The recent election windfall victory of Hamas has sent shock waves through the United States and the European Union. They swiftly announced their threat to withhold $400 million in aide if Hamas refused to recognize the state of Israel and disarm.

Hamas, which has promoted itself as a militant alternative to the discredited Fatah government, now has to live up to its own rhetoric of providing an alternative to the long suffering Palestinian people.

Mr Zahar, the leader of Hamas who rose to power in 1989, reportedly said, "Spies and thieves must fear us," and "thieves are those who steal our land". As a member of the American Indian Movement, I know full well that the roads into the Americas were paved by thieves. It was A government spy sent to create internal disruption, who set the stage for the execution of Anna Mae Aquash, an icon in Indian country; and while over 150 government police terrorized communities on the Pine Ridge Oglala Lakota reservation in the summer of 1975, the federal government stole one eighth of the Pine Ridge reservation land.

The state of Israel sets on land that was originally Palestinian but Zionist movements in Europe and the United States claimed that the "land was given to them by God" and their belief that their race possessed some "natural superiority". Euro- Americas pray to "god and country" and teach their future generations to pray homage to the gangsters, outlaws and thieves who stole the country from Indian nations in god,s name.

The European idea that they possessed a "God given superiority" not only had brought them into conflict with the Palestinian people, but also North American Indian Nations in the 1800s.

Review of James Douglass' Book

Despite a treasure-trove of new information having emerged over the last forty-six years, there are many people who still think who killed President John Fitzgerald Kennedy and why are unanswerable questions. There are others who cling to the Lee Harvey Oswald "lone-nut" explanation proffered by the Warren Commission. Both groups agree, however, that whatever the truth, it has no contemporary relevance but is old-hat, history, stuff for conspiracy-obsessed people with nothing better to do. The general thinking is that the assassination occurred almost a half-century ago, so let's move on.

Nothing could be further from the truth, as James Douglass shows in his extraordinary book, JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters (Orbis Books, 2008). It is clearly one of the best books ever written on the Kennedy assassination and deserves a vast readership. It is bound to roil the waters of complacency that have submerged the truth of this key event in modern American history.

It's not often that the intersection of history and contemporary events pose such a startling and chilling lesson as does the contemplation of the murder of JFK on November 22, 1963 juxtaposed with the situations faced by President Obama today. So far, at least, Obama's behavior has mirrored Johnson's, not Kennedy's, as he has escalated the war in Afghanistan by 34,000. One can't but help think that the thought of JFK's fate might not be far from his mind as he contemplates his next move in Afghanistan.

The memory of what happened in downtown Dallas 47 years ago today is still fresh for John Todd.

Now he wants to pass those memories on.

"When I asked my grandkids [to come], they immediately said yes," Todd said this morning near the spot where President John F. Kennedy was slain by a sniper's bullet. "So here we are."

The Todds had plenty of company: Dozens of people - tourists and locals, young and old - visited the site where the president's motorcade passed the Texas School Book Depository.

Prior to the fascist, destructive, genocidal US-UK-Israeli occupation of Iraq, Sunni and Shia, Muslims and Christians, Arabs and Kurds lived together in a harmonious atmosphere of brotherhood and unity that paralleled that of occupied Palestine before the Zionist occupation in 1948. It is egregious, disgusting, despicable, ignorant, absurd and erroneous on every factual basis to assert that the aforementioned ethnic and religious groups are now massacring each other, when in reality, they are being massacred by the murderous occupation armies.

Dividing Iraq via partition and driving it into a hell of ethnic cleansing was a Zionist plot that was originally designed in 1982 by Israeli foreign policy advisor Oded Yinon (1). The policies for destabilizing Iraq were reestablished in the 'Clean Break' papers written for mass murderer Benjamin Netanyahu by Zionist spy Richard Perle and several Zionist war criminals including Douglas Feith, David Wurmser, Meyrav Wurmser and Robert Loewenberg (2). Agents of the international terrorist group known as Mossad have been operating in Iraq as early as the 1950s, when the Zionist entity engaged in a false flag campaign of terror against the Iraqi-Jewish community (3). It has always been the absolute goal of the illegitimate usurping entity to destroy Iraq as a nation, so it can bring its 'Greater Israel' dream to fruition, settling its colonial extremists on the banks of the ancient Tigris and Euphrates rivers.

The bloody travesty of humanity that occurred on October 31st, 2010 which left 58 Iraqis dead in the Sayedat al-Najat Cathedral in Baghdad (4) was not the work of Al-Qaeda. The gunmen didn't belong to Islamic State of Iraq. The homicidal shooters weren't even Iraqi. The best way to honor the victims of senseless violence is to expose the truth of the attack. And the truth is, this massacre has Zionist fingerprints all over its blood-drenched structure.

Many people who think they have been keeping up with the revelations of the last several years about the destruction of the three high-rises in New York City on Sept. 11, 2001, will nonetheless be surprised to discover that the falling upper section of WTC 1 exhibited no measurable deceleration when it impacted the lower section. This is a startling revelation because it adds to the collection of "smoking guns" proving that the "collapse" of that building was not caused by the jetliner impact and ensuing fires.

Although theoretically possible, collapses of heavily constructed buildings like the Twin Towers and WTC 7 had never occurred prior to Sept. 11, 2001, without some form of "assistance." The reason for this is that they are built with significant reserve strength. The construction of each floor is designed to support several times the actual load above it.

The only way a collapse of a structure with significant reserve strength can continue is for the static load to be amplified in what is called dynamic loading. Dynamic loading occurs when the impacting object decelerates faster than the acceleration of gravity. For instance, if during an impact the falling object decelerates at three times the rate of gravity, it will impart a load on the object it strikes that is three times its static load. Dynamic loading was postulated in a paper used in the NIST report on the WTC collapses, written by Dr. Zdenek Bazant of Northwestern University. However, Dr. Bazant had not performed any actual measurements to support his theory.

Actual measurements of the descent of WTC 1 were performed independently in 2008 by physics instructor David Chandler of Fresno, California, and Professor Graeme MacQueen of Hamilton, Ontario. Both found no evidence of deceleration at any time during the descent. In fact the upper section of WTC 1 continuously accelerated, at approximately 2/3 of g (free-fall) during the first several seconds of the building's "collapse."

The contradiction caused by the lack of deceleration of the upper section of WTC 1 with the dynamic loading event postulated, but never measured, by Dr. Bazant or NIST, is discussed in a published paper entitled "The Missing Jolt," which can be found online at the Journal of 9/11 Studies and in the Technical Articles section of the AE911Truth website.

Proof that the necessary deceleration is observable in a collapse in which the momentum and kinetic energy of an upper section break the columns in the lower section is found in the demolition of several buildings in France. In recent years demolition engineers there have devised a system known as the Verinage technique, where they demolish buildings without the use of explosives. This technique uses hydraulic rams to break all of the columns in a couple of stories near the center of the building. The loss of vertical support in these stories then causes the upper section to fall unimpeded through a pre-determined distance before impacting the intact lower structure. Watch this video of one of these demolitions - of the Balzac-Vitry building.

Over the last century, the most astounding historical discoveries of man-made artifacts have often been accomplished by well-funded, highly experienced researchers. From the excavation of King Tut's tomb to the sighting of the sunken Titanic, stunning finds have required immense financial and human resources, as well as the leadership by distinguished. So, how did a mountain of never-before-seen footage used in NIST's World Trade Center investigations get exposed to the light of day last month? Was it the work of a billionaire adventurer? Not quite. You can thank an upstart non-profit, the International Center for 9/11 Studies, whose efforts have at last borne fruit.

The International Center for 9/11 Studies was founded in 2008 by Director James Gourley, a Texas lawyer who began questioning the events of 9/11 after watching a presentation given by David Ray Griffin on C-SPAN."

I was just floored by what I was hearing," Gourley explained, "and I've been looking into 9/11 ever since then."

In order to encourage a better understanding of the 9/11 attacks and promote scientific study of these tragic events, Gourley assembled a small team of trusted colleagues, which includes physics instructor David Chandler, activist Dr. Graeme MacQueen, and Justin Keogh, the Center's Chief Technical Officer. The Center has partnered with other key researchers in the past, including physicist Steven Jones and chemist Niels Harrit.

Since its inception, the Center has contributed to groundbreaking work on the technical analysis of the WTC building destructions. Gourley, who has a chemical engineering background, co-authored several papers that exposed evidence that the Twin Towers and WTC Building 7 were destroyed by means of controlled demolition. His critique of official-story defender Zdenek Bazant's crush down/crush up collapse theory was published as part of a formal discussion in the mainstream Journal of Engineering Mechanics. Gourley's contributions also extended to the peer-reviewed paper detailing the active thermitic material discovered in the WTC dust, which was published in the Bentham Open Chemical Physics Journal. In addition, the Center collaborated with Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth, Scholars for 9/11 Truth and Justice, and other scientists and engineers to submit 26 pages of comments on the NIST WTC 7 Draft Report within the three-week deadline.

Uncovering the data NIST used in its WTC investigations proved to be a little more difficult. The Center filed a FOIA Request with NIST on January 26, 2009, seeking disclosure of "all of the photographs and videos collected, reviewed, cited or in any other way used by NIST during its investigation of the World Trade Center building collapses." NIST initially ignored this request, and for months dismissed attempts by the Center to gain acknowledgment of its receipt. Undeterred, Gourley filed a lawsuit on May 28, 2009 to get the data released. Since then, NIST has been periodically turning over images and video from its archives. So far, the Center has received over 300 DVDs and several external hard disk drives related to the NIST Reports - more than three terabytes of data - and NIST has indicated that additional records will be released in the future.

This Halloween season, there is no book I could recommend more highly than Silvia Federici's brilliant Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation (Autonomedia 2004), which tells the dark saga of the Witch Hunt that consumed Europe for more than 200 years. In uncovering this forgotten history, Federici exposes the origins of capitalism in the heightened oppression of workers (represented by Shakespeare's character Caliban), and most strikingly, in the brutal subjugation of women. She also brings to light the enormous and colorful European peasant movements that fought against the injustices of their time, connecting their defeat to the imposition of a new patriarchal order that divided male from female workers. Today, as more and more people question the usefulness of a capitalist system that has thrown the world into crisis, Caliban and the Witch stands out as essential reading for unmasking the shocking violence and inequality that capitalism has relied upon from its very creation.

Who Were the Witches?

Parents putting a pointed hat on their young son or daughter before Trick-or-Treating might never pause to wonder this question, seeing witches as just another cartoonish Halloween icon like Frankenstein's monster or Dracula. But deep within our ritual lies a hidden history that can tell us important truths about our world, as the legacy of past events continues to affect us 500 years later. In this book, Silvia Federici takes us back in time to show how the mysterious figure of the witch is key to understanding the creation of capitalism, the profit-motivated economic system that now reigns over the entire planet.

The rescue of 33 miners in Chile is an extraordinary drama filled with pathos and heroism. It is also a media windfall for the Chilean government, whose every beneficence is recorded by a forest of cameras. One cannot fail to be impressed. However, like all great media events, it is a facade.

The accident that trapped the miners is not unusual in Chile and is the inevitable consequence of a ruthless economic system that has barely changed since the dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet. Copper is Chile's gold, and the frequency of mining disasters keeps pace with prices and profits. There are, on average, 39 fatal accidents every year in Chile's privatized mines. The San Jose mine, where the trapped men work, became so unsafe in 2007 it had to be closed - but not for long. On 30 July last, a labor department report warned again of "serious safety deficiencies," but the minister took no action. Six days later, the men were entombed.

For all the media circus at the rescue site, contemporary Chile is a country of the unspoken. At the Villa Grimaldi, in the suburbs of the capital Santiago, a sign says: "The forgotten past is full of memory." This was the torture center where hundreds of people were murdered and disappeared for opposing the fascism that General Pinochet and his business allies brought to Chile. Its ghostly presence is overseen by the beauty of the Andes, and the man who unlocks the gate used to live nearby and remembers the screams.

I was taken there one wintry morning in 2006 by Sara De Witt, who was imprisoned as a student activist and now lives in London. She was electrocuted and beaten, yet survived. Later, we drove to the home of Salvador Allende, the great democrat and reformer who perished when Pinochet seized power on 11 September 1973 - Latin America's own 9/11. His house is a silent white building without a sign or a plaque.

Cenk Uygur of the online news show The Young Turks interviewed former Governor of Minnesota Jesse Ventura earlier this year. Their discussion about the hidden history of the US is one you will never hear on mainstream media. Watch it and find out why...

Since The Great Flood hit Pakistan in July ...

• Many millions have been displaced, evacuated, stranded or lost their homes; numerous roads, schools and health clinics destroyed
  
  
• Hundreds of villages washed away
  
  
• Millions of livestock have perished; for the rural poor something akin to a Western stock market crash that wipes out years of savings
  
  
• Countless farms decimated, including critical crops like corn; officials say the damage is in the hundreds of millions of dollars and it does not appear that Pakistan will recover within the next few years
  
  
• Infectious diseases are rising sharply
  
  
• Airplanes of the United States of America have flown over Pakistan and dropped bombs on dozens of occasions [1]

I direct these remarks to readers who have to deal with Americans who turn into a stone wall upon hearing the United States accused of acting immorally; America, they are convinced, means well; our motives are noble. And if we do do something that looks bad, and the badness can't easily be covered up or explained away ... well, great powers have always done things like that, we're no worse than the other great powers of history, and a lot better than most. God bless America.

A certain percentage of such people do change eventually and stop rationalizing; this happens usually after being confronted X-number of times with evidence of the less-than-beautiful behavior of their government around the world. The value of X of course varies with the individual; so don't give up trying to educate the hardened Americans you come in contact with. You never know when your enlightening them about a particular wickedness of their favorite country will be the straw that breaks their imperialist-loving back. (But remember the warning from Friedrich Schiller of Germany: Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens. - "With stupidity even the gods struggle in vain.")