Thursday, October 27, 2016

We Will Not Be Deterred | Trinton & Clump | War on UNESCO | Fatah Leader: 'Wake Up' | Lieberman: Destroy Gaza | This Week's Photo | Much more ..

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SELECTED COMMENTARY

The Grubby War Between Trinton and Clump

By Jeremy Salt

Is Hillary Clinton a nasty person? Yes, probably so, seeing as she meets many of the definitions of 'nasty.' Is Hillary Clinton a woman? Yes. So it seems reasonable to call her a 'nasty woman' but when Donald Trump did just that instead of being politically correct and calling her a 'nasty person', he came under heavy shellfire from celebrity females, pop stars and politicians, who rushed into print or before the cameras to declare defiantly that they also were nasty women!

Deceit and dishonesty are deeply ingrained in Clinton's character. She lies or dissimulates effortlessly. She has a laminated personality, built up layer by layer over the decades. Who would know what lies at the core. Perhaps nothing, any more: perhaps lamination is all she is. What she says she is, the evidence indicates, is not what she really is. She talks endlessly of defending women and girls yet has a long record of hurting them when it suits her purposes. Early in her career as a lawyer she defended a man accused of raping a 12-year-old girl, arguing that the girl had 'a tendency to seek out older men.' Later she recollected, laughing, that she had the man take a polygraph test: he passed, 'which forever destroyed my faith in polygraph tests.' She abused Monica Lewinsky as a 'narcissistic loony tune', which Lewinsky may/may not have been - the whole point being to abuse and discredit the White House intern her husband had used his position to exploit.

She voted for the war on Iraq in which countless numbers of women and children were killed. She was one of the architects of the attack on Libya, which ended with the same result as Iraq - dead women and children all over the place. She is still arguing for an air war on Syria, despite the 300,000 dead so far, countless numbers of women and children, needless to say, among them. Her many residences include the pocket of the Zionist lobby: she intends to take US-Israeli relations to the 'next level', whatever future horrors that will turn out to mean. She justifies Israel's slaughter of men, women and children in Gaza: it is not Israel that has provoked the Palestinians through seventy years of occupation, dispossession, theft and settlement but the Palestinians who provoke Israel by striking back with the occasional rocket, she claims. It is Hamas, not Israel, that is really responsible for their deaths. So, yes, she has expressed her support for women and children everywhere, except in Iraq, Libya, Syria, Lebanon and Palestine or wherever else they really need to be defended from the aggression coming from the Clinton stable of friends and allies.

As Secretary of State she visited Tripoli in October 2011 and said she 'looked forward' to Muammar al Gaddafi being captured or killed: after seven months of a pulverizing air war on their country by the US, the UK and France she said that Libyans had to renounce violence. She cackled when the news came through that Gaddafi had been murdered, exclaiming, 'We came, we saw, he died.' Only a sociopath would find murder amusing. She has threatened to 'obliterate' Iran. Leaked documents reveal that she knew long ago that Saudi Arabia and Qatar were funding the so-called Islamic State. We know from a Defense Intelligence Agency memorandum stating that the establishment of a salafist state in eastern Syria would suit America's interests why she and Obama went along with the funding of the organization they publicly excoriated. They were covertly supporting it, too. The atrocities it was committing could not be allowed to stand in the way of the process of destroying the Syrian government. It was a tool they could not do without. This is the reality behind Clinton's pretense of fighting terrorism, of destroying the Islamic state and 'taking down' its caliph. Doesn't all this add up at least to nastiness?

Clinton's shoddy record goes all the way back to the time when she was the governor's consort in Arkansas. Her nastiness poked through in the debates with Trump when, deceitfully and dishonestly, the Goldwater girl become the latter day McCarthyite; she raised the Russian card. She then pledged that if elected president she would declare a no-fly zone over Syria. One of America's top generals had just said this would mean war with Syria and Russia, but what is a top general's opinion to Hillary Clinton when she wants to ignore it for political purposes? There is no evidence that Russia hacked her emails, only politically-loaded speculation, but Clinton needed to take attention away from what these emails contained, so she lied and added to the lie by saying Trump was Putin's puppet. The media sucked it up. It was Trump who argued against war, Trump who was saying that the trillions spent on foreign wars was needed at home (and which American could honestly deny that?) and Trump who wanted to sit down with Putin and sort things out. It was Hillary who argued for more war on Syria, who talks of ringing China with the US military as well as taking on Russia, and is still regarded by the media as the best person who replace Obama in the White House. ..

The War on UNESCO: Al-Aqsa Mosque is Palestinian and East Jerusalem is Illegally Occupied

By Ramzy Baroud

Did Italian Prime Minister, Matteo Renzi, actually read the full text of the UNESCO resolution on Palestine and Israel, before he raved with anger?

"I think this is a mistaken, inconceivable resolution," he said.

"It is not possible to continue with these resolutions at the UN and UNESCO that aim to attack Israel. It is shocking and I have ordered that we stop taking this position (his country's abstention) even if it means diverging from the position taken by the rest of Europe," he added.

Renzi, who became Prime Minister in 2014 at the relatively young age of 39 knows exactly how the game is played. In order to win favor with Washington, he must first please Tel Aviv.

His country has abstained from the October 12 vote on a resolution that condemns Israel's violations of the cultural and legal status of Occupied East Jerusalem. This decision has ignited the ire of Israeli Ambassador to Rome, Ofer Zaks, who riled up the Jewish community in Italy to protest the abstention. Renzi, in turn, was converted into a champion of the 'Temple Mount', the name Israel uses to describe the Palestinian Muslim holy site.

Renzi cravenly went on damage control mode without truly understanding the nature of the resolution, which merely condemned Israel's obvious violations of international law, and only calls for Israel to respect the status of Palestinian culture in the occupied city.

None of procedures that led to the vote on the UNESCO's resolution - voted by 24-6, with 26 abstentions - violated protocol, nor was any of the wording inconsistent with international law. In fact, UNESCO was merely doing its job: attempting to protect and preserve the historical and cultural heritage of the world.

Jerusalem is a sacred and a holy city to a majority of humanity, simply because it is significant to the spiritual wellbeing of the adherents of the three monotheistic religions. In fact, the resolution stated so:

"Affirming the importance of the Old City of Jerusalem and its Walls for the three monotheistic religions ..."

Renzi's outburst is quite disappointing, to say the least, for the young, eager politician simply tried to score cheap political points with Israel - thus the United States - without a full, or even partial comprehension of what the UNESCO resolution resolved. Nor did he seem aware of the fact that such text is largely a repeat of what has been discussed by the world's leading cultural organization in April, and repeatedly before that date.

"If anyone wants to say something about Israel, let them say it, but they should not use UNESCO... To say that the Jews have no links to Jerusalem is like saying the sun creates darkness," he said, paraphrasing the sentiment displayed by the Israeli Prime Minister.

It would be rather sad if Renzi sees a mentor in Benjamin Netanyahu, for the latter is one of the least liked world leaders who has made a mockery of international forums and derided the United Nations itself as anti-Semitic and its process as 'theater of the absurd'.

This is what Netanyahu had said in response to the resolution and shortly before he suspended his country's membership in UNESCO. Using a language that is as amusing as his cartoon depiction of the Iranian nuclear bomb in his famous UN spectacle in 2012, he said:

"To say that Israel has no connection to the Temple Mount and the Western Wall is like saying that China has no connection to the Great Wall of China or that Egypt has no connection to the Pyramids."

Other Israeli officials followed suit with a chorus of denunciations, included Israeli President, Reuven Rivilin, who described the decision as an "embarrassment" for UNESCO. Culture Minister, Miri Regev, cut to the chase, by labeling the resolution "shameful and anti-Semitic."

In fact, it was neither.

In addition to Renzi's odd reaction, the United States and other western governments reacted with exaggerated anger, again without even addressing the situation on the ground, which prompted the resolution - and numerous other UN resolutions in the past - in the first place.

Even the Czech parliament jumped on board, voting to condemn what they described as a "hateful, anti-Israel' sentiment."

I have read the resolution repeatedly to pinpoint the specific text that could possibly be understood by Israel's friends as hateful, to no avail. The entirety of the text was based on past international conventions, resolutions, international law, and refers to Israel as the Occupying Power, as per the diktat of the Geneva Conventions.

The Italian, Czech, American anger is, of course, misdirected and is largely political theater.

But, of course, there is an important context that they refuse to address.

Israel is working diligently to appropriate Muslim and Christian heritage in East Jerusalem, a city that is designated by international law as illegally occupied.

The Israeli army and police have restricted the movement of Palestinian worshipers and is excavating under the foundation of the third holiest Muslim shrine, Haram al-Sharif, in search of a mythological Temple.

In the process of doing so, numerous Palestinians, trying to defend their Mosque from the attacks staged by Israeli occupation forces and extremist Jewish groups, have been killed.

How is UNESCO to react to this? ..

Top Fatah Leader: Palestinians Must Wake Up, Peace Process is Dead

International Relations Commissioner for the Fatah movement Nabil Shaath called on Palestinians to begin a full-fledged consumer boycott of Israel in an interview with The Arab Weekly on Tuesday.

"A consumer boycott should be the Palestinians' weapon against Israel," the newspaper quoted Shaath as saying.

Referring to the decades-long Israeli-Palestinian peace process, which has failed and been revived numerous times, Shaath said Palestinians should "wake up from their dreams of peace," adding that the peace process should be declared dead.

"Rights are not given, but taken by force," Shaath said, saying the biggest strength Palestinians have against Israel's military, air force, and navy, was public action.

"If anything, past experiences and alterations in the world and around us in the region tell us that we should start depending on ourselves, not wait for others to give us our rights," Shaath said.

Shaath criticized peace brokers like the United States and France, who announced its efforts to renew a multilateral peace initiative earlier this year, saying that those countries "cannot realistically put pressure on Israel."

"Israel does not give anything to anybody for free," Shaath said. "It will never give us our land if the cost of occupying this land is not far higher than leaving it."

He went on to emphasize his call on fellow Palestinians to "depend on themselves more" through an economic boycott of Israel.

The international success of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel has led Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to call it a "strategic threat" for Israel and allocate state resources to fight it.

"The Palestinian boycott of Israeli products is spreading and becoming more entrenched, especially among younger Palestinians," Omar Barghouti, Palestinian human rights activist and co-founder of the BDS movement, said at the beginning of 2015.

(MAAN, PC)

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