the Israeli victims (relatively few) and playing down the Arab ones (tenfold more), greatly enhancing the Israelis' sense of being the victim, the exclusive sufferers.
So, is there anything new under the sun?
The things that Morris writes about the Kibiya press hold true, in part, for the press of the past few days: "As a whole, the press approached the Kibiya operation as an enlisted press, justifying, no matter what, government policy and the actions of the IDF ... The feeling was that if the entire world was denouncing [Israel], then the press here must unite, to beautify and repel the criticism."
Some things never change.
Isn't it best for us to know about all these things? Isn't it important for us to know about all these things, particularly now, in such difficult times? That's where it all started. That's how it all began
--
... It was the latest sign of the demographic, ethnic and political changes that are transforming the county and challenging long-held views of a region whose colorful -- its detractors might suggest zany -- reputation extends well beyond the borders of this state. At the end of 2009, nearly 45 percent of the county's residents spoke a language other than English at home, according to county officials. Whites now make up only 45 percent of the population; this county is teeming with Hispanics, as well as Vietnamese, Korean and Chinese families. Its percentage of foreign-born residents jumped to 30 percent in 2008 from 6 percent in 1970, and visits to some of its corners can feel like a trip to a foreign land. 
... Among the future consequences of not fixing our national problems will likely be an increase in social unrest and an increase in crime. A look at Chicago's problems may serve as a call to action for America's middle class. Chicago's city budget is in dire straits. That's also true of the state of Illinois, California, New York and other areas. In Chicago, the same mismanagement that deepened our fiscal crisis has caused a crisis in essential city services ... Thugs, gangs and renegade groups run the streets and neighborhoods, intimidating and victimizing the decent citizens of this city. They go mostly unchallenged and unchecked by a totally demoralized police force that is dangerously understaffed and still out-gunned on the streets. 
... In Iraq and Afghanistan, it was the inner group of neocons, originally leftist Trotskyites who then switched to the right, bringing their war propensities with them, when they saw the left turning against Israel. They are still very much around in the right wing of the Republican Party, and they are always the people to watch ... The bigger question we now face is whether the American people really want 800 American bases all over the world "projecting power," and whether we want to invade other countries and bring back body bags instead of rebuilding our bridges and highways and ports. 
Thousands of Germans, including teenagers, were forced to toil in Stalin's labor camps after World War II. When they were finally released, their country had been divided into east and west. Karl Heinz Vogeley and Lothar Scholz recall how no one was interested in their fate when they returned ... Between 15 million and 18 million people were imprisoned in Soviet gulags between the mid 1920s and the beginning of the 1950s. 
Dr. MacDonald explains how Jewish intellectuals promote policies to advance Jewish group interests while deceitfully justifying them on the basis of "universal values" and humanitarian principles that appeal to non-Jews. This video presentation, made by James Williams, lasts 4:53 mins. As part of what psychology professor MacDonald calls a "group evolutionary strategy," Jews frame polices that are good for Jews as beneficial for everyone. These policies include: Mass immigration and multiculturalism for the US and Europe, but not for Israel, which are justified on "humanitarian" grounds; and, Wars waged by the US against Israel's enemies, which are justified as promoting "freedom" and "democracy." 
Short answer. Iran's President Ahmadinejad did NOT call for Israeli Jews to be annihilated. Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the spiritual leader of Israel's Shas party, HAS called, more than once, for the Palestinians (and, in fact, all Arabs) to be exterminated. As reported by the mainstream Western media, Ahmadinejad called for Israel to be "wiped off the map". What that meant, it was asserted, was the destruction, the driving into the sea, of Israel's Jews. What Ahmadinejad actually called for was the de-Zionization of Palestine. His actual words were to the effect that he wanted the Zionist state to disappear as the Soviet Union had done. 
The first people to be liberated by Britain in the Second World War were our own criminals. As the declaration of hostilities was announced in 1939, the gates of the country's prisons swung open for any inmate with less than three months left to serve and all the Borstal boys who had completed six months. Next month sees the 70th anniversary of the start of the blitz and there will be, quite rightly, many celebrations of the courage and stoicism displayed during it. What may receive less publicity are the activities of those who took advantage of the confusion to make their criminal fortunes because, as most of the nation pulled together to help each other, others were very busily helping themselves. 
Today the Iraq war was declared over by Barack Obama. As his troops return home, Iraqis are marginally freer than in 2003, and considerably less secure. Two million remain abroad as refugees from seven years of anarchy, with another two million internally displaced. Ironically, almost all Iraqi Christians have had to flee. Under western rule, production of oil - Iraq's staple product - is still below its pre-invasion level, and homes enjoy fewer hours of electricity. This is dreadful. Some 100,000 civilians are estimated to have lost their lives from occupation-related violence ... The Iraq war will be seen by history as a catastrophe that did more than anything else to alienate Atlantic powers from the rest of the world and disqualify them as global policemen. 
The US formally ends its combat operations in Iraq at the end of August, marking a new phase in the seven-year conflict which has cost billions of dollars and many thousands of lives ... The respected and non-partisan Congressional Research Service estimates that the US will have spent almost $802 billion on funding the war by the end of fiscal year 2011, with $747.6 billion already appropriated. However, Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard's Linda Bilmes put the true cost at $3 trillion once additional impacts on the US budget and economy are taken into account. 
... This year, a group of retired generals and admirals released a report titled "Too Fat to Fight." "Between 1995 and 2008, the proportion of potential recruits who failed their physicals each year because they were overweight rose nearly 70 percent," the report concluded. Though the Army screens out the seriously obese and completely unfit, it is still finding that many of the recruits who reach basic training have less strength and endurance than privates past. It is the legacy of junk food and video games, compounded by a reduction in gym classes in many high schools, Army officials assert. 
... Compared to our German cousins across the pond, we work 1,804 hours versus their 1,436 hours - the equivalent of nine extra 40-hour workweeks per year. The Protestant work ethic may have begun in Germany, but it has since evolved to become the American way of life ... European social democracy - particularly Germany's - offers some tantalizing solutions to our overworked age. In comparison to the U.S., the Germans live in a socialist idyll. They have six weeks of federally mandated vacation, free university tuition, nursing care, and childcare. 
Simon Wiesenthal, a Holocaust survivor who gained worldwide fame for decades as a one-man Nazi-hunting operation, was in fact frequently on the payroll of the Mossad, Israel's spy agency, a new biography asserts. The assertion, based on numerous documents and interviews with three people said to be Mr. Wiesenthal's Mossad handlers, punctures not only a widely held belief about how he operated; it also suggests a need to re-evaluate the standard view that the Israeli government took no interest in tracking down Nazis until the 1960 capture in Argentina of Adolf Eichmann, and little thereafter. 
A Jewish French history teacher said Tuesday that she had been suspended for spending too much time teaching her pupils about the Holocaust and for organising trips to former Nazi death camps. A lawyer acting for Catherine Pederzoli, a 58-year-old secondary teacher in the eastern town of Nancy, said her client had been accused by administrators of teaching the World War II massacres with insufficient "neutrality". ... The report, compiled last month, alleged the teacher took up too much time preparing pupils for annual school trips to Poland and the Czech Republic to visit sites like the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp. A copy of the report, seen by AFP, accuses Pederzoli of "lacking distance, neutrality and secularism" in teaching the Holocaust and of manipulating her charges through a process of "brain-washing". 
... From the spring of 1944 onwards Anne rewrote her diary as she updated it, to turn it into a more eloquent piece of writing. After the war her father, Otto Frank, drew on versions A (the original) and B (Anne's revision) to produce C - the standard edition, until both the critical edition (1989) and the definitive edition (1995) supplemented C with hitherto omitted passages from A and B. ... Her posthumous beatification - the remaining few frames of film of her have almost the status of a relic - rests mostly on those lines in her diary about still believing that people are good at heart. (The ones about people's innate "urge to destroy . . . to kill . . . murder and rage" have curiously never found equal fame.) 
Samuel Edward Konkin III 
... The truth is that the U.S. no longer has a "defense" budget. The adjective is wrong. Our military forces' size long ago ceased to have any meaningful attachment to the requirements of protecting Americans ... Our military spending is nearly equal to half the world's, and our allies spend most of the other half. Russia, China, North Korea, Syria and Iran collectively spend about a fourth of what we do on defense, according to statistics compiled by the International Institute for Strategic Studies. Even if we cut our military in half, it would still be far bigger than that of any conceivable rival ... Our deficit problem is an opportunity to surrender the pretension that we are the world's indispensable nation, preventing instability, shaping the international system and guiding history. 
Millions of U.S. teens attend "drug-infested schools" where students routinely see drugs used, sold or kept on schools grounds, according to a national survey of attitudes on substance abuse released on Thursday. Thirty-one percent of high school students -- more than four million -- see drug dealing, illegal drug use or students high or drunk at least once a week on their school grounds, said the annual survey by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse (CASA) at Columbia University ... Since 2002, the proportion of students who attend schools where drugs are used, kept or sold soared 39 percent for high school students and 63 percent for those in middle school. 
An influential Israeli rabbi has said God should strike the Palestinians and their leader with a plague, calling for their death in a fiery sermon before Middle East peace talks set to begin next week. "Abu Mazen and all these evil people should perish from this earth," Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, spiritual head of the religious Shas party in Israel's government, said in a sermon late Saturday, using Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas' popular name. "God should strike them and these Palestinians -- evil haters of Israel -- with a plague," the 89-year-old rabbi said in his weekly address to the faithful, excerpts of which were broadcast on Israeli radio Sunday. 
A leading member of Germany's central bank has caused outrage by claiming that Jews are identified by a particular gene. Thilo Sarrazin, who is on the board of the the Bundesbank in Frankfurt, said in a newspaper interview: 'All Jews share a certain gene. Basques (Spanish separatists) have particular genes, that distinguishes them from others.' ... In the book he claims the country is on the road to ruin because of the influx of immigrants from the Middle East which would overwhelm the indigenous population and create a nation of 'dunces'. In particular he singles out Muslims for failing to integrate and having low IQs. This influx, he claims, has been going on virtually since the war while the birthrate of native Germans has been steadily falling. 
In the months following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, many [Americans] expected an immediate attack against the West Coast. Fear gripped the country and a wave of hysterical antipathy against the Japanese engulfed the Pacific Coast ... The Japanese were sent to concentration camps not by a group of West Coast racists seeking economic advantage, but by a popular and powerful government run by democratic liberals. At the top of the list of those responsible for not only authorizing the program, but also for keeping it in operation was President Franklin Roosevelt. 
While America's super-rich congratulate themselves on donating billions to charity, the rest of the country is worse off than ever. Long-term unemployment is rising and millions of Americans are struggling to survive. The gap between rich and poor is wider than ever and the middle class is disappearing. ... Even more unsettling is the fact that America, which has always been characterized by its unshakable belief in the American Dream, and in the conviction that anyone, even those at the very bottom, can rise to the top, is beginning to lose its famous optimism. According to recent figures, a significant minority of US citizens now believe that their children will be worse off than they are. 
.... Only now, 12 years after her death, have I found the box in my garage, containing dozens of volumes published by the Amalgamated Press (now IPC), in which a generation of schoolboys learned that Germans and Japanese were subhumans, and that we, the Brits - and occasionally Frenchmen and Americans, even Soviets - were fighting courageously against these "hordes" ... At their most racist, the comics cover the Allied-Japanese war. "The Emperor ... has ordered us to show these low-natured curs ... that we are the sons of Japan," a Jap says of the Brits in Malaya. But fear not, a plucky Tommy is there to "mow down the oncoming Japs" while screaming: "Come and get it you grinning little monkeys." 
Britain carried out assassinations during the Cold War, novelist and former secret agent John le Carre told The Sunday Telegraph newspaper. The espionage writer worked for Britain's domestic and external intelligence agencies during the 1950s and 1960s. "Certainly we did very bad things. We did a lot of direct action. Assassinations, at arm's length. Although I was never involved," said the 79-year-old, whose real name is David Cornwell. He drew a distinction between Western spy agencies and their Soviet bloc counterparts in the way they went about it. The novelist, who worked in Berlin in his Cold War days, denied that both sides were as bad each other. 
France's state rail operator, SNCF, has pledged to open its wartime archives to the state of California to prove it has "nothing to hide" over transporting French Jews to Nazi death camps. The pledge came a week after California passed legislation making full disclosure on involvement in taking people to work, concentration, prisoner of war, or extermination camps between January 1942 and December 1944 a requirement for bidding to build a high-speed railway in the state. Under the Holocaust Survivor Responsibility Act details of any reparations paid must also be disclosed. The new legislation is specifically aimed at SNCF, which is making a joint bid with French construction firm Alstom to build a $45 billion high speed link between Los Angeles and San Francisco. 
RAF [British air force] pilots shot down over the Channel during the Battle of Britain had to rely on German search and rescue services to save them from drowning, new research has unveiled. The problem became so severe that British aircraft were ordered to try to avoid travelling over the sea because too many being drowned, it has emerged. Amid the 70th anniversary commemorations this summer it can be disclosed that at least 200 pilots died "needlessly" in 1940 after bailing out over water. Once they hit the water there was very little chance of survival with only the occasional flier being picked up by a passing destroyer or fishing boat. 
... When it comes to military appropriations, the U.S. government already spends about seven times as much as China, thirteen times as much as Russia, and seventy-three times as much as Iran. Is this really necessary? During the Cold War, the United States confronted far more dangerous and numerous military adversaries, including the Soviet Union. And the U.S. government certainly possessed an enormous and devastating military arsenal, as well as the armed forces that used it. But in those years, U.S. military spending accounted for only 26 percent of the world total. 
... Having a giant undercover military jobs program is an insane way to keep Americans employed. It creates jobs we don't need but we keep anyway because there's no honest alternative. We don't have an overt jobs program based on what's really needed ... The Pentagon's budget -- and its giant undercover jobs program -- keeps expanding. The President has asked Congress to hike total defense spending next year 2.2 percent, to $708 billion. That's 6.1 percent higher than peak defense spending during the Bush administration. This sum doesn't even include Homeland Security, Veterans Affairs, nuclear weapons management, and intelligence. Add these, and next year's national security budget totals about $950 billion. 
... The initial successes of our forces against the Soviets were due to the fact that the Russians were not stationed in defense positions, but were instead positioned right at the front for attack, which made it possible for us to quickly encircle large Soviet forces. Thus, in the first weeks of the war, we were able to capture more than three million prisoners of war as well as enormous quantities of war equipment, all of which was on the frontier, positioned for attack. That's the truth of the matter, which can be proven. 
... To be completely and cold bloodedly serious about the respective positions being staked out by Iran and its chief antagonists in Washington and Tel Aviv, one must first of all remember that Tehran does not currently have a nuclear weapon and there is no real evidence that it even has a program to produce one. It has been basically compliant with the UN inspection regime mandated by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, to which it is a signatory. 
For the past year, sporadic articles have appeared in the Arabic press debating the life and policies of Sultan Abdulhamid II, the last absolute monarch of the Ottoman Empire, who ruled from 1876 until forced to abdicate in 1909 ... Once seen as the source of all things evil, Abdulhamid is now revealed as a farsighted ruler who suffered his throne because of his defiance of Zionist ambitions in Palestine. The passing of time has enabled scholars to quietly take a long hard look at their history away from emotional bolts of Arab nationalism. The warming of Arab ties under Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a man who very clearly is proud of his Ottoman past, has also contributed to this revisionist history. 
... If you take a look at the definition of apartheid here found in Article 2, you will see that Israel has inflicted each and every act of apartheid set out in Article 2 on the Palestinians, except an outright ban on marriages between Israelis and Palestinians. But even there they have barred Palestinians living in occupied Palestine who marry Israeli citizens from moving into Israel, and thus defeat the right of family reunification that of course the world supported when Jews were emigrating from the Soviet Union. 
... A key tenet of Christian Zionism is absolute support for Israel, whose establishment and existence, it is believed, heralds Armageddon and the second coming of Christ. The politically relevant upshot of this is that without Israel's expansion there can be no redemption, and those who subscribe to this interpretation are only too eager to sacrifice their Palestinian fellow Christians on the altar of Zionism. They do not want to hear about coreligionists' suffering at the hands of Israel. 
Did you know that John Maynard Keynes was a venomous anti-Semite who could have given Richard Wagner a run for his money? Me neither. Yet the evidence has been out there for decades. Here are a couple of extracts from his writings, courtesy of Chris Dillow via Clive Davis's Spectator blog: "[Jews] have in them deep-rooted instincts that are antagonistic and therefore repulsive to the European, and their presence among us is a living example of the insurmountable difficulties that exist in merging race characteristics, in making cats love dogs. And: "It is not agreeable to see civilization so under the ugly thumbs of its impure Jews who have all the money and the power and brains." 
Winston Churchill was a racist. He said things like 'I hate people with slit eyes and pig-tails. I don't like the look of them or the smell of them'.... The Churchill we salute as a lover of freedom and hater of tyranny muttered about kaffirs and blackamoors, and bore a lifelong commitment to subjecting swathes of the world to unwelcome British rule. How so? For answers, we may turn to Richard Toye's excellent new book, Churchill's Empire: The World That Made Him and the World He Made ... Sadness largely dominated Churchill's views on Empire following the War. Towards the end of his life he told his private secretary Anthony Montague-Brown: 'I have worked very hard all my life, and I have achieved a great deal - in the end to achieve nothing.' 
... In reality, we often base our opinions on our beliefs, which can have an uneasy relationship with facts. And rather than facts driving beliefs, our beliefs can dictate the facts we chose to accept. They can cause us to twist facts so they fit better with our preconceived notions. Worst of all, they can lead us to uncritically accept bad information just because it reinforces our beliefs. This reinforcement makes us more confident we're right, and even less likely to listen to any new information. And then we vote. 
... If the wars are not immediately stopped and the jobs brought back to America, the US is relegated to the trash bin of history. Obviously, the corporations and Wall Street would use their financial power and campaign contributions to block any legislation that would reduce short-term earnings and bonuses by bringing jobs back to America. Americans have no greater enemies than Wall Street and the corporations and their prostitutes in Congress and the White House. The neocons allied with Israel, who control both parties and much of the media, are strung out on the ecstasy of Empire. The United States and the welfare of its 300 million people cannot be restored unless the neocons, Wall Street, the corporations, and their servile slaves in Congress and the White House can be defeated. Without a revolution, Americans are history. 
... The National Socialists regarded art, and especially music, as an expression of a society's soul, character and ideals. A widespread appreciation of Germany's cultural achievements, they believed, encouraged a joyful national pride and fostered a healthy sense of national unity and mission. Because they regarded themselves as guardians of their nation's cultural heritage, they opposed liberal, modernistic trends in music and the other arts, as degenerate assaults against the cultural-spiritual traditions of Germany and the West. 
The Nuremberg Laws signed by Adolf Hitler that set the legal groundwork for the Holocaust will be transferred from California's Huntington Museum to the Washington-based National Archives, the institutions said Wednesday. The typewritten pages bearing Hitler's signature and dated September 15, 1935, were whisked out of [stolen from] Germany after World War II by US General George Patton, who donated them to the Huntington Museum, in San Marino, near Los Angeles, in 1945. 
A glamorous Nazi spy may have been behind one of the biggest setbacks suffered by Allied forces during World War II, newly released files suggest. The secret government papers suggest that Marina Lee, a blonde ballerina, stole battle plans which led to the fall of Norway to Germany in 1940 ... Born in St Petersburg, Russia, Lee was married to a Norwegian communist and had trained as a ballerina before becoming "a highly valued and experienced German agent", according to the files. She is described as "blonde, tall, with a beautiful figure, refined and languid in manner" and reportedly spoke five languages. 
... The false narrative we are hearing in America today is that constant war is both necessary and manageable, not to mention a safeguard of the US Constitution and our way of life. The Founding Fathers would not agree and would be horrified if they returned to America today. They saw clearly that foreign entanglements would bring about the death of the Republic and granted only to Congress the power to declare war. In spite of that, however, the United States has sent its soldiers into combat situations more then seventy times since the defeat of Japan in 1945, all without a declaration of war by Congress, and the president has acquired pretty much a free hand to initiate military action. 
... Thirty-five years from now, America's official century of being top dog 
A detailed look at President Franklin Roosevelt's secret campaign to provoke war in Europe prior to the outbreak of hostilities in September 1939. Highlights his efforts to pressure Britain, France and Poland into war against Germany in 1938 and 1939. Franklin Roosevelt not only criminally involved America in a war that had already engulfed Europe, he bears a grave responsibility for the outbreak of the most destructive war of all time. This paper relies heavily on secret Polish documents that fell into German hands when Warsaw was captured in 1939. These revealing docu ments also confirm the crucial role of Jewish power and in fluence on US foreign policy during these years. 
... To get their way, the elites must erode or dismantle the Constitution, bit by bit, in one way or another. What that means is that they must dismantle America. This has been going on piecemeal over the years, but now we have an administration in Washington that circumvents the Constitution wholesale, with its laws passed so fast that the public cannot know what is in them, its appointment of "czars" wielding greater power than Cabinet members', without having to be exposed to public scrutiny by going through the confirmation process prescribed by the Constitution for Cabinet members. Now there is leaked news of plans to change the country's immigration laws by administrative fiat rather than congressional legislation ... 
It's starting to feel like another recession. Businesses are ordering fewer goods. Home sales are the slowest in decades. Jobs are scarce, and unemployment claims are rising. Perhaps most worrisome, manufacturing activity, which had been one of the economy's few bright spots, is faltering. "The odds of a double-dip are rising and uncomfortably high," said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Analytics, referring to the possibility that the nation will tip back into recession. "Nothing else can go wrong. There is no cushion left." On Wednesday, the government offered the latest dose of grim news about the economic recovery: Companies cut back last month on their investments in equipment and machines. 
A debate still smoulders over one of the most ambitious, and disastrous, military endeavours in Canadian history that took place here [in northern France on Aug. 19, 1942] 68 years ago Thursday. The Dieppe raid, to be marked here by Canadian and local French officials and some veterans with a series of wreath-laying events and an outdoor mass, is still viewed by some as a useless waste of lives. But Antony Beevor, considered by some the most prominent military historian in the world, supports the argument that the Canadians mowed down or blown apart by overwhelming German firepower didn't die in vain. 
... About every fourth soldier here, where 48,000 troops and their families are based, has been in counseling during the past year, according to the service's medical statistics. And the number of soldiers seeking help for combat stress, substance abuse, broken marriages or other emotional problems keeps increasing. A common refrain by the Army's vice chief of staff, Gen. Peter Chiarelli, is that far more soldiers suffer mental health issues than the Army anticipated. Nowhere is this more evident than at Fort Hood, where emotional problems among the soldiers threaten to overwhelm the system in place to help them. 
Two Israeli groups set up training courses in Wikipedia editing with aims to 'show the other side' over borders and culture / Since the earliest days of the worldwide web, the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians has seen its rhetorical counterpart fought out on the talkboards and chatrooms of the internet. Now two Israeli groups seeking to gain the upper hand in the online debate have launched a course in "Zionist editing" for Wikipedia, the online reference site. Yesha Council, representing the Jewish settler movement, and the rightwing Israel Sheli (My Israel) movement, ran their first workshop this week in Jerusalem, teaching participants how to rewrite and revise some of the most hotly disputed pages of the online reference site. 
... Japan's economy has been and remains successful. So is Germany's. They have reached an economic steady state in which they don't need roaring growth rates to provide for their people. But for the economic Cassandras, apparently it doesn't matter if people's needs are being met; what matters is whether their theories and equations balance ... This is not an easy challenge, yet it is the path that Japan, Germany and others have chosen. Americans would be wise to learn from them. 
... The conflict which ensued spread across the world, and by the time it ended in 1945, an estimated 50 million had died. But the way in which the war is remembered varies around the world. In Britain, it's generally seen as a righteous battle against the forces of totalitarianism. In many of Britain's former colonies though, the picture is very different. Professor Richard Overy from the University of Exeter and Prof Tapan RayChaudhuri, an expert on Indian History at Oxford University, discuss the different perspectives. 
... The [Israel] state's chief archivist says many of the documents "are not fit for public viewing" and raise doubts about Israel's "adherence to international law", while the government warns that greater transparency will "damage foreign relations". ... Ethnic cleansing is the common theme of both these Israeli conquests. A deeper probe of the archives will almost certainly reveal in greater detail how and why these "cleansing" campaigns were carried out - which is precisely why Mr Netanyahu and others want the archives to remain locked. 
Declassified files from a Senate investigation into Israeli-funded covert public relations and lobbying activity in the United States were released by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) on July 23rd, 2010. The subpoenaed documents reveal Israel's clandestine programs for "cultivation of editors," the "stimulation and placement of suitable articles in the major consumer magazines" as well as U.S. reporting about sensitive subjects such as the Dimona nuclear weapons facility. 
Twenty-five thousand Jews live in Iran. It's the largest Jewish population in the Middle East outside of Israel. Iranian Jews are not persecuted or abused by the state, in fact, they are protected under Iran's constitution. They are free to practice their religion and to vote in elections. They are not stopped and searched at checkpoints, they are not brutalized by an occupying army, and they are not herded into a densely-populated penal colony (Gaza) where they are deprived of the basic means of survival. Iranian Jews live in dignity and enjoy the benefits of citizenship. 
... Young Winston had vowed to devote his life to the maintenance of the British Empire. As warlord during the struggle against Hitler he fought to preserve it even though that meant testing the Anglo-American alliance, which he also championed. As an old man he lamented that his life had been for nothing: 'The Empire I believed in has gone.' ... Churchill was 'anti-black', hated 'people with slit eyes and pigtails' and damned Hindus as a foul race 'protected by their mere pullulation from the doom that is their due'. He defended 'punitive devastation' against the Pashtuns. In South Africa he justified harsh measures against the Boers, including farm burnings and concentration camps. In Iraq he urged the use of mustard gas against 'uncivilised tribes'. 
As the United States dropped its atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, 1.6 million Soviet troops launched a surprise attack on the Japanese army occupying eastern Asia. ... But in recent years some historians have argued that the Soviet action served as effectively as -- or possibly more than -- the A-bombs in ending the war. Now a new history by a professor at University of California, Santa Barbara seeks to reinforce that view, arguing that fear of Soviet invasion persuaded the Japanese to opt for surrender to the Americans, who they believed would treat them more generously than the Soviets. 
... In August 1941 Hitler permitted a Red Cross delegation to visit the camp for Soviet POWs in Hammerstadt. It is these contacts that resulted in an appeal to the Soviet government, requesting that it should send food parcels for our officers and men. We are prepared to fulfill and comply with the norms of the Geneva convention, Moscow said in its reply, but sending food in the given situation and under fascist control is the same as making presents to the enemy ... How great was Stalin's hatred for those who had found themselves behind enemy lines. It made no difference: who, where, how and why? Even the dead were considered to be criminals. 
... When you read about America in European newspapers, what you are likely to find is a tone bordering on pity. The U.S. is depicted as a fraying empire of obesity, ignorance, debt, gridlock, stagnation, and mindless war. Sure, the iPad is cool, but it is evidence of what America was, not what it will be again. The stories are not angry, accusatory, or even ideological. It's worse: they are condescendingly elegiac ... America is no longer admired, imitated, or feared. We remain -- for now -- a safe haven for dollars (of which there are too many in the world). But we increasingly are seen less as a model or as an empire than as a cautionary tale of national neglect and decline. 
Israel might attack Iranian nuclear sites within a year, if Iran stays the current course and the U.S. administration doesn't succeed in persuading Israel's leadership that U.S. President Barack Obama is ready to stop Iran by force if necessary, so argues Jeffrey Goldberg in Atlantic magazine's September cover story ... Based on dozens of interviews the Atlantic correspondent conducted in recent months with Israeli, American and Arab officials, Goldberg came to the conclusion that the likelihood of an Israeli strike has crossed the 50 percent mark. And Israel might not even ask for the famous "green light" from the U.S. - or even give couple of false pre-attack alerts, so that Washington won't try to stop the unilateral operation. 
... Based on my conversations with Israeli decision-makers, this period of forbearance, in which Netanyahu waits to see if the West's nonmilitary methods can stop Iran, will come to an end this December ... In my conversations with former Israeli air-force generals and strategists, the prevalent tone was cautious. Many people I interviewed were ready, on condition of anonymity, to say why an attack on Iran's nuclear sites would be difficult for Israel. And some Israeli generals, like their American colleagues, questioned the very idea of an attack ... Based on months of interviews, I have come to believe that the administration knows it is a near-certainty that Israel will act against Iran soon if nothing or no one else stops the nuclear program ... 
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The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum says the refusal of Romania's central bank to withdraw a coin bearing the image of a prime minister who stripped Jews of their citizenship before World War II is "insensitive" to the memory of Holocaust victims. The Anti-Defamation League also condemned the decision and urged President Traian Basescu Friday to ensure that information about the anti-Semitic actions of Miron Cristea is included with each coin. The museum in Washington, D.C., said Cristea's tenure as Romania's premier from 1938 to 1939 "marked the opening of a systematic campaign of anti-Semitic persecution by successive Romania governments ..." 
... It is easy to blame Obama, as though he alone had the power to crack down on Israel's political elite. It is easy, too, to blame the American Israel Public Affairs Committee for its lobbying against critical US politicians. Just as important is the pressure that pro-Israel campaigners put on the mainstream US media. They warn people off the very word Zionist as though only antisemites use it and demand Israel be treated as a special country whose politics deserve more sympathy than others. In fact US publishers, editors, and reporters carry the biggest responsibility for the rotten state of US policy in the Middle East. The pro-Israel lobbies are powerful and Obama weak mainly because Americans rarely get an alternative view. 
Rail companies will be forced to come clean on their role in transporting Nazi victims during the Holocaust when they bid for a multi-billion-pound contract to operate a new bullet train in California. A Democratic politician in the US state is pushing to make it a requirement that any involvement in taking people to work, concentration, prisoner of war, or extermination camps between January 1942 and December 1944 must be disclosed. The proposal is specifically aimed at SNCF, the French national railway operator, which is expected to apply for a contract to run the new $45 billion high speed link between Los Angeles and San Francisco. 
Being lavished with affection by your mum as a young child makes you better able to cope with the stresses and strains of adult life, say researchers. Hugs, kisses and expressive declarations of love appear to rub off and foster emotional resilience. The results are from nearly 500 people, from the US state of Rhode Island, who were studied as children and adults. A secure mother-child bond may be key, the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health reports. But experts say it is important to know when to stop. Over-mothering can be intrusive and embarrassing, especially as children grow older. 
Time is running out for Israel. And the Israeli government knows it. The Jewish Diaspora, especially the young, has a waning emotional and ideological investment in Israel. The demographic boom means that Palestinians in Israel and the occupied territories will soon outnumber Jews. And Israel's increasing status as a pariah nation means that informal and eventually formal state sanctions against the country are probably inevitable. Desperate Israeli politicians, watching opposition to their apartheid state mount, have proposed a perverted form of what they term "the one-state solution." It is the latest tool to thwart a Palestinian state and allow Israel to retain its huge settlement complexes and land seizures in East Jerusalem and the West Bank. 
Police have launched an investigation to see if remarks by Bela Biszku, who had a role in the retributions following Hungary's anti-Soviet 1956 revolution, were in breach of the law, Magyar Nemzet daily reported on Thursday. Biszku, a former interior minister, told public television channel Duna TV in an August 4 interview that the retributions, which included the execution of former prime minister Imre Nagy, among others, had been lawful and that the events of 1956 had not been a revolution. Gyorgy Szilagyi, an MP for the radical nationalist Jobbik party, has asked for an investigation against Biszku on grounds of a new law forbidding the denial of communist crimes. 
... Now comes the India-born Madhusree Mukerjee with a savage indictment of Churchill's policies towards her homeland - then part of the British Empire - that likens his conduct to that of the genocidal barbarism of the Nazis. Drawing heavily on British Foreign Office documents, she asserts that his conduct, directly or indirectly, led to the deaths of three million Indians during the war, chiefly through starvation. She points out a cruel irony: While Britain and its Allies fought to "free" European nations from "captivity," Churchill and other British leaders strongly opposed the nascent Indian independence movement, imprisoning such leaders as Mahatma Gandhi. The horrific story that Ms. Mukerjee relates [in her new book, Churchill's Secret War] has been largely ignored in the vast volume of Churchillania produced in the last half-century. 
The world leadership qualities of the United States, once so prevalent, are fading faster than the polar ice caps. We once set the standard for industrial might, for the advanced state of our physical infrastructure, and for the quality of our citizens' lives. All are experiencing significant decline. The latest dismal news on the leadership front comes from the College Board, which tells us that the U.S., once the world's leader in the percentage of young people with college degrees, has fallen to 12th among 36 developed nations ... We've increasingly turned our backs on the very idea of hard-won excellence while flinging open the doors to decadence and decline. No wonder Lady Gaga and Snooki from "Jersey Shore" are cultural heroes. 
A new poll shows that the percentage of the Arab world that thinks a nuclear-armed Iran would be good for the Middle East has doubled since last year and now makes up the majority. The 2010 Arab Public Opinion Poll found that 57 percent of respondents not only believe that Iran's nuclear program aims to build a bomb but also view that goal positively -- nearly double the 29 percent who thought so in 2009. The percentage of those who view an Iranian nuclear bomb negatively fell by more than half, from 46 percent to 21 percent. The survey, conducted by University of Maryland professor Shibley Telhami in conjunction with the polling firm Zogby International, also found rapidly diminishing support among Arabs for President Obama ... 
.... When Israel announced a major new Jews-only building project of 1600 homes in occupied East Jerusalem, it was not only "spitting in the face" of visiting Vice President Biden, it was demonstrating its power to humiliate America and Americans. Netanyahu was sending a message to world: Israel backed by its billionaire-financed Presidents of the 51 Major American Jewish Organizations, leads the US by the nose ... The fundamental issue is that the ZPC [Zionist Power Configuration] in the United States is turning our country and its people into defenders of Israel's sordid crimes, casting the American people as accomplices to ethnic cleansing and degrading our moral sensibilities before the whole world. 
The Warsaw uprising, popularized in the post-communist era, is again a subject of controversy. / ... While the communists denounced the uprising, the memory of the doomed battle was kept alive by Polish exiles in the west. After the end of communism in 1989, the uprising became a central part of democratic Poland's identity. Lech Kaczynski became Poland's president in 2005 in large part because of his success in building a museum to the uprising -- arguably the most innovative and most modern museum in the country. The uprising has also been embraced in modern pop culture. 
Leon Trotsky has always had a certain appeal for intellectuals that the other Bolshevik leaders lacked. ...The fact is that Trotsky used his talents to take power in order to impose his willful dream - the abolition of the market, private property, and the bourgeoisie. His actions brought untold misery and death to his country. ... He was a champion of thought-control, prison camps, and the firing squad for his opponents, and of forced labor for ordinary, non-brilliant working people. He openly defended chattel slavery - which, even in our century, must surely put him into a quite select company. 
From January's war in Gaza to Holocaust denial, the world's largest collaborative encyclopedia has become a battlefield over history ... About 200 Israelis are active Wikipedians -- people who contribute and edit entries related to Israel several times a week. Israel has the world's highest per capita amount of Wikipedia users. Israelis use Wikipedia in English in large numbers, in addition to other languages like Russian and French. 
News that Russia will load nuclear fuel rods into an Iranian reactor has touched off a countdown to a point of no return, a deadline by which Israel would have to launch an attack on Iran's Bushehr reactor before it becomes effectively "immune" to any assault, says former Bush administration U.N. Ambassador John R. Bolton. Once the fuel rods are loaded, Bolton told Fox News on Friday afternoon, "it makes it essentially immune from attack by Israel. Because once the rods are in the reactor an attack on the reactor risks spreading radiation in the air, and perhaps into the water of the Persian Gulf." ... The developments mean Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu soon may face a stark choice: Attack the Bushehr reactor in the next eight days, or allow it to become operational despite the certainty it would greatly enhance Iran's ability to create nuclear weapons. 
... There is no way for the US to win a non-nuclear war with Iran. The US could "win" by dropping hundreds of nuclear weapons on Iran's military bases, nuclear facilities and industrial centres (cities) and killing five to ten million people. But short of that, nothing works. On this we have the word of Richard Clarke, counter-terrorism adviser in the White House under three administrations ... "After a long debate, the highest levels of the military could not forecast a way in which things would end favourably for the US," he said. The Pentagon's planners have war-gamed an attack on Iran and they just can't make it come out as a US victory ... The end would be an embarrassing retreat by the US and the definitive establishment of Iran as the dominant power of the Gulf region. 
The US Constitution is widely revered but little understood, says historian Mark Weber in this hour-long interview. Few Americans realize that the government laid out in the original Constitution was remarkably un-democratic. Many familiar federal government programs are, strictly speaking, not constitutional. What's decisive in any society is not a country's constitution, says Weber, but rather the character, basic values, and customs of its people. 
... Faced with the steepest and longest decline in tax collections on record, state, county and city governments have resorted to major life-changing cuts in core services like education, transportation and public safety that, not too long ago, would have been unthinkable. And services in many areas could get worse before they get better. The length of the downturn means that many places have used up all their budget gimmicks, cut services, raised taxes, spent their stimulus money -- and remained in the hold. Even with Congress set to approve extra stimulus aid, some analysts say states are still facing huge shortfalls. 
... The biggest political change in my lifetime is that Americans no longer assume that their children will have it better than they did. This is a huge break with the past, with assumptions and traditions that shaped us ... When the adults of a great nation feel long-term pessimism, it only makes matters worse when those in authority take actions that reveal their detachment from the concerns -- even from the essential nature -- of their fellow citizens. And it makes those citizens feel powerless. Inner pessimism and powerlessness: That is a dangerous combination. 
... Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., once said in an interview that the "nastiest act by this country, after human slavery, was the bombing of Nagasaki." But Nagasaki was "forgotten" from the very start, thanks to a blatant act of press censorship. One of the great mysteries of the Nuclear Age was solved just five years ago: What was in the censored, and then lost to the ages, newspaper articles filed by the first reporter to reach Nagasaki following the atomic attack on that city on Aug. 9, 1945. The reporter was George Weller, the distinguished correspondent for the now-defunct Chicago Daily News. His startling dispatches from Nagasaki, which could have affected public opinion on the future of the bomb, never emerged from General Douglas MacArthur's censorship office in Tokyo. 
Those Germans who were expelled from Eastern Europe following World War II have long sought recognition of their plight. With a museum in sight, however, some associated with the project have been accused of historical revisionism. Germany, says one deputy board member, wasn't solely responsible for starting the war ... Opposition to the pair has been growing in both breadth and volume. Both have been accused of historical revisionism. And German opposition politicians have joined historians in calling for the two to be removed from their new positions. 
A year after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, 16-year-old Takashi Hoshizaki and his family were moved from their home in Southern California by the federal government to Heart Mountain Relocation Center, an internment camp in northwest Wyoming. For the next two years, the family of eight lived in two rooms in a barracks, Hoshizaki says ... Motivated by racial hysteria during World War II, the U.S. government ordered more than 100,000 Japanese and American citizens of Japanese ancestry to leave their homes and live in the camps. Nearly 11,000, including the Hoshizakis, were interned at Heart Mountain from 1942 to 1945. 
The number of Americans who are receiving food stamps rose to a record 40.8 million in May as the jobless rate hovered near a 27-year high, the government reported yesterday. Recipients of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program subsidies for food purchases jumped 19 percent from a year earlier and increased 0.9 percent from April, the US Department of Agriculture said in a statement on its website. Participation has set records for 18 straight months. 
We write to alert you to the likelihood that Israel will attack Iran as early as this month. This would likely lead to a wider war. Israel's leaders would calculate that once the battle is joined, it will be politically untenable for you to give anything less than unstinting support to Israel, no matter how the war started, and that U.S. troops and weaponry would flow freely. Wider war could eventually result in destruction of the state of Israel. This can be stopped, but only if you move quickly to pre-empt an Israeli attack by publicly condemning such a move before it happens ... Netanyahu believes he holds the high cards, largely because of the strong support he enjoys in our Congress and our strongly pro-Israel media. 
Now the world is anxiously following the so-called crisis over Iran ... Once again we are told lies so similar to those we heard in 2002 and 2003, and from the same people, that it's amazing that anyone takes them seriously. ... No issue is of greater urgency than breaking the Jewish-Zionist grip on American political, social and cultural life. As long as that power remains entrenched, there will be no end to the systematic Jewish-Zionist distortion of history and current affairs, the Jewish-Zionist domination of the US political system, Zionist oppression of Palestinians, the bloody conflict between Jews and non-Jews in the Middle East, and the Israeli threat to peace. 
Since the end of World War II, authoritative claims about the character and scope of killings at the Auschwitz concentration camp have changed drastically. One particularly striking change concerns the various "official" estimates of the number of victims -- a number that since 1945 has been steadily declining ... Aumeier's testimony, which Meyer accepts as valid, suggests that Jews were killed at Auschwitz not as part of an comprehensive extermination program systematically to kill all European Jews, but rather as an exceptional measure to curb the horrific epidemics that were ravaging the Auschwitz I and Birkenau camps ... Compared to the recently "authoritative" figure of approximately one million Auschwitz deaths, Meyer has reduced the number of Jewish victims there by at least 450,000. 
... Christian anti-Semitism, Muslim anti-Semitism, Christian Islamophobia, Muslim persecution of Christians - all of these are acceptable topics of debate. But not Jewish hostility to Christianity ... Until now I've never written a word about Jewish prejudice against Christians, even though I've seen it at close hand, at a series of Jewish-run conferences I attended in America in the 1990s at which evangelical Christian believers were stereotyped as fanatics who needed only the right demagogue to turn them into murderous anti-Semites. 
... What on earth is the EU doing when it cosies up to the Israelis? ... "Israel has developed such strong political and economic ties to the EU over the past decade that it has become a member state of the union in all but name." ... Pardon me? Did we know this? Did we vote for this? Who allowed this to happen?
... I want it to be possible to say that in 2010, in France, a father of eight children, aged from 1 to 17, languishes in prison simply for having publicly expressed revisionist arguments. I want it known that in France, in 2010, a father of eight whose only weapon is a pen languishes in prison. ... Whatever the hardships, I will never give in. The cops, judges and prisons will make no difference. The seed has been sown; it will germinate and, some day, it will grow. 
US President Barack Obama gave an interview to Channel 2 Wednesday night in which he said his administration had provided Israel with more aid than any other before it ... In an interview aimed at assuring Israelis of the US's support, Obama ventured a guess as to why they were mistrustful of him. "Some of it may just be the fact that my middle name is Hussein, and that creates suspicion," he said. "Ironically, I've got a Chief of Staff named Rahm Israel Emmanuel. My top political advisor is somebody who is a descendent of Holocaust survivors. My closeness to the Jewish American community was probably what propelled me to the US Senate." 
From Hitler's speech of April 28, 1939. "... Palestine at present is occupied not by German troops but by the English; and the country is undergoing restriction of its freedom by the most brutal resort to force, is being robbed of its independence, and is suffering the cruelest mistreatment for the benefit of Jewish interlopers ... England is attempting to suppress a people that loves its freedom and is merely defending it ... England is not defending herself against a threatened Arab attack, but as an uninvited interloper, is endeavoring to establish her power in a foreign territory that does not belong to her." Original speech, with English subtitles. Runtime: 1:37 mins. 
... The document is in his possession, and now the history of World War II may have to be rewritten: It was Stalin's fault. The document, from October 1939, consists of three pages in English that purportedly reflect a dialogue in Moscow between a delegation from Czechoslovakia and a senior Soviet Foreign Ministry official. The Czechs tried to find out why the U.S.S.R. had signed the non-aggression treaty with Nazi Germany, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939. A few days later the Germans invaded Poland, and World War II began. The Soviet official, Alexandrov by name, explained to the Czech delegation that had the Soviet Union signed an agreement with the West, Hitler would not have dared to launch a war, and without that war there would have been no possibility of imposing communism in Europe. He also listed the benefits to the Soviet Union of the pact with Nazi Germany, and of the war. 
The war in Afghanistan is nearly nine years old -- the longest in American history. After the U.S. quickly toppled the Taliban regime in October 2001, the Taliban, by all accounts, came back stronger and harsher enough to control now at least 30 percent of the country. During this time, U.S. casualties, armaments and expenditures are at record levels. America's overseas wars have different outcomes when they have no constitutional authority, no war tax, no draft, no regular on the ground press coverage, no Congressional oversight, no spending accountability and, importantly, no affirmative consent of the governed who are, apart from the military families, hardly noticing. 
... Trying to make Pakistan into a satellite state will result in that enormously important, nuclear-armed nation of 170 million one day exploding with anti-American hatred, as was the case in Iran in 1979. The US-led war in Afghanistan is putting the two nations on a collision course. Over 90% of Pakistanis already say that their nation's primary enemy is the United States, followed by India. Here in Washington, the US Congress just ignored the WikiLeaks scandal and voted yet more billions to fuel the Afghanistan War. Politicians are petrified to oppose this nine-year war lest they be accused of being anti-patriotic, the kiss of death in hyper-patriotic America where flag-wavers root for foreign wars so long as their kids don't have to serve and they don't have to pay taxes to finance them. 
A month after the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, Joseph P. Kennedy, the American ambassador in London and father of a future president, expressed grave doubts about "this war for idealism" against Hitler. Joseph P. Kennedy, then an ambassador, criticized the war and Thomas E. Dewey in a 1939 letter to Roosevelt's personal secretary. "I can't see any use in everybody in Europe going busted and having communism run riot," Kennedy wrote to Marguerite LeHand, President Franklin D. Roosevelt's personal secretary ... Kennedy's letter is one of nine documents released Wednesday by the National Archives in Washington, part of a coming cache of letters, drafts and notes related to Roosevelt's presidency ... 
Large annual salaries of top nine officers of the "Southern Poverty Law Center," as shown on its most recent IRS 990 form. Headed by president and CEO Richard Cohen, these nine SPLC staff members receive six-digit annual salaries, totaling $1,835,541, to fight "Hate," as they define it. None of the leading figures of this prominent "civil rights" outfit is African-American. 
... He [Haim Saban] remains keenly interested in the world of business, but he is most proud of his role as political power broker. His greatest concern, he says, is to protect Israel, by strengthening the United States-Israel relationship. At a conference last fall in Israel, Saban described his formula. His "three ways to be influential in American politics," he said, were: make donations to political parties, establish think tanks, and control media outlets. In 2002, he contributed seven million dollars toward the cost of a new building for the Democratic National Committee -- one of the largest known donations ever made to an American political party. 
... What is important to understand about this campaign is that the aim of Gerecht and of the right-wing government of Benjamin Netanyahu is to support an attack by Israel so that the United States can be drawn into a direct, full-scale war with Iran. That has long been the Israeli strategy for Iran, because Israel cannot fight a war with Iran without full U.S. involvement. Israel needs to know that the United States will finish the war that Israel wants to start. Gerecht openly expresses the hope that any Iranian response to the Israeli attack would trigger full-scale U.S. war against Iran. 
In a secret wartime memorandum, Winston Churchill told his advisers that he wanted to "drench" Germany with poison gas. Churchill's July 1944 memo to his chief of staff Gen. Hastings Ismay was reproduced in the August-September 1985 issue of American Heritage magazine ... Churchill's directive bluntly stated: "I want a cold-blooded calculation made as to how it would pay to use poison gas ... One really must not be bound within silly conventions of the mind whether they be those that ruled in the last war or those in reverse which rule in this." 
Americans know that something fundamental is amiss. They sense -- rightly -- that they are being misled no matter which political party does the leading. A long misinformed public lacks the tools to grasp how they are being deceived ...This much is certain: a Democrat as president offers no real alternative to a Republican on those issues affecting U.S. policy in the Middle East. Today's corruption predates the duplicity in 1948 that induced Harry Truman to extend recognition to this extremist enclave as a legitimate nation state. Our troubles date from then. That fateful decision must be revisited in light of what can now be proven about the "how" of this ongoing duplicity -- unless Americans want to continue to be played for the fool. 
... In fact Republican and Democratic office holders and their retinues show a similar presumption to dominate and fewer differences in tastes, habits, opinions, and sources of income among one another than between both and the rest of the country. They think, look, and act as a class ... Today's ruling class, from Boston to San Diego, was formed by an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance, as well as tastes and habits. These amount to a social canon of judgments about good and evil, complete with secular sacred history, sins (against minorities and the environment), and saints. Using the right words and avoiding the wrong ones when referring to such matters -- speaking the "in" language -- serves as a badge of identity. 
... We need to begin by recognizing that our relationship with Israel has never been driven by strategic reasoning. It began with President Truman overruling his strategic and military advisers in deference to personal sentiment and political expediency. We had an arms embargo on Israel until Lyndon Johnson dropped it in 1964 in explicit return for Jewish financial support for his campaign against Barry Goldwater ... It's remarkable that something as fatuous as the notion of Israel as a strategic asset could have become the unchallengeable conventional wisdom in the United States. Perhaps it's just that as someone once said: "people ... will more easily fall victim to a big lie than a small one." 
... Bruce Cumings's "Korean War," a powerful revisionist history of America's intervention in Korea. Beneath its bland title, Mr. Cumings's book is a squirm-inducing assault on America's moral behavior during the Korean War, a conflict that he says is misremembered when it is remembered at all. It's a book that puts the reflexive anti-Americanism of North Korea's leaders into sympathetic historical context ... Mr. Cumings likens the indiscriminate American bombing of North Korea to genocide. He writes that American soldiers took part in, or observed, civilian atrocities not dissimilar to those at My Lai. 
Strikingly well-preserved mummies, tall in stature and fair in complexion, have lain in the parched Tarim Basin of western China for 3,800 years. Wearing Western-influenced textiles and possessing surprising technologies and customs, the identity of these extraordinary people is a mystery! This historic exhibition of 150 objects drawn from the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region Museum and the Xinjiang Institute of Archaeology in Urumqi, China reveals surprising details about the people who lived along the ancient Silk Road. For the first time ever, two of the more than 100 Caucasian mummies found and preserved in the western China's inhospitable desert sands are being presented in the United States. 
... Comes now a more scientific study from Princeton sociologists Thomas Espenshade and Alexandria Radford to confirm that a deep bias against the white conservative and Christian young of America is pervasive at America's elite colleges and Ivy League schools ... The discrimination against white and Asian applicants, because of the color of their skin and where their ancestors came from, is astonishing ... "To have the same chance of gaining admission as a black student with a SAT score of 1100, a Hispanic student otherwise equally matched in background characteristics would have to have 1230, a white student a 1410 and an Asian student a 1550." 
... If any overarching conclusion emerges from the Afghan and Iraq Wars (and from their Israeli equivalents), it's this: victory is a chimera. Counting on today's enemy to yield in the face of superior force makes about as much sense as buying lottery tickets to pay the mortgage: you better be really lucky. Meanwhile, as the U.S. economy went into a tailspin, Americans contemplated their equivalent of Israel's "demographic bomb" -- a "fiscal bomb." Ingrained habits of profligacy, both individual and collective, held out the prospect of long-term stagnation: no growth, no jobs, no fun. Out-of-control spending on endless wars exacerbated that threat. 
A rabbi from one of the most violent settlements in the West Bank was questioned on suspicion of incitement last week as Israeli police stepped up their investigation into a book in which he sanctions the killing of non-Jews, including children and babies. Rabbi Yitzhak Shapira is one of the leading ideologues of the most extreme wing of the religious settler movement. He is known to be a champion of the "price-tag" policy of reprisal attacks on Palestinians, including punishing them for attempts by officials to enforce Israeli law against the settlements. So far the policy has chiefly involved violent harassment of Palestinians, with settlers inflicting beatings, attacking homes, throwing stones, burning fields, killing livestock and poisoning wells. 
The journey of the (Anti-)Defamation League from beacon of tolerance to slightly potty geyser of toxic foolishness continues apace. Two years ago, Abe Foxman -- the ADL's very much over the hill president -- accused me of anti-semitism for pointing out the Israel-first tendencies of more than a few neoconservatives, especially when it came to plumping for war with Iran (if you don't believe me, read anything -- anything -- that the goofy harridan Jennifer Rubin writes about Israel or President Obama over at the Commentary blog). Then, earlier this year, Foxman accused David Petraeus of being anti-Israel for making the indisputable point the the Israeli-Palestinian conflict doesn't make life any easier for US troops fighting in the region. 
In a summer of suffering, America's military death toll in Afghanistan is rising, with back to back record months for US losses in the grinding conflict. All signs point to more bloodshed in the months ahead, straining the already shaky international support for the war ... The Dutch are due to remove the last of their 1,600 member force at the end of this month, and Canada plans to remove its 2,700 troops next year. 
The war in Afghanistan will consume more money this year alone than we spent on the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, the Civil War and the Spanish-American War -- combined. A recent report from the Congressional Research Service finds that the war on terror, including Afghanistan and Iraq, has been, by far, the costliest war in American history aside from World War II. It adjusted costs of all previous wars for inflation ... It was reflexive for liberals to rail at President George W. Bush for jingoism. But it is President Obama who is now requesting 6.1 percent more in military spending than the peak of military spending under Mr. Bush. And it is Mr. Obama who has tripled the number of American troops in Afghanistan since he took office. 
Israel's president has accused the English of being anti-semitic and claimed that MPs pander to Muslim voters. Shimon Peres said England was "deeply pro-Arab ... and anti-Israeli", adding: "They always worked against us." He added: "There is in England a saying that an anti-Semite is someone who hates the Jews more than is necessary." His remarks, made in an interview on a Jewish website, provoked anger from senior MPs and Jewish leaders who said the 87-year-old president had "got it wrong". But other groups backed the former Israeli prime minister and said the number of anti-semitic incidents had risen dramatically in the UK in recent years. 
... Asked why the opposition of the families was so pivotal in the decision, Mr. Foxman, a Holocaust survivor, said they were entitled to their emotions. "Survivors of the Holocaust are entitled to feelings that are irrational," he said. ... The statement is curious at a number of levels. First, Foxman is as noted a Holocaust survivor, born in 1940 in Poland, saved by his Catholic nanny, reunited with his parents after the war. So he is rationalizing his own bigotry? And by this logic are Palestinian victims of the Nakba entitled to be anti-Semites? 
A court in Weinheim, Germany, has found Günter Deckert guilty of violating the country's law against "popular incitement" by helping to translate, prepare and distribute a German-language edition of a "Holocaust denial" book, Auschwitz: The First Gassing. Rumors and Reality, by Italian revisionist writer Carlo Mattogno. Deckert was given a suspended sentence of four months in prison. 
The horrid attacks of 9/11 led to the cry: Why do they hate us?Most Americans seemed to believe that it was because we are such nice people. But the Times Square bomber reminds us that terrorism is mostly a response to U.S. government policies. After 9/11 President George W. Bush reassured Americans: we were attacked because we are beautiful people, spreading freedom around the world. But often the actions of our government are seen by others as less than beautiful ... Washington no longer can expect to invade, bomb, and intervene in other nations without consequence. Policymakers should consider all the costs, including terrorism, before they casually thrust the U.S. into foreign controversies and conflicts. 
There you go, Oliver Stone apologized for suggesting that the Jewish lobby controls Washington's foreign policy and that Hitler's actions should be put into context. In fact, Stone's apology confirms Stone's argument. We are subject to constant assault by Jewish and Israeli gatekeepers who insist on controlling the political and historical discourse and defy any possible criticism of Jewish national affairs. 
Austrians joyfully welcome the union of their country with the German Reich. From "UFA Ton-Woche" German newsreel, 1938. Runtime: 4:33 mins. 
... Irving went on us describe several sources of secret financial support enjoyed by Churchill. In addition to money supplied by the Czech government, Churchill was financed during the "wilderness years" between 1930 and 1939 by a slush fund emanating from a secret pressure group known as the Focus ... Irving then revealed further details of Churchill's financing by the Czechs, as well as the facts of Churchill's financial rescue by a wealthy banker of Austro-Jewish origins, Sir Henry Strakosch ... Irving then gave a detailed account of the cynical maneuverings of Churchill to escalate the aerial campaign against Germany's civilian population ... 
About two weeks ago, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu signed regulations restricting access to [Israel] government archives ... The information that remains classified deals, among other things, with the expulsions and massacres of Arabs in the War of Independence, Mossad operations in foreign countries ... The state archivist warned that some of the classified materials "has implications over [Israel's] adherence to international law." His words suggest that the state will be seen as an outlaw if the past deeds of the security and intelligence services are made public. 
... I was in politics for fifteen years, and I think you should start with the assumption: never trust a politician ... When people finally learn the truth, they turn against those who have been lying to them. And I think that if the movement of which you people are the cutting edge can retain dispassion in the face of outrages, setbacks and humiliations, the truth can ultimately prevail. You are doing something worse than criticizing the government of the United States; you're threatening the security of the state of Israel. And the Jewish community is dedicated to preserve that state, and to destroy those who speak against it. Good luck! 
... Justice is harsher in America than in any other rich country. Between 2.3 million and 2.4 million Americans are behind bars, roughly one in every 100 adults. If those on parole or probation are included, one adult in 31 is under "correctional" supervision. As a proportion of its total population, America incarcerates five times more people than Britain, nine times more than Germany and 12 times more than Japan. Overcrowding is the norm. Federal prisons house 60% more inmates than they were designed for. State lock-ups are only slightly less stuffed. The system has three big flaws, say criminologists. 
... The neocons had demonstrated to their satisfaction what current Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu had told a West Bank settler woman in 2001 after she asked if he was afraid of world opinion: "I know what America is. America is something that can easily be moved. Moved to the right direction." ... And the fact that the Afghan War is now the longest in our history, with no end in sight as Obama, Joe Biden and the generals all suggest the drawdown next year might not be feasible, should make us both depressed and angry. 
... Where are all those military bases outside the military zones like Iraq and Afghanistan, and what purpose do they serve? "More than half a century after World War II and the Korean War," wrote Vines, "we still have 268 bases in Germany, 124 in Japan, and 87 in South Korea." Are the bases in Germany and Japan there to deter any present or future leaders in those countries from a repeat performance of the events that led to World War II or to the Korean War? .. What is America doing in Iraq and Afghanistan? It's called "nation building". What business is it of America to be building other's nations? It's really none of their business. It's nothing more than the arrogance of power. 
It was 2017. Clans were governing America. The first clans organized around local police forces. The conservatives' war on crime during the late 20th century and the Bush/Obama war on terror during the first decade of the 21st century had resulted in the police becoming militarized and unaccountable. As society broke down, the police became warlords. The state police broke apart, and the officers were subsumed into the local forces of their communities. 
In Riga, the capital of Latvia, people welcome German troops as liberators from Soviet oppression, July 1, 1941. Video clip with Latvian narration. Runtime: 38 secs. 
House of Representatives resolution 1553, introduced by Congressional Republicans, and currently working its way through the system will endorse an Israeli attack on Iran, which would be going to war by proxy as the US would almost immediately be drawn into the conflict when Tehran retaliates. The resolution provides explicit US backing for Israel to bomb Iran, stating that Congress supports Israel's use of "all means necessary...including the use of military force." The resolution is non-binding, but it is dazzling in its disregard for the possible negative consequences that would ensue for the hundreds of thousands of US military and diplomatic personnel currently serving in the Near East region. 
A furious Haim Saban has mounted a campaign to get Showtime to cancel its planned airing of Oliver Stone's ten-part series, "A Secret History of America," in the wake of anti-Jewish remarks by the outspoken director ... The billionaire and outspoken media mogul told TheWrap he had contacted CBS chief Leslie Moonves to urge him to pull the series. He said that WME chairman Ari Emanuel had also called CBS privately to urge the series be pulled ... Saban, a major stakeholder in Univision and chairman of Saban Capital Group, said he is spreading the word among his Hollywood friends to avoid working with Stone. 
Steve Wynn, the well-known casino resort owner and real-estate developer, gives a scathing critique of America's political leadership. He speaks of a "confused and foolish government" in Washington, and a "frightening" US business climate. Recent US policies, he says, are "cuckoo," "phony," and "shocking." Across America, he says, there's a "sense of fear" that "the politicians are ruining us." Runtime: 4:40 mins. 
... We wage war because we think we're good at it -- and because, at a gut level, we've come to believe that American wars can bring good to others (hence our feel-good names for them, like Operations Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom). Most Americans are not only convinced we have the best troops, the best training, and the most advanced weapons, but also the purest motives. Unlike the bad guys and the barbarians out there in the global marketplace of death, our warriors and warfighters are seen as gift-givers and freedom-bringers, not as death-dealers and resource-exploiters. Our illusions about the military we "support" serve as catalyst for, and apology for, the persistent war-making we condone. 
The Anti-Defamation League is urging Estonia officials to condemn a march there honoring a division of the Nazi SS. The march in Vaivara, the home of the largest of the 22 concentration and labor camps established in Estonia by the Nazis during World War II, is scheduled for July 31 to honor an Estonian division of the Nazi SS that fought in a 1944 battle against Soviet troops. 
... Americans can get no help out of Washington, but the US ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice, declared that Washington's commitment to Israel's security is "not negotiable." Washington's commitment to California and to the security of the rest of us is negotiable. War spending has run up the budget deficit, and the deficit precludes any help for Americans. ... On July 12, Niall Ferguson, an historian of empire, warned that the American empire could collapse suddenly from weakness brought on by its massive debts and that such a collapse could be closer than we think. Deaf, dumb, and blind, Washington policymakers prattle on about "thirty more years of war." 
... Contrary to his early rhetoric, Obama is proving to be just like most of his predecessors, and for essentially the same reason. Last week was a tactical win for Bibi [Israeli prime minister Netanyahu] but yet another strategic misstep, because, as his predecessor Ehud Olmert and current Defense Minister Ehud Barak have both acknowledged, only a viable two-state solution can prevent Israel from becoming a full-fledged apartheid state. ... The reason Obama couldn't do the right thing was the power of the lobby, and that includes the endless machinations of folks like Kristol and Bauer. They are right to think that Israel is in deep trouble and that it's likely to get worse. What they don't get is that it is to a large extent their fault. 
Ethnic minorities are set to make up a fifth of the UK's population in 40 years, researchers at the University of Leeds have predicted. They say the proportion of black, Asian and other ethnic minorities will rise from 8% of the population, as recorded in the 2001 census, to 20% by 2051 ... In 2051, 79% of British people will be classed as white, compared with 92% now, the research suggests. 
... In 2011, said the Financial Times, China will surpass the United States as first manufacturing power, a title America has held since surpassing Great Britain around 1890. Each year, China passes a new milestone ... For decades, America's leaders have followed the Wall Street Journal ideology. We put a mythical world economy before our own economy. We put "global prosperity" before national interest. We forced our workers to compete, in their own country, against the products of foreign laborers earning a tenth of their pay. And we let in tens of millions of semi-skilled and unskilled immigrants, legal and illegal, to take the jobs of our countrymen. 
... Each big inflation -- whether the early 1920s in Germany, or the Korean and Vietnam wars in the US -- starts with a passive expansion of the quantity money. This sits inert for a surprisingly long time. Asset prices may go up, but latent price inflation is disguised. The effect is much like lighter fuel on a camp fire before the match is struck. People's willingness to hold money can change suddenly for a "psychological and spontaneous reason." causing a spike in the velocity of money. It can occur at lightning speed, over a few weeks. The shift invariably catches economists by surprise. They wait too long to drain the excess money. 
Jewish control of the media is preventing an open discussion of the Holocaust, prominent Hollywood director Oliver Stone told the Sunday Times, adding that the U.S. Jewish lobby was controlling Washington's foreign policy for years. In the Sunday interview, Stone reportedly said U.S. public opinion was focused on the Holocaust as a result of the "Jewish domination of the media," adding that an upcoming film of him aims to put Adolf Hitler and Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin "in context." "There's a major lobby in the United States," Stone said, adding that "they are hard workers. They stay on top of every comment, the most powerful lobby in Washington." 
... It is hardly surprising that the same people who flattened Hamburg, Pforzheim, Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki continued to do the same in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq. Similarly, the same lobbies that pushed Britain and America to a deadly confrontation with the Muslim world are now pushing us to flatten Iran. To save the world and to bring peace about, we must learn our past and we must be free to so. Revisionism is the means towards a better future. 
New Israeli citizens may soon be required to swear an oath of loyalty to a "Jewish and democratic" state, a step that has drawn harsh criticism from human rights groups. Israel's Cabinet, which meets Monday, is expected to approve this and extend a raft of existing measures that make it harder for Palestinians to achieve citizenship. The wording of the oath, which would apply to new applicants for citizenship, was slammed by Arab advocacy groups, who accused Israel of "racist" policies that attempt to link citizenship to ideology. "It's another step in the direction of getting the Arabs out of Israel," said Uri Avnery, a former MP and founder of the Israeli Gush Shalom peace movement. "Parliament has become a lynching mob." 
The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work ... Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States. An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances. 
A US federal watchdog has criticised the US military for failing to account properly for billions of dollars it received to help rebuild Iraq. The Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction says the US Department of Defence is unable to account properly for 96 percent o the money. Out of just over $9 billion, $8.7 billion is unaccounted for, the inspector says. The US military said the funds were not necessarily missing, but that spending records might have been archived. In a response attached to the report, it said attempting to account for the money might require "significant archival retrieval efforts" 
A huge cache of secret US military files today provides a devastating portrait of the failing war in Afghanistan, revealing how coalition forces have killed hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents, Taliban attacks have soared and Nato commanders fear neighbouring Pakistan and Iran are fuelling the insurgency. The disclosures come from more than 90,000 records of incidents and intelligence reports about the conflict obtained by the whistleblowers' website Wikileaks in one of the biggest leaks in US military history. 
A senior judge was under investigation yesterday after being accused of making anti-Semitic remarks in court that may have swayed his jury into acquitting a group of protesters. Judge George Bathurst-Norman was said by critics to have persuaded a jury to clear a group of campaigners who smashed up a factory making parts for Israeli warplanes. Summing up in the criminal damage trial, he compared Israel to the Nazi regime and accused the country of ignoring international law. The judge added that 'there may be much to be admired' about the chief protester, and that 'in the last war he would probably have received a George Medal'. 
... Considering the high cost in blood, money and lost leadership and prestige since our victory in the Cold War, the democracy crusade scarcely seems worth it. For while we have been bogged down in two wars, China has become the world's leading manufacturer, steelmaker, auto producer and exporter, and the second largest economy on earth. Nevertheless, we are ever admonished, we must not flag or fail in our pursuit of global democracy, for only when the world is democratic will our providential mission be accomplished. And only then can we be truly secure. 
Convicted Holocaust denier Gerd Honsik reiterated his claim in an Austrian court on Tuesday that there were no gas chambers in Germany during World War II. "There was not a single gas chamber anywhere in the area of Greater Germany, I stand by that," Honsik told a court in Vienna ... Honsik, 68, was in court because prosecutors have appealed a ruling earlier this year that his jail sentence be cut from five to four years. After the hearing Tuesday deteriorated into a shouting match between prosecutors, the judge and the defence, the appeal was adjourned until September 9. Honsik was found guilty in April 2009 of denying the Holocaust and the existence of gas chambers ... 
The American Jewish Congress has suspended its activities after running out of funds. The suspension of the venerable Jewish-American advocacy organization's activities, confirmed to JTA on Sunday by acting co-executive director Marc Stern, comes after months of rumors that the organization was on the verge of collapse after losing most of its endowment in the Bernard Madoff Ponzi scheme. As of Sunday afternoon there was no mention of the suspension on the AJCongress website. The Jerusalem Post had reported in April that the AJCongress lost as much as 90 percent of its approximately $24 million endowment in the Madoff scam. 
The installation of a memorial bust of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin in Bedford, Virginia, next to Western Allied leaders in World War II has ignited a firestorm of controversy and threatened to tear apart the small town 200 miles south of the nation's capital. Opponents of the bronze sculpture say it has no right to be placed in the National D-Day Memorial next to the busts of Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill because Stalin's murderous rule led to the deaths of at least 20 million people ... 
The credit scores of millions more Americans are sinking to new lows. Figures provided by FICO Inc. show that 25.5 percent of consumers -- nearly 43.4 million people -- now have a credit score of 599 or below, marking them as poor risks for lenders. It's unlikely they will be able to get credit cards, auto loans or mortgages under the tighter lending standards banks now use. More are likely to join their ranks. 
The contents of a secretly recorded video threaten to gravely embarrass not only Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister but also the US administration of Barack Obama. The film was shot, apparently without Mr Netanyahu's knowledge, nine years ago ... He tells the family that he deceived the US president of the time, Bill Clinton, into believing he was helping implement the Oslo accords, the US-sponsored peace process between Israel and the Palestinians, by making minor withdrawals from the West Bank while actually entrenching the occupation. He boasts that he thereby destroyed the Oslo process. He dismisses the US as "easily moved to the right direction" and calls high levels of popular American support for Israel "absurd." 
... To my knowledge, no one, either in politics or the media, pressed the case too hard, lest they discover that those who wanted to invade Iraq had, not America's interest, but Israel's interest in mind ... A great many people believe, myself included, that Israel wanted Saddam out of the way because, while he was not really a military threat to Israel, he was a political threat. He was someone, like Hizbollah, who stood in the way of Israeli hegemony over the entire Middle East ... Does anyone beside a few people in the United States see the danger to our country in being led around by the nose by the Israeli government? 
A former regional president of the far-right Party of Nationally Oriented Swiss has been fined just over 10,000 Swiss francs ($9,500) for claiming Anne Frank's diary was a fake. In June 2009 the 22-year-old ex-leader of the Basel branch of the extremist party had written an article called "The lies around Anne Frank", in which he branded the diary of the young Jewish girl a "historical lie." The young man has been fined for racial discrimination. 
... There is a pan-European consensus, fertilized by multiculturalism, that tolerance and peaceful coexistence require the restriction rather than the protection of freedom of speech. This has led to the mushrooming of hate-speech and so-called anti-discrimination laws that criminalize expressions characterized as "hateful" or merely "derogatory" toward members of religious, ethnic, national, or racial groups ... The ubiquitous European hate-speech laws represent a clear and present danger to freedom of expression in the Western world. Not only do they interfere with the basic right of the individual to speak his or her mind even if it causes offense, they are inherently arbitrary and prone to abuse. 
Jews played a highly disproportionate and probably decisive role in the infant Bolshevik regime, effectively dominating the Soviet government during its early years ... With the notable exception of Lenin, most of the leading Communists who took control of Russia in 1917-20 were Jews ... The US ambassador in Russia warned in a dispatch to Washington: "The Bolshevik leaders here, most of whom are Jews and 90 percent of whom are returned exiles, care little for Russia or any other country but are internationalists and they are trying to start a worldwide social revolution." 
The US trade deficit widened to its highest level in 18 months in May, driven by demand for imported cars, computers and clothing. The deficit increased by 4.8% to $42.3 billion -- the largest since November 2008, Commerce Department data showed. The 2.9% rise in imports outpaced the 2.4% climb in exports. 
The euro rocketed to a two-month high of $1.29 and sterling jumped two cents to almost $1.54 after The Fed confessed that the US economy may not recover for five or six years ... The Fed minutes amount to a policy thunderbolt, evidence of how quickly the recovery has lost steam. Just weeks ago the Fed was mapping out withdrawal of stimulus ... The signs of a deep and sudden slowdown in the US are becoming ever clearer as the "sugar rush" from the Obama fiscal stimulus wears off and the inventory boost fades. California, Illinois and other states are cutting spending, tightening US fiscal policy by 0.8 percent of GDP ... The US workforce has shrunk by one million over the past two months as discouraged jobless give up the hunt. 
Three groups of Israeli teens facing IDF [military] enlistment get expelled from various hotels in island of Ios after getting drunk, causing damage to property. Israel's consul in Athens says such cases cause great damage to country's image / Israel continues to lose popularity in overseas vacation resorts. Israeli Consul in Athens Eli Sneh informed the Foreign Ministry that several groups of young Israelis have been expelled from hotels in the Greek island of Ios over the past few weeks for getting drunk and behaving in an unruly manner. ... Sneh said that the hotels which expelled the teens on Sunday have informed they would not be hosting anymore Israeli youths. "These hooligans are causing serious damage to our image." 
... American involvement in war with Germany was preceded by a long series of steps [by FDR, including] ... the orders to American warships to shoot at sight at German submarines, formally announced on September 11 [1941]. The beginning of actual hostilities may be dated from this time rather than from the German declaration of war, which followed Pearl Harbor ... The promises to "keep America out of foreign wars" were a deliberate hoax on the American people, perpetrated for the purpose of insuring Roosevelt's re-election and thereby enabling him to proceed with his plan of gradually edging the United States into war. 
This special issue of The Social Contract journal provides detailed, devastating analysis of the influential and misnamed "Southern Poverty Law Center." Contributors to this issue review the hidden record and agenda of this highly profitable engine of defamation. 
...This chapter relies on a wide range of academic historical writing to paint his picture of the USSR during the critical decade of the 1920s. His account is therefore based on mainstream scholarship and overall is similar to other accounts .... Solzhenitsyn is emphasizing the ethnic angle to mass murder in the USSR: Russians were disproportionately victims, and non-Russians, and particularly Jews, were disproportionately perpetrators. He also emphasizes that a prime motive for Jews was revenge against the old order .. "Jewish communists participated efficiently and diligently" in collectivization. It was a war against the Russian people -- a war that was carried out with "a certain enthusiasm among Jews." 
... I actually believe the situation is going to get much worse over time. I believe that we're not going to have an Israeli-Palestinian peace settlement. I believe that talk of a two-state solution and all this talk about moving from "proximity talks" to "direct talks " is a charade ... America's interests and Israel's interests are going to continue to diverge. And the end result of that, back here in the United States, is that the [pro-Israel] lobby is going to have to work overtime to cover that up and make it look like everything is hunky-dory when in fact it's not. And that has all sorts of negative consequences for domestic politics. So I think things are very bad now but I'm sad to say they're only going to get worse. 
Jewish settlers, who claim a divine right to the whole of Israel, now control more than 42 per cent of the occupied West Bank, representing a powerful obstacle to the creation of a Palestinian state, a new report has revealed. The jurisdiction of some 202 settlements, illegal under international law, cover much more of the occupied Palestinian territory than previously thought. And a large section of the land has been seized from private Palestinian landowners in defiance even of an Israeli supreme court ruling, the report said, a finding which sits uncomfortably with Israeli claims that it builds only on state land 
The Israeli occupation of the West Bank is widely acknowledged to be unsustainable and costly to the country's image. But one more blunt truth must be acknowledged: the occupation is morally repugnant ...None of that changes the ugly truth that our ally, Israel, is using American military support to maintain an occupation that is both oppressive and unjust. Israel has eased checkpoints this year -- a real improvement in quality of life -- but the system is intrinsically malignant ... Meanwhile, the settlements continue to grow, seemingly inexorably -- and that may be the most odious aspect of the occupation. 
Somewhere there's an America that's full of neighborhoods where black and white kids play softball together, where biracial families e-mail photos online and where Asians and blacks dance in the same nightclub. And that America is on your television ... Critics say such ads gloss over persistent and complicated racial realities. Though the proportion of ethnic minorities in America is growing, experts say, more than superficial interaction between groups is relatively unusual. Most Americans live and mingle with people from their own racial background. Advertising, meanwhile, is creating a "carefully manufactured racial utopia, a narrative of colorblindness" says Charles Gallagher, a sociologist at Georgia State University ... 
It would be hard to think of anyone who has done more to undermine American freedoms than Joseph Lieberman. Since 9/11, the Independent senator from Connecticut has introduced a raft of legislation in the name of the "global war on terror" which has steadily eroded constitutional rights. If the United States looks increasingly like a police state, Senator Lieberman has to take much of the credit for it ... How much faith would American voters have in the likes of Lieberman, who claims that the Jewish state is their greatest ally, if they knew that Israeli agents planted firebombs in American installations in Egypt in 1954 in an attempt to undermine relations between Nasser and the United States ... 
... Contrary to what the author intended, this revealing book by a high-ranking ADL official serves as valuable exposé of the moral character of a man who sanctions violence against political opponents, who spits on the First Amendment, uses illegal methods to obtain information about adversaries, and who served as an agent for a foreign spy agency. Over the years, I have read several tracts and articles designed to discredit the Anti-Defamation League. None was able to persuade me of the illicit nature of this organization; it took the memoir of Arnold Forster to do that. 
Presbyterian leaders strongly backed a proposal Friday that included a call to end U.S. aid to Israel unless the country stops settlement expansions in disputed Palestinian territories. But they said the 172-page report, which details their church's approach to issues in the Middle East, was a sincere effort to mend long-standing fractures between the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and Jewish groups. It earned qualified praise but also criticism from pro-Israel organizations, which have long taken issue with various Presbyterian statements on Middle East peace. Church delegates approved the report by an 82 percent vote during the church's general assembly in Minneapolis. 
Recent events surrounding Afghanistan shouldn't confuse anyone, as the reality of the situation still lies in one simple statement: The US-NATO coalition has lost a war its political leaders never meant, or knew how, to win. 'Winning' in Afghanistan was never anything more than killing Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Mullah Omar, as many of their fighters and civilian supporters as possible and then getting out immediately with the full knowledge that -- as Mao said long ago -- insurgencies always rebuild and the process might need to be repeated. 
... Obama's "reset" in foreign policy seems to have yielded no more fruit than George W. Bush's crusade to "end tyranny in our world." Three months after Iraqi elections, there is no government in Baghdad. The August deadline for withdrawal of all U.S. combat troops will likely be missed ... America is facing a crisis of confidence in government, with the nation unable to win its wars, balance its budgets, control its borders, stop the bleeding of its manufacturing base or plug a hole in the ocean floor. 
A court session in John Demjanjuk's trial in Germany has been put off after the court's doctor said the 90-year-old was recovering from dehydration. Dr. Albrecht Stein told the court Thursday that Demjanjuk had not been drinking enough during recent hot weather and needed intravenous fluids. The former Ohio autoworker is being tried on 28,060 counts of accessory to murder over allegations he was a guard at the Nazis' Sobibor death camp. He says he is a victim of mistaken identity and never served as a guard at any camp. Demjanjuk suffers from a variety of medical problems, and it was at least the 10th session to be canceled for health reasons since the trial began Nov. 30. 
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad questioned the historic dimensions of the Holocaust but rejected the label of an anti-Semite, the Fars news agency reported Friday. "The West made a claim - about the Holocaust - and urges all the people in the world to accept it or otherwise go to prison," Ahmadinejad told a group of Islamic scholars Thursday in Nigeria, where he attended a summit of the Developing Eight, a group of countries with large Muslim populations. "The West allows everybody to question prophets and even God but not to pose a simple question and open the black box of a historic event," he charged. 
Martin A. Larson 
... In India, Hitler is not viewed as the personification of evil, but with an attitude of morally ambiguous fascination. He is seen as a management guru - akin to Machiavelli or Sun Tzu - by business students, and an object of wonder by people craving order amid the chaos of India ... Mein Kampf, Hitler's semi-autobiographical book outlining his anti-semitic ideology, sells thousands of copies a year. The book, free of copyright in India, is printed by more than half a dozen publishers ... For some, modern India is a country in chaos and, there is a "certain admiration" for Hitler and his extreme authoritarianism. There is also the inheritance of India's independence struggle, when "every enemy of Britain was a friend of India and at least potentially a good person." 
... It's a story that's being repeated all across California - and throughout the United States - as cash-strapped state and local governments grapple with collapsed tax revenues and swelling budget gaps. Mass layoffs, slashed health and welfare services, closed parks, crumbling superhighways and ever-larger public school class sizes are all part of the new normal. California's fiscal hole is now so large that the state would have to liberate 168,000 prison inmates and permanently shutter 240 university and community college campuses to balance its budget in the fiscal year that begins July 1. Think of California as Greece on the Pacific: bankrupt and desperately needing a bailout. 
... For the last few years, California stood more or less unchallenged as a symbol of the fiscal collapse of states during the recession. Now Illinois has shouldered to the fore, as its dysfunctional political class refuses to pay the state's bills and refuses to take the painful steps -- cuts and tax increases -- to close a deficit of at least $12 billion, equal to nearly half the state's budget. ... More broadly, Illinois is caught between blue state convictions about social safety nets and a red state aversion to taxes. For years, the Democratic-controlled legislature has passed budgets that are, in effect, in deficit. Lawmakers routinely skip around the state's balanced-budget law, with few consequences. 
The Battle of the Somme, which began in early July 1916, has come to symbolise the horror and futility of war, as Fergal Keane reflects on a visit to the battlefield. On the other side of the wood, the fighters soared and looped in a bright blue sky. I was standing in a cornfield and thought of how, in another time, that sound would have sent me running in terror for any cover I could find ... Between July and November 1916, more than a million men became casualties of war in these fields. 
Scholars of the life of Gertrude Stein were recently startled to learn that in 1938 the prominent Jewish-American writer had spearheaded a campaign urging the Nobel committee to award its Peace Prize to Adolf Hitler ... Stein's seemingly paradoxical views about Hitler and fascism have never been a secret. As early as 1934, she told a reporter that Hitler should be awarded the Nobel peace prize. "I say that Hitler ought to have the peace prize, because he is removing all the elements of contest and of struggle from Germany. By driving out the Jews and the democratic and Left element, he is driving out everything that conduces to activity. That means peace ... By suppressing Jews ... he was ending struggle in Germany" 
There is wide support in Congress for using all means to keep Iran from becoming a nuclear power, "through diplomatic and economic sanctions if we possibly can, through military actions if we must," visiting US Senator Joe Lieberman (I-CT) said Wednesday in Jerusalem. Lieberman, flanked at a Jerusalem press conference by his senate colleagues John McCain (R-AZ) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC), used very tough language, saying the words "military action" in regards to stopping Iran's nuclear program. Most US officials opt to tiptoe around the subject, saying "no options are off the table." 
... HaYovel is one of many groups in the United States using tax-exempt donations to help Jews establish permanence in the Israeli-occupied territories -- effectively obstructing the creation of a Palestinian state, widely seen as a necessary condition for Middle East peace. The result is a surprising juxtaposition: As the American government seeks to end the four-decade Jewish settlement enterprise and foster a Palestinian state in the West Bank, the American Treasury helps sustain the settlements through tax breaks on donations to support them. A New York Times examination of public records in the United States and Israel identified at least 40 American groups that have collected more than $200 million in tax-deductible gifts for Jewish settlement in the West Bank and East Jerusalem over the last decade. 
A blue-and-white Israeli flag hung from Blair House. Across Pennsylvania Avenue, the Stars and Stripes was in its usual place atop the White House. But to capture the real significance of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's visit with President Obama, White House officials might have instead flown the white flag of surrender. Four months ago, the Obama administration made a politically perilous decision to condemn Israel over a controversial new settlement. The Israel lobby reared up, Netanyahu denounced the administration's actions, Republican leaders sided with Netanyahu, and Democrats ran for cover. 
A photograph of Winston Churchill giving his victory salute has been airbrushed to remove his signature cigar. In the well-known original image, Churchill makes a "V" shaped symbol with his fingers - while gripping a cigar in the corner of his mouth. But in a reproduction of the picture, hanging over the main entrance to a London museum celebrating the wartime leader, he has been made into a non-smoker through the use of image-altering techniques. 
... Chamberlin opens America's Second Crusade with the words: "Americans, more than any other people, have been inclined to interpret their involvement in the two great wars of the twentieth century in terms of crusades for righteousness." In the pages that follow, Chamberlin deftly and devastatingly tears apart the folly of such arrogance. He exposes the mendacity of American leaders such as Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt, the fraud of the Nuremberg trials, and the hypocrisy and bad faith of the Allied leaders in their Second World War "crusade." 
The Federal Bureau of Investigation has widened its probe into allegedly fraudulent Holocaust-era claims that could have bilked the German government out of millions of dollars, The Jewish Week has learned. The fraud was discovered in December by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany in New York, which processes Holocaust-era claims for survivors in behalf of the German government. It immediately contacted federal authorities, including the FBI. The fraud initially involved claims submitted to the Hardship Fund but has now been broadened to include the Article 2 Fund, a pension program that may have been defrauded out of about $7 million over the last decade. Both investigations are continuing and the Article 2 Fund pensions of more than 200 people were suspended last Thursday.
Dariusz Ratajczak 
... An accumulating body of evidence suggests that the traditional view of Iran-Contra was mistaken, that this conventional understanding of the scandal was like starting a novel in the middle and assuming you're reading the opening chapter ... In view of the latest evidence - and the crumbling of the long-running October Surprise cover-up -- there appears to have been a single Iran-Contra narrative spanning the entire twelve years of the Reagan and Bush I administration, and representing a much darker story. And it was not simply a tale of Republican electoral skullduggery and treachery, but possibly even more troubling, a story of rogue CIA officers and Israel's Likud hardliners sabotaging a sitting U.S. president, Jimmy Carter. 
... For us to even consider several more years of fighting and dying in Afghanistan -- at a cost of heaven knows how many more billions of American taxpayer dollars -- is demented ... We're like a compulsive gambler plunging ever more deeply into debt in order to wager on a rigged game. There is no victory to be had in Afghanistan, only grief. We're bulldozing Detroit while at the same time trying to establish model metropolises in Kabul and Kandahar. We're spending endless billions on this wretched war but can't extend the unemployment benefits of Americans suffering from the wretched economy here at home. The difference between this and a nightmare is that when you wake up from a nightmare it's over. This is all too tragically real. 
Sacked US General Stanley McChrystal issued a devastatingly critical assessment of the war against a "resilient and growing insurgency" just days before being forced out. Using confidential military documents, copies of which have been seen by the IoS, the "runaway general" briefed defence ministers from Nato and the International Security Assistance Force (Isaf) earlier this month, and warned them not to expect any progress in the next six months. During his presentation, he raised serious concerns over levels of security, violence, and corruption within the Afghan administration. 
Beneath its commitment to soft-spoken diplomacy and beyond the combat zones of Afghanistan and Iraq, the Obama administration has significantly expanded a largely secret U.S. war against al-Qaeda and other radical groups, according to senior military and administration officials. Special Operations forces have grown both in number and budget, and are deployed in 75 countries, compared with about 60 at the beginning of last year. In addition to units that have spent years in the Philippines and Colombia, teams are operating in Yemen and elsewhere in the Middle East, Africa and Central Asia ... Obama, one senior military official said, has allowed "things that the previous administration did not." 
Greek inventor Archimedes is said to have used mirrors to burn ships of an attacking Roman fleet. But new research suggests he may have used steam cannons and fiery cannonballs instead. A legend begun in the Medieval Ages tells of how Archimedes used mirrors to concentrate sunlight as a defensive weapon during the siege of Syracuse, then a Greek colony on the island of Sicily, from 214 to 212 B.C. No contemporary Roman or Greek accounts tell of such a mirror device, however. Both engineering calculations and historical evidence support use of steam cannons as "much more reasonable than the use of burning mirrors," said Cesare Rossi, a mechanical engineer at the University of Naples ... 
A German man is facing up to six months in jail for having a speech by Adolf Hitler as his mobile phone ringtone. Every time the 54-year-old man's phone rang, it played a speech by Hitler, in which the former dictator pledged the destruction of world Jewry if Germany was dragged into war. Fellow passengers on a train in Hamburg heard the ringtone several times during a journey and reported him to police, who seized the telephone and arrested him when the train stopped. Police found swastika stickers and a photo of Hitler on the telephone with the words "the greatest commander of all time" written over it. The man was charged with violating the German constitution, which expressly forbids public displays of the Nazis and all their works. 
The United States will donate $15 million to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Foundation, pending congressional authorization and appropriations, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Saturday. Speaking at the Schindler Factory Museum in Krakow, Poland, Clinton said the contribution will go to preserve the site of the concentration camp and "demonstrates America's commitment to Holocaust education, remembrance and research," the State Department said. 
... Democracy in its current state, especially within the English-Speaking world, is a political system that specializes in positioning inadequate, unqualified and dubious characters in leading positions. Two democratically elected leaders launched the illegal war in Iraq. Two democratically elected leaders marched the west into a financial disaster ... .As much as our elected leaders are totally clueless, the Sabans, the Lord Levys and the Wolfowitzes know exactly what to do. The Jewish religion, culture and ideology provides its followers with a narrative that saves us of the democratic limbo. The Sabans of this world are far from being amateurs or clueless; they know exactly what to do. They have been doing it for three thousand years. 
More American women are choosing not to have children than three decades ago, according to a new report. Nearly 20 percent of older women do not have children, compared to 10 percent in the 1970s, the Pew Research Center said. ... Education also is a factor in a woman's choice to be a mother. The more educated women are, the higher the childless rate is. 
In this interview on the British BBC television program "Hardtalk," an activist describes how Israeli troops stormed the Gaza flotilla vessel. Given here in three parts. The BBC presenter repeatedly tries to justify or excuse Israel's attack on the humanitarian aid ship, as well as the Zionist state's overall policies. Ken O'Keefe, a former US Marine combat soldier, speaks calmly but forcefully about the Israeli attack, the humanitarian flotilla operation, the plight of the Palestinians, and Israel's propaganda lies. 
During the Second World War the Americans tested in the desert of Utah the bombardment of Berlin. In accurate detail they had copies of tenement buildings constructed. The architect was the well-known German Jew Erich Mendelsohn / ... The Berlin tenements were erected in May 1943 on the Dugway Proving Grounds, shortly before Winston Churchill had gale-force firestorms ignited in the center of Hamburg. Their intended purpose was to try out the possibilities and to solve the problems that clearly lay beyond any moral limits of target bombardments. The buildings became a trade fair for the growing lobby of fire war. 
This booklet documents the background and criminal activities of Jewish Zionist terrorist groups, and especially the Jewish Defense League. Particular emphasis is given here to terror -- including murder -- against "thought criminals" who question the Holocaust story that six million Jews were systematically killed during the Second World War ... This terror campaign culminated in a devastating arson attack on the Institute's offices and warehouse in Torrance on July 4, 1984 -- the 209th anniversary of American independence. Damage in the attack, carried out in the early morning hours of the 4th, was estimated at $400,000. 
The United States is a "puppet state of Israel," says Dr. Roberts, and the US media presents the American public with "Israeli propaganda." "The United States government does not represent the American people," he continues. "It represents the military-security complex, the Israel lobby, Wall Street, the oil companies, the insurance industry, the pharmaceuticals." The US is an "oligarchy of powerful special interests, and they control politics with their campaign contributions." Runtime: 6:37 mins. 
Minister Louis Farrakhan in a letter addressed to U.S. Jewish organizations accused Jews of hurting blacks and called for dialogue to "repair" the damage. The Nation of Islam leader sent the letter, as well as a two-volume copy of "The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews" by the Nation of Islam Historical Research Team, which he said proves "an undeniable record of Jewish Anti-Black behavior," the Associated Press reported Tuesday. "We could charge you with being the most deceitful so-called friend, while your history with us shows you have been our worst enemy," he reportedly wrote in the letter, dated June 24. 
French rail operator SNCF is being targeted by a California state lawmaker who has introduced legislation that would force the company to disclose its role in the Holocaust as a condition of a multibillion-dollar high speed rail contract, the Financial Times reported.The move by Democratic Bob Blumenfield could complicate the ambitions of state-owned SNCF, one of the top potential bidders for the contract, which has been estimated to be worth a total of $43 billion (35 billion euros) and represents the largest single tender in California's history. 
Authorities in Georgia on Sunday tore down another monument to Soviet dictator and native son Josef Stalin. The monument in the town of Tkibuli in western Georgia was taken down two days after authorities tore down a bigger and more famous monument to Stalin in his hometown of Gori. Both statues were brought down in the middle of the night in an apparent bid to avoid protests and media attention. 
A new film tells the terrible story of Stalin's own Final Solution - and Churchill's shameful complicity / … This is the harrowing scene of a devastating new film, Katyn. It takes its name from the village in western Russia where the bodies of more than 4,000 Polish prisoners of war were dug up in 1943. But these bodies were by no means the only ones to be disinterred. Near the Soviet city of Kalinin, now known as Tver, another 6,000 bodies were unearthed. Near Kharkov in Ukraine there were 4,000. In all, more than 22,000 Poles -- roughly two-thirds of them officers and policemen, the rest political prisoners -- suffered the same appalling fate: to be executed, without trial or even warning, and thrown like carcasses into mass graves. 
Germar Rudolf, 44, a German chemist and intellectual dissident who had been serving a prison sentence for violating Germany's law against "Holocaust denial," was released from Mannheim prison on July 4 after three years and nine months behind bars. Upon his release, he was met by his American wife and four-year-old US-born daughter. In October 2005 he was arrested in Chicago, and deported to his homeland, where he was tried, sentenced, and imprisoned. 
In a tour of the western US, David Irving is addressing meetings in 17 cities, including Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco, Costa Mesa, and Kansas City. His topic is "Hitler, Himmler and `Enigma': Re-writing World War II history using Nazi messages decoded by the British Secret Service." The best-selling British historian also has available copies of his prison memoir, which tells of his headline-making arrest and harrowing prison ordeal in Austria, 2005-06. 
In Russia it is not only the future that is unpredictable; often the past is equally in doubt … When authorities in Estonia removed a monument to Soviet soldiers from the centre of Tallinn two years ago, riots between police and ethnic Russian citizens of Estonia ensued, and the Kremlin made furious noises. With its new commission and law, Moscow is upping the stakes. Russia accuses the governments of Estonia and Latvia of glorifying partisan regiments which fought on the side of the Nazis. In recent years, relations between Latvia and Russia have normalised in many spheres, but the Second World War is still a thorny issue. 
A Jewish group in Ukraine is objecting to a criminal case brought over the "Great Famine" committed in the 1930s. The nation's security service is pressing the case against a list of former Soviet officials accused of committing the Holodomor, which caused the deaths of millions in Ukraine in 1932-33. Most of the names on the list were Jewish. 
It has always been those few who can see through the political correctness and hypocrisy of popular attitudes who are considered dangerous. "Holocaust denial laws" are now in place in about a dozen countries. Defenders of these laws claim that the expression of unconventional views about the Jewish genocide is "hate speech" and "incitement to violence" and therefore must be suppressed. But history shows the greatest purveyors of lies, hatred and incitement to violence are those with the power to spread their poison by manipulating popular opinion via the control or complicity of the mass media. 
President Barack Obama's refusal to take a stand on protests in Iran stands in sharp contrast to demands he has made on Israel, Morton Klein, president of the Zionist Organization of America, says in a Newsmax interview … Klein says leaders of Jewish organizations are rethinking their support of Obama in light of his attitude toward Israel. "There are many leaders in the organized Jewish world who have privately discussed this issue with me, and say they are deeply concerned about Obama's actions and policies toward Israel, and now they're rethinking their support for Obama during the campaign and the election," says Klein … 
Britain is in the grip of a "virulent" new strain of anti-Semitism, according to the Chief Rabbi. Sir Jonathan Sacks told The Times in an interview that in January the number of anti-Semitic incidents reached the highest level since records began. Jews have been physically attacked, schools targeted and cemeteries desecrated … Although the new "mutation" was different from the anti-Semitism promoted by Hitler, it was dangerous because it was international, he said. "The internet means that we no longer have national cultures; we have global cultures and the new anti-Semitism is very much a phenomenon of the global culture." Whereas in the past, hatred was focused against Judaism as a religion or Jews as a race, the focus this time was on Jews as a nation. 
… Not counting money projected for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the presidentially approved budget plan would continue increasing the Pentagon's budget: by another $8.1 billion in 2011 (up 1.5 percent), another $9 billion in 2012 (up 1.6 percent), and $10.4 billion in 2013 (up1.8 percent), and so on all the way out to 2019. If we add in the costs for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Pentagon budget for the current fiscal year - 2009 - exceeds any year since the end of World War II, including the spending peaks for the Korean and Vietnam wars. President Obama's plan is to increase that lead. Obama also will outspend Ronald Reagan on defense. 
… Reality can be so easily stood on its head when it comes to Israel because the misreading of Israeli declarations is a long-established practice among commentators and journalists in the United States. In fact, a special vocabulary has been developed for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the United States. It filters and structures the way in which developing stories are misread here, making it difficult for readers to fully grasp the nature of those stories -- and maybe even for journalists to think critically about what they write. The ultimate effect of this special vocabulary is to make it possible for Americans to accept and even endorse in Israel what they would reject out of hand in any other country. 
… In Iran's system, election fraud has no purpose, because a small select group of ruling mullahs select the candidates who are put on the ballot. If they don't like an aspiring candidate, they simply don't put him on the ballot. When the liberal reformer Khatami ran for president, he won with 70% of the vote and served from 
Adolf Hitler's obsessive hatred for Jews was sparked by his experiences after World War One, according to a new book. Respected historian Ralf-George Reuth argues the dictator blamed them for both the Russian revolution and the collapse of the German economy. The claim is a stark contrast to previous theories … At the time almost half of all German private banks were Jewish owned, the stock exchange dominated by Jewish stockbrokers, almost half of the nation's newspapers were Jewish run as were 80 per cent of chain stores. It became fashionable to decry the loss of the war on Jewish financiers. But Hitler, according to Reuth, also blamed Jews for the Russian revolution … 
Americans like to think of themselves as martyrs to work. They delight in telling stories about their punishing hours, snatched holidays and ever-intrusive BlackBerrys … But when it comes to the young the situation is reversed. American children have it easier than most other children in the world, including the supposedly lazy Europeans. They have one of the shortest school years anywhere, a mere 180 days compared with an average of 195 for OECD countries and more than 200 for East Asian countries. German children spend 20 more days in school than American ones, and South Koreans over a month more. 
An ex-candidate in Canada is suing the country's leading Jewish advocacy groups, alleging they ruined her political career. Lesley Hughes, who was dumped as a Liberal candidate in a Winnipeg-area electoral district, claims the Canadian Jewish Congress and B'nai Brith Canada made false and defamatory accusations that she is anti-Semitic. In a lawsuit filed June 16, Hughes alleges that as a result of the actions of the CJC and B'nai Brith, former federal Liberal leader Stephane Dion revoked her candidacy in last September's federal elections. 
… The state-run radio station's Washington correspondent, Nathan Guttman, obtained data from a recent unpublished poll, conducted by the Israel Project, an organization that works to improve Israel's image in the United States. The Israel Project has been conducting a periodic running poll, asking American registered voters questions about Israel … There is a steep decline in the percentage of Americans who say that the U.S. should support Israel. That has dropped from 71% in March 2008 (at the time of the Annapolis process) to only 44% now. 
… Thus President Obama faces a choice. He can play along with the Israelis, pretending to believe their promises of good intentions and the significance of the distinctions they offer him. Such a pretense would buy him time and favor with Congress. But the Israelis would be playing him for a fool, and he would be seen as one in the Mideast and beyond. Alternatively, the president could break with two decades of American compliance, acknowledge publicly that the emperor is indeed naked, dismiss Mr. Netanyahu for the cynic he is and remind Israelis that all their settlements are hostage to American goodwill. He could also remind Israelis that the illegal communities have nothing to do with Israel's defense, much less its founding ideals of agrarian self-sufficiency and Jewish autonomy. 
… I sometimes fear there's a genetically inbred survival characteristic of the Jews that predisposes us to try to beat the system, to get away with things, a characteristic that came in very handy for all those many centuries during which the nerve and cleverness to beat the system enabled survival, but that has now become a dysfunctional anachronism. Be that as it may, Netanyahu's stance will likely turn out to be a serious miscalculation of Obama's intentions and abilities. Obama has no intention of endangering Israel, but when it comes to outsmarting a would-be outsmarter, he is not exactly a beginner. 
… The idea of the Palestinian state has now become a part of the national consensus, and only a handful of ultra-rightists reject it directly. But this is only the beginning. The main struggle will be about turning the idea into reality. The entire speech was addressed to one single person: Barack Obama. It was not designed to appeal to the Palestinians … Obama is not seeking a frontal collision with the Israeli government. It seems that he wants to exert "soft" pressure, vigorously but quietly. To my mind, that is a wise approach. 
There is growing concern among the American Jewish community over Obama's Mideast initiatives, this according to the executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, Malcolm Hoenlein. "President Obama's strongest supporters among Jewish leaders are deeply troubled by his recent Middle East initiatives, and some are questioning what he really believes," Hoenlein, said in an interview published Monday. 
Only a few years ago, Edward Fagan was a world-renowned lawyer for the underdog, brash and audacious enough to take on Swiss banks and even whole countries to win judgments for Holocaust survivors and victims of South African apartheid. This week, the Supreme Court announced he was barred from practicing law in New Jersey, completing one of the steepest falls from grace in the state's law community. The court found Fagan, 56, misappropriated nearly $400,000 of the money he won for the victims he so effectively championed. 
