The killing of Hezbollah’s Imad Moughniya

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This Hollywood-type approach is not new.

By Raid Khoury

Slain Hezbollah leader Imad Moughniya

Picture: Slain Hezbollah commander Imad Moughniya.

Imad Moughniya’s death, like his life, will remain shrouded in mystery and secrecy, but what few things we can learn for certain about this person’s life we already have. First, the image of the man created in the Western media, especially the US corporate media with its typically superficial, and simplistic “good vs bad” story lines should be dismissed as a largely fictional account.

The focus on a single, elusive, shadowy figure lurking somewhere in the dark preparing to kill Americans and Jews in cold blood is good for ratings, and compatible with the overall anti-Arab, anti-Muslim bias that characterizes US news coverage but can hardly be considered reliable journalism. This Hollywood-type approach is not new. Before Moughniya, Carlos “the Jackal” and Abu Nidal were featured stars in the sensational news-entertainment industry. As a result we do not have an accurate picture of Moughniya (which may not be possible anyway), but more importantly, we have been presented with a distorted reality of the decades-long, bloody struggle between Israel and Hizballah.

Second, the history of Hizballah, founded in 1982 soon after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon is mainly a history of resistance (Hizballah also has a network of social services catering to the needs of a large segment of society traditionally ignored by the Lebanese state) to the Israeli military occupation of Lebanon, and contrary to prevailing propaganda, was conducted ethically.

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The Israeli Agenda and the Scorecard of the Zionist Power Configuration for 2008

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By James Petras - February 2008

The Ashkenazo-zionist Agenda and the Scorecard of the Zionist Power Configuration for 2008

The Israeli Agenda openly defended, publically practiced and aggressively pursued by the Zionist power configuration (ZPC) has greatly influenced the US Presidential elections and the likely future course of Washington’s Middle East policy.

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US Ashkenazo-zionist magazine, ‘Heeb’, shows ‘How to cook a gentile’ cartoons, February 2008.

The strategy of the Jewish state is the complete Zionization of Palestine, the takeover of land, water, offshore gas (estimated to be worth $4 billion dollars) and other economic resources and the total dispossession of the Palestinian people. Tel Aviv’s tactics have included daily military assaults, giant walls ghettoizing entire Palestinian towns, military outposts and controls undermining commerce and production to force bankruptcy, poverty, severe deprivation and population flight. The second priority of the Israeli colonial state is to bolster the Jewish state’s political and military supremacy in the Middle East, using preposterous arguments of ‘survival’ and ‘existential threats’. The key postulate of Israeli Middle East policy is to destroy or intimidate the principle adversaries of its Zionization of Palestine and its expansionist Middle East policy. In pursuit of that policy, it invaded southern Lebanon to destroy Hezbollah, bombing neighborhoods and critical infrastructure in Beirut and other cities, bombed Syria as a provocation.

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Death and Darkness in Gaza, People are dying, Help us!

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Death and Darkness in Gaza, People are dying, Help us!A humanitarian crisis is underway as the Gaza Strip’s only power plant began to shut down on Sunday, and the tiny coastal territory entered its third full day without shipments of vital food and fuel supplies due to Israel’s punitive sanctions.

The Gaza Strip’s power plant has completely shut down on Sunday because it no longer has the fuel needed to keep running. One of the plant’s two electricity-generating turbines had already shut down by noon.

This will drastically reduce output to 25 or 30 megawatts, down from the 65 megawatts the plant produces under normal conditions. By Sunday evening the plant will shut down completely, leaving large swaths of the Gaza Strip in darkness.

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Bill Hijarah

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No word, no poetry, no art, nothing that can be expressed verbally or otherwise may convey the majesty and the glory of the human spirit as it was expressed by this Palestinian mother and her children.

by Fred Habachi*

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No, Bill Hijarah is not someone’s name. In fact, it’s not a name at all. It’s a phrase in Arabic. To be phonetically more accurate, it should have been written: “be al hijarah,” or “b’ll hijarah,” which is how it sounds when you say it fast. The phrase means: with the stones.

“B’ll hijarah, b’ll hijarah” is a cry I once heard while watching the news on television some decade ago or maybe longer. The cry became so engraved in my soul, I can never watch a spin doctor labor to denigrate the Palestinian people without the scene which gave birth to that cry come to memory and scream at me: “Don’t believe a word of this.”

The scene is that of a young Palestinian woman running out of her house, one toddler on her arm and another toddler following her. She was not running away from something, she was running ahead to confront something. That something was an Israeli tank that was bigger than the house. The monster tank had come to demolish the house, and upon hearing it approach, the woman came out of the house with her children. She put down the child on her arm, picked up a stone and cried out to the toddlers: “b’ll hijarah, b’ll hijarah,” as she threw the first stone at the advancing tank hoping against hope to stop its advance on the house. Read more



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Documentary - The Israeli Lobby and its Impact on US Foreign Policy

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Excellent documentary from 2007 about the Israeli lobby and its impact on US foreign policy. The first minute and 20 seconds are entirely in dutch- but the rest of documentary is in English (occasionally dutch narrated but you won’t miss a thing if you don’t understand it). Featuring John J. Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago’s Department of Political Science and Stephen M.Walt of Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government who wrote the paper The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.

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This video can be downloaded to your computer here.

Update:

Thanks to the kindness of Ms. Marije Meerman we know how can we support this great investigative journalism and ducomentary program (Tegenlicht = Backlight) on VPRO, by purchasing the dvd through email: tegenlicht@vpro.nl.



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Without Borders

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Without a border, there can be no peace. And without peace, it is the height of chutzpa to demand something from the other side that we totally refuse to do ourselves.

by Uri Avnery

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MARCH 24, 2007-Incredible! In Palestinian schoolbooks, there is no trace of the Green Line! They do not recognize the existence of Israel even in the 1967 borders! They say that the “Zionist gangs” stole the country from the Arabs! That’s how they poison the minds of their children!

These blood-curdling revelations were published this week in Israel and around the world. The conclusion is self-evident: the Palestinian Authority, which is responsible for the schoolbooks, cannot be a partner in peace negotiations.

What a shock!

Truth is, there is nothing new here. Every few years, when all the other arguments for refusing to speak with the Palestinian leadership wear thin, the ultimate argument pops up again: Palestinian schoolbooks call for the destruction of Israel!

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Terrorized by ‘War on Terror’

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How a Three-Word Mantra Has Undermined America

by Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski

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The “war on terror” has created a culture of fear in America. The Bush administration’s elevation of these three words into a national mantra since the horrific events of 9/11 has had a pernicious impact on American democracy, on America’s psyche and on U.S. standing in the world. Using this phrase has actually undermined our ability to effectively confront the real challenges we face from fanatics who may use terrorism against us.

The damage these three words have done — a classic self-inflicted wound — is infinitely greater than any wild dreams entertained by the fanatical perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks when they were plotting against us in distant Afghan caves. The phrase itself is meaningless. It defines neither a geographic context nor our presumed enemies. Terrorism is not an enemy but a technique of warfare — political intimidation through the killing of unarmed non-combatants.

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The IgnoramUS

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by Anwaar Hussain

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Most Americans don’t know that back in November 1999 when George W Bush, the then Republican frontrunner in the United States presidential elections, was subjected to a little foreign policy quiz by a Boston TV, he did not know the names of two leaders, among others, who represented about one-fifth of humanity…the leaders of Pakistan and India.

Most Americans don’t know that such was the state of the awareness of a man about to be handed over the reins of the most awesome military machine of the most powerful country on planet earth and let loose upon the world.

Most Americans don’t know that their country’s foreign policy has been held hostage to the wellbeing of the state of Israel for the past about four decades and all the world’s major crisis, including the so called ‘war on Terror’, can be traced, one way or the other, to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and America’s extremely partisan Israel-centric role in that. Read more



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The Neocons’ Greatest Sin

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by Anwaar Hussain

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Neocons - They got their nickname out of defecting from the Democratic camp to the Conservative camp (therefore: “new Conservatives”), and not for renewing Conservatism or the like.

Of all the sins that the Neocons have committed, of all their deeds and misdeeds, of all their devious misconducts, there is one act of theirs that by far surpasses all the rest of their acts of omission and commission. And that is giving rise to a tidal wave of resurgence of Islamic radicalism from Africa to Indonesia and leaving people like me in the lurch.

Allow me to explain.

I was born in a moderate Pakistan and grew up to adulthood in General Zia’s America inspired Jihadi times. I witnessed firsthand the invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviet juggernaut and the sudden mushrooming of American funded Jihadi outfits all over Pakistan to counter that. I saw the eventual humbling of the Soviet forces by those resistance fighters and the resultant demise of the Soviet Union. I was younger then and was awed by the reported heroics of these Islamic fighters who stood in the way of a godless, alien force that wanted to subjugate not just Afghanistan but all the bordering countries into absolute submission. I could rattle out the names of all the 17 or so resistance organizations in Pakistan and Iran that were conducting operations inside Afghanistan. I remembered the names of all of their leaders. They were my heroes. Read more



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The Truth of Israel’s War

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by Anwaar Hussain

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The truth is that organizations like Hizbollah and Hamas are there because Israel is there and not vice versa.

As the land of Lebanon continues to be drenched with the blood of its own children, the world stands in a hushed silence watching this murderous crime from the safety of the sidelines. The Muslim world itself, with nary a peep from it’s corpulent leadership, remains busy in brave exchanges of ‘please-say-no-to-Israeli-aggression’ emails and imploring Allah to come to the aid of Israel’s victims.It is time to shout the truth of Israel’s war from the rooftops.

The truth is that organizations like Hizbollah and Hamas are there because Israel is there and not vice versa. Read more



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Anwaar’s articles appear simultaneously here at Truth Spring and at Soul Vibes in The Pakistan Tribune.


US loses its status as economic world power
DAVOS, Switzerland, 2008
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