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Islamabad, Pakistan - Pakistan's officially declared "Day of Love for the Prophet Muhammad" devolved into deadly violence in major cities Friday as tens of thousands of Pakistanis angrily demonstrated against an Islam-mocking YouTube video, although calm generally prevailed in other predominantly Muslim countries.
At least 20 people died and more than 150 were injured in the protests in Pakistan, authorities said - the highest one-day death toll since protests began over the video on Sept. 11. The demonstrations have spread to about 20 nations.
The government's announced effort to tamp down anger by providing a national holiday for peaceful protest clearly backfired, offering instead what seemed like an official sanction to violence.
Critics called the holiday a pandering attempt to please hard-line Islamist parties, whose influence has been on the rise here in recent years.
"This was a terrible idea," said Mehreen Zahra-Malik, a columnist with the News, a national English-language daily. "It was time to calm people down and not give a stamp of approval to protesters, many of whom would just use it as an excuse for violence. . . . There was clearly going to be violence."
Another commentator, Marvi Sirmed, said on Twitter: "It is sad, so very sad that we could never make a government realize that they don't have to kneel before mullah," a reference to Muslim clerics.
An edited version of this article by Jonathan Cook, with pictures, captions and comments by Lasha Darkmoon.
President Barack Obama has claimed that the United States enjoys a special bond with Israel unlike its relations with any other country. He has called the friendship "unshakeable". His Republican rival, Mitt Romney, has gone further, arguing that there is not "an inch of difference between ourselves and our ally Israel".
While such pronouncements form the basis of an apparent Washington consensus, the reality is that the cherished friendship is no more than a fairy tale.
Politicians may prefer to express undying love for Israel, and hand over billions of dollars annually in aid, but the US security establishment has - at least, in private - always regarded Israel as an unfaithful partner.
The distrust has been particularly hard to hide in relation to Iran. Israel has been putting relentless pressure on Washington, apparently in the hope of manoeuvring it into supporting or joining an attack on Tehran to stop what Israel claims is an Iranian effort to build a nuclear bomb concealed beneath its civilian energy programme.
While coverage has focused on the personal animosity between Obama and the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, the truth is that US officials generally are deeply at odds with Israel on this issue.
The conflict burst into the open this month with reports that the Pentagon had scaled back next month's joint military exercise, Austere Challenge, with the Israeli military that had been billed as the largest and most significant in the two countries' history.
© Darkmoon.me
"Once we squeeze all we can out of the United States, it can dry up and blow away." - Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, 2002. (Widely reported, see here)It is possibly the greatest of American political myths.
President Barack Obama has claimed that the United States enjoys a special bond with Israel unlike its relations with any other country. He has called the friendship "unshakeable". His Republican rival, Mitt Romney, has gone further, arguing that there is not "an inch of difference between ourselves and our ally Israel".
While such pronouncements form the basis of an apparent Washington consensus, the reality is that the cherished friendship is no more than a fairy tale.
Politicians may prefer to express undying love for Israel, and hand over billions of dollars annually in aid, but the US security establishment has - at least, in private - always regarded Israel as an unfaithful partner.
The distrust has been particularly hard to hide in relation to Iran. Israel has been putting relentless pressure on Washington, apparently in the hope of manoeuvring it into supporting or joining an attack on Tehran to stop what Israel claims is an Iranian effort to build a nuclear bomb concealed beneath its civilian energy programme.
While coverage has focused on the personal animosity between Obama and the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, the truth is that US officials generally are deeply at odds with Israel on this issue.
The conflict burst into the open this month with reports that the Pentagon had scaled back next month's joint military exercise, Austere Challenge, with the Israeli military that had been billed as the largest and most significant in the two countries' history.
© ITNMitt Romney described 47% of Americans as government-dependent 'victims' in a covertly recorded video released by Mother Jones magazine this week.
Mitt Romney's historic gaffe caught on video - published, with great timing, by the left-leaning Mother Jones magazine - in which he said that his campaign was writing off 47% of American voters since they "depended on government" handouts, was committed in an equally significant manner, as he delivered the remarks to a closed group of potential major donors in Florida. GOP stalwart and Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan is calling for an intervention in the campaign, and even some fellow Republicans are scampering to distance themselves from the inflammatory remarks.
But I find the remarks fascinating and important to deconstruct because they affirm - as insider discourse captured for the public often can - the fact that a new kind of narrative for America has taken over from one of our oldest and most cherished national myths. What Romney's comments reveal is that the American Dream is dead, killed off by skepticism from the bottom up - by the 99% of lower-income and middle-class people who no longer believe in it - and by cynicism from the top down - by the 1%, top-earning people who don't believe in it.
What, after all, is the narrative of "the American Dream"? It was a discourse formulated between the 1880s and the 1920s in the United States during the great waves of migration and expansion and reforms of the Progressive Era. Slogans, often used by political leaders who wished to court the aspirational, immigrant vote, invoked a promise that America was "the land of opportunity", where hard work, gumption and a bit of luck could make any poor kid a millionaire.
Abby Interviews outspoken journalist, and US Congressional Candidate, David Seaman, about the slow erosion of civil liberties in America.
Best of the Web: Conspiracy Theorists Are Popular Because People are Fed-Up with Government and Media Lies
Public opinion polls show that public trust in government and the media is at an all time low. Their record of lying to the Western public is difficult to conceal, even with the biggest propaganda machine in history at their disposal. The growth and influence of the global alternative media has broken the magic spell over the public. The "mainstream media" is no longer mainstream. The old fringe is the new mainstream.
Conspiracy theorists have been proven right about so many issues and historical events, with 9/11 being the most important among them. The views of conspiracy theorists are more popular than ever because they are telling the truth.
© GettyGame: A Luftwaffe boss reveals shooting children was a sport.
But now a disturbing - and at times horrifyingly graphic - new book has laid to rest the myth that only the likes of the SS and Gestapo were responsible for war crimes and acts of rape, murder and genocide.
And the German people have been forced into reassessing their past.
Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing and Dying: The Secret Second World War Tapes of German POWs, which is published in English for the first time next week, contains shocking transcripts of ordinary soldiers, sailors and airmen condemning themselves from their own mouths.
We are printing some of them here to highlight how widespread the bloodlust was among German troops.
British intelligence hid microphones among POWs at Trent Park detention centre in North London, captured every boast, offhand remark and sick joke about the killing of children and new mothers, women being raped and the mass extermination of Jews.
The transcripts from tape recordings of 13,000 inmates over four years, form the most unique and bleak look inside the mind of war-time German forces ever published. Before the book by historians Soenke Neitzel and Harald Welzer came out in Germany, people there assumed that their fathers and grandfathers did not have blood on their hands.
A few years ago, nobody in Asia gave much thought to the Senkaku islands. They form a cluster of eight pimples in the East China Sea, mid-way between Taiwan and Japanese Okinawa, devoid of people, culture and - by all accounts - beauty. Yet suddenly, they have become the focus of a dispute between China and Japan which is growing so bitter that doomsters fear Beijing might even go to war over them.
The dispute is one of a dozen involving islands off the Asian mainland - some claimed by Vietnam, others by South Korea, others again by the Philippines - in which China is wielding a big stick. In some cases, it covets fish stocks around the rocks, in others there is oil under the sea; elsewhere, Beijing merely wants to extend its territorial waters. What alarms the United States, as well as the regional powers, is the ferocity with which China is pursuing its claims.
The row about the Senkakus escalated when the Tokyo government recently purchased them from their owner, a Japanese businessman. In the past week, the ownership of the islands has provoked demonstrations in a dozen Chinese cities, outbreaks of violence and vandalism against Japanese targets which have prompted some of its industrial giants - Nissan, Honda, Canon, Panasonic - to shut down their plants in that country.
The row about the Senkakus escalated when the Tokyo government recently purchased them from their owner, a Japanese businessman. In the past week, the ownership of the islands has provoked demonstrations in a dozen Chinese cities, outbreaks of violence and vandalism against Japanese targets which have prompted some of its industrial giants - Nissan, Honda, Canon, Panasonic - to shut down their plants in that country.
National security officials told NBC News that the continuing cyber attacks this week that slowed the websites of JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America are being carried out by the government of Iran. One of those sources said the claim by hackers that the attacks were prompted by the online video mocking the Prophet Muhammad is just a cover story.
A group of purported hackers in the Middle East has claimed credit for problems at the websites of both banks, citing the online video mocking the founder of Islam. One security source called that statement "a cover" for the Iranian government's operations.
The attack is described by one source, a former U.S. official familiar with the attacks, as being "significant and ongoing" and looking to cause "functional and significant damage." Also, one source suggested the attacks were in response to U.S. sanctions on Iranian banks.
A group of purported hackers in the Middle East has claimed credit for problems at the websites of both banks, citing the online video mocking the founder of Islam. One security source called that statement "a cover" for the Iranian government's operations.
The attack is described by one source, a former U.S. official familiar with the attacks, as being "significant and ongoing" and looking to cause "functional and significant damage." Also, one source suggested the attacks were in response to U.S. sanctions on Iranian banks.
An analyst says Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has made the Palestinians disappear from the international stage with the "will he, won't he" drama of threatening to bomb Iran.
In an article on The Guardian website, Chris McGreal said Netanyahu's bid to draw "Washington's energies into trying to prevent him from attacking Iran before the US election" has all but eliminated any talk of the illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories and Palestine's move for statehood or recognition at the UN.
"When the Israeli prime minister was last in Washington, there was barely a mention of the Palestinians after his meeting with [US President Barack] Obama. And barely a word was breathed about the Palestinians at this year's meeting of the most influential of the pro-Israel lobby groups in Washington, American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). The focus was firmly on Iran."
McGreal said Netanyahu's recent appearance on Meet the Press this weekend was "telling" in that "there wasn't a single mention of the Palestinians during the 15-minute interview."
"[Interviewer David] Gregory didn't ask about them, and Netanyahu didn't talk about them. Thus the fate of several million people living under varying degrees of an occupation that continues to plunder land, maintain discriminatory laws and administrative procedures - such as rationing water to Arab villages while their neighbors in the Jewish settlements have unlimited supplies - remains in limbo."
"When the Israeli prime minister was last in Washington, there was barely a mention of the Palestinians after his meeting with [US President Barack] Obama. And barely a word was breathed about the Palestinians at this year's meeting of the most influential of the pro-Israel lobby groups in Washington, American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). The focus was firmly on Iran."
McGreal said Netanyahu's recent appearance on Meet the Press this weekend was "telling" in that "there wasn't a single mention of the Palestinians during the 15-minute interview."
"[Interviewer David] Gregory didn't ask about them, and Netanyahu didn't talk about them. Thus the fate of several million people living under varying degrees of an occupation that continues to plunder land, maintain discriminatory laws and administrative procedures - such as rationing water to Arab villages while their neighbors in the Jewish settlements have unlimited supplies - remains in limbo."
Georgia's Interior Minister Bacho Akhalaia
"I feel moral and political responsibility that we failed to eradicate the horrible practice (of torture)," Bacho Akhalaia said in a statement on Thursday.
"This is why I have submitted my resignation to the president," he added.
Before taking office as interior minister, Akhalaia was the official overseeing the country's prisons.
Several video recordings emerged on September 18, showing graphic images of prison guards at a jail in the capital Tbilisi brutally beating prisoners. In one video, a prison guard is seen sexually assaulting an inmate.
Comment: While we applaud the hard work done by the alternative media in trying to sift through the lies of the government and main stream press, some people are more likely disinfo agents. They may by unwitting puppets of the PTB, discrediting the work of the real alternative press, and very often it is difficult work determining who is trustworthy.
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