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Despite worldwide protests, Obama refuses to condemn Israel's atrocities in Gaza


PressTV
Fri, 01 Aug 2014 20:44 UTC
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US President Barack Obama has refused to condemn Israel's ongoing atrocities in the Gaza Strip despite widespread global anti-Israeli protests.

Obama instead condemned the Palestinian groups for killing Israeli soldiers.

"I think it's important to note that we have, and I have, unequivocally condemned Hamas and the Palestinian factions responsible for killing two Israeli soldiers and abducting a third almost minutes after a ceasefire has been announced," Obama said in the briefing room of the White House in Washington on Friday.

The US president also urged Hamas to commit to the ceasefire.
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Dominoes

Recruits for Havana: U.S. used young Latinos to foment revolutionary moods in Cuba


RT
Mon, 04 Aug 2014 12:21 UTC
Latino recruit
© Win McNamee/Getty Images/AFP
Rajiv Shah, administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID)
The US secretly sent young Latinos to Cuba to trigger the political unrest, says a new leaked report. The 'traveling spies' working undercover within health and civic programs were put in danger as there was no safety net if they had been caught.
The ''travelers" project was launched in Cuba back in October 2009 by the US Agency for International Development (USAID), best known for overseeing billions of dollars in US humanitarian aid. It was secretly dispatching Venezuelan, Costa Rican and Peruvian young people to the island nation, said an AP investigation. The American authorities hoped that these people would help to provoke a revolution in the country.
Young Latinos often posed as tourists. They traveled across the country and recruited people whom they believed they could turn into political activists.

Another US attempt to spy on the neighboring country was from an HIV-prevention workshop, which is labeled by memos obtained by AP as "the perfect excuse" for the program's political goals.

AP also found some interesting documents revealing how the members of the program were communicating. They used encrypted memory sticks to hide their files and sent encrypted messages. The "travelers" used innocent content on their laptops so that they wouldn't be suspected by Cuban authorities. When they wrote "I have a headache," it meant they suspected they were being monitored by the Cuban government. "Your sister is ill" meant they wanted to cut their trip short.

"We worked it so that the government here didn't know we were traveling to Cuba and helping these groups," Yajaira Andrade, a former administrator with a Venezuelan organization, told AP, "because that was when [President Hugo] Chavez was in power, and if he had known about us - that some Venezuelans were working to stir rebellion - we would have been thrown in jail."

(Aug. 4) AP

Comment: Oligarchy owns the media and controls the government. Media and the government manipulate the populace. USAID...can we say tool for the CIA? Next target?

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Propaganda

The world sees the IDF's atrocities in Gaza for what they are - despite the media

Robert Fisk
The Independent
Thu, 31 Jul 2014 00:00 UTC
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© Unknown
Pictures like these tell no lies and many are now waking up to this fact.
The world is starting to turn against Israel

There was a time when our politicians and media had one principal fear when covering Middle East wars: that no one should ever call them anti-Semitic.

So corrosive, so vicious was this charge against any honest critic of Israel that merely to bleat the word "disproportionate" - as in any normal wartime exchange rate of Arab-to-Israeli deaths - was to provoke charges of Nazism by Israel's would-be supporters. Sympathy for Palestinians would earn the sobriquet "pro-Palestinian", which, of course, means "pro-terrorist".

Or so it was until the latest bloodbath in Gaza, which is being so graphically covered by journalists that our masters and our media are suffering a new experience: not fear of being called anti-Semitic, but fear of their own television viewers and readers - ordinary folk so outraged by the war crimes committed against the women and children of Gaza that they are demanding to know why, even now, television moguls and politicians are refusing to treat their own people like moral, decent, intelligent human beings.
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Star of David

Chris Hedges: Israel and the Big Lie

Chris Hedges
TruthDig
Sun, 03 Aug 2014 18:54 UTC
palestine evacuation
© AP/Eyad Baba
Palestinians evacuate a survivor of an Israeli airstrike that hit a family building Sunday in Rafah, in southern Gaza.
All governments lie, as I.F. Stone pointed out, including Israel and Hamas. But Israel engages in the kinds of jaw-dropping lies that characterize despotic and totalitarian regimes. It does not deform the truth; it inverts it. It routinely paints a picture for the outside world that is diametrically opposed to reality. And all of us reporters who have covered the occupied territories have run into Israel's Alice-in-Wonderland narratives, which we dutifully insert into our stories - required under the rules of American journalism - although we know they are untrue.
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Black Magic

Paul Craig Roberts: Israel is murdering and stealing its way through Palestine

Paul Craig Roberts
Paulcraigroberts.org
Tue, 29 Jul 2014 18:21 UTC
Image
© Unknown
Nidal Abu Rjeilah, 30, leans over the blanket-covered corpse of his disabled sister Ghadeer, 17, in the southern Gaza village of Khuzaa.
The Moral Failure Of The West

Readers are asking for my take on the Israel-Gaza situation, and, believe it or not, Oxford University's famous debating society, the Oxford Union, invited me to debate the issue.

I replied to the Oxford Union that I was unprepared to take responsibility for the Palestinians without undergoing the extensive preparation that an Oxford Union debate deserves and requires. Unless things have changed since my time at Oxford, one prevails in a Union debate by anticipating every argument of one's opponent and smashing the arguments with humor and wit. Facts seldom, if ever, carry the day, and sometimes not even wit and humor if the audience is already committed to the outcome by the prevailing propaganda. There is no time or energy in my overfull schedule for such preparation plus time away and jet lag.

Moreover, I am not an expert on Israel's conquest and occupation of Palestine. I know more than most people. I was rescued from Zionist propaganda by Israeli historians, such as Ilan Pappe, by Jewish intellectuals, such as Noam Chomsky and Norman Finkelstein, by documentary film makers, such as John Pilger, by Israeli journalists such as Uri Avnery and the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, and by an Israeli houseguest who is an Israeli member of an Israeli peace group that opposes Israeli destruction of Palestinian homes, villages, and orchards in order to build apartment blocks for settlers.
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Stormtrooper

Russia launching probe into child soldiers being used in Ukraine


RT
Mon, 04 Aug 2014 16:49 UTC
Image
© RIA Novosti
Woman holds poster "Volyn Mothers Oppose War" during protest "Mothers and Wives for Rotation of Soldiers in War Zone" near the Ukrainian Verkhovna Rada whose members discuss Presidential Executive Order On Partial Mobilization.
Russia's Public Chamber has asked Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov to launch an international probe into allegations Ukrainian National Guard units used child soldiers in the restive regions in the East and southeast of the country.

"We are writing to Sergey Lavrov because we are convinced international law mandates Ukrainian conscripts aged under-19 must be given the right to leave the war zone. These servicemen and their parents must know about this fact," the deputy head of the Russian Peace Foundation Yelena Sutormina said in an interview with the Izvestia daily.

"One years' difference might seem a purely bureaucratic detail, but not today, when life and death depend on it. In reality Ukrainian mothers have a carte blanche for saving their sons," Sutormina said. The move was prompted by Kiev authorities confirming on July 28 the death of an 18-year old army conscript who fought against federalist forces in the Donetsk Region.

Russian activists said in their letter they had about 17 and even 16-year old boys taking part in military operations in Ukraine. "It is unthinkable that cynical politicians and instigators are literally hiding behind the backs of young lads," the Public Chamber's letter reads.
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Light Saber

Switzerland rejects involvement of EU sanctions against Russia


RT
Mon, 04 Aug 2014 15:59 UTC
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© Reuters/Ruben Sprich
Swiss Economy Minister Johann Schneider-Ammann
For Switzerland to copy and paste EU sanctions against Moscow is unwise, and would jeopardize the country's role as a mediator, said Swiss Economy Minister Johann Schneider-Ammann.

The Swiss government has no plans to follow in the EU's footsteps and impose sanctions against Russia, Schneider-Ammann said in an interview with the Swiss newspaper Schweiz am Sonntag.

Schneider-Ammann said that choosing a side would undermine the country's neutrality in the matter.

"This role [as mediator] will be weakened, if we duplicate EU sanctions," Schneider-Ammann said, adding that Switzerland holds the chairmanship of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), which is vitally important for peace talks between Russia and Ukraine.

Another main concern for Switzerland, home to many Russian nationals, is any economic blowback from sanctions.

The economy minister warned that shutting out Russia could "result in a domino effect" which will "have a negative impact on our economy."
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Eye 1

Brian Eno: Today I saw a weeping Palestinian man holding a plastic bag of meat: it was his son


stopwar.org.uk
Mon, 04 Aug 2014 15:39 UTC
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Dear All of You:

I sense I'm breaking an unspoken rule with this letter, but I can't keep quiet any more.

Today I saw a picture of a weeping Palestinian man holding a plastic carrier bag of meat. It was his son. He'd been shredded (the hospital's word) by an Israeli missile attack - apparently using their fab new weapon, flechette bombs. You probably know what those are - hundreds of small steel darts packed around explosive which tear the flesh off humans. The boy was Mohammed Khalaf al-Nawasra. He was 4 years old.

I suddenly found myself thinking that it could have been one of my kids in that bag, and that thought upset me more than anything has for a long time.

Then I read that the UN had said that Israel might be guilty of war crimes in Gaza, and they wanted to launch a commission into that. America won't sign up to it.

What is going on in America?
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Star of David

Alison Weir: A few questions for the New York Times and their ilk

Alison Weir
alisonweir.org
Sat, 26 Jul 2014 13:26 UTC
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Following are a few short questions for the New York Times in regard to a recent news report:

1. When are you going to cover the killing of Palestinians the same way you cover the killing of Israelis?

Israel's killing of at least 8 civilians in one day was relegated to the second half of the story and not mentioned in the headline.

The murder of a father of three children, a staff member for Defense for Children International, got two sentences in the 17th paragraph. Israeli forces' killing of a 17-year-old got one sentence in the 25th paragraph. The killing of a 12-year-old and a 15-year-old got a half sentence - between them - in the 27th paragraph.
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Heart - Black

In Gaza Israeli soldiers shoot and kill fleeing civilians


Human Rights Watch
Mon, 04 Aug 2014 14:50 UTC
gaza civilians
© Reuters
Palestinians carry the bodies of fellow Palestinians in the east of Khan Younis in southern Gaza on August 1, 2014.
Israeli forces in the southern Gaza town of Khuza'a fired on and killed civilians in apparent violation of the laws of war in several incidents between July 23 and 25, 2014. Deliberate attacks on civilians who are not participating in the fighting are war crimes.

Seven Palestinians who had fled Khuza'a described to Human Rights Watch the grave dangers that civilians have faced in trying to flee the town, near the Israeli border, to seek safety in Khan Younis. These included repeated shelling that struck apparent civilian structures, lack of access to necessary medical care, and the threat of attack from Israeli forces as they tried to leave the area.

"When will there be justice for the civilians in Khuza'a, who suffered shelling for days, then faced deadly attacks by Israeli soldiers after being ordered to leave the town?" asked Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East and North Africa director.
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