Following heated debate, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's cabinet has voted in favor of anchoring in law the status of Israel as "the national homeland of the Jewish people," which critics fear would discriminate the Arab population.

According to the draft law, Israel's Basic Laws would no longer define it as "Jewish and democratic" country, but as the Nation-State of the Jewish People.

15 Israeli ministers in the cabinet supported the 'Jewish state bill,' with only six, including Israeli Justice Minister, Tzipi Livni, saying 'no' to the initiative on Sunday.

The bill now has to be approved by the country's parliament, Knesset, which is scheduled to vote on it on Wednesday.

Netanyahu said that it's high time to amend the legislation as the idea of Israel being the national homeland of the Jewish people is challenged by many inside and outside the country.

"The Palestinians refuse to recognize this, and there is also opposition from within - there are those who want to establish autonomy in the Galilee and the Negev, and who deny our national rights," the Prime Minister is cited by Jerusalem Post newspaper.

He assured that the bill won't give Judaism precedence over democracy, with all Israeli citizens - no mater of their culture and faith - to have equal rights.

"But there are national rights only for the Jewish people: a flag, anthem, the right of every Jew to immigrate to Israel, and other national symbols," Netanyahu added.

However, the critics have called the proposal "anti-democratic," expressing concerns that it would legalize discrimination against 1.7 million Arabs living in Israel.

Israel and the Third Intifada?

Timothy Alexander Guzman, Silent Crow News - The Israeli government knows how to provoke a response from the Palestinians. They are repressing the Palestinians by controlling their right to enter the sacred Al-Aqsa mosque located in the Old City of Jerusalem. This action, I believe is intentional. It is to provoke a response from the Palestinians so that Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) would respond militarily. Why would the Israeli government allow right-wing Israeli extremists to continue their violent actions against Palestinian worshippers? The Israeli government knows that it would only inflame a religious hatred among Palestinians against the Jewish population. Perhaps, that is what Israel wants, a decisive war with the Palestinians to finally get their wish to have absolute control over all of East Jerusalem including Al-Aqsa and the Ibrahimi mosques. The U.S. main stream media usually blames the Palestinians for attacking Jewish worshippers as they conveniently ignore the facts that there is a collaboration of the Israeli government (IDF soldiers and police) and extremist Jewish settlers who has committed numerous attacks on Palestinian worshippers in East Jerusalem for the last 50 years. Palestinian scholar, journalist and author Ramzy Baroud points out Israel's coordinated efforts with various political parties, the military and Jewish settlers in an article he wrote in early 2014 titled 'Al-Aqsa vs. Israel: The lurking danger beneath' and declared the following:

Most alarming about these attacks is their political context, which indicates that a great degree of coordination is underway between politicians, security forces and Jewish settlers. In anticipation of a Palestinian backlash, on March 2004, an Israeli court sentenced Islamic leader Sheikh Rade Saleh to eight months in prison for 'incitement.' The Sheikh is the most outspoken Palestinian leader regarding the danger facing Al-Aqsa. Why silence Sheik Saleh now when the attacks against al-Aqsa are at an all times high?

It was on Feb. 25, 1994, that U.S.-born Jewish extremist Baruch Goldstein stormed into the Ibrahimi Mosque in the Palestinian city of al-Khalil (Hebron) and opened fire. The aim was to kill as many Arabs as he could. At that moment, nearly 800 Muslim worshipers were kneeling down during the dawn prayer in the holiest month of the Muslim Calendar; Ramadan. He killed up to 30 people and wounded over 120. Exactly 20 years later, the Israeli army stormed al-Aqsa Mosque, the third holiest Muslim site, and opened fire. The timing was no accident

When Gaza was attacked during the summer, Angela Merkel promised to "stand by the side of Israel." The German chancellor has done much more than offer verbal support for Israel's crimes. Under her leadership, the Berlin government has been equipping Israel with submarines that reportedly carry nuclear weapons. Some German politicians have tried to muzzle debate about Israel by denouncing its critics as "anti-Semites." The American journalist Max Blumenthal - author of Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel - faced such a smear on a recent speaking tour in Germany.

A number of elected politicians alleged that a scheduled talk by Blumenthal and his colleague David Sheen in a Berlin theater would serve "to promote anti-Semitic prejudice." This was deeply ironic: both Blumenthal and Sheen are themselves Jewish. The politicians denouncing them failed to produce any evidence that they are hostile towards fellow Jews.


Blumenthal spoke to Emran Feroz in Stuttgart.

Emran Feroz: You recently witnessed the destruction caused by Israel in Gaza. What scenes had the most effect on you?

Max Blumenthal: Emergency operations had to be performed in dentist chairs, while the bodies of dead children had to be laid in ice boxes, which were originally designed for ice cream. Those were probably the most shocking testimonies I heard.

EF: Not long after your trip to Gaza, you started using the hashtag #JSIL (Jewish State of Israel in the Levant) on Twitter. Making this kind of comparison between the group Islamic State and Israel is taboo in Germany. Why did you dare to do this?

MB: It is strange that you equate, in Germany, IS with Hamas or describe the entire Palestinian national movement as "heirs of the Nazis," while there is such an outrage regarding my comparison. It was not a direct one-to-one comparison, but I wanted to point out the hypocrisy behind supporting one religiously exclusive state that forces minorities out of its territory while attacking another.

I've long written about how the percentage of sociopaths within a group of humans becomes increasingly concentrated the higher you climb within the positions of power in a society, with it being most chronic amongst those who crave political power (see: Humanity is Rising).

The reason for this is obvious. Those with the sickest minds, and who wish to act upon their destructive fantasies, understand that they can most easily get away with their deeds if they are protected by an aura of power and ostensible respectability.

They believe that as a result of their status, no one would dare accuse them of horrific activities, and if it ever came to that, they could quash any investigation. Unfortunately for us all, this is typically the case. I previously covered the issue of powerful pedophiles in the UK in the piece: Former BBC Host "Sir" Jimmy Savile Exposed as Major Player in Massive Pedophile Ring.

Now we have evidence of yet another case.

Back in the heyday of the old Soviet Union, a phrase evolved to describe gullible western intellectuals who came to visit Russia and failed to notice the human and other costs of building a communist utopia. The phrase was "useful idiots" and it applied to a good many people who should have known better. I now propose a new, analogous term more appropriate for the age in which we live: useful hypocrites. That's you and me, folks, and it's how the masters of the digital universe see us.

And they have pretty good reasons for seeing us that way. They hear us whingeing about privacy, security, surveillance, etc., but notice that despite our complaints and suspicions, we appear to do nothing about it. In other words, we say one thing and do another, which is as good a working definition of hypocrisy as one could hope for.

John Naughton, The Guardian

"Who needs direct repression," asked philosopher Slavoj Zizek, "when one can convince the chicken to walk freely into the slaughterhouse?"

In an Orwellian age where war equals peace, surveillance equals safety, and tolerance equals intolerance of uncomfortable truths and politically incorrect ideas, "we the people" have gotten very good at walking freely into the slaughterhouse, all the while convincing ourselves that the prison walls enclosing us within the American police state are there for our protection.

Call it doublespeak, call it hypocrisy, call it delusion, call it whatever you like, but the fact remains that while we claim to value freedom, privacy, individuality, equality, diversity, accountability, and government transparency, our actions and those of our government overseers contradict these much-vaunted principles at every turn.

For instance, we disdain the jaded mindset of the Washington elite, and yet we continue to re-elect politicians who lie, cheat and steal. We disapprove of the endless wars that drain our resources and spread thin our military, and yet we repeatedly buy into the idea that patriotism equals supporting the military. We chafe at taxpayer-funded pork barrel legislation for roads to nowhere, documentaries on food fights, and studies of mountain lions running on treadmills, and yet we pay our taxes meekly and without raising a fuss of any kind. We object to the militarization of our local police forces and their increasingly battlefield mindset, and yet we do little more than shrug our shoulders over SWAT team raids and police shootings of unarmed citizens.

Interview with Asam Ismi of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives

Peter Koenig: Is BRICS (Brazil, Russia, China, India and South Africa) a viable alternative to the present U.S.-dominated world economic system and does it have the potential to replace it? Are we witnessing the birth of a new international economic order in BRICS and the Russia-China energy deal?

Asad Ismi: The BRICS have a great potential to become a viable alternative to the dollar dominated economic system. The creation of the BRICS development bank is an indication in this direction. The bank could temporarily even act as a BRICS Central Bank and when the time comes issue a new BRICS currency, for example the Bricso. Together the BRICS account for almost 30% of world GDP and for about 45% of the world population. However, the US is using any means they can to destabilize the BRICS one by one. Take Brazil, though Dilma Rousseff has won easily the first round of elections, but after Washington's slandering her government for corruption and high indebtedness - the usual non-substantiated arguments - her campaign had to work hard until reason prevailed. I'm confident, people's trust will confirm her in the second round.

There is a massive effort of de-dollarization going on by the BRICS, led by Russia and China, the two strongest BRICS members. Since June 2014 regular and sizable ruble - yuan swaps have taken place to free the two countries from the traditional trading currency, the US dollar. In early July this year, after meeting with Vladimir Putin, Elvira Nabiullina, Governor of the Russian Central Bank, declared in an international media event, just before her impending meeting with the Governor of the Central Bank of China in Beijing, "We are discussing with China and our BRICS partners the establishment of a system of multilateral swaps that will allow to transfer resources to one or another country, if needed. A part of the currency reserves can be directed to [the new system]", - thus announcing the emergence of an international anti-dollar alliance.

Every year, without fail, the president dies all over again. For a few days every autumn, the entire media is overwhelmed by those haunting photos from Dallas. Those cruelly happy and innocent pictures of a young president smiling and waving at bystanders, the first lady clutching a bouquet of roses. With their soft, prelapsarian colors, they seem to hail from another universe - one that has been stolen from us.

Perhaps it is that feeling of loss that explains the lingering sense of grief over John F. Kennedy's assassination year after year, when the anniversaries of other, equally shocking events - from Pearl Harbor to 9/11 - are generally quieter affairs. But there is also something unfinished about Kennedy's death, a lingering suspicion that no one has ever been able to banish.

Foreign missions are ostensibly sent to monitor and correct perceived problems on the ground. They are equipped with the language of appropriate righteousness, and the clothing of good will. That, at least, is what the operation brief is meant to state. Often, the language fades.

The mission suffers metamorphosis. Deals are done on the ground. Money changes hands. Favours are done. It is not so much building Rome as becoming Rome that becomes important. Join what one cannot change - many local conditions simply resist transformation from the outside.

The EU's rule of law mission in Kosovo, Eulex, was one such creation. It remains the EU's biggest foreign crisis mission, despite a slimming operation that cut staff from 2,200 to 1,600. The Economist suggested, rather freely, that the deployment of Eulex in 2008 "delighted" Kosovars. "Many hoped it would stamp out organised crime and corruption."[1] Certainly, the legal infrastructure on the ground proved sparse and susceptible to manipulation. But the big fish were never going to enter Eulex's nets. They were the political untouchables, at least without sufficient evidence for conviction. The reputation of the group, as a result, waned.

Critics started gathering ammunition. Andrea Capussela, formerly involved in the economic side of things in the EU's policy in Kosovo, found Eulex indifferent, even timid, in getting the cores of corruption. At worst, it proved craven. The errors in the prosecution side of things started mounting. Prominent local Kosovars, instead of facing a legal brief, found themselves in clover.

As if it weren't enough that the U.S. government (along with fellow reprobate countries Canada and Ukraine) voted against a UN resolution that essentially said fascism is bad, now Washington has stated their intention to continue working with Turkey to provide support to their terrorist proxies in Syria, which is ostensibly "battling" the Islamic State there. Sputnik reports:

Washington will continue to cooperate with Ankara on providing support to "moderate opposition" in Syria, which is battling Islamic State (IS) extremists, the White House said in a statement following a meeting between US Vice President Joe Biden and Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu.

"The two leaders agreed on the need to degrade and defeat ISIL, to work towards a political transition in Syria, and provide support for the Iraqi Security Forces and the moderate Syrian opposition," the statement, released Friday, said.

According to the White House, Biden and Davutoglu discussed "the fight against ISIL in Iraq and Syria" during their Friday meeting in Ankara, which followed the US Vice President's visit to Ukraine.

Of course, by "battling", Washington actually means colluding with, jumping camps to, being defeated by, and 'surrendering' to IS. Of course, none of this - the U.S. supporting Nazis and terrorists - is really a surprise. As a Sott.net editor wrote in a comment to Riley Waggaman's recent piece for Russia Insider, 'Ukrainian Nazis Seem Nice': For the last 2 or 3 generations, the leaders of the West (led by the Late, Great United States) have been closet fascists. First they brought over the cream of the Nazi crop during Project Paperclip, and it's been all downhill since then. But at least they had the decency to keep their anti-human, pathocratic proclivities at least partially concealed. Now they're openly supporting neo-Nazis in Ukraine and voting against resolutions condemning Nazism.

Judge Andrew P. Napolitano, once a Fox News TV show host - and now an outspoken critic of the US government - delivered a short, intriguing, and, I believe, important speech at the Mises Institute in Costa Mesa, California, on November 8th, 2014.

He began by talking about the origins of Natural Laws, beginning with this quote from Sir Thomas More's treason case under Henry VIII:

Some men say the earth is flat.
Some men say the earth is round.
But if it is flat, could Parliament make it round?
And if it round, could the kings command flatten it?

More was appealing to the jury of the Laws of Nature that restrain even the government. This was the classic Natural Law argument. More was not the originator of this argument; that was Saint Thomas Aquinas nearly 800 years ago. The English liberal philosopher John Locke picked up on this, as did Thomas Jefferson when he wrote the Declaration of Independence, and James Madison when he was a Scrivener for the US Constitution.

Thomas Jefferson's version of More's phrase -- "We are endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights and among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" -- articulates the view that our rights come from our humanity.

Napolitano asks: What are these rights that come from humanity? And how can the government trample them? The concept of Natural Rights articulated by Aquinas is that there are areas of human behavior for which we do not need a government permission slip in order to make free choices. Things like freedom to develop your own personality, to think as you wish, to say what you think, the right to worship or not to worship, to assemble in groups or to refuse to assemble, to petition the government for redress of your differences, and the right to defend yourself against tyrants. These are the quintessential 'American rights'. The right to be left alone, for example, codified in the Fourth Amendment today is called the 'right to privacy'.