The chart below shows that Oslo Peace Process was simply a cover and deception operation to ensure Israel's successful colonization of West Bank
The graph on the left shows how the settler buildup was not even slowed down by the so-called Peace Process. Note also how the rate of settlement in the West Bank accelerated after the accession of Barack Obama to the Presidency. The map on the right lays out locations of settlements (red areas). Areas A (brown) and B (tan) are the areas under varying degrees of Palestinian control as of 2012. Not shown are the Israeli only access roads connecting the settlements and the Israeli roadblocks that effectively restrict Palestinian travel among their areas, stifling the flow of Palestinian commerce. Also not shown is the fact that Israelis control all but one or two of the major springs in the West Bank and all of the pumping stations that extract water from the crucial aquifers lying under the West Bank. (One third of Israel's water budget comes from the aquifers under the West Bank)
Click on Image to Enlarge
So, why did President Bill Clinton go along with the scam during the Oslo process in the crucial 1990s, and why has Barack Obama allowed the rate of settlement to accelerate on his watch?
Well, as the American humorist Russell Baker said, “Politics is about money; where it comes from; where it goes?” Attached is but one small window into the convoluted pathways implicit in Baker's world view:
One of Mark’s [Jones] ideas for the [former “Crashlist”] list, one the moderators share I’m sure, is that the list could be used to share weapons of struggle. Anyone who has done serious mass work, I mean the kind away from the keyboard, knows that sometimes a pithy quote, an uncovered source, an irrefutable fact, a way of phrasing, a piece of reasoning, hypocrisy exposed, an infiltrator outed, a great “expert” really grilled, etc can cause a kind of critical mass and cause all sorts of people from all sorts of backgrounds to take a quantum leap in consciousness or at least take a fork in the road on a whole new direction.
I have been invited several times to debate Zionists on Palestine (usually in the role of a “PalestIndian” as we see Palestinians as the Indians of the Middle East and American Indians as “the Palestinians” of North America). By debatng Zionists, I mean, the official kind, as in working in paid positions for open Zionist organizations clearly tied in with Israel, in the capacity of roving and officially designated “Speakers”. It is Palestinian friends who invite me to join them.
China-Mali:For the record. China has offered to send more than 500 soldiers to the UN force seeking to contain Islamist militants in Mali . This would be China's largest UN peacekeeping contingent.
Iraq: An attack at a military checkpoint at Taji, north of Baghdad, on Thursday killed 11 people, including four soldiers, and wounded five.
Comment: The pause appears ended. The fighting has killed 420 people this month.
Lebanon: Fighting in Tripoli continued for a fifth day. Overnight clashes killed six people and wounded 40. .The Middle East is now destabilized from the border of Iran to the Mediterranean.
Niger: Islamic militants executed coordinated attacks at two locations in Niger, the country east of Mali. In one attack, a suicide bomber detonated a car bomb at a French-Niger owned uranium mine in the town of Arlit. Simultaneously and 125 miles south, another bomber detonated a car bomb inside a military camp in the city of Agadez. Other jihadists in vehicles attempted to overrun the base, but were stopped by a firefight with Nigerian soldiers. The bombs killed 5 bombers, 25 people and injured 29, according to the Ministry of Defense. No expatriates were killed.
During this Watch, a surviving bomber is holding several Nigerien soldiers hostage
These were the first terrorist attacks of this kind in Niger. The two towns are in central Niger. Some of the facilities for processing uranium ore were damaged at Arlit.
An affiliate of al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb, known as the Movement for Unity and Jihad in West Africa (MUJAO) claimed responsibility. They were also involved in the Mali fighting. Nigerien officials judge the fighters came from Libya. One said that Libyan instability is destabilizing the entire region.
Early this year one military analyst judged that Niger was even less prepared than Mali to cope with Islamic militants and terrorists. Nevertheless, a Nigerien unit participated in clearing operations in Gao, Mali.
The key points are that the jihadists have not given up their plans to establish a base in Sahelian Africa and all the countries are vulnerable. Their territory is enormous with poor infrastructure. They are poor and have small, poorly supported security forces.
The attacks might compel France to deploy some of the troops withdrawing from Mali to Niger. Niger is France's single most important supplier of uranium for its extensive nuclear and electric power industries.
France might need to re-evaluate its strategy for providing security assistance to its former colonies. The threat calls for an integrated regional approach to security. The Sahelian nations and France will certainly need outside help.
The Holy Land needs advocates for the truth. “It is the truth, and only the truth, that will lead to peace and justice”
While the Jewish State was putting its finishing touches to Operation Cast Lead (the horrific blitzkrieg launched over Christmas-New Year 2008/9 against Gaza’s civilians, including the Christian community there), the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, joined Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks in a visit to the former Nazi camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau to demonstrate their joint solidarity against the extremes of hostility and genocide.
“This is a pilgrimage… to a place of utter profanity – a place where the name of God was profaned because the image of God in human beings was abused and disfigured,” said the Archbishop. “How shall we be able to read the signs of the times, the indications that evil is gathering force once again and societies are slipping towards the same collective corruption and moral sickness that made the Shoah possible?”
Read the signs? He needed to look no further than the hell-hole that the Holy Land had been turned into by Israel’s occupation and unfettered aggression, with Britain’s blessing… and, dare one say, without too much fuss from England’s established church either.
If ever there was a place where “the name of God was profaned” the so-called Holy Land is it.
The popular perception of Hezbollah as simply an Islamic terrorist organization has been colored by American-Israeli propaganda (particularly wrt to relations with Iran and Syria), sloppy reporting, and a growing sense of Islamophobia in American culture.
Rami Khouri is a prolific Lebanese intellectual who writes widely on the Middle East. His austere, direct form of writing lays out arguments clearly and concisely. Like all writers of Middle Eastern affairs, his predictions are often wrong, but unlike most, his fault lines, when they occur, are easily traced. In short, Khouri is always a good read and well worth following, because even if his arguments turn out to be erroneous, they are a fount of useful information.
Attached below is his fascinating take on Hezbollah. I reformatted it to highlight his points but have not changed a word or the order of his words. Some readers find my highlighting distracting, others like it; if you are one of the former, the link below will take you to the original.
BEIRUT — The most fascinating aspect of the war in Syria this month — and perhaps also the most significant in terms of long-term regional geo-politics — is the direct involvement of Hezbollah, the powerful Lebanese Shiite party and resistance group that is closely allied to Iran and Syria. The significance of Hezbollah’s participation in the battle for the Syrian town of Qusayr comprises several distinct elements:
It is a brutal fact that no country benefited more from war during in the 2oth Century than the United States. World War I enriched and invigorated the US economy, and the self destruction of the 19th Century European state system left the US as the world's mightiest industrial power. World War II ended the Great Depression, put the US on a pathway to unparalleled world military power, and set the stage a long economic boom that created a rich middle class that, not withstanding its recent hardening of the arteries, remains unprecedented in world history. Pearl Harbour excepted, neither war visited any significant destruction on the American homeland.
While we think of war in terms of our sacrifices, it may surprise readers to learn that the United States suffered fewer military deaths in WWII than Yugoslavia, an allied country not usually thought of in the NASCAR mentality of the United States as being a major player that war. In fact, hundreds of millions of people — mostly civilians — died in the wars (and their aftermath) of the 20th Century, while the United States in comparison paid a relatively minor price in lives lost and a vanishingly small price in terms of material destruction wrought at home.
Indeed the most traumatic material destruction and highest number of civilian deaths suffered on the US mainland since the dawn of the unprecedented state violence of the 20th Century were caused by the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in September of 2001 (the nearby NYSE was closed for only a week and the Pentagon never shut down). While horrific and psychologically devastating in themselves, these attacks were a horrendous crime, not an act of war.
Moreover, when viewed in the grand sweep of the preceding 100 years, the material and human destruction of 9-11 was pinprick compared to that visited on the trenches in Flanders, the Somme, and Verdun, the cities of Nanking and Warsaw, London and Coventry, Hamburg and Berlin and Dresden, Leningrad and Stalingrad and Minsk, or in the fire bombing raids on Tokyo, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or the now forgotten destruction of every city in North Korea, of millions of civilians killed by bombing (and sanctions) in North Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan. Even casual readers of history know this summary just scratches the surface of carnage wrought by 20 Century warfare — carnage which, by the grace of good fortune, pretty much bypassed the people and land of the United States. Perhaps some American even think this good fortune is a kind of entitlement. Is it not surprising that President Bush's call on the American people to keep consuming and living the good life when he asked Congress to authorize a global war of terror in our national response to the crime of 9-11 was so well received?
None of these facts denigrates the bravery and sacrifice of the American soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen who fought and died in the wars of the last 100 years, but they are facts nevertheless, and they provide a backdrop against which the strength our national character is measured by others.
Nor should we be surprised, given this history of good fortune, that many leaders and opinion makers in America, especially strategic wannabees like Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina or the armchair strategists in the Heritage Foundation (which receives a lot of grant money from arms merchants who benefit from war), treat war as a cavalier endeavor. Nothing typifies this cavalier attitude so much today as the loose talk about bombing Iran's nuclear reactors (unless it be an intervention in Syria). The attached essay puts this kind of warmongering talk into a perspective appropriate to those who, unlike most Americans during the 20th Century, would be on the receiving end of such an attack.
This email builds on the information in my 8 May email entitled, The Real Scare in Syria Is Not Chemical Weapons.” Attached below is a post from Joshua Landis’s Syria Comment blog. Landis is a professor at the University of Oklahoma and a specialist on Syria — his blog often provides useful, insightful information.
Particularly important, IMO, are Landis’ comments relating the conflict in this region to its spillover effects into Turkey (for more background see also: “Will Syria’s Revolt Disrupt the Turkish Borderlands?.”
Spillover is a very serious issue, because the Turkish province just north of the map below, Hatay Province, used to be part of Syria — it was in effect ceded to Turkey by France (and the UK and the League of Nation) in the late 1939s as part of a subtle deal to elicit Turkey’s neutral if they became involved in a war with Germany (WWII) — a promise Turkey kept.
The map herewith shows where Hatay is located:
Landis' comments, among other things, highlights some of the forces sucking Turkey may further into the Syrian quagmire. Note text marked in red below are my comments. The first half of this essay is a summary of Landis’ personal views on the situation in Levantine Syria, the second half is a series of essays outlining reasons why the US should not intervene militarily.
