President George W. Bush was in his stand-up comedian role when he declared that he wanted to be remembered as a fighter for human rights.

Seldom has a fighter for human rights amassed Bush’s death toll. According to Information Clearing House, Bush’s invasion and occupation of Iraq has resulted in 1,297,997 dead Iraqis. Millions more have been wounded, and millions are displaced. Bush’s legions have taken out weddings, funerals, kid’s soccer games, hospitals, and mosques.

And that’s before we come to Afghanistan.

In Afghanistan “we don’t do body counts” declared a commander of Bush’s imperial legions. But the thousands of dead civilians and school children have rallied Afghans to the Taliban, whose lightly armed fighters have retaken most of the country from the Unipower.

The Taliban doesn’t have an air force, or cluster bombs, or drones, or “smart missiles,” or tanks, or satellite capability. The Taliban has Afghan resistance to occupation.
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The Western media can either catch up with the agenda instead of trying to follow the Zionist agenda by continuing to peddle big lies. The viewing piblic have largely lost trust in the mainstream media, especially in the wake of Iraq.

Quite simply, the public has become cynical and jaded and can not be lied to any more. if the mainstream media is to regain any credibility journalists need to challenge israeli and Western leaders.

The truth is a powerful weapon and it is true that… Read more »

While the Holocaust suffering of the Jews lasted for six long apocalyptic years, the suffering and persecution of many Palestinians has gone on for more than three decades and is no less cataclysmic for the victims, some displaced in 1948 are still living in refugee camps with generations growing up and dying in these camps. With children being born in refugee camps in appalling conditions in the sniper gun-sights of the Israeli soldiers, and dying in the same camps under a hail of Israeli tank shells, never having seen the outside world, and never having entertained any hope of escape from their predicament, in their innocence they ask what makes the Jews suffering an holocaust and theirs merely murder that the world can tolerate as if it was an ordinary street crime? Millions are being held captives in their own homeland with daily humiliations and torture, treatment that one would not met out to a dog. Killing them in small numbers at a time on a daily basis and wounding many more so that they would eventually die off as cripples but not raise the alarm in the rest of the world because numbers seem to define when mass killing is called a genocide and when it isn’t. ( Chapter 3 , http://prisonersofthecave.org ) Read more »

Free DVDs available for Gaza House Parties

Inform and Mobilize your Community about Gaza, the West Bank, and the History of Injustice!

While supplies last, If Americans Knew is providing FREE DVDs of the award-winning documentary Occupation 101 (View Clips.) to people who will hold screenings for friends, family, neighbors, community members, etc.

By John Pilger, Jan 9, 2009
The lying silence of those who know.
“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.

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By Tony Karon, Rootless Cosmopolitan, January 9, 2009

Repeating behaviors that have produced catastrophic failures and expecting a different result is insane; and when a person’s psychotic behavior puts himself those around him in immediate physical danger, the responsibility of those who claim to be his friends is to restrain him. But even as Waltz With Bashir shows in multiplexes across the world as a grim reminder of the precedent for Israel’s brutal march of folly in Gaza, the U.S. (and the editors of the New York Times and Washington Post) insist that there is a sanity and rationality to sending one of the world’s most powerful armies into a giant refugee camp to rend the flesh and crush the bones of those who stand in its way — whether in defiance or by being unlucky enough to have been born of the wrong tribe and be huddling in the wrong place. By fighting its way to their citadel, they would have us believe, Israel can destroy Hamas and usher in a golden age of peace. Or, to borrow from the casual callousness of Condi Rice during the last such display of futile brutality, we are witnessing, again, the “birth pangs of a new Middle East.” Israel failed in 2006, just as in 2002 and 1982. This time, they tell us, will be different.

And then the horror unfolds, as it always does — the hundreds of civilians butchered as they cowered in what they were told were places of safety, mocking the Israel’s torrent of self congratulation over its restraint and its brilliant intelligence — and the hopelessly out-gunned enemy manages to survive, as he does every time. And by surviving, grows stronger politically. No matter how many are killed, the leaders targeted by Israel’s military are endlessly regenerated in the fertile soil of grievance and resentment born of the circumstances Israel has created. Circumstances it has created, but which it, and its most fervent backers refuse to acknowledge, much less redress. [continued…]

From the beginning of history, those who get corrupted by power have yet to learn that violence doesn’t resolve anything. Bombing is not a problem. War is not a solution. Heart and mind can never be won with brutality.

and other atrocities

Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani on Wednesday summarily dismissed his National Security Adviser Major General (retd) Mehmud Ali Durrani for being a bit too candid on the tricky issue of Mumbai carnage suspect Ajmal Kasab, “without having taken me into confidence”. more….

There is hardly any difference between Musharraf, Hussain Haqqani, Rehman Malik and Mehmud Durrani. They are all agents of the neocons and zionists to varying degrees. The unfortunate thing in the case of Durrani is the attitude in Pakistan. When it comes to India, everyone is hyper sensitive. Durrani comments were not undermining Pakistan’s security and independence as much Hussain Haqqani’s routine statements that justify the US aggression - on going aggression - against Pakistan. But no one thinks of sacking him for justifying and further intensifying the US war on Pakistan.

It is not just that the neocons-zionist lost one point person on a key position but that they also probably got a lesson - if they did - that their using India to attack and weaken Paksitan will backfire big time. It will turn the nuclear armed sub-continent into a total human catastrophe. So far Pakistan have taken lots of blows from the US, but a single adventure from India will lead to disastrous consequences. May be that what the neocons-zionists want.

In his system, anti-Pakistan political parties – Zardari PP, MQM and ANP – would rule in perpetuity, the independence of judiciary and neutrality of public servants abolished, and the armed forces replaced by militias of the ruling parties. Read more »

That trauma may last a lifetime, with devastating consequences for Palestinian society, according to psychologists who have studied the impact of two decades of bloody conflict in the Gaza strip on children who have grown up under army watchtowers, dodging bullets, seeing classmates shot as they sat at the next desk, watching tanks and bulldozers destroy thousands of homes.

Even after the Israelis pulled Jewish settlers out of Gaza in 2005, children and their parents have had to endure regular rocket attacks and punishing sonic booms when Israeli jets broke the sound barrier over the territory. Now there is the bombing and fighting that has left nearly 700 Palestinians dead in less than a fortnight.

To understand a fraction of the plight of Palestinians, imagine one night with your children in your kitchen like this. Imagine all the mayhem and show of barbarity in Gaza in one city of the biggest supporter of Israeli crimes for one day only…. Imagine the reaction. Imagine the shock. Imagine the response…

It is absolutely not easy. Think of one murder in a community. Imagine one drive-by shooting or a the consequences of a lone shooter on the rampage. Think of the calls for counseling and psychological support to heal the victim community and kids in schools. But for Gaza and the rest of occupied Palestine, all the unimaginable shock and horror is all considered normal - a daily routine.

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According to Afghan President Hamid Karzai “during a coalition operation, 17 civilians including women and children were killed among militants in Laghman province.” The United States has denied the claim, insisting that only militants were killed in the attack on the Taliban’s roadside bomb network….Such incidents were rampant in 2008, and the US traditionally has denied reports of civilian deaths for long periods after such incidents.