Israel: Nationalist group urges model Bar Refaeli to marry Jewish, dump Leo DiCaprio

Rumored wedding bells for Bar Refaeli and Leonardo DiCaprio may ring true or false, but these are already being muffled by controversy.

Israel-bar-refaeli-getty Supermodel Bar Refaeli is one of Israel's most successful "exports." But with fame comes responsibility -- and now an Israeli organization is beseeching Refaeli not to wed Leonardo DiCaprio -- out of a responsibility to future generations.

"It is not by chance that you were born Jewish," wrote Baruch Marzel in a letter he sent Refaeli through her mother (and that promptly appeared in the press). "Your grandmother and her grandmother did not dream that one of their descendants would one day remove the family's future generations from the Jewish people. Assimilation has forever been one of the enemies of the Jewish people."

Marzel, a well-known stalwart among Israel's ultra-nationalists, appealed to Refaeli on behalf of an organization named "Lehava." In Hebrew, this means "flame:; it is also the Hebrew acronym for "Preventing Assimilation in the Holy Land."

The organization, according to its Facebook page (in Hebrew) provides assistance to Jewish girls in relationships with non-Jews, especially Arabs. There are other organizations in Israel that specialize in extricating Jewish women from marriages and other relationships with Arabs. Last month, Yad L'achim held an event for 100 women "rescued from Arab villages."

DiCaprio is not Arab, of course. But for those concerned with the cultural implications of assimilation, it's not what Leo is but what he isn't -- Jewish.

This isn't personal, wrote Marzel, who was careful to open his letter stressing that he "has nothing against Mr. DiCaprio, who I have no doubt is a talented actor." Still, he implores Refaeli: "Come to your senses, look forward and back too -- and not only the present. Don't marry Leonardo DiCaprio, don't harm the future generations."

Four years ago, Marzel sent a similar letter to Israeli beauty queen Linor Abergil, asking her not to marry non-Jewish Lithuanian NBA player Sarunas Jasikevicius (Sharas, as he was called in Israel) and thus divorce the Jewish people. They did marry -- and later divorced.

Photo: Model Bar Refaeli arrives at the 2010 Vanity Fair Oscar Party hosted by Graydon Carter, held at Sunset Tower on March 7, 2010, in West Hollywood.

Source Article:- LA Times

Iceland Rejects Icesave Depositors Bill in Referendum

Icelanders overwhelmingly rejected a bill that would saddle each citizen with $16,400 of debt in protest at U.K. and Dutch demands that they cover losses triggered by the failure of a private bank, first results show.

Ninety-three percent voted against the so-called Icesave bill, according to preliminary results on national broadcaster RUV. Final results may be published tomorrow morning.

The bill would have obliged the island to take on $5.3 billion, or 45 percent of last year’s economic output, in loans from the U.K. and the Netherlands to compensate the two countries for depositor losses stemming from the collapse of Landsbanki Islands hf more than a year ago.

“Ordinary people, farmers and fishermen, taxpayers, doctors, nurses, teachers, are being asked to shoulder through their taxes a burden that was created by irresponsible greedy bankers,” said President Olafur R. Grimsson, whose rejection of the bill resulted in the plebiscite, in a Bloomberg Television interview yesterday.

Failure to reach an agreement on the bill has left Iceland’s International Monetary Fund-led loan in limbo and prompted Fitch Ratings to cut its credit grade to junk. Moody’s Investors Service and Standard & Poor’s have signaled they may follow suit if no settlement is reached.

‘Obsolete’

Political leaders have already moved on and are trying to negotiate a new deal with the U.K. and the Dutch, making the bill in today’s vote “obsolete,” Prime Minister Johanna Sigurdardottir said on March 4.

“This referendum is very peculiar and without any parallel in Iceland’s history,” said Gunnar Helgi Kristinsson, a professor of political science at the University of Iceland, in an interview.

The Icesave deal passed through parliament with a 33 to 30 vote majority. Grimsson blocked it after receiving a petition from a quarter of the population urging him to do so. The government has said it’s determined any new deal must have broader political backing to avoid meeting a similar fate.

Even so, signs of disunity across the political divide have emerged, prompting concerns that the government may be forging ahead without the backing of opposition parties.

“It’s extremely important that we try in full to complete the negotiations in harmony with the opposition,” Sigurdardottir said. “If that’s not possible, we will have to try to resolve this by ourselves.”

Outrage

Icelanders used the referendum to express their outrage at being asked to take on the obligations of bankers who allowed the island’s financial system to create a debt burden more than 10 times the size of the economy.

The nation’s three biggest banks, which were placed under state control in October 2008, had enjoyed a decade of market freedoms following the government’s privatizations through the end of the 1990s and the beginning of this decade.

Protesters have gathered every week, with regular numbers swelling to about 2,000, according to police estimates. The last time the island saw demonstrations on a similar scale was before the government of former Prime Minister Geir Haarde was toppled.

Icelanders have thrown red paint over house facades and cars of key employees at the failed banks, Kaupthing Bank hf, Landsbanki and Glitnir Bank hf, to vent their anger. The government has appointed a special commission to investigate financial malpractice and has identified more than 20 cases that will result in prosecution.

Economic Impact

The island’s economy shrank an annual 9.1 percent in the fourth quarter of last year, the statistics office said yesterday, and contracted 6.5 percent in 2009 as a whole.

Household debt with major credit institutions has doubled in the past five years and reached about 1.8 trillion kronur ($14 billion) in 2009, compared with the island’s $12 billion gross domestic product, according to the central bank.

Icelanders, the world’s fifth-richest per capita as recently as 2007, ended 2009 18 percent poorer and will see their disposable incomes decline a further 10 percent this year, the central bank estimates.

Grimsson, who has described his decision to put the depositor bill to a referendum as the “pinnacle of democracy,” says he’s not concerned about the economic fallout of his decision.

“The referendum has drawn back the curtain and people see on the stage the matter in a new perspective,” he said in an interview. “That has strengthened our position and our cause.”

Source- March 6th:- Bloomberg

That was a war council in Damascus

The three-party meeting that took place in Damascus on Friday gathering the Syrian president Bashar al Assad, the Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the Hizbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah was a war council to devise counterattack plans and assign tasks in the event of an Israeli offensive on one or all parties, wrote Abdelbari Atwan, the editor-in-chief of the pan-Arab newspaper Al Quds al Arabi.

“The timing of the meeting, the way it was undertaken and the ensuing press conference that was held at its conclusion, all point to a strategic coalition being reinforced. This is the build-up of a new front that will spearhead the confrontation with the US-Israeli alliance and whichever Arab countries that may, expressly or implicitly, be affiliated with it.”

The Iranian president said he expects war to break out somewhere between spring and summer of this year. Meanwhile, the Hizbollah chief vowed to strike the Israeli capital, its airports and power stations if Israel dared to attack Beirut’s critical infrastructure. “Indeed, we are being exposed to a new discourse here, an unprecedented sense of self-confidence and an unheard-of preparedness for retaliation.”

For its part, the Syrian leadership appears to have made up its mind to close off the US administration’s “trite and cheap” flirtation with Damascus and opted for bolstering its tactical partnership with Tehran.

Clatter over Iraqi vote is good news

It is a matter of several days before the Iraqi people go to the polls and have their say on their country’s political future. These national elections may bring Iraq great opportunities to thrive and develop, but they may also be the country’s last elections, commented Abdul Rahman al Rashed in the London-based newspaper Asharq al Awsat.

“The clatter we’re hearing and the heated media battles and polemics currently happening in Iraq in the lead-up to the elections prefigure a decisive outcome of the ballot polls. I don’t think that the past four years, during which an elected government was in power under Nouri al Maliki, will be reduplicated even if Mr al Maliki himself is reappointed prime minister.”

That’s because a number of factors on the ground will be changing as of next year. Most important of all, US troops will pull out of the country. And the US presence, besides the protection it offers to the opponents of the post-occupation regime, has had a political influence balancing out the competing forces. “Doubtless, the new foundations that were laid after the fall of Saddam’s regime won’t be easy to preserve in the absence of a US umbrella.” Still, whichever leadership ends up with the majority of the votes, the upcoming elections carry the hope that the rocking Iraqi ship will finally berth safely.

The uncertain fate of Arab Christians

Two months ago, Christians from Jerusalem, mostly clergymen from various sects, issued a statement about the dreadful conditions that Jerusalem and all Palestinian territories are facing under the Israeli occupation, wrote Redwan al Sayid, a professor of Islamic Studies at the University of Lebanon, in the UAE newspaper Al Ittihad.

Another statement then came from the Vatican diagnosing the status of “Eastern Christians”, as it labelled them, according to four main factors: the declining numbers of Christians in the Levant region due to intensive immigration; pressure Christians are subjected to in Israel, the Palestinian territories and Iraq; marginalisation and violence they are facing in other Arab states due to the rise of fundamentalist ideologies; and major schisms within the Arab Christian community resulting from the indifference of Christians of the western world.

A one-day conference was then convened under the theme of “Living Together: Christians and Muslims in the Middle East.” “I noted that Christians and Muslims in the Levant suffer from three main issues: the rise of fundamentalism, the perpetuity of the totalitarian state and the dreadfulness of the Zionist regime.” True, Israeli occupation has oppressed and humiliated Muslims and Christians alike, but Christians felt it most, precisely because they are a minority.

The effect of 10,000 detained Palestinians

“Israel holds in captivity more than 10,000 Palestinians as part of a scheme that no imperial power has undertaken before,” wrote Rimonda Hawa al Taweel in the comment pages of the Palestinian newspaper Al Quds. Locking up such a large number of Palestinians has multifarious implications. First, it bespeaks Israel’s ill will regarding any peace initiative.

“It seems that Israel wants to make peace with itself rather than with its ‘enemies’. For peace would cost it the critical foe that unifies it internally.”

Second, with so many of their loved ones in jail, Palestinians will quite naturally never stop their resistance or relinquish their struggle for freedom. Israel wrongly thinks those 10,000 Palestinians are “hostages” that will dishearten the resistance, but the exact opposite is true. These inhumane incarcerations rather sow the seeds of a deeper hatred for Israel in the next generations. If Israel doesn’t care about love because, as it claims, it can always command respect through intimidation, it can never root out abhorrence. “Let’s open the Palestinian prisoner files to the whole world, so it may read, learn and then decide.”

Source Article - March 01. 2010:-
http://www.thenational.ae/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100301/OPINION/702289930/1006

Ernst Zundel released from German prison

MANNHEIM, Germany - Far-right German activist Ernst Zundel was freed after serving five years in prison for denying the Holocaust ever happened - something he wouldn't speak about Monday.

The 70-year-old had been extradited in 2005 from Canada, where he spent some additional time behind bars on the German warrant after having been deported from the United States for alleged immigration violations.

A crowd of 20 supporters on Monday morning clapped and shouted "bravo" as Zundel emerged from the prison in Mannheim. Some handed him flowers as he passed through the prison's steel gates.

"I'm back out after seven years, three weeks, three prisons and three countries," Zundel said, declining to comment when asked whether the Holocaust happened. He also served some time in prison in North America.

"It's kind of a sad situation; there's a lot to say. I'll certainly be careful not to offend anyone and their draconian laws."

Zundel was convicted on 14 counts of inciting hatred for years of anti-Semitic activities, including contributing to a Web site devoted to denying the Holocaust - a crime in Germany. The Web site's accessibility made it possible for German prosecutors to charge him.

Zundel and his supporters had argued he was exercising his right to free speech.

Ernst Zundel, Europe's most famous political Prisoner of Conscience, has been released from Mannheim Prison this morning, March 1st. Here he is with one of his defense attorneys, Dr. Herbert Schaller of Austria, both of them smiling broadly...

On Monday he gave no details about his future plans, saying only that he wanted to improve his health and would return to his home region in the Black Forest.

"Having spent the last seven years in a 'chicken coop,' I've gained a lot of weight. I have to lose that. I have to get checked out in a hospital," Zundel told reporters outside the Mannheim prison, though did not indicate that he was ill.

He said he was unsure if he would return to Canada, where he had lived in both Toronto and Montreal for years after emigrating in 1958. He was rejected twice for Canadian citizenship and moved to Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, but was sent back to Canada in 2003.

In February 2005, a Canadian judge ruled that Zundel's activities were a threat to national security as well as "the international community of nations," clearing the way for his deportation to Germany later that year.

One of his lawyers on Monday criticized the five-year sentence in Germany as having been too severe, saying there had been a lack of justice due to the fact that the Holocaust is a sensitive subject in Germany.

"I'm happy that he made it," attorney Alexandra Rittershaus said. "It was a hard and frustrating time" during which she said he was initially not allowed to receive all of some 1,700 letters because officials feared it would "threaten his resocialization."

Supporters outside the prison called Zundel "a brave man" and "a victim of justice," while some maintained there still was no evidence that anyone was gassed to death at Nazi concentration camps during World War II.

Meanwhile, another Holocaust disputer had his Austrian prison sentence reduced Monday from five years to four. Austrian author Gerd Honsik - who wrote "Hitler Innocent?" - was sentenced in April after being arrested in Spain, to where he had fled following his original 1992 conviction for writings that defended Adolf Hitler's Third Reich.

A Vienna court ruled Monday that Honsik's five-year sentence was too hefty.

Source article [the title has been changed to show our respect for Ernst, who is still subject to 'draconian' restrictions - editor]:-

Associated Press: Zundel

Note to Whites: Animals Aren’t Children, May Actually Kill You

Dawn Brancheau, the 40-year-old White woman killed by a (surprise) killer whale, was married and had no children. But “she loved the animals like they were her own children”, a family member says.

Allow for a moment my angle on this, which I realize isn’t shared by some White advocates: Dawn Brancheau represents a disturbing trend among Whites whereby puppies, kittens, dogs, cats, horses, orangutans and other beasts are considered their “children.” They collect them, work with them, hoard them, fawn over them and spend absurd amounts of money on them. Meanwhile, they have no actual children — and I’m betting it’s not often because they’re biologically unable.

My unclinical opinion is that this is a form of obsessive compulsive disorder, though possibly with a historical root in an evolutionarily-developed survival affinity for animals (unique to Whites) that can provide food and protection. The latter is understandable, but the former is a problem.

White women seem to be able to think of pretty much anything as their children — except natural children from their own wombs: adopted children from Africa, expensive houses, dogs, even killer whales. It has to stop. Dawn Brancheu was fit and attractive and probably would have borne great White children. Instead, she walked in front of nature’s moving train and got crushed. Can you hear the Black comedians joking about this one? (”Da lady got in the tank with killer whales. And guess what happened?”)

I’ll have to give them this one. Talk about survival of the fittest.

Christopher Donovan is the pen name of an attorney and former journalist

Source article:- The Occidental Observer Blog

Marrache law firm: once prestigious, now under scrutiny Ponzi Anyone?

GIBRALTAR -- The arrest of two of the three brothers who headed up the Marrache & Co law firm here has sent shudders through the financial services and legal sectors. The Financial Services Commission has withdrawn licences it had issued to Marrache, prompting the seizure of clients’ investment funds.

Whether lawyers at what was considered one of the best firms on the Rock had any inkling of what was afoot remains to be discovered. Last week, Benjamin and Solomon Marrache, the two brothers facing multi-million pound fraud charges, were refused bail and remanded in prison by the Magistrates Court. Stipendiary Magistrate Charles Pitto said there was a high risk of the two men fleeing Gibraltar as the police probe into the affairs of Marrache & Co intensified. Attorney General Ricky Rhoda, QC, said the scale of the alleged fraud appeared to be larger than investigators first thought. If convicted, the brothers could spend up to 10 years in jail. Supposedly if more wrong doing is discovered, their future lives behind bars may be extended.

Benjamin and Solomon appeared in court last week jointly charged with falsely accounting $5.6 million Canadian dollars and 2.1 million euros belonging to Malory Holdings and Remus Enterprises. That is in addition to the charges of falsifying documents to conceal 1.8 million euros of missing money belonging to another client they already face. Prosecutors claim they falsified ledgers to show that they held the clients’ money when in fact it was missing.

Initially they had been granted bail on hefty sureties but now Mr Pitto has sent them to a cell in the Moorish Castle instead. The defence lawyers had sought to highlight the defendants' strong local ties but that argument is weakened by the absence of the other senior Marrache partner – Isaac, brother to the jailed duo. He was out of the country when his siblings were arrested and seems reluctant to return. An international arrest warrant is probably in the offing. The case is similar to that of Marbella’s former deputy mayor Carlos Fernandez, who at the time of the ‘Malaya’ town planning corruption case arrests was walking the Camino de Santiago – and has kept walking to this very day.

The company’s and clients’ affairs are now being handled by a committee made up of the four senior partners of Hassans, Isola & Isola, Triay Stagnetto Neish and Triay & Triay – the Rock’s four other major firms. The committee is overseeing the distribution of live cases to other local lawyers in order to protect the interests of Marrache clients.

What I find strange about cases such as this was the certainty that they would be found out. If you were a fraudster you could set up a fake investment account, attract gullible investors, then make off with 1.8 million euros. However the Marrache’s have allegedly misappropriated nearly ten million in Canadian dollars and euros – their misdeeds covered by a few flimsy pieces of forged letters so assuring that sooner rather than later their legal house would come tumbling down.

Also a rogue father, son, mother or daughter has in the past often brought down or shaken the very foundations of the family concern. Here it appears we have three suspect brothers who if proved guilty presumably colluded in the fraud. This is behaviour more akin to the mafia. In which case one has to ask the question – are there other people in Marrache’s who were involved?

Once this case comes to court the proverbial will hit the fan and it will be spread over Gibraltar’s legal and financial sectors. Their very integrity will undoubtedly be questioned because if you can’t trust Marrache in Gibraltar terms who can you trust? What is certain is that future students of law and human nature will study the proceedings of the Marrache case with keen interest.

(The photograph here was sent to me last year by Marrache during fanfare announcing their sponsorship of this race car. Whether the driver behind the wheel is Isaac making a quick getaway I know not.)

Source: http://dscriber.com/

Bernard-Henri Lévy caught out by fake philosopher

France's best-known philosopher, Bernard-Henri Lévy, has become the butt of intellectual ridicule after copiously quoting a leading authority on Kant who, it transpires, is a modern-day hoax.

Bernard-Henri Lévy

Mr Lévy, who in France goes simply by his initials BHL, has been doing the media rounds to promote his new work, On War in Philosophy.

In his book, which has received lavish praise from some quarters, the open-shirted Mr Lévy lays into the philosopher Immanuel Kant as being unhinged and a "fake". To support his claims, he cites a certain Jean-Baptiste Botul, whom he describes as a post-War authority on Kant.

But the chorus of approval turned to laughter after a journalist from Le Nouvel Observateur pointed out that Mr Botul does not exist: he is a fictional character created in by a contemporary satirical journalist, Frédéric Pagès.

Alarm bells should have rung given that Mr Pagès, a journalist with Le Canard Enchaîneé, a satirical weekly, has penned one book under the Botul pseudonym entitled The Sex Life of Immanuel Kant.

He has even given rise to a school of philosophical thought called Botulism – a play on words with the lethal disease – and has created a theory of "La Metaphysique du Mou" the Metaphysics of the Flabby.

But Mr Lévy missed the joke, citing Mr Botul from a "series of lectures to the neo-Kantians of Paraguay" he supposedly gave after the war, in which he said that "their hero was an abstract fake, a pure spirit of pure appearance".

Aude Lancelin, the Nouvel Obs journalist who spotted the blunder, said it was tantamount to "a nuclear gaffe that raises questions on the Lévy method".

Mr Lévy took the humiliation on the chin last night in appearances in a series of evening TV shows. "I found the book astonishing," he said, adding that Mr Pagès was a "very good philosopher.

"Hats off to the this invented but truer than real life Kant whose portrait, whether signed by Botul or Pagès still seems in line with my idea of (the philosopher)," he told the Libération.

Mr Pagès kept up the joke last night, saying: "It has never been firmly established that Botul didn't exist and it cannot thus be ruled out that one day history will prove Bernard-Henri Lévy right."

Source Aricle - 09 Feb 2010: www.telegraph.co.uk

Bus Assault Pensioner

Bus assault pensioner, 67, starred in second YouTube altercation last August... when he was Tasered by police./

Thomas Bruso confronts the younger black man on the bus. He starred in a YouTube clip last year.

The 67-year-old man captured in a YouTube video beating up a fellow bus passenger was involved in another altercation that became an internet hit last year.

Thomas Bruso was Tasered twice by police last August at an Oakland A's baseball game.

The 6ft 1ins, 20 stone pensioner - who calls himself 'Tom Slick,' 'Vietnam Tom' and 'Epic Beard Man' - was confronted by stadium staff when he brought alcohol into the stadium.

When Bruso refused to leave, Coliseum security asked Oakland police officers working at the game to eject him.

Three officers verbally tried several times to get Bruso to leave, but he refused.

The situation quickly escalated after Bruso made a rude gesture at one of the two officers.

They then placed a handcuff on Bruso's left wrist.

A third officer arrived with a Taser, stunning the man in the left shoulder blade while another officer was placing the other cuff on Bruso's right wrist.

The third officer applied the Taser on Bruso again, this time near the middle of his back, which caused Bruso to fall forward into an aisle.

He was charged with resisting arrest and taken to a hospital for a psychiatric evaluation.

The latest altercation involving Bruso began when a younger black man began yelling at him as the pair sat across from one another on the bus.

Bruso was taken to the John George Psychiatric Pavilion for an evaluation after he struck the male passenger several times and continued to rant about the incident, Alameda County Sheriff's spokesman Sgt. J.D. Nelson said.

[...]

Bruso stands up and takes a vicious swipe at the other bus passenger.

The young black man appears to throw the first punch, but the 67 year old retaliates  with a flurry of punches to his face.

The video footage of the men fighting has sparked a race row in the U.S after it became an internet sensation.

The 20-stone pensioner beats the younger man to the ground as other passengers look on.

A video of the brawl captured by a college student, Iyanna Washington, showed the two men speaking to each from across the aisle near the centre or rear of the bus.

Within minutes, an argument broke out and quickly escalated.

Bruso incensed the man by asking: 'How much you charge me for a spit shine?'

The younger man then ordered Bruso away from him, to the front of the bus.

Bruso angrily stalked to the front, followed by the younger man who continued to yell at Bruso.

The exchange continued with the goading of other passengers until finally the younger man struck him.

Bruso stood up and returned the blows, beating the man until he fell to the floor with a bloody nose.

Confrontation: The  unnamed bus passenger before the fight broke out.

AC Transit spokesman Clarence Johnson said the younger man's nose was broken. No one was arrested.

'He (expletive) hit me. He expletive) hit me in the face,' the enraged Bruso bellowed after the driver escorted him off the bus.

'I'm 67 years old and I'm not getting killed,' he screamed.

The video has had around 700,000 hits on YouTube, although many more will have seen the row after several blogs picked it up.

The woman who filmed the fight has also been accused of stealing the older man's bag, although she denies this and has posted her own video on YouTube to refute the allegations.

Several spoof versions of the bus fight have now appeared online, including one where the 67-year-old has been turned into a character from the video game Mortal Kombat.

The event even has its own Wikipedia entry.

Source Article: www.dailymail.co.uk

Breaking News! German police arresting nationalist leaders!

German police arresting nationalist leaders!

Shocking or not, but Germany is back to [a mirror image -Ed.] nazism/totalitarian system! However this time is not back to a nationalist dictatorship but to a multicultural/democratic dictatorship.

The German cops are going house to house to arrest people involved with the Dresden march.

After an interview with a journalist this morning at 7AM, he said the number of marchers was around 10,000 nationalists, with 6,000 cops and several hundred antifa communists.

After the recent commemorative march in the name of 500,000+ German victims of the Dresden Holocaust, the German police has decided to raid the attendant’s homes and even arrest them. In 1945 the Allies have firebombed Dresden, a German town not only once but twice! The story is much more tragic than the Jewish Holocaust. After the first Allied air-raid over Dresden which killed tens of thousands of innocent civilians, the Hospitals sent ambulances and medical staff to take care of the injured but the Allies were on their way for a second air-raid to kill each and every one! All victims were civilians! It was an deliberate WAR CRIME and not a mistake.

So Jews can build museums and worship their exaggerated ‘holocaust’ figures, but when a few White people march to commemorate 500,000 murdered men, women, and children, they are to be arrested?

This is a perfect example of our brothers and sisters in OUR white lands being hunt down like freaking animals for being WHITE and proud.

How sad that holding a rally to honor dead German children and woman can get you arrested. A bunch of racist radical anti-German Communist show up trying to interfere and the government persecutes the nationalist honoring dead refugee woman and children.

We must remember that the Communist are just an annoyance, should not even be worried about them, their still trying to fight WW2 and the Cold war. It is the government which has the real upper hand, but the government is full of former Communist and Socialist, so maybe it is the Communist which has the upper hand?...

Source Article: Feb 16,  2010
http://www.eutimes.net/2010/02/breaking-news-germany-is-back-to-nazism-gestapo-2/

Rescued from Racism by the Love of GK

At 20 the National Front's youth leader was sent to jail. Today Joseph Pearce is a leading Catholic writer...

Joseph Pearce: ‘In England we’ve replaced all traditions of virtue and beauty with this sado-masochistic cynicism’  [understated as ever Joe]

Joseph Pearce is a happy man. He is one of the leading Catholic biographers in the English-speaking world, and his studies of Tolkien, Solzhenitsyn, C S Lewis, Oscar Wilde and Shakespeare, among others, have gained him an enviable reputation as a writer who knows his subjects inside out and understands their religious dimensions like few other writers.

Today this burly but rather boyish-looking Englishman is the image of the contented middle-aged Catholic family man, living with his wife and two young children in sunny South Carolina eight months of the year and spending the rest in even sunnier Florida, where he lectures at the Catholic Ava Maria University.

It is hard to square this man with the figure familiar to anti-racist campaigners of the Seventies and Eighties: the pugnacious and frightening leader of the Young National Front, pictured at extreme Right-wing rallies alongside the likes of his friend, Nick Griffin. That Pearce ran a racist magazine called Bulldog, a cross between the Beano and Der Stürmer, which spewed out hatred of Asians and blacks and encouraged readers to denounce Left-wing teachers. That Pearce ended up in jail.

But while most of his former comrades are still extremists, either active, retired or dead, Pearce has turned his back on racial hatred and, much to the bemusement or disgust of old allies, embraced Catholicism. For this grace he gives eternal thanks to G K Chesterton.

Born in 1961, Pearce grew up in Dagenham, a working-class suburb of east London that boasted the worst educational standards in England. He was an angry young man, as young men are prone to be. But while most teenagers angered by gross inequality turn to Leftist politics of various shades of red, a minority, like Pearce, go the other way.

"I was angry because I had this idea that the British Empire was something good that had been systematically destroyed," he recalls, although now he has no time for any imperialism.

He was also angry, as many were at the time, about Commonwealth immigrants arriving in tightly knit working-class neighbourhoods, and so migrated to the one group that opposed it. Formed in 1967 by A K Chesterton, GK's alcoholic cousin (whose views GK condemned and mocked), the National Front (NF)_was originally dominated by old Empire Loyalists of a broadly racist inclination, but as its support surged the NF was taken over by the neo-Nazi followers of John Tyndall (who later formed the British National Party).

Pearce joined the NF at 15, lying about his age and giving up education to devote himself full-time to be a "racial revolutionary", a decision he later described as a Faustian pact with the Devil [dude!!!], although at the time he was an agnostic. This was in the long, hot summer of 1976 and the party was approaching the peak of its popularity, attracting 120,000 votes at the GLC elections the following year. With extreme politics came violence, and increasingly so, as both the NF and its enemies (the future Socialist Workers Party) used physical force to intimidate and hurt opponents. He has the scars to prove it.

"I was a radical," he says, "and at the age of the 15 I was in favour of it, not the violence per se, but in needing to have a physical presence."

The street fighting between Left and Right culminated in the "Battle of Lewisham" in August 1977, after which the "middle-aged, middle-class war veterans were replaced by skinheads and football hooligans, young bald men making Nazi salutes", he recalls.

That year Pearce became leader of the youth wing, as well as founding Bulldog. Two years later he became editor of the more grown-up, but equally virulent, political magazine Nationalism Today, and, at 18, became the youngest member of the party's national committee.

The NF also flirted with Loyalism, and at 17 Pearce flew to Derry to organise an NF march, which degenerated into sectarian rioting on a scale a London street fighter could not imagine. He developed contacts with the Ulster Defence Association and also joined the Orange Order.

His anti-Catholicism, he says, was ingrained. Pearce's father, a carpenter from the East End, was "very anti-Irish and anti-Catholic", and had, as his son recalls, the Whig history mindset which associated Catholicism with the Spanish Armada and the Gunpowder plot. "My father passed on that English cultural heritage."

But while Pearce's star was still rising, the party was becoming increasingly Monty Pythonesque, fractured by splits too numerous to list, but which eventually resulted in two National Fronts, exerting most of their energies fighting each other. Margaret Thatcher killed off the party with anti-immigration rhetoric that brought back the NF's waverers and left only a core, lunatic fringe.

Pearce was among them, and in 1982 he was sentenced to six months in Chelmsford young offenders' institute for soliciting material "likely to incite racial hatred". The authorities, fearful that Pearce's presence would stir up tension in a jail evenly split between white and black, put him in solitary. This decision changed his life.

"There are two types of conversion - the quick conversion of St Paul at Damascus, and the slow melting of Augustine, where the conversion is like an intellectual process and a healing. In my case it was the latter and took place over the entire Eighties.

"At that time I would have happily gone to my death, I was such a fanatic, and I considered myself a political prisoner. But it gave me time to write and read."

In solitary he read Cardinal Newman's Apologia Pro Vita Sua and Ronald Knox's A Spiritual Aeneid, but most of all it was G K Chesterton who brought him "into the light", as he recalls, turning him away from what GK called "the solemn fools of Teutonism".

Although Chesterton was a great critic of fascism and Nazism, and hated racism, his Catholic social ideas of distributism, which argues for the maximum spread of property between people, appeals to reformed fascists. His philosophy, with its focus on community and obligation, and its appeal to honour and faith, attracts many people unsettled by what they see as a vacuous, immoral and unjust world.

Pearce rejoined an increasingly irrelevant NF upon release and a second, longer prison term would follow in 1985. But he was already on the road. "When I went to prison for the second time I was asked during the process what my religion was. I wasn't expecting it and I had to give an answer so I just said 'Catholic'. And that was my first affirmation of Catholicism.

Although technically I wouldn't join the Church until 1989, I had read Belloc, Newman and C S Lewis, I had reached the stage of being a Catholic by conviction but I was still confused because I was full of this political nastiness. There was a battle in me."  [money won then it seems]

In prison he began to pray, say the rosary, and go to Mass. This time he would not go back.

His first biography, Wisdom and Innocence: A Life of G K Chesterton, was published in 1996, and other subjects include C S Lewis, Solzhenitsyn, the underrated interwar poet Roy Campbell, and Oscar Wilde. Many of his books concern Catholic literary converts, while his biography of Shakespeare, which argues for the Bard's Catholicism, inspired a television series on EWTN. Since 2001 Pearce has also been writer in residence and professor of literature at Ave Maria University in Naples, Florida, and began lecturing on September 11 that year (a strange day to start).

"Before going I had an anti-American thing which was endemic to Europeans. Lots of the problems of western secularism I put down to Hollywood and MTV, but there are two faces - you go inside America and you realise family life is much stronger here, marriage is much stronger, traditional morality is much stronger."

He rarely visits England any more, and although he misses the aspects people always do - having a beer with friends, watching the football - much about home disturbs him.

"The last time I was in England was for my mother's funeral, and I was at the wake in a local pub in Dagenham. I was wearing a crucifix lapel badge. One person saw it and took out a pentangle as if to ward off my crucifix with his pentangle. He said he had three books by his bed - one was the Bible, one was a Buddhist tome, and one was Mein Kampf. This could be a satire by Evelyn Waugh.

"Another came up and got very aggressive, almost foaming at the mouth and saying the Catholic Church is nothing but a conspiracy, the Church and the Illuminati are the same thing. I happen to know for a fact this person has never read a book in his life, this was purely the result of conversations in pubs with people who have half-digested The Da Vinci Code or watched similar rubbish on TV."

Such cultural malaise, the shedding of an entire culture, is further developed in Europe, he says, after a century of centralised control.

"I'm hopeful, because hope is a virtue and despair is a sin, but in England we've replaced all traditions of virtue and beauty with this sado-masochistic cynicism. William Shakespeare, Beowulf, Chaucer, they've thrown everything out. It is despair. Scratch beneath the surface of atheism, and you have despair.

"Over here there is diversity in the best sense of the word. Multiculturalists talk about diversity but they actually force a secularist fundamentalist monoculture." In Pearce's old home the vacuum has been filled by his old friend Nick Griffin, whose British National Party, a joke only a decade ago, are now the official opposition on the council. Although he hates the racism, Pearce understands the appeal.

"As so far as it [the BNP] is racist, I unequivocally distance myself from it. As far as it is opposing this multicultural monoculture and the centralising power of the European Union - if none of the major parties address these issues, why are we surprised that a party that does address them is getting support?"

The depths of multiculturalism's failure was illustrated during another visit. As a child he had one close Asian friend before he got involved in politics, "the first to show me pornography", but spent years without knowing any black or Asian people.

"Many years later, after my conversion, I was in Mile End tube station, on my way to see my parents. These two Asian chaps came up to me and said: 'Are you Joe Pearce?' And I thought: 'Hang on now. I'm going to be attacked.' I said yes, rather cagily. He said: 'You don't remember me, do you?' Then he gave me his name.

"He knew nothing about my conversion, and said to me: 'We've got a lot in common. You hate the Jews and Israel. So do we!' This young man had gone from being a westernised son of a Pakistani immigrant to a radicalised Islamist. That serves to me to illustrate the dangerous turn of events in England."

He remains optimistic, however. "Generations can do an awful lot of damage in passing, but here the new generation are more solid, orthodox, willing to speak out outrageously against decisions. The logic of heterodoxy is ultimately apostasy. The theological liberals cease to be Catholic, anyone they touch ceases to be Catholic, and certainly their children don't grow up to be Catholic. It's what the Holy Father has said: the Catholic Church in the 21st century will be smaller but truer." There is also one last heart-warming aspect to his story, about his father.

"Weirdly, though, he became a Catholic in the mid-1990s when he was in his 60s, and spent the last 10 years of his life as a Catholic. I love my father dearly. He was a great intellect and I certainly wouldn't want to imply he did it just because I did.

"A lot of my anti-Catholicism was inherited from him, but like me he saw the error of his ways and converted. It was a supreme irony that he had the last rites from an Irish Catholic priest - that was a wonderful end." The Quest for Shakespeare is available from Ignatius Press, priced £14.50

Source Article February 5th, 2010:- http://www.catholicherald.co.uk/features/f0000524.shtml

Article in Syrian Government Daily Supports Holocaust Denial

In an article in the Syrian government daily Al-Thawra, columnist Dr. Sayyah 'Azzam expresses support for Holocaust deniers and agrees with claims that it is impossible that six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust, and that there were no gas chambers or crematoria. He says that "Zionism" exploited some events during the Nazi era in Germany in order to establish a Jewish state.

Following are excerpts from the article: [1]

"The U.N. General Assembly set January 27 as the international day commemorating the so-called Holocaust... thus spurring the countries of the world to revive this memory in order to prevent future generations from again perpetrating collective extermination...

"There is no choice but to point out the many reservations [that some have] regarding the Holocaust, particularly vis-à-vis recognizing it as a unique and unprecedented catastrophe. The truth is that collective extermination was perpetrated [also] against the Indians, across the U.S.

"On the other hand, there are those who deny the Holocaust. The first published book on Holocaust denial was Absolute Rule [2] by American jurist Francis Parker Yockey, who in 1946 was assigned to reexamine the Nuremburg trials. In his work, he expressed his bitterness at what he called the unfairness in the courtroom deliberations – which led to his removal from his post after a few months!

"After this book [was published], the well-known historian Harry Elmer Barnes, of Columbia University, cast doubt regarding the historical truth of the Holocaust; after him came James Martin and Willis Carto, also Americans... British and Canadian researchers and lecturers also denied this Holocaust...

"These are the main arguments raised by this stream that denies the Holocaust:

"1) The extermination of six million Jews, as claimed by the Zionists, is an inflated statistic, because based on the statistics in Europe prior to World War II, the total number of Jews was 6.5 million. This would mean that nearly all the Jews were exterminated in the Holocaust. Statistics from European immigration departments contradict this; they indicate that 1.5 million Jews immigrated to Sweden, Spain, China, India, Palestine, and the U.S. between 1933 and 1945... Historians note that the total number of Jews in the world in 1938 was 16.5 million, and that 10 years later it was 18.5 million. If we assume, for the sake of argument, that six million Jews did indeed die in the Holocaust, then it is inconceivable that the remaining 10 million multiplied in a way so contrary to the laws of statistics and of human propagation...

"2) There isn't a single official document noting the details of the Holocaust operation [to verify] the Zionist claims.

"3) The extensive media [coverage] of the [many] detention camps and death camps has no basis in truth. These camps were intensive production units aimed at supporting the [German] war machine. [Likewise,] there is no truthful basis for [the tales about] the so-called 'gas chambers' – where they put Jews by the thousands in order to poison them. On the contrary; these were small rooms for manufacturing agricultural pesticides. There were several crematoria, [but] these were aimed at burning the corpses of people who died of typhoid as a result of lack of medical services.

"4) Many photos displayed in the world and also in the Nuremburg trails, taken from the German archive itself, [are photos in which the] Germans tried to show the scope of the spread of starvation and typhoid in Germany during the war. Many photos presented [to prove] that there was mass extermination of Jews were, in fact, [photos] of the worst attack by Allied aircraft, on Dresden, Germany, February 13-15, 1945, during which 9,000 tons of bombs were dropped on the city, and 24,866 out of [the city's] 28,410 buildings were destroyed – including a large number of hospitals, churches, schools, banks, and hotels.

"From these and other points, it emerges that global Zionism used some of what happened to the Jews in Germany during the Nazi era as a means of plundering the countries of Europe... and emotionally [extorting] the world, in order to establish a state for the Jews in Palestine. It is also clear that there is great, illogical exaggeration in several aspects of what has been published about the victims of the so-called 'Holocaust' and the means used against the Jews..."

Endnotes:

[1] Al-Thawra (Syria), January 26, 2010.

[2] The reference is apparently to Imperium, first published in 1948.

http://www.memri.org/report/en/0/0/0/0/0/0/3973.htm#_edn1

Scotland Yard Commander Ali Dizaei guilty of corruption charges

Abuse of power: Ali Dizaei arrives with wife Shy at Southwark crown court today

London's most senior black policeman faced jail today after being convicted of misconduct and trying to pervert the course of justice.

Commander Ali Dizaei, 47, was found guilty of assaulting and attempting to frame a man who had designed his internet web page.

Seven years ago Dizaei was cleared by an Old Bailey jury of similar charges after a £7million two-year police investigation.

In July 2008 he attacked Waad Al-Baghdadi in the street near the Yas restaurant in Kensington after refusing to pay him £600 for the web design. Then he arrested him illegally and deliberately wounded himself and blamed the victim to back up his lies.

Peter Wright, QC, said when colleagues arrived Dizaei falsely claimed he had been threatened and stabbed with the metal mouthpiece of a hookah pipe.

Source:- London Evening Standard

Presidential Assassinations of US Citizens

The Washington Post's Dana Priest today reports that "U.S. military teams and intelligence agencies are deeply involved in secret joint operations with Yemeni troops who in the past six weeks have killed scores of people." That's no surprise, of course, as Yemen is now another predominantly Muslim country (along with Somalia and Pakistan) in which our military is secretly involved to some unknown degree in combat operations without any declaration of war, without any public debate, and arguably (though not clearly) without any Congressional authorization. The exact role played by the U.S. in the late-December missile attacks in Yemen, which killed numerous civilians, is still unknown.

But buried in Priest's article is her revelation that American citizens are now being placed on a secret "hit list" of people whom the President has personally authorized to be killed:

After the Sept. 11 attacks, Bush gave the CIA, and later the military, authority to kill U.S. citizens abroad if strong evidence existed that an American was involved in organizing or carrying out terrorist actions against the United States or U.S. interests, military and intelligence officials said. . . .

The Obama administration has adopted the same stance. If a U.S. citizen joins al-Qaeda, "it doesn't really change anything from the standpoint of whether we can target them," a senior administration official said. "They are then part of the enemy."

Both the CIA and the JSOC maintain lists of individuals, called "High Value Targets" and "High Value Individuals," whom they seek to kill or capture. The JSOC list includes three Americans, including [New Mexico-born Islamic cleric Anwar] Aulaqi, whose name was added late last year. As of several months ago, the CIA list included three U.S. citizens, and an intelligence official said that Aulaqi's name has now been added.

Indeed, Aulaqi was clearly one of the prime targets of the late-December missile strikes in Yemen, as anonymous officials excitedly announced -- falsely, as it turns out -- that he was killed in one of those strikes.

Just think about this for a minute. Barack Obama, like George Bush before him, has claimed the authority to order American citizens murdered based solely on the unverified, uncharged, unchecked claim that they are associated with Terrorism and pose "a continuing and imminent threat to U.S. persons and interests." They're entitled to no charges, no trial, no ability to contest the accusations. Amazingly, the Bush administration's policy of merely imprisoning foreign nationals (along with a couple of American citizens) without charges -- based solely on the President's claim that they were Terrorists -- produced intense controversy for years. That, one will recall, was a grave assault on the Constitution. Shouldn't Obama's policy of ordering American citizens assassinated without any due process or checks of any kind -- not imprisoned, but killed -- produce at least as much controversy?

Obviously, if U.S. forces are fighting on an actual battlefield, then they (like everyone else) have the right to kill combatants actively fighting against them, including American citizens. That's just the essence of war. That's why it's permissible to kill a combatant engaged on a real battlefield in a war zone but not, say, torture them once they're captured and helplessly detained. But combat is not what we're talking about here. The people on this "hit list" are likely to be killed while at home, sleeping in their bed, driving in a car with friends or family, or engaged in a whole array of other activities. More critically still, the Obama administration -- like the Bush administration before it -- defines the "battlefield" as the entire world. So the President claims the power to order U.S. citizens killed anywhere in the world, while engaged even in the most benign activities carried out far away from any actual battlefield, based solely on his say-so and with no judicial oversight or other checks. That's quite a power for an American President to claim for himself.

As we well know from the last eight years, the authoritarians among us in both parties will, by definition, reflexively justify this conduct by insisting that the assassination targets are Terrorists and therefore deserve death. What they actually mean, however, is that the U.S. Government has accused them of being Terrorists, which (except in the mind of an authoritarian) is not the same thing as being a Terrorist. Numerous Guantanamo detainees accused by the U.S. Government of being Terrorists have turned out to be completely innocent, and the vast majority of federal judges who provided habeas review to detainees have found an almost complete lack of evidence to justify the accusations against them, and thus ordered them released. That includes scores of detainees held while the U.S. Government insisted that only the "Worst of the Worst" remained at the camp.

No evidence should be required for rational people to avoid assuming that Government accusations are inherently true, but for those do need it, there is a mountain of evidence proving that. And in this case, Anwar Aulaqi -- who, despite his name and religion, is every bit as much of an American citizen as Scott Brown and his daughters are -- has a family who vigorously denies that he is a Terrorist and is "pleading" with the U.S. Government not to murder their American son:

His anguish apparent, the father of Anwar al-Awlaki told CNN that his son is not a member of al Qaeda and is not hiding out with terrorists in southern Yemen.

"I am now afraid of what they will do with my son, he's not Osama Bin Laden, they want to make something out of him that he's not," said Dr. Nasser al-Awlaki, the father of American-born Islamic cleric Anwar al-Awlaki. . . .

"I will do my best to convince my son to do this (surrender), to come back but they are not giving me time, they want to kill my son. How can the American government kill one of their own citizens? This is a legal issue that needs to be answered," he said.

"If they give me time I can have some contact with my son but the problem is they are not giving me time," he said.

Who knows what the truth is here? That's why we have what are called "trials" -- or at least some process -- before we assume that government accusations are true and then mete out punishment accordingly. As Marcy Wheeler notes, the U.S. Government has not only repeatedly made false accusations of Terrorism against foreign nationals in the past, but against U.S. citizens as well. She observes: "I guess the tenuousness of those ties don't really matter, when the President can dial up the assassination of an American citizen."

A 1981 Executive Order signed by Ronald Reagan provides: "No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination." Before the Geneva Conventions were first enacted, Abraham Lincoln -- in the middle of the Civil War -- directed Francis Lieber to articulate rules of conduct for war, and those were then incorporated into General Order 100, signed by Lincoln in April, 1863. Here is part of what it provided, in Section IX, entitled "Assassinations":

The law of war does not allow proclaiming either an individual belonging to the hostile army, or a citizen, or a subject of the hostile government, an outlaw, who may be slain without trial by any captor, any more than the modern law of peace allows such intentional outlawry; on the contrary, it abhors such outrage. The sternest retaliation should follow the murder committed in consequence of such proclamation, made by whatever authority. Civilized nations look with horror upon offers of rewards for the assassination of enemies as relapses into barbarism.

Can anyone remotely reconcile that righteous proclamation what the Obama administraiton is doing? And more generally, what legal basis exists for the President to unilaterally compile hit lists of American citizens he wants to be killed?

What's most striking of all is that it was recently revealed that, in Afghanistan, the U.S. had compiled a "hit list" of Afghan citizens it suspects of being drug traffickers or somehow associated with the Taliban, in order to target them for assassination. When that hit list was revealed, Afghan officials "fiercely" objected on the ground that it violates due process and undermines the rule of law to murder people without trials:

Gen. Mohammad Daud Daud, Afghanistan's deputy interior minister for counternarcotics efforts, praised U.S. and British special forces for their help recently in destroying drug labs and stashes of opium. But he said he worried that foreign troops would now act on their own to kill suspected drug lords, based on secret evidence, instead of handing them over for trial.

"They should respect our law, our constitution and our legal codes," Daud said. "We have a commitment to arrest these people on our own" . . . .

Ali Ahmad Jalali, a former Afghan interior minister, said that he had long urged the Pentagon and its NATO allies to crack down on drug smugglers and suppliers, and that he was glad that the military alliance had finally agreed to provide operational support for Afghan counternarcotics agents. But he said foreign troops needed to avoid the temptation to hunt down and kill traffickers on their own.

"There is a constitutional problem here. A person is innocent unless proven guilty," he said. "If you go off to kill or capture them, how do you prove that they are really guilty in terms of legal process?" . . .

So we're in Afghanistan to teach them about democracy, the rule of law, and basic precepts of Western justice. Meanwhile, Afghan officials vehemently object to the lawless, due-process-free assassination "hit list" of their citizens based on the unchecked say-so of the U.S. Government, and have to lecture us on the rule of law and Constitutional constraints. By stark contrast, our own Government, our media and our citizenry appear to find nothing wrong whatsoever with lawless assassinations aimed at our own citizens. And the most glaring question for those who critized Bush/Cheney detention policies but want to defend this: how could anyone possibly object to imprisoning foreign nationals without charges or due process at Guantanamo while approving of the assassination of U.S. citizens without any charges or due process?

Glenn Greenwald: I was previously a constitutional law and civil rights litigator in New York. I am the author of two New York Times Bestselling books: "How Would a Patriot Act?" (May, 2006), a critique of the Bush administration's use of executive power, and "A Tragic Legacy" (June, 2007), which examines the Bush legacy. My most recent book, "Great American Hypocrites", examines the manipulative electoral tactics used by the GOP and propagated by the establishment press, and was released in April, 2008, by Random House/Crown.

Source Article - January 27, 2010 :- information clearing house

Time Magazine Pushes Draconian Internet Licensing Plan

Time Magazine has enthusiastically jumped on the bandwagon to back Microsoft executive Craig Mundie’s call for Internet licensing, as authorities push for a system even more stifling than in Communist China, where only people with government permission would be allowed to express free speech.

As we reported earlier this week, during a recent conference at the Davos Economic Forum, Craig Mundie, chief research and strategy officer for Microsoft, told fellow globalists at the summit that the Internet needed to be policed by means of introducing licenses similar to drivers licenses – in other words government permission to use the web.

His proposal was almost instantly advocated by Time Magazine, who published an article by Barbara Kiviat - one of Mundie’s fellow attendees at the elitist confab. It’s sadistically ironic that Kiviat’s columns run under the moniker “The Curious Capitalist,” since the ideas expressed in her piece go further than even the free-speech hating Communist Chinese have dared venture in terms of Internet censorship.

“Now, there are, of course, a number of obstacles to making such a scheme be reality,” writes Kiviat. “Even here in the mountains of Switzerland I can hear the worldwide scream go up: “But we’re entitled to anonymity on the Internet!” Really? Are you? Why do you think that?”

Kiviat ludicrously compares the necessity to show identification when entering a bank vault to the apparent need for authorities to know who you are when you set up a website to take credit card payments.

“The truth of the matter is, the Internet is still in its Wild West phase. To a large extent, the law hasn’t yet shown up. Yet as more and more people move to town, that lawlessness is becoming a bigger and bigger problem. As human societies grow over time they develop more rigid standards for themselves in order to handle their increased size. There is no reason to think the Internet shouldn’t follow the same pattern,” she writes.

“The people in charge—as much as anyone can be in charge when it comes to the Internet—are thinking about it,” Kiviat barks in her conclusion, seemingly comfortable with the notion that shadowy individuals and not the Constitution itself are “in charge” of deciding who is allowed free speech.

Despite Kiviat’s mealy-mouthed authoritarianism and feigned reasonableness in advocating such a system, Mundie’s proposal is little different to a similar system already considered by officials in Communist China to force bloggers to register their identities before they could post. At the time the idea was attacked by human rights advocates as an obvious ploy “by which the government could control information” and crack down on dissent.

Indeed, the proposal was deemed too severe and the Chinese government eventually backed down. So a system considered too authoritarian and too much of a threat to freedom in Communist China is seemingly just fine and dandy in the “land of the free,” according to Kiviat and her ilk.

Unfortunately for her, Kiviat was immediately reminded about what makes the Internet such a threat to the ruling elite for whom she is a well-trained apologist – almost every comment below her article disagreed with her.

“No. A thousand times no. This benefits no one but “the people in charge,” wrote one respondent.

'Drivers’ licenses ensure a basic level of driving competency, so that 13-year-olds don’t get drunk and drive into a schoolbus. That kind of stupidity doesn’t happen on the Internet. Enough security theater! Focus on actual security. Truly awful idea, Barbara.

'I, for one, welcome our new internet overlords. It will be a comforting time when “the law” comes along to protect people from themselves on the net, because gosh darn it, freedom is dangerous,” quips another. “Not to mention, standards only ever come about through coercive government action, and never through private parties responding to their own incentives.'

I think bloggers ought to be fingerprinted, DNA tested for abnormalities and have the information safely stored in a government vault. That way when some authoritarian ruler of pit, decides you have broken his self made tyrannic law he can prosecute you,” jokes another respondent. “For being a journalist you sure are s—-d, anonymity protects the right of free speech especially when the scary internet is most dangerous in a nation that prosecutes freedom of speech and opinion. The biggest thugs and criminals you mentioned are corrupt governments. I bet you love China’s safe internet measures huh? But there are worse than China.”

“The internet is the only thing preventing total tyranny right now, and they are trying everything they can to chill free speech. There is NO grass roots movement anywhere calling for government intervention in the internet. It is not broken. It works too well, that is a problem for tyrants,” points out another.

Shortly after Time Magazine started peddling the proposal, the New York Times soon followed suit with a blog this morning entitled Driver’s Licenses for the Internet? which merely parrots Kiviat’s talking points.

Of course there’s a very good reason for Time Magazine and the New York Times to be pushing for measures that would undoubtedly lead to a chilling effect on free speech which would in turn eviscerate the blogosphere.

Like the rest of the mainstream print dinosaurs, physical sales of Time Magazine have been plummeting, partly as a result of more people getting their news for free on the web from independent sources that don’t feed at the trough of the military-industrial complex. Ad sales for the New York Times sunk by no less than 28 per cent last year with subscriptions and street sales also falling.

“The Internet, where newspapers are generally free, has siphoned off circulation and advertising,” conceded an October 2009 NY Times article, which is precisely why establishment publications like the Old Gray Lady and Time are pushing proposals that would strangle the blogosphere and in turn eliminate their competition – while devastating free speech all in one foul swoop.

Alternate source:- www.infowars.com

A Black Journalist On The Haiti Earthquake What A Disappointment Black Leaders Are...

Excerpt:

Like all places populated by black people, Haiti is poor. As I watched the television images, I felt very sorry for that forsaken place. Then I was hit by a thunderbolt.

I wondered what if there were no white people. You see, when the earthquake hit Haiti somebody had to come to its assistance. There had to be a rescue effort. The Haitians who survived of course did their fair bit by digging out their families from the collapsed ramshackle buildings.

But such was the scale of the devastation and the loss of human life that a bigger effort was needed. For that sort of work, you need heavy lifting gear and other sophisticated rescue equipment. I have been following the story of the earthquake keenly. I can attest to the fact that the first people to arrive with sniffer dogs were white crews from all over the world. The aero planes that set off carrying water and food were from white countries. Not only that, the teams of volunteer doctors that I saw on television comprised white people from across the world. As the sniffer dogs went into action, the organized rescue teams that carried the stretchers were made up of white people.

It was announced that a mobile hospital was on the way. It was coming from a white country. For all intents and purposes in the aftermath of the earthquake, Haiti was literally swarming with white people. They had all arrived to save the poor blacks. And the locals were so happy to see them. Granted there were teams from the Orient such as the Chinese and Japanese. They too had quickly left their homes and families to go and assist the stricken people of Haiti.

It is obvious to everyone that this was a devastating earthquake and the work to repair Haiti and return it to a modicum of normalcy will take many years. Somebody had to commit funds to this effort. Most of the countries that have committed funds to aid the recovery are white. In fact, it would seem the whites are running the show in Haiti.

What is my point?

My point is that ever since Haiti was hit by the earthquake I have not seen any of my folks from Africa. Unless the television cameras deliberately ignored them, I never saw a rescue team from my motherland. Nor did I see any sniffer dogs from down here.

Heck, I never saw a single traditional doctor busy divining where to find people buried under the rubble. Haiti is a land of black people. I would have expected the place to be swarming with black people helping their own. They were nowhere to be seen. I never saw any ships from black countries pulling into the harbour.

As the air traffic circled above the small airport, none of the planes was reported as coming from Africa. The blacks were nowhere to be found. They issued tepid statements of condolence to the people of Haiti and a few of the African countries donated small amounts of cash.

Granted that was better than nothing. But I must say I was disappointed. I was sad because the blacks did not behave as I had expected. You see, for far too long black countries have been insolent to the point of being abusive. They have a tendency of insulting the white man and telling him to keep out of their countries. In fact, black people have the temerity to tell white people they can perfectly survive on their own.

So I had expected the black countries to be consistent and behave true to form. Why didn't black countries tell white countries to stay away from Haiti because we were quite capable of leading the rescue effort? We should have insulted them as we often do at international forums.

There, our countries insult white countries and accuse them of imperialism and neo colonialism. I was extremely disappointed when our countries failed to accuse white people of practicing imperialism and neo colonialism by coming to rescue the blacks of Haiti.

We should have told them we have better sniffer dogs that have been taught only to rescue black people. We should have told their ships to stay away and their planes not to overfly Haiti because we were up to the job with our own ships and aeroplanes.

We should have brought in our traditional food instead of the strange rations the Haitians are not accustomed to. I am so disappointed by the black leaders that I hope never to hear them again bleating about how bad white people are. The Earthquake in Haiti was the most opportune time to show the whites, once and for all, that we don't need them.

From now onwards, I want black leaders to shut up and never accuse, ever, white people of being bad. I am sick and tired of big words such as imperialism and neo colonialism which are unable to rescue victims of the earthquake.

Source Article: Botswana Times - January 29, 2010

America is broke, and needs its old friends

The US badly needs its European allies to help redress its loss of balance and stem the haemorrhaging of its international clout.

Barack Obama's $3.8tn budget is a vastly complex affair. But one fact stands out plainly: in layman's terms, America is broke. The federal government's outgoings will exceed income by about $1.6tn this year; over the next 10 years combined, the predicted gap is $8.5tn. Given the partisan impasse on Capitol Hill over spending cuts and higher taxes, there is no reason to assume matters will improve any time soon.

Obama suggested this week that such mind-boggling improvidence is unsustainable, economically and even morally. But continuing, chronic American financial vulnerability also carries increasingly serious implications for US global influence and its standing as the world's only superpower. In short, the deficit, and the mindset that produces it, begin to threaten the post-1945 security architecture.

The western world has been here before. In Asia, Africa, and the Middle East after the second world war, the US extended its geopolitical pre-eminence and market dominance, filling a vacuum where the exhausted British and European empires once held sway. Facing serious competition only from the Soviet Union, America supplanted the "old world" and took control. The end of the cold war entrenched its global grip.

Now the wheel turns – and it is the US that is coming down with a bump. In prospect is America's "east of Suez" moment, when imperial Britain was forced to recognise it could no longer afford to project its power into every corner of the globe. Washington's still pre-eminent military might is increasingly unmatched and undermined by its economic performance and, arguably, by its political leadership. As Obama noted in his West Point speech on Afghanistan, the US can no longer finance open-ended wars.

The end of the American empire has long been foretold. But it's not hubris or hostile action that brings it low. It's a lack of readies, meaning unpaid, high-interest, foreign-owned debt, and an unaffordable lifestyle. And unlike the postwar period, when a Europe with common interests, a broadly similar political outlook, and shared values passed the security baton to the US, America has no like-minded, amicable successor to turn to as its own power fades. Quite the opposite, in fact.

China, the country most likely to replace the US some time this century as the world's top dog, has sent blunt signals in recent months indicating how very different a post-American world will look. At Copenhagen, by many accounts, it played spoiler against the developed world, deliberately humbling Obama. It made political advantage, not climate change, the most pressing issue.

Beijing's deliberately disproportionate reaction to the latest US arms sale to isolated Taiwan, its noisy objections to any meeting between Obama and the Dalai Lama, and its blatant use of internet censorship and broad disregard for international human rights norms highlight disturbing differences in priorities and attitudes.

China's rapid military buildup, its appeasement of Iran's energy-rich, nuclear-suspect regime, its exploitative development and resource policies in Africa, and its unfair trading and currency practices are strategically more destabilising. All this suggests a government ruthlessly on the make, determined to exploit perceived weakness in Washington and increasingly prepared to act in direct opposition to western security and political interests.

Accumulated US public debt of $7.5tn, much of it held by China, was heightening American vulnerability in the face of such challenges, said Wall Street Journal columnist Gerald Seib. "The US government this year will borrow one of every three dollars it spends, with many of those funds coming from foreign countries," he wrote this week. "That weakens America's standing and its freedom to act; strengthens China and other world powers, including cash-rich oil producers; puts long-term defence spending at risk; undermines the American system as a model for developing countries; and reduces the aura of power that has been a great intangible asset for presidents for more than a century."

Obama isn't cutting defence, not yet at any rate. And some argue that a world not girdled by American military bases, embassies and trade missions would be a better place. But it might not be a safer one. It would almost certainly be less compatible with western democratic standards and value systems. These are powerful reasons to invert former British prime minister George Canning's famous 1826 call to bring "the new world into existence to redress the balance of the old".

On present trends, Obama's America badly needs the allies of "old world" Europe to help redress its loss of balance and stem the haemorrhaging of its international clout. With wolves at the door, the transatlantic relationship, often dismissed as moribund and unimportant under George Bush and Obama, may be coming back into its own.

Obama does not seem to realise this yet, with the state department announcing this week, for example, that the president will not attend a US-EU summit in Spain in May.

Give him time. As the bills pile up and threat levels rise, America may remember who its real friends are.

The Guardian

German court summons Holocaust-denying bishop

BERLIN (Reuters) – A German court said on Wednesday it had summoned traditionalist Catholic bishop Richard Williamson to face charges he denied the Holocaust, an offence punishable by up to five years in jail.

In comments broadcast on Swedish television last January, Williamson said he believed no more than 300,000 Jews perished in the Holocaust and that there were no gas chambers.

The consensus among historians is the Nazis killed some six million Jews in the Holocaust.

The district court in the southern city of Regensburg has set a hearing for April 16, because Williamson had appealed against a 12,000 euro (10,433 pound) fine for incitement that was summarily handed down last year for his remarks.

The court has now summoned Williamson, 69, to face questioning in person, court spokesman Thomas Frick said.

Authorities cannot force him to attend, but if Williamson is not represented at the hearing, then the appeal against the fine will be thrown out, Frick added.

“Then the fine becomes legally binding,” he said.

Williamson’s remarks broadcast on the television station were made near to Regensburg, within the court’s jurisdiction.
British-born Williamson belongs to an ultra-traditionalist Catholic splinter group, the Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX).
The Pope caused outrage among Jewish groups last year when he lifted excommunications on four SSPX bishops, including Williamson, at about the same time that Williamson denied Jews had died in Nazi gas chambers.

Williamson later offered an apology for his comments though the Vatican rejected this, saying it did not go far enough.

SSPX, which opposes the way the Catholic Church has evolved over the last 40 years, rejects the Second Vatican Council’s decision to stop calling Jews killers of Jesus Christ and to seek good ties with Protestants, Jews, Muslims and other faiths.

January 27 is international Holocaust remembrance day.

Source article:- UK Reuters

The Return of ‘Uncontrollable’ Bishop Williamson

Despite the order received from the Society of Pius X, (FSPX) not to speak publicly about his political views after the scandal caused by his holocaust revisionism, Bishop Williamson’s ‘fundamentalist recidivism’ is evident in a video posted on the internet on Thursday 14th January.

The crisis started when details of the bishop Richard Williamsons revisionism were made public the same day that we learned of the lifting of the excommunications against him and the three other bishops consecrated by archbishop Lefebvre. Williamson has for the first time since the crisis emerged from the shadows with the video recently posted on the Dailymotion website.

The controversial bishop has refused to reply to requests for interviews from the mainstream-media, including La Croix, but instead allowed Pierre Panet to film him. Panet was a candidate on the list at the last European elections led by the anti-Zionist – comedian Dieudonne.

The latter met Williamson last week in Wimbledon at the HQ of the Society of Pius X in the UK. The former head of the seminary at La Reja, Argentina has been ‘champing at the bit’ since he was dismissed and expelled from Argentina. His activities were sleeping and eating – he said in the video – he has been more active speaking from the pulpit recently since his blog was limited to subscribers only.

For fifteen minutes Bishop Williamson discusses religious and political issues. When asked about Iran, he replied that there was absolutely no reason to attack the country applying the Catholic standard of just war. On the legitimacy of the state of Israel he hesitated a moment before saying: “Many people believe that the State is legitimate, but that does not mean that it necessarily is.”

Regarding the negotiations started between the FSPX and Rome, he was convinced that their views were ‘incompatible’ [and hence settlement was impossible]...” Either the Brotherhood is betrayed, or Rome is converted, or we end up in a dialogue of the deaf,” said the grim opponent of Vatican II. Regarding the trial in Germany for racial hatred he said that: “they attacked me because I questioned whether six million Jews were gassed – this is a crime in German law” (1). Bishop Williamson has not fully publicly apologised, as was required, because of the scandal caused by his remarks a year ago, but has refused to comment further on the matter.

The less he speaks the better…

For the last year the Society has tried to forget him – there has been no publicity about him in Argentina since the “unfortunate circumstances of his departure, the Societies’ South American director, Father Christian Bouchacourt said: “he has stepped back and is resting.”

Bishop Williamson, who was removed from all positions, was also ordered not to speak publicly about his views. In March the superior general of the FSPX, bishop Fellay, stated in an interview with the German weekly ‘Der Spiegel’… he has disappeared from public life for a while. “It’s a punishment”, he explained. In an interview on June 29th, father Cellor Gregory spokesman for the district of France stated bluntly: “most of the faithful like him, but everyone agrees that he has got us into trouble on a subject that has nothing to do with our fight. It’s better to keep quite – the less he speaks the better off everyone will be.”

An unsuccessful extremist

His return to the public stage reflects the ambiguities in his character. He was born in London on 8th March, 1940 to an Anglican family and is a graduate in literature at Cambridge. According to the university chancellor he was “fascinated by the darker side of things.” He converted to Roman Catholicism aged 31 – discovering the unacknowledged Marian apparitions at Garabandal. The following year, in 1972, he joined Econe.

Former head of the seminary, monsignor Jacques Mason, who subsequently left in 1974, has referred to Williamson as a ‘fanatic’ and said that he asked archbishop Lefebvre to expel Williamson and other extremists. He was one of the most hard-line in Rome. I very much feared that this group would grow and push archbishop Lefebvre into schism. Monsignor Masson was dismissed from the seminary and Fr Williamson consecrated bishop in 1988. He became a member of the Societies’ expanded governing body which determines policy with Rome.

He is too extreme to be successful. The four bishops are moving towards a schism [in the society], said P. Celier.” but we must not forget that Williamson is aging – nearly 70 and moving towards retirement age (bishops retire at 75 – ed.). It does not give much time for an extraordinary new career.”

(1) Williamson was found guilty by the German (Regensburg) court of 'inciting racial hatred' [in October], but has refused to pay the fine of 12,000 Euros. Had he paid he would have avoided a trial which will most probably be scheduled to start in March.

Source Article - 21st January:- http://www.la-croix.com/Le-retour-de-l-incontrolable-Williamson/article/2411208/55352

Muslim police say Islam not to blame for terror attacks

Muslim police officers have rebelled openly against the Government’s anti-terrorism strategy, warning that it is an “affront to British values” which threatens to trigger ethnic unrest.

The National Association of Muslim Police (NAMP) claimed that ministers were wrong to blame Islam for being the “driver” behind recent terrorist attacks.

Far-Right extremists were a more dangerous threat to national security, it said.

The officers told MPs that Muslims were being “stigmatised” by the Government’s attempts to tackle terrorism, which was adding to “hatred” against entire communities.

In the official intervention, the association said the Government’s anti-terrorism policies could not “continue unchecked”.

The comments, made in a seven-page memorandum to a parliamentary committee investigating extremism, are embarrassing for Gordon Brown. They indicated that Muslim officers may be reluctant to take part in “hearts and minds” anti-terrorism campaigns.

The organisation, which represents more than 2,000 officers, was previously publicly backed by Mr Brown. The Prime Minister said the association was crucial to bridge the historic divide between Muslims and the police.

There have been growing concerns about the radicalisation of Muslims in Britain. The failed Detroit bombing on Christmas Day was carried out by an al-Qaeda-inspired extremist who had studied in London.

The Daily Telegraph disclosed last week that American intelligence agencies believed that Britain had the greatest number of Islamic extremists of any Western country.

It is thought to be the first time that the Muslim association, which was founded in 2007, has criticised government policy.

In an analysis of the Prevent strategy, which is a set of policies designed to stop radicalisation, the organisation claimed: “The strategies of Prevent were historically focused on so-called Islamist extremism.

“This has subjected the biggest black and ethnic minority community, and second biggest faith group, in an unprecedented manner, stigmatising them in the process.

“Never before has a community been mapped in [such] a manner ... it is frustrating to see this in a country that is a real pillar and example of freedom of expression and choice.

“Our British system is a model for the world to follow, yet we have embarked on a journey that has put this very core of British values under real threat.”

The association warned there were “echoes” of the racism of the 1970s and 1980s which led to inner city riots. “We appear to have ignored the lessons learnt from these dark days,” the officers said.

There is growing criticism among Muslim groups of the government strategy, which was welcomed by mainstream police organisations.

The policies are aimed at stopping Muslims from becoming radicalised through measures such as sponsoring moderate community groups.

Ministers insisted that the strategy, which costs more than £140 million a year, had “real successes”. More than 200 people were convicted of terrorist offences in the past eight years.

But the NAMP claimed the policies had led to “hatred against Muslims” which “has grown to a level that defies all logic and is an affront to British values”.

The organisation said Prevent should focus on confronting far-Right extremists such as the BNP.[our emphasis]

The memorandum warned that Muslims were subjected to “daily abuse” due to the strategy. “We must not diminish our British values further by continuing to allow such behaviour and polices to continue unchecked,” it added.

The Muslim officers believe the Government is wrong to blame Islam as the main driver of terrorist activity.

Research by “those convicted of terrorism acts shows Islam was not, and is not, a real driver but all our strategy seem to focus on is this un-evidenced view of Islam being the driver,” they said. The Government said that confronting Islamic terrorism was one of the key priorities of the anti-radicalisation strategy. Last night, the Foreign Office admitted that funding for counter-terrorism policies in Pakistan had been cut.

A spokesman from the Department of Communities and Local Government said: “The idea that we only focus on Muslims on terror issues is completely false.

“Muslims, like other faith groups, engage with government departments right across Whitehall, from health to education to work and pensions, to culture, media and sport. They rightly play a full role in our society, and across public and civic life.”

Source:- Telegraph - Moslems not to Blame

"ECB prepares legal ground for euro rupture as Greek crisis escalates"

Fears of a euro break-up have reached the point where the European Central Bank feels compelled to issue a legal analysis of what would happen if a country tried to leave monetary union.

The economic struggle facing Greece caused riots in December 2008

“Recent developments have, perhaps, increased the risk of secession (however modestly), as well as the urgency of addressing it as a possible scenario,” said the document, entitled Withdrawal and expulsion from the EU and EMU: some reflections.

The author makes a string of vaulting, Jesuitical, and mischievous claims, as EU lawyers often do. Half a century of ever-closer union has created a “new legal order” that transcends a “largely obsolete concept of sovereignty” and imposes a “permanent limitation” on the states’ rights.

Those who suspect that European Court has the power pretensions of the Medieval Papacy will find plenty to validate their fears in this astonishing text.

Crucially, he argues that eurozone exit entails expulsion from the European Union as well. All EU members must take part in EMU (except Britain and Denmark, with opt-outs).

This is a warning shot for Greece, Portugal, Ireland and Spain. If they fail to marshal public support for draconian austerity, they risk being cast into Icelandic oblivion. Or for Greece, back into the clammy embrace of Asia Minor.

ECB chief Jean-Claude Trichet upped the ante, warning that the bank would not bend its collateral rules to support Greek debt. “No state can expect any special treatment,” he said. He might as well daub a death’s cross on the door of Greece’s debt management office.

This euro-brinkmanship must be unnerving for the Hellenic Socialists (PASOK). Last week’s €1.6bn (£1.4bn) auction of Greek debt did not go well. The interest rate on six-month notes rose to 1.38pc, compared to 0.59pc a month ago. The yield on 10-year bonds has touched 6pc, the spreads ballooning to 270 basis points above German Bunds.

Greece cannot afford such a premium for long. The country must raise €54bn this year – front-loaded in the first half. Unless the spreads fall sharply, the deficit cannot be cut from 12.7pc of GDP to 3pc of GDP within three years. As Moody’s put it, Greece (and Portugal) faces the risk of “slow death” from rising interest costs.

Stephen Jen from BlueGold Capital said the design flaws of monetary union are becoming clearer. “I don’t believe Euroland will break up: too much political capital has been spent in the past half century for Euroland to allow an outright breakage. However, severe 'stress-fractures’ are quite likely in the years ahead.”

As Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece, and Spain (PIIGS) slide into deflation, their “real” interest rates will rise even higher. “It is tantamount to hiking rates in the already weak PIIGS,” he said. This is the crux. ECB policy will become “pro-cyclical”, too tight for the South, too loose for the North.

The City view is that the North-South split may cause trouble, but that there will always be a bail-out to prevent a domino effect. “If a rescue turns out to be necessary, a rescue will be mounted,” said Marco Annunziata from Unicredit.

It comes down to a bet that Berlin will do for Club Med what it did for East Germany: subsidise forever. It is a judgement on whether EMU is the binding coin of sacred solidarity, or just a fixed exchange rate system like others before it.

Politics will decide, and in Greece it is already proving messy as teams of “inspectors” ruffle feathers. The Orthodox LAOS party is not happy that an EU crew dared to demand an accounting from the colonels. “The Ministry of Defence is sacrosanct,” it said.

Greece alone in Western Europe treats the military budget as a state secret. Rating agencies guess it is a ruinous 5pc of GDP. Does the country really need 1,700 battle tanks, 420 combat jets, and eight submarines? To fight NATO ally Turkey? Merely to pose the question is to enter dangerous waters.

Who knows what the IMF surveillance team made of their mission in Athens. The Fund’s formula for boom-bust countries that squander their competitiveness is to retrench AND devalue. But devaluation is ruled out. Greece must take the pain, without the cure.

The policy is conceptually foolish and arguably cynical. It is to bleed a society in order to uphold the ideology of the European Project. Greece’s national debt will be 120pc of GDP this year. S&P says it will reach 138pc by 2012. A fiscal squeeze – without any offsetting monetary or exchange stimulus – will cause tax revenues to collapse. Debt will rise higher on a shrinking economic base.

Even if Greece can cut wages without setting off mass protest, it lacks the open economy and export sector that may yet save Ireland in similar circumstances. Greece is caught in a textbook deflation trap.

Labour minister Andreas Loverdos says unemployment would reach a million this year – or 22pc, equal to 30m in the US. He broadcast the fact with a hint of menace, as if he wanted Europe to squirm. Two can play brinkmanship.

Source:- Telegraph - Greek crisis escalates

"Holocaust hangs over pope's visit to Rome synagogue"

Pope Benedict XVI talks with chief Rabbi Riccardo Di Segni in Rome's main Synagogue.

ROME (AFP) – The role of the Roman Catholic Church during the Holocaust hung over a landmark visit Sunday by Pope Benedict XVI to Rome's main synagogue.

"Unfortunately many remained indifferent" as the Nazis slaughtered millions of Jews before and during World War II, the German-born pope said in a speech often punctuated by applause in the cavernous temple.

But silence greeted his assertion that the Holy See "performed actions of support, often hidden and discreet."

The 82-year-old pontiff, a respected theologian, punctuated his speech with Hebrew words, stressing the two faiths' common heritage.

"We pray to the same God and have the same roots but often remain unknown to each other," he said.

The much-anticipated visit came barely a month after the pope angered many Jews by moving his wartime predecessor Pius XII, accused of inaction during the Holocaust, further on the road to sainthood.

The Catholic Church has long argued that Pius XII, who was pope from 1939 to 1958, saved many Jews who were hidden away in religious institutions, and that his silence was born out of a wish to avoid aggravating their situation.

Speaking before the pope, the head of Rome's Jewish community demanded access to Vatican archives on Pius XII.

"Awaiting a shared judgement, we wish with the utmost respect that historians will have access to the Vatican archives concerning this period," Riccardo Pacifici said, referring to the "painful" silence of the wartime pope.

"Maybe he could not have stopped the death trains, but he could have sent a signal, a word of extreme comfort, of human solidarity for our brothers taken off to Auschwitz," he said.

Pacifici, whose grandparents died at Auschwitz, however said in a voice choked with emotion that he was "grateful" to Catholic nuns in Florence for sheltering his father and uncle.

In another emotion-charged moment, Pacifici paid homage to Holocaust survivors present, many of whom had tears in their eyes, as the pope rose to applaud them.

The Vatican said last year that some five or six years of work remained before the secret archives on Pius XII could be opened to researchers.

Archivist Sergio Pagano said the documents would show that he had "taken risks, including personal risks, to save the Jews."

Benedict's visit, announced in October, appeared at risk of being cancelled amid howls of protest over a papal decree bestowing the title "venerable" on Pius XII.

Adding fuel to the fire, the head of the Roman Catholic Church on Friday urged Vatican doctrinal experts to speed rapprochement with a Catholic fraternity that includes a Holocaust-denying bishop, Richard Williamson.

The tension on Sunday was in stark contrast to the warm welcome reserved for Benedict's predecessor John Paul II, who became the first modern pope to visit a synagogue -- the same imposing temple on Rome's River Tiber -- in 1986.

A high-profile stayaway was the president of Italy's assembly of rabbis, Giuseppe Laras, who said Benedict had "weakened" ties between Catholics and Jews.

Israel's ambassador to the Holy See attended but remarked that "Catholic anti-Judaism still exists".

Rome's Jewish community has some 15,000 members.

While Pius XII was pope, the Nazis rounded up more than 1,000 Roman Jews for deportation on October 16, 1943. Only a handful returned from the death camps.

Benedict placed a wreath before a plaque commemorating this tragedy before going into the synagogue.

He also stopped before another inscription marking a 1982 attack by Palestinian extremists that killed a two-year-old child and wounded 27 other people.

Pope Benedict has visited two other synagogues as pontiff, in Cologne in his native Germany and in New York.

Source:- Yahoo News - Jan 17

"Welcome to Orwell’s World, 2010"

"In "Nineteen Eighty-Four," George Orwell described a superstate called Oceania, whose language of war inverted lies that “passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past’, ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past’.” Barack Obama is the leader of a contemporary Oceania. In two speeches at the close of the decade, the Nobel Peace Prize winner affirmed that peace was no longer peace, but rather a permanent war that “extends well beyond Afghanistan and Pakistan” to “disorderly regions and diffuse enemies”. He called this “global security” and invited our gratitude. To the people of Afghanistan, which America has invaded and occupied, he said wittily: “We have no interest in occupying your country.”

In Oceania, truth and lies are indivisible. According to Obama, the American attack on Afghanistan in 2001 was authorised by the United Nations Security Council. There was no UN authority. He said the “the world” supported the invasion in the wake of 9/11 when, in truth, all but three of 37 countries surveyed by Gallup expressed overwhelming opposition. He said that America invaded Afghanistan “only after the Taliban refused to turn over [Osama] bin Laden”. In 2001, the Taliban tried three times to hand over bin Laden for trial, reported Pakistan’s military regime, and were ignored. Even Obama’s mystification of 9/11 as justification for his war is false. More than two months before the Twin Towers were attacked, the Pakistani foreign minister, Niaz Naik, was told by the Bush administration that an American military assault would take place by mid-October. The Taliban regime in Kabul, which the Clinton administration had secretly supported, was no longer regarded as “stable” enough to ensure America’s control over oil and gas pipelines to the Caspian Sea. It had to go.

Obama’s most audacious lie is that Afghanistan today is a “safe haven” for al-Qaeda’s attacks on the West. His own national security adviser, General James Jones, said in October that there were “fewer than 100” al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. According to US intelligence, 90 per cent of the Taliban are hardly Taliban at all, but “a tribal localised insurgency [who] see themselves as opposing the US because it is an occupying power”. The war is a fraud. Only the terminally gormless remain true to the Obama brand of “world peace”.

Beneath the surface, however, there is serious purpose. Under the disturbing General Stanley McCrystal, who gained distinction for his assassination squads in Iraq, the occupation of one of the most impoverished countries is a model for those “disorderly regions” of the world still beyond Oceania’s reach. This is a known as COIN, or counter-insurgency network, which draws together the military, aid organisations, psychologists, anthropologists, the media and public relations hirelings. Covered in jargon about winning hearts and minds, its aim is to pit one ethnic group against another and incite civil war: Tajiks and Uzbecks against Pashtuns.

The Americans did this in Iraq and destroyed a multi-ethnic society. They bribed and built walls between communities who had once inter-married, ethnically cleansing the Sunni and driving millions out of the country. The embedded media reported this as “peace”, and American academics bought by Washington and “security experts” briefed by the Pentagon appeared on the BBC to spread the good news. As in Nineteen Eighty-Four, the opposite was true.

Something similar is planned for Afghanistan. People are to be forced into “target areas” controlled by warlords bankrolled by the Americans and the opium trade. That these warlords are infamous for their barbarism is irrelevant. “We can live with that,” a Clinton-era diplomat said of the persecution of women in a “stable” Taliban-run Afghanistan. Favoured western relief agencies, engineers and agricultural specialists will attend to the “humanitarian crisis” and so “secure” the subjugated tribal lands.

That is the theory. It worked after a fashion in Yugoslavia where the ethnic-sectarian partition wiped out a once peaceful society, but it failed in Vietnam where the CIA’s “strategic hamlet program” was designed to corral and divide the southern population and so defeat the Viet Cong -- the Americans’ catch-all term for the resistance, similar to “Taliban”.

The most telling forerunners of the Obama Plan, which the Nobel Peace Prize winner and his strange general and his PR men prefer we forget, are those that failed in Afghanistan itself. The British in the 19th century and the Soviets in the 20th century attempted to conquer that wild country by ethnic cleansing and were seen off, though after terrible bloodshed. Imperial cemeteries are their memorials. People power, sometimes baffling, often heroic, remains the seed beneath the snow, and invaders fear it.

“It was curious,” wrote Orwell in "Nineteen Eighty-Four," “to think that the sky was the same for everybody, in Eurasia or Eastasia as well as here. And the people under the sky were also very much the same, everywhere, all over the world … people ignorant of one another’s existence, held apart by walls of hatred and lies, and yet almost exactly the same people who … were storing up in their hearts and bellies and muscles the power that would one day overturn the world.”

Source: January 4, 2010 Global Research - Orwell's World

Israeli officers cancel UK trip for fear of arrest

Palestinian women chant Islamic slogans during a rally organized by Islamic Jihad marking the first anniversary …

JERUSALEM – An Israeli military delegation has canceled an official visit to Britain, officials said Tuesday, the latest in a string of politicians and army officials to put off travel to the U.K. because of fears of war crimes prosecution.

Israel complained that the practice, spearheaded by pro-Palestinian activists, is harming relations, and Britain's visiting attorney general said an urgent solution must be found.

The Israelis called off their trip because their British army hosts could not guarantee they would not be arrested, the Israeli officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter. Neither the Israeli military nor the British government would comment.

The incident underlined the effectiveness of a pro-Palestinian legal campaign to harass Israeli officials in the wake of war crimes allegations after Israel's devastating invasion of Gaza a year ago to stop rocket attacks.

Israelis brand the tactic "lawfare," which they denounce as warfare through distortion of laws and conventions. It has crimped the travel plans of many officials and put Israel on the defensive in international bodies.

In Britain, pro-Palestinian groups have forced Israelis to cancel trips for fear of arrest, taking advantage of Britain's "universal jurisdiction" law that allows prosecution of war criminals whose crimes have no direct connection with Britain.

Britain is one of the pioneers of the "universal jurisdiction" concept, but the British government is concerned that its application to Israel is badly straining relations between the two countries and has vowed to solve the problem.

Visiting British Attorney General Patricia Janet Scotland heard a stiff protest Tuesday from deputy Israeli Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon, who called the situation "intolerable."

Later Tuesday, in a speech at Jerusalem's Hebrew University, she noted that the British government "is looking urgently at ways in which the U.K. system might be changed to avoid this situation arising again and is determined that Israel's leaders should always be able to travel freely to the U.K."

In Britain, pro-Palestinian groups have condemned moves to reform the law.

"We believe no attempt should be made (to change the law)," said Inayat Bunglawala, spokesman for the Muslim Council of Britain. "There's no reason why Israel should be singled out for special treatment. If they're accused of war crimes, we have a duty — and legislation — to prosecute."

Israelis charge the Palestinian use of the universal jurisdiction law is a distortion of its original intention — to prosecute war criminals whose own justice systems were incapable or unwilling to investigate their deeds. Though it has not satisfied international rights groups, Israel's military has investigated its own activities in the Gaza war and says it is still looking into a handful of cases.

Israeli experts charge that other examples of "lawfare" are condemnations by human rights groups and the U.N. of Israeli actions against Palestinian militants, especially last winter's military operation in Gaza that left about 1,400 Palestinians dead, including many civilians, and caused widespread destruction.

Last month, pro-Palestinian activists persuaded a London judge to issue an arrest warrant for Israeli politician Tzipi Livni, who was foreign minister during the war in Gaza. The warrant was withdrawn after Livni canceled her trip, but the matter strained relations between Britain and Israel.

The threat of arrest has forced several former security officials to call off trips to London, including a former general who had to hole up on an airplane at Heathrow Airport in 2005 to avoid arrest. Last fall, Defense Minister Ehud Barak fended off an arrest attempt by successfully arguing he had diplomatic immunity.

Source:- Yahoo News

Army charities fear they won't cope with 'overwhelming' influx of Lumley's Gurkhas

Gurkha veterans are facing a life of poverty and homelessness in Britain, welfare groups warned yesterday.

The ex-soldiers have begun leaving Nepal after actress Joanna Lumley spearheaded a campaign to win them the right to settle here.

But many are virtually destitute when they arrive, having already borrowed money to pay for their flights and visas.

Fighting spirit: British actress Joanna Lumley with former Gurkha Tul Bahadour Pun outside the High Court during last year's campaign.

One man found himself homeless within 48 hours, and others have been forced to rely on charities for housing.

Up to 12,000 of the retired Nepalese soldiers and their families are expected to apply to live in Britain by 2013 and welfare groups fear they could be overwhelmed by veterans needing financial help.

Retired Gurkhas are not automatically entitled to housing or benefits.

Paul Cummings, director of welfare for the Army Benevolent Fund, said Gurkhas had already begun arriving with no savings and scant possessions.

He said: 'It is an issue of grave concern. While we will do everything we can to help them, we must not forget the other people that call on us for help, and the money we need to set aside for the future, particularly for those fighting in Afghanistan.'

Nepal is one of the poorest countries in the world, and there are fears that Gurkhas may not realise the cost of living here.

The Army Benevolent Fund estimates that new arrivals need about £2,000 for accommodation and basic furniture.

That is the equivalent of almost three years' pension for some retired Gurkhas.

Source: Daily Mail - Lumley's Gurkhas

Israel to seek another 1b euros Holocaust in reparations from Germany

Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz will demand between 450 million to 1 billion euros in reparations from Germany on behalf of Jews forced into slave labor during the Holocaust, it emerged on Sunday.

Minister Steinitz will reportedly present German government with the demand on behalf of 30,000 Israeli survivors of forced labor in wartime ghettos, during a joint session scheduled to take place in early 2010 in Berlin.

Israeli officials estimate that according to a ghetto workers act passed by the German parliament in 2002, all of the 30,000 living forced labor survivors are entitled to a retroactive payment of approximately 15,000 euros each.

However, Finance Ministry officials say that according to the German government's calculations, the one-time payment is larger than that estimated by Israel, and reaches a total of 1 billion euros.

In addition to the one-time payment, the survivors are also entitled to a monthly allowance, which adds up to around 100 million euros a year.

In September, Germany's top court dismissed a claim yesterday for the return of land seized by the Nazis from its Jewish owner in 1933.

Jewish businessman Adolf Sommerfeld, who owned nearly 80 percent of a company building a housing estate in the Berlin suburb of Kleinmachnow, was beaten up and shot at by Nazi thugs and fled Germany in 1933, the year the Nazis came to power.

The Nazis later sold the homes to their occupants, who are now the owners. Seizures of property from Jews continued through the 1930s, culminating in the Holocaust.

Source: http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1136383.html

The Gaza Strip: still suffering from a 23-day war and the Ongoing Siege

Gaza, December 22, 2009 ... One year has passed since Israel’s cruel 23-day war on the 1.5 million people of the Gaza. 1,400 people were brutally killed and tens of thousands were seriously wounded. It was 23 days that violated Palestinian human rights and put justice further out of reach. It was a war that utilized ‘state of the art’ phosphorous missiles to achieve levels of suffering and destruction that had not been seen in a generation. Tens of thousands of Gazans were made homeless and schools and hospitals were directly targeted.

The horrific 23-day bombardment of Gaza finished last January. However, the siege of Gaza and the suffering of its people continue. While UN and NGO reports describe the bombardment of Gaza and its aftermath in the abstract, talking to Gaza’s children provides an important reminder of the human side of the pain inflicted by Israel.

Anas’ Experience

Anas, a 9 year-old boy living in Bureij Refugees camp, narrated his own experience during the war.

"It was such an unbearable 23 nights of hell. Sometimes I had to hide forcibly staying under my mattress for almost 4 hours or more. I was terrified each time my father went to fetch bread for my family. My mother had to shout at my older brothers not to go outside our house so they wouldn’t be harmed by the continuing attacks. We were without electricity for up to five days at a time which made things even harder.”

“One day I woke up in complete shock, with my father’s voice shouting at us to close all the windows because an Israeli warplane fired a phosphorus missile that landed just by our home. My mother brought us pieces of cloth to cover our mouths so we didn’t breathe in the toxic chemicals.”

Research by the Gaza Community Mental Health Program shows that more than 70% of the Strip’s children remain traumatized and display symptoms of serious psychological difficulties. Understandably, Anas has found it difficult to adapt to life after the war.

He explained, “Recently I have had dreadful nightmares about the war. When I got back to my school in Bureij Refugees camp, I noticed the bad smell of gunpowder and missiles. I was really upset when I found out that five of my mates were killed and lots were gravely wounded”.

Like all of Gaza’s children, Anas is also fearful of the future, “It would be catastrophic if the Israeli government launches another war on us. I keep dreaming of a calm future for me and for children of the Gaza Strip. I hope this bad experience will never happen again".

Diana’s Memory

Diana, a 13 year-old girl, has also spoken about her experience of the war.

“The war was very hard for our family because our house is made of asbestos. An Israeli missile hit our neighbor’s house and completely destroyed it. The shrapnel from the explosion was falling down around our house like rain and was flying around inside as well".

One year on, Diana has little hope for the future, and she does not look at her house as a place of safety and security. There are many children who have lost their houses and their source of comfort and security.

A war against humanity

During the military offensive, at least 280 schools and kindergartens were severely damaged, and 18 schools were destroyed. Six of the destroyed schools are in North Gaza alone, affecting almost 9,000 students who had to relocate to other schools according to UNICEF, UNRWA. Furthermore, six university buildings were destroyed, and 16 were damaged. Because of the ongoing drastic siege on the strip, it has been hard to rebuild the damaged schools.

According to Dr Hasan Zeyada, a psychologist with GCMHP http://www.gcmhp.net/ ‘children are victims of aggression with all its forms; killings, injuries, imprisonments, loss, and economic & physical siege. The generations of Palestinian children have accumulated, through years of exposure to long term traumatic experiences, negative psychological and behavioral reactions that pose a significant threat to their psychological well-being. www.gcmhp.net

The harrowing experience of the siege prevents the children of the Gaza Strip from having any kind of normal childhood. Children become more acquainted with the names of the dead rather than the names of games.

Anas and Diana are two examples of children whose only crime was being born Palestinian in the Gaza Strip. They hope and dream of a time when they can live in peace and stability with a right to their childhood.

Palestinian Telegraph - Gaza

Shakedown in Copenhagen

If you would know what Copenhagen is all about, hearken to this nugget in The Washington Post's report from the Danish capital:

"Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi--who is representing all of Africa here--unveiled his proposal Wednesday for a system in which rich countries would provide money to poor ones to help deal with the effects of climate change. ...

"Zenawi said he would accept $30 billion in the short term, rising to $100 billion by 2020. ... This was seen as a key concession by developing countries, which had previously spurned that figure ... as too low." [At Copenhagen, both rich and developing nations offer concessions, By Juliet Eilperin and David A. Fahrenthold, December 17, 2009]

There was a time when a U.S. diplomat would have burst out laughing after listening to a Third World con artist like this.

But not the Obamaites. They are already ponying up.

Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack just pledged $1 billion at Copenhagen to developing countries who preserve their forests. Thus America, $12 trillion in debt and facing a second straight $1.4 trillion deficit, will borrow another $1 billion from China to send to Brazil to bribe them to stop cutting down their trees.

When you slice through the blather about marooned bears and melting ice caps, oceans rising and cities sinking, global warming is a racket and a crock. It is all about money and power.

Copenhagen has always been about an endless transfer of wealth from America, Europe and Japan and creation of a global bureaucracy to control the pace of world economic and industrial development.

End game: enrichment and empowerment of global elites at the expense of Western peoples whose leaders have been bamboozled by con artists.

When Katrina hit New Orleans and the Gulf Coast and Rita came ashore in Texas in 2005, we were told this was due to global warming, and hurricane seasons would now get worse and worse until the world radically reduced the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

President Bush ignored the hysteria. What happened?

As Michael Fumento reports, the 2009 hurricane season ended quietly, with the fewest hurricanes since 1997, and not one hurricane made landfall in the United States.

When the feds sought to list the polar bear as an endangered species, Gov. Sarah Palin protested this "politicized science" and sued, claiming the polar bear was a healthy species whose numbers had doubled in recent years.

Was she wrong?

Is the Arctic ice cap melting? So we are told. But what harm has befallen mankind other than to have a Northwest Passage opened up to maritime traffic in the summer?

The Antarctic ice sheet is nine times as large as the Arctic, and here is what the British Antarctic Survey wrote last April:

"(D)uring the winter freeze in Antarctica this ice cover expands to an area roughly twice the size of Europe. Ranging in thickness from less than a meter to several meters, the ice insulates the warm ocean from the frigid atmosphere above. Satellite images show that since the 1970s the extent of Antarctic sea ice has increased at a rate of 100,000 square kilometers a decade."

One hundred thousand square kilometers a decade?

This would mean Antarctic sea ice expanded by 300,000 square kilometers since the 1970s, or 116,000 square miles, which is an area larger than all of New England.

How can the Antarctic ice cap grow for three decades as the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has steadily increased, unless carbon dioxide has little or nothing to do with global warming?

Unlike the Arctic, Antarctica is a continent, and while chunks of ice are cracking off in Western Antarctica, in Eastern Antarctica, four times larger, the ice sheet is thickening and expanding. The Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research reported last April that the South Pole had shown "significant cooling in recent decades."

In April 1992, as the alarm over the Earth's end times began, scientists worldwide issued what was called the Heidelberg Appeal, aimed at just the kind of hysteria we are witnessing now in Copenhagen.

"We are ... worried ... at the emergence of an irrational ideology which is opposed to scientific and industrial progress and impedes economic and social development," said the scientists.

"We contend that a Natural State, sometimes idealized by movements with a tendency to look towards the past, does not exist and has probably never existed since man's first appearance in the biosphere. ... (H)umanity has always progressed by increasingly harnessing Nature to its needs and not the reverse.
"We do, however, forewarn the authorities in charge of our planet's destiny against decisions which are supported by pseudo-scientific arguments or false and non-relevant data."

Since then, 4,000 scientists and 72 Nobel Prize winners have signed on. Again, it needs be said: Global warming is cyclical, and has been stagnant for a decade. There is no conclusive proof it is manmade, no conclusive proof it is harmful to the planet.

Source: http://buchanan.org/blog/shakedown-in-copenhagen-3274

Jewish school racially discriminated, says court

A Jewish school's admission policy amounted to race discrimination, the Supreme Court ruled today.

But the nine Justices who heard the case at the highest court in the land made clear that their ruling should not be read to mean that any party to the case could be considered "racist" in the pejorative sense of the word.

A boy was refused entry to JFS - formerly the Jews' Free School, in Brent, north west London - because he was not a Jew according to the rules set by the chief rabbi.

The boy's father is Jewish by birth, but his mother is Jewish by conversion, conducted at a progressive synagogue which is not recognised by the orthodox faith.

The school went to the Supreme Court after three judges at the Court of Appeal ruled in June that the entry criteria racially discriminated against the boy, referred to as M.

By a majority the Justices dismissed the school's appeal but said it was not clear that the test for admissions adopted by JFS would result in it being required to admit children who were not regarded as Jewish by one or more of the established Jewish movements.

They said it may be arguable that a special exemption should be provided under the Race Relations Act to allow Jewish faith schools to operate such admissions policies.

Lady Hale said: "There may or not be a good case for allowing Jewish schools to adopt criteria which they believe to be required by religious law even if these are ethnically based."

Lord Phillips, President of the Court, said that the whole question of admissions policies extended to other Jewish faith schools and the result of the case risked upsetting a policy of admission that over many years had not been considered to be open to objection.

"This demonstrates that there may well be a defect in our law of discrimination."

Lady Hale added: "No-one in this case is accusing JFS or the Office of the chief rabbi of discrimination on grounds of race as such.
"Any suggestion or implication that they are racist in the popular sense of that term can be dismissed."

Lord Kerr said: "One can have sympathy with the school authorities in their wish to pursue what must have seemed to them an entirely legitimate religious objective. It is plain that the chief rabbi and the Governors of JFS are entirely free from any moral blame."

Source: Independent.co.uk - Jewish school racially discriminated

UK-Israeli ties in crisis as Miliband calls for changes to legal system

David Miliband has called for “urgent” changes to the legal system after relations with Israel descended into crisis following an attempt to arrest Tzipi Livni, the country’s former foreign minister, in London.

Tzipi Livni, the former Israeli foreign minister, cancelled a visit to Britain amid reports pro-Palestinian activist groups sought a warrant for her arrest on alleged war crimes charges

Britain’s ambassador to Tel Aviv was told that the country’s hopes of a major role in the Middle East peace process were in jeopardy after a court issued a warrant to arrest Mrs Livni for alleged war crimes, a charge she strenuously denies.

Mrs Livni cancelled a trip to London at the weekend shortly before a court in Westminster granted a warrant for her arrest.

The warrant is thought to have been issued after an application by pro-Palestinian lawyers, but was later rescinded when it emerged that Mrs Livni, now leader of the opposition, had cancelled her trip. The Foreign Secretary said the Government was looking at ways of changing the system that allowed arrest warrants to be sought without advice from a prosecutor.

“Israeli leaders, like leaders from other countries, must be able to visit and have a proper dialogue with the British Government,” he said.

“The Government is looking urgently at ways in which the UK system might be changed in order to avoid this sort of situation arising again,” Mr Miliband said in a statement.

“The procedure by which arrest warrants can be sought and issued without any prior knowledge or advice by a prosecutor is an unusual feature of the system in England and Wales,” he added.

Israel earlier slammed the warrant understood to have been issued by a London court at the weekend against Mrs Livni over her role in Israel’s war against Hamas-run Gaza last January.

Israel warned Britain that it would not be able to play a key role in the peace process unless it curbed such actions.

“Israel rejects the cynical legal move made in the British court against the head of the opposition, Tzipi Livni, at the behest of radical elements,” the foreign ministry said.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanayahu’s office said the premier viewed the incident “with utmost gravity”.

Mr Miliband said Britain was determined to “protect and develop” ties with Israel, which was a “strategic partner and a close friend of the UK”.

Source: Telegraph.co.uk - Tzipi-Livni-arrest-warrant

The Climate Change 'Fraud'

THE scientific consensus that mankind has caused climate change was rocked yesterday as a leading academic called it a “load of hot air underpinned by fraud”.

Professor Ian Plimer condemned the climate change lobby as “climate comrades” keeping the “gravy train” going

In a controversial talk just days before the start of a climate summit attended by world leaders in Copenhagen, Prof Plimer said Governments were treating the public like “fools” and using climate change to increase taxes.

He said carbon dioxide has had no impact on temperature and that recent warming was part of the natural cycle of climate stretching over ­ billions of years.

Prof Plimer - author of Heaven and Earth: Global Warming, The Missing Science - told a London audience: “Climates always change. They always have and they always will. They are driven by a number of factors that are random and cyclical.”

His comments came days after a scandal in climate-change research emerged through the leak of emails from the world-leading research unit at the University of East Anglia. They appeared to show that scientists had been massaging data to prove that global warming was taking place.

The Climate Research Unit also admitted getting rid of much of its raw climate data, which means other scientists cannot check the subsequent research. Last night the head of the CRU, Professor Phil Jones, said he would stand down while an independent review took place.

Professor Plimer said climate change was caused by natural events such as volcanic eruptions, the shifting of the Earth’s orbit and cosmic radiation. He said: “Carbon dioxide levels have been up to 1,000 times higher in the past. CO2 cannot be driving global warming now.

“In the past we have had rapid and significant climate change with temperature changes greater than anything we are measuring today. They are driven by processes that have been going on since the beginning of time.”

He cited periods of warming during the Roman Empire and in the Middle Ages – when Vikings grew crops on Greenland – and cooler phases such as the Dark Ages and the Little Ice Age from 1300 to 1850.

And he predicted that the next phase would cool the planet.

Climate change is widely blamed on the burning of fossil fuels which release greenhouse gases such as CO2 into the atmosphere, where they trap the sun’s heat.

The talks at Copenhagen are expected to find ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions globally.

But Professor Plimer, of Adelaide and Melbourne Universities, said that to stop climate change Governments should find ways to prevent changes to the Earth’s orbit and ocean currents and avoid explosions of supernovae in space. Of the saga of the leaked emails, he said: “If you have to argue your science by using fraud, your science is not valid.”

The CRU’s Professor Jones has admitted some of the emails may have had “poorly chosen words” and were sent in the “heat of the moment”. But he has categorically denied manipulating data and said he stood by the science. And yesterday he dismissed suggestions of a conspiracy to alter ­evidence to support a theory of man-made global warming as “complete rubbish”.

But mining geology professor Plimer said there was a huge momentum behind the climate-change lobby.

He suggested many scientists had a vested interest in promoting climate change because it helped secure more funding for research. He said: “The climate comrades are trying to keep the gravy train going. Governments are also keen on putting their hands as deep as possible into our pockets.

“The average person has been talked down to. He has been treated like a fool. Yet the average person has common sense.”

But Vicky Pope, head of Met Office Climate Change Advice, said: “We are seeing changes in climate on a timescale we have not seen before.

“There clearly are natural variations. But the only way we can explain these trends is when we include both man-made and natural changes to the climate.

“We have also seen declines in summer sea ice over the past 30 years, glaciers retreating for 150 years, changing rainfall patterns and increases in subsurface and surface ocean temperatures.”

And as the war of words between the rival camps intensified, leading economist Lord Stern dismissed the sceptics as “muddled”.

Lord Stern, who produced a detailed report on the issue for the Government, said evidence of ­ climate change was “overwhelming”. He accepted that all views should be heard but said the degree of ­ scepticism among “real scientists” was very small.

Source Article:- www.dailyexpress.co.uk

Law chief wasn't happy about Iraq war, says John Prescott

Outspoken: John Prescott has cast doubt over the legality of the Iraq war

Outspoken: John Prescott has cast doubt over the legality of the Iraq war

John Prescott cast new doubt on the legality of the Iraq War last night by revealing that former attorney general Lord Goldsmith 'wasn't happy' about the decision to invade.

In his most outspoken interview since leaving government, the former deputy prime minister branded George Bush 'crap' and said he now questions why he backed the conflict.

Mr Prescott said he witnessed ' hairraising' conversations between Tony Blair and Mr Bush in the run-up to war.

He also revealed that he once branded Mr Blair 'a Tory' to his face and regards Gordon Brown as a political 'axeman'.

His comments about Lord Goldsmith are particularly explosive because they come after it was revealed earlier this month that he warned Mr Blair eight months before the conflict that regime change in Iraq would be illegal.

Mr Blair was forced to deny reports that he bullied his attorney general into changing his mind and ruling that the war was legal just days before the conflict.

In a wide-ranging interview with the New Statesman magazine, Mr Prescott admitted that he has had soul searching conversations with Mr Blair about the decision to join the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

He said: 'I do wonder, looking back now, having the privilege of discussing with Tony about all this: how did I then go along [with it]?'

In a withering assessment of the former U.S. president, Mr Prescott said: 'Listen, Bush is crap - you know it, I know it, the party knows it.' And in a telling analysis of the legal case for war, he said: 'If you say, "Was Goldsmith a happy man about this?" - no he wasn't.'

Mr Prescott's comments are likely to be studied closely by the Chilcot Inquiry into the war, which is due to address its legality in hearings in the new year.

He was equally frank about domestic issues, revealing that he threatened to resign from the Cabinet if Mr Blair forged an electoral pact with the then Liberal Democrat leader Paddy Ashdown.

Mr Prescott, who became Mr Blair's 'cover' with the Labour left, said he once told Mr Blair: 'You're a bloody Tory.' Mr Prescott said he originally intended to support Gordon Brown in the fractious leadership contest in 1994, when Mr Blair seized control of the Labour Party.

'Gordon's like me; he's a Labour politician born and bred,' added Mr Prescott. 'With Gordon, the politics is much more serious - for him, it is a division between Tory and Labour.

'With Tony, it would be a division between two personalities in politics. He's a foil man. Gordon's an axeman. I'm an axeman.'

Source:- Daily Mail - John Prescott

45-minute WMD claim 'came from an Iraqi taxi driver'

Tory MP and defence specialist Adam Holloway says MI6 got information from a taxi driver who had heard Iraqi military commanders talking about weapons.

Jack Straw, the then-foreign secretary, opens the debate on war with Iraq in February 2003, as Tony Blair and John Prescott, then the prime minister and deputy prime minister respectively, look on

An Iraqi taxi driver was the source of the discredited claim that Saddam Hussein could unleash weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes, a Tory MP claimed today.

Adam Holloway, a defence specialist, said MI6 obtained the information indirectly from a taxi driver who had overheard two Iraqi military commanders talking about Saddam's weapons.

The 45-minute claim was a key feature of the dossier about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction that was released by Tony Blair in September 2002. Blair published the information to bolster public support for war.

After the war the dossier became hugely controversial when it became clear that some of the information it contained was not true. An inquiry headed by Lord Butler into the use of intelligence in the run-up to the war revealed that MI6 had subsequently accepted that some of its Iraqi sources were unreliable, but his report did not identify who they were.

Today, in an interview with the Daily Mail, Holloway said the key piece of information about 45 minutes came from an Iraqi officer who was using a taxi driver as his own sub-source.

"[MI6] were running a senior Iraqi army officer who had a source of his own, a cab driver on the Iraqi-Jordanian border," said Holloway, a former Grenadier Guardsman and television journalist.

"He apparently overheard two Iraqi army officers two years before who had spoken about weapons with the range to hit targets elsewhere in the Middle East."

Holloway made his comments to coincide with the publication of a report he has written claiming that MI6 always had reservations about some of the information in the dossier but that these reservations were brushed aside when Downing Street was preparing it for publication.

According to the Mail, Holloway says in his report: "Under pressure from Downing Street to find anything to back up the WMD case, [MI6] were squeezing their agents in Iraq for anything at all.

"In the [MI6] analysts' footnote to their report, it flagged up that part of the report describing some missiles that the Iraqi government allegedly possessed was demonstrably untrue. The missiles verifiably did not exist.

"The footnote said it in black and white. Despite this the report was treated as reliable and went on to become one of the central planks of the dodgy dossier."

Holloway claims that MI6 was not to blame for the fact that the footnote was ignored. "It seems that someone, perhaps in Downing Street, found it rather inconvenient and ignored it lest it interfere with our reasons for going to war," his report says.

The report is due to be published on the first defence website.

Butler concluded that, although the claims in the Iraq dossier went to the "outer limits" of what the intelligence available at the time would sustain, there was no evidence of "deliberate distortion".

Today Sir John Scarlett, the key figure responsible for the preparation of the dossier, will give evidence to the Iraq inquiry. Scarlett was chairman of the joint intelligence committee at the time and he went on to become head of MI6.

He is expected to be asked about the dossier, although he is unlikely to provide detailed information about MI6 sources in public. The inquiry has said that, if witnesses want to discuss confidential issues relating to national security, they can do so in private.

The September dossier did not specify what weapons Iraq could deploy within 45 minutes. Intelligence officials subsequently revealed that it was meant to be a reference to battlefield weapons, not long-range missiles.

But, when it was published, some British papers interpreted the dossier as meaning that British troops based in Cyprus would be vulnerable to an Iraqi attack. At the time the government did not do anything to correct this error.

Source:- Guradian - taxi driver

Climate change: this is the worst scientific scandal of our generation

Our hopelessly compromised scientific establishment cannot be allowed to get away with the Climategate whitewash...

CO2 emissions will be on top of the agenda at the Copenhagen summit[...]

A week after my colleague James Delingpole , on his Telegraph blog, coined the term "Climategate" to describe the scandal revealed by the leaked emails from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit, Google was showing that the word now appears across the internet more than nine million times. But in all these acres of electronic coverage, one hugely relevant point about these thousands of documents has largely been missed.

The reason why even the Guardian's George Monbiot has expressed total shock and dismay at the picture revealed by the documents is that their authors are not just any old bunch of academics. Their importance cannot be overestimated, What we are looking at here is the small group of scientists who have for years been more influential in driving the worldwide alarm over global warming than any others, not least through the role they play at the heart of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Professor Philip Jones, the CRU's director, is in charge of the two key sets of data used by the IPCC to draw up its reports. Through its link to the Hadley Centre, part of the UK Met Office, which selects most of the IPCC's key scientific contributors, his global temperature record is the most important of the four sets of temperature data on which the IPCC and governments rely – not least for their predictions that the world will warm to catastrophic levels unless trillions of dollars are spent to avert it.

Dr Jones is also a key part of the closely knit group of American and British scientists responsible for promoting that picture of world temperatures conveyed by Michael Mann's "hockey stick" graph which 10 years ago turned climate history on its head by showing that, after 1,000 years of decline, global temperatures have recently shot up to their highest level in recorded history.

Given star billing by the IPCC, not least for the way it appeared to eliminate the long-accepted Mediaeval Warm Period when temperatures were higher they are today, the graph became the central icon of the entire man-made global warming movement.

Since 2003, however, when the statistical methods used to create the "hockey stick" were first exposed as fundamentally flawed by an expert Canadian statistician Steve McIntyre , an increasingly heated battle has been raging between Mann's supporters, calling themselves "the Hockey Team", and McIntyre and his own allies, as they have ever more devastatingly called into question the entire statistical basis on which the IPCC and CRU construct their case.

The senders and recipients of the leaked CRU emails constitute a cast list of the IPCC's scientific elite, including not just the "Hockey Team", such as Dr Mann himself, Dr Jones and his CRU colleague Keith Briffa, but Ben Santer, responsible for a highly controversial rewriting of key passages in the IPCC's 1995 report; Kevin Trenberth, who similarly controversially pushed the IPCC into scaremongering over hurricane activity; and Gavin Schmidt, right-hand man to Al Gore's ally Dr James Hansen, whose own GISS record of surface temperature data is second in importance only to that of the CRU itself.

There are three threads in particular in the leaked documents which have sent a shock wave through informed observers across the world. Perhaps the most obvious, as lucidly put together by Willis Eschenbach (see McIntyre's blog Climate Audit and Anthony Watt's blog Watts Up With That ), is the highly disturbing series of emails which show how Dr Jones and his colleagues have for years been discussing the devious tactics whereby they could avoid releasing their data to outsiders under freedom of information laws.

They have come up with every possible excuse for concealing the background data on which their findings and temperature records were based.

This in itself has become a major scandal, not least Dr Jones's refusal to release the basic data from which the CRU derives its hugely influential temperature record, which culminated last summer in his startling claim that much of the data from all over the world had simply got "lost". Most incriminating of all are the emails in which scientists are advised to delete large chunks of data, which, when this is done after receipt of a freedom of information request, is a criminal offence.

But the question which inevitably arises from this systematic refusal to release their data is – what is it that these scientists seem so anxious to hide? The second and most shocking revelation of the leaked documents is how they show the scientists trying to manipulate data through their tortuous computer programmes, always to point in only the one desired direction – to lower past temperatures and to "adjust" recent temperatures upwards, in order to convey the impression of an accelerated warming. This comes up so often (not least in the documents relating to computer data in the Harry Read Me file) that it becomes the most disturbing single element of the entire story. This is what Mr McIntyre caught Dr Hansen doing with his GISS temperature record last year (after which Hansen was forced to revise his record), and two further shocking examples have now come to light from Australia and New Zealand.

In each of these countries it has been possible for local scientists to compare the official temperature record with the original data on which it was supposedly based. In each case it is clear that the same trick has been played – to turn an essentially flat temperature chart into a graph which shows temperatures steadily rising. And in each case this manipulation was carried out under the influence of the CRU.

What is tragically evident from the Harry Read Me file is the picture it gives of the CRU scientists hopelessly at sea with the complex computer programmes they had devised to contort their data in the approved direction, more than once expressing their own desperation at how difficult it was to get the desired results.

The third shocking revelation of these documents is the ruthless way in which these academics have been determined to silence any expert questioning of the findings they have arrived at by such dubious methods – not just by refusing to disclose their basic data but by discrediting and freezing out any scientific journal which dares to publish their critics' work. It seems they are prepared to stop at nothing to stifle scientific debate in this way, not least by ensuring that no dissenting research should find its way into the pages of IPCC reports.

Back in 2006, when the eminent US statistician Professor Edward Wegman produced an expert report for the US Congress vindicating Steve McIntyre's demolition of the "hockey stick", he excoriated the way in which this same "tightly knit group" of academics seemed only too keen to collaborate with each other and to "peer review" each other's papers in order to dominate the findings of those IPCC reports on which much of the future of the US and world economy may hang. In light of the latest revelations, it now seems even more evident that these men have been failing to uphold those principles which lie at the heart of genuine scientific enquiry and debate. Already one respected US climate scientist, Dr Eduardo Zorita, has called for Dr Mann and Dr Jones to be barred from any further participation in the IPCC. Even our own George Monbiot, horrified at finding how he has been betrayed by the supposed experts he has been revering and citing for so long, has called for Dr Jones to step down as head of the CRU.

The former Chancellor Lord (Nigel) Lawson, last week launching his new think tank, the Global Warming Policy Foundation , rightly called for a proper independent inquiry into the maze of skulduggery revealed by the CRU leaks. But the inquiry mooted on Friday, possibly to be chaired by Lord Rees, President of the Royal Society – itself long a shameless propagandist for the warmist cause – is far from being what Lord Lawson had in mind. Our hopelessly compromised scientific establishment cannot be allowed to get away with a whitewash of what has become the greatest scientific scandal of our age.

Christopher Booker's The Real Global Warming Disaster: Is the Obsession with 'Climate Change' Turning Out to be the Most Costly Scientific Blunder in History? (Continuum, £16.99) is available from Telegraph Books for £14.99 plus £1.25 p & p.

Source:- Telegraph.co.uk - November 28, 2009

Matthew Norman: Justice vs Mercy the impossible conflict behind Demjanjuk's trial

The question is not whether he's guilty, but if justice is served by trying him now

The trial in Munich of John Demjanjuk, already the source of as much anguished moral perplexity as any in memory, became even more unsettling on its postponement yesterday. The decrepit old man accused of herding almost 30,000 Jews into the death chambers of the Sobibor camp had developed a fever resistant to medication, the judge accepted, and was unable rather than unwilling to appear in court.

And so the doubts as to whether a gravely ill geriatric should be standing trial at all further intensified. Both the arguments and counter-arguments are so persuasive, it seems to me, that one is perfectly capable of supporting both with equal conviction at the same time. I am, anyway.

Reading the testimony of relatives of Mr Demjanjuk's alleged victims, seized by the Gestapo in Holland and instructed to pack their best shoes for their final journey to Nazi-occupied Poland, it feels inexcusably detached and effete to cite the passage of time and physical decay as reason to spare an ailing 89-year-old from being confronted with and punished for his past.

"I promise you I'll be strong, and I'll definitely survive," wrote Emmy Salomon to the friend charged with caring for her husband and small son, in a letter she threw from the train and later posted back to Amsterdam. She was gassed by exhaust fumes in Sobibor four days later, possibly bundled into the chamber by the hands hidden beneath an orange blanket as their owner lay headlong on a stretcher listening to her son recite those words.

Also possible is that the Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk is innocent. Already acquitted in 1993 by Israel's Supreme Court, on appeal after being sentenced to hang, of being Treblinka's monstrous "Ivan the Terrible", natural justice insists he be convicted before we assume his guilt. However heart-rending the posthumous accounts that reduced those in court to sobbing, they have no bearing on what appears, legally speaking, to be primarily a matter of identification and a hugely hazardous one at that more than six decades after the event. Were he convicted even in part on the emotional impact of such testimony rather than conclusive evidence, this would constitute a form of victims' justice scarcely less reprehensible than victors'.

The greater questions than that of his guilt, however, are perhaps whether justice of any kind is served by trying him now, a few months short of his 90th birthday and apparently close to death; and if so, whether the desire for justice or for vengeance is the paramount motive for the trial.

One central plank of Mr Demjanjuk's defence is that he is a victim himself. While this looks like moral equivocation taken to obscene lengths, it raises some disturbing questions. An inmate of the German concentration camp at Trawniki after being captured with the Red Army, he more than likely suffered brutality at the hands of his captors. Of course nothing could begin to excuse what allegedly followed, but if he later volunteered to be a camp guard through fear for his life, it might partly explain it. The instinct for survival is of course far the strongest known to mankind, and turns angels into devils. Which of us has the imagination to state with absolute certainty that we would opt for death over carrying out even the most unspeakably wicked of orders? I am depressingly aware that I wouldn't know the answer until the moment that choice had to made.

Whether the Nuremberg rules can be fairly applied to such a minuscule cog in such a gargantuan engine of genocidal mania seems as opaque as whether Mr Demanjuk was a sadistic brute or an obedient drone made compliant by terror. If the latter, what purpose can there be in inflating so ineffably minor a figure into probably the last of the major Nazi defendants?

The purpose, you might argue, is a duty to history. After migrating to the United States in 1951, Mr Demanjuk worked as a mechanic at a Ford plant in Ohio, and you know what his boss thought of history. But it isn't bunk, is it? "The history of the world," wrote Frederich von Schiller, "is the world's court of justice," and by this superior definition it behoves the world to do justice by revering even its most excruciating history above the humane urge to show clemency to a stricken old man.

Abraham Lincoln, who knew something about racial persecution, disagreed. "I have always found that mercy," said that greatest of Presidents, "bears richer fruit than strict justice." The modern history of South Africa, which 20 years ago seemed destined for an anarchic bloodbath but chose reconciliation over the entirely just craving for revenge, seems to bear this out.

Then again, nothing from the darkest chapters of human history – not apartheid, not slavery, not even other genocides – matches the Holocaust for unimaginable horror. What sets it apart is not the number killed or the insanely evil intent of the killers, but the clinically industrial methodology of the killing that has left in its wake a sense of unquenchable outrage. It would be a grotesque outrage itself if ever that were quenched, and if this trial played some part in maintaining it one might be less uneasy about the sight of so pitiful a specimen standing trial – lying trial, more accurately, on his stretcher – and seeing out what days remain to him in a cell.

However, one senses no fierce public interest. Those following the case, you suspect, will already be familiar with the peerlessly gruesome details of the Holocaust, and if you polled a random sample of 1,000 at a train station, I doubt more than 100 would even recognise the name of John Demjanjuk. Those paying close attention will learn nothing new. Those ignoring it will learn nothing.

Meanwhile, if Germany seeks some kind of expiation by trying a non-German national who committed no crime on German soil, it will hardly remove the stain of its shockingly laissez faire attitude to punishing infinitely more senior and viler Germans in the decades after the war.

Yet for all the grave suspicion that the trial is political and that any conviction would be unsafe, for all the worry that Mr Demjanjuk's frailty might induce sympathy where none is merited, and despite the concern expressed by David Cesarani in Wednesday's Independent that a lenient sentence will make a mockery of the case while a stiff one will look needlessly cruel, how can anyone hear Mrs Salomon's letter without believing he should return to that dock on December 21, on life-support if necessary? What level of contempt would it show, to the six million who form history's most tragic statistic and the one who is simply a tragedy, to promote mercy over strict justice? If strict justice can conceivably be done, that is, in a case so fraught with evidential and other difficulties.

Often there are no easy answers, sometimes there are no answers at all, and very occasionally there are two directly contradictory answers as compellingly persuasive as each other. Perhaps the best to be said of this trial is that by reducing the observer to agonised bewilderment over whether it should be held at all, it faithfully reflects and reinforces the unique incomprehension occasioned in us still, and God willing always, by the episode in which it was born.

Source:- independent.co.uk - justice v mercy

German Trial is New Twist in Demjanjuk Saga -

Heartless bastards! If you wish to see the face of evil, this is it. Reflect on the fact that THIS is what “zero tolerance” means. Reflect also on the fact that the prissy konvertsy approve of this (in common with their self-congratulatory American suburban neighbours). I pity the Demjanjuk family and ask you all to pray for them. Poor old fellow… he deserves to be home with his family, not awaiting trial. He was nothing but a spear-dragger, you ignorant...[edited due to Uk censorship laws]

John Demjanjuk once was the focus of the world’s attention for the bloodcurdling crimes he stood accused of. Today, he’s attracting notice for being the lowest-ranking person to go on trial for Nazi crimes in World War II. The latest chapter in a 32-year legal saga brings the retired Ohio autoworker to a court in Munich in a case opening Monday that breaks new ground in Germany’s pursuit of alleged Holocaust perpetrators. If successful, it could significantly lower the bar for who is considered important enough to go to jail for being part of the Nazi apparatus.

In the 1980s, Demjanjuk stood trial in Israel accused of being the notoriously brutal guard “Ivan the Terrible” at the Treblinka extermination camp. He was convicted, sentenced to death, then, freed when an Israeli court overturned the ruling saying the evidence showed he was the victim of mistaken identity. Now, at age 89, he is accused of serving as a low-ranking guard at the Sobibor death camp, charged with being an accessory to the murders of 27,900 people during the time he is alleged to have been there.

Demjanjuk maintains he was a victim of the Nazis, first, wounded as a Soviet soldier fighting German forces, then, captured, and held as a prisoner of war under brutal conditions. German prosecutors paint a different picture. After the Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk was in German captivity, they maintain, he volunteered to serve with the fanatical German SS and was posted to Sobibor in Nazi-occupied Poland. It is the first time prosecutors have tried someone so allegedly low-ranking without proof of a specific offence. If Demjanjuk is convicted, other low-ranking suspects could face prosecution.

“This definitely marks a change in the decades-old policies of the German judiciary, a positive change,” said Efraim Zuroff, the top Nazi-hunter at the Simon Wiesenthal Center. Immediately after the war, top Nazis such as Hermann Göring were convicted at war-crimes trials run by the Allied powers. Investigations of the lower ranks eventually fell to German courts. Many of those trials ended with short sentences, or acquittal, of suspects in greater positions of responsibility than Demjanjuk allegedly had. Demjanjuk is accused of having served as a “Wachmann”, a guard, the lowest rank of the “Hilfswillige” volunteers who were subordinate to German SS men.

For example, Karl Streibel, the commandant of the SS Trawniki training camp where Demjanjuk allegedly was trained, was tried in Hamburg, but, acquitted in 1976 after the judges ruled it hadn’t been proven that he knew what the guards being trained would be used for. But, today’s judges grew up in the 1950s and 1960s and, recently, have approached war crimes cases differently from their predecessors. In August, the same court that will hear Demjanjuk’s case convicted Josef Scheungraber, a former German officer, of murder for the massacre of 10 civilians in Italy in 1944 even though no witness saw him give the order. There are no direct living witnesses in Demjanjuk’s case either, but, prosecutors argue that if he was a guard at the death camp, that necessarily means he was involved in the death machinery. “In the early 1950s, there were certainly some mistakes made, and sometimes there may have been an agenda behind it”, said Kurt Schrimm, head of the special German prosecutors’ office responsible for investigating Nazi-era crimes. “One must remember, however, that our office has embarked since its founding in 1958 into completely uncharted territory”, he added. “It is unique that a people pursues their own crimes over decades, and we are always learning more”.

Demjanjuk’s family argues that there is pressure from the Simon Wiesenthal Center, the US Justice Department, and others to try him. “I think they’re going to push forward to have the trial no matter what, to have the media event and make it seem like Germany is doing what it can to hunt down and prosecute so-called Nazi war criminals”, John Demjanjuk Jr told The Associated Press in a telephone interview, adding that his father suffers from a bone marrow disease and could only have months to live. Schrimm said it was not until 2008, when his prosecutors’ office found lists of Jews transported to Sobibor during the time Demjanjuk was allegedly there, that there was enough evidence to pursue a case against him in Germany. Now, he said, there is an obligation to proceed with the trial. “It is naturally difficult to deal with men who are soon in their 90th year”, Schrimm said. “But, there are no doubts: The lawmakers decided in 1979 to remove the statute of limitations for murder, and therefore I see no reason to treat this case any differently”.

Proving the case is another matter. Demjanjuk maintains he was never at the camp and questions the authenticity of one of the prosecution’s main pieces of evidence, an SS identity card that they say features a photo of a young, round-faced Demjanjuk and that says he worked at Sobibor. He claims to be a victim of mistaken identity, a Red Army conscript from Ukraine who was captured in Crimea in May 1942 and held prisoner until joining the Vlasov Army. This force of anti-communist Soviet POWs and others was formed to fight with the Germans against the Soviets in the final months of the war.

Demjanjuk, who is being tried in Munich because he lived in the area briefly after the war, emigrated to the U.S. in 1952 and gained citizenship in 1958. He was extradited to Israel in 1986 after the U.S. Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations, or OSI, said it had evidence that he was “Ivan the Terrible”. He went on trial in 1987 and was convicted and sentenced to death. But, in 1993 the Israeli high court overturned the ruling and freed him after it received evidence that another Ukrainian, not Demjanjuk, was that Nazi guard. At the trial, former Treblinka prisoners misidentified Demjanjuk as Ivan the Terrible. But, this time, there are no Sobibor survivors who claim to remember him at all.

Thomas Blatt, a Sobibor survivor whose mother, father, and brother were killed immediately on arrival at the camp in April 1943, is to testify at the German trial, but, he concedes that even if he had encountered Demjanjuk, he wouldn’t be able to remember him after so many years. “I don’t remember the faces of my parents right now”, said Blatt, 82. “How could I remember him?” But, he said he still looks forward to testifying about the role of the camp guards, whom he recalls seeing returning from the gas chambers, their boots splattered with the blood of Jews who resisted. “That is what I can tell, only what the group (has) done. They were not regular guardsmen. They were murderers”.

Some evidence against Demjanjuk comes from statements attributed to Ignat Danilchenko, a now-deceased Ukrainian who once served in the Soviet Army and was exiled to Siberia following World War II for helping the Nazis. In 1979, he told the Soviet KGB that he served with Demjanjuk at Sobibor and that Demjanjuk “like all guards in the camp, participated in the mass killing of Jews”. But, the OSI itself has questioned the validity of his statements, saying in reports that there are “numerous factual errors”.

If convicted, Demjanjuk faces a possible 15-year sentence, though he could be given credit for some or all of the seven years he spent behind bars in Israel. Even if acquitted, however, Demjanjuk will likely have to remain in Germany because his US citizenship has been revoked. “There’s no justice in this case, regardless of the outcome”, Demjanjuk Jr said.

Source:http://02varvara.wordpress.com/2009/11/29/german-trial-is-new-twist-in-demjanjuk-saga/

Former Nazi SS member charged with killing Jewish labourers

Man named in German media reports as Adolf Storms accused of killing 58 people near Austrian village.

A 90-year-old former member of the Nazi SS has been charged with 58 counts of murder over the killings of Jewish forced labourers in Austria, officials said today. The man is suspected of killing his victims near the village of Deutsch Schützen in 1945, a statement from a German state court said.

"On 29 March 1945, the accused and his accomplices brought at least 57 Jewish forced labourers in several groups to a nearby forest area, where they had to give up their valuables and kneel by a grave," the statement said.

"The accused and other SS members then cruelly shot the Jewish forced labourers from behind."

The court described the suspect as a "retiree from Duisburg", but German media reports have named him as Adolf Storms, a former member of the 5th SS Panzer Division, known as Wiking.

The suspect is accused of shooting another Jew who could no longer walk during a forced march from Deutsch Schützen to Hartberg on the day after the massacre.

The remains of the victims of Deutsch Schützen were found in a mass grave by the Austrian Jewish association in 1995. A plaque now marks the site.

Prosecutors opened an investigation of Storms at the end of 2008 after being alerted to his presence by an Austrian university student who had been researching the killings.

The chief prosecutor, Andreas Brendel, said it was still ongoing. So far, three former members of the Hitler Youth, who were helping the SS to oversee the march, have provided witness statements in Austria.

A fourth former Hitler Youth member, now living in Canada, will be interviewed this week, Brendel told the Associated Press. "There are two who witnessed the shooting of the individual Jewish victim, but there are no people still alive who were part of the other shootings themselves," he said.

He added that statements had been made during an Austrian trial of others involved which could be used as evidence against the suspect.

When German authorities raided the suspect's home last December, they said he had invoked his right not to make a statement. He had denied involvement in the shootings to others. He was interned in a US prisoner of war camp following the war, but was released in 1946. In the chaotic aftermath of the conflict, it was not uncommon for possible war criminals to slip through the cracks. The Austrian press has reported the man changed the spelling of his name after the second world war – a possible explanation of why he went undetected for so long.

Editor's Note

Der Spiegel magazine reported last October that investigators were put onto Storms thanks to research into the massacre by a 28-year-old Austrian student, Andreas Forster.

Forster travelled to Duisburg and filmed hours of interviews over several days, finding the elderly man to be "sprightly" but unable to recollect the day of the massacre.

"We informed prosecutors in July," Forster told the magazine, since which time Storms has refused all contact with him.

Iran’s nuclear threat is a lie

Obama's "showdown" with Iran has another agenda. The media have been tasked with preparing the public for endless war.

In 2001, the Observer published a series of reports that claimed an "Iraqi connection" to al-Qaeda, even describing the base in Iraq where the training of terrorists took place and a facility where anthrax was being manufactured as a weapon of mass destruction. It was all false. Supplied by US intelligence and Iraqi exiles, planted stories in the British and US media helped George Bush and Tony Blair to launch an illegal invasion which caused, according to the most recent study, 1.3 million deaths.

Something similar is happening over Iran: the same syncopation of government and media "revelations", the same manufacture of a sense of crisis. "Showdown looms with Iran over secret nuclear plant", declared the Guardian on 26 September. "Showdown" is the theme. High noon. The clock ticking. Good versus evil. Add a smooth new US president who has "put paid to the Bush years". An immediate echo is the notorious Guardian front page of 22 May 2007: "Iran's secret plan for summer offensive to force US out of Iraq". Based on unsubstantiated claims by the Pentagon, the writer Simon Tisdall presented as fact an Iranian "plan" to wage war on, and defeat, US forces in Iraq by September of that year - a demonstrable falsehood for which there has been no retraction.

The official jargon for this kind of propaganda is "psy-ops", the military term for psychological operations. In the Pentagon and Whitehall, it has become a critical component of a diplomatic and military campaign to blockade, isolate and weaken Iran by hyping its "nuclear threat": a phrase now used incessantly by Barack Obama and Gordon Brown, and parroted by the BBC and other broadcasters as ­objective news. And it is fake.

The threat is one-way

On 16 September, Newsweek disclosed that the major US intelligence agencies had reported to the White House that Iran's "nuclear status" had not changed since the National Intelligence Estimate of November 2007, which stated with "high confidence" that Iran had halted in 2003 the programme it was alleged to have developed. The International Atomic Energy Agency has backed this, time and again.

The current propaganda derives from Obama's announcement that the US is scrapping missiles stationed on Russia's border. This serves to cover the fact that the number of US missile sites is actually expanding in Europe and the "redundant" missiles are being redeployed on ships. The game is to mollify Russia into joining, or not obstructing, the US campaign against Iran. "President Bush was right," said Obama, "that Iran's ballistic missile programme poses a significant threat [to Europe and the US]." That Iran would contemplate a suicidal attack on the US is preposterous. The threat, as ever, is one-way, with the world's superpower virtually ensconced on Iran's borders.

Iran's crime is its independence. Having thrown out America's favourite tyrant, Shah Reza Pahlavi, Iran remains the only resource-rich Muslim state beyond US control. As only Israel has a "right to exist" in the Middle East, the US goal is to cripple the Islamic Republic. This will allow Israel to divide and dominate the Middle East on Washington's behalf, undeterred by a confident neighbour. If any country in the world has been handed urgent cause to develop a nuclear "deterrence", it is Iran.

As one of the original signatories of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Iran has been a consistent advocate of a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East. In contrast, Israel has never agreed to an IAEA inspection, and its nuclear weapons plant at Dimona remains an open secret. Armed with as many as 200 active nuclear warheads, Israel "deplores" UN resolutions calling on it to sign the NPT, just as it deplored the recent UN report charging it with crimes against humanity in Gaza, just as it maintains a world record for violations of international law. It gets away with this because great power grants it immunity.

Preparing for endless war

Obama's "showdown" with Iran has another agenda. On both sides of the Atlantic the media have been tasked with preparing the public for endless war. The US/Nato commander General Stanley McChrystal says 500,000 troops will be required in Afghanistan over five years, according to America's NBC. The goal is control of the "strategic prize" of the gas and oilfields of the Caspian Sea, central Asia, the Gulf and Iran - in other words, Eurasia. But the war is opposed by 69 per cent of the British public, 57 per cent of the US public and almost every other human being. Convincing "us" that Iran is the new demon will not be easy. McChrystal's spurious claim that Iran "is reportedly training fighters for certain Taliban groups" is as desperate as Brown's pathetic echo of "a line in the sand".

During the Bush years, according to the great whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, a military coup took place in the US, and the Pentagon is now ascendant in every area of American foreign policy. A measure of its control is the number of wars of aggression being waged simultaneously and the adoption of a "first-strike" doctrine that has lowered the threshold on nuclear weapons, together with the blurring of the distinction between nuclear and conventional weapons.

All this mocks Obama's media rhetoric about "a world without nuclear weapons". In fact, he is the Pentagon's most important acquisition. His acquiescence with its demand that he keep on Bush's secretary of "defence" and arch war- maker, Robert Gates, is unique in US history. He has proved his worth with stepped-up wars from south Asia to the Horn of Africa. Like Bush's America, Obama's America is run by some very dangerous people. We have a right to be warned. When will those paid to keep the record straight do their job

Source: New Statesman - October 1, 2009. http://www.newstatesman.com/international-politics/2009/10/iran-nuclear-pilger-obama

'Dishonest' Blair and Straw accused over secret plan for multicultural UK

Jack Straw and Tony Blair 'dishonestly' concealed a plan to allow in more immigrants and make Britain more multi-cultural because they feared a public backlash if it was made public, it has been claimed.

The allegation was made after a former Labour adviser said the Government opened up UK borders partly to humiliate Right-wing opponents of immigration.

Andrew Neather, who worked for Mr Straw when he was Home Secretary, and as a speech writer for Mr Blair, claimed a secret Government report in 2000 called for mass immigration to change Britain's cultural make-up forever.

Jack Straw and Tony Blair 'covered up plan to let more immigrants in for political reasons'

It also emerged that:

* Home Office Minister Barbara Roche, who pioneered the open-door policy, wanted to restore her Labour reputation after being attacked by Left-wingers for condemning begging by immigrants as 'vile'.
* Civil servant Jonathan Portes, who wrote the immigration report, was a speechwriter for Gordon Brown and is now a senior aide to Cabinet Secretary Sir Gus O'Donnell.
* Labour chiefs decided to brand Tory leaders William Hague and Michael Howard as racists to deter them from criticising the covert initiative.

Mr Neather said there was a 'driving political purpose' behind Labour's decision to allow in hundreds of thousands of migrants to plug gaps in the labour market.

He said the stance was foreshadowed by a report by Mr Blair's Performance and Innovation Unit (PIU) think-tank, which said the nation would benefit from more migrants.

Mr Neather claimed that earlier, unpublished versions of the report made clear that one aim was to make Britain more multi-cultural for political reasons.

'I remember coming away from some discussions with the clear sense that the policy was intended - even if this wasn't its main purpose - to rub the Right's nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date,' he said.

The report, entitled Research, Development And Statistics Occasional Paper No67 - Migration: An Economic And Social Analysis, was published in January 2001 by the Home Office, then run by Mr Straw.

Most of its key statistics came from a PIU team led by Mr Portes. The report paints a rosy picture of mass immigration, stating: 'There is little evidence that native workers are harmed by migration. The broader fiscal impact is likely to be positive because a greater proportion of migrants are of working age and migrants have higher average wages than natives.'

It goes on: 'Most British regard immigration as having a positive effect on British culture.'

Mr Portes remains an enthusiastic advocate of the benefits of immigration. He wrote a report for the Department of Work and Pensions last year rejecting claims that Eastern European workers had stolen the jobs of British counterparts, arguing Britons lacked the skills and motivation.

A former Government adviser told The Mail on Sunday: 'If the Government had been prepared to have an open debate about immigration, we would not have had the problems we have seen with the BNP. But it did not want immigration policy discussed.

' It is not a very honest Government. They knew immigration was a hot issue and they did not want to get into a fight on it.'

The source said Labour deliberately targeted William Hague and Michael Howard when they called for tougher immigration controls.

Mr Hague was accused of 'playing the race card' in 2001 when he said Mr Blair was turning Britain into a 'foreign land'. Michael Howard was called a 'racist' in 2004 after he went to BNP stronghold Burnley, in Lancashire, to denounce Labour's stance on asylum seekers.

A Labour insider suggested Mrs Roche relaxed immigration controls partly in response to the outcry she faced after criticising begging Romanian mothers.

'She was called a scumbag,' said the source. 'She wanted to show she was a genuine liberal.'


http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1222769/Dishonest-Blair-Straw-accused-secret-plan-multicultural-UK.html

German court fines 'Holocaust Denying' bishop

BERLIN - An ultraconservative British bishop was fined $16,822 (euro12,000) in Germany for denying the Holocaust in an interview with Swedish television, his lawyer said Tuesday. A court in the Bavarian city of Regensburg issued the fine against Richard Williamson for incitement in connection with his Holocaust denial, Williamson's lawyer Matthias Lossmann said.

"We received the order of punishment on Monday and my client has time until Nov. 9 to react to it," Lossmann said. He gave no indication how Williamson would react.

An order of punishment is a German legal tool that involves no trial, but is equivalent to a conviction if accepted by the defendant. If the defendant objects, it goes to trial.

The investigation of whether Williamson broke German laws against Holocaust denial was launched after the interview was aired earlier this year. In it, Williamson said he didn't believe any Jews were killed in gas chambers during World War II.

The interview was conducted near Regensburg and was granted shortly before Williamson's excommunication was lifted by Pope Benedict XVI, along with that of three other bishops from the anti-modernization movement of the late Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre.

The lifting of Williamson's excommunication sparked outrage among Jewish groups and in Israel. The Vatican's handling of the affair prompted criticism from German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Earlier this month, Williamson was quoted by the weekly Der Spiegel as saying he tried to have an injunction issued to block the interview's release in Germany.

"I tried to ... prevent my interview with Swedish television from being broadcast in Germany via the Internet," Williamson was quoted as saying. He could use that argument should the case go to trial.

On Monday, Pope Benedict XVI met for talks with a delegation from Williamson's traditionalist group, the Society of St. Pius X which split from Rome over the modernizing reforms of the Second Vatican Council, particularly its outreach to Jews and Christians who were not Catholics.

Pope Benedict XVI's effort to reconcile with the group is part of his overall aim of unifying the church and putting a highly conservative stamp on it.

Source:
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gB0aMiwAI9fDIt7tm-l2O1tNz3xQD9BJGTCG0

‘Holocaust-denying’ bishop charged

GERMAN prosecutors have filed a complaint against a British bishop, Richard Williamson, for inciting racial hatred after he said "not one Jew" was killed in Nazi gas chambers.

The competent court in Regensburg, southern Germany, must now decide whether to accept the charges, its president, Johann Ploed, said, adding that the decision would come in around one week.

Any punishment would likely be a fine, he said today.

If Biship Williamson accepted the fine, there would be no need for a public trial.

Bishop Williamson sparked controversy in January when he gave a television interview in the vicinity of Regensburg in which he said: "There was not one Jew killed by the gas chambers. It was all lies, lies, lies."

The bishop said he believed "200,000 to 300,000 Jews perished in Nazi concentration camps, but none of them by gas chambers".

The outburst prompted a very rare comment on religious matters by German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who called on Pope Benedict XVI to "clarify unambiguously that there can be no denial" the Nazis killed six million Jews.

The scandal carried particular resonance as it was Nazi Germany that masterminded and carried out the murders during World War II, and because the 82-year-old pope is German.

Denying that the Holocaust took place is illegal in Germany and Austria.

Olé! Major Spanish politician denounces Holocaust “trick, fraud and legend”

Make no mistake about it, Spain's Partido Popular (PP) is the equivalent of Establishment conservative parties everywhere; so this Valencia is like an American Republican leader or a British Tory, NOT a fringe candidate.

[JdN: In Europe, this name "Popular Party" often means the moderate conservatives; in Austria the Volkspartei is like this.]

The People's Party is powerful and likely to take power at Spain's next general election. It is already more popular than Zapatro's ruling socialist party.

* * *

The Valencia Partido Popular replace Ricardo Costa with a holocaust denier:

The new PP Regional General Secretary is César Augusto Asencio.

The Partido Popular in Valencia has decided to replace Ricardo Costa as Regional General Secretary with César Augusto Asencio.

El País [a major Madrid newspaper] reveals that Sr. [Señor] Asencio is a holocaust denier, who described the holocaust as ‘the greatest fraud in history’ in an article published in the publication Diario Información. He described the extermination of six million Jews during the Second World War as a ‘legend’.

In the article he said that ‘a detailed study’ had shown ‘propaganda on a worldwide scale’ in the hands of the Jews, supported by countless tricked photos and documents."

He noted that the International Red Cross never mentioned the existence of any gas chambers or mass exterminations in its reports.

The political group, Iniciativa del Poble Valencia, has called for the immediate resignation of César Augusto Asencio, because of his ‘Nazi position’.

=====My comment

Without Solutrean support, both ideological and practical. I predict this gent will cave in to pressure and resign.

"For fear of the Jews"....

In reality, only convinced national socialists and Solutreans (social nationists) do not cave in when the Jews huff and puff, because they fear God more than the Jews -- and the shame of cowardice and treason.

Still, this is a very good sign to see the leader of a major party in a major region of an important country (Greater Valencia has two million people, and is the third-biggest city in Spain) openly attack the disproven mega-fraud of the Holocaust, which is surviving only by throwing researchers in prison for five or ten years in state-sponsored terrorism by political judges.

My friend Pedro Varela of Barcelona was arrested in 2006 and charged Orwellianly with genocide for disproving genocide! ZOG loves everywhere to use female police and female judges in these political terrorist actions, to humiliate white males. I gave a speech in Spanish to his organization on "Psychopaths in High Politics" [Los psicopatas en la alta politica]. Spanish can be a beautiful language -- and it is a WHITE European language, no matter how many mostly Aztec mestizos in the USA speak it badly with a lazy Mexican whine.

Valencia is a very nice city on the Mediterranean coast. The people speak both regular Spanish and Catalan, a separate language related to Spanish, Latin and southern French dialects. The name of this language, Catalan, comes from the word "Gothland," from the ancient Germanic Visigoths.

Fittingly, as Wikipedia tells us,

...the original Latin name of the city was Valentia (/wa'lentia/), meaning "strength", "valor", the city being named for the Roman practice of recognizing the valor of its soldiers after a victorious war.

The great Spanish composer Joaquin Rodrigo was from Valencia. I was promoting his hauntingly beautiful just a few weeks ago. Joaquin Rodrigo of Valencia's "Aranjuez Concerto

The Center for Arts and Sciences, Valencia. The northern half of Spain is racially very white, and also prosperous. The south has some Arabic genes from the long Moorish conquest. But mestizos from Mexico and Peru are now flooding in.

Starting in 1492, Spain and later Portugal, England, France, Holland and Russia began reclaiming the Americas for the original white owners. In many centuries of Reconquista,the Spanish knights and soldiers took back Spain from the Arabic Moors, learning to fight VALIANTLY. IN 1492, there were three major events:

1) The Spanish reconquered and liberated the last Arabic-occupied territory at the southern tip of España;

2) They re-discovered for our Solutrean race the so-called New World;

3) They expelled all Jews [who refused to convert to Catholocism].

Finally Some Truth Out Of The Zionists:

We have just witnessed the despicable Palestinian Authority Leader Mahmoud Abbas totally surrender to his Israeli masters, and refuse to push for the Goldstone report to be presented to the UN Security Council. That man is a traitor to his own people, definitely.

Now we find out from Zionist Israel's own Foreign Minister, Lieberman, that the Israelis do NOT want peace with the Palestinians at all.... Here is an article through www.presstv.ir that explains this fact in detail:

'Israel not after real peace with Palestine'-
Thursday, Oct 8, 2009

The Israeli Foreign Ministry's documents suggest Tel Aviv is not after a real peace deal but rather a shelter from international frustration and Palestinian armed response.

An unapproved document outlining Israel's future foreign policy states that the government should not attempt to reach a permanent settlement with the Palestinians but should focus instead on a temporary accord to prevent US and European frustration.

The draft, handed to Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman on Wednesday, was composed by Naor Gilon, Lieberman's former counselor for political affairs, and is scheduled to be presented before the ministry's directorate within the coming days in order to be approved as Israel's official foreign policy.

Gilon argues that 'the attempt at imposing a settlement with the Palestinians has failed in the past', warning that future attempts would lead to more disappointment on the part of Israel's Western allies and a harsh Palestinian response.

"We need a realistic attitude - the arrival at a temporary accord without dealing with the core issues. This is the maximum that can be achieved, if we want to be realistic," Ynet news website quoted the document as saying.

It also advises Lieberman to reestablish ties with African, Latin American, Balkan, Asian, and moderate Arab nations, countries which Israel has abandoned for many years.

Gilon has also urged Lieberman to employ a zero tolerance policy for instances of anti-Semitism and international isolation, suggesting that Israel should focus on environmental and economic issues in order to improve its global image.

Israel turns to face-saving measures amid mounting challenges it faces from the international community over war crimes committed during Tel Aviv's 23-day military onslaught against the Gaza Strip, which left more than 1,400 people - mostly civilians - killed.

Tel Aviv's Western allies are also pushing for a freeze on its illegal settlement construction activity in the occupied West Bank to pave the way for resuming long-stalled peace talks with Palestinians.

NTS Notes: WE in the blogosphere have known the truth about the Zionists all along. These monsters do not want peace with the Palestinians, when in fact they want their territory, and the full expulsion or genocide of the Palestinian people. That has been their sick evil goal since their criminal enterprise called Israel was created in 1948.

When will people finally wake up to the bitter truth about Zionism and their goals of domination over others? They have been playing the US as fools for all of these years by going to the negotiation tables to discusst "Roadmap to Peace" BS programs, while they continue to build their illegal settlements in Palestinian territory.

Now these despicable criminals call for "a realistic attitude" and a "temporary accord" with the Palestinians to avoid US and European "frustration"? That is absolutely ludicrous and shows the warped mindset of these criminals!

There will never be peace in Palestine until the world wakes up and takes a hard stance against the criminal Zionists. The Palestinian people deserve a future for themselves without the tyranny, genocides, and brutal occupation being carried out by these Zionist criminals.

The lying game: how we are prepared for another war of aggression

Obama's "showdown" with Iran has another agenda. The media have been tasked with preparing the public for endless war

In 2001, the Observer published a series of reports that claimed an "Iraqi connection" to al-Qaeda, even describing the base in Iraq where the training of terrorists took place and a facility where anthrax was being manufactured as a weapon of mass destruction. It was all false. Supplied by US intelligence and Iraqi exiles, planted stories in the British and US media helped George Bush and Tony Blair to launch an illegal invasion which caused, according to the most recent study, 1.3 million deaths.

Something similar is happening over Iran: the same syncopation of government and media "revelations", the same manufacture of a sense of crisis. "Showdown looms with Iran over secret nuclear plant", declared the Guardian on 26 September. "Showdown" is the theme. High noon. The clock ticking. Good versus evil. Add a smooth new US president who has "put paid to the Bush years". An immediate echo is the notorious Guardian front page of 22 May 2007: "Iran's secret plan for summer offensive to force US out of Iraq". Based on unsubstantiated claims by the Pentagon, the writer Simon Tisdall presented as fact an Iranian "plan" to wage war on, and defeat, US forces in Iraq by September of that year - a demonstrable falsehood for which there has been no retraction.

The official jargon for this kind of propaganda is "psy-ops", the military term for psychological operations. In the Pentagon and Whitehall, it has become a critical component of a diplomatic and military campaign to blockade, isolate and weaken Iran by hyping its "nuclear threat": a phrase now used incessantly by Barack Obama and Gordon Brown, and parroted by the BBC and other broadcasters as ­objective news. And it is fake.

The threat is one-way

On 16 September, Newsweek disclosed that the major US intelligence agencies had reported to the White House that Iran's "nuclear status" had not changed since the National Intelligence Estimate of November 2007, which stated with "high confidence" that Iran had halted in 2003 the programme it was alleged to have developed. The International Atomic Energy Agency has backed this, time and again.

The current propaganda derives from Obama's announcement that the US is scrapping missiles stationed on Russia's border. This serves to cover the fact that the number of US missile sites is actually expanding in Europe and the "redundant" missiles are being redeployed on ships. The game is to mollify Russia into joining, or not obstructing, the US campaign against Iran. "President Bush was right," said Obama, "that Iran's ballistic missile programme poses a significant threat [to Europe and the US]." That Iran would contemplate a suicidal attack on the US is preposterous. The threat, as ever, is one-way, with the world's superpower virtually ensconced on Iran's borders.

Iran's crime is its independence. Having thrown out America's favourite tyrant, Shah Reza Pahlavi, Iran remains the only resource-rich Muslim state beyond US control. As only Israel has a "right to exist" in the Middle East, the US goal is to cripple the Islamic Republic. This will allow Israel to divide and dominate the Middle East on Washington's behalf, undeterred by a confident neighbour. If any country in the world has been handed urgent cause to develop a nuclear "deterrence", it is Iran.

As one of the original signatories of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Iran has been a consistent advocate of a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East. In contrast, Israel has never agreed to an IAEA inspection, and its nuclear weapons plant at Dimona remains an open secret. Armed with as many as 200 active nuclear warheads, Israel "deplores" UN resolutions calling on it to sign the NPT, just as it deplored the recent UN report charging it with crimes against humanity in Gaza, just as it maintains a world record for violations of international law. It gets away with this because great power grants it immunity.

Preparing for endless war

Obama's "showdown" with Iran has another agenda. On both sides of the Atlantic the media have been tasked with preparing the public for endless war. The US/Nato commander General Stanley McChrystal says 500,000 troops will be required in Afghanistan over five years, according to America's NBC. The goal is control of the "strategic prize" of the gas and oilfields of the Caspian Sea, central Asia, the Gulf and Iran - in other words, Eurasia. But the war is opposed by 69 per cent of the British public, 57 per cent of the US public and almost every other human being. Convincing "us" that Iran is the new demon will not be easy. McChrystal's spurious claim that Iran "is reportedly training fighters for certain Taliban groups" is as desperate as Brown's pathetic echo of "a line in the sand".

During the Bush years, according to the great whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, a military coup took place in the US, and the Pentagon is now ascendant in every area of American foreign policy. A measure of its control is the number of wars of aggression being waged simultaneously and the adoption of a "first-strike" doctrine that has lowered the threshold on nuclear weapons, together with the blurring of the distinction between nuclear and conventional weapons.

All this mocks Obama's media rhetoric about "a world without nuclear weapons". In fact, he is the Pentagon's most important acquisition. His acquiescence with its demand that he keep on Bush's secretary of "defence" and arch war- maker, Robert Gates, is unique in US history. He has proved his worth with stepped-up wars from south Asia to the Horn of Africa. Like Bush's America, Obama's America is run by some very dangerous people. We have a right to be warned. When will those paid to keep the record straight do their job?

Source Article:- http://www.johnpilger.com/page.asp?partid=549"

The Pathology of Evil

Israeli PM Netanyahu's speech at The UN is a major insight into the Israeli's mentality, psyche and logic. In his speech Netanyahu, a prolific and charismatic speaker, gives air to his genocidal inclinations, he brings to light the Israeli supremacy, but he also allows us to detect some shaky and vulnerable spots at the heart of the Jewish national narrative. Reading Netanyahu's speech makes it very clear that both the Zionist Shoa and the 'promised land' narratives are on the verge of collapse. It seems as if the 'discredited' Iranian president Ahmadinejad has managed to succeed after all.

Don't You Mess With Our Shoa

Israelis love their Shoa, for the Shoa is no doubt their best selling Hasbara (propaganda) product. It somehow allows them to kill en masse and to do it indistinguishably while insisting that it is they who happen to be the victims.

"I went to a villa in a suburb of Berlin called Wannsee." Said Netanyahu. "There, on January 20,1942, after a hearty meal, senior Nazi officials met and decided how to exterminate the Jewish people."

PM Netanyahu, if you are genuinely interested in 'extermination plans' you do not have to travel to Wannsee, Berlin. All you have to do is visit your IDF's headquarters in Tel Aviv. Your chief commanders will guide you through their IDF 'solutions' for the Palestinians. At the end of the day, it is your army that surrounds Palestinians with barbed-wire, it is you who keep civilian populations in a siege with inadequate food supplies and medicine. It is your army that poured WMD over the most densely populated neighbourhoods on this planet. While the real meaning of the 'Nazi Final Solution' (Die Endlösung) is still discussed by historians who fail to agree between themselves what it really meant, the true reality of the Israeli murderous solution has been seen by us all.

However, it is almost amusing to see PM Netanyahu rushing to defend the Zionist holocaust narrative. Looking at Netanyahu presenting the protocol of the Wannsee conference to the UN assembly gives a clear impression that the Israeli PM believes that the Shoa needs an urgent pump of credibility. For the first time, the Shoa is on the defence.

"Here is a copy of the plans for Auschwitz-Birkenau, where one million Jews were murdered. Is this too a lie?" asks the Israeli PM.

PM Netanyahu, may I suggest to you that not a single humanist cares about the exact numbers: whether it was one or four millions Jews who died in Auschwitz, no one doubts that the camp was a horrible place. Yet, two questions must be answered once and for all: how is it that the Jews, who suffered so much during that war, managed to get themselves involved in a colossal racist crime against the Palestinians (1948 Nakba) just three years after the liberation of Auschwitz? How is it that the Israeli leadership, that happens to be so sensitive to Jewish suffering, manages to neglect the pain they inflict on millions of Palestinians?

Supremacy and Beyond

As a National movement, Zionism fails to respect other national and popular movements. Seemingly Netanyahu fails to respect the Iranian people and their regime. "Wherever they can, they impose a backward regimented society where women, minorities, gays or anyone not deemed to be a true believer is brutally subjugated." Netanyahu, must know that the Judaic law is not very different from Islam on these matters. He must also remember that it is in his country that gays were murdered in the street just a month ago. It is almost amusing that Netanyahu chooses to equate Iran with Barbarism and the Middle Ages for its treatment of minorities. As far as minorities are concerned, the Jewish state is actually the darkest place on this planet. In Netanyahu's promised land half of the population cannot participate in the democratic game just for failing to be Jewish.

Israel according to Netanyahu is the embodiment of Western modernity.

"We (the Westerners) will crack the genetic code. We will cure the incurable. We will lengthen our lives. We will find a cheap alternative to fossil fuels and clean up the planet. I am proud that my country Israel is at the forefront of these advances." I must admit that I am not at all overwhelmed by Israeli scientific or technological achievements. Nor have I ever seen any evidence of Israeli attempts to save humanity or even the planet. In fact all I see is quite the opposite. However, if Netanyahu welcomes scientific progress, he should be the first to rally for the Iranian nuclear project. As we all know, this doesn't seem to be the case. He, for some reason, thinks that, at least regionally, nuclear energy and weapons must remain Jew only property.

Netanyahu argues that "if the most primitive fanaticism can acquire the most deadly weapons, the march of history could be reversed for a time." Netanyahu may well be correct but one should point out to him that the above applies to Israel more than any other country, state or society. For the time being it is the Jewish State that has been caught pouring WMD on its imprisoned civilian population. It is the Jewish State that is dragging us all into an 'eye for an eye' primitive Biblical fanaticism. As if this is not enough, it is also America and Britain that launched illegal wars orchestrated by Zionist led Neocons and fundraisers. This war has cost more than one million lives so far.

However, for once I agree with Netanyhau:

"The greatest threat facing the world today", he says, "is the marriage between religious fanaticism and the weapons of mass destruction."

In fact, no one could describe the danger posed by the Jewish state and Zionism any better. Israel is indeed a deadly marriage between Old Testament gross genocidal barbarism, Zionist fanaticism and a huge arsenal of WMD, chemical, biological and nuclear that has already been partially put into action.

Sabbath Goyim

Like other Zionist operations around the world, Netanyahu is convinced that the Goyim should fight the Jewish wars. "Above all, will the international community stop the terrorist regime of Iran from developing atomic weapons, thereby endangering the peace of the entire world?" I actually would like to stress that PM Netanyahu is all wrong here. If the United Nation is interested in bringing peace to this region and the world, it is of the essence to help Iran to develop its nuclear project and even its military nuclear capacity.

This seems to be the only thing that may curb the English Speaking Empire's lethal expansionist enthusiasm as performed recently in Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan. It will surely stop the Zionists from celebrating their symptoms at the expense of their neighbours.

Following the successful transformation of the American and British armies into an Israeli subservient mission force, Netanyahu seems to expect the UN to follow and to fulfil the very same role. "Hamas", he says, "fired from Gaza thousands of missiles, mortars and rockets on nearby Israeli cities. Year after year, as these missiles were deliberately hurled at our civilians, not a single UN resolution was passed condemning those criminal attacks." I guess that someone should remind the Israeli PM that the dispute between Hamas and Israel is not exactly an international quarrel, for Palestine is not a sovereign state and Gaza is nothing less than an Israeli-run concentration camp. In other words, the practicality of the matter is simple. The UN should only deal with war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by Israel, its leadership and its army. It is not down to the UN to pass any kind of judgment on the oppressed.

Mass Murder Fantasies

It doesn't take long before Netanyahu lists his ideological mentors and the core of his lethal inspiration "When the Nazis rocketed British cities during World War II." Actually the allies levelled German cities, causing hundreds of thousands of victims. By these twisted standards, the UN Human Rights Council would have dragged Roosevelt and Churchill to the dock as war criminals. What a perversion of truth. What a perversion of justice. Delegates of the United Nations, will you accept this farce?"

Netanyahu is almost correct. In his recounting of the 2nd WW he surely admits here that Israel follows Roosevelt's and Churchill's mass murder tactics. But he surely fails to realise that if it was indeed down to ethics and Justice (rather than the usual dirty politics) Roosevelt and Churchill would have been charged with war crimes on a most severe scale. Shockingly enough, Netanyahu falls into the most obvious legal trap equating Israeli activity with acts of carpet bombardment on a huge scale. For those who fail to see it all, this is a rapidly blinking red light hazard. In Netanyahu's perception of reality nuking countries and flattening towns is a justifiable act. Roosevelt and Churchill seem to be his moral entitlement. In fact these statements are enough to make it clear to every reasonable human being that Israel is a genocidal entity that is capable of bringing our civilisation to a devastating end.

This is a wake up call: it is not just the Palestinians or the Iranians. It is actually all of us.

Bibi* the Peace Maker

By now, the Israeli PM is ready to state his Judeo centric peace mantra. "Ladies and Gentlemen, all of Israel wants peace". Yet as far as statistics are concerned, we have recently learned that 94% of the Israeli Jews also approved the carpet bombardment of their next door neighbours. It is impossible not to see a clear discrepancy between the 'peace loving' verbalism and the murderous reality.

"We ask the Palestinians to finally do what they have refused to do for 62 years: Say yes to a Jewish state." Once again, I happen to agree with PM Netanyahu. The Palestinian may as well say YES to a Jewish state, but not in Palestine or in the Middle East. If Obama, Brown, Merkel or any other deluded world leader who is still insisting to approve the validity or necessity of a racially orientated 'Jewish national homeland', he or she is more than welcome to allocate land to such a project within his or her own territory. Palestinians should say NO to a Jewish state in the Holy Land or in the region. Palestinians should never agree to the existence of a Jewish state on their land. In fact the UN must follow this line and do whatever it can to dismantle this evil apartheid regime.

Khazarian United

To a certain extent, Netanyahu's UN speech expresses some deep concerns Jews tend to keep to themselves. At the end of the day, the Israelis and Ashkenazi Israelis in particular know pretty well that Palestine is not exactly the land of their ancestors. If the Israeli Ashkenazi Jews, including Netanyahu, do want to find their roots, Khazaria is the place to start. However, Netanyahu tries to defuse these historical facts. "The Jewish people are not foreign conquerors in the Land of Israel. This is the land of our forefathers. We are not strangers to this land. It is our homeland" says Netanyahu with total conviction.

PM Netanyahu, I will make it plain and clear. Not only are you foreign to the land, you are also foreign to almost every possible understanding of the notion of humanity. In fact, the Separation Wall that is going to be left after the inevitable disappearance of your 'Jew only democracy' will serve generations to come with an astonishing historical monument of Jewish national identity estranged from ethics, universalism and human brotherhood. The crime against humanity committed by the Jewish state in the name of the Jewish people is not something that will be wiped out from the history text books in a short time. Quite the opposite; it will stand as another mythological chapter in this never-ending saga of supremacist compulsive pathological self-loving.

"We must have security" says Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu as he ends his speech. And I am here to disappoint him. Israel will never be secured. It was born in a sin, and its existence surpasses any notion of ethics or human existence. The Jewish state has passed the 'no return zone'. It is doomed to vanish. We can only hope that once this happens the process of Jewish assimilation and integration into humanity will re-embark. At the end of the day Jewish Nationalism both left, right and centre was there to keep Jews apart. The history of the 20th century teaches us that this tendency to segregate oneself is bad for humanity and it is also devastating for the Jews.

* Netanyahu's nickname is Bibi

Source:http://gilad.co.uk/html%20files/bibiun.html

Israel stole the organs of more than a 1000 Palestinians

ALGIERS, (PIC)-- Swedish journalist, Donald Bostrom, said that Israel started the illegal harvesting of organs from Palestinian victims as early as 1960, with a marked increase in this practice during the first Palestinian intifada.

Bostrom was speaking at an event organised, on Wednesday, by the the National Federation of Algerian Journalists in the capital Algiers. He also said that the organ harvesting was not limited to Palestinian victims, but included those of other nationalities who were killed in Palestine.

He pointed out that the investigative report he published in August in Aftonbladet was based on testimonies of a UN group in Palestine about "the ugly treatment meted to the corpses of Palestinians."

He confirmed that he received death threats by telephone and e-mail after his article in the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet about the IOF practice.

New York police arrest Jewish gang trafficking organs of Algerian children 08/09/2009

ALGERIA, (PIC)-- An Algerian official revealed Sunday the New York city police were able to catch a Jewish gang involved in the abduction of children from Algeria and trafficking of their organs headed by Levy Rosenbaum.

Rosenbaum was directly involved in the recent case of trading human organs which raised a storm of reactions in the US and Israel. Dr. Mustafa Khayatti, the head of the Algerian national committee for the development of health and research, said that the arrest of the gang came after Interpol investigations showed that Algerian children were abducted from cities in western Algeria and taken to Morocco in order to harvest their kidneys and traffic them in Israel and the US for $20,000 and $100,000 dollars each.

"The arrest of Jewish organ trafficking gangs does not mean that the danger has gone, top officials and specialists in this issue assert that there are other Jewish gangs who remain active in several Arab countries," Dr. Khayatti noted.

US authorities had arrested 44 people including Rabbis and mayors in New Jersey last July; they all were prosecuted for money laundering activities and sale of human organs.

Last month, a report issued by Aftonbladet, a newspaper Swedish, accused Israeli soldiers of kidnapping Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip to kill them and steal their organs, indicating a possible link between these crimes and the mafia of human organs detected in the US.

In another related context, the humanitarian relief committee affiliated with the union of Egyptian doctors declared Monday its intention to organize an international and Arab media campaign to expose the Israeli crimes of stealing organs from Palestinians.

The committee called in a statement for opening an investigation into these crimes, stressing that a number of Israeli surgeons are involved in harvesting human organs of Palestinians.

Dr. Abdelkader Hegazy, the head of the committee, said that the union of Egyptian doctors received a letter from the Jordanian union about the ways of cooperation in prosecuting every Israeli involved in committing such crimes.

Has Osama Bin Laden been dead for seven years - and are the U.S. and Britain covering it up to continue war on terror?

Source: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1212851/Has-Osama-Bin-Laden-dead-seven-years--U-S-Britain-covering-continue-war-terror.html

The last time we heard a squeak from him was on June 3 this year.

The world's most notorious terrorist outsmarted America by releasing a menacing message as Air Force One touched down on Saudi Arabian soil at the start of Barack Obama's first and much vaunted Middle East tour.

Even before the new President alighted at Riyadh airport to shake hands with Prince Abdullah, Bin Laden's words were being aired on TV, radio and the internet across every continent.

Genuine picture: Osama Bin Laden in October 2001

It was yet another propaganda coup for the 52-year-old Al Qaeda leader. In the audiotape delivered to the Arab news network Al Jazeera, Bin Laden said that America and her Western allies were sowing seeds of hatred in the Muslim world and deserved dire consequences.

It was the kind of rant we have heard from him before, and the response from British and U.S. intelligence services was equally predictable.

They insisted that the details on the tape, of the President's visit and other contemporary events, proved that the mastermind of 9/11, America's worst ever terrorist atrocity, was still alive - and that the hunt for him must go on.

Bin Laden has always been blamed for orchestrating the horrific attack - in which nearly 3,000 people perished - eight years ago this week. President George W. Bush made his capture a national priority, infamously promising with a Wild West flourish to take him 'dead or alive'.

The U.S. State Department offered a reward of $50million for his whereabouts. The FBI named him one of their ten 'most wanted' fugitives, telling the public to watch out for a left-handed, grey-bearded gentleman who walks with a stick.

Fake? Bin Laden two months later, when he was supposedly dead

Yet this master terrorist remains elusive. He has escaped the most extensive and expensive man-hunt in history, stretching across Waziristan, the 1,500 miles of mountainous badlands on the borders of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Undeterred, Barack Obama has launched a fresh operation to find him. Working with the Pakistani Army, elite squads of U.S. and British special forces were sent into Waziristan this summer to 'hunt and kill' the shadowy figure intelligence officers still call 'the principal target' of the war on terror.

This new offensive is, of course, based on the premise that the 9/11 terrorist is alive. After all, there are the plethora of 'Bin Laden tapes' to prove it.

Yet what if he isn't? What if he has been dead for years, and the British and U.S. intelligence services are actually playing a game of double bluff?

What if everything we have seen or heard of him on video and audio tapes since the early days after 9/11 is a fake - and that he is being kept 'alive' by the Western allies to stir up support for the war on terror?

Incredibly, this is the breathtaking theory that is gaining credence among political commentators, respected academics and even terror experts.

Of course, there have been any number of conspiracy theories concerning 9/11, and it could be this is just another one.

But the weight of opinion now swinging behind the possibility that Bin Laden is dead - and the accumulating evidence that supports it - makes the notion, at the very least, worthy of examination.

The theory first received an airing in the American Spectator magazine earlier this year when former U.S. foreign intelligence officer and senior editor Angelo M. Codevilla, a professor of international relations at Boston University, stated bluntly: 'All the evidence suggests Elvis Presley is more alive today than Osama Bin Laden.'

9/11: Bin Laden originally insisted in official press statements that he had played no role in the atrocity

Prof Codevilla pointed to inconsistencies in the videos and claimed there have been no reputable sightings of Bin Laden for years (for instance, all interceptions by the West of communications made by the Al Qaeda leader suddenly ceased in late 2001).

Prof Codevilla asserted: 'The video and audio tapes alleged to be Osama's never convince the impartial observer,' he asserted. 'The guy just does not look like Osama. Some videos show him with a Semitic, aquiline nose, while others show him with a shorter, broader one. Next to that, differences between the colours and styles of his beard are small stuff.'

There are other doubters, too. Professor Bruce Lawrence, head of Duke University's religious studies' department and the foremost Bin Laden expert, argues that the increasingly secular language in the video and audio tapes of Osama (his earliest ones are littered with references to God and the Prophet Mohammed) are inconsistent with his strict Islamic religion, Wahhabism.

He notes that, on one video, Bin Laden wears golden rings on his fingers, an adornment banned among Wahhabi followers.

Bin Laden in 1998 (l) and, allegedly, in 2002: Sceptics have pointed to a thicker nose and the ring on his right hand as proof it is an imposter.

This week, still more questions have been raised with the publication in America and Britain of a book called Osama Bin Laden: Dead or Alive?

Written by political analyst and philosopher Professor David Ray Griffin, former emeritus professor at California's Claremont School of Theology, it is provoking shock waves - for it goes into far more detail about his supposed death and suggests there has been a cover-up by the West.

The book claims that Bin Laden died of kidney failure, or a linked complaint, on December 13, 2001, while living in Afghanistan's Tora Bora mountains close to the border with Waziristan.

His burial took place within 24 hours, in line with Muslim religious rules, and in an unmarked grave, which is a Wahhabi custom.

The author insists that the many Bin Laden tapes made since that date have been concocted by the West to make the world believe Bin Laden is alive. The purpose? To stoke up waning support for the war on terror in Iraq and Afghanistan.

To understand Griffin's thesis, we must remember the West's reaction to 9/11, that fateful sunny September day in 2001. Within a month, on Sunday, October 7, the U.S. and Britain launched massive retaliatory air strikes in the Tora Bora region where they said 'prime suspect' Bin Laden was living 'as a guest of Afghanistan'.

This military offensive ignored the fact that Bin Laden had already insisted four times in official Al Qaeda statements made to the Arab press that he played no role in 9/11.

Indeed, on the fourth occasion, on September 28 and a fortnight after the atrocity, he declared emphatically: 'I have already said I am not involved. As a Muslim, I try my best to avoid telling a lie. I had no knowledge... nor do I consider the killing of innocent women, children and other humans as an appreciable act.'

Within hours of the October 7 strikes by the U.S. on Tora Bora, Bin Laden made his first ever appearance on video tape. Dressed in Army fatigues, and with an Islamic head-dress, he had an assault rifle propped behind him in a broadly lit mountain hideout. Significantly, he looked pale and gaunt.

Although he called President George W. Bush 'head of the infidels' and poured scorn on the U.S., he once again rejected responsibility for 9/11.

'America was hit by God in one of its softest spots. America is full of fear, from its north to its south, from its west to its east. Thank God for that.'

Then came a second videotape on November 3, 2001. Once again, an ailing Bin Laden lashed out at the United States. He urged true Muslims to celebrate the attacks - but did not at any time acknowledge he had been involved in the atrocity.

And then there was silence until December 13, 2001 - the date Griffin claims Bin Laden died. That very day, the U.S. Government released a new video of the terror chief. In this tape, Bin Laden contradicted all his previous denials, and suddenly admitted to his involvement in the atrocity of 9/11.

The tape had reportedly been found by U.S. troops in a private home in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, after anti-Taliban forces took over the city. A label attached to it claimed that it had been made on November 9, 2001.

Bush made Bin Laden's capture a national priority, claiming he could get his man - dead or alive

The tape shows Bin Laden talking with a visiting sheik. In it, he clearly states that he not only knew about the 9/11 atrocities in advance, but had planned every detail personally.

What manna for the Western authorities! This put the terrorist back in the frame over 9/11. The Washington Post quoted U.S. officials saying that the video 'offers the most convincing evidence of a connection between Bin Laden and the September 11 attacks'.

A euphoric President Bush added: 'For those who see this tape, they realise that not only is he guilty of incredible murder, but he has no conscience and no soul.'

In London, Downing Street said that the video was 'conclusive proof of his involvement'. The then Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, added: 'There is no doubt it is the real thing. People can see Bin Laden there, making those utterly chilling words of admission about his guilt for organising the atrocities of September 11.'

Yet Professor Griffin claims this 'confessional' video provokes more questions than answers. For a start, the Bin Laden in this vital film testimony looks different.

He is a weighty man with a black beard, not a grey one. His pale skin had suddenly become darker, and he had a different shaped nose. His artistic hands with slender fingers had transformed into those of a pugilist. He looked in exceedingly good health.

Furthermore, Bin Laden can be seen writing a note with his right hand, although he is left-handed. Bizarrely, too, he makes statements about 9/11 which Griffin claims would never have come from the mouth of the real Bin Laden - a man with a civil engineering degree who had made his fortune (before moving into terrorism) from building construction in the Middle East.

For example, the Al Qaeda leader trumpets that far more people died in 9/11 than he had expected. He goes on: 'Due to my experience in this field, I was thinking that the explosion from the gas in the plane would melt the iron structure of the building and collapse the area where the plane hit and all the floors above it only. That is all we had hoped for.' (In reality the Twin Towers' completely fell down).

The words of the true Bin Laden? No, says Griffin, because of the obvious mistakes. 'Given his experience as a contractor, he would have known the Twin Towers were framed with steel, not iron,' he says.

'He would also known that steel and iron do not begin to melt until they reach 2,800 deg F. Yet a building fire fed by jet fuel is a hydrocarbon fire, and could not have reached above 1,800 deg F.'

Griffin, in his explosive book, says this tape is fake, and he goes further.

'A reason to suspect that all of the post-2001 Bin Laden tapes are fabrications is that they often appeared at times that boosted the Bush presidency or supported a claim by its chief 'war on terror' ally, British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

'The confession tape came exactly when Bush and Blair had failed to prove Bin Laden's responsibility for 9/11 and both men were trying to win international public support, particularly in the Islamic world, for the anti-terrorist campaign.'

Griffin suggests that Western governments used highly sophisticated, special effects film technology to morph together images and vocal recordings of Bin Laden.

So if they are fakes, why has Al Qaeda kept quiet about it? And what exactly happened to the real Bin Laden?

The answer to the first question may be that the amorphous terrorist organisation is happy to wage its own propaganda battle in the face of waning support - and goes along with the myth that its charismatic figurehead is still alive to encourage recruitment to its cause.

As for the matter of what happened to him, hints of Bin Laden's kidney failure, or that he might be dead, first appeared on January 19, 2002, four months after 9/11.

This was when Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf told America's news show CNN: 'I think now, frankly, he is dead for the reason he is a kidney patient. The images of him show he is extremely weak.'

In his book, Professor Griffin also endorses this theory. He says Bin Laden was treated for a urinary infection, often linked to kidney disease, at the American Hospital in Dubai in July 2001, two months before 9/11. At the same time, he ordered a mobile dialysis machine to be delivered to Afghanistan.

How could Bin Laden, on the run in snowy mountain caves, have used the machine that many believe was essential to keep him alive? Doctors whom Griffin cites on the subject think it would have been impossible.

He would have needed to stay in one spot with a team of medics, hygienic conditions, and a regular maintenance programme for the dialysis unit itself.

And what of the telling, small news item that broke on December 26, 2001 in the Egyptian newspaper Al-Wafd? It said a prominent official of the Afghan Taliban had announced that Osama Bin Laden had been buried on or about December 13.

'He suffered serious complications and died a natural, quiet death. He was buried in Tora Bora, a funeral attended by 30 Al Qaeda fighters, close members of his family and friends from the Taliban. By the Wahhabi tradition, no mark was left on the grave,' said the report.

The Taliban official, who was not named, said triumphantly that he had seen Bin Laden's face in his shroud. 'He looked pale, but calm, relaxed and confident.'

It was Christmas in Washington DC and London and the report hardly got a mention. Since then, the Bin Laden tapes have emerged with clockwork regularity as billions have been spent and much blood spilt on the hunt for him.

Bin Laden has been the central plank of the West's 'war on terror'. Could it be that, for years, he's just been smoke and mirrors?

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1212851/Has-Osama-Bin-Laden-dead-seven-years--U-S-Britain-covering-continue-war-terror.html#ixzz0Rva1qiJG

£25,000 a day for Met police to provide Musharraf gun guard

www.thisislondon.co.uk

Former Pakistani dictator Pervez Musharraf is being protected by Scotland Yard at a cost to taxpayers of around £25,000 a day.

It comes after it was revealed yesterday that the former military leader has swapped the presidential palace in Islamabad for a £1 million flat surrounded by the shisha bars and kebab joints of London's Arabic quarter.

The Metropolitan Police Specialist Protection Unit, known as SO1, has now assigned a 24-hour security team, said to be made up of at least ten men and women, to protect Musharraf at his three-bedroom flat.

Musharraf has been living in the relatively modest flat, near Tony Blair's Connaught Square mansion, for the last four months and is believed to enjoy dining at top restaurants including the Dorchester Hotel.

Although the former military leader pays for a team of retired Pakistani commandos to protect him, the decision to provide further security was taken at a meeting of the Royal and VIP Executive Committee held at the Home Office.

It is thought the decision to give Musharraf the costly protection service was taken because of fears that any attempt on his life could lead to injury for innocent civilians if he is targeted in public.

The security committee is responsible for the personal protection of the Prime Minister, former prime ministers, certain government ministers, some ambassadors and “high-profile persons considered to be under threat from terrorist attack in the UK”.

The costs are said to include the provision of a car, plus security equipment such as alarms and closed-circuit television cameras fitted to his flat.

Lord Ahmed of Rotherham has written to the Home Secretary Alan Johnson urging him to stop spending taxpayers' money on protection for Musharraf.

He said: “I think the Government needs to review Mr Musharraf's security. There are people within Britain who could do with those extra police officers rather than a man who can afford private body guards.”

Musharraf is the latest in a long line of dictators and dissidents to live in London and receive government protection.

General Augusto Pinochet, the Chilean dictator, lived in London and Surrey in 1998 when detained on an extradition charge during a stopover in London. He was given protection at the State's expense.

Benazir Bhutto, the former Prime Minister of Pakistan, was in exile in London from 1998 to 2007 after being ousted from office, while Nawaz Sharif, another former Pakistani Prime Minister, was in exile in London from 2006 to 2008 but it is not known whether they received security from the Met.

Earlier this year the cost of providing police protection for junior members of the Royal Family was highlighted.

It is believed the annual bill for royalty protection could be as much as £50 million a year.