BEING THE CHANGE IN THE WORLD

PART II

by Jean Hudon

1-17-09

 
Strawberry Fields
Keeping the Spirit of John Lennon Alive
Documents the outpouring of love for John with dozens of fan interviews. Interwoven
is a photographic narration of the many milestones, from birth through assassination.
Phil Spector tells stories about "his brother" and the wonderful music they produced.
http://StrawberryFields.net

 


 
Hello everysoul!
 
Once again the extremely disturbing situation in Gaza is the main focus of this compilation. As you read and watch what I found for you below, please keep in mind that one of the key aspects of this crisis, from a spiritual standpoint, is that we are all being tested once again as to whether we can face this harrowing information and still remain centered, not allowing overtly strong emotional reactions to take over our mind and heart and blind us to the fact that every single soul being involved in this drama is our soul kin and is deserving of being unconditionally loved no matter how much we may disapprove of their actions and motivations, whichever side they may happen to be... Simply because unconditional love IS unconditional.
 
If we can keep in check the temptation to harshly react, and see through the compassionate eye of the soul consciousness that each soul involved not only needs our spiritual healing assistance to get to the bottom of what brought them to the point of utter disregard for the sanctity of human life that is currently displayed, but most importantly need to be showered and cleansed with the light of our Love so as to rise above their current outburst of violence and hatred and let their own soul consciousness show them the true nature of their acts and find in to themselves the courage to change their ways and climb back from the valley of shadows and death they are trapped in.

 
If we can heal within ourselves and in everyone of our relationships the same dysfunctional behaviors and emotional reactions that can ultimately lead to the levels of violence we see there and elsewhere, then we will contribute to shifting up the vibrational atmosphere and help eliminate the breeding ground for the savagery humans are capable of when they forget they are soul beings and sons and daughters of the same Universal Source of All That Is.

 
Here is first a recent correspondence that shed some useful light on this overall situation...

 
An ERN subscriber, Elisa (swagemakers.elisa@wanadoo.fr) wrote this to me on January 11:

 
"We are here surrounded by anti-Israel news, are we obliged to howl with the wolves? Mark Twain seemed to have said: 'If you don't read a newspaper, you are uninformed, if you do read a newspaper you are misinformed'. The propaganda was never so omnipresent. It is obvious and ugly. As for me, I want to know both sides, although it is impossible to have an opinion, or to know the truth. I am just trying to understand. Most people say: 'I don't want to know'. Probably, because it's difficult to know and not being able to do something. We can send some light to these poor people which fate put together."
 
AND MY REPLY WAS:

Dear Elisa
 
Although I applaud your desire to know both sides of this situation and to send them all some light, I'm a bit surprised that you refer to the information about the ongoing massacre of defenseless civilians by the 4th largest military force in the world as "propaganda".
 
Please go see these pictures of war in Gaza and imagine yourself as one of those people who for 3 generations have endured death and destruction after the theft of their land - a bit like what happened to the aboriginal people in America and around the world centuries ago - and tell me you still see the information about this situation as being mere "anti-Israel news" and "ugly propaganda".
 
Please know also that I'm just as sorry about the fate of the souls of the Israeli soldiers (often just young kids in their twenties) whose sense of humanity is just as much destroyed by what they are doing to their Palestinian brothers and sisters as I am for the fate of the souls of these mostly innocent victims - children, women and men - whose terrible destiny was determined the day they were born Palestinians.
 
For 61 years the ever-deepening karma associated with those 2 peoples and with all those individuals around the world who have supported and abetted one side or the other in this tragedy has been growing, now requiring a period of healing and karmic rebalancing that will probably be just as long - if not more. We can all learn wonderful soul-stirring lessons from this great drama played out there and the sooner we help these souls get on the healing track and peace path (we cannot simply wash our hands of their fate!) and coming to their assistance with the utmost dedication required to bring about the needed change and reconciliation -- just as the world did to make it absolutely clear that the apartheid regime was no longer acceptable and enable the emergence of a leader like Nelson Mandela who could then help set his entire country onto a path of healing (that is far from completed yet!) -- the sooner they will be able to start climbing out of the deep hole of hatred and darkness that is robbing them and us all of their/our most precious qualities as souls:  their/our ability to love unconditionally, to forgive unreservedly and to be the wonderful beings of Light we truly are.
 
I thank you for expressing your sentiment on this as what you see if just as important to know, being reflective of what so many others experience in front of this abyss of violence.
 
In many ways the Israelis, like others in similar situations, behave like children who were mistreated by abusive parents in their youth and who have repeated the same abusive patterns with their own kids. In this analogy, their historical abuse - and this is a terrible euphemism - was inflicted upon them by the people of Germany who were under the spell of a massive propaganda campaign to dehumanize the Jews. In turn, their descendants have been led to lose sight of the humanity that is reflected in the eyes of the people with whom they now have to share the land - and again the word "share" is a terrible euphemism... - and this blindness is in great part responsible for the ongoing deprivation and abuse of their basic human rights that millions of Palestinians must endure every day. In turn, unless the cycle perpetuating this vicious circle of hatred and revenge can be broken and a virtuous circle of love and reconciliation established, such deeply dysfunctional behaviors - another great euphemism! - will be passed on to future generations and will only add to the burden of karmic rebalancing to be done, willy nilly, at some future point, and with the same souls involved in this current learning cycle.
 
I would even dare to add that in this age of the global village where news of faraway conflicts reach the shore of our awareness almost in real-time, as long as we let simmer such sore points in the fragile and yet resilient web of relationships all souls on Earth are connected through, our collective evolution towards brighter pastures will be stuck in a morass of unhealed, deeply divisive soul hurts and no one will escape from the hell we create for ourselves on this paradise planet.
 
It is in our own best Self interest to focus all our energies and Love to heal the past, soothe the present and sow the seeds of our common future.
 
This I know we can do and this I Know we have chosen to accomplish and will soon manifest in all its soaring glory.
 
Jean

 
NOTE: Elisa who gave me permission to quote her came to this conclusion about being "surrounded by anti-Israel news" after reading the following article... A View from the Target Zone - Israel (2009-01-10) depicting the perspective on this conflict as seen from the Israeli side where rockets attacks have for many years threatened the lives of Israeli civilians subjected to the campaign of random terror directed by the Hamas in their attempt to avenge the death of their own people. Obviously it cannot be more obvious in this case that "an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind" as Mohandas Gandhi once famously said... and this quote applies equally to all parties involved...

 
Now here is something I cannot recommend to you strongly enough...

 
The Price of Silence - Introduction by Laurence Fishburne (Watch in high quality and full screen)
A music video that brings together 16 of the worlds top musicians-some of whom have fled oppressive regimes-in a rousing musical plea to guarantee human rights for all. More through http://pth.amnestyusa.org/

 
and then, if you can, listen to this one hour long radio interview...

 
The Gaza Holocaust, Part Two: The Weapons of Genocide - EXTREMELY REVEALING! The HORRENDOUS DIME bomb! This genotoxic 100% carcinogenic weapon is the Pentagon's alternative to the Depleted Uranium tipped bombs - it kills within 3 months... So imagine how many more - sure to be unreported - deaths there will be in Gaza...
A conversation with James Brooks of Vermonters for a Just Peace in Palestine/Israel, who is an expert on weapons used by the Israelis. The US weapon manufacturers are testing their latest hyper lethal weapons - including the BGU39 bomb that can be launched from 60 miles away from a fighter bomber plane flying over Israel and glide up to Gaza and explode with tremendous destructive power and spread LOTS of depleted uranium over civilian population. Much more in the article Unconventional weapons used against Gazans included in full below. The following 2006 article is also quoted in his radio interview: US and Israel targeting DNA in Gaza? Part 1: The DIME bomb, yet another genotoxic weapon - Here is a telling excerpt: "DIME bombs produce an unusually powerful blast within a relatively small area, spraying a superheated "micro-shrapnel" of powdered Heavy Metal Tungsten Alloy (HMTA). Scientific studies have found that HMTA is chemically toxic, damages the immune system, rapidly causes cancer, and attacks DNA (genotoxic). [4-11] It is unfortunate that the US media have virtually blacked out the story of Israel's new weapon, not least because our own military may soon be using it in Iraq and Afghanistan. The story might also have told us something about the grossly disproportionate brutality of Israel's war on the Palestinian people -- reason enough for the media to suppress it. (...) "despite the damage in internal soft tissue in the bodies of injured people, the fragments were not detected by X-ray. In other words, they had disappeared or dissolved inside the body." [13] "There were usually entry and exit wounds," Dr. Al-Saqqa reported. "When the wounds were explored no foreign material was found. There was tissue death, the extent of which was difficult to determine. . . . A higher deep infection rate resulted with subsequent amputation. In spite of amputation there was a higher mortality." The effects of the weapon seemed"radioactive." [14] [15] According to Palestine News Network, Dr. Al-Saqqa "confirmed that there were dozens of wounded legs and arms. Many of them had been burned from the inside, and distorted to the point that they cannot return to life again." Much more through http://www.vtjp.org/report/

 
Here is a confirmation that such this new genotoxic weapon - The DIME bomb - is indeed being used in Gaza:

 
Israel turns Gaza into weapon testing lab? (13 Jan 2009)
Israel has turned Gaza into a research laboratory to test out its new "extremely nasty" weapons on Palestinians, say on the scene medics. After working for 10 days at the Shifa Hospital in the war-torn Palestinian territory, Dr. Mads Gilbert, a member of a Norwegian triage medical team in Gaza, blasted Israel for conducting experimental military work in the impoverished strip. "There's a very strong suspicion I think that Gaza is now being used as a test laboratory for new weapons," Gilbert told reporters at Oslo's Gardermoen airport upon his return home on Monday. Dr. Gilbert said the kinds of injuries he and his colleague Erik Fosse had seen during their ten-day aid work in Gaza had proven that Dense Inert Metal Explosives (DIME) was being used in the embattled territory. DIME, which is an experimental kind of explosive, is believed to have strong biological effects in those who are hit by the "low lethality" weapons. Survivors close to the lethal range may have their limbs amputated as their soft tissues and bones are shredded to pieces. The victims may also subsequently contract cancer from the micro-shrapnel embedded in their body tissue within just four to six months. "This is a new generation of very powerful small explosives that detonates with an extreme power and dissipates its power within a range of five to 10 meters (16-98 feet)," said Gilbert. "We have not seen the casualties affected directly by the bomb because they are normally torn to pieces and do not survive, but we have seen a number of very brutal amputations... without shrapnel injuries which we strongly suspect must have been caused by the DIME weapons," he added. The weapon "causes the tissue to be torn from the flesh. It looks very different (from a shrapnel injury). I have seen and treated a lot of different injuries for the last 30 years in different war zones, and this looks completely different," said Fosse, 58. "If you are in the immediate (vicinity of) a DIME weapon, it's like your legs get torn off. It's an enormous pressure wave and there is no shrapnel," he explained. Israel had also used the weapon in the 2006 war with Lebanon and previously in Gaza. "We are not soft-skinned when it comes to war injuries, but these amputations are really extremely nasty and for many of the patients not survivable," he added. Following reports on the use of suspected chemical weapons in Gaza, the United Nations Human Rights Council decided to dispatch a fact-finding mission to investigate human rights violations committed in the territory. UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay said on Tuesday that "Accountability must be ensured for violations of international law," suggesting that the Council consider a mission to assess violations committed by both sides in the conflict. The latest casualty figures according to Health officials have topped 940 since the operation began on 27 December, while some 4,400 others have been wounded. Senior United Nations officials have expressed grave concern about reports that over 40 per cent of the Palestinians killed in the Israeli offensive, and almost half of the wounded, are women and children. The new report comes on top of earlier reports which revealed the Israeli military had used controversial white phosphorus shells on Gazans.  CLIP
 
Gaza facing 'medical crisis'
Medical facilities in the Gaza Strip are at the point of collapse, according to two western doctors who have been working there during the conflict. Doctors Mads Gilbert and Erik Fosse warn that many more could die as basic medical equipment runs out. - Dr. Mads Gilbert says: "I think we could sum it by saying that it's been a LIVING HELL for the Palestinians!"

 
Israel maintains heavy bombardment
Israeli planes have attacked more than 60 targets in Gaza as its offensive against Hamas entered its 18th day.

 
'The wounded cannot wait for days'
The head of the International Red Cross, Jakob Kellenberger, has been to the Gaza Strip to see the humanitarian situation. Mr Kellenberger visited the main Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza, where he said he was very concerned that many of those injured in the fighting were unable to get rapid medical assistance. He told reporters: "It is not negotiable that a medical mission in such a conflict has to be protected. The medical mission has to be protected".

 
Once the Israeli government deems that their "objectives" have been met and they finally pull their troops out of Gaza, all of this will soon be forgotten by most people in the Western world as the media's interest will fade and move to Obama's inauguration and whatever else that can help everyone bury the memories of the blood and gore of Gaza and pretend that everything is back to "normal"... just as most everyone did for all the previous instances of such extreme violence in our recent past.

 
But the fresh wounds opened by Operation Cast Lead in the hearts of all Palestinians and all those who care for these long-suffering soul beings will continue to fester and unless a deep shift of policy by the US towards Israel is implemented by the new Obama administration, the specter of military violence and mayhem will rear its ugly head again and the unending torture of the Palestinian people will continue while the souls and conscience of all Israeli people of good conscience and all those who care for them will continue to be torn and tortured by the aggressive military policy of their government.

 
And yet as George Harrison wisely wrote "All Things Must Pass"... and this too will soon pass...

 
Jean Hudon
Earth Rainbow Network Coordinator
http://www.earthrainbownetwork.com

P.S. To ensure that these compilations are not blocked, please add globalvisionary@earthrainbownetwork.com to your safe senders list. Your feedback is as always welcomed and may be included in a coming compilation - unless you prefer it is not. Circulating this compilation (or any part of it) and personally inviting your correspondents to subscribe to this list would also help enlarge the circle of people who have access to this material. Please include the following note and the URL address for the archived copy below along with your forwards, so others may have the opportunity to explore the original copy, if they so choose.
 
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To unsubscribe from the Earth Rainbow Network automated listserver, or change your listing on it when you have a new email address, the simplest way is to do it yourself by sending a blank email at earthrainbownetwork-unsubscribe@lists.riseup.net -- IMPORTANT: You MUST do it from the email account you wish to unsubscribe otherwise the system won't recognize your request. And then you subscribe your new email address - from your new email account - by sending a blank email to earthrainbownetwork-subscribe@lists.riseup.net - And then you'll have to reply to the confirmation email you'll receive.

 
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THE QUOTES
 
"No one I spoke to could seem to find any circumstance in which they would begin to question Israel's war. No number of civilian deaths, no displays of extreme suffering -- nothing could deter their enthusiasm for attacking one of the most vulnerable populations in the world with the world's most advanced weaponry. There are no limits, no matter what Israel does, no matter how it does it."

 

 
"Since July 1, more than 125,000 of you have donated $4 million. In addition, we've received major gifts and foundation support totaling $2 million. This combined revenue will cover our operating expenses for the current fiscal year, ending June 30, 2009. Your donation makes you a key supporter of the free culture movement, and pays for: Day-to-day operations: servers, hosting, bandwidth, our staff of just 23 people. Continued development & improvements of open source software that powers all Wikimedia projects. Outreach events like Wikipedia Academies: in-person workshops where you can learn more about how to use and edit Wikipedia. Volunteer support: helping our international volunteer community to grow and to continue to do amazing work. You can still get involved: Any donations beyond our $6 million goal are put in a reserve fund, which will help us to offset operating costs beyond the current fiscal year. Your continued support will also serve as a much-needed financial safety net if economic conditions continue to worsen globally. You have proven that Wikipedia matters to you, and that you support our mission: to bring free knowledge to the planet, free of charge and free of advertising. You've helped make and keep Wikipedia available for the whole world.I deeply appreciate your support."

 
- Jimmy Wales -- Taken from Thank you from Wikipedia founder (Amazing!)-------

 
CONTENTS

 
1. An inside story of how the US magnified Palestinian suffering
2. AN EYE FOR AN EYELASH: THE GAZA MASSACRE
3. Norwegian doctor: Israel intentionally targeting civilians
4. 100 Survivors Rescued in Gaza From Ruins Blocked by Israelis
5. Unconventional weapons used against Gazans
6. 750 Palestinians, FOUR Israelis. What is wrong with this picture?!?!
7. You can't fool all the people all the time: Israeli propaganda takes international beating
8. Holocaust Denied: The lying silence of those who know
9. An Unnecessary War
10. Peace is just for the massacred
11. Want to End the Violence in Gaza? Boycott Israel
12. Gaza Strip: When Perpetrators Play Victim
13. Is the Gaza Catastrophe Really About Natural Resources?
14. Open Letter to the Illuminati
15. Obama Predicted To Release Secret UFO Files
16. Are Illegal weather modification programs poisoning us and contaminating our land, water and air?
17. Mission accomplished: Globe enveloped in a radioactive, toxic chemical, heavy metal and nano particle-laden haze
18. French government bans advertising of mobiles to children
19. The Pax Natura Declaration
20. Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace . . . One School at a Time
21. The Beauty of What's in Front of You
22. 'Foreclosure Angel' Saves Stranger's Home
 
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SPECIAL SUBTLE ACTIVISM FOCUS
 
Winter Feast for the Soul              
We invite you to consider participating in a wonderful upcoming subtle activism event: A Winter Feast for the Soul. The mission of the Winter Feast event is to support individuals around the world to commit to a spiritual practice for forty consecutive days in the heart of winter. It is inspired by the saying of Rumi "What nine months does for the embryo, forty early mornings will do for your growing awareness." There will be a globally synchronized meditation on January 15 at 4.30am PST/7.30am EST/12.30pm GMT to open the event and another on February 23 (same times) to close the event. During the event, participants will be able to listen to daily webcasts of guided meditations to support their practice. Gaiafield co-founder David Nicol will present a talk about Subtle Activism in Sun Valley Idaho (the hub of the Winter Feast event) on Jan 13 to help launch the event. Please visit http://www.winterfeastforthesoul.com for more details about how to participate. Please join us early morning on Inauguration Day (Tuesday Jan 20) from 6.00-7.00am PST/9.00-10.00am EST/2.00-3.00pm GMT for a "deep listening" call to help set the energetic tone for that remarkable day. We will create a space for participants to listen silently into the collective field and to share any guidance that may emerge. To access the call, click here or call in at (724) 444-7444, Call ID: 25028#, then 1#.
 
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WORTHY OF YOUR ATTENTION
 
GAZA ADS: DONATE NOW FOR CEASEFIRE CALL
The Gaza bloodshed is escalating. With over 700 Palestinians and 11 Israelis killed and the civilian toll mounting daily, we urgently need to step up our ceasefire campaign to spur key world leaders to bring a lasting end to this horror.Proposals are now coming from many states in Europe and the Middle East. But outrageously, the US Bush administration is blocking a fair resolution at the UN, leaving diplomats arguing over toothless statements. So we're launching a major media campaign for a ceasefire -- starting in the US, where a decent voice for peace is urgently needed, with a big ad in the Washington Post's influential op-ed section and follow-up meetings with Security Council powers. CLIP LOTS MORE on the tragic situation in Gaza below in this compilation
 
NO HEROS FOR ISRAEL
Gaza photos
Rivers of blood and gory massacres done by Israel and paid for by the USA
 
Alex Thomson shuts-up Israeli spokesman!
Description by a Red Cross representative of humanitarian horrors caused by Israel
 
Proof of Infanticide - Israel's planned killing on children!!! (January 10, 2009 )
 
Jeremy Paxman asks the Israeli Ambassador to the UK about the Israeli atrocities in Gaza
Mads Gilbert - interview GAZA , Palestine - Worst Man-Made Disaster!
Protests around the world 10/01/09
US Congress votes for Israel
...while they have their palm greased (secretly) by the Israel's lobby with the very money voted by Congress to support Israel according to Hal Turner...
 
Pro-Israel Rally For Attacking Gaza, NYC, 1-11-09
Pro-Israel Rally Attended by Big-Time NY Dems Descends into Obscene Calls for 'Wiping Out' Palestinians. Full story here: http://www.alternet.org/story/119372 On January 11, an estimated 10,000 people rallied in front of the Israeli consulate in midtown New York in support of Israel's attack on the Gaza Strip. -- The sad results of continuous pro-Israeli brainwashing by the US media!
 
Exposing media bias about the Israeli - Palestine conflict
Why is the American (and Canadian) media so biased in the coverage of the Israeli - Palestine conflict? Excellent video from Prof. Robert Jensen explaining how & why our media is biased in favor of Israel.
 
Former guard on Guantanamo 'torture' BBC - Broadcast January 09, 2009  (2 min)
A former guard at the US detention centre at Guantanamo Bay has spoken in his first television interview about the brutality he witnessed to inmates. Chris Arendt told the BBC what he saw amounted to ''torture'' and that some of his fellow guards were so violent as to be ''psychotic.''
 
Everybody - We are all born free
Introduction to Thank You News (January 08, 2009)
Thank You News will be an the alternative to daily network and cable news which tends to be mostly "bad news." (their website isn't yet online)
 
Indian 'boy genius' shares skills (9 January 2009)
It's not clear whether Aman's teaching skills match his computer skills. An eight-year-old boy in India who specialises in animation for films has begun teaching his skills to adults. Aman Rehman, from Dehradun in the north Indian state of Uttarakhand, is also seeking to win a Guinness Book of World Records "Young Achiever" award. Aman learned computers while his friends played in the fields and has made more than 1,000 animated movies. He is known as the "Little Bill Gates" - famous all over the state after learning his trade as a toddler. CLIP
 
Ingesting Magic Mushrooms has Long Lasting Positive Effects! (3 min 41 sec)
Check the related videos there too!
 
CNBC SAYS - MARIJUANA = LARGEST CASH CROP IN CA
CNBC discusses the California Cash Crop of Marijuana, how it is sold in California and how dispensaries operate.

 
1st Eco Village Living and Learning Center in the Democratic Republic of Congo
A wonderful initiative by the Earth Rights Institute
The vision for this initiative is to implement an eco-development and eco-restoration plan for the region of the State of Bandundu Province in the DRC. Earth Rights Institute and Jatukik Providence Foundation will assist and promote an 'holistic' sustainable community development program. By creating the first Eco Village Living and Learning center in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, it will set as a role model for change that helps eradicate poverty, reduce disparities in living conditions and manage development and the environment in a balanced and sustained manner. The goal is to create an intentional sustainable community by reversing the gradual disintegration of our supportive socio-cultural structures and the upsurge of destructive environmental practices that threaten to drown us and to uplift our living standard by creating a harmonious synthesis between tradition and modernism without endangering nature.  CLIP The Earth Rights Institute has also submitted a "Land Rights and Land Value Capture via Green Tax Shift" proposal to the Ideas for Change in America website.
 
Obama and organic foods - Help Organic Food Production Survive
President-elect Obama's recent choice for Secretary of Agriculture is a VERY BAD choice for those of us who believe in organic foods. Tom Vilsack promotes genetically engineered crops and is not a friend to organic gardeners, but he IS a friend to the nasty Monsanto company. I just signed this petition to try to block his confirmation. Please take a minute to do the same. Recommended by Janneke Monshouwer (monshouwer@xmsnet.nl) who is curious to know what others think about this choice.
 
Tara & Bella Show Us How
Letterman's top 10 Bush Moments (5.7 megs download)
USAF designed flying disk to bomb Soviet Union
Hellish hairy sea monster cast ashore
Amazing pictures of deep sea creatures
 
Stunning images of planet Earth surrounded by space garbage
About 4,600 launches have been made since the first launch of Earth's man-made satellite in 1957. Nowadays, there are about 6,000 artificial satellites orbiting the planet
 
Organic Bytes - latest news from the Organic Consumers Association
Vandenburg Missile Test ... or UFO Wormhole ?
This highly controversial footage is an alleged missile launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base. However, some argue that we are seeing some form of extraterrestrial phenomenon, perhaps even a UFO Wormhole.
 
Spiral UFO coming out Wormhole or Hyperspace? (Hyper bizarre!!!)
Inspiring Geometry in the Crop Circles - Amazingly beautiful!! Those deep-memory archetypical triggers become fully alive through the stunning art of Dutch artist Janosh
The mystery of crop circles has fascinated thousands of people for years. Still more than hundred new crop circles appear in (mainly) England every year. Every crop circle contains a different code that influences a specific part of our subconscious mind. For this reason, every hologram carries its own specific title, such as Openness, Integration and Time Shift. All colourful holograms - with their geometric shapes, different titles and powerful symbolism - are to be found in "gallery 1" and through the successive "Next Series" links.
Following the geometric patterns of the crop circles codes, there are also Grail codes. The theme of these new codes "Geometry and the Quest for the Holy Grail" is: liberating yourself. Learn to listen to your own feelings, your own truth. The essence of these codes is that the geometry of the Grail enters through your subconscious mind. You will find directions for all 33 new codes in "gallery 2". -- A fascinating website! Make sure to check http://www.the-arcturians.com/eng/experience/index.htm and the 3 related links there. To download some of these amazing images as desktop pictures, click HERE - Check also what he says on Crop circles HERE
 
Strange small ball of light filmed in a crop circle
Slowed down and posted on the web by Trevor Osborne (Trevor@world-harmony.com)
 
Alien artifacts discovered underneath crop circles
Tentacle UFO spotted night before carnage at Conisholme wind farm (6 January 2009)
ENGINEERS from Ecotricity are working to establish how a 20m blade mysteriously fell off a turbine at Conisholme wind farm - but residents have their own conclusions.It is believed the a blade fell off the 89m turbine and another was left badly bent on Sunday January 4. Speculation has continued amongst residents in Conisholme and the surrounding villages with some saying they saw strange flashing tentacle shaped lights above the wind farm on the night before it happened. Mr John Harrison, Saltfleetby described how on Saturday night, January 3 he looked out of his landing window to see a 'massive ball of light' with 'tentacles going right down to the ground' over Conisholme wind farm. "It was huge" he said "At first I thought it must have been a hole where the moon was shining through but then I saw the tentacles - it looked just like an octopus."It was an incredible site; I have never seen anything like it before. I have no idea what it was, all I can say is what I saw". And although many believe the incident is an isolated one, reports of damage to wind turbines appear to be more common than people think: CLIP
 
UFO hits wind turbine - with video
 
Argentina: UFOs over lake seen by multiple witnesses
Argentina is in the middle of a massive UFO flap, with sightings occurring virtually on a daily basis. Much of this activity centres on the town of Victoria in the Entre Rios province. One of the most recent sightings occurred on January 2 2009 starting at around 11pm. Witnesses are reported to have seen at least three UFOs. The first emerged from the body of water known as Laguna Del Pescado and then sped towards the fields surrounding the regional city of Victoria. A second large white light then appeared in the sky, parallel to the moon, before turning west and speeding upwards away from earth. Finally another light then appeared and did the same-the lights ranged in colour from white, blue, red orange and yellow. CLIP
 
UNICEF's Photos of the Year
Socotra Island -The Most Alien-Looking Place on Earth
The Richat Structure: The Eye of the Earth
Hahaha
71 million people have seen this video... and laughed
The human perfection in physical world - Utterly amazing feat!

 
Wing Suit Fliers - Quite stunning!

 
Missing Links the Definitive truth About 9/11
Now you will discover the definitive truth about 9/11 and learn why even the most popular movies on the subject have failed to address the evidence exhaustively presented in this video. The facts will make it abundantly clear that the so-called 9/11 "Truth" movement has been infiltrated and is ultimately controlled by the same criminal group who masterminded the attacks. As they say, 'if you want to control the dissent you lead the dissent.' Utilizing evidence from the FBI, CIA, NSA, US Armed Forces Intelligence sectors, Foreign Intelligence organizations, local law enforcement agencies and independent investigators, Missing Links goes where no other 9/11 video has dared to.
 
Dennis Kucinich: Federal Reserve No More "Federal" Than Federal Express! (January 09, 2009)
Abolish it and let the U.S. government print U.S. money
 
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Israelis strike 60 Gaza targets (13 January 2009) With a video of the ongoing bombings and terror!!
Israeli planes have attacked more than 60 targets in Gaza as its offensive against Hamas entered its 18th day.The strikes came as Israeli troops advanced into the suburbs of Gaza City.The head of the Red Cross accompanied a convoy of aid into Gaza during a three-hour ceasefire, during which witnesses said there was increased shelling.Palestinians say more than 90,000 people have left their homes to escape the bombing. Militants, however, have kept up rocket attacks on Israel.Thirteen rocket or mortar attacks were launched from Gaza on Tuesday, Israeli police said. No-one was hurt.Jacob Kellenberger, the president of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), was expected to go to the main Shifa hospital in Gaza City to see patients and medical teams.He also intended to hold talks with senior Israeli and Palestinian officials.Last week the ICRC accused Israel of failing to fulfil its duty to help wounded civilians in Gaza, and said it was a "full-blown humanitarian crisis".About 100 lorries entered from Israel during the ceasefireIsraeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak said the military operation would continue in order to stop Hamas rockets being fired into Israel and to prevent arms smuggling into Gaza."We are working towards those two goals while at the same time keeping an eye on the diplomatic initiatives," he said during a tour of an air force base.Meanwhile, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas accused Israel of trying to "wipe out" his people."This is the 18th day of the Israeli aggression against our people, which has become more ferocious each day as the number of victims rises," he said."Israel is keeping up this aggression to wipe out our people over there." (...) Human rights group al-Mizan in Gaza said more than 90,000 people had fled their houses during the violence. About 31,000 of them were staying at UN-run schools in Gaza City, which are full, in Jabaliyah camp and Shati camp. The other 60,000 were staying with neighbours and relatives. The UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, is due in the region on Wednesday to push for a truce. He has implored Israel and Palestinian militants to halt the fighting in Gaza immediately. Mr Ban said too many people had died and there had been too much civilian suffering. CLIP
Israel generals discuss scope of war (13 January 2009) http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7826209.stm
Even as the United Nations secretary general sets off on a tour of the region, the Israeli military has been launching raids ever deeper into Gaza City. But is this gradual expansion of the ground operation merely intended to speed the work of the diplomats, or is there a precise military goal in mind? Yaakov Amidror, a former major general in military intelligence, believes Israel should go into Gaza as decisively as it went into the West Bank during the second intifada. "To conquer Gaza," he says, "to clean it of military capabilities of Hamas, to put Hamas in a situation where even if they want to attack Israel, they can't: this is the situation in the West Bank."Mr Amidror concedes that few people inside Israel want to put the 1.5 million Palestinians inside Gaza back under full Israeli control. (...) But Maj Gen Eiland also has a warning. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has mused about the desirability of toppling Hamas altogether from running Gaza."It could be the creation of chaos," Maj Gen Eiland argues. "It is not necessarily better than to have a weakened Hamas."That, at least, he says, would be "one accountable government, that has something to lose, something to deliver to its own people."The Israeli military knows it does not have all the time it wants in GazaA complete collapse of Hamas, and a complete re-occupation of Gaza would not be, he adds, drily, "exactly consistent with our real interests". The military goals, and the size of the military operations will, in the end, be decided by the prime minister and his senior colleagues. They have the advantage of solid public support inside Israel. But all the military men are agreed - Israel has only a few days at most to set its final aims and deployments.The scale of Palestinian casualties has troubled much of the world. Diplomats are working hard to nail down the details of a ceasefire.Israel - as one senior officer put it - "may have all the time in the world; but the world does not have all the time for Israel".
 
Israel accused of Gaza 'genocide' (JANUARY 14, 2009)
The president of the UN General Assembly has condemned Israel's killings of Palestinians in its Gaza offensive as "genocide". Miguel d'Escoto Brockmann also told Al Jazeera he had never believed that the UN Security Council would be able to stop the violence in Gaza and that Ehud Olmert, the Israeli prime minister, had practically told the UN to "mind their own business" by continuing the offensive."The number of victims in Gaza is increasing by the day... The situation is untenable. It's genocide," d'Escoto said at the UN in New York.  (...) "It's unbelievable that a country that owes its existence to a general assembly resolution could be so disdainful of the resolutions that emanate from the UN."D'Escoto, a former Roman Catholic priest and Nicaragua foreign minister, is known for his outspoken criticism of Israel and last year likened Israel's treatment of the Palestinians to the racist apartheid system previously used in South Africa.Gabriela Shalev, Israel's ambassador to the UN, called d'Escoto an "Israel hater" for having hugged Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president and a vocal critic of Israel.D'Escoto also said the UN had to bear some responsibility for the long-standing conflict in the Middle East as it had allowed the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, leaving the Palestinians stateless."You have to attack problems at their root cause and the Palestinian people have been subjected to subhuman treatment for decades and this [the Israeli offensive] is going to make matters worse." CLIP

 
Who will save Israel from itself? (JANUARY 13, 2009)
One by one the justifications given by Israel for its latest war in Gaza are unravelling. The argument that this is a purely defensive war, launched only after Hamas broke a six-month ceasefire has been challenged, not just by observers in the know such as Jimmy Carter, the former US president who helped facilitate the truce, but by centre-right Israeli intelligence think tanks.The Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center, whose December 31 report titled "Six Months of the Lull Arrangement Intelligence Report," confirmed that the June 19 truce was only "sporadically violated, and then not by Hamas but instead by ... "rogue terrorist organisations". Instead, "the escalation and erosion of the lull arrangement" occurred after Israel killed six Hamas members on November 4 without provocation and then placed the entire Strip under an even more intensive siege the next day. According to a joint Tel Aviv University-European University study, this fits a larger pattern in which Israeli violence has been responsible for ending 79 per cent of all lulls in violence since the outbreak of the second intifada, compared with only 8 per cent for Hamas and other Palestinian factions.Indeed, the Israeli foreign ministry seems to realise that this argument is losing credibility.  (...) The claim that Hamas will never accept the existence of Israel has proved equally misinformed, as Hamas leaders explicitly announce their intention to do just that in the pages of the Los Angeles Times or to any international leader or journalist who will meet with them.With each new family, 10, 20 and 30 strong, buried under the rubble of a building in Gaza, the claim that the Israeli forces have gone out of their way to diminish civilian casualties - long a centre-piece of Israel's image as an enlightened and moral democracy - is falling apart.Anyone with an internet connection can Google "Gaza humanitarian catastrophe" and find the UN's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in the Occupied Territories and read the thousands of pages of evidence documenting the reality of the current fighting, and the long term siege on Gaza that preceded it. The Red Cross, normally scrupulous in its unwillingness to single out parties to a conflict for criticism, sharply criticised Israel for preventing medical personnel from reaching wounded Palestinians, some of whom remained trapped for days, slowly starving and dying in the Gazan rubble amidst their dead relatives. (...) On the ground, the evidence mounts ever higher that Israel is systematically violating a host of international laws, including but not limited to Article 56 of the IV Hague Convention of 1907, the First Additional Protocol of the Geneva Convention, the Fourth Geneva Convention (more specifically known as the "Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War of 12 August 1949", the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, and the principles of Customary International Humanitarian Law. CLIP

 
Israel Is Committing War Crimes -- Wall Street Journal (Jan 10, 2009)
Hamas's violations are no justification for Israel's actions. (...) Israel had not suffered an "armed attack" immediately prior to its bombardment of the Gaza Strip. Since firing the first Kassam rocket into Israel in 2002, Hamas and other Palestinian groups have loosed thousands of rockets and mortar shells into Israel, causing about two dozen Israeli deaths and widespread fear. As indiscriminate attacks on civilians, these were war crimes. During roughly the same period, Israeli forces killed about 2,700 Palestinians in Gaza by targeted killings, aerial bombings, in raids, etc., according to the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem. But on June 19, 2008, Hamas and Israel commenced a six-month truce. Neither side complied perfectly. Israel refused to substantially ease the suffocating siege of Gaza imposed in June 2007. Hamas permitted sporadic rocket fire -- typically after Israel killed or seized Hamas members in the West Bank, where the truce did not apply. Either one or no Israelis were killed (reports differ) by rockets in the half year leading up to the current attack. Israel then broke the truce on Nov. 4, raiding the Gaza Strip and killing a Palestinian. Hamas retaliated with rocket fire; Israel then killed five more Palestinians. In the following days, Hamas continued rocket fire -- yet still no Israelis died. Israel cannot claim self-defense against this escalation, because it was provoked by Israel's own violation. An armed attack that is not justified by self-defense is a war of aggression. Under the Nuremberg Principles affirmed by U.N. Resolution 95, aggression is a crime against peace. CLIP

 
Israel sends army reservists into Gaza battle (January 12, 2009)
GAZA (Reuters) - Israeli leaders trying to find a knockout blow against Hamas militants defying a 17-day-old assault on the Gaza Strip have sent army reservists into battle.With the Palestinian death toll nearing 900 and international pressure for a ceasefire mounting, Israeli forces might launch a full-scale attack on Hamas smuggling tunnels on Gaza's border with Egypt, and perhaps a wider urban operation. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Defense Minister Ehud Barak and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni met late on Sunday and decided to tighten pressure on Hamas, Israeli media reported. Livni told Army Radio that the Gaza offensive had "restored Israel's deterrence" and "created a new equation ... which says that when our citizens are attacked we respond with force." She declined to say when Israel would end its assault. CLIP

 
Battered by Israel, Hamas Faces Tough Choice (January 12, 2009)
(...) But although Hamas' militant wing had been preparing for an Israeli assault for years, the enemy's firepower has been devastating and some analysts say Gaza can't endure much more destruction. Government buildings have been razed and more than 1 million residents in the seaside enclave are without electricity. The Israel Defense Forces say that at least 300 militants have been killed, others are defecting and the number of rockets launched into Israel in recent days has declined significantly. CLIP

 
Israelis Protest Against Gaza Action
JERUSALEM - Israel's once-mighty peace camp has been mostly silent during its country's military assault on the Hamas organization in Gaza - at least until Saturday night. Then, as the Jewish Sabbath ended, more than 1,000 Israelis protested against the Gaza attacks in front of the Ministry of Defence offices in Tel Aviv. It was the first and only public outburst in Israel against the conflict in the 15 days since it began. With the international community largely opposed to Israel's campaign and with Israel's friends in the region - Turkey, Jordan and Qatar - questioning their ties to Jerusalem, Ehud Olmert's government could take solace in the fact that nine out 10 Israelis supported the attack on Gaza.Saturday night's protest might mark a turning point, however: The demonstrators were not all peaceniks who oppose any and all war."This was a demonstration by people who supported the military action when it started," said Avshalom Vilan, a member of the Knesset from the left-wing Meretz party who attended the rally. "But after three days of the bombing, it was enough," he said. "We couldn't achieve militarily any more than we already had. There was no justification for continuing the death and destruction." CLIP

 
Jordan under pressure as Israel presses on in Gaza (Jan 11, 2009)
Jordan has been strident in its condemnation of Israel's attack on Gaza on the popular and official levels.Jordanian protesters shout anti Israeli slogans and wave Arabic and Hamas banners during a demonstration in Amman, Saturday. In a country where more than 60 percent of the population is of Palestinian origin, and home to the powerful Muslim Brotherhood, it was inevitable to hear voices opposing the 1994 Wadi Araba peace treaty with Israel get louder by the day, as more civilians died in Gaza. The Islamist-led opposition, green-lighted by the authorities to protest, have been venting their anger at the continued attacks since they started on December 27. A flurry of protests swept the kingdom from its southern city of Aqaba upwards to the tribal-dominated city of Karak, to Maan, Amman and the crowded refugee camps. (...) The pro-West government appeared to have threatened to end peace ties with Israel, but this threat is unlikely to materialize, say analysts.The kingdom, awarded an annual $500 million in military and economic assistance from Washington ever since it signed the peace treaty with Israel in 1994, considers its deal with Israel an irrevocable action, also for higher national interests. As far as Jordanian officials are concerned, the peace treaty means the kingdom is safe from what could be potential Israeli interest in Jordanian lands and protects the future generations. Moreover, officials in Amman insist their diplomatic relations with Israel are vital for Gazans at this delicate time as they have been able to send badly-needed humanitarian aid to the coastal enclave through the government-run charity organizations. All aid pouring in from around the Arab and Muslim worlds, and even from the West, passes through the kingdom before crossing King Hussein Bridge on Jordanian trucks to Israel. CLIP

 
Kadima Held Secret Poll to Know if War Improves Its Popularity (January 14, 09)
(...) News1 notes that Kadima chairwoman Tzipi Livni and other Kadima leaders announced that they were suspending the party's election campaign because of the war. It notes that the timing and nature of the poll would make it seem that the ruling party had political considerations in mind at the time it launched the war. Some pundits have claimed from the outset of the war that the war itself is a political campaign for Kadima and Labor. Labor, which is headed by Defense Minister Ehud Barak, has indeed risen dramatically in the polls since the war began, from about 11 projected Knesset seats to about 16. Kadima and Likud enjoy similar levels of support in the polls to the ones they had on the week before the war began.

 
Elections 2009: Latest poll gives Likud big edge over Kadima (21/11/2008)
This is mainly why they attacked Gaza! Plus the gas off-shore!

 
Gaza conflict will shake the Arab world (11 January 2009)
Egypt's leadership could be the first hit by shockwaves sent through the neighbourhood by Israel's attacks -- The human cost of Israel's decision to attack Gaza is being paid by the Palestinians. However, the fallout from this wanton violence is going to have long-term political consequences throughout the Arab world. The Israeli attack on Gaza is likely to bring to the fore political trends that up to now have remained just below the parapet of influence. The situation has brought the Arab world to an historic crossroads, where leaders will either move towards Arab independence from western policies, which is likely to be driven by popular grassroots support, or continue to toe the line of Israel/US influence. Much of this will be determined by the duration of Israeli attacks and the survival or demise of Hamas. CLIP

 
All the President's Nazis (Real and Imagined): An Open Letter to Bush (May 15, 2008)
Your speech on the Knesset floor today was not only a disgrace; it was nothing short of treachery. Worse still, your exploitation of the Holocaust in a country carved out of the wounds of that very crime, in order to strike a low blow at American citizens whose politics differs from your own is unforgivable and unpardonable.  (...) You ordered the creation of secret camps all over the world and on US territory where you also authorized the torture of countless men, women and children is a violation of the Geneva Conventions, international law, and domestic law. In other words, you authorized war crimes.We don't know the number of people you have had disappeared, tortured, and possibly murdered. Although we have some idea of what these numbers may be, I doubt the full truth of it all will ever be known. In 2005, I had a CENTCOM document leaked to me illustrating that since the start of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, more than 70,000 men, women, and children have been detained at one of your various camps Mr. Bush. We don't know what happened to them, if they were tortured, raped, or murdered. What we do know is that less than 2% of those 70,000 had any sort of charge brought against them in a court of law. None of those alleged crimes, by the way, were acts of terrorism. We don't know if that 70,000 figure was the actual and full count of detainees in US custody around the world in 2005. But it is safe to say that in the last 3 years since this document was published, the number of detainees has likely grown. What we also now know, in great horror, is that at least one of your camps had a crematorium in it, which some of the US soldiers stationed there suspected was used for burning bodies: "We had some kind of incinerator at the end of our building," Specialist Megan Ambuhl said. "It was this huge circular thing. We just didn't know what was incinerated in there. It could have been people, for all we knew -- bodies." Sergeant Davis was not in doubt. "It had bones in it," he said, and he called it the crematorium. "But hey, you're at war," he said. "Suck it up or drive on."What we also now know is that Dick Cheney and senior members of your administration carried out a plan of torture and abuse that violated international and domestic law with regard to human rights, down to the type of torture tactics that would be used against prisoners in our custody. This plan, we now know, was approved by you. Has the mirror cracked yet from this much fact or are you still peering into the political sphere hoping to ascribe your own crimes to others? It won't work. It never has and it certainly won't work now. We know far too much about you and yours.I could continue listing the litany of your crimes, both against the United States and against foreign nations. I won't. We know what you are and what you have done. Having roughly 1,000,000 dead Iraqis under your belt should have shamed you into the parasitic hole you came out of, attaching yourself to the blood of this nation and sucking it dry. Instead, you parade around, the globe-trotting horror show and anti-Semite that you are. Yes, you are an anti-Semite Would you say no, you are not an anti-Semite? Consider your own words when you thought no one was keeping score: "You know what I'm gonna tell those Jews when I get to Israel, don't you Herman?" a then Governor George W. Bush allegedly asked a reporter for the Austin American-Statesman.When the journalist, Ken Herman, replied that he did not know, Bush reportedly delivered the punch line: "I'm telling 'em they're all going to hell."Only an anti-Semite would think this type of humor is acceptable. Did you tell the Jews of Israel they were going to hell? No, instead, you told them that American Democrats are Nazi sympathizers and in an act of sheer indecency, the right wing Likud party orchestrated the greatest applause you ever got. For shame!What this blind adoration finally proves to me is that the right-wing regime that has overtaken Israel cares nothing for its people, its heritage, and the tragic history that they now honor by applauding a man whose family-fortune was built on the bodies of their loved ones. Like their Republican (and Lieberman) counterparts in the United States, Likud does not represent its people, rather, it represents its owners. Likud has traded Israel, its Jews, their heritage and history for the same golden calf purchased and sold by the far-right wing in the United States. I am ashamed of you Mr. Bush. I am ashamed of those who applauded your political porn played out against the hallowed backdrop of the Holocaust. I am ashamed of those reporters with you, who between them could not muster the moral courage to call you out on your ugly rhetoric and ask you about your own family Nazi ties. You are, sir, the most abhorrent human being of my lifetime. I dare say, in the lifetime of this nation. CLIP

 
Torture Bill Gives Bush Retroactive War Crimes Immunity
Remember! They pardoned themselves of all wrongdoings in 2006. Can this be overturned?...

 
Thomas: Bush is a nice guy but he flubbed 9/11 twice By HELEN THOMAS (January 9, 2009)
WASHINGTON -- As he leaves office, President Bush is passing on to his successor two wars and a growing economic debacle. What a way to go!Because of Bush's policies, the U.S. also is complicit in the Israeli attack on the Palestinians on the Gaza Strip by providing a "made-in-America" high-tech arsenal for the assault and blocking a ceasefire for nearly two weeks, a move intended to help the Israelis consolidate their hold.Not to worry, Bush says he isn't concerned about how history will view his militant eight years in the White House, telling ABC News that he "won't be around to read it."Well, they say that journalism is the first draft of history. So I am going to predict that those future historians will not deal kindly with the Bush presidency. CLIP

 
Martial Law, the Financial Bailout, and War (January 8, 2009)
(...) Let us deal first with the preparations for martial law. On September 30, 2008, the Army Times announced the redeployment of an active Brigade Army Team from Iraq to America, in a new mission that "may become a permanent part of the active Army": The 3rd Infantry Division's 1st Brigade Combat Team has spent 35 of the last 60 months in Iraq patrolling in full battle rattle, helping restore essential services and escorting supply convoys. Now they're training for the same mission - with a twist - at home. Beginning Oct. 1 for 12 months, the 1st BCT will be under the day-to-day control of U.S. Army North, the Army service component of Northern Command, as an on-call federal response force for natural or manmade emergencies and disasters, including terrorist attacks. . . . After 1st BCT finishes its dwell-time mission, expectations are that another, as yet unnamed, active-duty brigade will take over and that the mission will be a permanent one. . . .They may be called upon to help with civil unrest and crowd control.17 This announcement followed by two weeks the talk of civil unrest and martial law that was used to panic the Congress into passing Paulson's bailout legislation. Not only that, the two unprecedented events mirror each other: the bailout debate anticipated civil unrest and martial law, while the announced positioning of an active Brigade Combat Team on U.S. soil anticipated civil unrest (such as might result from the bailout legislation). Then on December 17, 2008, US Northern Command chief General Renuart announced that "the US military plans to mobilize thousands of troops to protect Washington against potential terrorist attack during the inauguration of president-elect Barack Obama."18 The US Army War College has also raised the possibility of the U.S. Army being used to control civil unrest, according to the Phoenix Business Journal: A new report by the U.S. Army War College talks about the possibility of Pentagon resources and troops being used should the economic crisis lead to civil unrest, such as protests against businesses and government or runs on beleaguered banks. "Widespread civil violence inside the United States would force the defense establishment to reorient priorities in extremis to defend basic domestic order and human security," said the War College report. The study says economic collapse, terrorism and loss of legal order are among possible domestic shocks that might require military action within the U.S.19 It is clear that there has been a sustained move in the direction of martial law preparations, a trend that has been as continuous as it has been unheralded.  CLIP

 
NOTE from Jean: At first I didn't want to network the following because Hal Turner is not exactly a reliable source but because of what is mentioned above "on December 17, 2008, US Northern Command chief General Renuart announced that "the US military plans to mobilize thousands of troops to protect Washington against potential terrorist attack during the inauguration of president-elect Barack Obama." it now appears the Pentagon and the Cabal may indeed be planning such a horror show to create their long-planned military dictatorship in North America... Of course I DO hope these plans will be thwarted once again thanks to our vigilant galactic friends... Anyway, here it goes...

 
Inauguration faces credible bio-weapon threat; insurrection threats
Washington, DC -- The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is working feverishly to thwart what they believe is credible evidence of a planned bio-weapons attack during the Inauguration of Barack Obama on January 20. According to sources who demanded anonymity for fear of being fired and prosecuted over revealing national security information, Domestic groups obtained several different genetically-engineered, militarized, bio-weapons from laboratories that lost security and were ultimately destroyed when Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans several years ago. (...) It is also widely known in national security circles that "many active cultures" of military grade bio-weapons were intentionally stolen by former lab workers who intended to earn huge money by selling those bio-weapons to the highest bidders. According to the source from DHS, authorities know for a fact that the following biological weapons were acquired by unauthorized persons: Weapons grade Anthrax, weapons grade Y-Pestis (Pneumonic plague), genetically-modified mousepox and, worst of all, militarized smallpox. All of these diseases have a 75% and higher mortality rate. (At least 75% of those who become infected, die.) According to the source from DHS, federal authorities have information that the weapons will be used to attack the inauguration in a manner that cannot be defended against. DHS has been told weapons grade biological materials will be placed inside helium-filled balloons which are tied shut with the same type of fuse cord found on typical firecrackers. The poison-filled balloons can be driven in cars, vans or trucks to a position near the inauguration which can take advantage of prevailing winds, which would carry the balloons over the crowds. CLIP

 
Kissinger Calls on Obama to Create NWO (At the 2 min. 45 sec. mark)
Henry Kissinger discusses Israel's invasion of Gaza, endorses President-elect Barack Obama's cabinet selections and calls on Obama to create a New World Order out of the current state of global affairs. Or as he calls it, a "great opportunity", not a "crisis". CLIP - THAT'S EXACTLY WHAT THEY WANT HIM TO DO THROUGH DECLARING MARTIAL LAW AFTER A FALSE FLAG ATTACK - PERHAPS DURING THE INAUGURATION CEREMONY...

 
More Groups Than Thought Monitored in Police Spying
(...) The Maryland State Police surveillance of advocacy groups was far more extensive than previously acknowledged, with records showing that troopers monitored - and labeled as terrorists - activists devoted to such wide-ranging causes as promoting human rights and establishing bike lanes. Intelligence officers created a voluminous file on Norfolk-based People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, calling the group a "security threat" because of concerns that members would disrupt the circus. Angry consumers fighting a 72 percent electricity rate increase in 2006 were targeted. The DC Anti-War Network, which opposes the Iraq war, was designated a white supremacist group, without explanation. CLIP

 
Why Obama's Green Jobs Plan Might Work (January 4, 2009) At long last the US will go Green... All the way!
(...) President-elect Barack Obama wants to spend $150 billion over the next decade to promote energy from the sun, wind and other renewable sources as well as energy conservation. Plans include raising vehicle fuel-economy standards and subsidizing consumer purchases of plug-in hybrids. Obama wants to weatherize 1 million homes annually and upgrade the nation's creaky electrical grid. His team has talked of providing tax credits and loan guarantees to clean-energy companies.His goals: create 5 million new jobs repowering America over 10 years; assert U.S. leadership on global climate change; and wean the U.S. from its dependence on imported petroleum. "Breaking our oil addiction . . . is going to take nothing less than the complete transformation of our economy," Obama said during a campaign stop in Michigan's capital, Lansing, last year. (...) Renewable-energy proponents such as former California Treasurer Phil Angelides say stupidity would be to stick with current U.S. energy policy, which has turbocharged global warming, super-sized the trade deficit and propped up oil-rich regimes hostile to American interests. Angelides heads the Apollo Alliance, a coalition promoting clean industries as a means of rebuilding U.S. manufacturing and lessening the nation's dependence on foreign oil. "It's the best path to recovery and the best chance of creating jobs that can't be outsourced," he said.Although Angelides' organization takes its name from the space program that put Americans on the moon, creating green jobs isn't rocket science, said Oakland activist Van Jones, author of "The Green Collar Economy."Jones said Obama's proposal to weatherize homes would pay for itself through energy savings while putting legions of unemployed construction workers back on the job. A $100-billion investment in a green recovery could create 2 million jobs within two years, a good chunk of them in retrofitting, according to a recent University of Massachusetts study. CLIP

 
Data Points: Investments In Clean Energy Soar (October 3, 2008 )
Governments, banks, and private investors around the world are furiously pumping capital into renewable energy, research and development, and clean energy manufacturing.Roughly $100 billion was invested globally in clean energy in 2007, continuing a steady trend of annual growth since 2001 ranging from 20 to 40 percent. Thanks to the rapid development of American clean energy technology and some progress in state and federal policies, about a third is being invested in American-made renewable energy tools, equipment, and practices. "Building a new energy economy requires a new way of doing business in America, one that takes the cost of global warming into account, "The New Apollo Program says. "It also requires visionary new investments in our industries, our communities, and our workers." (...) A primary facet of the program would make buildings more energy efficient. Homes, commercial buildings and factories account for almost 70 percent of U.S. energy consumption. Three-quarters of U.S. buildings will be new or substantially renovated by 2035. Using an Energy Smart Fund, the plan would funnel money to state and local programs focused on making these buildings more efficient, prioritizing those programs that create high-quality, local jobs in the construction industry. Every $10 billion invested in efficiency upgrades would create 100,000 on-site jobs and hundreds of thousands more jobs throughout the economy. CLIP Much more to discover through http://apolloalliance.org

 
Zimbabwe Cholera Deaths Climb to 1,778, UN Health Agency Says  - CONTINUING SILENT TRAGEDY!
Jan. 8 (Bloomberg) -- The death toll from a cholera outbreak in Zimbabwe rose to 1,778 after 35,931 people were infected with the bacterium, the World Health Organization said. At least 709 people were admitted to hospital yesterday suffering from the disease, the Geneva-based organization said in an e-mailed statement today. Cholera causes profuse watery diarrhea and vomiting that can lead to fatal dehydration and shock. Zimbabwe, ruled by President Robert Mugabe since 1980, has had a decade of economic recession and its health, sewage and water systems have collapsed. The cholera outbreak has been fueled by a lack of safe drinking water and medical supplies, and poor sanitation, the World Health Organization said on Dec. 26. CHECK all the latest news on the dire situation in Zimbabwe. NOTE: I was spurred to check the latest on Zimbabwe after receiving this email from Judith Taylor (Judith@softwareafrica.co.za) : "I am concerned but not unreasonably, that Zimbabwe's cholera crisis is no mentioned [in your latest compilations].  I do understand that what is going on in Gaza is far more violent, however, we now have over a thousand deaths there plus more in other adjacent countries.  Robert Mugabe and his dear wife Grace have gone on holiday to the East, possibly to get away for the smell of death and sewerage. SADC sits on its thumbs, the AU does too. SA is doing stuff all and people died horribly of a disease that is very curable. Zimbabwe police today arrested 200 shop keepers and business men for selling their goods in foreign currency.  Zimbabwean nurses earn 14 US$ a MONTH!  I won't go on to the DRC or any where else. Ghana has had a free and fair election!  Africa is changing but she needs a great kick up the bum or lots of love to get it all right!"

 
Forecast for 2009 (December 28th, 2008)
There are two realities "out there" now competing for verification among those who think about national affairs and make things happen. The dominant one (let's call it the Status Quo) is that our problems of finance and economy will self-correct and allow the project of a "consumer" economy to resume in "growth" mode. This view includes the idea that technology will rescue us from our fossil fuel predicament -- through "innovation," through the discovery of new techno rescue remedy fuels, and via "drill, baby, drill" policy. This view assumes an orderly transition through the current "rough patch" into a vibrant re-energized era of "green" Happy Motoring and resumed Blue Light Special shopping.The minority reality (let's call it The Long Emergency) says that it is necessary to make radically new arrangements for daily life and rather soon. It says that a campaign to sustain the unsustainable will amount to a tragic squandering of our dwindling resources. It says that the "consumer" era of economics is over, that suburbia will lose its value, that the automobile will be a diminishing presence in daily life, that the major systems we've come to rely on will founder, and that the transition between where we are now and where we are going is apt to be tumultuous.My own view is obviously the one called The Long Emergency. (...) 2009 may be the point where we begin to understand what kinds of places will be more hospitable to human society further ahead. I maintain that our giant urban metroplexes have way overshot their sustainable scale and will contract severely. With all the economic hardship, we ought to expect a lot of demographic churning, people leaving hopeless places and moving on to something more promising. I believe we will see them move to smaller towns and smaller cities. The reorganization of the rural landscape into smaller-scaled farms has not begun to occur -- though 2009 might be very hard on agribusiness, given the shortage of capital and if oil begins to march up in price by late winter. Eventually, the rural landscape will require the labor of many more people than is currently the case. Whatever else happens, 2009 will surely see a massive return to home gardening as budgets become strained to the extreme. As the New Urbanist Andres Duany said recently, "Gardening is the new Golf!" CLIP

 
Rays of Rash? (January 4th, 2009) 23 min Video Must Watch! Incandescent light bulbs will be banned in Canada in 2012 and we will be stuck will only the mercury-laden new compact fluorescent light bulbs
We're told every bulb we switch will help save energy and the planet, but could the new compact fluorescent lightbulbs be damaging our skin? The issue is ultraviolet radiation, and officials at Health Canada tell 16x9 that, "there may be skin sensitivity issues, especially in people with certain skin diseases," but they wouldn't provide us with their findings. So how much UV radiation are they giving off? 16x9 goes to London, England to find out. They may be environmentally friendly, but health experts continue to raise concerns about new fluorescent light bulbs. In part two of a 16:9 investigation, Allison Vuchnich explores whether there's a link between these bulbs and the triggering of migraine headaches in some people and that's not all. NOTE from Jean: Being in close contact with those new light bulbs for more than one hour CAN be dangerous as they cause skin rashes to people with sensitive skins and migraine headaches and MANY other symptoms in other people. One bulb in five emits an extremely HIGH level of ultraviolet radiations. There is NO warning about this problem anywhere! Once again Health Canada officials are not living up to their responsibility!! Light emitting diodes are apparently the really safe eco-friendly solution for the future...

 
Artificial light brings a large number of benefits to modern civilization, but there are some aspects which indicate that it is necessary to be careful with the selection of light sources. Energy efficiency plays the main role in recent discussions, but are the light sources with the highest performance also the most healthy ones? Mercury-based fluorescent light sources, including so called "energy saving bulbs" as well as white LEDs with high colour temperature hold a great potential to interact with the human endocrine and circadian system, which can be detrimental for health under long term conditions. Since the complex light reactions in humans are now better understood, it is possible to select the spectral composition and electromagnetic properties of an artificial light source in order to avoid detrimental side effects and to achieve a maximum of positive effects on human health. (...) The question is, is it only sunlight which is responsible for the increasing incidence of age related macular degeneration, which is found in 30% of the population over 70 years of age in industrialized nations? These people stay 90% of their time inside buildings while under the influence of artificial light, which has to be taken into account as well. We indeed find that there is a large and increasing number of fluorescent light sources in our environment which produce high amounts of photo oxidative potent light, such as mercury vapor lamps with high color temperature, the back light of TFT computer screens and TV sets. The fluorescent lamp spectrum does not contain significant amounts of long wave radiation such as deep red or near infrared. A number of experiments with wavelength > 650 nm have shown that they have the potential to repair the oxidative damage caused by blue and violet light on cellular levels. Again - if we compare the spectral constitution of energy saving lamps and other fluorescent light sources with the incandescent lamp spectrum, the latter shows clear advantages in terms of better vision and retinal protection and repair. - More on this important issue through http://www.international-light-association.eu/page4/page4.html - Recommended by André Fauteux (info@21esiecle.qc.ca) who has published related material in his excellent French magazine La Maison du 21e siècle in the following article: Fluocompactes : sources d'électropollution nocives pour les hypersensibles

 
Senate Boosts Wilderness Protection Across US (11 January 2009)
In a rare Sunday session, the Senate advanced legislation that would set aside more than 2 million acres in nine states as wilderness. Majority Democrats assembled more than enough votes to overcome GOP stalling tactics in an early showdown for the new Congress. Republicans complained that Democrats did not allow amendments on the massive bill, which calls for the largest expansion of wilderness protection in 25 years. But Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and other Democrats said the bill - a holdover from last year - was carefully written and included measures sponsored by both Republicans and Democrats.
 
World's First Wave Farm now Generating Power for 1,500 Homes (January 7, 2009)
There's power in them thar waves! That's why Portugal built Agucadoura, the world's first wave farm off its coast, consisting of three Wave Energy Converters generating a total of 2.25MW. CLIP
 
Mystery Roar from Faraway Space Detected (07 January 2009)
LONG BEACH, Calif. -- Space is typically thought of as a very quiet place. But one team of astronomers has found a strange cosmic noise that booms six times louder than expected. The roar is from the distant cosmos. Nobody knows what causes it. (...) The signal is measured to be six times brighter than the combined emission of all known radio sources in the universe. For now, the origin of the signal remains a mystery. "We really don't know what it is,"said team member Michael Seiffert of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. And not only has it presented astronomers with a new puzzle, it is obscuring the sought-for signal from the earliest stars. But the cosmic static may itself provide important clues to the development of galaxies when the universe was much younger, less than half its present age. Because the radio waves come from far away, traveling at the speed of light, they therefore represent an earlier time in the universe. CLIP
 
Extinct Animals Could be Brought Back to Life (8 Jan 2009)
(...) There is no chance of bringing back the dinosaurs because genetic information is unlikely to survive more than a million years in any environment. But scientists have just announced they had "resurrected" a gene from the Tasmanian tiger by implanting it in a mouse and examined its function - the first time such a feat had been achieved. The genomes of several extinct species besides the mammoth are already being sequenced. To revive a long-dead species scientists would have to recover enough DNA from a well-preserved specimen and find a suitable surrogate species similar to that of the extinct animal in which to grow the new baby from an embryo. CLIP
 
Billions face food shortages, study warns (9 January 2009)
Half of the world's population could face severe food shortages by the end of the century as rising temperatures take their toll on farmers' crops, scientists have warned.Harvests of staple food crops such as rice and maize could fall by between 20% and 40% as a result of higher temperatures during the growing season in the tropics and subtropics. Warmer temperatures in the region are also expected to increase the risk of drought, cutting crop losses further, according to a new study. The worst of the food shortages are expected to hit the poor, densely inhabited regions of the equatorial belt, where demand for food is already soaring because of a rapid growth in population. A study in the US journal Science found there was a 90% chance that by the end of the century, the coolest temperatures in the tropics during the crop growing season would exceed the hottest temperatures recorded between 1900 and 2006. More temperate regions such as Europe could expect to see previous record temperatures become the norm by 2100."The stress on global food production from temperatures alone is going to be huge, and that doesn't take into account water supplies stressed by the higher temperatures," said David Battisti, at the University of Washington, who led the study. CLIP
 
The Frightening New Evidence Scientists Have Just Learned About Global Warming (January 13, 2009)
Scientists have found the first unequivocal evidence that the Arctic region is warming at a faster rate than the rest of the world at least a decade before it was predicted to happen.Climate-change researchers have found that air temperatures in the region are higher than would be normally expected during the autumn because the increased melting of the summer Arctic sea ice is accumulating heat in the ocean. The phenomenon, known as Arctic amplification, was not expected to be seen for at least another 10 or 15 years and the findings will further raise concerns that the Arctic has already passed the climatic tipping-point towards ice-free summers, beyond which it may not recover.
 
The Pacific Ocean Is Now "The Great Pacific Garbage Patch" (January 8, 2009)
Most people do not realize that our reckless polluting has turned the Pacific Ocean into "the Great Pacific Garbage Patch" which is a "plastic soup" of trash, plastic, garbage and human waste an area about twice the size of the continental United States that stretches from Hawaii to Japan.We are literally destroying the Pacific Ocean and the situation is getting rapidly worse every single hour of every single day.Someday historians will look back on our time and will refer to us as "those crazy Plastic People".We take things like plastic and nylon and polyester for granted today. But look at what we have done.This "garbage vortex" occupies a large and relatively stationary region in the north Pacific Ocean and it is filled with millions of pounds of our trash, most of it plastic. It is the largest landfill in the world, and it floats in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. It is estimated that the Great Pacific Garbage Patch contains over 100 million tons of debris. One of the most frightening things about all of this is that plastic does not biodegrade. That means that it just sits there and all of the new garbage that comes along daily just adds to the problem.Just read what one organization is saying about the problem..... Much of our waste today is comprised of plastic that does not biodegrade. This waste accumulates in swirling seas of debris, where plastic to sea life ratios are 6:1; where birds and mammals are dying of starvation and dehydration with bellies full plastics; and fish are ingesting toxins at such a rate that soon they will no longer be safe to eat.It is roughly the size of Texas, containing approximately 3.5 million tons of trash. Shoes, toys, bags, pacifiers, wrappers, toothbrushes, and bottles too numerous to count are only part of what can be found in this accidental dump floating midway between Hawaii and San Francisco. How could we be so foolish as to turn our beautiful Pacific Ocean into a soup of plastic, trash and human waste? How could we be so destructive towards the wildlife of the planet?Just look at what we have done. Now we have an area about twice the size of the continental United States that we will NEVER be able to clean up, and the problem gets worse by the hour. How could we be so immoral and destructive? What could we possibly tell our children?
 
EMF-Omega-News 10. January 2009
Make sure to read  French government bans advertising of mobiles to children below..

 
Fears Mount of Gaza Conflict Spillover in Europe (Jan 6, 2009)
Government officials and Jewish leaders are concerned the conflict in Gaza may spill over into violence in Europe, with attacks reported against Jews and synagogues in France, Sweden and Britain. Assailants rammed a burning car into the gates of a synagogue in Toulouse, in southwest France, Monday night. A Jewish congregation in Helsingborg, in southern Sweden, was attacked Monday night by someone who 'broke a window and threw in something that was burning,' said police spokesman Leif Nilsson. And on Sunday slogans, including 'murderers ... You broke the cease-fire,' were daubed on Israel's Embassy in Stockholm.
 
Israeli atrocities in Gaza: a political impasse and moral collapse (January 8, 2009)
The premeditated slaughter yesterday of innocent men, women and children sheltering in the UN-run al-Fakhora school in Gaza is a war crime for which the Israeli government and military general staff are directly responsible. As atrocity piles on atrocity, it is clear that the Israeli military is using Hamas's rocket attacks as the pretext for terrorising and subjugating the entire Palestinian population. (...) Today's Financial Times reported that at least 115 of the casualties have been children. Thousands more have been deeply traumatised by the terrifying experience of constant bombing as well as the lack of electricity, running water, food and sanitation. "Even before the Israeli attacks began," the article explained, "some 50,000 children were suffering from malnutrition in Gaza, amid the crippling blockade of the territory. This number 'could be increased by thousands,' warned Isama Damo, who works in Gaza with the human rights group, Save the Children. Many grocery stores have shut and fresh food such as milk, cheese and fruit is scarce."The targetting of the al-Fakhora school exposes the lie used by Israel and its apologists to justify its war against the Palestinian people as an act of "self defence". The Israeli army is engaged in a desperate attempt to destroy the capacity of Palestinians to resist in any way their decades-long oppression. When Israeli officials denounce Hamas as "terrorists", their vitriol is in reality directed at the million and a half impoverished people crushed into the narrow strip of land known as Gaza. (...) The perspective at the heart of the assault on Gaza's population was spelled out in a letter written in 2007 by former Sephardi chief rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu to Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, calling for the carpet bombing of the entire area. As reported in the Jerusalem Post, Eliyahu wrote that the population as a whole was morally responsible for failing to halt the rocket attacks on Israeli territory. His son, also a prominent rabbi, told the newspaper that the Israeli air force had to kill "whatever it takes to make them stop"-a 100, a 1,000, 10,000, 100,000, even a million.These comments recall nothing so much as the methods of collective punishment employed by the Nazis during World War II in an effort to end resistance to their rule throughout Europe. They reflect the complete perplexity in Israeli ruling circles and the political dead-end that has been reached in the Zionist project as a whole. Israel's desperate attempt to use overwhelming military force to suppress Palestinian opposition in Gaza can only lead further into the morass. One can only ask what comes next: the forcible expulsion of all Arabs from Israeli territory? The US government's blocking of a ceasefire has given the green light for the Israeli military to escalate its attacks. CLIP
 
Chavez Boots Israeli Ambassador (01/07/2009)
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has ordered the expulsion of the Israeli Ambassador to Venezuela in a show of solidarity with the civilians suffering under the Israeli assault on the densely populated strip. Chavez previously called on Venezuelan Jews to speak out over the 'murderers' in Tel Aviv saying "Now I hope that the Venezuelan Jewish community speaks out against this barbarism. Do it. Don't you strongly reject all acts of persecution?" He also said that if the world had any conscience both the Israeli President and US president would stand before an International court to answer for themselves over Gaza. He also called the IDF cowards "bombing innocent people."
 
Ecuador accuses Israel of crimes against humanity (01.07.09)
'World is horrified by Israeli military offensive against Palestinian people,' says country's legislative commission. "A large number of the victims are women and children, which raises the issue of state-sponsored terrorism and (constitutes) a crime against humanity," the resolution said.
 
Gaza Horror: Large Photo Gallery of Gaza Massacre by Israel
ANALYSIS / Israel must prepare to turn its military might from Gaza to Iran (03/01/2009)
(...) Gaza is a far simpler sector than Lebanon - narrow, short, bounded, flat and exposed - and even though there too explosive charges, anti-tank ambushes and suicide terrorists are waiting, in Golani they are describing it as more of a company-level war game than a brigade maneuver. What they are aspiring to achieve in Gaza is just what was accomplished in Lebanon: a situation where even if Hamas/Hezbollah is left at the end of the fighting with rockets, it won't dare fire them. If no Qassam is launched from Gaza for two and a half years, then they will see this as a major achievement, in the hope that the public that became embittered by the results of the Lebanon war will respond with satisfaction this time. The austerity of the planners of the current operation suggests that they are aspiring to a certain, realistic degree of success, at the price of a diplomatic defeat: acceptance of Hamas rule in Gaza, both in terms of relinquishing the idea of getting rid of it, and in negotiating with it on an agreement that will lead to the end of the operation, before the price in IDF casualties and to civilian locales inside Israel, on the eve of an election, starts to become too heavy.  (...)  the IDF must move quickly to disengage, in order to free its attention for the paramount task of preparing a military blow to Iran, if diplomacy and deterrence fail. As long as the great threat of Iranian power is hovering, the smaller threats of Hezbollah and Hamas that derive from it will not be dispelled. Cast lead, heavy as it may be, is still easier to digest than enriched uranium.
 
Jewish Women Occupy Israeli Consulate in Toronto (January 8, 2009)
A diverse group of Jewish Canadian women are currently occupying the Israeli consulate at 180 Bloor Street West in Toronto. This action is in protest against the on-going Israeli assault on the people of Gaza. The group is carrying out this occupation in solidarity with the 1.5 million people of Gaza and to ensure that Jewish voices against the massacre in Gaza are being heard. They are demanding that Israel end its military assault and lift the 18-month siege on the Gaza Strip to allow humanitarian aid into the territory.Israel has been carrying out a full-scale military assault on the Gaza Strip since December 27, 2008.  (...) Protesters are outraged at Israel's latest assault on the Palestinian people and by the Canadian government's refusal to condemn these massacres. They are deeply concerned that Canadians are hearing the views of pro-Israel groups who are being represented as the only voice of Jewish Canadians. The protesters have occupied the consulate to send a clear statement that many Jewish-Canadians do not support Israel's violence and apartheid policies. They are joining with people of conscience all across the world who are demanding an end to Israeli aggression and justice for the Palestinian people.
 
Protest Against Israel At Associated (January 8, 2009)
Three groups - Baltimore Palestine Solidarity, the local chapter of Tikkun, and Food Not Bombs - held a demonstration yesterday afternoon, Jan. 7, outside of the downtown headquarters of the Associated: Jewish Community Federation of Baltimore.Organizers said around 25-30 protesters stood at the corner of Maryland and Mount Royal avenues to voice their opposition to Israel's military campaign against Hamas in the Gaza Strip. (...) "We think the [organized] Jewish community needs to know that a lot of Jews don't support what Israel is doing right now," she said. "It doesn't really matter what religion you are, a human is a human. We're not speaking to the Jewish religion but to a social institution that supports Israel."While condemning attacks on towns and cities in southern Israel, she said the Jewish state was largely to blame for Hamas's actions since Israel's withdrawal from Gaza in 2005."Israel still controls [Gaza's] borders, the airspace, and there's no free trade," she said. "Gaza has never been independent. It's a concentration camp, or a prison, or whatever you want to call it. They don't have their own country, so they're shooting rockets." CLIP
 
Montreal Jews rally to support Israel (JANUARY 8, 2009)
Montreal's Jewish community rallied around Israel Thursday night, as the embattled state faced growing global calls for it to halt its incursions into Gaza. "I'm speechless," Israel's consul general in Montreal, Yoram Elron, said at first as an energized, standing-room only crowd of about 1,000 cheered him on at Congregation Beth Israel Beth Aaron, a synagogue in Côte St. Luc.The welcome was heartening, he said, as Israel faced intense pressure to stop its attacks on Gaza, which have left nearly 770 Palestinians dead and more than 3,200 wounded since they began on Dec. 27.The attacks are justified, after eight years of assaults on Israel by Hamas terrorists, he said. CLIP
 
European Jews to hold rallies supporting Israel's Gaza offensive (09/01/2009)
Responding to daily anti-Semitic incidents and anti-Israel protests, Dutch and Belgian Jewry have decided to stage rallies to show their support for Israel in Operation Cast Lead in Gaza, along with British, German, Austrian and Italian sister-communities. One demonstration against Israel this week was attended by a Dutch legislator who called for "intifada" in order to "free Palestine."  CLIP
 
British Jews come out to support Israel (Jan 9, 2009)
Pro-Israel rallies will take place on Sunday in London's Trafalgar Square and in central Manchester Albert Square, after rival demonstrations sparked conflict outside the Israeli Embassy this week. Around 300 police were deployed at the embassy in London on Wednesday night to keep apart pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian demonstrators after the Jewish community staged a rally of support for Israel. CLIP
 
Israel's Gaza invasion provokes protests throughout Latin America (an. 07, 2009)
Opposition to Israel's invasion of the Gaza Strip is heating up throughout Latin America.Venezuela has expelled Israel's ambassador. Guatemala and Colombia have called on Israel to stop fighting and begin immediate peace talks. Demonstrators in Argentina, El Salvador and Bolivia have condemned the invasion. Brazil is sending aid to victims."There is a tradition in Latin America of rejecting violence to solve any international conflict," said Adrian Bonilla, the director of the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences in Ecuador. "There is also a tradition of supporting the weakest country in a conflict since most Latin American countries have been part of the Third World network. Another factor is that Israel is a close ally of the United States." CLIP
 

 
100 Survivors Rescued in Gaza From Ruins Blocked by Israelis

Relief Agencies Fear More Are Trapped, Days After Neighborhood Was Shelled

By Craig Whitlock and Reyham Abdel Kareem - Washington Post Foreign Service
 
January 9, 2009
 
JERUSALEM -- Emergency workers said they rescued 100 more trapped survivors Thursday and found between 40 and 50 corpses in a devastated residential block south of Gaza City that the Israeli military had kept off-limits to the International Committee of the Red Cross for four days.
 
Relief agencies said they feared more people remained in the rubble of several shattered houses in the Zaytoun neighborhood. Red Cross officials said that they began receiving distress calls from people in the houses late Saturday but that they were blocked by the Israeli military from reaching the area until Wednesday.
 
"There are still people under demolished houses -- we are sure of it," said Khaled Abuzaid, an ambulance driver for the Red Cross who treated survivors at the site Wednesday and Thursday. "But without water or electricity, we are sure they will die."
 
In an interview at al-Quds Hospital, a Red Cross medical center in Gaza, Abuzaid said rescue workers found 16 bodies Wednesday in a large room of a house in Zaytoun: seven women, six children and three men, all members of the al-Samuni family.
 
Most had sustained trauma injuries from shelling, but many had gunshot wounds as well, he said. Four children, weak but alive, were found lying under blankets, nestled next to their dead mothers, Abuzaid said. Red Cross officials had said earlier that 12 adult bodies had been found in the house but otherwise corroborated Abuzaid's account.
 
Abuzaid said he was part of a crew of 10 paramedics and other rescue workers who reached Zaytoun on Wednesday afternoon, during a three-hour break in combat operations in Gaza during which relief agencies were allowed to deliver supplies and medical care to stricken Gazans.
 
He said Israeli soldiers told the crew of Red Cross and Palestinian Red Crescent workers in advance that they were forbidden to take cameras, radios or cellphones to the site. It is standard practice for crews to carry such equipment on rescue missions.
 
The Red Cross has accused the Israeli military of repeatedly refusing to grant permission for ambulances to go to Zaytoun, even though soldiers were stationed outside the damaged houses and were aware people were wounded inside. In a statement issued early Thursday, the agency called the episode "unacceptable" and said the Israeli military had "failed to meet its obligation under international humanitarian law to care for and evacuate the wounded."
 
The Israeli military said it was investigating but declined to respond to specific allegations by the Red Cross. "This is a complaint, and we have to check it," said reserve Brig. Gen. Ilan Tal, an Israeli military spokesman.
 
The United Nations also pressed Israel to investigate the Red Cross allegations. John Holmes, chief of U.N. humanitarian aid programs, called the Zaytoun deaths "a particularly outrageous incident." "What they found was absolutely horrifying," he said at a news conference in New York.
 
B'Tselem, the Israeli human rights group, said residents of Zaytoun who had been trapped in other houses have given similar accounts of how Israeli soldiers were aware of their plight but refused to allow rescue workers into the neighborhood. "What these family members say consistently is that the IDF was close by," said Sarit Michaeli, a spokeswoman for the group, referring to the Israel Defense Forces. "This wasn't some remote area. The soldiers certainly were about and were aware of their position."
 
Access to Zaytoun, near a major north-south road that bisects Gaza, remained highly restricted Thursday. Red Cross and Red Crescent crews were allowed back to the site during another three-hour break in the fighting, evacuating 103 people who had been trapped for days without food and water, according to Anne-Sophie Bonefeld, a Red Cross spokeswoman in Jerusalem. Other relief officials said the people rescued Thursday were crammed inside three houses on the same block as the Samunis' house.
 
Two surviving members of the Samuni family said dozens of their relatives in the area had been rounded up by the Israeli military early Sunday and ordered to stay inside a handful of houses while soldiers conducted operations door-to-door. They said some people died in the shelling, which left a gaping hole in the roof of the Samuni home.
 
On Friday, the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said it had confirmed the account of what happened to the Samuni family. Calling it "one of the gravest incidents" in Gaza since the start of the fighting, the U.N. said Israeli soldiers had packed about 110 Palestinians into the house Sunday, then "shelled the home repeatedly" 24 hours later.
 
The U.N. said about 30 people were killed inside. It said three children, the youngest five months old, died after reaching a hospital.
 
Survivors of the fighting in Zaytoun remained scattered at hospitals across Gaza on Friday, and Red Cross officials said they were trying to account for their whereabouts and medical condition. The Israeli military has barred foreign journalists from entering Gaza.
 
"It was horrible," said Shifaa Samuni, 70, who was detained in the family's house but fled with her grandson Monday afternoon after the killings. She said two of her sons and three daughters-in-law were among the dead.
 
"Look how much I lost," she said at al-Quds Hospital, where she was receiving treatment for minor injuries, including wounds to her hands. "Why? We did nothing. We are a peaceful family."
 
Ahmad Talal Samuni, 23, said the neighborhood came under heavy shelling and helicopter gunfire Saturday night. He said that when tanks approached, two of his uncles and their families, who lived nearby, rushed over to seek refuge in his home, about 45 people all told. The next morning, he said, fighting resumed and soldiers came to the house.
 
"They told us not to leave -- not by using loudspeakers, but by shooting," he said in a telephone interview from Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, where he was tending to other relatives. "The soldiers were shooting in the air and they told us to go east, in the direction of Salah Din Street."
 
The soldiers ordered the family into a large concrete house owned by another relative, Ahmad Samuni said. By then, about 70 people were gathered inside, he recalled. "The soldiers told us not to leave. . . . We were hungry. There was no milk for the babies, no medicine for the ill children."
 
Shortly before dawn Monday, three Samuni men decided to leave the house so they could gather other relatives and bring them back, said Meysa Fawzi Samuni, 19, a member of the family who survived the fighting and gave an extensive interview to B'Tselem. The group provided a written version of her statement to The Washington Post, but she could not be reached to independently confirm her account.
 
Meysa Samuni told B'Tselem that an explosion struck the doorway of the house as the three men prepared to leave, killing one of them. Moments later, a larger explosion on the roof rocked the house. She said she fell to the floor, covering her infant daughter with her body.
 
"Everything filled up with smoke and dust, and I heard screams and crying. After the smoke and dust cleared a bit, I looked around and saw 20-30 people who were dead, and about 20 who were wounded," Meysa Samuni said in her statement.
 
She said she was only slightly injured; her baby also survived but lost three fingers in the explosion.
 
After about 15 minutes, Meysa Samuni said she, her brother-in-law Musa and his two young sisters, Islam, 5, and Isra, 2, fled and knocked on the door of another relative's home nearby.
 
Israeli soldiers had already occupied the house, she said, and were guarding about 30 Palestinians inside, several of whom had been blindfolded.
 
Meysa Samuni said the soldiers seized Musa, tying his hands and blindfolding him. Another soldier gave first aid to Meysa and her infant, bandaging their hands and checking their pulses. The Israelis said the mother and daughter could leave.
 
"They ordered us to leave the house and we walked along the street about 400-500 meters" -- about a quarter-mile -- "until we found an ambulance," which took them to Shifa Hospital, where she later met a few relatives who had escaped the shelling on the house, she said in her statement. "As far as I know, the dead and the wounded who were under the ruins are still there."
 
Abdel Kareem reported from Gaza City. Special correspondent Samuel Sockol in Jerusalem contributed to this report.
 
Unconventional weapons used against Gazans
 
05 Jan 2009
 
By Akram al-Sattari, Press TV, Gaza
 
Doctor Mads Gilbert is a member of a Norwegian triage medical team present in the besieged Gaza Strip. The team has exposed that Israel has used depleted uranium weapons in its war on the impoverished territory which is home to 1.5 million Palestinians. He described the conditions inside Gaza in an exclusive Press TV interview.

Press TV: What can you tell about the uranium findings?

Dr. Mads Gilbert:The findings about the uranium I cannot tell you much about, but I can tell you that we have clear evidence that the Israelis are using a new type of very high explosive weapons which are called Dense Inert Metal Explosive (DIME) and are made out of a tungsten alloy.

These weapons have an enormous power to explode.

The power of the explosion dissipates very quickly and the strength does not travel long, maybe 10 meters, but those humans who are hit by this explosion, this pressure wave are cut in pieces.

This was first used in Lebanon in 2006, it was used here in Gaza in 2006 and the injuries that we see in Shifa [Hospital] now, many many of them I suspect and we all suspect are the effect of DIME weapons used by the Israelis.

On the long term, these weapons will have a cancer effect on those who survive. They will develop cancer we suspect. There has been very little research on this but some research has been among other places in the United States, which show that these weapons have a high tendency to develop cancer. So they kill and those who survive risk having cancer.

Press TV: And what do you have to say about this?

Dr. Mads Gilbert:All that is happening in Gaza here now is against international law, it is against humanity and I think it is against what it means to be a decent person. You don't treat other people like this. Even if you disagree with himŠ maybe even if you fight with them, you don't treat civilians, children and women like this.

And I have an appeal to the Israeli doctors and nurses. They are my colleagues. We belong to the same international community, the medical community. I wish that the good doctors and nurses in Israel tell their government to stop these atrocities. We cannot continue with this. We may differ in opinions, but you cannot treat the civilian Palestinian population in Gaza in this way.

Today, they were bombing in Gaza City; we received 150 wounded and more than 50 killed.
 
Press TV: Only at Shifa?!

Dr. Mads Gilbert:Yes, here in Shifa. I treated a ten-year-old boy. He had his whole chest filled with fragments from the bomb. On his lap was another person's leg that had been cut off. We resuscitated him and did everything we could do to save his life but he died between our hands.

This is such a terrible experience and behind the numbers that you report all the time, there are human beings, families, women, grandmothers, children. That is in fact the reality in this situation. Those who are paying the price for the Israeli bombardments now are the common people, the Palestinian people.

Half of the population in Palestine are below 15 years and 80 percent of the people in Gaza live below the level of poverty defined by the UN. Now they don't have food, they don't have electricity. It's cold they don't have warmth and in addition to that, they are killed.

This must be stopped.

Press TV How many people did you see that are effected by this weapon?

Dr. Mads Gilbert: Almost all of the patients we have received have these sever amputations. They seem to have been affected by this kind of weapon. Of course, we have many fragment injuries and burns but those who have got their limbs cut off, constitutes quite a large proportion.

You know we have a lot to do. Palestinian doctors, nurses and paramedics do an incredibly heroic job to save their people. Doctor Eric and I are just a small drip in the ocean, but we learn from them. Unfortunately, we don't have the time to do research, we have to save lives, but this question should be researched by the international community.
 
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Related articles:
 
Rights Group: Israel Uses Incendiary Bombs in Gaza (11 January 2009)
Human Rights Watch said Sunday that Israel's military has fired artillery shells with the incendiary agent white phosphorus into Gaza and a doctor there said the chemical was suspected in the case of 10 burn victims who had skin peeling off their faces and bodies. Researchers in Israel from the rights group witnessed hours of artillery bombardments that sent trails of burning smoke indicating white phosphorus over the Jebaliya refugee camp in northern Gaza. But they could not confirm injuries on the ground because they have been barred from entering the territory. CLIP
 
Israel 'using banned arms against Gazans' (8 January 2009)
Israel has been using phosphorus bombs, cluster ammunitions and banned arms against the civilian population of the Gaza Strip, a report says. After examining video footage of the military operation in Gaza, Turkish military analysts confirmed that such weapons have been used by the Israeli military in Gaza, the Today Zaman reported Thursday. Cluster bombs contain hundreds of bomblets, which can bring about a catastrophe when used in civilian areas. The bomblets often remain unexploded during the military operation and cause casualties thereafter. The United States, Russia, China, India, Pakistan and Israel have so far refused to sign an agreement to ban the use of cluster ammunitions. Journalists and medics also reported the use of white phosphorus shells by Israel in the Gaza offensive. The chemical can cause serious burns or death if it comes to contact with human skin.
 
Gaza victims' burns increase concern over phosphorus  (January 8, 2009)
Photographic evidence has emerged that proves that Israel has been using controversial white phosphorus shells during its offensive in Gaza, despite official denials by the Israel Defence Forces.There is also evidence that the rounds have injured Palestinian civilians, causing severe burns. The use of white phosphorus against civilians is prohibited under international law.The Times has identified stockpiles of white phosphorus (WP) shells from high-resolution images taken of Israel Defence Forces (IDF) artillery units on the Israeli-Gaza border this week. The pale blue 155mm rounds are clearly marked with the designation M825A1, an American-made WP munition. The shell is an improved version with a more limited dispersion of the phosphorus, which ignites on contact with oxygen, and is being used by the Israeli gunners to create a smoke screen on the ground. (...) British and American artillery units have stocks of white phosphorus munitions but they are banned as anti-personnel weapons. "These munitions are not unlawful as their purpose is to provide obscuration and not cause injury by burning," a Ministry of Defence source said. Mads Gilbert, a Norwegian war surgery specialist working in Gaza, told The Times that he had seen injuries believed to have resulted from Israel's use of a new "dense inert metal explosive" that caused "extreme explosions". He said: "Those inside the perimeter of this weapon's power zone will be torn completely apart. We have seen numerous amputations that we suspect have been caused by this."
 
Israel's Chemical Warfare
Explosive and Kinetic Weapons - Poison Gases
 
OVERVIEW: Israel's Use of Chemical Weapons
Development and deployment of chemical weapons by Israel, 1974-2004 -- Allegations that Israeli forces have used chemical and biological weapons date back to the War of 1948. In March 2003, the highly-respected BBC television network presented Israel's Secret Weapon, an investigation of Israel's development of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. The BBC reported: "The Israeli army has used new unidentified weapons. In February 2001 a new gas was used in Gaza. A hundred and eighty patients were admitted to hospitals with severe convulsionsŠ.Israel is outside chemical and biological weapons treaties and still refuses to say what the new gas was." (1) This report explores the reported development and deployment of chemical weapons by the government of Israel since 1974, paying particular attention to incidents since 2001 in which unidentified poison gas(es) and other chemicals were used against civilians in the occupied Palestinian territories. The documentation includes photos, videos, interviews, and reports by human rights organizations, the world press and independent researchers. We invite you to explore the evidence.
 
The Gaza Holocaust, Part One
The numbers below are already outdated as the number of killed Palestinians is edging towards 1000 - and it is certainly MUCH more in fact...
 
Forwarded by Mark Graffis (mgraffis@gmail.com)
 
750 Palestinians, FOUR Israelis. What is wrong with this picture?!?!
 
And after withholding food, medical and necessary supplies to life from the Gazans since Israel "pulled out" in 2005, and really for years long before that, we are supposed to believe people who set off a few homemade rockets after watching their own people starving to death in history's largest concentration camp are the terrorists???  Homemade rockets against an arsenal of skin-eating PHOSPHOROUS 100% cancer-causing depleted uranium bombs and the FOURTH largest military in the world?!  That's the US, Russia, China, and then Israel in that order--no one else--against rock-throwing kids!  Half of Gaza is under the age of 18!
 
I'll tell you what's wrong with this picture--Americans unwilling to stand up and demand a stop to this 60-year GENOCIDE all because the entire nation has been brainwashed by the media, the education system, the movies and so-called politically correct "social movements" to remain silent out of fear of being called a name!!!!!  Sticks and stones, people!  It's not anti-semitic to tell the truth--that's the lie!
 
We're brainwashed into feeling sorry for a country that has FOUR HUNDRED NUCLEAR WAR HEADS; we're brainwashed into feeling sorry for people who control our own world's most powerful government and every system of information and can ruin your life if you stand up to them.  We're brainwashed into thinking that people who point this out are racist, when the real racism is in reverse!  They are getting away with mass murder!  They do it by riding on your fears of even noticing, let alone speaking your minds.
 
Oh, by the way--Palestinians are semitic!  100%.  Not European; not Khazar; not descendants of Turks who raped Slavic women; not people who control all the international banks--I don't know who these other people are, but the real anti-semitism is the selfish fear of being falsely accused of it while these people kill the real ones.
 
You blame and wonder how the Germans could remain silent--you're experiencing it!  Right now, right this minute, as you're surfing the net, watching TV, paying your federal taxes to fully fund a foreign country that is based entirely upon genociding a pre-existing culture (sound familiar?) and has no separation of religion and state--absolutely UnAmerican--you're experiencing exactly how people are controlled into pretending genocide is not happening, and that thugs are the victims.  This is it.  This is how it's done.
 
Do something.  Say something.  At least contact congress.  http://www.visi.com/juan/congress/  You've got a phone, they've got numbers.  All you need is a CONSCIENCE to do it.
 
Tell them to stop being afraid of being called untrue names.  Tell them to stop letting AIPAC, the ADL and all those pro-Israel and anti-everybody-else organizations blackmail the rest of us into letting them kill, kill, kill, with your money, your government's weapons, your Caterpillar corporation's machines, and your elected officials.  Time to pull the plug on all of this.
 
And no religion is worth all this.  Christian?--you know who's ass Jesus is going to come kick?--Yours for choosing to be a blind coward--for lying to yourself.  If you're not fooling me, you're way not fooling God.  Didn't he say something about the MEEK inheriting the earth?  This isn't you--it's not the Israelis with their 4th most powerful military operation on the planet--it's the Palestinians.  The Palestinians.  Who are 20% Christian.  The starving, bombed out, terrorized, long-disarmed people who are at YOUR mercy--not the Israelis'--YOUR mercy.  The Israelis couldn't do all this without you.  They couldn't kill 200 to one without YOU.  Who would Jesus stand up for?  The MEEK--not YOU.  The rock-throwers--not the mighty people funding massacring machines, carpet-bombing an area the size of Washington DC.
 
Stop being afraid of being called names and stop assuming that other people who are called those names are what they are called--they are not.  They are telling the truth. They've been yelling the truth and you let lies and the twisting of information from that little brainwash box tell you what to think about them--all lies.
 
What is the truth?  750 Palestinians and FOUR Israelis--that's the truth--and that's the way it's been for over 60 years.
 
When the Palestinians are all dead and gone, who will be their next victims? YOU?  Who will stand up for you if you don't stand up for Palestinians now?
 
Wendy
 
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Related articles:
 
The United States Promotes Israeli Genocide Against the Palestinians by Prof. Francis A. Boyle (Jan 10, 2009)
(...) As documented by Israeli historian Ilan Pappe in his seminal book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2006), Israel's genocidal policy against the Palestinians has been unremitting, extending from before the very foundation of the State of Israel in 1948, and is ongoing and even intensifying against the 1.5 million Palestinians living in Gaza.  Zionism's "final solution" to Israel's much touted "demographic threat" allegedly posed by the very existence of the Palestinians has always been genocide. Certainly, Israel and its predecessors-in-law-the Zionist agencies, forces, and terrorist gangs-have committed genocide against the Palestinian people that actually started on or about 1948 and has continued apace until today in violation of Genocide Convention Articles II(a), (b), and (c). (...) Rather than rein in the Israelis-which would be possible just by turning off the funding pipeline-the United States government, the U.S. Congress, and U.S. taxpayers instead support the "Jewish" state to the tune of about 4 billion dollars per year, without whose munificence this instance of genocide - and indeed conceivably the State of Israel itself - would not be possible.  What the world witnesses here is (yet another) case of "dishumanitarian intervention" or “"humanitarian extermination" by the United States and Israel against the Palestinians and Palestine.  In today's world genocide pays so long as it is done at the behest of the United States and its de jure or de facto allies such as Israel.  Of course miracles can always happen.  But I anticipate no fundamental change in America's support for the Israeli campaign of genocide against the Palestinians during the tenure of the Obama/Clinton administration

Gaza Slaughter Exposes Truth About Zionism (January 12, 2009)
(...) Indeed, it is remarkable that even though the US Senate just voted unanimous support for Israel many Americans probably still think the United States is not directly involved in the Gaza violence. Nothing could be further from the truth. The US is deeply involved. On December 28th, the US government used its UN Security Council veto to block the international community from ending the bloodshed. From that point the US was officially on record: openly supporting Israel's attacks. But US support long predates the recent crisis. Israel's refusal to negotiate with Hamas was only possible because of US diplomatic and military support dating back over many years. The US has used its UN veto on forty occasions, spanning almost four decades, to shield Israel from accountability. But for this the UN would have intervened to resolve the conflict, long ago. In which case Hamas would never have come into existence and there would be peace in Palestine, today.US military assistance is also crucial. Israel is slaughtering the people of Gaza with US-made F-16s, US-made helicopter gun ships, and US-made bombs/ammunition. Other US-made equipment includes enormous Caterpillar bulldozers which the Israeli army uses to flatten Palestinian homes, often arbitrarily, even entire neighborhoods. (...) Uncritical US support for Israeli-style Apartheid has thus placed the United States on the wrong side of history, an ugly reality that ought to be a source of concern, indeed, of alarm, for each and every American. At issue is the racist nature of the Zionist enterprise, and it's long past time that we call the thing by its true name.
 
You can't fool all the people all the time: Israeli propaganda takes international beating
 
Despite Israel's propaganda campaigns on Gaza conflict, world public opinion remains critical of Tel Aviv.

TEL AVIV - Israel has taken a battering in the global media battle over its war on Gaza, despite deploying a propaganda campaign that used Youtube and blogs, experts said.

Populations and even governments worldwide have slammed the Israeli military onslaught on the Gaza Strip, with UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon condemning attacks near UN schools that killed dozens and foreign media angry at being kept out of the Palestinian territory.

With images of parents carrying lifeless children to overwhelmed hospitals dominating international media, angry protests have been staged in major capitals and Israeli websites have reportedly come under cyber attack.

European Union External Relations Commissioner Benita Ferrero-Waldner told President Shimon Peres in a meeting on Tuesday that "Israel's image is being destroyed" by its refusal to heed appeals for a ceasefire.
Hamas has been largely shunned by western media, but its plight - as the legitimate representatives of the Palestinian people in Gaza, the West Bank and even in East Jerusalem - is recognized by much of the world. .

Israel has sought to blame Hamas for its attacks on Gaza, ignoring the fact that Hamas was democratically elected by the Palestinians and that the people in Gaza know very well that Israel is the party behind their suffering.

But that fact is not commonly known in the West, where Israeli propaganda enjoys a large influence.

Israeli military spokeswoman Major Avital Liebovich and Israeli ambassadors have joined the television battle.

The defence ministry in Tel Aviv has posted videos of Israeli air strikes on Youtube, and the government has also tried to spur debates on Facebook.
 
But both sites are also a favorite of peace and humanitarian activists condemning Israeli policies long before Israel's new offensive.

The Israeli consulate in New York this week organised a Twitter social networking debate on the merits of the war which drew more than 2,500 bloggers.

 
But blogs are the last place Israeli propaganda is expected to prevail, where they have long been used as a platform to expose Israeli crimes.

Israel says it will not let world public opinion sway the decision whether to call a ceasefire in the conflict that has left more than 680 Palestinians dead since December 27 -- a third of them children.

According to the president's office, Peres replied to Ferrero-Waldner: "We are not in the business of public relations or improving our image."

But experts say Peres tells a lie as Israel is doing all it can to present its war on the besieged Palestinian population in Gaza as an act of "self defense".

Israel last year had hired a British public relations firm that had worked with Lebanon and the Northern Ireland governments on their image, experts say.

The Israelis "are the ones who have a grip on communications," said Dominique Wolton, a specialist on media at France's National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) in Paris.

"But Israel will not win the communications battle because whatever Israel's legitimate rights are, the unbalanced use of force and the unleashing of violence by Israel is acting against it.

"The Palestinians are not saying a lot. Israel has a grip on the communications and Israel manages its very well," Wolton commented. "The word 'terrorist' is systematically linked to Palestinians."

Charles Tripp, professor of Middle East politics at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London, said that in Europe, "the very powerful images of what's happening to civilians in Gaza must be having a greater impact than seeing Israeli spokesmen talking about the war on terror.

"In many ways, one of the main targets of the Israeli propaganda is Europe and the US, and I would have thought they're not doing too well there."
Meanwhile, two press rights groups Wednesday urged a media corridor in Gaza and called for Israel to allow journalists to work unfettered in the conflict zone.

Israel had blocked international journalists from entering Gaza. Israel had also bombed a Hamas-run TV station during its second day of raids against Gaza.
 
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Related article:
 
Mahathir blames US for Gaza war (January 6, 2009)
Mahathir said Israel was emboldened by continuous US support [EPA]Malaysia's former prime minister has blamed the US for backing Israeli military aggression against Palestinians in Gaza, saying it makes the US "much more guilty than even the Israelis".Mahathir Mohamad, long known for his anti-West views, on Monday said that no matter how clever or powerful Israel was it would not be able to carry out the offensive without US support."The backing by the US gives it encouragement to do all these things which I think ordinary Americans would not like to see them do," Mahathir said in an interview with Al Jazeera. CLIP

 
Is the Gaza Catastrophe Really About Natural Resources?

January 8, 2009
 
Israel's official war aim is difficult to take seriously. -- Israel claims it is fighting in Gaza to stop Hamas rocket-fire against Israel, the continuation of which constituted a flagrant breach of the six-months ceasefire. Hence, the objective of the military operation is limited by the aim of putting an end to the rocket-fire. In fact, the current outbreak of violence cannot be understood without analyzing the asymmetries in military violence between the two parties; the dynamic structure of the conflict in the context of the character of the Israeli occupation; the central role of recent discoveries of substantial natural gas reserves in Gaza; and joint Anglo-American and Israeli attempts to monopolize the lucrative (and strategic) energy resources through a political process tied to a corrupt Palestinian Authority run by Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah Party.Hamas' unprecedented victory in democratic elections in 2006 fundamentally threatened these plans. Operation Cast Lead, the concurrent Israeli military venture, was operationalized as a war plan in early 2008, and already finalized in detail as far back as 2001 by Israeli military intelligence. Its execution in late December 2008 into January 2009 is designed to head-off not only domestic Israeli elections, but more significantly, the outcome of further incoming Palestinian democratic elections likely to consolidate Hamas' power, to permanently shift the balance of geopolitical and economic power in its favor. The long-term goal is the "cantonization" of the Occupied Territories making way for increased Israeli encroachment, and ultimately the escalation of Palestinian emigration. Disproportionate Violence -- 700: 4 - Who bears primary responsible for the violence? You decide. Nearly 700 Palestinians are dead, and 3,000 Palestinians injured. At least 13,000 civilians -- half of them children -- have been forced to flee their homes, now turned to rubble. (Save the Children Alliance, 02.01.09) Israeli human rights groups, like B'Tselem (The Israeli Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories) based in Jerusalem, confirm that the Israeli military is committing war crimes by intentionally targeting the civilian population in Gaza.
 

(...) This barely scratches the surface of what has been done. Other Israeli human rights groups, UN agencies, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, Save the Children, along with dozens of other credible independent organizations confirm that Israeli forces are indiscriminately targeting the entire Palestinian civilian population, blowing up residential areas, destroying power plants, bombing sewage facilities, annihilating hospitals, pummeling roads, all into bloody rubble. Compare the hundreds of Palestinians killed, thousands injured, and tens of thousands made homeless, to the fact that only 4 Israelis have been killed due to Hamas rocket-attacks since the outbreak of conflict in December. (...) over the last 7 years of conflict, a grand total of 14 Israelis were killed by Hamas' rocket-fire, compared to an estimated 5,000 Palestinians killed by Israeli forces with advanced American and British-supplied military equipment (Guardian, 30.12.08)

Given the growing weakness of Abbas and the increasing popularity of Hamas, it was far from likely that the PA would be able to forestall elections until January 2010, as it had wanted to, without severe recriminations and domestic opposition. Both presidential and parliamentary elections were therefore likely in 2009, and would have allowed Hamas to consolidate its power in the Occupied Territories. Israeli military and policy planners clearly recognized that this would create significant difficulties for Israel's own plans for the Occupied Territories. A decade back, the British the oil firm BG International discovered a huge deposit of natural gas just off the Gaza coast, containing 1.2 trillion cubic feet of gas valued at over $4 billion. Controlling security over air and water around Gaza, Israel quickly moved to negotiate a deal with BG to access Gaza's natural gas at cheap rates.  The incentives for Israel are obvious -- as the Telegraph reports: "Israel's indigenous gas fields -- north of the Gaza Marine field -- could run out within a few years and the only other long-term source will be a pipeline from neighboring Egypt." The British Foreign Office, described the reserves as "by far the most valuable Palestinian natural resource."

CLIP - to read the entire article, please go at http://www.alternet.org/story/118039/is_the_gaza_catastrophe_really_about_natural_resources/?page=entire

Israeli Military Objectives

Pundits, slavishly quoting Israeli defense sources, claim that Israel is trying to stop the Hamas rocket-fire, and will keep the operation rolling until they believe that they have degraded Hamas military capabilities sufficiently so as to forever prevent Hamas from firing rockets at Israel again. Ever. Failing this, pundits tend to be confused about the scope of Israel's objectives, noting that the state aim is rather vague and intrinsically impossible to measure.

Given the preceding analysis, Israel's official war aim is difficult to take seriously. On the contrary, there is thus little doubt that Operation Cast Lead is aimed at obliterating Hamas as a viable source of politico-military resistance in the Palestinian Territories, paving the way for the "cantonization" of the latter under the erection of the corrupt Abbas-led PA, before imminent 2009 Palestinian elections could consolidate Hamas' socio-political entrenchment. The operation thus has two major objectives:

1) The short-term objective is to allow Israeli and Anglo-American unchallenged monopolization of the Gaza gas reserves, and continued apartheid-style domination of the Territories.

2) The long-term objective is to create permanent conditions facilitating Israel's re-encroachment on the Territories, encouraging Palestinian emigration and expulsion from their homes, and absorbing their remaining lands under renewed Israeli settler-colonization programs.
 
The war on Gaza is, therefore, a war on democracy; a war on the right of peoples to self-determination; a war on the right of peoples' to utilise their own resources for their own benefit. It continues and extends the policies of repression and discrimination perpetrated by Israel in the Occupied Territories since 1948, when three quarters of a million Palestinians were forced from their homes, and hundreds massacred, by Israeli forces in the Nakba (Catastrophe). Since then, Israel has continued to violate UN resolutions, attempted to grab as much territory as possible from the Palestinians, denied them the right to statehood and self-determination, and instituted racist laws to deprive them of civil liberties and human rights. Even Israeli officials like Ami Ayalon, the retired head of Shin Bet, Israel's domestic security service, have condemned these policies as a form of "apartheid": "The things a Palestinian has to endure, simply coming to work in the morning, is a long and continuous nightmare that includes humiliation bordering on despairŠ We have to decide soon what kind of democracy we want here. The present model integrates apartheid and is not commensurate with Judaism." (Ma'ariv, 05.12.00)

Israel's illegal occupation of Palestine is supported by the U.S., Britain, and Western Europe, through financial aid, extensive supplies of arms and military equipment, diplomatic support. The global social justice movement needs to extend its support for Gaza far beyond marching and demonstrations, by pressuring media, government and civil society institutions to recognize that the Gaza crisis is an outcome of long-term policies that can only be understood in the context of recognizing the reality of Israel as a Setter-Colonial Apartheid regime sponsored by Anglo-American power.

Thus, the global social justice movement should look to widening and deepening public understanding of the origins of the current crisis in the contemporary conjuncture of the global imperial system. Yet just as South African apartheid required a massive international campaign of diplomatic and economic boycotting to bring it down, so too will the Israeli Settler-Colonial Apartheid regime require a comprehensive campaign of diplomatic and economic boycotts to weaken the nexus that ties Anglo-American power to Israel, and move toward a meaningful resolution of the conflict based on democracy and equality for Jews and non-Jews, together.

Where can we start, practically? An outstanding example is to call for the establishment of an International Criminal Tribunal for Israel (ICTI) under UN Charter Article 22, as has been advocated by the Islamic Human Rights Commission (IHRC), a London-based NGO with Special Consultative Status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council. As IHRC Chairman Massoud Shadjareh observed, "The setting up of such a tribunal is long-overdue, and is desperately needed to address the war crimes perpetrated not only in the current attacks on Gaza but in previous campaigns against the Lebanese and Palestinians. The relevant procedures and precedents are in place. It is time for the UN to act if it hopes to regain a shred of credibility amongst the outraged peoples of the world." The IHRC's call for a tribunal resonates with numerous comments from independent experts on Israeli war crimes, such as Francis Boyle, Professor of International Law at the University of Illinois:

The establishment of ICTI would provide some small degree of justice to the victims of Israeli war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide against the Peoples of Lebanon and Palestine -- just as the ICTY has done in the Balkans. Furthermore, the establishment of ICTI by the U.N. General Assembly would serve as a deterrent effect upon Israeli leaders such as Prime Minister Olmert, Foreign Minister Livni, Defense Minister Barak , Chief of Staff Ashkenazi and Israel's other top generals that they will be prosecuted for their further infliction of international crimes upon the Lebanese and the Palestinians.

So here's something you can do to make the establishment of an ICTI a real possibility -- write to the UN General Assembly President, demanding the creation of an Israeli war crimes tribunal under UN Charter Article 22.
 
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Related articles:

 
War and Natural Gas: The Israeli Invasion and Gaza's Offshore Gas Fields (January 8, 2009)
The military invasion of the Gaza Strip by Israeli Forces bears a direct relation to the control and ownership of strategic offshore gas reserves. This is a war of conquest. Discovered in 2000, there are extensive gas reserves off the Gaza coastline. British Gas (BG Group) and its partner, the Athens based Consolidated Contractors International Company (CCC) owned by Lebanon's Sabbagh and Koury families, were granted oil and gas exploration rights in a 25 year agreement signed in November 1999 with the Palestinian Authority. The rights to the offshore gas field are respectively British Gas (60 percent); Consolidated Contractors (CCC) (30 percent); and the Investment Fund of the Palestinian Authority (10 percent). (Haaretz, October 21,  2007). The PA-BG-CCC agreement includes field development and the construction of a gas pipeline.(Middle East Economic Digest, Jan 5, 2001). The BG licence covers the entire Gazan offshore marine area, which is contiguous to several Israeli offshore gas facilities. (See Map below). It should be noted that 60 percent of the gas reserves along the Gaza-Israel coastline belong to Palestine.  The BG Group drilled two wells in 2000: Gaza Marine-1 and Gaza Marine-2. Reserves are estimated by British Gas to be of the order of 1.4 trillion cubic feet, valued at approximately 4 billion dollars. These are the figures made public by British Gas. The size of Palestine's gas reserves could be much larger.

AlterNet Commenters Share Their Anger at the Killing and Atrocities in Gaza (January 10, 2009)
http://www.alternet.org/rights/118630/alternet_commenters_share_their_anger_at_the_killing_and_atrocities_in_gaza/?page=entire
As global conflicts go, emotions always run exceptionally high over the question of Israel and Palestine, so it came as no surprise that AlterNet readers have a lot to say about the current crisis in Gaza. The anger and frustration -- over the inaction of U.S. politicians, the failure of the corporate media to honestly portray the conflict, over Hamas's rockets and the Israeli subjugation of the Palestinian people, and over the slaughter of hundreds of innocent civilians -- is palpable. A good deal of the comments posted in response to our Gaza coverage have focused on which side is to blame. But many others grapple with the harder questions of how to end this intractable conflict, what the appropriate response should be from Barack Obama, the roots of the prejudice that makes it possible to justify killing innocent civilians, and what the current bloodletting will produce down the line. Below is a collection of some of the more striking comments elicited by AlterNet's recent Gaza coverage CLIP

What You'd Know About Israel If You Watched Al Jazeera TV (January 9, 2009)
http://www.alternet.org/audits/118080/what_you%27d_know_about_israel_if_you_watched_al_jazeera_tv_/
DAMASCUS, Syria -- Throughout the 11 days of Israel's pummeling of Gaza, live coverage of the war hasn't made it into most American living rooms.That's because Israel, America's staunch ally, isn't allowing journalists to enter Gaza while Al Jazeera, called anti-American and pro-terrorist by many in Washington, is the only network broadcasting live images from Gaza to the world. The 350 reporters who descended on Israel when the conflict began are stuck at the border between Israel and Gaza. Israel says that opening border crossings to journalists would put their soldiers in danger, but many have accused them of trying to control the story. Instead of giving their viewers up-close pictorial evidence of what is occurring in Gaza, television networks have been restricted to showing their viewers plumes of smoke as they rise in the distance. But Al Jazeera, the Qatari network that has previously undergone attacks and had its reporters arrested by the U.S. military, remains typically defiant. While other networks are increasingly severed from Gaza as phone lines are cut and 75 percent of the territory is without electricity, Al Jazeera is bringing its approximately 140 million English- and Arabic-speaking viewers live images of bombings, tanks rolling through Gaza's farmland, and interviews with civilians and aid workers inside Gaza city. Like all of the networks, Al Jazeera gives constant hard-hitting interviews with politicians and analysts from Israel, the West Bank, and the rest of the Arab world. But while others can only balance pundits with more pundits, Al Jazeera has been taking the viewer to the scene to weigh the words of politicians against the reality on the ground. (...) While Al Jazeera might be the only channel reporting from inside Gaza, scores of channels across the Middle East are airing constant commentary as well as images of wailing women, dead children, and burning buildings on loop. On the Syrian satellite station Al-Sham, for example, a pro-Hezbollah series about Israel's occupation of south Lebanon was alternated with a 20-minute musical piece sung over images of dead babies, American soldiers kicking men in orange jumpsuits, a naked Arab man with a bag over his head running from American military dogs, stone-throwing Palestinian children, and endless footage of blood-soaked Palestinians and Iraqis. The song's chorus, "The heart of humanity has died. It died between us brothers. Maybe we forgot one day that all Arabs are brothers," reflects the deep anger that people are feeling toward the inaction of Arab governments here. By and large, media here is "all Gaza, all the time," and the more people see and hear about what is going on there, the angrier they seem to get.  (...) Meanwhile, the world's only live coverage of the tragedy is kept away from American eyes. While Al Jazeera English competes with CNN and BBC as one of the largest networks in the world, no major American cable provider has been willing to carry the channel since it launched in 2006. Some say cable providers are squeamish about working with a channel popularly perceived in the United States as giving airtime to terrorists.But Al Jazeera is finding its way around the problem. Today, Americans hungry for inside coverage of Gaza can download Livestation, a free program that will let viewers watch Al Jazeera English among other international networks. Defiant as always, Al Jazeera might break through another media blackout, and into American homes.

 
UN Wants to Know If War Crimes Were Committed in Gaza (January 9, 2009)
The UN high commissioner for human rights Friday called for an investigation of possible Israeli war crimes in Gaza as local residents told more gruesome tales about Israeli troops neglecting wounded civilians and the killing of unarmed Palestinians. (...) There was no sign that the conflict would end soon. Instead, Israeli leaders directed the military to intensify operations in Gaza, where about 800 Palestinians - nearly half of them women and children - have been killed in the past two weeks, according to Palestinian medical officials.In what the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs called "one of the gravest incidents" of the military operation, 30 Palestinians were reported killed when Israeli shells hit a home south of Gaza City that was filled with more than 100 residents who were trying to avoid the fighting.

Bush's Final Act: A Bloody War in Gaza (January 9, 2009)
http://www.alternet.org/audits/118102/bush%27s_final_act%3A_a_bloody_war_in_gaza/
George W. Bush was not going to leave the White House quietly. After eight days of relentless Israeli bombing of Gaza, he waved the green flag to Israel to invade the Gaza Strip. In his weekly radio address, Bush held Hamas responsible for the latest violence. And he proclaimed that "no peace deal would be acceptable without tougher action to prevent Hamas and other groups from receiving weapons". Hours later on January 3, Israeli tanks were rolling into the Gaza Strip.As the removals work in the White House, the conduct of George W. Bush in the last few days of his presidency shows that there is no change in him after eight years. He remains a hostage of his demons. His radio address is going to be remembered alongside television pictures of mutilated bodies of Palestinian children, beamed all over the world. The Bush presidency ends just as it began in 2001 - with war. A lot has happened in the intervening years. But the overpowering impression he leaves behind is that of a president who put political opportunism to most destructive use, wherever and however he could, to satisfy his own capriciousness and prejudices. With few exceptions, those in Congress in Washington and in other Western capitals simply caved in, because they did not want to be on the 'wrong' side. The cost of this failure has been horrendous. As Bush prepares for quieter pastures in Texas, he leaves much of the Middle East and South Asia burning. (...)

Campaign For Special Torture Prosecutor Takes Change.gov Site By Storm (January 9, 2009)
http://www.alternet.org/rights/118708/campaign_for_special_torture_prosecutor_takes_change.gov_site_by_storm/
The votes are in, and the top-ranked question -- out of 70,000 submitted to Obama's site -- asks for an investigation of torture and spying. (...) [T]he number one submission on the popular "Open for Questions" portion of the site might seem more than a little impolitic to [President Bush]: "Will you appoint a Special Prosecutor -- ideally Patrick Fitzgerald -- to independently investigate the gravest crimes of the Bush Administration, including torture and warrantless wiretapping," wrote Bob Fertik of New York, who runs the Web site, Democrats.com.Though the Obama team has promised to answer some of the top questions as early as this week, they have not said whether they will respond to Mr. Fertik's, which has received more than 22,000 votes since the second round of the question-and-answer feature began on Dec. 30. The site logged more than 1.5 million votes for 20,000-plus questions ... The second highest-ranked submission, which is about oversight of the nation's banking industry, is several thousand of votes behind the query about a special prosecutor.  CLIP

 
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15.

 
WITH THE VIOLENT UPHEAVALS GOING ON, HERE IS A VITAL PERSPECTIVE WE OUGHT TO ALWAYS REMEMBER. THERE IS GREAT HEALING AND SOUL OPENING FOR ANYONE TRULY LIVING BY THE HIGH STANDARD OF LOVING ACCEPTANCE, FROM A STANDPOINT OF ONENESS CONSCIOUSNESS, OFFERED HERE.

 

 
Open Letter to the Illuminati

By Ron Van Dyke (paradoxman@cfl.rr.com), Paradox Publications, December 10-12, 2008
 
It has been two weeks since I finished my article: Wow! We Did It! Immediately after writing that one, this one beckoned, calling out to be written. Still, I postponed and delayed the writing day after day for fourteen days. Now, I shall begin to writeŠwhat, exactly, I'm not sure. Things were much clearer then than now; yet I must write, encouraging the reader to go back and read the aforementioned article, since these go together.

Although none may read it anytime soon, this is a life-giving letter addressed to world leaders, visible and, especially, invisible; for indeed it is those in the invisible realms of our world that have long visualized complete control of the entire world and all that are in it. It is also this sphere of influence that grandly succeeded in convincing humanity that we are separate from the very Source of All That Is. In fact, All-That-Is is an appropriate word for Source, or what some call: Creator God. Every human has played a role in that accomplishment, no matter which side of the polarity has been experienced throughout time. It is my belief that we each have experienced both sides in a wide array of opposites. Whether that is true or not, we have all bit and been bitten by the demon of egocentric paranoia that sprouts in the fear-impregnated soil of the lie of separation, becoming the malignant tree we know as the polarized, modern culture of fear-based control.

However, oh illumined ones, it has been your bloodlines, carefully protected and hidden until quite recently in human affairs, that carried the plan forward from generation to generation into our day and age. How far back this has gone is, at best, a matter of speculation. Someday, the truth will be known; for, indeed, nothing can be ultimately hidden. There is no secret that shall not be revealed. Such is the reality of Light. You who have called yourselves Illuminati know this well; at least you should, though you seem to have forgotten it.

Lest anyone be uninformed, the Illuminati are, by far and large, Luciferians; and, as I said in the previously mentioned article, Lucifer was perhaps the biggest hero of all in creating, through The Lie, the perceived reality of separation. Make no mistake; it can only ever be a perceived realityŠnever Reality itself. Yet, my friends, you seem, as I said, to have forgotten that yourselves, acting, so it appears, as if you are on the very threshold of completing your vision of the total control of ignorance over Reality. However, all of your nefarious plans have already made their way into the consciousness of many humans. Now, that for which you have labored long and hard, pushing against the pricks of sanity itself, cannot come to pass. As soon as it began impinging on the awareness of more and more people-an exponential awakening indeed-your plan was doomed to failure. You always knew this would be the case, which is precisely why there has long been a concerted effort on your part to keep it all a secret from the masses. Of course, you failed! It is a secret no more!

Do you have any idea how your plan is being subverted and undermined? Being masters of force rather than those who appreciate and understand real power, I highly doubt it. To you, it has always been about the control of others, which you have seen as separate from yourselves. You believed your own lie! To continue such belief will prove fruitless, because we are learning the great truth that nothing and no one have ever been separate. This is precisely how your plan will fail: we embrace you as part of ourselves, connected, oh so connected in this game we have created together.
 

For so long you were vilified, maintaining our mutually agreed upon lie, as if we could become whole by rejecting you or any other part. Yes, we who called ourselves Lightworkers (as you call yourselves Illuminati) played your game of polarization. The fabricated unreality of divide-and-conquer divided and conqueredŠall of us, at least temporarily. No exceptions! Yes, me too! The lie grabbed me by the balls, and it still does at times, convincing me, through ignorance, that I am different, separate, and somehow justified above others. We all share in this egocentric paranoia, better known simply: as fear. We shall also all share in the combined wisdom, better known truly: as Love.

Yes, Illuminati, there's a part of me, the real me I suspect, that actually loves and appreciates you by loving and appreciating the part of me that you represent. That other self that plays dirty tricks, the shadow that hides from the Light of Truth, in me; these are my teachers, as you have been. Soon, the entire Cosmos will applaud you for playing your role so exquisitely well, as we did ours. As we are seeing, you too will see: there is ONLY Light. Darkness has no self-sustaining existence. It cannot. Neither can control be sustainable; for once the lies of separation are known-as in intimacy: to become one with-only Love exists. All that has been feared simply vanishes into a memory of a long-standing run on Broadway that spanned eons. With Love, the mechanisms of control are meaningless. Where is the other to be controlled?

You are amazing! I am amazing! We all are. What an incredible party awaits us-the one we are co-creating together. We are actually bringing the world to the realization of the absolute insanity of our distorted game. As we awaken from our jointly created nightmare; as we open our eyes and begin to see, really see the foolishness of lack in an abundant Universe of unlimited potential; and as we remember and recognize our ancient and mutual origin, how can we not celebrate? For each soul, it is a homecoming. The murderer embracing the murdered, raised from the illusory dead; the rich enriching the poor, and with genuine thanksgiving each appreciating the gift of experience that has been created; and all victims and victimizers dancing together in the streets.

Yes, I've read our prophecies of gloom and doom. We wrote them. That was the scenario we were creating as part of our game, our lie. It had to be that way to wake us up. We had to really believe we could destroy the world, and be on the verge of actually doing it, before we could wake upŠtogether.

It is said, and I've said it myself, that some will choose to stay in the delusion. (I cannot call it an illusion anymore, since that is not how I see it.) This may be the case for those who choose to remain insane. Still, I cannot imagine how any of you, my brothers and sisters of the Light, can choose, no, refuse to come home after such an arduous journey into never-never land. It may have been a thriller; but far from a blockbuster, it can only pale by comparison to the genuine thrill of being whole againŠfor the very first time. Oh yes, it will not be like the wholeness we could not appreciate before the lie succeeded so well, for so long. Thrill just doesn't do it justice. Ecstatic comes closer; and even that is but a shadow of the reality of bringing unity to a physical world for the first time everŠ.

That's what we are doing, you know. We became blind in creating a physical world, unable to see the connection that remained spiritual and invisible. We died in a world teeming with abundant life. We suffered in a world of exceedingly rich blessings. We did all of this, and more, by taking on the skin of physicality. Can you not see, hear, taste, smell, feel and know the joy, the absolute elation we will experience as we bring the eternal truth of the highest spiritual world into the so-called lowest of physical realms? It will literally be like transforming hell into Heaven itself...again, for the first time ever, anywhere.

Now I know, oh Illuminati, that you have your vision. I know, too, that your vision does not include people like me. I know that. It's ok. I have a greater vision; and mine does include youŠloved, appreciated, and understood. I can see the hero you are! My vision is stronger than yours, based as it is on Eternal Reality. How can I not love you when I can see that you are made of the same stuff as me? Fear has impregnated your cells just as it has mine; yet we both cry out from the depth of our being for the Love we knew in the beginning, before Creator allowed us to create our game. We were thereŠtogether, unaware that we could create that which was always thought impossible: something separate from Source, or at least the delusion thereof.

I am one piece of consciousness, vibrating at a rate even I do not yet fully comprehend. My vibration is a gift I receive to give, to flow. That's right. It does not originate with my separate self, my master, ego creator. It comes to me from the higher, everlasting part of me that has never been disconnected from the ultimate and essential part of you. Never! We really areŠONE!

Whereas the energy of separation and the delusion of the lie have been able to operate as our vital teacher, now the power of love reunites the apparent parts. This is the world we co-create, we, the illumined lightworkers who finally understand what Jesus taught: "Love your enemies!" Now, we have done the impossible again. We have recognized that our enemies were our friends all alongŠand we really do love you. Can you love us?

Things are clearer again, in this moment, for me. Thanks for letting me share my Open Letter with you.

Namaste

Afterthought: Just think: What kind of a world could we create together by simply loving and respecting one another? What a legacy that would be to leave for all of our children! A real future where life is a joy is one we can manifest now, if we are only willing to stop the insanity of the game we created as a cosmic experiment.

 
Note from Jean: If you liked this article, give a look at Ron's other inspired articles at http://www.metagroups.info/Ron%27sArticles.htm

 
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16.

 

 
Obama Predicted To Release Secret UFO Files

 
By Jeff Peckman - Dec. 31, 2008

Predictions are increasing that President Elect Barack Obama will release secret UFO files to the public. Nearly 40% of all UFO-related news articles archived by Paradigm Research Group over the last 13 years occurred in 2008. The astonishing news coverage and the events themselves prompted the predictions. 

In January 2008, major UFO sightings in Stephenville, TX drew global attention. The flip-flopping attempts by confused Air Force personnel to discredit the witnesses failed in light of FAA radar reports. In April, the proposed ballot initiative to create an Extraterrestrial Affairs Commission in Denver started another global media blast. 
 
On May 13, Vatican astronomer Father Funes declared that it's OK to believe in extraterrestrial beings as 'our brothers and sisters' and that such beliefs are not in conflict with faith in God. On May 14, Britain released more than 1,000 documents on UFO sightings from the 1970s and 1980s. Also on May 14, a UFO crashed south of Las Vegas near Needles, CA that immediately attracted "men in black" and a secret military operation. The May 30 Denver press conference showing of Stan Romanek's "Alien-in-the-window-video" became a smash Internet and news hit and even broke page view records at DenverPost.com. 
 
On July 23, former astronaut Dr. Edgar Mitchell shocked the world with his interview on Kerrang Radio by proclaiming that the Roswell extraterrestrial UFO crash was real and so are government cover-ups of UFO phenomena. Further proof of this cover-up was the Oct. 20 release of more UFO files in Britain that included the story of US airman Milton Torres who was told to shoot down a UFO in 1957 near England.

Finally, on November 5, President Elect Obama announced that John Podesta, an advocate of UFO disclosure, would co-manage the White House transition team. Podesta has stated publicly, "I think it's time to open the books on questions that have remained in the dark on the question of government investigations of UFOs. It's time to find out what the truth really is that's out there. We ought to do it really because it's right. We ought to do it because the American people, quite frankly, can handle the truth. And we ought to do it because it's the law."

Other key White House Cabinet members are like-minded. Bill Richardson of New Mexico, home of the 1947 Roswell extraterrestrial vehicle crash, has stated that "The federal government has not come clean on all that issue [Roswell UFO] and should." The Rockefeller Initiative briefed Senator Hillary Clinton on the UFO issue. Gov. Napolitano of Arizona surely knows that former Arizona Gov. Fife Symington has admitted to seeing the "Phoenix Lights" UFO. He said he thought it was "some sort of alien spacecraft". Symington also believes the government has used dis-information tactics to try to discredit thousands of other witnesses.

 
Confidence that the Obama administration will release the UFO files has also encouraged Jeff Peckman to temporarily suspend his ballot initiative campaign to create an Extraterrestrial Affairs Commission in Denver.

 
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17.

 

 
Jan. 2, 2009

 
Some of you may be interested in this full-page advertisement placed in a Redding, California paper recently by the North State Citizens for Clean Air (530) 947-8872.

 
PAID ADVERTISEMENT

 
ARE WE THE EXPERIMENT?

Are Illegal weather modification programs poisoning us and contaminating our land, water and air?

HERE ARE THE FACTS - YOU DECIDE

More than three dozen Shasta and Siskiyou County lab test results taken from snow pack, pond, rainfall and dust samples show "off the chart" levels of Aluminum, Barium and Strontium.
Tests performed by BASIC LABS, a state-certified lab in Redding, California

LANDSCAPE PHOTO WITH CHEMTRAILS IN SKY ~ LANDSCAPE PHOTO WITH CHEMTRAILS IN SKY
MOUNT SHASTA - 6-22-08 MOUNT SHASTA - 6-22-08

 
---

 
ALARMING LOCAL LAB TESTS REVEAL ACCUMULATED CONTAMINATION

A Lake Shasta sample from Pit River Arm tributary tested at 4,610,000 ugl (ugl=ppb or parts per billion), over 4610 times the MCL (maximum contaminant level) for aluminum in drinking water for the State of California. A pond in Shasta County in a "filtered location" (forested hilltop away from any highway or industry) tested "0" for aluminum when the pond was constructed and filled. After 18 months' exposure to the atmosphere, the pond tested at 375,000 ugl or 375 times the MCL. Recently, snow pack sample, taken from Ski Bowl on Mt. Shasta, tested at 61,100 ugl, or 61 times the MCL for aluminum in drinking water for the State of California.

FAST-TRACKING "WEATHER MODIFICATION" BILLS IN CONGRESS:

U.S. Senate Bill 1807 and House Bill 3445
While the U.S. Government continues to deny the existence of these weather modification programs, Congress IS NOW planning to legalize such schemes. If weather modification programs are not being conducted, then why is this Bill needed, even fast-tracked? These programs are to be conducted with no publicly disclosed oversight whatsoever. Farmers from Texas to Nebraska have made a public outcry about the altered weather patterns due to weather modification programs openly conducted in their states. Weather modification programs are fact, not fiction. Nearly one hundred publicly disclosed programs were conducted in the Continental United States last year. A similar number is expected to be performed this year.
All military programs are considered CLASSIFIED and remain UNPUBLICIZED

 
---

 
US Government Issues Alarming Patent to Hughes Aircraft From U.S. Patent #5,003,186 - Filed April 1990
(See for yourself at www.uspto.gov, then search by patent number)

Stratospheric ... Seeding For Reduction Of Global Warming

"...the particle seeding should be done at an altitude on the order of 10 kilometers. The particles may be seeded by dispersal from seeding aircraft...solution to the problem of global warming involves the seeding of the atmosphere with metallic particles... It is therefore an object of the present invention to provide a method for reduction of global warming due to the greenhouse effect..."

"2...said material comprises one or more of the oxides of metals.

"3...said material comprises aluminum oxide.
(There are dozens of weather modification patents that include various forms of climate alteration and artificial cloud formation)

 
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~ The U.S. Military has openly stated that it is their goal to "OWN THE WEATHER" by 2025

~ Atmospheric physicists state that a naturally-occurring vapor trail can last only 60-90 seconds maximum, under the most extreme conditions.

~ German scientists and meteorologists have exposed and are taking legal action against the German government for weather manipulation and counterfeiting satellite and radar imagery to mask the scope of these operations.

~ The last RAIN TEST taken (Shasta County) in May of 2008 was hundreds of times the range of "normal" for aluminum, and seven times the MCL (maximum contaminant level).

~ Concerned Citizen groups have formed in all major western U.S. population centers with SIMILAR TESTING RESULTS! Major cities throughout the NATO nations are seeing public unrest and a demand for truth. Aluminum, Barium and other known weather modification agents are being found worldwide at horrifying levels.
~ Shasta County Air Quality staff stated that testing would cost from $500,000 to $1 million when in fact, lab tests for Siskiyou and Shasta County residents were performed by a state-certified lab in Redding for $21 per test.
~ According to the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the only way to form artificial clouds in warm, dry air is to introduce enough particulates into the atmosphere to attract and accrete all available moisture into visible vapor. If repeated often enough, the resulting rainless haze can lead to drought.

~ Numerous studies have connected aluminum exposure to neurological damage (like autism, Alzheimer's, etc.) and a host of other diseases. It is very detrimental to soils, changing PH levels, and lethal to many forms of aquatic life.

~ Atmospheric conductivity and lightning strikes have increased dramatically since the apparent onset of these programs. Metallic particles increase atmospheric conductivity, increasing lightning frequency and intensity.

 
~ State of California tests taken by aircraft of Pacific clouds from China show NO aluminum or Barium, contrary to Shasta County Air Quality Officials who stated China was the cause (again without testing themselves).

 
ARE FINE METALLIC PARTICULATES, LIKE ALUMINUM, HURTING OUR CHILDREN?

Asthma and other respiratory diseases have seen dramatic increases over the last decade, while Alzheimer's and autism have become epidemic.

 
Harvard reports that particulates less than 10 microns poses a serious threat to human health (source: http://earthislandinstitute.net/journal/index.php/eij/article/stolen_skies_the_chemtrail_mystery/)

The major mainstream paper, The Las Vegas Tribune, writes "...Especially disturbing for residents of heavily chemtrailed communities like Las Vegas is a "chemtrail sickness associates with heavy spray days leaving many stricken people complaining of the 'flu' and accute allergic reactions... "

THE BOTTOM LINE IS THIS: We believe that Shasta County Air Quality officials have a legal, moral and political responsibility to locate the source of these alarming levels of contaminants in our water, air and land, whatever it may be. If not their responsibility, then WHO?

WHY would the Shasta County Air Quality officials REFUSE to investigate these DANGEROUS FINDINGS in spite of repeated requests by Citizens and Supervisors?

For local information visit jeffpress.com. TOGETHER WE CAN STOP THIS! MAKE YOUR VOICE HEARD!

Shasta County Supervisors: 225-5550
Shasta County Air Quality: 225-5674
Governor's office: (916) 445-2841
Paid For by North State Citizens for Clean Air (530) 947-8872
The above full-page ad ran in the Redding, California newspaper recently.

 
CONTINUED FROM PART 2...

 
Eye of The Storm Series #4: Inferno! is archived at http://www.earthrainbownetwork.com/Archives2009/EyeStorm4.htm

 
There has been hardly any donation in a good while... http://www.earthrainbownetwork.com/Donate.htm

 


 
1.

 
NOTE: As explained below, the responsibility for the current situation in Gaza rests squarely on the shoulders of the War Criminal in Chief George W Bush and his accomplice Condoleezza Rice - and of course the entire Israeli government, army and backers around the world.

 

 
An inside story of how the US magnified Palestinian suffering

The covert push to empower Fatah failed. And isolating Hamas just made things worse. But it's not too late to change course.
 
By Norman H. Olsen and Matthew N. Olsen -- January 12, 2009 edit

CHERRYFIELD, MAINE; AND WASHINGTON - A million and a half Palestinians are learning the hard way that democracy isn't so good if you vote the wrong way. In 2006, they elected Hamas when the US and Israel wanted them to support the more-moderate Fatah. As a result, having long ago lost their homes and property, Gazans have endured three years of embargo, crippling shortages of food and basic necessities, and total economic collapse.

We spoke again Saturday with three of our longtime Gazan contacts. They and their families, all Fatah supporters, were in their eleventh day without electricity, running water, or heat. They are cowering in cold basements trying to protect their children from the storm of explosions that is filling Shifa hospital with amputees and the dead. Our friends in Israel are likewise living in fear.

The 850-plus dead Gazans, more than a dozen dead Israelis, and some 3,000 injured have since the end of the cease-fire become part of what Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice once called the birth pains of a new Middle East.

It didn't have to be this way. We could have talked instead of fought.

Hamas never called for the elections that put them in power. That was the brainstorm of Secretary Rice and her staff, who had apparently decided they could steer Palestinians into supporting the more-compliant Mahmoud Abbas (the current president of the Palestinian authority) and his Fatah Party through a marketing campaign that was to counter Hamas's growing popularity - all while ignoring continued Israeli settlement construction, land confiscation, and cantonization of the West Bank.

State Department staffers helped finance and supervise the Fatah campaign, down to the choice of backdrop color for the podium where Mr. Abbas was to proclaim victory. An adviser working for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) explained to incredulous staffers at the Embassy in Tel Aviv how he would finance and direct elements of the campaign, leaving no US fingerprints. USAID teams, meanwhile, struggled to implement projects for which Abbas could claim credit. Once the covert political program cemented Fatah in place, the militia Washington was building for Fatah warlord-wannabee Mohammed Dahlan would destroy Hamas militarily.

Their collective confidence was unbounded. But the Palestinians didn't get the memo. Rice was reportedly blindsided when she heard the news of Hamas's victory during her 5 a.m. treadmill workout. But that did not prevent a swift response.

She immediately insisted that the Quartet (the US, European Union, United Nations, and Russia) ban all contact with Hamas and support Israel's economic blockade of Gaza. The results of her request were mixed, but Palestinian suffering manifestly intensified. The isolation was supposed to turn angry Palestinians against an ineffective Hamas. As if such blockades had not been tried before.

Simultaneously, the US military team expanded its efforts to build the Mohammed Dahlan-led militia. President Bush considered Dahlan "our guy." But Dahlan's thugs moved too soon. They roamed Gaza, demanding protection money from businesses and individuals, erecting checkpoints to extort bribes, terrorizing Dahlan's opponents within Fatah, and attacking Hamas members.

Finally, in mid-2007, faced with increasing chaos and the widely known implementation of a US-backed militia, Hamas - the lawfully elected government - struck first. They routed the Fatah gangs, securing control of the entire Gaza Strip, and established civil order.

Its efforts stymied, the US has for more than a year inflexibly backed Israel's embargo of Gaza and its collective punishment of the Strip's 1.5 million residents. The recent six-month cease-fire saw a near cessation of rocket fire into Israel and calm along the border, yet the economic siege was further tightened.

Gaza's economy has collapsed, and the population, displaced for decades from their farms and villages, relies ever more on food aid from Hamas and the UN. The US expresses shock that Gazans resort to using smuggling tunnels for survival rather than passively accepting the suffering inflicted by the embargo. What would we expect Americans to do in the same circumstances? With no easing of the blockade, the missile launches have increased in range and frequency, yielding massive Israeli response.

Our "good," US-supported Palestinians did not vanquish the "bad" Palestinians any more than Washington's Lebanese clients turned on Hezbollah, despite the suffering and death of the 2006 war with Israel. Abbas sits emasculated in Ramallah. The Israelis continue to build settlements while blaming Iran for their troubles, as though the Palestinians have no grievances of their own. And we are further than ever from peace.

Cultural differences aside, Gazans, like Americans, unite in adversity. Neither punishment, nor a cease-fire that extends the embargo will make them accept the loss of their property, 60 years of displacement, or life in squalid refugee camps.

 

 
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2.

 

AN EYE FOR AN EYELASH: THE GAZA MASSACRE - PART 1 -- JANUARY 12, 2009

On March 24, 1999, an emotional Tony Blair appealed to the House of Commons and to the people of Britain:
"We must act to save thousands of innocent men, women and children from humanitarian catastrophe."
Blair described the emergency:

 
"Let me give the House an indication of the scale of what is happening: a quarter of a million Kosovars, more than 10 per cent of the population, are now homeless as a result of repression by Serb forces... Since last summer 2000 people have died." (Blair: 'We must act - to save thousands of innocent men, women and children,' The Guardian, March 23, 1999; http://www.guardian.co.uk/Kosovo/Story/0,,209876,00.html)
Not even Blair claimed all the killings had been on one side. George Robertson, the UK Defence Secretary at the time of the crisis, testified before the House of Commons that until mid-January 1999, "the Kosovo Liberation Army [KLA] was responsible for more deaths in Kosovo than the Serbian authorities had been". (Quoted, Noam Chomsky, Hegemony or Survival, Routledge, 2003, p.56)

The Guardian rallied to Blair's cause:

"The only honorable course for Europe and America is to use military force to try to protect the people of Kosovo... If we do not act at all, or if there is a limited bombing campaign which still fails to change Milosevic's mind, what is likely to be Kosovo's future?" (Leader, 'The sad need for force, Kosovo must be saved,' The Guardian, March 23, 1999)

The following day, NATO began its 78-day blitz of Serbia.

Ten years later and almost one-half of the 2,000 death toll that so horrified Blair and the Guardian in 1999 has been reached by the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) in its massacre of 890 Palestinians in just over two weeks. Some 3,800 more have been wounded. The current slaughter is far more one-sided than Kosovo. There have so far been 3 Israeli civilian deaths and 10 soldiers killed: 4 of these were victims of their own 'friendly fire'.

KLA attacks did nothing to temper media outrage at the spectacle of the Serbian state attacking tiny Kosovo. The focus was on Serbian "massacres" and "genocide". The Observer wrote of the alleged killing of 45 Albanian civilians in Racak by Serb armed forces on January 16, 1999:
"History will judge that the defining moment for the international community took place on 16 January this year... Albanians returning after an attack by Serb security forces discovered the bodies of men they had left behind to look after the houses." (Peter Beaumont, Justin Brown, John Hooper, Helena Smith and Ed Vulliamy, 'Hi-tech war and primitive slaughter - Slobodan Milosevic is fighting on two fronts,' The Observer, March 28, 1999)

Serb forces, the Observer wrote, were "pursuing their own version of a Balkan Final Solution". (Ibid.)

In 1999, British and American media were full of talk of "genocide" in Kosovo. A Nexis database search showed that between 1998-1999 the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Washington Post, Newsweek and Time used "genocide" 220 times to describe Serb actions in Kosovo. (Email from Edward Herman to Media Lens, August 27, 2002)

We have found no examples of a British journalist describing Israeli actions as "genocidal" over the last month. Daily Mail columnist Melanie Phillips made rare use of the word on January 5:

"Many others also share the view that Israel is in the wrong. So why is a country [Israel] under attack from genocidal fanatics pilloried for defending its citizens against slaughter?" (Phillips, 'Yes, this war is terrible. But the alternative was worse - for us all,' Daily Mail, January 5, 2009)

Israel's massacre is presented as a "war", as a "Gaza conflict" between two sides engaged in "fighting". This is the standard fiction, as Tim Llewellyn, the BBC's former Middle East Correspondent, noted five years ago:
"In the news reporting of the domestic BBC TV bulletins, 'balance', the BBC's crudely applied device for avoiding trouble, means that Israel's lethal modern army is one force, the Palestinians, with their rifles and home-made bombs, the other 'force': two sides equally strong and culpable in a difficult dispute, it is implied, that could easily be sorted out if extremists on both sides would see reason and the leaders do as instructed by Washington..." (Llewellyn, 'Why the BBC Ducks the Palestinian Story - Part 1,' Media Lens, January 15, 2004)

Norwegian doctor Mads Gilbert, one of two foreign doctors working at Gaza's biggest hospital, al-Shifa, told CBS News:

 
"I've seen one military person among the hundreds that we have seen and treated. So anyone who tries to portray this as sort of a clean war against another army are lying. This is an all-out war against the civilian Palestinian population in Gaza and we can prove that with the numbers." (CBS News, January 5, 2008; http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=Ev6ojm62qwA)
Even the death toll cited above does little to communicate the true one-sidedness of the wider violence, injustice and cruelty. One hardly knows where to begin. For example, largely unmentioned by the media, prior to the latest invasion, 14 Israelis had been killed by mostly homemade rockets fired from Gaza over the last seven years as against 5,000 Palestinians killed in Israeli attacks. (Seumas Milne, 'Israel's onslaught on Gaza is a crime that cannot succeed,' The Guardian, December 30, 2008; http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/dec/30/israel-and-the-palestinians-middle-east)

Consider the response of Blair and the Guardian to Israel's mass killing. From Blair there is no longer talk of the need to send bombs and tanks to save a stricken population (Blair led calls for a ground war against Serbia). Instead:

 
"I think the position is that there are circumstances in which we could get an immediate ceasefire and that's what people want to see. I think the circumstances focus very much around clear action to cut off the supply of arms and money from the tunnels that go from Egypt into Gaza. I think if there were strong, clear, definitive action on that, that would give us the best context to get an immediate ceasefire and to start to change the situation." (Andrew Sparrow, 'Immediate Gaza ceasefire is possible, says Tony Blair,' The Guardian, January 6, 2009; http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jan/06/israelandthepalestinians-middleeast)
No Guardian editorials have proposed a massive military assault on Israel as the only "honorable course for Europe and America". The question has not been asked: "If we do not act at all... what is likely to be Gaza's future?" Instead, the country's "leading liberal newspaper" is sensitive to the perspective of the Israeli killing machine:

"The ghost of Israel's humiliation at the hands of Hezbollah in Lebanon in 2006 hangs over this enterprise and Israel will want to exorcise it... Israel will judge the success of its operation on the extent to which it will have depleted Hamas's command structure, as well as its ability to launch rockets." (Leader, 'Gaza ground assault: When victory is a hollow word,' The Guardian, January 5, 2008)

As we will see, the claim that Israel is working merely to smash "Hamas's command structure" is a classic liberal herring.

The Guardian's solution: "There is only one way out of the political trap which Israeli forces are now entering, and that is an immediate ceasefire." (Ibid.)

To be fair, a second leader did contemplate a slap on the wrist:
"If Israel presses on regardless, it should face an immediate suspension of all arms from the EU, as Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat leader, proposes." (Leader, 'Gaza: No shelter,' The Guardian, January 7, 2008)

As ever, Israeli politicians claim to have been heroically restraining themselves and their capacity for violence (a manifest source of pride) in the face of endless provocation. And yet, as recently as February-March last year 110 Palestinian civilians were killed during 'Operation Winter Heat'. (See our earlier Media Alerts: 'Israel's Illegal Assault On The Gaza "Prison"' March 3, 2008, and 'Israeli Deaths Matter More,' March 11, 2008)

This military violence is piled on the staggering economic violence of Israel's blockade of Gaza. Prior to the latest offensive, John Ging who runs the Gaza operations of Unrwa, the UN agency that looks after Palestinian refugees, told the BBC last month:

"There's one million on food aid, including 750,000 refugees. 80% are below the poverty line, meaning they live on less than $2 a day. Almost 100,000 jobs have gone in the last 18 months, since the total Israeli embargo came in. [Because that included most building materials] $93m of Unrwa construction projects, medical centres, houses for refugees, all are stopped. 3,200 out of 3,500 Gaza businesses have gone down in the siege."

"There's no ray of sunlight. It's all
 
going in the wrong direction. It's all well documented and predictable."
 
"The Quartet [of the US, UN, Russia and the EU] said a new approach was needed for Gaza. In fact there are even stricter sanctions." (BBC online, 'Bowen diary: The days before war,' January 10, 2009; http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/7822048.stm)

During the ceasefire, Israel placed severe restrictions on the number of trucks allowed to bring food, fuel, cooking-gas canisters, spare parts for water and sanitation plants, and medical supplies to Gaza. Israeli historian, Avi Shlaim, professor of international relations at the University of Oxford, wrote in the Guardian:
"It is difficult to see how starving and freezing the civilians of Gaza could protect the people on the Israeli side of the border. But even if it did, it would still be immoral, a form of collective punishment that is strictly forbidden by international humanitarian law." (Shlaim, 'How Israel brought Gaza to the brink of humanitarian catastrophe,' The Guardian, January 7, 2009; http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jan/07/gaza-israel-palestine)
 
He added: "The Biblical injunction of an eye for an eye is savage enough. But Israel's insane offensive against Gaza seems to follow the logic of an eye for an eyelash."

It is the sheer cruelty of Israeli oppression that captures the world's imagination. Or, more accurately, defies it.
 
Targeting Hamas

The corporate media has been happy to echo the claim that Israel is "targeting Hamas" rather than the Palestinian people. In reality, the Palestinian people elected Hamas as its democratic government in 2006. And it is the Palestinian people who are paying the price now. The state of the art, US-supplied missiles, bombs and artillery shells are not being aimed at the regular army targets for which they were designed: tanks, command posts, trenches and bunkers. They are being fired into residential areas in one of the world's most densely-populated strips of land.

The white phosphorus (WP) shells being used are incendiary airburst weapons designed to incinerate a wide target area. The weapon has been used by US forces in their infamous "shake 'n' bake" attacks on Iraqi insurgents in cities such as Fallujah. On the BBC's World News, correspondent Ben Brown said WP shells were being used merely to illuminate targets in Gaza. (Brown, BBC World News, January 9)
 
Israel consistently claims that 80 per cent of those killed were Hamas "militants". Al Haq, a Palestinian legal rights group, reports that in fact 80 per cent of Palestinian fatalities have been civilians. According to figures cited by the World Health Organisation, at least 40 per cent have been children. (Jonathan Cook, 'Civilian death toll spurs legal action,' The National, January 9, 2009; http://www.thenational.ae/article/20090109/FOREIGN/417838381/1002)

 
Medicins Sans Frontiers (MSF) characterised the death toll as reaching "alarming proportions" and indicative of "extreme violence indiscriminately affecting civilians." (http://reliefweb.int/rw/rwb.nsf/db900sid/TUJA-7N55DU?OpenDocument&rc=3&cc=pse)

Claims of careful targeting are hardly credible given that Israeli artillery shells hit three United Nations-run schools being used as refugee centres, killing more than 50 people. The UN had informed the Israeli military that the schools were refugee centres - GPS coordinates were provided. Israeli forces knew what they were attacking and they knew the centres were packed with the same families they had previously told to leave their homes to avoid attack.

Israel explained that Hamas fighters had been firing from within one of the schools. When the claim became indefensible, it was quietly withdrawn in "private" briefings to Westerners - a retraction barely reported anywhere. (http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=s0BRJS6WnMs)

The latest claim (Ben Brown, BBC World News, January 11) is that the UN-run school was hit by a stray mortar round. But just prior to the launch of the ground offensive, Israel shelled Palestine Square, Gaza City's main shopping area, killing five Palestinians. They destroyed the American International School. They also destroyed a mosque in Beit Hanoun during evening prayers killing a dozen people. At least thirty civilians were killed in Zeitoun when a house was shelled the day after Israeli forces ordered 100 Palestinians to shelter there (Mel Frykberg, 'Israel Fighting Also The UN,' January 10, 2009;
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=45364). Were these all accidents?

Haaretz reported that, in approving the ground invasion, the Israeli government had taken into account the likely high number of Palestinian civilian casualties. On January 9, the paper reported that Lt. Colonel Amir, commander of a combat engineers unit, had told Israeli TV:

 
"We are very violent. We are not shying away from any method of preventing casualties among our troops." (Amos Harel and Avi Issacharoff, 'Israel's three alternatives for the future of the Gaza war,' Haaretz, January 9, 2009; http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1053590.html)

Israeli media have reported that their commanders are unsurprised by the heavy civilian toll - the priority was indeed the protection of IDF soldiers:

 
"For us, being cautious means being aggressive," one told Israel's Haaretz newspaper. "From the minute we entered, we've acted like we're at war. That creates enormous damage on the ground. I just hope those who have fled the area of Gaza City in which we are operating will describe the shock. Maybe someone there will sober up before it continues." (Amos Harel and Avi Issacharoff, 'Using aggressive tactics in Gaza to save soldiers' lives,' Haaretz, January 7, 2009; http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1053401.html)
These are comments which define the methods and aims indicated by the term 'terrorism'.

On January 6, Israeli internal security minister Meir Shitreet responded to the massive civilian casualties on BBC's Newsnight:

 
"The French say, 'La guerre comme la guerre'." (January 6, 2009; http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00gnjlm/Newsnight_06_01_2009/)

War is indeed war, but the civilian population of Gaza is not at war - the Geneva Conventions protecting civilian life apply.
 
Last year, Shitreet suggested that residential Gaza neighbourhoods from which Hassam rockets were fired should be obliterated: "any other country would have already gone in and level [sic] the area, which is exactly what I think the IDF should do - decide on a neighborhood in Gaza and level it." (Attila Somfalvi, 'Sheetrit: We should level Gaza neighbourhoods,' Ynet, February 10, 2008; http://www.ynet.co.il/english/articles/0,7340,L-3504922,00.html)

He added: "We should let them know 'you have to leave, this area will be taken down tomorrow' and just take it down - that will show them we mean business."

Using violence to show a civilian population "we mean business" is, again, terrorism. Needless to say, Shitreet was advocating major war crimes.

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has declared that Gazan civilians should not be allowed "to live normal lives"; and internal security minister Avi Dichter has previously demanded that Israel take action "irrespective of the cost to the Palestinians". (Jonathan Cook, 'Disappearing Palestine,' Zed Books, London, 2008, p.132)

Preparing The Propaganda For War

 
CLIP - To read the rest and access all the links in this article, please go at http://www.medialens.org/alerts/09/090112_an_eye_for.php

 
<> <> <> <> <> <> <> <>

 
3.

 

Norwegian doctor: Israel intentionally targeting civilians

 
Doctor estimates 2,000 - 2,500 civilian casualties

Mads Gilbert, a Norwegian doctor working in Gaza, told Sky News on Monday that he believes Israel is deliberately attacking the Palestinian population, not just targeting Hamas as Israeli authorities have said numerous times.

"Just a little bit more than an hour ago, the Israelis bombed the central food market in Gaza City and we had a mass influx of about 50 injured and between 10 and 15 killed," said Gilbert, on the phone with Sky News.

"At the same time they bombed an apartment house with children playing on the roof and we had a lot of children also. This is really like from Dante's Inferno. It's like hell here now and it's been bombing all night. Up till now, close to 500 people have been killed and the number of casualties is getting to 2, 2 and a half thousand, which 50 percent are children and women."

"Are your hospital's reaching capacity?" asked the Sky News correspondent. "Can you deal with these people?"

"We have been doing surgery around the clock," Gilbert replied. "I just talked to one of my colleagues in the ICU who has not been sleeping for three days and they hospital is completely overcrowded and we are running six, seven OR's and there are injuries that you just don't want to see in this world. Children coming in with open abdomens and legs cut off.

"We just had a child who left. We had to amputate both legs and the arms and the only crime they have done is being civilians -- Palestinians living in Gaza. The relief now is not more doctors and more drugs the relief now is to stop the bombing immediately. This can not go on. It is a disaster."

"You've talked about the civilians, the women and children, the men who aren't involved in this but are you also getting casualties that are Hamas fighters?" asked the reporter.

"To be honest, we came on New Year's Eve in the morning," answered Gilbert. "I've seen one military person among the tens -- I mean, hundreds -- we have seen and treated. So, anybody who tries to claim this as sort of a clean war against another army are lying.

"This is an all out war against the civilian Palestinian population in Gaza and we can prove that with the numbers and you have to remember that the average age of the Gaza inhabitant is 17-years. It's a very young population and 80 percent are living below the poverty limit of the U.N.

"So, this is a poor and very young people and they are able to escape absolutely nowhere because they can not flee like other populations can in wartime. Because they are fenced in and they are in a cage. So, they are bombing one and a half million people in a cage. And young people and poor people and, you know, you can not separate between the civilians and the fighters in such a situation."

 
This video is from CBS News, broadcast Jan. 5, 2008.
 

 
---

 
Related articles and videos:

 
Israel attacks civilian areas in Gaza City (8 Jan 2009)
Israeli airstrikes have targeted civilian areas in the center of Gaza City amid an intensified full-scale incursion into the territory. The latest attack on the city has raised the Palestinian death toll to at least 772 late Thursday night, Press TV reported.

 
UN halts Gaza aid after convoy hit (JANUARY 08, 2009 )
The United Nations aid agency has suspended its operations in the Gaza Strip in the wake of a series of Israeli attacks on its personnel and buildings."UNRWA decided to suspend all its operations in the Gaza Strip because of the increasing hostile actions against its premises and personnel," Adnan Abu Hasna, a Gaza-based spokesman for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, UNRWA, said on Thursday. The move came after Israeli tanks shelled a UN convoy earlier in the day, killing a Palestinian UN worker and injuring two others, as lorries were travelling to the Erez crossing to pick up humanitarian supplies meant to have been allowed in during a three-hour suspension of fire.At least three UN-run schools have also been hit by Israeli fire, killing scores of civilians, during the 13 days of Israel's assault on the Gaza Strip. 'Tragic deaths' John Ging, the head of the UN relief agency in Gaza, said that the casualties in the convoy attack were Palestinian civilian contractors hired to bring supplies from the crossing points. "They were co-ordinating their movements with the Israelis, as they always do, only to find themselves being fired at from the ground troops," he told Al Jazeera."It has resulted tragically in the death of one and the injury of two others."Richard Miron, the UN spokesman, said the Israeli army had been notified in advance about the movements  of the UNRWA convoy.All convoys to Erez and the Kerem Shalom, which has been the main crossing point used for bringing humanitarian supplies into Gaza, were suspended after the incident."This underlines the fundamental insecurity inside Gaza at a time when we are trying to address the dire humanitarian needs of the population there," Miron said. Al Jazeera's Ayman Mohyeldin, reporting from Gaza City, said that 50 bodies were recovered during the three-hour lull, raising the death toll of Palestinians in Gaza to at least 763, including more than 200 children, since air raids first began on December 27. More than 3,121 people have also been wounded. Eight Israeli soldiers and three civilians have died in the same period. CLIP

 
Israeli shells kill 42 at U.N. school: Gaza medics (Jan 6, 2009)
GAZA (Reuters) - Israeli shelling killed more than 40 Palestinians on Tuesday at a U.N. school where civilians had taken shelter, medical officials said, in carnage likely to boost international pressure on Israel to halt a Gaza offensive.The Israeli army accused Hamas of using civilians as "human shields" and said its troops had fired mortars at the premises after gunmen mortared their positions from inside al-Fakhora school in Jabalya refugee camp. Citing intelligence reports, it named two men it said were Islamist gunmen killed in the attack. A spokesman said the army did not know how many others died.People cut down by shrapnel lay in pools of blood in the street. Witnesses said two shells exploded outside the school, killing at least 42 civilians and wounding dozens among people who had taken refuge there and residents of nearby buildings. (...) The spike in civilian casualties could prove to be a turning point in Israel's "Operation Cast Lead," launched on December 27 with the declared aim of removing the Hamas rocket threat. The killing of 28 unarmed Lebanese in Israeli bombing in the village of Qana in the 2006 Lebanon war drained foreign support for its campaign against Hezbollah guerrillas. (...) According to the Palestinian Health Ministry in the Gaza Strip, at least 631 Palestinians have been killed and more than 2,700 wounded since Israel began its offensive.  (...) Most of the deaths reported by Gaza hospitals in recent days have been civilians. The Israeli military said it killed 130 militants since it began the ground assault, a figure that suggested the total Palestinian death toll might be close to 750 and that bodies could still be on the battlefield. CLIP

 
More children among Gaza dead (January 06, 2009)
Palestinian children are increasingly among the dead as the Gaza death toll continues to rise. One man has lost his entire family - including children, wife, parents and cousins - after a single attack.

 
'Sound Bombs' Hurt Gaza Civilians, Trigger Miscarriages in Women (January 6, 2009 )
The tactic of jets creating sonic booms low over the homes of Palestinians has been attacked by doctors and UN officials as terrifying and indiscriminate. These terrifying sonic blasts have reportedly caused spontaneous abortions and miscarriages. The horrible impacts of these weapons have been known since at least 2005, yet Israel persists in using against the civilian population of Gaza. Almost half the population under attack in Gaza is under the age of 15. CLIP Moe on this in Targeting Gaza's Children with Sound Bombs

 
Digging For The Dead - Israeli attack on 4 story building in Gaza kills 25 http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article21678.htm
Israeli F-16 planes hit a 4-storey apartment building belonging to civilians in Gaza on Tuesday. While the building was razed to the ground, 25 people were killed in the building.

 
Israel trained on model for Gaza assault (January 6, 2009)
Israel's army had reportedly trained on a model of Gaza City for 18 months before starting the ground offensive in the densely-populated Strip. According to Israeli military spokesman Avi Benayahou, Israel used a model of the main city built at an army base in the Negev desert to train its soldiers for a ground operation. "Our soldiers know all the back streets where their targets are," military spokesman Avi Benayahou told Israeli public television on Monday. "For a year and a half our soldiers trained on a reduced model of Gaza City built on the Tsehilim base," he added. The base is in the Negev desert in southern Israel, near the frontier with Gaza.  CLIP

 
The Courage To Resist - Woman faces down armed Israeli soldiers - SHE IS AMAZINGLY BRAVE!!  (Jan 28, 08)
"You are shooting at kids... Don't you understand that!" (That was a year ago)

 
'Iran aid ship nears Gaza' (8 Jan 2009)
An Iranian aid ship, destined for Palestinians, has reportedly entered Egyptian waters and scheduled to dock at the port of Gaza on Saturday. According to IRIB, the ship, with 2000 tons of humanitarian aid, passed through the Suez Canal and will head for Gaza "After obtaining needed permissions". The move came as the Israeli 13-day onslaught on the improvised strip has killed 763 Palestinians and injured thousands more. Since 2007, Tel Aviv also imposed a siege on the tiny coastal region that inflicted a humanitarian crisis in Gaza, putting lives of almost 1.5 million residents at stake. The Iranian ship carried medicine and foodstuffs including rice, flour, sugar as well as a group of medics and nurses. The Islamic Republic has also sent several consignments of humanitarian aid to the tiny land via Egypt so far. NOTE: No doubt that if Israel lets this ship go to Gaza it has good strategic reasons, such as then launching big rockets against its major cities, claiming they were provided to Hamas by Iran hidden in this ship and then using this as a faked excuse to attack Iran.

 
Spirit of solidarity sidelines Palestinian split (Jan 6, 2009)
RAMALLAH, West Bank (Reuters) - Israel's offensive on Gaza appears to be creating a mood of unity on the streets of the West Bank that the leaders of hostile Palestinian factions have been unable to obtain in months of negotiation. It is not the formal entente they say they are searching for, but it is a grassroots solidarity of suffering that some feel exposes how artificial is the split in Palestinian ranks at the level of the political leadership. On Tuesday, angry Palestinians in the occupied West Bank city of Ramallah protested, chanting: "Today Gaza is under fire, tomorrow it will be the West Bank."Slogans called for an end to the schism between President Mahmoud Abbas' secular Fatah faction and Islamist rival Hamas, winner of a 2006 parliamentary election. Since fighting in 2007, the two now control the West Bank and Gaza Strip respectively. Abbas and his allies are ready to negotiate peace with Israel after 60 years in return for an end to occupation and an Arab state that would live side by side with the Jewish state, in mutual security.Hamas has refused to recognize Israel's right to exist and its leaders call on all to join their resistance platform.Some analysts say Israel is content to have Palestinians divided, and doubt that there would be serious progress toward a peace deal with them if Islamist hardliners were brought back into the fold.Non-stop television pictures of charred corpses and children's body parts plucked from the smoking rubble of bombed buildings are shocking West Bank Palestinians. Israel's 11-day offensive has killed 600 of their people, including many civilians. And it has sidelined the once all-engrossing Fatah-Hamas schism, for the time being at least. CLIP

 
Israel and Hamas hold fire to allow aid into Gaza (Jan 7, 2009)
GAZA (Reuters) - Israel and Hamas said they were temporarily holding their fire in the Gaza Strip on Wednesday to ease the flow of humanitarian aid and both sides said they were studying an Egyptian proposal for a ceasefire. International pressure on Israel to halt its 12-day-old assault mounted after tank shells killed 42 Palestinians at a U.N. school in the coastal enclave. While it ordered a three-hour-long lull in "offensive" military operations to let in aid, Israel said it was considering a major escalation that would push troops deep inside Gaza's cities and refugee camps in their bid to end rocket salvoes into Israel by Islamist militants. In fresh fighting, 12 Palestinians were killed by Israeli attacks in the Gaza Strip, medical workers said. At least eight Hamas rockets hit southern Israeli, causing no casualties.The United Nations called for an inquiry into Israel's deadly shelling of a school in Jabalya refugee camp on Tuesday. Israel said Hamas militants at the school had fired rockets. The U.N. said there were no gunmen on the premises. CLIP

 
Israeli army's latest tactic: Kill, take a short break, and kill again (January 8, 2009)
Israel ordered a pause in its Gaza offensive on Wednesday for three hours to allow food and fuel to reach besieged Palestinians, as the country's leaders debated whether to accept an international cease-fire plan or to expand the assault against Hamas. With criticism rising of the operation's spiraling civilian death toll and Gazans increasingly suffering the effects of nonstop air strikes and shelling, Israel's military said it would open "humanitarian corridors" to allow aid supplies to reach Palestinians.Israeli military spokesman Peter Lerner said the "recess in offensive operations" was aimed at allowing in supplies and fuel, and would last from 1 to 4 p.m. local time (11:00-14:00 GMT). He said similar lulls in the coming days would be considered. (...) About 300 of the nearly 700 Palestinians killed so far are civilians, according to Palestinian and UN figures. Of those killed, at least 130 are children age 16 and under, says the Gaza-based Palestinian Center for Human Rights, which tracks casualties.The number of armed fighters killed remains unclear. Gaza residents say Hamas fighters have begun wearing civilian clothes, and the organization is keeping its casualties secret and housing its wounded and dead in undisclosed locations.Israel has lost six soldiers since launching a ground offensive on Saturday -- four of them in "friendly fire" incidents -- and four other Israelis have been killed by rocket fire, three of them civilians.Israel's lull in operations could ease the plight of civilians in Gaza, where much of the territory has no power or running water, because pumps are dependent on electricity. More than 500 aid trucks have been shipped into Gaza since operations began. But even when aid crosses into Gaza military operations have prevented officials from distributing it, leading to food shortages in some areas. A World Bank statement Wednesday said there are growing signs of a severe public health crisis in Gaza because of a shortage of drinking water and an escalating failure of the sewage system. CLIP

 
CNN Confirms Israel Broke Ceasefire First (January 05, 2009)
Rick Sanchez does the research and finds that Israel violated the terms of the ceasefire first by killing 6 Gazans on November 4. Shouldn't media outlets check the facts before running with a story?

 
Brasscheck TV: Israel created Hamas
It's really not a state secret. Unless you depend on the US newsmedia for your information. Israel create Hamas. Now they're using its existence to slaughter Palestinian civilians. Ron Paul shares the details

 
Israeli strikes, Hamas rockets resume after pause (Jan 7, 2009)
GAZA CITY, Gaza - Israeli airstrikes and Hamas rockets resumed after a brief pause Wednesday to allow food and fuel to reach Palestinian civilians in Gaza, where an Israeli warplane dropped leaflets urging some residents to flee because of imminent attacks. Even as the Israeli government tentatively welcomed a cease-fire proposal from Egypt and France, its military was instructed to continue its assault on Hamas. The proposal could mark the first sign of a possible exit from 12 days of bloodshed in Gaza. But Israel says it needs guarantees that any cease-fire will halt rocket fire and prevent Hamas from rearming, while Hamas demands that Gaza's blockaded border crossings be opened. (...) Israel carried out 40 airstrikes Wednesday on targets including smuggling tunnels on the Gaza-Egypt border, Israel's chief army spokesman Brig. Gen. Avi Benayahu said.An Israeli combat officer, identified as Lt. Col. Amir, said troops neutralized hundreds of explosives devices, including booby-trapped houses.Residents said 16 houses on the border were destroyed, with Israel presumably targeting buildings shielding tunnel entrances. Hamas had about 300 smuggling tunnels in the area before the offensive, and Israel has already destroyed dozens in repeated strikes. (...) Despite the new cease-fire efforts, Israel's security Cabinet decided to push ahead with the offensive, according to participants who spoke on condition of anonymity because they are not allowed to discuss the content of such meetings. The military has called up thousands of reserve troops that it could use to expand the offensive, supporting the three brigade-size formations of regular troops now inside. Defense officials said the troops could be ready for action by Friday. They spoke on condition of anonymity because the army's preparations are classified.Osama Hamdan, a Hamas representative in Lebanon close to the group's leadership in Syria, told Al-Jazeera television that Hamas will reject any initiative that does not include the withdrawal of the Israeli army from Gaza and the opening of all of the territory's border crossings. "Any proposal that does not include these bases is unacceptable," he said. "The idea of an international force is rejected and such forces which will come to Gaza to protect Israel will be dealt with as enemy forces."

 
Israel's conditions for ceasefire announced (06 Jan 2009)
The German chancellor and the former British prime minister have declared Israel's conditions for a ceasefire in Gaza to the Turkish prime minister. Tony Blair and Angela Merkel informed Recep Tayyip Erdogan about the Israeli preconditions in separate telephone conversations, Turkey's Yenisafak newspaper reported on Tuesday. Merkel and Blair said that Israel wants an international mechanism to prevent the smuggling of weapons into the Gaza Strip and wants Turkey to play a role in the initiative. Turkey's prime minister declared that he will inform Hamas about the preconditions. Erdogan also said Turkey is willing to take part in such a mechanism. Meanwhile, Syrian President Bashar al-Asad on Tuesday told CNN that Hamas is ready to agree to peace if the Israeli army will stop military operations and withdraw from Gaza. "They are ready (to make a deal)," al-Assad said. "They were ready, they are ready. Today, the factors have changed so the requirement will change at the same time," he added.

 
Red Cross Accuses Israel of Neglecting Gaza Wounded (January 9, 2009)
PARIS - The International Committee of the Red Cross said Thursday it had discovered "shocking" scenes - including small children next to their mothers' corpses - when its representatives gained access for the first time to parts of Gaza battered by Israeli shelling. It accused Israel of failing to meet obligations to care for the wounded in areas of combat. (...) In an unusually blunt criticism , the Geneva-based International Committee of the Red Cross said it had been seeking access to shell-damaged areas in Zeitoun in the east of Gaza City since Saturday but the Israeli authorities granted permission only on Wednesday - the first day that Israel allowed a three-hour lull in the attacks on Gaza on humanitarian grounds.The statement said a team of four Palestine Red Crescent ambulances accompanied by Red Cross representatives made its way to Zeitoun Wednesday where it "found four small children next to their dead mothers in one of the houses. They were too weak to stand up on their own. One man was also found alive, too weak to stand up. In all, there were at least 12 corpses lying on mattresses."In another house, the statement said, the rescue team "found 15 other survivors of this attack including several wounded. In yet another house, they found an additional three corpses. Israeli soldiers posted at a military position some 80 meters away from this house ordered the rescue team to leave the area which they refused to do. There were several other positions of the Israeli Defense Forces nearby as well as two tanks."Because of berms built by Israeli forces, the ambulances could not enter the area so "the children and the wounded had to be taken to the ambulances on a donkey cart," the statement said.The statement quoted Pierre Wettach, an International Red Cross representative for Israel and the Palestinian areas, as calling the incident "shocking." CLIP

 
CONTINUED FROM PART 6...

 
Eye of The Storm Series #4: Inferno! is archived at http://www.earthrainbownetwork.com/Archives2009/EyeStorm4.htm

 
There has been hardly any donation in a good while... http://www.earthrainbownetwork.com/Donate.htm

 


 
18.

 

 
Mission accomplished: Globe enveloped in a radioactive, toxic chemical, heavy metal and nano particle-laden haze

 
The good news: Wireless toys and communications are "awesome," war is more lethal and airplanes are better able to hide from one another

The bad news: People, plants and animals are collapsing under the toxic burdens they are carrying; biological apocalypse is looming large

You, me and our children are now breathing ethylene-dibromide, nanoparticulates of aluminum, barium and cationic polymer fibers capable of growing and reproducing inside our bodies

By Don Harkins

The "chemtrail" story has become so huge that we can't describe it in mere words. All we can do is "imagine" it. So, close your eyes and take a deep breath-wait don't take a deep breath because we can't do that anymore.

Let's try again: Close your eyes and clear your mind (try to ignore the constant ringing in your ears and your chronic pains). Now imagine the ionosphere, the stratosphere and the troposphere; imagine all the oceans, seas, lakes and rivers; imagine all the islands and continents and their mountains and valleys, gorges and canyons, deserts and rainforests, badlands and scablands, the frozen arctic and frozen antarctic; now imagine the depths to which man has drilled into the earth and the heights to which man has reached in outer space. Now that you have "imagined" the heights, depths and breadths of our world, you can grasp how big the chemtrail "story" has become.

"We are laboratory rats whose very biochemistry is being altered. Our atmosphere is now conductive and we are all receiving its "current." The spraying....has saturated our air with polymers, metallic particles and fungi, all of which are now in our bodies as well as in the soil, plants and animals we co-exist with. We are being steadily moved away from real nature into an engineered matrix where all our functions can be observed and governed. Whether you realize it or not, it has happened,"

counterpropagandist Sofia Smallstorm wrote at her website AboutTheSky.com.

Smallstorm, who previously produced the highly acclaimed documentary 9/11 Mysteries (2006) has immersed herself in the global chemtrail emergency. According to Smallstorm, "The [chemtrail] spraying is part of an integrated atmospheric weapons system. Though it seems the program is currently about weather modification, the aerosols contain nano-engineered biologics, or weaponized parasites. According to those who have done the research, we are virtually all infected. Perhaps 'seeded' would be a better word.

"The mix of engineered parasites, pathogens, toxic heavy metals and nanobots is designed to assemble within us to create a microchipped terrain. Never mind the dog-and-pony-show discussion about future RFID (radio frequency identification) tags. It's already done."

One of the researchers to which Smallstorm referred is former government research scientist Clifford Carnicom. For several years now Carnicom has been actively involved in bringing attention to the chemtrail phenomenon. His technical background is extensive and he has collected and analyzed countless photos and specimen samples.

Carnicom's intuitive research and lucid analyses prove his qualifications as a scientist who believes that, "The saturation [of our atmosphere via aerosol operations] is complete. It is now a matter of maintenance and concentration."

Morgellons

Perhaps the creepiest of all chemtrail-related developments is the appearance of an affliction called "Morgellons disease." According to microbiologist Dr. Hildegarde Staninger, Morgellons is an environmental disease that will ultimately infect more living things than any other disease in history. "Its environmental impact will be far greater than DDT, PCBs and asbestos have ever been," Dr. Staninger stated to an audience of environmental professionals in 2007.

Morgellons is a "Nano-911 foreign invader," Dr. Staninger explained and added that medical professionals struggling to identify the infection have called it "fiber disease, mystery disease, delusional parasitosis and unknown dermatological skin disorder, to name a few."

In the abstract to her 2007 research paper "Chemical foreign invaders," Dr. Staninger gave Morgellons a chilling description: "It is silent, smart, glistening-powered by its own transitional metal battery. And when it strikes its victim it feels like a piece of burning broken glass as it pierces the skin. Smaller than any of the 150 pieces of a virus (known as virons), it is invisible to the naked eye. So silent is it, only the one who has been invaded knows its true nature. Marked with the seal of man-made, self-assembling nano-size materials, they can be used in forming drugs, pharmaceuticals, chemicals, biomaterials, artificial nerves, artificial brains, pseudo skin and molecular electronics. Yes, it was patterned after nature's many wonders, but it is still one hundred percent man-made. The nano-brew has been let loose from its scientific flask casting its woes upon an unsuspecting innocence."

Some of Carnicom's more recent research shows that the airborne chemtrail fibers and the fibers found in the tissues of a patient with advanced Morgellons Disease match. Additionally, the unusual airborne blood cell samples have been found to match the unusual blood cells in Morgellons-infected individuals.

The implications of these findings are that we have all been deliberately exposed to Morgellons via chemtrails.

Global dimming

It is ironic that Al Gore, et al., has been blaming global warming on CO2 (an element) without ever mentioning the global deployment of toxic man-made particulates via aerosol operations. While the global warming debate is more political and emotional than scientific, scientists measuring the amount of sunlight reaching the earth's surface have been concurring that a process of global dimming has been ongoing for the last several decades. Global dimming is evidenced by diminished output of electricity generated by solar panels and a reduction in plant productivity through decreased photosynthesis. Potential complications from global dimming are food chain interruptions from crop failures and weather problems from decreased water evaporation.

According to Smallstorm, "The aerosols being sprayed overhead contain, among other things, metal particles which become ionized (electrically charged) by sunlight. Thus, the air in which we live has been converted from a neutral, life-supporting medium into an electrically charged plasma (a conductive gas). We are told that experiments with deflecting sunlight are to our benefit. We are told that the "global dimming" phenomenon, now being admitted to by NASA as a consequence of the haze layers formed by "persistent jet contrails," will serve to cool the planet. We have already seen a 20 percent loss of sunlight in just a couple of decades."

A NASA project to officially quantify global dimming was delayed when the Shuttle Columbia crashed in 2001 and permanently abandoned in 2006, allegedly due to budgetary restraints. It is thought by some, however, that the project was scuttled because it would inevitably lead to exposing global aerosol operations and the toxic levels of particulates being deployed under the cloak of national security.

Nano particles and internal organs

The spray planes are filling our atmosphere with nano particles of barium on an almost daily basis. Carnicom estimates that barium levels worldwide are eight times higher than acceptable safety limits. The inhaled nano-particles, 80,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair, stick to the moist lung walls and are small enough to easily be absorbed directly into the blood stream where they will gain access to internal organs such as the liver and brain.

Since the aerosol operations began in earnest in about 1998 our bodies have been loading with these particulates and we are just now beginning to feel the ill effects.

Fait accompli?

Below is a shortlist of websites. From them you can dedicate an evening to surfing. To your utter amazement and horror, you will see dozens of shocking photos of chemclouds so severe that no one can claim them to be of natural origin. You will also see specimen samples photographed under microscopes showing that our breathing mixture is teeming with a vast array of weaponized molds, fungi, human blood cells, nano bacteria, radioactive particles, heavy metals, polymers and self-replicating fibers that seem to be synthetic. When you take all of this in and look at photos revealing our entire planet is blanketed in a toxic plasma no longer describable as "air," you will get the feeling that the transition of our natural, life-giving world into a synthetic, life-taking, planetary tomb is fait accompli.

However, we can't believe that because there would be no reason to go on living; we can't act as if there is no hope because there are millions of children whose futures depend upon our cleaning up this horrible mess.

On page 10 [ of the Dec 08 Idaho Observer, & shown below this article ] are some ideas on how to deal with chemtrails physically. On page 14 are some ideas on how to deal with chemtrails socially. [ SunToads thinks the material that is referenced to pages within the Idaho Observer are included in this email. We can't be sure because we do not have a paper

copy of the Idaho Observer in our possession. ]

Will we be able to stop this madness and clean up the biggest mess in human history? The answer to that question is in a future that will be shaped by what we do NOW. Go to AboutTheSky.com, Carnicom.com, BariumBlues.com, DontChemtrailMeBro.com, NewYorkSkywatch.com, ArizonaSkywatch.com,and ISeeLines.com. ***Email these links to others***
 
Biologic components have been reported in airborne samples that include modified molds, desiccated red blood cells and exotic strains of bacteria. Additionally, award winning investigative reporter, Will Thomas, has reported findings of over 300 types of virally-mutated fungi in the chemtrail fall out. The Idaho Observer reported in July, 2006, that analysis of chemtrail fallout in Iowa revealed traces of 26 known toxins including barium, aluminum and uranium, a variety of infectious pathogens, chemicals and drugs including sedatives. The government admits to deploying "military chaff" (fiberglass-coated aluminum particles) when air force pilots are training in U.S. airspace. Dr.R. Michael Castle reports the finding of cationic polymer fibers. Others have reported findings of tiny parasitic nematode eggs of some type encased in the fibers. Researcher Clifford Carnicom has reported finding chemtrail fibers that are an exact match with the bizarre fibers found in those suffering from Morgellons disease. Welcome to the brave new world of toxic skies, weather control, mind control and population control through the use of chemtrails modulated with electromagnetic frequencies generated by HAARP. Our health is under attack as evidenced by the skyrocketing rates of chemtrail-induced lung cancer, asthma and pulmonary/respiratory problems as well as the emergence of a new plague, Morgellons disease, an infection of unknown pathology that has been diagnosed in an estimated 60,000 Americans in over 12,000 families in the U.S. There is a corporate media blackout on this subject and public officials are either unable or unwilling to do or say anything about the fact that our entire planet is covered in a thick toxic haze. We are on our own. The only way to sound the alarm is by word of mouth. People are already dying because of the chemtrails. Life expectancy is down. This situation presents an immediate and serious threat to you, your family and loved ones. We must join together to stop this insane program of chemtrail spraying now. Please do what you can to help.
 
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From the December 2008 Idaho Observer:

Surviving chemtrails, weaponized parasites, molds, fungi and "nanobots"

By Ingri Cassel

I began researching information for this column in hopes of finding an "antidote" to the chemtrail emergency (see pages 11-14). I must admit that I, too, was beginning to think that Morgellon's and other chemtrail-induced illnesses could affect any warm-blooded human or animal on the planet and there was nothing we could do about it. As I was reading new material and reviewing information from my files, I found myself coming full circle to the teachings of my mentor, Dr. John R. Christopher, often referred to as the "father of American herbology. I now know that the wisdom of Dr. Christopher and his students, such as Dr. Richard Schulze, is just as applicable today in the world of "nanobots" and weaponized parasites, molds and fungi as it was when the world wasn't so scientifically sinister.

What natural hygienists, raw foodists and mucusless diet advocates have known all along is that heating food to over 120 degrees Fahrenheit destroys enzymes. These enzymes in raw foods are essential for proper assimilation of key nutrients. Bodies whose cells are oxygenated, hydrated, detoxified and supplied with the proper nutrients do not become "safe havens" for heavy metals, parasites, fungi and the strange nanotechnology that is designed to multiply in such terrain.

It really goes beyond that brief lesson in physiology. Our bodies are also electric with energy meridians running throughout our body that are linked bioenergetically to our endocrine glands and vital organs in a very real physical sense. These meridians are often blocked by our lifestyle choices, including negative emotions and thoughts. Getting clear about who you are as a spiritual being and your unique service work now actually becomes paramount if you want to survive the intense depopulation agenda being foisted upon us at lightning speed.

What should spiritual beings do? Live as close to nature as possible. If this is not possible, create a living space that surrounds you and your family with plant life, sprouting trays, and a vegetarian pet, giving you regular opportunities to share your appreciation of and love for the life forms existing in your space. This is essential to not only healing ourselves but our planet and God's creations. I love what Arthur and Fiona Cristian in Australia had to say about chemtrails and surviving the "end times plagues" these chemtrails are foreshadowing.
 
They gave four basic recommendations at the end of an important chemtrail expose sent out by John Hammell of International Advocates for Health Freedom (IAHF, www.iahf.com) that are posted to the website http://ww.loveforlife.com.au

With our own personal experiences we feel you only need to do the following to remove all chemtrail nasties from your body.

* Become a full on living/raw food eater - Stop cooking food and water and stop consuming meat, dairy and all other processed food and drink.

* Take MMS, the "Miracle Mineral Supplement" (see Back to Basics, Sept 2008.) A simple and effective way to oxygenate your body, MMS helps rid the body of parasites and fungi while relieving bad habits and "cravings."

* Take a quality liquid mineral supplement. (I would add that you should take a quality form of colloidal silver daily - one with an ionic or small micron size of silver.)

* Start growing all your food organically as soon as possible.

The Cristians warn people that they will likely feel really sick for a spell as their bodies detoxify. It is important to understand that these temporary sick spells are called "healing crises." When healing any chronic condition God and Nature's way, it is important to understand Dr. Constantine Herring's law of cure: "All [healing] starts from within out; from the head down and in the reverse order as the symptoms have appeared."

For instance, if you suppressed an ear infection with immuno-suppressive drugs sometime in your past, you will experience an intense ear ache for a few hours as part of your body's detoxification process.

How to protect yourself by doing cleanses

As a result of researching the very real danger posed by chemtrails (see following four pages), Hammell recommends doing herbal cleanses on a regular basis in order to keep the nano particles in the chemtrails from being able to assemble in the body so that you can't be microchipped from the inside and (thereby mind-controlled) and to purge your body of the parasites and heavy metals in the chemtrails.

The three cleanses that should be done on a regular basis are a parasite/colon cleanse, kidney cleanse, and gallbladder/liver cleanse. There is not a "one size fits all" protocol for everyone to follow when it comes to doing herbal cleanses for the simple reason that there are thousands of people with every imaginable health situation. There are basic guidelines, however. It's up to you whether or not you consult with a naturopath or medical doctor when doing these cleanses (if you have any serious health problem, consulting with a health professional is strongly recommended).

If you have access to the Internet, a good place to start is at CureZone.com/cleanse where Dr. Hulda Clark's protocols for the above-mentioned three cleanses are posted. We have also detailed colon cleansing, parasite and gallbladder flushes in past "Back to Basics" columns that can easily be accessed via The Idaho Observer website. Another excellent source of information on these three basic cleanses is in Dr. Richard Schultze's newsletters posted at www.HerbDoc.com. For a complete catalog of his superb products that make these cleanses "easy," call 800-HerbDoc.

Parasites/Fungi

In our radiation-saturated world, many people test positive for parasites and overgrowths of candida albicans. As a result of our bodies being bombarded with microwaves, iodine deficiencies are now the "norm" as well as deficiencies in all the "alkaline" minerals. It is important to do these cleanses in a space that is not close to celltowers or saturated with radiation from cordless DECT phones, microwave ovens or household use of cellphones. Being constantly exposed to microwaves weakens the body's ability to purge itself of heavy metals and other toxins that provide the perfect environment for parasites and fungi.

The three herbs that are used for doing a parasite flush in conjunction with a colon cleanse are black walnut leaves or hulls, wormwood and cloves. Raw garlic is also recommended. It is worth noting that black walnut trees-the leaves, the hulls and the inner bark-contain an organic and, therefore, highly assimilable form of iodine (32 micrograms per pound according to Dr. Christopher). Clinical experimentation in the 1960s has shown that the ellagic acid in black walnuts affords an ideal protective antidote to electrical shock, accidental electrocution and lightning mishaps [See "Preliminary Pharmacology of Ellagic Acid from Juglans nigra (Black Walnut)"; Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences, 57:1731, October 1968].

Black walnut is best known as a powerful vermifuge, used specifically in the treatment of ringworm, tape worm and other intestinal parasites. It has also been used as an effective treatment for tuberculosis, lupus, diphtheria, syphilis, herpes, tonsillitis, eczema and all manner of skin rashes and abscesses.

In India and Pakistan the oil of black walnut is used to treat leprosy. Dr. Christopher gained fame in the U.S. Army during WWII for his treatment of an "incurable" case of impetigo at Fort Lewis in Washington state using black walnut tincture externally. According to Dr. Christopher, black walnut is a miracle worker when used externally in cases of scrofula, impetigo, eczema, acne, dandruff, boils, and shingles. The tincture is also an excellent first aid, antiseptic remedy for wounds. Black walnut has also been used successfully in the treatment of poisonous snake and insect bites.

Detoxification involves taking a substance internally that mobilizes or attaches to the toxins needing removal from the body, and then making sure the substance along with the toxins are eliminated efficiently.

One of the most under-estimated means of removing heavy metals and other poisons from the body is the use of clay, both internally and externally.

The list of healing properties attributed to clay happens to be nearly identical to those of black walnut. Clay has a negative electrical attraction for particles that are positively charged. Most toxic poisons and pathogens are positively charged. This is why toxins are irresistibly drawn towards the clay.

Clay is composed of flat, microscopic, square-shaped "flakes." Laid edge-to-edge, one gram of these particles has the surface area of around 800 square meters or about 10 football fields. The greater the surface area, the greater is its power to pick up positively charged particles.

Calcium bentonite, also known as "montmorillonite," is the most popular clay for use internally in North America, although there are many different clays throughout the world that have the same therapeutic properties. Acupuncturist Julie Christ wrote the following in her article, Clay-The Healing Underground: "Bentonite attracts and neutralizes poisons in the intestinal tract. It can eliminate food allergies, food poisoning, mucus colitis, spastic colitis, viral infections, stomach flu, and parasites (parasites are unable to reproduce in the presence of clay). There is virtually no digestive disease that clay will not treat. It enriches and balances blood. It absorbs radiation (think cell phones, microwaves, x-rays, TVs and irradiated food, for starters). It has been used for alcoholism, arthritis, cataracts, diabetic neuropathy, pain treatment, open wounds, diarrhea, hemorrhoids, stomach ulcers, animal and poisonous insect bites, acne, anemia, in fact, the list of uses is too long for this article. It was used during the Balkan war of 1910 to reduce mortality from cholera among the soldiers from 60 to three percent." According to Dr. David G. Williams, researchers at Arizona State University found that certain clays killed several forms of pathogenic bacteria, including staphylococcus aureus (staph), methicillin-resistant S. aureus (MRSA), penicillin-resistant S. aureus (PRSA) and E. coli. The number of infections and deaths attributed to MRSA has risen dramatically in the U.S., much higher than cases of and deaths attributed to AIDS, Parkinson's disease, influenza and tuberculosis (see related article this page).

Clay baths.

The results people experience using this method are phenomenal and definitely worth the money when it comes to getting metals and other chemicals out of your body. It takes a few baths to have the full effect but after the first successful bath, you will likely be "hooked" and want to share this method with others. Twelve specific clay baths, each bath enhanced with herbs designed to pull out particular contaminant(s) needing removal, are available at www.magneticclay.com

Ionic Foot baths and Foot pads.

This is a fairly innovative way of pulling out heavy metals and other toxins through the feet. Many practitioners who use the foot baths in their offices recommend drinking a lot of water afterwards followed by ionic mineral supplementation. There are numerous fabulous testimonies with these baths, though lab analysis of the water after treatments is rare. The foot pad method works on the same principle of pulling out metals/toxins through the feet; this method being fairly effortless since one applies the pads to the soles of their feet when they go to bed at night.
 
A testimonial at http://www.bodypurenow.com is by a dentist who claims the following toxins came out of his body through his feet-mercury, isopropyl alcohol, benzene, nickel, asbestos, dimethylaminoazobenzene and PCBs. This same website offers a free analysis of the toxins in used foot pads that are purchased from them.

CAUTION.

One Internet blogger advises caution when eliminating heavy metals, parasites and fungi-specifically for those who are experiencing Morgellon's disease or suspect that the nanotechnology has been in them for years and has likely become integrated into their biological system. She claims her advise comes from " personal experience."

References for further research
:
1.
"Whistle blower contacts IAHF with inside info on chemtrails: How to detox and protect ourselves" http://www.loveforlife.com.au/node/5138
2.
The Cure For All Diseases by Hulda Regehr Clark, Ph.D., N.D. (1995)
3.
Doctor Christopher's Newsletter and Continuing Education Service, "Black Walnut, Juglans Nigra", Volume 5, No. 7. Christopher Publications, Inc., P.O. Box 412, Springville, Utah 84663.
4.
"Clay: The Healing Underground" by Julie Christ, M. Ac., The Idaho Observer, February 2005. See http://www.acupla.net
5.
Alternatives for the Health-Conscious Individual, December 2008, pp. 139-142. http://www.drdavidwilliams.com

 

 
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French government bans advertising of mobiles to children

New limits will be placed on radiation levels amid fears of increased risk of cancer from phone use

 
By Geoffrey Lean, Environment Editor

 
11 January 2009

 
New laws cracking down on children's use of mobile phones are to be introduced in France amid growing fears that they may cause cancer and other diseases.

All advertising of the devices to children under 12 is to be prohibited under the legislation - announced by the Environment Minister, Jean-Louis Borloo, last week - and he will also take powers to ban the sale of any phone designed to be used by those under six.

The French government will also introduce new limits for radiation from the phones and make it compulsory for handsets to be sold with earphones, so that users can avoid irradiating their heads and brains. And one of the country's largest cities last month started an advertising campaign to discourage the use of the phones by children.

The clampdown represents the most comprehensive action yet taken by any government worldwide. It contrasts sharply with the stance of British ministers, who have largely ignored the recommendations of an official report nine years ago that people aged under 16 should be discouraged from using mobiles, and that the industry should be stopped from promoting them to children. Since then their use by the young has almost doubled, so that nine out of 10 of the country's 16-year-olds own a handset.

Swedish research indicates that children and teenagers are five times more likely to get brain cancer if they use the phones, causing some experts to predict an "epidemic" of the disease among today's young people in later life. But consideration of the threat to them has been specifically excluded from Britain's official £3.1m investigation into the risk of cancer from mobiles.

The French ministry warned that "mobile phone use is increasing at a rapid pace among youths", and warns that the young may be "more sensitive because their bodies are still developing". Children's heads are smaller and their skulls thinner.

Lyon, France's second city, launched an advertising campaign before Christmas aimed at dissuading people from buying mobiles for children as presents, with the slogan "Let's keep them healthy, away from mobile phones!"

A year ago France's official Agency for Environmental and Occupational Health Safety said that parents should not give small children mobiles. And France's Health Ministry urged using them in moderation.

The French legislation is the latest evidence of growing official alarm at the hazards of the radiation caused by mobile phone use. In September, the European Parliament voted 522 to 16 to urge ministers across Europe to bring in stricter radiation limits, and the European Environment Agency has also issued a warning.
 
Toronto's Department of Public Health has advised that children under eight should only use mobiles in emergencies and teenagers should limit calls to less than 10 minutes. The Russian Ministry of Health says that young people under 18 should not use the devices, and Israel's Health Ministry has also advised caution.

 
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20.

 

 
The Pax Natura Declaration

 
By Jeff Middleton  - January 1, 2008

We, the people of the Earth, affirm the Universe is governed with precision and perfection by a system of natural laws set in motion to maintain order and sustain all living and non-living systems. Over the long corridors of time, these laws have brought forth an astonishing diversity of life reflecting Nature's beauty, creativity, and orderliness.

This tapestry of diversity at the very heart of Nature is whole, indivisible, and manifests in the countless interconnections of each and every part. Our human family is but one thread in this interwoven fabric and yet mirrors, as do all its parts, the grandeur of the Universe and the wisdom of its Creator. We have an inherent right and solemn responsibility to live peacefully not only with each other, but with every expression of Nature's bounty in the eternal web of life.

In the course of human existence it has now become necessary to humbly acknowledge the manifold abuse delivered by ourselves, and in our names, upon the very Nature that has created and sustained us throughout time. We stand at a critical juncture in history. While wars have ravaged human civilization in the form of armed conflict between our fellow brothers and sisters, an undeclared war has also been raging against the natural world. This conflict, while complex and difficult to define, constitutes a far more insidious and dangerous threat to our long-term survival. Reports of new levels of destruction and decimation continue coming from front line ecologists, biologists, meteorologists, and concerned individuals from many different fields. The battle grounds in this war include the decline of clean air and water, the relentless restructuring of our atmosphere and climate, the clearing of the rainforests, the destruction of the coral reefs, the degradation of planting soils, the proliferation of unnatural monoculture agriculture, the random re-structure of Nature's gene pool, and a host of other violent acts against our Mother earth. The result of this assault is now self-evident with the tragic loss of bio-diversity and a general decline in the quality of life for all species, including our own.

Violence against Nature is not new and is rooted in the philosophical belief that humans have sovereignty over living systems and that our existence is justified at the expense of a declining planet. We reject this thesis and all of its ramifications. While acknowledging that all natural systems require energy and water for survival, and that competition for resources is a natural process in nature's design, we hold this form of competition does not constitute an act of war. Rather, the conflict we speak of is an idea instilled in the hearts and minds of our youth for generations and manifests as separation, isolation, and alienation from the natural world. We must cultivate in our children a deep and profound appreciation for the Nature that sustains them.

It is time to begin healing centuries of conflict by re-defining our place in the web of life on earth. Ancient philosophical principles all proclaim and speak to the Oneness of the world. Experience and research from every corner of the globe has now demonstrated that these once abstract principles must now be understood in a practical way as the framework for the survival of all. A Universal Declaration of Peace with Nature will mark the beginning of a new era of life on earth where human civilization is patterned on the eternal guiding principles of natural law, and the diversity of life is governed, without prejudice, from the unity and oneness of Nature.

Therefore, we the undersigned, representing ourselves, our lands, and the best aspirations of all humankind, do hereby declare from this day forward, a state of perpetual Peace with Nature.

 
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21.

 
Recommended by Marie Bélec Steurer-Henry (maadestp@globetrotter.net) - a very moving story as you'll see!

 

 
Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace . . . One School at a Time

 
By Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin

 
In Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace . . . One School at a Time, Greg Mortenson, and acclaimed journalist David Oliver Relin, recount the unlikely journey that led Mortenson from a failed attempt to climb Pakistan's K2, the world's second highest mountain, to successfully building schools in some of the most remote regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan. By replacing guns with pencils, rhetoric with reading, Mortenson combines his unique background with his intimate knowledge of the third-world to fight terrorism with books, not bombs, and successfully bring education and hope to remote villages in central Asia. Three Cups of Tea is at once an unforgettable adventure and the inspiring true story of how one man really is changing the world-one school at a time.

In 1993 Mortenson was descending from his failed attempt to reach the peak of K2. Exhausted and disoriented, he wandered away from his group into the most desolate reaches of northern Pakistan. Alone, without food, water, or shelter he eventually stumbled into an impoverished Pakistani village where he was nursed back to health.

While recovering he observed the village's 84 children sitting outdoors, scratching their lessons in the dirt with sticks. The village was so poor that it could not afford the $1-a-day salary to hire a teacher. When he left the village, he promised that he would return to build them a school. From that rash, heartfelt promise grew one of the most incredible humanitarian campaigns of our time: Greg Mortenson's one-man mission to counteract extremism and terrorism by building schools-especially for girls-throughout the breeding ground of the Taliban.

In an early effort to raise money he wrote letters to 580 celebrities, businessmen, and other prominent Americans. His only reply was a $100 check from NBC's Tom Brokaw. Selling everything he owned, he still only raised $2,000. But his luck began to change when a group of elementary school children in River Falls, Wisconsin, donated $623 in pennies, thereby inspiring adults to take his cause more seriously. The Korphe Bridge (pictured above) and the Korphe School (left) were complete in 1996. Since then, he's built over sixty schools. Mortenson and award-winning journalist David Oliver Relin have written a spellbinding account of his incredible accomplishments in a region where Americans are feared and hated. In pursuit of his goal, Mortenson has survived an armed kidnapping, fatwas issued by enraged mullahs, repeated death threats, and wrenching separations from his wife and children. Yet his success speaks for itself. This year the schools will educate 24,000 children.

'Three Cups of Tea is one of the most remarkable adventure stories of our time. Greg Mortenson's dangerous and difficult quest to build schools in the wildest parts of Pakistan and Afghanistan is not only a thrilling read, it's proof that one ordinary person, with the right combination of character and determination, really can change the world.' -Tom Brokaw

 
Greg Mortenson has provided a Three Cups of Tea Reading Guide and a Question & Answer Interview for use in book clubs, interviews, classrooms, etc. http://www.threecupsoftea.com
Purchases of Three Cups of Tea made through this link on Amazon.com will generate up to 7% of proceeds to benefit CAI. Much more to discover through https://www.ikat.org/

 
Note from Jean: Now imagine for a second how the world would be if instead of wasting countless billions of dollars and immense resources and human ingenuity in bombing, maiming and killing in pursuit of their demented hegemonic goals, the United States of America and its war allies around the world had done like this wonderful soul and put all their energies into doing good around the world... Just imagine...

 
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Related article:

 
The Afghan Scam: The Untold Story of Why the U.S. Is Bound to Fail in Afghanistan (January 11, 2009) http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175019
(...) Had the U.S. delivered the promised services on time, while employing Afghans to rebuild their own country according to their own priorities and under the supervision of their own government -- a mini-Marshall Plan -- they would now be in charge of their own defense. The forces on the other side, which we loosely call the Taliban, would also have lost much of their grounds for complaint.Instead, the Bush administration perpetrated a scam. It used the system it set up to dispense reconstruction aid to both the countries it "liberated," Afghanistan and Iraq, to transfer American taxpayer dollars from the national treasury directly into the pockets of private war profiteers. Think of Halliburton, Bechtel, and Blackwater in Iraq; Louis Berger Group, Bearing Point, and DynCorp International in Afghanistan. They're all in it together. So far, the Bush administration has bamboozled Americans about its shady aid program. Nobody talks about it. Yet the aid scam, which would be a scandal if it weren't so profitable for so many, explains far more than does troop strength about why, today, we are on the verge of watching the whole Afghan enterprise go belly up.What's worse, there's no reason to expect that things will change significantly on Barack Obama's watch. During the election campaign, he called repeatedly for more troops for "the right war" in Afghanistan (while pledging to draw-down U.S. forces in Iraq), but he has yet to say a significant word about the reconstruction mission. While many aid workers in that country remain full of good intentions, the delivery systems for and uses of U.S. aid have been so thoroughly corrupted that we can only expect more of the same -- unless Obama cleans house fast. But given the monumental problems on his plate, how likely is that?The Jolly PrivateersIt's hard to overstate the magnitude of the failure of American reconstruction in Afghanistan. While the U.S. has occupied the country -- for seven years and counting -- and efficiently set up a network of bases and prisons, it has yet to restore to Kabul, the capital, a mud brick city slightly more populous than Houston, a single one of the public services its citizens used to enjoy. When the Soviets occupied Afghanistan in the 1980s, they modernized the education system and built power plants, dams, factories, and apartment blocs, still the most coveted in the country. If, in the last seven years, George W. Bush did not get the lights back on in the capital, or the water flowing, or dispose of the sewage or trash, how can we assume Barack Obama will do any better with the corrupt system he's about to inherit? CLIP

 
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22.

 
Forwarded by Kathy Roberts (weerkhr@pacbell.net)

 

 
The Beauty of What's in Front of You

 
January 07, 2009

A man sat at a metro station in Washington DC and started to play the violin; it was a cold January morning. He played six Bach pieces for about 45 minutes. During that time, since it was rush hour, it was calculated that thousands of people went through the station, most of them on their way to work.

Three minutes went by and a middle aged man noticed there was musician playing. He slowed his pace and stopped for a few seconds -- then hurried to meet his schedule.

A minute later, the violinist received his first dollar tip: a woman threw the money in the till and, without stopping, continued to walk.

A few minutes later, someone leaned against the wall to listen to him, but the man looked at his watch and started to walk again. Clearly he was late for work.

The one who paid the most attention was a 3-year old boy...

His mother tried to rush him, but the boy stopped to look at the violinist. Finally the mother pushed hard and the child continued to walk turning his head all the time. This action was repeated by several other children. All the parents, without exception, forced them to move on.

In the 45 minutes the musician played, only 6 people stopped and stayed for a while. About 20 gave him money but continued to walk their normal pace. He collected $32. When he finished playing and silence took over, no one noticed it. No one applauded, nor was there any recognition.
 
No one knew this but the violinist was Joshua Bell, one of the best musicians in the world. He played one of the most intricate pieces ever written with a violin worth 3.5 million dollars.
 
Two days before his playing in the subway, Joshua Bell sold out at a theater in Boston and the seats averaged $100.
 
This is a real story. Joshua Bell playing incognito in the metro station was organized by the Washington Post as part of an social experiment about perception, taste and priorities of people. The themes were: in a commonplace environment at an inappropriate hour: How do we perceive beauty? Do we stop to appreciate it? Do we recognize the talent in an unexpected context?

One of the possible conclusions from this experience could be:

If we do not have a moment to stop and listen to one of the best musicians in the world playing the best music ever written, how many other things are we missing?

Ouch!
 
Try not to miss the beauty of life coming your way -- it may be right in front of you. Right now, in fact.

 
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Related video

 
Stop and Hear the Music
Will one of the nation's greatest musicians be noticed in a D.C. Metro stop during rush hour? Violinist Joshua Bell experimented for Gene Weingarten's Sunday Magazine story in The Washington Post.

 
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23.

 
'Foreclosure Angel' Saves Stranger's Home

 
Marilyn Mock Says 'People Need to Help Each Other'

By JONANN BRADY
 
Tracy Pottsboro lost her job and then her home when she couldn't make mortgage payments. On Saturday, she watched as her home was auctioned off in Dallas.

"The final farewell to my house," Pottsboro said. "It means so much to all of us. It's not just a house."

 
Auctions on foreclosed houses are an opportunity for some and agony for those who've lost their homes.

 
From July through September of this year, more than 2,700 Americans lost their homes to foreclosure every day, according to The Associated Press. In Texas, almost 9,200 homes entered the foreclosure process in September.

On Saturday, Pottsboro took her seat among the crowd, waiting for house No. 73 to be called.

Marilyn Mock, a small-business owner from Rockwall, Texas, had accompanied her son, who was interested in buying a house, to the auction that day.

Mock was sitting near Pottsboro and noticed that she was upset.

"She was crying, and I asked her what is she upset about, and you know, she lost her house," Mock said.

When the No. 73 came up and the auction began, Mock said she asked Pottsboro, "Is it worth it?"

"She said yes. & I just kept taking her word," Mock said.

Mock ended up winning the auction, with a bid of about $30,000. And just like that, Pottsboro's sad goodbye turned into welcome home.
 
Mock told "Good Morning America" that she will take out a bank loan to finance about half the cost and will let Pottsboro and her family live in the house and make payments to her instead of the bank. She said she will pay for about half the house upfront.

Mock was straightforward about her motive. "People need to help each other, and that's all there is to it," she said.

 
Mock was straightforward about her motive. "People need to help each other, and that's all there is to it," she said. Pottsboro was moved to tears by Mock's random act of generosity. "Nobody's done anything like that for me before, and I hope that I can repay the favor," she said.

 
Mock said her son and husband have come to expect these "crazy" things. "When I came home and I said, 'Well, honey, guess what?' He just goes, "OK, whatever.' He's used to it," Mock told "GMA."

 
"I do a lot of things, you know, loan money out and give to somebody -- you see somebody in need, you give them money," she said. "Or you see somebody in the grocery store, they don't have enough money to pay for it, I'm usually the one behind saying here, here's $20 or something.
CONTINUED FROM PART 4...

 
Eye of The Storm Series #4: Inferno! is archived at http://www.earthrainbownetwork.com/Archives2009/EyeStorm4.htm

 
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8.

 

 
Holocaust Denied: The lying silence of those who know

 
by John Pilger -- January 8, 2009

"When the truth is replaced by silence," the Soviet dissident Yevgeny Yevtushenko said, "the silence is a lie." It may appear the silence is broken on Gaza. The cocoons of murdered children, wrapped in green, together with boxes containing their dismembered parents and the cries of grief and rage of everyone in that death camp by the sea, can be viewed on al-Jazeera and YouTube, even glimpsed on the BBC. But Russia's incorrigible poet was not referring to the ephemeral we call news; he was asking why those who knew the why never spoke it and so denied it. Among the Anglo-American intelligentsia, this is especially striking. It is they who hold the keys to the great storehouses of knowledge: the historiographies and archives that lead us to the why.

They know that the horror now raining on Gaza has little to do with Hamas or, absurdly, "Israel's right to exist." They know the opposite to be true: that Palestine's right to exist was canceled 61 years ago and the expulsion and, if necessary, extinction of the indigenous people was planned and executed by the founders of Israel. They know, for example, that the infamous "Plan D" resulted in the murderous depopulation of 369 Palestinian towns and villages by the Haganah (Jewish army) and that massacre upon massacre of Palestinian civilians in such places as Deir Yassin, al-Dawayima, Eilaboun, Jish, Ramle and Lydda are referred to in official records as "ethnic cleansing." Arriving at a scene of this carnage, David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister, was asked by a general, Yigal Allon, "What shall we do with the Arabs?" Ben-Gurion, reported the Israeli historian Benny Morris, "made a dismissive, energetic gesture with his hand and said, 'Expel them'. The order to expel an entire population "without attention to age" was signed by Yitzhak Rabin, a future prime minister promoted by the world's most efficient propaganda as a peacemaker. The terrible irony of this was addressed only in passing, such as when the Mapan Party co-leader Meir Ya'ari noted "how easily" Israel's leaders spoke of how it was "possible and permissible to take women, children and old men and to fill the roads with them because such is the imperative of strategy Š who remembers who used this means against our people during the [Second World] war Š we are appalled."

Every subsequent "war" Israel has waged has had the same objective: the expulsion of the native people and the theft of more and more land. The lie of David and Goliath, of perennial victim, reached its apogee in 1967 when the propaganda became a righteous fury that claimed the Arab states had struck first. Since then, mostly Jewish truth-tellers such as Avi Schlaim, Noam Chomsky, the late Tanya Reinhart, Neve Gordon, Tom Segev, Yuri Avnery, Ilan Pappe and Norman Finklestein have dispatched this and other myths and revealed a state shorn of the humane traditions of Judaism, whose unrelenting militarism is the sum of an expansionist, lawless and racist ideology called zionism. "It seems," wrote the Israeli historian Ilan Pappe on 2 January, "that even the most horrendous crimes, such as the genocide in Gaza, are treated as desperate events, unconnected to anything that happened in the past and not associated with any ideology or system Š Very much as the apartheid ideology explained the oppressive policies of the South African government, this ideology - in its most consensual and simplistic variety - has allowed all the Israeli governments in the past and the present to dehumanize the Palestinians wherever they are and strive to destroy them. The means altered from period to period, from location to location, as did the narrative covering up these atrocities. But there is a clear pattern [of genocide]."

In Gaza, the enforced starvation and denial of humanitarian aid, the piracy of life-giving resources such as fuel and water, the denial of medicines and treatment, the systematic destruction of infrastructure and the killing and maiming of the civilian population, 50 per cent of whom are children, meet the international standard of the Genocide Convention. "Is it an irresponsible overstatement," asked Richard Falk, the United Nations Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territory and international law authority at Princeton University, "to associate the treatment of Palestinians with this criminalized Nazi record of collective atrocity? I think not."

In describing a "holocaust-in-the making," Falk was alluding to the Nazis' establishment of Jewish ghettos in Poland. For one month in 1943, the captive Polish Jews led by Mordechaj Anielewiz fought off the German army and the SS, but their resistance was finally crushed and the Nazis exacted their final revenge. Falk is also a Jew. Today's holocaust-in-the-making, which began with Ben-Gurion's Plan D, is in its final stages. The difference today is that it is a joint US-Israeli project. The F-16 jet fighters, the 250-pound "smart" GBU-39 bombs supplied on the eve of the attack on Gaza, having been approved by a Congress dominated by the Democratic Party, plus the annual $2.4 billion in war-making "aid," give Washington de facto control. It beggars belief that President-elect Obama was not informed. Outspoken on Russia's war in Georgia and the terrorism in Mumbai, Obama's silence on Palestine marks his approval, which is to be expected, given his obsequiousness to the Tel Aviv regime and its lobbyists during the presidential campaign and his appointment of Zionists as his secretary of state, chief of staff and principal Middle East advisers. When Aretha Franklin sings "Think," her wonderful 1960s anthem to freedom, at Obama's inauguration on 21 January, I trust someone with the brave heart of Muntadar al-Zaidi, the shoe-thrower, will shout: "Gaza!"

The asymmetry of conquest and terror is clear. Plan D is now "Operation Cast Lead," which is the unfinished "Operation Justified Vengeance." The latter was launched by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in 2001 when, with Bush's approval, he used F-16s against Palestinian towns and villages for the first time. In the same year, the authoritative Jane's Foreign Report disclosed that the Blair government had given Israel the "green light" to attack the West Bank after it was shown Israel's secret designs for a bloodbath. It was typical of New Labor Party's enduring, cringing complicity in Palestine's agony. However, the 2001 Israeli plan, reported Jane's, needed the "trigger" of a suicide bombing which would cause "numerous deaths and injuries [because] the 'revenge' factor is crucial." This would "motivate Israeli soldiers to demolish the Palestinians." What alarmed Sharon and the author of the plan, General Shaul Mofaz, the Israeli Chief of Staff, was a secret agreement between Yasser Arafat and Hamas to ban suicide attacks. On 23 November, 2001, Israeli agents assassinated the Hamas leader, Mahmud Abu Hunud, and got their "trigger"; the suicide attacks resumed in response to his killing.

Something uncannily similar happened on 5 November last, when Israeli special forces attacked Gaza, killing six people. Once again, they got their propaganda "trigger." A ceasefire initiated and sustained by the Hamas government - which had imprisoned its violators - was shattered by the Israeli attack and homemade rockets were fired into what used to be Palestine before its Arab occupants were "cleansed." The On 23 December, Hamas offered to renew the ceasefire, but Israel's charade was such that its all-out assault on Gaza had been planned six months earlier, according to the Israeli daily Ha'aretz.
 
Behind this sordid game is the "Dagan Plan," named after General Meir Dagan, who served with Sharon in his bloody invasion of Lebanon in 1982. Now head of Mossad, the Israeli intelligence organization, Dagan is the author of a "solution" that has seen the imprisonment of Palestinians behind a ghetto wall snaking across the West Bank and in Gaza, effectively a concentration camp. The establishment of a quisling government in Ramallah under Mohammed Abbas is Dagan's achievement, together with a hasbara (propaganda) campaign relayed through a mostly supine, if intimidated western media, notably in America, that says Hamas is a terrorist organization devoted to Israel's destruction and to "blame" for the massacres and siege of its own people over two generations, long before its creation. "We have never had it so good," said the Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Gideon Meir in 2006. "The hasbara effort is a well-oiled machine." In fact, Hamas's real threat is its example as the Arab world's only democratically elected government, drawing its popularity from its resistance to the Palestinians' oppressor and tormentor. This was demonstrated when Hamas foiled a CIA coup in 2007, an event ordained in the western media as "Hamas's seizure of power." Likewise, Hamas is never described as a government, let alone democratic. Neither is its proposal of a ten-year truce as a historic recognition of the "reality" of Israel and support for a two-state solution with just one condition: that the Israelis obey international law and end their illegal occupation beyond the 1967 borders. As every annual vote in the UN General Assembly demonstrates, 99 per cent of humanity concurs. On 4 January, the president of the General Assembly, Miguel d'Escoto, described the Israeli attack on Gaza as a "monstrosity."

When the monstrosity is done and the people of Gaza are even more stricken, the Dagan Plan foresees what Sharon called a "1948-style solution" - the destruction of all Palestinian leadership and authority followed by mass expulsions into smaller and smaller "cantonments" and perhaps finally into Jordan. This demolition of institutional and educational life in Gaza is designed to produce, wrote Karma Nabulsi, a Palestinian exile in Britain, "a Hobbesian vision of an anarchic society: truncated, violent, powerless, destroyed, cowed Š Look to the Iraq of today: that is what [Sharon] had in store for us, and he has nearly achieved it."

Dr. Dahlia Wasfi is an American writer on Palestine. She has a Jewish mother and an Iraqi Muslim father. "Holocaust denial is anti-Semitic," she wrote on 31 December. "But I'm not talking about World War Two, Mahmoud Ahmedinijad (the president of Iran) or Ashkenazi Jews. What I'm referring to is the holocaust we are all witnessing and responsible for in Gaza today and in Palestine over the past 60 years Š Since Arabs are Semites, US-Israeli policy doesn't get more anti-Semitic than this." She quoted Rachel Corrie, the young American who went to Palestine to defend Palestinians and was crushed by an Israeli bulldozer. "I am in the midst of a genocide," wrote Corrie, "which I am also indirectly supporting and for which my government is largely responsible."

Reading the words of both, I am struck by the use of "responsibility." Breaking the lie of silence is not an esoteric abstraction but an urgent responsibility that falls to those with the privilege of a platform. With the BBC cowed, so too is much of journalism, merely allowing vigorous debate within unmovable invisible boundaries, ever fearful of the smear of anti-Semitism. The unreported news, meanwhile, is that the death toll in Gaza is the equivalent of 18,000 dead in Britain. Imagine, if you can.

 
Then there are the academics, the deans and teachers and researchers. Why are they silent as they watch a university bombed and hear the Association of University Teachers in Gaza plea for help? Are British universities now, as Terry Eagleton believes, no more than "intellectual Tescos, churning out a commodity known as graduates rather than greengroceries"?

Then there are the writers. In the dark year of 1939, the Third Writers' Congress was held at Carnegie Hall in New York and the likes of Thomas Mann and Albert Einstein sent messages and spoke up to ensure the lie of silence was broken. By one account, 3,500 jammed the auditorium and a thousand were turned away. Today, this mighty voice of realism and morality is said to be obsolete; the literary review pages affect an ironic hauteur of irrelevance; false symbolism is all. As for the readers, their moral and political imagination is to be pacified, not primed. The anti-Muslim Martin Amis expressed this well in Visiting Mrs. Nabokov: "The dominance of the self is not a flaw, it is an evolutionary characteristic; it is just how things are."

If that is how things are, we are diminished as a civilized society. For what happens in Gaza is the defining moment of our time, which either grants the impunity of war criminals the immunity of our silence, while we contort our own intellect and morality, or gives us the power to speak out. For the moment I prefer my own memory of Gaza: of the people's courage and resistance and their "luminous humanity," as Karma Nabulsi put it. On my last trip there, I was rewarded with a spectacle of Palestinian flags fluttering in unlikely places. It was dusk and children had done this. No one told them to do it. They made flagpoles out of sticks tied together, and a few of them climbed on to a wall and held the flag between them, some silently, others crying out. They do this every day when they know foreigners are leaving, believing the world will not forget them.

 
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Related articles:

 
The Invasion of Gaza: "Operation Cast Lead", Part of a Broader Israeli Military-Intelligence Agenda (Jan 4, 09)
The aerial bombings and the ongoing ground invasion of Gaza by Israeli ground forces must be analysed in a historical context. Operation "Cast Lead" is a carefully planned undertaking, which is part of a broader military-intelligence agenda first formulated by the government of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in 2001: "Sources in the defense establishment said Defense Minister Ehud Barak instructed the Israel Defense Forces to prepare for the operation over six months ago, even as Israel was beginning to negotiate a ceasefire agreement with Hamas."(Barak Ravid, Operation "Cast Lead": Israeli Air Force strike followed months of planning, Haaretz, December 27, 2008) It was Israel which broke the truce on the day of the US presidential elections, November 4: "Israel used this distraction to break the ceasefire between itself and Hamas by bombing the Gaza strip.  Israel claimed this violation of the ceasefire was to prevent Hamas from digging tunnels into Israeli territory. The very next day, Israel launched a terrorizing siege of Gaza, cutting off food, fuel, medical supplies and other necessities in an attempt to "subdue" the Palestinians while at the same time engaging in armed incursions. In response, Hamas and others in Gaza again resorted to firing crude, homemade, and mainly inaccurate rockets into Israel.  During the past seven years, these rockets have been responsible for the deaths of 17 Israelis.  Over the same time span, Israeli Blitzkrieg assaults have killed thousands of Palestinians, drawing worldwide protest but falling on deaf ears at the UN."
Planned Humanitarian Disaster On December 8, US Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte was in Tel Aviv for discussions with his Israeli counterparts including the director of Mossad, Meir Dagan. "Operation Cast Lead" was initiated two days day after Christmas. It was coupled with a carefully designed international Public Relations campaign under the auspices of Israel's Foreign Ministry. Hamas' military targets are not the main objective. Operation "Cast Lead" is intended, quite deliberately, to trigger civilian casualities. What we are dealing with is a "planned humanitarian disaster" in Gaza in a densely populated urban area. The longer term objective of this plan, as formulated by Israeli policy makers, is the expulsion of Palestinians from Palestinian lands:  "Terrorize the civilian population, assuring maximal destruction of property and cultural resources... The daily life of the Palestinians must be rendered unbearable: They should be locked up in cities and towns, prevented from exercising normal economic life, cut off from workplaces, schools and hospitals, This will encourage emigration and weaken the resistance to future expulsions" Ur Shlonsky, quoted by Ghali Hassan, Gaza: The World's Largest Prison (...) Israel is not seeking to oblige Hamas "to cooperate". What we are dealing with is the implementation of the "Dagan Plan" as initially formulated in 2001, which called for: "an invasion of Palestinian-controlled territory by some 30,000 Israeli soldiers, with the clearly defined mission of destroying the infrastructure of the Palestinian leadership and collecting weaponry currently possessed by the various Palestinian forces, and expelling or killing its military leadership. The broader question is whether Israel in consultation with Washington is intent upon triggering a wider war. Mass expulsion could occur at some later stage of the ground invasion, were the Israelis to open up Gaza's borders to allow for an exodus of population. Expulsion was referred to by Ariel Sharon as the "a 1948 style solution". For Sharon "it is only necessary to find another state for the Palestinians. - 'Jordan is Palestine' - was the phrase that Sharon coined."

 
Vatican-Israel ties tense over cardinal's camps comment (Jan 8, 2009)
VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - Relations between the Vatican and Israel grew tense on Thursday when the Jewish state condemned an aide to Pope Benedict for calling Gaza "a big concentration camp."Israel criticized Cardinal Renato Martino as the pope delivered a speech to diplomats in which he spoke out against the use of violence by both Israel and Hamas Islamists in Gaza.On Wednesday, Martino, president of the Vatican's Council for Justice and Peace, delivered the Vatican's toughest criticism of Israel since its offensive in the Palestinian-ruled enclave, calling Gaza a "big concentration camp.""We are astounded to hear from a spiritual dignitary words that are so far removed from truth and dignity," Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor told Reuters. CLIP

 
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9.

 

 
An Unnecessary War
 
By Jimmy Carter -- January 8, 2009

I know from personal involvement that the devastating invasion of Gaza by Israel could easily have been avoided.

After visiting Sderot last April and seeing the serious psychological damage caused by the rockets that had fallen in that area, my wife, Rosalynn, and I declared their launching from Gaza to be inexcusable and an act of terrorism. Although casualties were rare (three deaths in seven years), the town was traumatized by the unpredictable explosions. About 3,000 residents had moved to other communities, and the streets, playgrounds and shopping centers were almost empty. Mayor Eli Moyal assembled a group of citizens in his office to meet us and complained that the government of Israel was not stopping the rockets, either through diplomacy or military action.

Knowing that we would soon be seeing Hamas leaders from Gaza and also in Damascus, we promised to assess prospects for a cease-fire. From Egyptian intelligence chief Omar Suleiman, who was negotiating between the Israelis and Hamas, we learned that there was a fundamental difference between the two sides. Hamas wanted a comprehensive cease-fire in both the West Bank and Gaza, and the Israelis refused to discuss anything other than Gaza.

 
We knew that the 1.5 million inhabitants of Gaza were being starved, as the U.N. special rapporteur on the right to food had found that acute malnutrition in Gaza was on the same scale as in the poorest nations in the southern Sahara, with more than half of all Palestinian families eating only one meal a day.

Palestinian leaders from Gaza were noncommittal on all issues, claiming that rockets were the only way to respond to their imprisonment and to dramatize their humanitarian plight. The top Hamas leaders in Damascus, however, agreed to consider a cease-fire in Gaza only, provided Israel would not attack Gaza and would permit normal humanitarian supplies to be delivered to Palestinian citizens.

After extended discussions with those from Gaza, these Hamas leaders also agreed to accept any peace agreement that might be negotiated between the Israelis and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, who also heads the PLO, provided it was approved by a majority vote of Palestinians in a referendum or by an elected unity government.

Since we were only observers, and not negotiators, we relayed this information to the Egyptians, and they pursued the cease-fire proposal. After about a month, the Egyptians and Hamas informed us that all military action by both sides and all rocket firing would stop on June 19, for a period of six months, and that humanitarian supplies would be restored to the normal level that had existed before Israel's withdrawal in 2005 (about 700 trucks daily).

We were unable to confirm this in Jerusalem because of Israel's unwillingness to admit to any negotiations with Hamas, but rocket firing was soon stopped and there was an increase in supplies of food, water, medicine and fuel. Yet the increase was to an average of about 20 percent of normal levels. And this fragile truce was partially broken on Nov. 4, when Israel launched an attack in Gaza to destroy a defensive tunnel being dug by Hamas inside the wall that encloses Gaza.

On another visit to Syria in mid-December, I made an effort for the impending six-month deadline to be extended. It was clear that the preeminent issue was opening the crossings into Gaza. Representatives from the Carter Center visited Jerusalem, met with Israeli officials and asked if this was possible in exchange for a cessation of rocket fire. The Israeli government informally proposed that 15 percent of normal supplies might be possible if Hamas first stopped all rocket fire for 48 hours. This was unacceptable to Hamas, and hostilities erupted.

After 12 days of "combat," the Israeli Defense Forces reported that more than 1,000 targets were shelled or bombed. During that time, Israel rejected international efforts to obtain a cease-fire, with full support from Washington. Seventeen mosques, the American International School, many private homes and much of the basic infrastructure of the small but heavily populated area have been destroyed. This includes the systems that provide water, electricity and sanitation. Heavy civilian casualties are being reported by courageous medical volunteers from many nations, as the fortunate ones operate on the wounded by light from diesel-powered generators.

The hope is that when further hostilities are no longer productive, Israel, Hamas and the United States will accept another cease-fire, at which time the rockets will again stop and an adequate level of humanitarian supplies will be permitted to the surviving Palestinians, with the publicized agreement monitored by the international community. The next possible step: a permanent and comprehensive peace.

The writer was president from 1977 to 1981. He founded the Carter Center, a nongovernmental organization advancing peace and health worldwide, in 1982.

 
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10.

 
ETHNIC CLEANSING IT IS AND IT HAS BEEN FOR 60 YEARS WITH THE BLESSING OF THE WEST... QUESTION: WHY IS THE ETHNIC CLEANSING PERPETRATED BY ISRAEL MORE ACCEPTABLE IN THE EYE OF THE U.S., CANADA, THE UK AND MANY OTHER COUNTRIES THAN WHAT WAS DONE BY YUGOSLAVIA AND THE LIKES?

 
Forwarded by Ricardo (ricardos@auroville.org.in)

 

 
Peace is just for the massacred

 
by Milton Hatoum -- 07.01.2009

 
The army of Israel is powerful enough to destroy the entire Middle East (and, in fact, also to destroy a significant part of the west). The only problem is that, up until now, it has never managed to succeed, even in the territory which would suit them to be in charge of. The most powerful army of the world is held, still, by the Palestinian resistance. How to understand this contradiction?

 
Well, for starters, Israel never worked to build peace with the Palestinians; never used other means which were not the means of extermination, ethnic cleansing, Holocaust, to kill the native population and residents in historic Palestine, from the foundation of the State of Israel in May 1948.

Israel expelled 750 thousand Palestinians, converted them into refugees and then began to systematically prevent their return and their children (today, also, already, the grandchildren of them), in spite of UN Resolutions, at the same time they continued to destroy cities and towns, or - what is the same thing - started to build occupation colonies on the ruins of Palestinian cities and towns.

Since 1967, Israel did everything that a state could do to make it impossible for any political solution: it colonized territories, occupied by illegal roads and refused to respect the boundaries before the invasion of 1967, built an apartheid wall, and made life impossible for the majority of Palestinians. Nothing, then, wou even make them think about peace efforts. As before, the operation is continuing towards systematic ethnic cleansing in the illegally occupied Palestinian territories.

 
Therefore, to implicate peace - as it necessarily means - the end of the mini-empire built by Israel, Israel will continue to do what is in their power so that there is no peace, even if the peace it offered on a tray, as the Saudi peace initiative, recently, for example. Again, one does not understand: if the Israelis were only waiting for such an offer, if they wanted some peace, but they rejected it, practically without even considering it?
So much of the time Israel rejects any and all possibility of peace, that most Israelis are no longer able to see what rejecting peace has become for Israel, a sort of second nature.

But the most terrifying reason why no peace initiative ever had any chance to advance has to do in fact, with us, with the west.

Israel continues to be supported by Western democracies as a sort of delegated power, like an advanced western stronghold, located at the entrance of the Arab world, more vital, so more dependent on the West, as regime-clients, like the Saudis and Iraq with Saddam until 1990.

 
A kind of 'incarnation' of the thesis of the "clash of civilizations" of Huntington, Israel is, as ever, more exposed or more shrouded, a bastion of the Jewish-Christian world against the Arabs and Islam.

 
This was true for decades, but has never been more true than in the last decade, when the New World Order came into terminal crisis, and the "Doctrine of Shock" and "Shock and Awe" began to be heard from several desert storm 'operations' in Asia and always against the Islamists.

Israel, not Iran, has nuclear weapons and is able to use them - and repeatedly has threatened to use them. But speaking as if the threat came from Iran, not Israel, those who propose the destruction of Iran are the same merchants of tragedies that foisted to the USA and England the high cost of the Iraq war.

 
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Related article:

 
Gaza attacks bring Srebrenica to mind (08 Jan 2009)
Bosnians add their voice to those of the world, saying the war on Gaza is similar to the genocide brought against them by the Serbs. Israel waged war on Gaza on December 27 and escalated its offensive into the strip on Saturday. So far Israeli operations have killed at least 763 Palestinians and wounded 3,100 others. Bosnia and Herzegovina Several hundred Sarajevans, carrying banners reading 'Stop the killing of women and children of Palestine', marched the streets of Sarajevo on Thursday, condemning the Israeli onslaught on the Gaza Strip. Gathered in front of US Embassy in Sarajevo, the demonstrators drew parallels between the Israeli operations in Gaza and the Serb blockade and genocide against Bosnians. The objective was to urge the US to end its support for Israel. The tragic scenes from Gaza, according to the protesters, bear a striking resemblance to the ethnic cleansing committed by the Serb in the Bosnian War.  CLIP

 
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11.

 
Want to End the Violence in Gaza? Boycott Israel

 
By  Naomi Klein -- January 9, 2009.

To end the bloody occupation, Israel should become the target of the kind of global movement that put an end to South Africa's apartheid.

It's time. Long past time. The best strategy to end the increasingly bloody occupation is for Israel to become the target of the kind of global movement that put an end to apartheid in South Africa.

In July 2005 a huge coalition of Palestinian groups laid out plans to do just that. They called on "people of conscience all over the world to impose broad boycotts and implement divestment initiatives against Israel similar to those applied to South Africa in the apartheid era." The campaign Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions -- BDS for short -- was born.

Every day that Israel pounds Gaza brings more converts to the BDS cause, and talk of cease-fires is doing little to slow the momentum. Support is even emerging among Israeli Jews. In the midst of the assault roughly 500 Israelis, dozens of them well-known artists and scholars, sent a letter to foreign ambassadors stationed in Israel. It calls for "the adoption of immediate restrictive measures and sanctions" and draws a clear parallel with the antiapartheid struggle. "The boycott on South Africa was effective, but Israel is handled with kid gloves.Š This international backing must stop."

Yet even in the face of these clear calls, many of us still can't go there. The reasons are complex, emotional and understandable. And they simply aren't good enough. Economic sanctions are the most effective tools in the nonviolent arsenal. Surrendering them verges on active complicity. Here are the top four objections to the BDS strategy, followed by counterarguments.

1. Punitive measures will alienate rather than persuade Israelis. The world has tried what used to be called "constructive engagement." It has failed utterly. Since 2006 Israel has been steadily escalating its criminality: expanding settlements, launching an outrageous war against Lebanon and imposing collective punishment on Gaza through the brutal blockade. Despite this escalation, Israel has not faced punitive measures -- quite the opposite. The weapons and $3 billion in annual aid that the US sends to Israel is only the beginning. Throughout this key period, Israel has enjoyed a dramatic improvement in its diplomatic, cultural and trade relations with a variety of other allies. For instance, in 2007 Israel became the first non-Latin American country to sign a free-trade deal with Mercosur. In the first nine months of 2008, Israeli exports to Canada went up 45 percent. A new trade deal with the European Union is set to double Israel's exports of processed food. And on December 8, European ministers "upgraded" the EU-Israel Association Agreement, a reward long sought by Jerusalem.
It is in this context that Israeli leaders started their latest war: confident they would face no meaningful costs. It is remarkable that over seven days of wartime trading, the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange's flagship index actually went up 10.7 percent. When carrots don't work, sticks are needed.

2. Israel is not South Africa. Of course it isn't. The relevance of the South African model is that it proves that BDS tactics can be effective when weaker measures (protests, petitions, back-room lobbying) have failed. And there are indeed deeply distressing echoes of South African apartheid in the occupied territories: the color-coded IDs and travel permits, the bulldozed homes and forced displacement, the settler-only roads. Ronnie Kasrils, a prominent South African politician, said that the architecture of segregation that he saw in the West Bank and Gaza was "infinitely worse than apartheid." That was in 2007, before Israel began its full-scale war against the open-air prison that is Gaza.
 
3. Why single out Israel when the United States, Britain and other Western countries do the same things in Iraq and Afghanistan? Boycott is not a dogma; it is a tactic. The reason the BDS strategy should be tried against Israel is practical: in a country so small and trade-dependent, it could actually work.

4. Boycotts sever communication; we need more dialogue, not less. This one I'll answer with a personal story. For eight years, my books have been published in Israel by a commercial house called Babel. But when I published The Shock Doctrine, I wanted to respect the boycott. On the advice of BDS activists, including the wonderful writer John Berger, I contacted a small publisher called Andalus. Andalus is an activist press, deeply involved in the anti-occupation movement and the only Israeli publisher devoted exclusively to translating Arabic writing into Hebrew. We drafted a contract that guarantees that all proceeds go to Andalus's work, and none to me. In other words, I am boycotting the Israeli economy but not Israelis.

Coming up with our modest publishing plan required dozens of phone calls, e-mails and instant messages, stretching from Tel Aviv to Ramallah to Paris to Toronto to Gaza City. My point is this: as soon as you start implementing a boycott strategy, dialogue increases dramatically. And why wouldn't it? Building a movement requires endless communicating, as many in the antiapartheid struggle well recall. The argument that supporting boycotts will cut us off from one another is particularly specious given the array of cheap information technologies at our fingertips. We are drowning in ways to rant at one another across national boundaries. No boycott can stop us.

Just about now, many a proud Zionist is gearing up for major point-scoring: don't I know that many of those very high-tech toys come from Israeli research parks, world leaders in infotech? True enough, but not all of them. Several days into Israel's Gaza assault, Richard Ramsey, the managing director of a British telecom specializing in voice-over-internet services, sent an email to the Israeli tech firm MobileMax. "As a result of the Israeli government action in the last few days we will no longer be in a position to consider doing business with yourself or any other Israeli company."

Ramsey says that his decision wasn't political; he just didn't want to lose customers. "We can't afford to lose any of our clients," he explains, "so it was purely commercially defensive."

It was this kind of cold business calculation that led many companies to pull out of South Africa two decades ago. And it's precisely the kind of calculation that is our most realistic hope of bringing justice, so long denied, to Palestine.

 
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Related articles:

 
Ontario union wants ban on Israeli academics (January 6, 2009)
A proposed resolution by a major Ontario union to ban Israeli academics at the province's universities has sparked a bitter debate between leaders on both sides over an Israeli attack on a Gaza university. The Ontario arm of the Canadian Union of Public Employees announced yesterday it would propose, in a meeting next month, "a ban on Israeli academics doing speaking, teaching or research work at Ontario universities," if they do not explicitly condemn Israeli action in Gaza.The proposal comes specifically after a Dec. 29 attack on an Islamic university in Gaza, which Israel claimed was affiliated with Hamas."Attacking an institution of learning is just beyond the pale," CUPE Ontario president Sid Ryan said last night. "They deliberately targeted an institution of learning. That's what the Nazis did." (...) CUPE Ontario, which has about 20,000 members in Ontario's universities, in 2006 passed a notorious resolution supporting boycotts of Israeli goods, sparking a firestorm of debate. CLIP

 
Outrage in Italy at call to boycott Jews (January 8, 2009)
ROME: Italian politicians reacted with outrage Thursday to a proposal by a small union calling for a boycott of Jewish-owned shops in Rome to protest Israel's offensive in the Gaza Strip. The FLAICA-CUB union, which claims to represent thousands of workers in shops and malls, said in a statement it would promote a boycott of businesses "tied to the Roman Jewish Community." The union suggested shoppers should focus the protest on clothing stores, many of which are traditionally owned by members of the capital's small community. Rome Mayor Gianni Alemanno "firmly condemned" the initiative, saying it was reminiscent of the boycotts against Jewish shops organized by the Fascist regime as part of its anti-Semitic policies in the 1930s. CLIP

 
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Forwarded by Ricardo (ricardos@auroville.org.in)

 

 
Gaza Strip: When Perpetrators Play Victim

 
11.01.2009

 
Does the world need an armed to the teeth, and heaven help us allŠnuclear armedŠracist apartheid state in the Middle East? In September of 2001, Israel was branded a "racist apartheid" state by thousands of non-governmental organizations attending a forum in South Africa that was part of the UN Conference against Racism. Outraged Israelis walked out of the conference saying that the declaration would delegitimize the Israeli state. They were joined by their American benefactors / protectors.
 
Indeed, the State of Israel has been delegitimized, not by that conference, but by their own sordid, brutal, fascist behavior quite reminiscent of the Nazis during the war. Homes and vineyards are bulldozed to make way for more and more Jewish settlements, as the Palestinian native population continues to disappear from the map. Lebensraum? Israel has been systematically carrying out genocide, indeed a holocaust, against the Palestinian peopleŠvery literally. Most recently, Israel used a weapon of mass destruction known as phosphorous bombs which literally set people on fire. This type of murderous behavior has been going on since the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948.

While Israelis bask in swimming pools, less than 15% of the water is allocated to Palestinians, who must ration water for drinking and cooking. Palestinians are made to pass through numerous humiliating checkpoints just to carry on their day-to-day life. In fact, many are prevented from having employment because of this. Additionally, there are "Jews only" roads.

Children are frequently target practice or subjects of intimidation on the part of the Israeli occupation forces. Children are literally starving since Gaza has been blockaded, with food supplies and humanitarian assistance denied them and electricity is cut off. This is all because Israel does not like the democratically elected Hamas government and has done everything to bring down this government by kidnapping and killing many government officials in addition to the illegal blockade.

The total dead thus far in the recent campaign is well above 800, including over 250 children, and many more victims may still be buried in the rubble. The International Federation of Journalists has condemned Israel's targeting of journalists. In Gaza City, journalists held a sit-in after Israeli forces bombed the Jawhara Media Building killing a journalist, Ala' Murtaja. Another 22 Palestinians were killed Wednesday morning in bombing and shelling as Israel's "Operation Cast Lead" entered day 11. The dead included four people killed in a children's playground near a mosque in the Sheikh Radwan neighborhood of Gaza city.
 
Israeli forces shelled a house on the Gaza Strip that they had moved around 110 Palestinians into 24 hours earlier. Around 70 corpses were found there later by a Palestinian paramedic. Does such behavior sound familiar to anyone? As in the wholesale slaughter the SS engaged in? Dr. Mawia Hassanien, head of emergency services at Shifa Hospital says at least 12 emergency workers have been killed and 32 injured. Eleven ambulances have been destroyed. It is an outrage that emergency workers and ambulances are attacked. Then there was the United Nations school where 40 Palestinians seeking shelter were killed. Many children were among the dead in what British leader, Gordon Brown, called the 'darkest moment yet' in the Gaza crisis.

 
PEOPLE BEING KILLED ARE CIVILIANS, NOT THE ONES LAUNCHING THE ROCKETS. That is just an excuse, a pretext to cleanse the entire area. The military invasion of the Gaza Strip by Israeli forces bears a direct relation to the control and ownership of strategic offshore gas reserves. This is a war to conquer. The issue of sovereignty over Gaza's gas fields is crucial. From a legal standpoint, the gas reserves belong to Palestine. The election of the Hamas government and the collapse of the Palestinian Authority after Arafat's death have enabled Israel to establish de facto control over Gaza's offshore gas reserves.

 
For many decades, the world has been beaten over the head with "guilt trips" about the events of the war as though the horrors of that war happened only to Jews alone. This has made it possible for Israel to get a free pass to behave in the most horrendous, inhuman and savage manner. Israel is still hoping the latest genocidal onslaught would have yet another desensitizing and de-mystifying effect on people's perceptions and attitudes and that people will continue to either ignore or mindlessly support their behavior.

There are war crimes being committed, and no excuse is going to pass the test of credibility, even though Israel is using the pathetically small response of crudely made Hamas rockets as an excuse for their genocidal campaign. As many have experienced, Israel heavily employs rabid counterattack and name calling (anti-Semite, Nazi, etc.), mendacity, deception and disinformation to conceal its criminality and barbarism. They have seen to it that it is not politically correct to criticize Israel, otherwise one risks life, limb and livelihood.
 
Visible on western TV screens are Israelis who complain of lack of sleep, fear, paranoia. They have the audacity to complain that they are the victims, but the dead, while always a tragedy and lamentable, are few and far between. You see them playing musical instruments in their shelters, complaining about trivial inconveniences and palpitations, while Palestinian children sit bloodied amid rubble unattended in the middle of countless dead bodies and in many cases the dead bodies are their parents. While their ambulances are targeted. Yet much of the western world sits quietly by. The western corporate media is largely complicit in the tranquility of the silent screams and tears of the women and children of Gaza. Western corporate media has consistently sought to deaden all vestiges of empathy.

 
How long is the international community going to allow this to continue without barely a response except for scattered individuals around the globe? When will Israel be sanctioned? When will Israel be boycotted? When will their ambassadors and representatives be expelled from civilized countries (Gracias, Hugo Chavez). When will neutral / UN peacekeeping forces be imposed upon Israel? Indeed, when will they be subjected to the infamous empire termŠhumanitarian bombing?
 
Thus far, the State of Israel is hearing nothing about stopping their campaign of slaughter. They singularly believe they don't have to agree to anything and that their American benefactors will clear the way for them forever. The State of Israel must transform itself completely...and start to behave like a responsible member of the international community. After the last world war, there is no place on this planet for such behavior by any nation claiming to be civilized, let alone a "democracy." You would have thought that Israel and the Israelis would know better.