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Tuesday, May 15, 2018
Israel has massacred over 60 Palestinians in 24 hours Take to the streets ...
"America's Jerusalem embassy for mass murder, occupation and wider war" Finian Cunningham
America's Jerusalem embassy for mass murder, occupation and wider war
Finian Cunningham (born 1963) has written extensively on international affairs, with articles published in several languages. Originally from Belfast, Northern Ireland, he is a Master’s graduate in Agricultural Chemistry and worked as a scientific editor for the Royal Society of Chemistry, Cambridge, England, before pursuing a career in newspaper journalism. For over 20 years he worked as an editor and writer in major news media organizations, including The Mirror, Irish Times and Independent. Now a freelance journalist based in East Africa, his columns appear on RT, Sputnik, Strategic Culture Foundation and Press TV.
How obscenely ironic. Embassies traditionally symbolize diplomacy and peace. The opening of the US Embassy in Jerusalem was occasioned by a grotesque baptism of murder of Palestinians, heralding wider war in the Middle East.
Not only that, but on the very anniversary of one of the most shameful episodes of ethnic cleansing and dispossession over the past century – the 1948 Nakba or Catastrophe for Palestinians – the US government is brazenly siding with the heirs of that historic violence, the Israeli state.
Trump's wholesale abandonment of any shame in endorsing Israeli violations against Arab historic rights is an incitement to regional conflagration.
It's hard to express the horror. Israeli snipers shooting unarmed Palestinian protesters in Gaza, while some 100 kilometers away in Jerusalem, US dignitaries and evangelical pastors were blessing the opening of Washington's new embassy as 'God's work'.
US President Donald Trump's policy in the Middle East, if you could call it "policy", has descended into absolute lunacy. No wonder, most European states stayed away from the US reception for unveiling its new diplomatic center.
Trump's reckless disregard for Palestinian-Israeli peace is plunging the region into a blood bath. This week's incendiary snub to Palestinians and the wider Arab region followed his tearing up of US obligations to the Iran nuclear accord. That violation of an international treaty has left diplomats from Europe, Russia, China and Iran scrambling to salvage a deal, which if it falls apart will unleash more instability and even war in the Middle East.
When Trump announced in December the moving of his country's embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem it was roundly rebuked at the United Nations. The move violates decades of international consensus that Jerusalem should be a shared capital between Palestinians and Israelis pending the outcome of peace negotiations.
Trump said his decision was merely a "reflection of reality". Cynically, it marks US acquiescence to illegal Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory.
To be fair, Washington's decision to relocate its embassy to Jerusalem was made over 20 years ago in 1995. Presidents Clinton, GW Bush and Obama opted to delay the actual move, claiming that such a move depended on progress in peace talks. Trump has now put into action legislation that was already on the books.
But what his declaration signifies is the jettisoning of any pretense by the US of being an "honest broker" between Israelis and Palestinians. Palestinian leaders now refuse to even engage with US officials, such is their disgust.
Paradoxically, Trump is helping to clarify the situation. The US is openly backing Israeli conquest of Palestinian territory and oppression of Palestinians. Washington is now transparently complicit in criminal Israeli policy rather than hiding behind a facade of mediation.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hailed Trump this week for "making Israel great again". With typical chutzpah, Netanyahu urged other nations to follow suit, absurdly claiming that by relocating their embassies from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem they would facilitate peace.
The perverse logic, as proven already by the US policy, is that any chance of peace between Palestinians and Israelis is being utterly destroyed.
The hellish conditions that Palestinians are subjected to under relentless Israeli occupation are driving them to the desperate act of lining up in their thousands under the fire of Israeli snipers.
Over the past six weeks since Gaza's population began the "Great Return March" some 50 unarmed protesters have been murdered by Israeli live fire. On the day of the US Embassy opening, dozens of more civilians were shot dead, within hours of the Jerusalem ceremony.
Israeli commanders have openly admitted that a shoot-to-kill tactic is being used whereby soldiers are even targeting children who dare to approach a separation barrier on Gaza's eastern border with Israeli-held territory.
The Gaza protests were organized by ordinary Palestinians to highlight their desperate plea against a barbaric occupation and prevention of residents returning to their historic homes, including in Jerusalem. Some 70 per cent of Gaza's population are descended from refugees who were displaced by Israeli settlers in the 1948 pogroms and later in the 1967 War.
Under Israeli siege, which the UN has described as illegal, Gazans are prevented from moving out of the coastal strip. Some two million people – half of whom are under 18 years old – subsist in unlivable conditions. Over 90 per cent of Gaza's water supply is contaminated, electricity is available for only a few hours per day, fisherman are prevented from going beyond a few miles from the shore where human sewage runs directly into the sea.
As American historian Norman Finkelstein points out, Gaza is being tormented by military occupation, an inhuman blockade, massacres conducted with impunity by Israeli military, and children being poisoned. It is this context of genocide in which the recent protests are taking place.
Those protests were organized to coincide with the 70th anniversary of Israel's declared foundation on May 14, 1948. The next day, May 15, is what the Palestinians and many supporters around the world prefer to focus on – the Catastrophe.
Trump's decision to open the US Embassy in Jerusalem this week could not be more provocative and criminally insane.
It truly is a shockingly callous display of US support for seven decades of barbaric oppression against Palestinians and the wider Arab region.
Jerusalem is seen as a holy site for Muslims and Christians. Washington's acquiescing to Israel's declaration of the city as "undivided capital" of the Jewish Israeli state is an outrageous blow to hundreds of millions of people from other faiths. As well as a vandalistic swipe at world opinion based on ordinary principles of justice, morality and compassion towards the long-suffering Palestinian people.
Europe bears a heavy responsibility for the plight of Palestinians. After Hamas won the parliamentary elections in 2006, the EU and the US both moved to sanction the new Hamas government owing to its refusal to recognize the state of Israel. The Israeli siege on Gaza has thus been perpetrated with the complicity of the EU and the US, albeit the latter appearing more brazenly complicit under Trump.
European governments may be discomfited by Trump's strident contempt for Palestinian rights and international law. But they have contributed to the present deterioration in the Middle East by pandering towards Washington's policies of sponsoring Israeli occupation, as well as sponsoring reactionary Arab client regimes like Saudi Arabia, and fomenting illegal wars and regime-change operations.
Trump's impetuousness and ignorance – no doubt encouraged by multi-million-dollar donations from rich Jewish Americans like Sheldon Adelson – has set the US on a collision course with the Arab masses from his insolent indifference to their rights. As if that could not be any more combustible, Trump is pushing the same Israeli-Saudi despot agenda of hostility towards Iran, as evinced by the nuclear accord sabotage.
Europe has for too long tied itself to the shipwreck that is US policy in the Middle East. Surely, European governments must realize by now that if explosive violence and conflict is to be avoided in the Middle East, they must abandon the US shipwreck and begin asserting an independent foreign policy.
A genuine peace process advocating for long-neglected Palestinian rights, and repudiating US attempts to collapse the Iran nuclear accord are two immediate matters for the Europeans to claw back some sanity and respect – before it's too late.
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.
Putin takes ax to military spending
To pay for a 'Russia first' agenda, Putin takes ax to military spending
With the tensions between Russia and the West so high – often being described as “a new cold war” – one might understandably assume that there is a corresponding arms race going on. But in fact, Russia's military spending is on the decline. In the first strategic program of his new and possibly final presidential term, Vladimir Putin announced plans for a relentless focus on domestic development, to be partially paid for by sharp cuts in defense spending.
Cuts to defense spending will go toward underwriting that agenda. But in fact, Russian defense spending has already started to decline. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), Russian military spending fell by 20 percent last year, the first major decrease in two decades. While critics dispute the amount and suggest there may be budgetary machinations at work, most analysts agree that the share of military spending as a percentage of GDP is set to fall, from 6.6 percent in 2016, to 5 percent this year and to 3 percent by the end of Putin's current term in 2024.
Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space
PO Box 652
Brunswick, ME 04011
(207) 443-9502
http://www.space4peace.org
http://space4peace.blogspot.
Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth. - Henry David Thoreau
PO Box 652
Brunswick, ME 04011
(207) 443-9502
http://www.space4peace.org
http://space4peace.blogspot.
Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth. - Henry David Thoreau
A short flight to Armageddon: Trump & Netanyahu bringing us closer to end of times by George Gallowy
A short flight to Armageddon: Trump & Netanyahu bringing us closer to end of times
George Galloway was a member of the British Parliament for nearly 30 years. He presents TV and radio shows (including on RT). He is a film-maker, writer and a renowned orator.
The biblical town of Armageddon is but a few miles as the bullets fly from the site of the latest Gaza massacre which has taken us further down the road to the end of times.
Its proximate cause was the latest Man-Child effort of Donald J Trump, this time to relocate the US embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv, with all the other embassies, to Jerusalem, half of which though annexed by Israel still constitutes Occupied Territory under international law.
It is a criminal offence to "make permanent changes" on "territory acquired by force" – which this territory was in 1967 when Israel seized it by force of arms.
Israel has made many such changes to Occupied Territories. For example, the Golan Heights still belongs to Syria despite the many illegal settlements built there, however much stolen oil is extracted there, or however many field hospitals for Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS) and Al-Qaeda fighters Israel erects there. That like Jerusalem, the Golan has been illegally annexed makes no difference at all in law nor to every other government in the world. Except Trump's government.
In fact every US president in the last 50 years has promised to move the US embassy to Jerusalem, at least whilst running for election. But campaigning is done in poetry, governing is done in prose and no president has followed through on this pledge. Except Donald Trump.
That his decision would entirely predictably lead to a bloodbath may not have occurred to Trump, but it certainly did to the professionals around him, from those aghast at the State Department to those salivating for the provocation, dripping from the moustache of the likes of John Bolton.
There have been many bloodbaths, of course, but there is reason to believe that this one may be of more lasting significance. It surely hastens the political passing of the Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas for whom time and circumstance have run their course. It makes it more likely that the Palestinian Mandela, the prisoner Marwan Barghouti, will enter the race – from behind bars – to be his successor and make more likely his success.
It may – temporarily at least – complicate the all-but-consummated courtship between the Saudi Crown Prince MbS (Mohammad bin Salman) and Prime Minister Netanyahu, enjoined by their mutual antipathy towards Iran but now, inevitably, tempered by the Gaza massacre. The religious establishment in Saudi Arabia and the conservative forces are waiting for their excuse to strike back at the man who allegedly hung his relatives upside down in the Ritz-Carlton until their money fell out of their trouser pockets, and the massacre gives them a perfectly Kosher opportunity to do so.
It makes more difficult any complicity by any Arab ruler with any Israeli provocation against Iran. Many Arabs may be hostile to Iran but, after this week, many have rediscovered their antipathy towards Netanyahu.
The already-vaulting opposition to Israeli crimes against the Palestinians in Western countries – which has led to spectacular successes in the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) movement across several continents – will likely intensify too.
When I joined the movement in solidarity with the Palestinians back in 1975 you could have fitted the supporters of the PLO in Britain into a medium sized hall. Now you couldn't fit them into Hyde Park or indeed all of Central London. Back then there was genuine affection for the State of Israel in all Western countries. Now nobody moves for Israel out of love, only out of interest. And interest too is waning.
The US is now defunct as a broker in the Middle East, that mantle surely passed smoothly to Russia this week.
For Trump and Netanyahu – on whom both their respective police forces may be closing fast – there is no way back. That they are steeped in blood so far that none could tell whether it is bloodier to go on or to go o'er is self-evident. Trump tweeted on the morning of the massacre that "This is a big day for Israel, a big day.” For once he was quite accurate. Just not in the way he could possibly have imagined.
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.
Wir Europäer sagen NEIN zu einem Krieg gegen Russland!
Öffentliche Erklärung, 8./9. Mai 2018, in fünf SprachenWir Europäer sagen NEIN zu einem Krieg gegen Russland!Von Rudolf Hänsel, Ullrich Mies und Mitunterzeichnern
Zwei Weltkriege sind genug!
In der Vergangenheit ließ sich Deutschland in den Ersten Weltkrieg hineinziehen und hat im Zweiten Weltkrieg dem russischen Volk unermessliches Leid zugefügt.
Wir werden nicht zulassen, dass sich dies noch einmal wiederholt!
Wenn die deutsche Vasallen-Regierung in Komplizenschaft mit den Kriegstreibern in Großbritannien und Frankreich unter der Führung der USA und der NATO einen neuen Angriffskrieg gegen Russland plant, dann tut sie das nicht in unserem Namen!
Zu Krieg und Frieden haben wir, die Bürgerinnen und Bürger,
das letzte Wort!
Wir sagen NEIN zu Krieg und Gewalt in den internationalen Beziehungen und verurteilen die fortgesetzte Kriegstreiberei, Aufrüstung und Militarisierung!
***
Urteilsbegründung des internationalen Militärgerichtshofs in Nürnberg 1946:
„Die Entfesselung eines Angriffskrieges ist nicht bloß ein internationales Verbrechen. Es ist das schwerste internationale Verbrechen, das sich von anderen Kriegsverbrechen nur dadurch unterscheidet, dass es in sich alle Schrecken der anderen Verbrechen einschließt und anhäuft.“
Papst Johannes Paul II am 13. Januar 2003:
„Krieg ist niemals ein unabwendbares Schicksal.
Krieg bedeutet immer eine Niederlage für die Menschheit.“
Nikolaj Desjatnitschenko, russischer Schüler in seiner Rede am Volkstrauertag vor dem Deutschen Bundestag am 22. November 2017:
„Ich hoffe aufrichtig, dass einmal auf aller Welt der gesunde Menschenverstand walten wird und die Welt nie wieder Kriege sehen wird.“
Erstunterzeichner:
Dr. Rudolf Hänsel
Milica Radojkovic-Hänsel
Ullrich Mies
Annette van Gessel
Siegfried Wilhelm
Rule B. Ph. von Bismarck
Anneliese Fikentscher
Andreas Neumann
Dr. Daniele Ganser
Prof. Dr. Heinrich Wohlmeyer
Willy Wimmer
Prof. Dr. Mohssen Massarrat
Klaus von Raussendorff
Prof. Dr. Kees van der Pijl
Jochen Scholz
Dr. Ansgar Klein
Helene Klein
Dr. Matthias Burchardt
Elias Davidsson
Veronika Thomas-Ohst
Ernst Wolff
Jens Wernicke
Peter Vonnahme
Hans Bauer
Klaus Hartmann
Hermann Ploppa
Stefanie Seide
Dr. Wolfgang Bittner
Lisa Fitz
Prof. Dr. Norman Paech
Gina Pietsch
Dr. Amir Mortasawi
Brigitte Kabbeck
Dr. Daniela Dahn
Bernhard Trautwetter
Prof. Dr. med. Klaus-Dieter Kolenda
Gordana Beljkas
Prof. Dr. Velimir Nedeljkovic
Dr. Ludger Beyerle
Viktor Braun
Anke Kern
Dr. med. Mechthild Klingenburg-Vogel
Dr. med. Barbara Saul-Krause
Prof. Dr. med. Dr. med. habil. Karl Hecht
Alena Stierli
Helmut Mueller
Peter Köberle
Berthold Oestreich
Dr. med. Christof Metzler
Lothar Werner
Walter Rieck
Harro Erhart
Franz Brandl
Renate Schoof
Bildmotiv: Halstuch, entworfen von Pablo Picasso für die dritten Weltjugendfestspiele in Berlin (DDR), 1951
Nachfolgend der Aufruf in den Sprachen Englisch, Niederländisch, Serbisch und Russisch:http://www.nrhz.de/flyer/beitrag.php?id=24807
Zwei Weltkriege sind genug!
In der Vergangenheit ließ sich Deutschland in den Ersten Weltkrieg hineinziehen und hat im Zweiten Weltkrieg dem russischen Volk unermessliches Leid zugefügt.
Wir werden nicht zulassen, dass sich dies noch einmal wiederholt!
Wenn die deutsche Vasallen-Regierung in Komplizenschaft mit den Kriegstreibern in Großbritannien und Frankreich unter der Führung der USA und der NATO einen neuen Angriffskrieg gegen Russland plant, dann tut sie das nicht in unserem Namen!
Zu Krieg und Frieden haben wir, die Bürgerinnen und Bürger,
das letzte Wort!
Wir sagen NEIN zu Krieg und Gewalt in den internationalen Beziehungen und verurteilen die fortgesetzte Kriegstreiberei, Aufrüstung und Militarisierung!
***
Urteilsbegründung des internationalen Militärgerichtshofs in Nürnberg 1946:
„Die Entfesselung eines Angriffskrieges ist nicht bloß ein internationales Verbrechen. Es ist das schwerste internationale Verbrechen, das sich von anderen Kriegsverbrechen nur dadurch unterscheidet, dass es in sich alle Schrecken der anderen Verbrechen einschließt und anhäuft.“
Papst Johannes Paul II am 13. Januar 2003:
„Krieg ist niemals ein unabwendbares Schicksal.
Krieg bedeutet immer eine Niederlage für die Menschheit.“
Nikolaj Desjatnitschenko, russischer Schüler in seiner Rede am Volkstrauertag vor dem Deutschen Bundestag am 22. November 2017:
„Ich hoffe aufrichtig, dass einmal auf aller Welt der gesunde Menschenverstand walten wird und die Welt nie wieder Kriege sehen wird.“
Erstunterzeichner:
Dr. Rudolf Hänsel
Milica Radojkovic-Hänsel
Ullrich Mies
Annette van Gessel
Siegfried Wilhelm
Rule B. Ph. von Bismarck
Anneliese Fikentscher
Andreas Neumann
Dr. Daniele Ganser
Prof. Dr. Heinrich Wohlmeyer
Willy Wimmer
Prof. Dr. Mohssen Massarrat
Klaus von Raussendorff
Prof. Dr. Kees van der Pijl
Jochen Scholz
Dr. Ansgar Klein
Helene Klein
Dr. Matthias Burchardt
Elias Davidsson
Veronika Thomas-Ohst
Ernst Wolff
Jens Wernicke
Peter Vonnahme
Hans Bauer
Klaus Hartmann
Hermann Ploppa
Stefanie Seide
Dr. Wolfgang Bittner
Lisa Fitz
Prof. Dr. Norman Paech
Gina Pietsch
Dr. Amir Mortasawi
Brigitte Kabbeck
Dr. Daniela Dahn
Bernhard Trautwetter
Prof. Dr. med. Klaus-Dieter Kolenda
Gordana Beljkas
Prof. Dr. Velimir Nedeljkovic
Dr. Ludger Beyerle
Viktor Braun
Anke Kern
Dr. med. Mechthild Klingenburg-Vogel
Dr. med. Barbara Saul-Krause
Prof. Dr. med. Dr. med. habil. Karl Hecht
Alena Stierli
Helmut Mueller
Peter Köberle
Berthold Oestreich
Dr. med. Christof Metzler
Lothar Werner
Walter Rieck
Harro Erhart
Franz Brandl
Renate Schoof
Bildmotiv: Halstuch, entworfen von Pablo Picasso für die dritten Weltjugendfestspiele in Berlin (DDR), 1951
Nachfolgend der Aufruf in den Sprachen Englisch, Niederländisch, Serbisch und Russisch:http://www.nrhz.de/flyer/beitrag.php?id=24807
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