Beyond The Fringe

A question from the audience after Obama’s poor SCOTUS speech reveals Obama has a shocking ignorance of the history of the Middle East and transparent double standards when it comes to the protection of the human rights of the stateless, defenceless Palestinian people. Has the Middle East been plaguing itself? He is a vapid tool of the Israel lobby.

The full transcript of Obama’s woeful answer is here.

This film is a powerful exposes of the way vulnerable countries are ruthlessly farmed by empire and its mercantilist consorts, assisted by the World Bank and IMF, to the detriment of local people and environment.

Don’t just sit stunned after watching, get out there and challenge the corporations and countries who enslave people for venal gain. Spread the word, make this film viral!

It’s time now to end permanently the collective punishment of the people of Gaza by the ziocolony which is supported by the imperial US neocolony and its craven cronies including Australia.

How about it, Rudd? are you strong enough to make a stand for human rights against the hegemon with which we now have an $11.2b trade deficit thanks to the ‘Free’ Trade Agreement and from whom we purchase copious amounts of weapons of war?

Palestinian rights advocate, Ali Abunimah makes mincemeat of Israeli strategist Mordechai Kedar, who froths with hateful racial supremacist fury.

This is a six part vid of a brilliant address on equal rights and justice for Palestinians by Ali Abunimah.

Equal rights for all is the key to the democratisation of the fascist ziostate.

Barghouti defines the resistance movement with three aims (1) ending the occupation and colonisation of Palestine outside the 1967 border (2) ending racial discrimination against Palestinians (3) allowing Palestinian refugees the right of return.

George Fletcher, a law professor at Columbia University disgracefully blames the conflict on the oppressed Palestinians, showing a complete absence of understanding of natural justice. His shallow white supremacist argument boils down to ‘Israel is right’, therefore there is no argument. He denies Israel’s genocide of Palestinians, despite being faced with the evidence.

The Israeli ziocolonialist land thieves are the real ‘water pirates’.

Palestinian farmers in the West Bank, or “water pirates” as Israeli occupation forces prefer to call them, are siphoning off drinking water pipes in an effort to secure water to irrigate their farmland.

Water is an increasingly disputed resource between Israel and the Palestinians.

A World Bank report has accused Israel of using four times more water than Palestinians from the so-called Mountain Aquifer that bridges Israel and the territory and runs along the West Bank. Israel disputes that claim and says the Palestinians are jeopardising the resource through illegal use.

Palestinians argue they are being denied access in order to force them off their land.

This exclusive report from Al Jazeera shows Israeli occupation forces dismantling a farmer’s water pipes in the agricultural village of al-Baqa.

Badran Jaber, a Palestinian farmer, told Al Jazeera: “We were surprised by a large group of soldiers and settlers who surrounded the entire area. We asked them: ‘why are you doing this and what do you want?’ They refused to speak to us.

“Men who came with the soldiers stormed the field and pulled out all the irrigation pipes, destroying the crops.”

Al Jazeera’s Jacky Rowland reports on how Israeli rules blight the lives of many Palestinians.

NGO Monitor is an Israeli organisation “founded jointly by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, an organization which says it has “developed and implemented an array of cutting-edge programs to present Israel’s case to the world”,[4] and the U.S.-based [5] Wechsler Family Foundation.”

This unholy alliance also runs the ICA [Institute for Contemporary Affairs] in Jerusalem which “provides a forum for discussion of Israel’s strategic, defense and national security challenges”.

Thus NGO Monitor is clearly a hasbara conglomerate. Ironically, it is subsidised by the US taxpayer to undermine the work of peace organisations in Israel and Palestine in the interests of the Israeli and US economic elite.

One of its co-sponsors is the Wechsler foundation, a non-profit [sic], tax-exempt US organisation.

The foundation’s contact is Harry C Wechsler. Is this the same person as the ex CIA officer mentioned in regard to the Boston Systematics/Alltel/Vince Foster/PROMIS software affair?

The Applied Research Institute in Jerusalem claims NGO Monitor is “an organization that attempts to frame the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a one sided skewed narrative. NGO Monitor is run by pro-Israeli contributors, is funded by pro-Israeli groups, and has a proven track record of smearing Palestinian supported groups while refusing to report on pro-Israeli organizations.”

The ARI took NGO Monitor to court and won in 2007.

UPDATE:

Play Spot the NGO Monitor below – (Click on the + signs on the coloured squares to expand)

Here’s the NGO Monitor International Advisory Board:

Elie Wiesel
Professor Alan Dershowitz
Sir Martin Gilbert
R. James Woolsey
Tom Gross
Michael Gove MP
Douglas Murray
Judea Pearl
Elliott Abrams
Harry Wechsler
Nina Rosenwald

Also worth a look around is the Project for the New American Century map.

Why have I not come across this before? so much would have been made clear.

Vladimir Lenin said: “The Australian Labor Party does not even call itself a socialist party. Actually it is a liberal bourgeois party, while the so-called Liberals are really conservative.”

So that’s why the chardonnay drinking chattering pseudo-left colonises the working class, and workers who do not aspire to be like their social ’superiors’ are alienated and delegitimised, encouraged by the complicit, servile mainstream media.

“And in this era of printing and parliamentarism it is impossible to gain the following of the masses without a widely ramified, systematically managed, well-equipped system of flattery, lies, fraud, juggling with fashionable and popular catchwords, and promising all manner of reforms and blessings to the workers right and left – as long as they renounce the revolutionary struggle for the overthrow of the bourgeoisie …”

Time for a sea change in the left in Australia.

Breaking the Thirst, Water Deprivation as a Means of Ethnic Cleansing from Alternative Information Centre on Vimeo.

Kevin Rudd is optimistic of the survival of western hegemony for at least another 15 years, as it shifts to a balance of powers rather than US unilateralism. This is reflected already in the expansion of the G7 to the G20, to include representation from most blocs, with under-representation from Africa and South East Asian regions, and no representation from the small island nations of the South Pacific, who are seriously threatened by the by-products of economic activity.

From Paul Kelly:

The basis of Rudd’s stance is a rejection of American decline and faith in American renewal. “By any rational measurement, US global power will remain unchallenged for the first quarter of the current century and arguably for much of the second,” he says. Rudd argues that US leadership “must nonetheless be deployed in a policy environment that is more interconnected, complex and contested than at any time since 1945″.

The new era, he says, is “no longer hot war, no longer cold war”. It is, on the contrary, a period of “an extraordinary complex peace”.

Confident in his reading of Obama, Rudd says the US will not return to unilateralism (a historic trait recently exemplified by Bush) or seek the “wholesale redesign of the global order” (attempted unsuccessfully by Woodrow Wilson) but will adopt a pragmatism that seeks to “renew the existing institutions of global governance from within”. He sees this as Obama’s project.

Rudd interprets Obama’s America as “acting as the pivotal power within the system rather than simply railing at the system from without”. Moving to his central proposition, Rudd argues that the US cannot lead alone but must be supported by a “new driving centre of global politics and global economics”. He means the G20, a group of developed and developing nations far more representative than the major-power Group of Eight. “This I believe is the current direction of the Obama administration,” Rudd says.

Understand what Rudd is really saying. For all his praise of US power, the G20 begins to recognise the relative decline of the US and the West. It is about a sharing of power to create better global outcomes. The group comprises France, Germany, Britain and Italy along with the European Union; from South America it has Brazil and Argentina; the Asian members are Japan, China, India, Indonesia and South Korea; the rest are Australia, Canada, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Turkey and the US. It testifies to the reality of a more multipolar world. While arguing that the US will stay No.1, Rudd believes power is shifting from the West to East Asia and other power centres.

This penetrates to the essence of his vision: the need to reform global institutions and arrangements. Rudd is a dedicated multilateralist in the Labor tradition of H.V. Evatt, Gough Whitlam and Gareth Evans. He says the system created at San Francisco and Bretton Woods at the end of World War II has been static while the globe has been transformed. It is no longer functioning or legitimate. He warns that the global financial architecture has reached a tipping point.

The Israeli New York Consulate response to the Goldstone Report is a case study in deception. I’ve posted a comment which has not as yet, after three days waiting at their checkpoint, been published, now published. Here it is:

I notice you are still regurgitating the same hasbara about “thousands” of Hamas rockets despite this information including confirmation from your own ex-Shin Bet chief about the efficacy of the ceasefire from June 08:

“Time magazine in a report published four days earlier on December 15 backed The Associated Press report, and calculated the ceasefire, until the Israeli military raid, had resulted in a dramatic decline in projectile attacks.

“From the beginning of the year until June 19, Israel was struck by 2,660 projectiles fired from Gaza. From June 19, when the tahdiya went into effect, to Nov. 4, the total was 65. But on Nov. 5 a new round of “negotiations” — with weapons — began when Israel struck what it said were militants tunneling under the Gaza fence. Hamas responded with a barrage of rocket fire that has continued for most of the past month,” the Time report said.

A month earlier Yoram Cohen, until recently the Deputy Director of the Israeli intelligence service Shin Bet, wrote a similar account for the Washington Institute.

“Last week, Israeli forces entered Gaza, destroyed an underground border tunnel, and battled Hamas fighters, leaving several militants dead. In response, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad fired around eighty rockets into southern Israel, including the Israeli city of Ashkelon,” he wrote

“On June 19, 2008, Israel and Hamas began observing an Egyptian-mediated ceasefire, which was intended to last six months with an option to extend. In general, Hamas has observed the ceasefire; the number of attacks and rocket launches has decreased significantly, and Hamas has prevented other Gaza militant organizations from striking Israel,” wrote Cohen.”

Hamas has said they would cooperate with Goldstone’s recommendations.

Israel refuses to cooperate – a clear indication that it has plenty to hide.

Waiting, waiting … and in the interim, there is movement at Hasbara Central.

Nutanyahoo has announced his intention to set up an investigative committee to inquire into the findings of the Goldstone Report – Goldstone welcomed this, adding

“I would be delighted if Israel established a committee to investigate our allegations. That?s what we asked for – a transparent open investigation into our allegation I hope Hamas will also go for it.”

What is the likelihood any committee set up by Nutanyahoo will be transparent and independent?

For the record.

In Haaretz (22/9/09):

The head of the Hamas government in the Gaza Strip has told United Nations Secretary-General Ban ki-Moon that the group supports any steps leading to the creation of a Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders, according to the Palestinian news agency Ramattan.

The letter – written by Ismail Haniyeh on Tuesday to coincide with a UN conference currently underway in New York – stated that, “We would never thwart efforts to create an independent Palestinian state with borders [from] June 4, 1967, with Jerusalem as its capital.”

The missive also comes as Barack Obama prepared to meet with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas for his first Mideast summit as United States president.

Haniyeh’s message was only covered by Xinhua and was identical to the Haaretz story.

Not very convincing coverage compared to Erekat’s centre stage at ABC News.

There was a glaring lack of coverage elsewhere of Al Jazeera’s reportage of Hamas’s willingness to cooperate with Goldstone’s recommendations:

“AJ: .. to carry out their own independent investigations into their conduct during the war … a request Hamas told us they’d be happy to carry out if it means the international community will then take seriously claims in the report that Israeli soldiers committed warcrimes.

Ahmed Youssef (Deputy Foreign Minister, Hamas): Regarding Hamas firing rockets on the civilian areas, this is something easy to do the investigation by looking where these rockets hit and where is the target of these rockets if these rockets really intended to be targetting civilian areas or military bases in the neighbourhood.”