Dr. Elina Paulin-Grothe talking about the new discovery in the Valley of...

Commenting http://edition.cnn.com/2014/04/27/world/meast/mideast-abbas-holocaust/index.html

Genocide of Jews - and Roma and other minorities - by the Nazis was a horrible crime against humanity, but it's far from an isolated incident in recent history.

Few examples:

Up to 35 million people from Soviet Union died in WW II, up to 20 million died in Stalin's purges.

In China, the great Taiping rebellion 1850-64 led to death of up to 40 million people, several rebellions at the same time had death toll in multiple millions. No one knows how many died in the warlord period in early republic, but it was again many millions of people. War against Japan in 1937-45 killed at least 15 million, the last period of civil war until 1949 and it's aftermath killed at least 10 million people, then came Mao's atrocities.

In Congo the Belgian colonial government according to it's own later calculation killed 50 % of population, 10 million people. The civil war in 1960s led to death of up to 1.5 million people, the civil war and Rwandan attacks since 1997 have killed between 2-7 million people.

In Burundi and Rwanda civil wars and genocide have caused the death of up to 2 million people (but probably closer to 1.6-1.7 million) since they gained independence in 1962.

In Cambodia the Khmer Rouge killed between 800 000 - 2 200 000 people between 1975 and 1979; according to some estimates 50 % of them belonged to the Cham minority.

Armenian genocide by the Ottoman Empire during WW I led to deaths of 800 000 - 1 700 000 people; normal estimate is 1.2-1.5 million deaths.

Many of the examples above had to do with ethnicity, pigment or religion.

We tend to think that genocide is a 20th century "invention" as a deliberate action, instead of happening previously as an "accidental" result of uncontrolled massacres (Conquistadors etc), but genocide has been used quite often in the past.

It was a common item among other "tools" of empires - and even by politically unorganized groups.

The Mongols are an extreme example of the former, when it comes to the latter the traditional Inuit story how they overcame their predecessors, the Dorset, is one of genocide, although recent genetic studies show that some of the Dorset were assimilated into the ranks of the Inuit.

The Inuit traditional history is one of many very similar ones around the globe; just like in the one in Bible about how Hebrews took over Canaan it gives us a story of a "positive" genocide - even when modern evidence shows that this isn't the whole truth.

People around the world have favoured these stories of genocide over more complicated reality, where there have been also peaceful co-existence so that the heritage, genetic and cultural, of the defeated have also been passed to them.

This preference tells us something about the nature of humanity.

Commenting http://www.wired.com/2014/04/quantum-theory-flow-time/

The problem with physicists is that they often don't look beyond their models of what happens on the micro level. A universe is not a roll of film that could be watched in either direction, because after the universe forms objects on the macro level, these also have an influence.

A very simple universe made of elementary particles has no need for an "arrow of time", but in a more complex universe the arrow of time rises from the complexity itself.

You can't "wind back the time" in our universe. There's no basis in physics for the idea that the flow of time is just a roll of film and that all matter would behave as it did in the past. It would be bizarre if long dead stars whose atoms have been scattered around the galaxy would come back at the moment of their explosion as supernovas and would then start to become younger.

Stars don't behave like that. Complex objects don't behave like that.

Information about the past would also have to be preserved 100 % so that the flow of time could change even in a very simple universe without complexity.

Commenting http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/apr/25/obama-downbeat-collapse-middle-east-peace-talks?commentpage=1:

According to John Kerry, this current round of sham peace talks was not about ending the occupation foremost, but about "the safety of Israel".

As long as the safety of the occupier (as the occupier itself and it's Best Friend Forever see it) are put before the freedom of the occupied nothing will come out of these peace talks.

Only when the needs of the occupied are put before the demands of the occupier and pressure is put on the occupier instead of the occupied will we see success.

Commenting http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/.premium-1.587365 :

Kerry set at the basis of his "peace plan" Israel's previous maximum demands, already impossible to accept for Palestinians, and then said nothing as Netanyahu&co went farther, from Israel getting most of East Jerusalem to Israel demanding whole of East Jerusalem, from Israel being able to occupy Jordan Valley for ten more years to Israel annexing Jordan Valley, from Israel being able to keep forces permanently with all borders of Palestine along with international and Palestinian presence to Israel having sole control. The "peace talks" were intended to fail, with Palestinians getting the blame.

Commenting http://www.theguardian.com/world/on-the-middle-east/2014/apr/23/israel-palestinian-territories?commentpage=1:

The long shadow what matters is not the death of one terrorist, but that the so-called "West" treats with deep deference his current heirs in Israel's regime, who are still operating based on his ideas and still have as their goal as purely Jewish state in all of Palestine, where none but Jews can live.

All of Britain's main political parties' leaders do ritualistic declarations of unconditional, unending support to Israel at a time when it has accelerated illegal settlement building and home demolitions to a level unprecented in recent decades.

This refusal to confront the racism and human rights abuses of Israel just because it declares itself to be a Jewish state is the long shadow that must be dispelled.

Commenting http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/apr/20/israel-mordechai-vanunu-hero-edward-snowden?commentpage=2

What Israel did to Vanunu when they kidnapped him was to put him in solitary confinement. It's a form of torture and many people have gone insane in Israeli prisons, where people can be locked up for decades in solitary and where there is no accountability for the jailers.

Observe the case of the Australian emigrant Ben Zygier who was secretly imprisoned and died in prison, supposedly through by suicide although he was claimed to be under 24 hour surveillance in his cell, and the case of the still imprisoned another "Prisoner X", whose identity is still not known but who is claimed to be an Israeli Jew.

The "Western" deference towards Israel's regime and the idiotic charade about Israel's nuclear weapons - everybody knows it has them, but the "West" refuses to normally acknowledge them and USA's government openly celebrates each time it blocks IAEA from demanding access to Israel's nuclear weapons program - had made the "West", both states and establishment, reluctant to lift a finger to help Vanunu.

According to the Obama administration, path to a nuclear weapons free Middle East demands - and this is a quote - that IAEA isn't allowed to make visits and observe Israel's nuclear facilities.

Israel and nuclear weapons are an example of "Emperor without clothes" and the meek Western governments and establishment need to acknowledge what everyone knows, help Vanunu get out and get Israel's nuclear weapons programs in public light.

This is needed especially as Israel is known to have helped the nuclear weapons programs of Shah's Iran and Apartheid-era South Africa and could be currently or might in the future, help other regimes to acquire their own nuclear weapons.

Sauve une Vie - Camp Palestinien Al Yarmouk - حملة اغاثة فلسطينيومخيم ال...

April 15th, 2014: Western Sahara: Brutal crack down on a peaceful protest

From Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp in Damascus, Syria:

Post by ‎طيرة حيفا - الطيرة نت‎.

Comment to http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/apr/11/middle-east-the-peace-bubble-bursts?commentpage=1:

Palestinian leadership opposes "Israel is a Jewish state" demand because they fear it will be used to "justify" the ethnic cleansing of remaining Arabs from Israel. Something which Israel's foreign minister Lieberman brings up every second week, with US government refusing to condemn him.

Kerry's plan doesn't just call for Israeli "security strip" along the border with Jordan, it calls for Israel occupying whole Jordan Valley for 10 more years and afterwards controlling still all borders and air space of Palestine.

Tens of thousands of Palestinians have been without running water in East Jerusalem for over a month now, part of Israel's ethnic cleansing of the town, emboldened by Kerry proposing that Israel would get almost whole of East Jerusalem in his plan. The response from Israel's government and the Zionist administration of Jerusalem has been that they want the whole East Jerusalem - without the people.

The simple problem behind Kerry's plan is that it can be described with this sentence: "Palestinians give and Israel gets."

The more concessions Palestinians have made through the decades, the more is demanded from them by Israel and the USA.

During these peace talks Israel has used Kerry's plan just a starting point for their own demands, like the case of East Jerusalem, with Kerry wanting to give Israel everything but few outlaying neighbourhoods and Israel being emboldened by this and now demanding that Jerusalem can't even be mentioned in a peace agreement.

There's no pressure being put on Israel's government, instead an endless number of Western politicians making their way in a pilgrimage to Israel and Netanyahu, declaring their loyalty - "indestructible" in the words of David Cameron - to Israel and opposition to all boycotts and sanctions, with Ed Miliband the most recent.

In this political environment Israel's regime thinks that it can get everything without having to give up any piece of the occupied land. Status quo suits it fine.

That famous forgery by the Czar's secret police, "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" has been taken as the truth by the Western politicians, whose fanatical philosemitism is actually a result of antisemitic belief that Jews (and Israel especially) do control the world and that to win elections in Western countries one has to avoid criticism of Israel and instead declare eternal support for it no matter what it does.

And because politicians think that Israel and the Jews do decide elections - this isn't true even in the United States, where Jewish populations are big enough basically in just two states to have any real effect on elections - this gives Israel real power over the Western countries.

The antisemitic belief about the power of the Jews that drives the Western politicians results in them avoiding all practical means of ending the occupation, with politician after another now declaring opposition to the BDS boycott movement, which has succeeded in putting finally some pressure on Israel and the foreign companies that take part and profit from the occupation.

Forgotten Bird of Paradise (full version) - undercover West Papua docume...

Comment to http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/apr/07/syria-failure-intervene-terrible-consequences-blair:

The best thing Blair can do for the people of Syria is to keep his mouth shut.

Assad and his top cronies do need to go, the torture and the barrel bombs must stop, but as much of the current government structure and armed forces need to be kept intact and not bombed into oblivion, as the simple fact is that the most powerful rebel groups at this point are current and former al-Qaeda affiliates al-Nusra Front and ISIL/ISIS, which also holds territory in western Iraq. Attacking the regime would just help al-Qaeda.

The regime, as vile as it is, is with the fence sitting Kurdish YPD the main semi-secular forces in Syria. Instead of wanting to give Syria to al-Qaeda, the so-called "West" should come up with bribes big enough - Golan Heights come to mind - to replace the regime's leadership and reform it as a core for a secular interim government with the Kurds and willing rebel factions and then given all the possible help to defeat al-Qaeda.

Al-Qaeda, whose every member should thank every day on their knees Tony Blair for everything that his geopolitical errors have given to them.

Comments to AP's article:

JERUSALEM -- Tens of thousands of Palestinians living in east Jerusalem have been without running water for more than a month, victims of a decrepit and overwhelmed infrastructure and caught in a legal no-man's land caused by the divisions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The residents of the Shuafat refugee camp are technically part of the Jerusalem municipality. But they live outside the massive West Bank separation barrier that Israel has built. So Israeli services are sparse, yet Palestinian authorities are barred from operating there or developing the water system.

The local Israeli water authority says the existing system of pipes cannot handle the rapid population growth of the area and it is scrambling to solve the problem. Last week, the Israeli Supreme Court gave officials 60 days to find a solution.

But with the scorching summer season approaching, residents are growing increasingly desperate. Basic tasks like brushing teeth are a challenge. Showers have become a luxury. Families often send their clothes to relatives elsewhere in the city to wash them.

"Sixty days — that's a lot of time for us," said Hani Taha, a local butcher. "There will be chaos here."

Israel captured then-mainly Arab east Jerusalem in the 1967 Middle East war. After the war, it redrew Jerusalem's municipal boundary, expanding it into the West Bank to encompass what were then small Palestinian communities, and annexed the lands that were made part of the city.

The annexation was never internationally recognized. Israel considers all of east Jerusalem, including Shuafat, to be part of its capital, building a ring of Jewish districts in the city. Some 200,000 Israeli Jews and 300,000 Palestinians now live in east Jerusalem, which the Palestinians demand as the capital of a future nation.

Palestinians have long complained that the city neglects roads, schools and public services in Arab neighborhoods of east Jerusalem. The situation has worsened for areas like Shuafat since Israel built its separation barrier last decade.

The barrier, which Israel says is needed to keep attackers from entering the city, has cut some neighborhoods in half, leaving thousands of people on the outside. Anyone entering or exiting Shuafat, for instance, must pass through an Israeli military checkpoint.

Residents said they first began to feel the water crunch last month, when the water cut out on March 4. Since then, service has been scarce and often non-existent. Residents buy bottles or large jerrycans of water to get by.

A lack of hydraulic pressure from the month-long shortage has forced desperate residents to lower rooftop tanks to ground level and fill them by hand.

On one block, three large black tanks sat stagnant in a pile of rotting trash and empty plastic bottles. Six pumps and a snarl of tubing had been rigged to force water upward.

But faucets in the adjacent building were running dry. Young men could be seen lugging large plastic containers up flights of stairs into a home. A young girl held a bag of water bottles for her family.

"When my kids want to go to school, there's no water to wash themselves. My husband goes to work and it's the same thing," said Umm Osama al-Najar, pointing at a pile of dirty dishes in her kitchen sink.

"Sometimes I go into the bathroom and I am disgusted, especially when so many people use the bathroom and there is no water to flush. It's very important that we get the water back here. It's breaking my heart."

Israeli officials are at a loss to explain the cause of the crisis. The neighborhood has suffered from water shortages in the past, but residents say this year is the worst they can remember. Officials speculated that an exceptionally dry winter — the only time the region experiences rainfall — may be to blame.

Much of the problem stems from Israel's construction of the separation barrier.

Arab residents of east Jerusalem, in contrast to Palestinians in the neighboring West Bank, have Israeli residency rights, giving them the ability to move freely inside Israel and qualifying them for Israeli health care and social benefits.

With residents fearful of losing these rights if they leave the city limits, Arab neighborhoods on the Israeli side of the barrier have seen real estate values skyrocket in recent years.

Outlying areas like Shuafat have experienced a wave of unregulated construction as people search for cheaper housing within municipal boundaries. Israeli work crews rarely venture into these areas, fearing confrontations with the local population.

"It's kind of the classic east Jerusalem trap," said Ronit Sela, a spokeswoman for the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, which has led the legal battle on behalf of Shuafat residents.

"We're talking about an area that was cut off from the rest of the city by a wall, where the Israeli authorities don't go in, an area that was neglected even before the wall was set up, no water connection, no infrastructure. And of course the number of people continues to rise," she said.

"Now the whole water system collapses. And when it collapses, no one takes responsibility."

Hagihon, the local water carrier in Jerusalem, said there is little it can do. It said the rapid growth, lack of proper urban planning and rampant use of unauthorized "pirated" pipes have overwhelmed the infrastructure.

Eli Cohen, a deputy director at the company, said the system was built to serve about 15,000 people. He believes the population has swelled to 60,000-80,000. Few homes have water meters, meaning that some 97 percent of the population doesn't pay for its water, he said.

"Unfortunately, this whole burden falls on Hagihon," he said. "We have a national, political problem here. This is beyond our jurisdiction, but we are the only government body left to deal with it."

Israel's National Water Authority denied responsibility and said it is supervising Hagihon in finding a solution.

"I can't tell you right now what the plan will be," Cohen said. "The issue is to find a solution that is sustainable."

The nearby Jewish area of Pisgav Zeev, just a few hundred meters away inside the wall, suffers no such problems. Cohen said Pisgat Zeev has a recognized infrastructure and residents pay for their water like other Israeli customers.

The Palestinian Authority, the self-rule government in the West Bank, provides water to people in the areas it governs but is barred from operating inside Jerusalem's city limits.

In the meantime, residents are forced to buy expensive water and wait out the drought.

"Without water, can we live?" said Aida Subhi Hamoud, a mother of 11 who has lived in the camp for 40-years. "We can afford to buy water to drink, but what about the rest, the laundry, the showers? Water is the lifeblood of the home."

Israel is a racist Apartheid state which wants to ethnically cleanse East Jerusalem of it's inhabitants and USA is supporting the ethnic cleansing. These areas suffering now from Israel's water Apartheid are areas which John Kerry and his AIPAC boys has deemed to be part of Israel in the future in their peace agreement. The areas, not the people living in them. Israel's ruling ideology is Racism.

Israel is a monstrous Apartheid state, which deliberately uses lack of water as a weapon of ethnic cleansing. It demands that it will get the whole of East Jerusalem in a peace agreement and John Kerry wants to give Israel almost all of it, but as you can see, the Zionist racists don't want the people they torment, just the land. Racism is Apartheid Israel's ruling ideology, hate towards those who are not part of the "Chosen People".

Comment to http://www.jpost.com/Diplomacy-and-Politics/Barkat-The-world-must-take-Jerusalem-off-the-negotiating-table-forever-347676:

Nir Barkat is one of those Zionist politicians who tries to command the entire world. I'm sure US Congress does it's usual "Yes sir! Right away sir!" as with always with Israeli delusions of grandeur, but Jerusalem will stay at the table - and Nir Barkat could get one day face trial for his part in the ethnic cleansing of East Jerusalem.

Response to http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2014/04/04/wall-street-journal-gives-western-sahara-morocco/

The problem with this article is that it's using a real issue about the international disinterest towards Western Sahara to whine about criticism towards Israel. Saharawis are being reduced to being human shields for Apartheid Israel. 

 

Let's remember why both Palestinians and Saharawis are living under occupation: Because USA is supporting the occupier and stopping international community from putting sanctions on the occupier so that the occupation would end. 

 

The occupations are tied and you can help to end them both by boycotting Israel and Morocco. Don't visit them, do not buy products made in there nor use products of companies that operate in the occupated areas. In the case of Western Sahara, visit for example Western Sahara Resource Watch athttp://www.wsrw.org/

They Do Not Exist - Film by Mustafa Abu Ali

G4S Securing War Crimes