Tag Archives: palestinian

Trump Learns that Arabs Want a Palestinian Peace Deal

by DelphiaPridgen4 Posted on May 22, 2017

Mother Jones

In some ways, it’s sort of entertaining to have a president who’s literally learning the most basic facts of the world on the job:

President Trump began a two-day visit to Israel on Monday with a blunt assessment for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: If Israel really wants peace with its Arab neighbors, the cost will be resolving the generations-old standoff with the Palestinians….“I was deeply encouraged by my conversations with Muslim world leaders in Saudi Arabia, including King Salman, who I spoke to at great length. King Salman feels very strongly and, I can tell you, would love to see peace with Israel and the Palestinians.”

It’s an open question whether a Palestinian peace deal would really produce comity with the rest of the Arab world, but it’s certainly a prerequisite and has been for decades. But I guess Trump hadn’t really considered that a serious obstacle until he heard it face-to-face from the king.

Anyway, we all know where this is going, right? Benjamin Netanyahu wants to stay on good terms with Trump, and Trump wants a peace deal. Everyone on the planet knows perfectly well that Netanyahu has no interest in this, but he’ll string Trump along anyway. A “peace process” will be set up, Jared Kushner will preside over a meeting or two, and Netanyahu will settle back and wait for some kind of bombing or other terror attack to declare that he tried but the Palestinians just can’t be dealt with. Every neocon in America will immediately jump on the bandwagon and insist that this is the final straw. Things were so hopeful thanks to Trump’s goodwill, but they bombed innocent women and children while Israel was earnestly trying to make peace! They’re savages! Netanyahu will ask Trump for a statement of support, and of course Trump will provide it because terrorists are bad. And that will be that.

The whole thing will be a ridiculous charade, and everyone except Trump will know it.

See original article: 

Trump Learns that Arabs Want a Palestinian Peace Deal

Posted in alo, Everyone, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Trump Learns that Arabs Want a Palestinian Peace Deal

If CNN Asks the GOP Contenders This Question Tonight, It Will Make Them Squirm

by EulahDittmer Posted on December 15, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

At CNBC’s Republican presidential debate in October, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie lashed out at the moderators after they asked a question about whether daily fantasy sports—a growing and lucrative industry—should be considered a form of gambling and regulated by the government. “Are we really talking about getting the government involved in fantasy football?” he bellowed. “We have $19 trillion in debt, we have people out of work, we have ISIS and Al Qaeda attacking us, and we’re talking about fantasy football? Can we stop? How about this? How about we get the government to do what they’re supposed to be doing: secure our borders, protect our people and support American values and American families. Enough on fantasy football. People play, who cares?”

The rant garnered applause, but it’s likely that Christie won’t be engaging in similar theatrics tonight if the topic of online gambling comes up. That’s because GOP megadonor Sheldon Adelson will be sitting front and center at the debate, which will be held in the billionaire’s Las Vegas casino. A fierce opponent of online gambling, Adelson has said he will spend “whatever it takes” to ban it.

So far, the question of whether daily fantasy sports qualify as online gambling has not been definitely settled, and none of the current attempts to regulate online gambling have directly addressed daily fantasy sports. But if it is deemed a form of gambling, it would seem to be a likely target for opponents of online gambling.

In 2012, Adelson and his wife, Miriam, spent at least $92 million backing Republican candidates, and they are widely expected channel the same amount into this election. But the Adelsons have yet to throw their weight behind a GOP contender—which means that what the candidates do or don’t say could be a deciding factor on whether they win the “Adelson primary.” Along with online gambling, the candidates will likely face questions on several other pet Adelson topics—drug legalization, for instance, which Adelson opposes but which several GOP candidates have said should be left up to each state.

Continue Reading »

See the article here: 

If CNN Asks the GOP Contenders This Question Tonight, It Will Make Them Squirm

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on If CNN Asks the GOP Contenders This Question Tonight, It Will Make Them Squirm

The Era of Dog Whistles Is Now Over

by KatherineUbc Posted on December 9, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Steve Benen makes a useful point today about Donald Trump’s brass-balled religious bigotry:

Jeb Bush told MSNBC’s Chuck Todd yesterday that the Trump campaign is relying on “dog-whistle proposals to prey on people’s fears.” That’s half-right — Trump is clearly preying on people’s fears, but these aren’t “dog-whistle proposals”; they’re the exact opposite. The whole point of dog-whistle politics is subtlety and coded language. Trump’s racism, however, is explicit and overt. “So what? They’re Muslim” is less of a dog whistle and more of a bullhorn.

Even Jesse Helms felt it necessary to talk about the “bloc vote”—wink wink, nudge nudge. In other contexts, candidates will use phrases familiar to evangelicals, or terms of art specific to deep knowledge of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or academese with a very specific meaning only to those in the know. Trump isn’t bothering with any of that. He thinks Muslims are all potential terrorists and he’s saying it just as loudly and as clearly as he can.

And guess what? It turns out that maybe you don’t need dog whistles after all. Republicans don’t need them because their base turns out to be pretty tolerant of outright bigotry. Democrats don’t need them because Republicans will just make up dog whistles of their own if they miss the meaning of the real ones (Agenda 21, hockey stick, etc.).

We should all hail our new era of two-fisted politics. Finally, we can just say all the stuff we’ve been holding back for so long. Doesn’t that sound great?

Original post – 

The Era of Dog Whistles Is Now Over

Posted in alo, bigo, Citizen, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Era of Dog Whistles Is Now Over

Report: The Obama Administration May Release Israeli Spy Jonathan Pollard

by AndresDFXspx Posted on July 24, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Much of the debate surrounding the nuclear deal with Iran announced last week has centered around Israel’s reaction—and what the United States might offer the Israeli government to tamp down its anger over the agreement. It turns out one of those things may be the freedom of convicted Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard.

Pollard, once a US Navy intelligence analyst, was convicted of espionage in 1985 and sentenced to life in prison. His release became a cause célèbre for many Israelis, and the country’s leaders have campaigned for years to have Pollard released. They have been unsuccessful up until now, but the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday afternoon that the US will soon allow Pollard to go free.

Israel has been the leading international critic of the Iran deal—Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called it a “stunning historic mistake” within hours of its completion—and the timing of the report gives the impression that Pollard’s release would be an olive branch to the Jewish state. But, as the Journal reports, “some U.S. officials strongly denied Friday there was any link between the Iran deal and Mr. Pollard’s prospective release, saying that any release decision would be made by the U.S. Parole Commission.” Pollard has also been a bargaining chip in previous US-Israeli diplomatic spats, most recently last year as the Obama administration sought concessions from Israel in order to salvage peace talks with the Palestinian Authority.

Pollard is approaching the 30-year mark of his life sentence, and is eligible for parole for the first time on November 21, 2015.

Originally posted here:  

Report: The Obama Administration May Release Israeli Spy Jonathan Pollard

Posted in Anchor, Casio, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Report: The Obama Administration May Release Israeli Spy Jonathan Pollard

Does Mike Huckabee Know Where the Ark of the Covenant Is Buried?

by KeenanAltman50 Posted on May 22, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Harry Moskoff wouldn’t immediately strike you as the guy to discover the true location of the Ark of the Covenant, the chest that supposedly once held the stone tablets on which the Ten Commandments were written. He was born in Canada, studied jazz at Berklee College of Music, worked in IT, and started a company that specialized in copyright infringement claims when he moved to Tel Aviv 10 years ago. But in his free time, the ordained rabbi has dabbled in biblical archeology, poring over ancient texts and contemporary works, in search of any unturned stone that might help him track down the ark.

“I came up with a theory via Maimonides as to where the ark is located, which I later discussed with rabbis and archeologists in Israel,” he told the Times of Israel in 2013. “It was a Jewish Da Vinci Code type project.” His grand theory? It’s been in Jerusalem all this time, buried underneath the courtyard of the Temple of Solomon. To promote his discovery, in 2013 he made a sci-fi movie called The A.R.K. Report.

Last year, Moskoff, who describes himself as a “Jewish Indiana Jones,” published a non-fiction book, also called The A.R.K. Report, chronicling his search for this legendary artifact, and he got a boost from a higher power of a different sort—former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, who is now a Republican presidential candidate.

“From the days of ancient history to the modern interest created by movies like ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark,’ there has been a dogged curiosity about the biblical ‘Ark of the Covenant,'” Huckabee wrote in a blurb. “Rabbi Harry Moskoff’s spellbinding book, ‘The Ark Report,’ takes curiosity to clarity and gives the reader an understanding of why the authenticity of the real Ark could be a game changer for the world.”

Huckabee had one good reason to endorse the Moskoff’s book—he was in it. Moskoff snagged a sit-down interview with the former governor and featured it prominently in the middle of the book. In this lengthy Q&A, Huckabee discussed a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (he was against it) and claimed the Obama administration was too cowardly to confront Iran. Huckabee, a onetime Baptist minister, also weighed in on Markoff’s theory regarding the ark, noting that modern-day archeology has consistently proven that the stories of the Bible are true:

Moskoff’s’s theories go beyond the ark’s location. He claims that the CIA is “interested” in his “findings” and that the spy agency has interfered with archeological digs to prevent the discovery of biblical artifacts. Why would the spy service do this? Because the unearthing of such items, including the ark, would strengthen Israel’s claim to disputed territory.

So is a top-secret US agency conspiring to hide the Ark of the Covenant and other biblical evidence from the rest of the world for covert geopolitical motives? If elected president, will Huckabee undo this CIA cover-up and also reveal the ark and its godly power to all? In any event, we’ve seen this movie before:

Link – 

Does Mike Huckabee Know Where the Ark of the Covenant Is Buried?

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, oven, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Does Mike Huckabee Know Where the Ark of the Covenant Is Buried?

Pope Francis Will Officially Recognize Palestinian Statehood

by LyndaSifford Posted on May 13, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

The Vatican is set to sign a new treaty to formally recognize the state of Palestine. The statement was released by a joint commission of Vatican and Palestinian officials on Wednesday, and indicated an agreement had been “concluded,” with an official signing to take place soon.

Though the Vatican has long hinted at supporting an official recognition, Wednesday’s news signals the Vatican’s first legal shift from recognizing the Palestinian Liberation Organization to the state of Palestine, according to the AP. In 2012, the Vatican applauded the United Nations’ decision to formally observe a Palestinian state.

Shortly after the statement’s release, Israel expressed disappointment in the Vatican’s decision.

“This move does not promote the peace process and distances the Palestinian leadership from returning to direct and bilateral negotiations,” the Israeli foreign ministry said, according to the AP. “Israel will study the agreement and will consider its steps accordingly.”

View the original here: 

Pope Francis Will Officially Recognize Palestinian Statehood

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Pope Francis Will Officially Recognize Palestinian Statehood

The Often Overlooked Role of Natural Gas in the Israel-Palestine Conflict

by FideliaHupp Posted on March 27, 2015

Mother Jones

Known oil and gas fields in the Levant Basin US Energy Information Administration/Wikimedia

This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

Guess what? Almost all the current wars, uprisings, and other conflicts in the Middle East are connected by a single thread, which is also a threat: these conflicts are part of an increasingly frenzied competition to find, extract, and market fossil fuels whose future consumption is guaranteed to lead to a set of cataclysmic environmental crises.

Amid the many fossil-fueled conflicts in the region, one of them, packed with threats, large and small, has been largely overlooked, and Israel is at its epicenter. Its origins can be traced back to the early 1990s when Israeli and Palestinian leaders began sparring over rumored natural gas deposits in the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Gaza. In the ensuing decades, it has grown into a many-fronted conflict involving several armies and three navies. In the process, it has already inflicted mindboggling misery on tens of thousands of Palestinians, and it threatens to add future layers of misery to the lives of people in Syria, Lebanon, and Cyprus. Eventually, it might even immiserate Israelis.

Resource wars are, of course, nothing new. Virtually the entire history of Western colonialism and post-World War II globalization has been animated by the effort to find and market the raw materials needed to build or maintain industrial capitalism. This includes Israel’s expansion into, and appropriation of, Palestinian lands. But fossil fuels only moved to center stage in the Israeli-Palestinian relationship in the 1990s, and that initially circumscribed conflict only spread to include Syria, Lebanon, Cyprus, Turkey, and Russia after 2010.

The Poisonous History of Gazan Natural Gas

Back in 1993, when Israel and the Palestinian Authority (PA) signed the Oslo Accords that were supposed to end the Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank and create a sovereign state, nobody was thinking much about Gaza’s coastline. As a result, Israel agreed that the newly created PA would fully control its territorial waters, even though the Israeli navy was still patrolling the area. Rumored natural gas deposits there mattered little to anyone, because prices were then so low and supplies so plentiful. No wonder that the Palestinians took their time recruiting British Gas (BG)—a major player in the global natural gas sweepstakes—to find out what was actually there. Only in 2000 did the two parties even sign a modest contract to develop those by-then confirmed fields.

Continue Reading »

Read this article:

The Often Overlooked Role of Natural Gas in the Israel-Palestine Conflict

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, organic, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Often Overlooked Role of Natural Gas in the Israel-Palestine Conflict

One Gaza Family’s Heartbreaking Story

by BrandieRitz Posted on December 10, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

One Family in Gaza from Jen Marlowe on Vimeo.

This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

Rubble. That’s been the one constant for the Awajah family for as long as I’ve known them.

Four months ago, their home was demolished by the Israeli military—and it wasn’t the first time that Kamal, Wafaa, and their children had been through this. For the last six years, the family has found itself trapped in a cycle of destruction and reconstruction; their home either a tangle of shattered concrete and twisted rebar or about to become one.

I first met the Awajah family in August 2009, in the tent where they were living. I filmed them as they told me what had happened to them eight months earlier during the military invasion that Israel called Operation Cast Lead and said was a response to rocket fire from the Gaza Strip.

Continue Reading »

More – 

One Gaza Family’s Heartbreaking Story

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Pines, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on One Gaza Family’s Heartbreaking Story

6 Basic Assumptions About the Middle East That the Washington Consensus Gets Dead Wrong

by JesusEYOSrkuspb Posted on November 25, 2014

Mother Jones

This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

“Iraq no longer exists.” My young friend M, sipping a cappuccino, is deadly serious. We are sitting in a scruffy restaurant across the street from the Cathedral of St. John the Divine on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. It’s been years since we’ve last seen each another. It may be years before our paths cross again. As if to drive his point home, M repeats himself: “Iraq just doesn’t exist.”

His is an opinion grounded in experience. As an enlisted soldier, he completed two Iraq tours, serving as a member of a rifle company, before and during the famous Petraeus “surge.” After separating from the Army, he went on to graduate school where he is now writing a dissertation on insurgencies. Choosing the American war in Iraq as one of his cases, M has returned there to continue his research. Indeed, he was heading back again that very evening. As a researcher, his perch provides him with an excellent vantage point for taking stock of the ongoing crisis, now that the Islamic State, or IS, has made it impossible for Americans to sustain the pretense that the Iraq War ever ended.

Few in Washington would endorse M’s assertion, of course. Inside the Beltway, policymakers, politicians, and pundits take Iraq’s existence for granted. Many can even locate it on a map. They also take for granted the proposition that it is incumbent upon the United States to preserve that existence. To paraphrase Chris Hedges, for a certain group of Americans, Iraq is the cause that gives life meaning. For the military-industrial complex, it’s the gift that keeps on giving.

Continue Reading »

This article is from:

6 Basic Assumptions About the Middle East That the Washington Consensus Gets Dead Wrong

Posted in Anchor, Casio, Citizen, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Oster, Pines, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on 6 Basic Assumptions About the Middle East That the Washington Consensus Gets Dead Wrong

How the US is Bankrolling Israel

by WadeScheffler Posted on February 10, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

We Americans have funny notions about foreign aid. Recent polls show that, on average, we believe 28 percent of the federal budget is eaten up by it, and that, in a time of austerity, this gigantic bite of the budget should be cut back to 10 percent. In actual fact, barely 1 percent of the federal budget goes to foreign aid of any kind.

In this case, however, truth is at least as strange as fiction. Consider that the top recipient of foreign aid over the past three decades isn’t some impoverished land filled with starving kids, but a wealthy nation with a per-head gross domestic product on par with the European Union average, and higher than that of Italy, Spain, or South Korea.

Consider also that this top recipient of such aid—nearly all of it military since 2008—has been busily engaged in what looks like a nineteenth-century-style colonization project. In the late 1940s, our beneficiary expelled some 700,000 indigenous people from the land it was claiming. In 1967, our client seized some contiguous pieces of real estate and ever since has been colonizing these territories with nearly 650,000 of its own people. It has divided the conquered lands with myriad checkpoints and roads accessible only to the colonizers and is building a 440-mile wall around (and cutting into) the conquered territory, creating a geography of control that violates international law.

Continue Reading »

Link:  

How the US is Bankrolling Israel

Posted in alo, Anchor, Casio, Citizen, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on How the US is Bankrolling Israel