The Enlightenment brought with it the idea that Reason should govern the affairs of man thereby ensuring Liberty. That Reason and Liberty have been hijacked by the banking and corporate elites who engage in open war and genocide with impunity has never been clearer than today.

Reason has fled, all rationality is gone, we are therefore called to act in defiance of the genocidal murderers in Palestine. In just the same way as the economy is being used to control us, we can exert similar pressure on Israel by boycotting all Israeli goods, all Israeli services and any company that does business with Israel however small.

A four-month ceasefire between Israel and Palestinian militants in Gaza was in jeopardy today after Israeli troops killed six Hamas gunmen in a raid into the territory.

Hamas responded by firing a wave of rockets into southern Israel, although no one was injured. The violence represented the most serious break in a ceasefire agreed in mid-June, yet both sides suggested they wanted to return to atmosphere of calm.

Israeli troops crossed into the Gaza Strip late last night near the town of Deir al-Balah. The Israeli military said the target of the raid was a tunnel that they said Hamas was planning to use to capture Israeli soldiers positioned on the border fence 250m away. Four Israeli soldiers were injured in the operation, two moderately and two lightly, the military said.

One Hamas gunman was killed and Palestinians launched a volley of mortars at the Israeli military. An Israeli air strike then killed five more Hamas fighters. In response, Hamas launched 35 rockets into southern Israel, one reaching the city of Ashkelon.

How a middle-class white guy came to accept the evil embedded in American political and military might.

Shortly after the attacks of 9/11, many American voices raised the question, "Why do they hate us?" The "they," in this case, was Muslim fundamentalists, but the same question could have been asked of South American peasants, of the people of Iraq or Iran, of the poor of India or Indonesia, or, indeed, of the poor anywhere.

In fact, "they" don't only hate us; the feelings of people around the world toward the United States are a complex mixture of positive and negative. On the one hand, for instance, much of the rest of the world is excited by the election of Barack Obama. Almost six years ago, visiting Iraq just before the American invasion, I listened to Iraqis who professed their admiration for much of America and how American democracy has been a "beacon" to the rest of the world. On the other hand, those same Iraqis felt betrayed by the United States that would attack a country that did not threaten it. And by 2008, multiple polls of people around the world revealed a deep anger toward our country: Clear majorities believe us to be the "greatest danger to world peace." My own coming to understand why they hate us has been a painful process, but one I consider important to share with any American who still does not understand.

The testimonies of Gaza Strip residents are revealing new details about the Israel Defense Forces' mode of operation there. In the past two days, Beit Lahia residents forced from their homes said soldiers were posing as members of Hamas' armed wing while advancing on the ground.

The daily pauses in bombing allow Gazans to meet with the displaced - most of whom are housed in an UNRWA school - and hear their stories.

Gaza resident S. told Haaretz he heard several people say they saw armed men wearing the uniforms and symbols of the Iz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, who "called out to each other in Arabic, as if they had caught a collaborator, and then, with the element of surprise, went into the houses.

Israeli Prime Minister's spokeperson (Australian born!) Mark Regev, confirms that Hamas did not violate the ceasefire until after Israel attacked the Gaza Strip on the 4th November!

The phrase 'burdens of the office' is overstated," President Bush said today at his 47th and final presser.

"You know, it's kind of like, 'Why me?'" he said, mimicking someone in whiney self-pity. "'Oh, the burdens,' you know. 'Why did the financial collapse have to happen on my watch?'

In a scathing article by British journalist Robert Fisk titled "The Rotten State of Egypt is too Powerless and Corrupt to Act" published in the Independent on Wednesday, the seasoned Beirut-based reporter lashed out against the Egyptian regime in light of the recent assault on Gaza.

He opens his tirade with a sarcastic reference to the times of President Hosni Mubarak - "'La Vache Qui Rit', as he is still called in Cairo" - where the world is no longer worried about the anger of the Arab masses because you can always count on their governments to shut them down brutally and inhumanely.

Contrary to Israel's argument that it was forced to launch its air and ground offensive against Gaza in order to stop the firing of rockets into its territory, Hamas proposed in mid-December to return to the original Hamas-Israel cease-fire arrangement, according to a U.S.-based source who has been briefed on the proposal.

Also says President Bush has no need to apologize on financial crisis

Washington - Vice President Dick Cheney said Thursday that he sees no reason for President George W. Bush to pre-emptively pardon anyone at the CIA involved in harsh interrogations of suspected terrorists. "I don't have any reason to believe that anybody in the agency did anything illegal," he said.

In an interview with The Associated Press, Cheney also said that Bush has no need to apologize for not foreseeing the economic crisis.

"I don't think he needs to apologize. I think what he needed to do is take bold, aggressive action and he has," Cheney said.

"When the truth is replaced by silence," the Soviet dissident Yevgeny Yevtushenko said, "the silence is a lie." It may appear the silence is broken on Gaza. The cocoons of murdered children, wrapped in green, together with boxes containing their dismembered parents and the cries of grief and rage of everyone in that death camp by the sea, can be viewed on al-Jazeera and YouTube, even glimpsed on the BBC. But Russia's incorrigible poet was not referring to the ephemeral we call news; he was asking why those who knew the why never spoke it and so denied it. Among the Anglo-American intelligentsia, this is especially striking. It is they who hold the keys to the great storehouses of knowledge: the historiographies and archives that lead us to the why.

They know that the horror now raining on Gaza has little to do with Hamas or, absurdly, "Israel's right to exist." They know the opposite to be true: that Palestine's right to exist was canceled 61 years ago and the expulsion and, if necessary, extinction of the indigenous people was planned and executed by the founders of Israel. They know, for example, that the infamous "Plan D" resulted in the murderous depopulation of 369 Palestinian towns and villages by the Haganah (Jewish army) and that massacre upon massacre of Palestinian civilians in such places as Deir Yassin, al-Dawayima, Eilaboun, Jish, Ramle and Lydda are referred to in official records as "ethnic cleansing." Arriving at a scene of this carnage, David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister, was asked by a general, Yigal Allon, "What shall we do with the Arabs?" Ben-Gurion, reported the Israeli historian Benny Morris, "made a dismissive, energetic gesture with his hand and said, 'Expel them'. The order to expel an entire population "without attention to age" was signed by Yitzhak Rabin, a future prime minister promoted by the world's most efficient propaganda as a peacemaker. The terrible irony of this was addressed only in passing, such as when the Mapan Party co-leader Meir Ya'ari noted "how easily" Israel's leaders spoke of how it was "possible and permissible to take women, children and old men and to fill the roads with them because such is the imperative of strategy ... who remembers who used this means against our people during the [Second World] war ... we are appalled."