shame on you

Israeli soldiers targeting Palestinian family from Hebron H2.

Germany wants to show that no challenge to austerity and neoliberalism will be accepted and it wants a regime change in Athens, a government by the people who created the Greece state debt in the first place and did nothing to push through those "reforms" now demanded from Syriza.

But these fathers of tax evasion and culture of bribery are now loyal converts to austerity, although not to deconstructing their own web of cleptocracy and it's austerity that Germany demands, not believable reforms.

Old chairmen of Bank of Greece are polished off to be PM and ministers in a "technocratic government" until new rightwing government looks likely in polls.

This is a coup. Merkel whines about "lost trust", but why on earth should Syriza do what that loyal hand puppet of Berlin, Samaras, signed on. Samaras, who was treated kindly by Germany while not doing those "reforms" beyond austerity.

According to some estimate, there are up to 200 billion euros worth of money in Swiss bank accounts by Greek tax evaders. Has the EU offered help to regain those billions? Of course not.  They are by the same old elite which EU  now wants to re-instate.

A Gigantic Jigsaw Puzzle: The Epicurean Inscription of Diogenes of Oinoa...

20 years of search and solitude for Srebrenica mothers

Education For Occupied Children

Commenting  http://www.economist.com/comment/2778574#comment-2778574:

What The Economist is basically saying is that from it's point of view Greece doesn't need nor should have an elected government, because the fanatical neoliberal organs and their henchmen know better.
They know better, the Greek government is wrong in everything and should just obey. No point in Greek government or independence then, is it?

The obsession about retirement age is especially laughable, considering the sky-high unemployment among the younger age groups. Every year that people over 60 work is taken from the the youth, sidelining them more from the job market. It's just fanatical ideology that makes the Troika demand it.

And the German posturing about debts is laughable. In the Paris Peace Treaty in 1947 Germany was ordered to pay my country reparations for it's schorched earth policy. We paid our own war reparations by 1952. To this day East Germany, West Germany and united Germany have paid us exactly 0 euros and have always resisted and still resist any talk about them paying those debts.

The Germans love the myths about their economy and national characters, but at the end of the day they are people who burn your provincial capital and for 68 years refuse to pay the compensation they were ordered to pay, while pretending to be avatars of economic competence, prudence and thriftiness that all should emulate.

When it comes to Greece, the Germans bribed Greek politicians, officials and military to buy German military hardware by the billions, part of it broken when delivered, like some of the submarines. Now all those bribes are forgotten by the Germans. More sickening posturing from them.

DinoZoo - Beseiged Gaza creates an amazing dinosaur attraction

Commenting: Middle East peace needs UN resolution

1. Every time Palestinians have made or offered a 'hard compromise' (hard for them, not for Israel), US and Israeli governments have seen it as a weakness and upped their demands.

In 2009 PA was ready to give up 50 % of E. Jerusalem. Both US and Israeli governments refused this offer and demanded that PA gives up the ENTIRE E. Jerusalem.

US' negotiator Mitchell got angry on PA for even trying to hold to part of E. Jerusalem, demanded that Palestinians give it up and then prepare "for more hard compromises" aka to give up more land.

Enter Kerry, whose Likudnik team demanded that Palestinians give up 90 % of E. Jerusalem. Immediately Israel's government demanded that E. Jerusalem or Jerusalem overall can't be even MENTIONED in a peace agreement...

There are over 300 000 Palestinians in E. Jerusalem. Israel has kept running water cut off from E. Jerusalem's Shuafat refugee camp now for 13 months, destroyed homes and businesses in most days of the week, announces new illegal settlement building in E. Jerusalem each week and has made it clear that it won't accept Palestinian presence in E. Jerusalem if it gets to keep it. But those 300 000 Palestinians are "facts on the ground" that PA can't ignore.

Kerry's plan would have left up to 700 000 Palestinians in areas that would have been annexed by Israel. All evidence is that those areas would have been ethnically cleansed and the bantustans on what would have remained of West Bank would have become more crowded.

But US attitude is immortalized in Dennis Ross' own words in his memoirs that "Palestinians don't need land, Israel does." It's totally in contradiction with reality on the ground.

Lastly, the refugees: US and Israel take it for granted that refugees can't return (when they at the same time think it's right that everyone with 1 Jewish grand-parent can move into Palestinians' ancestral lands) and that refugees must forever be left rotting in refugee camps, outcasts from the society around them. The fact that Syrian and Iraqi conflicts have already turned that applecart of theirs has not - as is the case with them always when it comes to Palestinians - registered. There is likely no place for Palestinian refugees in any "new Syria", whoever wins. Lebanon can be engulfed too.

Does USA and Israeli govs really expect that Europe will take in hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees without demanding that Israel shares the burden? Apparently they do, like they still think that they can force Abbas or some successor to sign of the rights of refugees, sign of E. Jerusalem, Jordan Valley etc.

US and Israeli govs are utterly blind to the "red lines" that Palestinian leaders can't cross, whose breaking the people will not accept. Same goes with Europe. USA is far from Palestine, Europe is near and will be affected by ways that it must take into account and which the US politicians gorging themselves on Israeli Lobby money in Washington D.C. utterly fail to take into account.

2. UN didn't actually partition Palestine, and of course the actual dismemberment has been a horrific mess.

UN tried to partition Palestine, claiming Balfour declaration as an excuse, even when British government already in early 1920s said it was not binding. Palestinians would have gotten only 44 %, divided into four different, separate areas. The Anglo-American proposal in 1945 would have given Palestinians almost 60 %.

Kosmos Enough Campaign

Commemorating 67 years of Al Nakba in Ni'lin

Nakba Day 2015 Protest Downing Street London

Nakba Day Outside Downing Street (with a reading dubbed over)

67 Years of Occupation - Nakba (The Catastrophe)

New Israeli government plans to annex 1/3 of West Bank by 'legalizing' illegal settlements - International Middle East Media Center

New Israeli government plans to annex 1/3 of West Bank by 'legalizing' illegal settlements - International Middle East Media Center

New Israeli government plans to annex 1/3 of West Bank by 'legalizing' illegal settlements - International Middle East Media Center

New Israeli government plans to annex 1/3 of West Bank by 'legalizing' illegal settlements - International Middle East Media Center

Minurso must monitor human rights

Commenting article: Iran’s claim that Israel has 400 nuclear weapons

Commenting article: Iran’s claim that Israel has 400 nuclear weapons:

1

How many "Pinocchios" would every US Congressman and Obama administration member get who refuse to acknowledge in public that Israel has nuclear weapons?

2

During it's existence Israel has ethnically cleansed up to 1 million Palestinians from their homes and has attacked (just examples, not a total list) Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, Saudi-Arabia, Sudan, Syria and Tunisia.

3

The main point is that Israel has nuclear weapons and that the US (and much of the rest of the "West") have no plan whatsoever to force it to give them up or even acknowledge them and allow inspections at the same time that these same countries have come up with the Iran sanctions farce.

There would be good reasons to pressure Iran but they tend to be the same as to pressure US: Use of torture, high number of executions, political system where it's opponents are not allowed a say in media or elections.

4 

What this article doesn't mention is that a)Israel had tested nuclear weapons by 1968 b)Israel sold nuclear weapons to South Africa c)the 1979 nuclear test was a test of nuclear weapon sold to South Africa by Israel d)Israel helped Shah's Iran in it's program to develop a nuclear weapon e)Israel helped South Africa in it's attempt to build a ballisti missile in 1982-84 with which it could have targeted all major capitals.

5

During it's existence Israel has ethnically cleansed up to 1 million Palestinians from their homes and has attacked (just examples, not a total list) Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, Saudi-Arabia, Sudan, Syria and Tunisia.

6

And no change to come, like her biggest funder Haim Shaban recently said: "Everything that Hillary Clinton will do will be about Israel."

And her opponents... Well... Look at Netanyahu at US Congress.