The recent escalation of tensions in Jerusalem with clashes between Palestinian demonstrators and Israeli police in and around the Old City appear to signify the emergence of a disturbing new trend: the Hebronisation of Jerusalem. This presages not only the triumph of the radical settler groups in taking over culturally sensitive parts of the city, but also further violence and turmoil. More importantly it also interrupts the delicate moves towards the resumption of negotiations between the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority/PLO.

The apology offered by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Interior Minister Eli Yishai recalls the joke about the servant who pinched the king's bottom. En route to the gallows, the servant apologized: He thought it was the queen's bottom.

Currently, around 500,000 Jews reside illegally in over 120 West Bank and East Jerusalem settlements as well as dozens of outposts. Their numbers grow daily despite occasional pledges to curtail or slow them, the latest last November when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared a 10 month freeze, calling it a move to "help launch meaningful negotiations to reach a historic peace agreement that would finally end the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians."

he painful truth is that NATO may be suffering from a terminal illness. Its current mission in Afghanistan, the alliance’s most significant and far-flung muscle-flexing to date, might be its last. Afghanistan has been the graveyard of many an imperial power from the ancient Macedonians to the Soviets. It now seems to be eyeing its next victim.

Recent exposés revealing that Ethan Bronner, the New York Times Israel-Palestine bureau chief, has a son in the Israeli military have caused a storm of controversy that continues to swirl and generate further revelations.

Many people find such a sign of family partisanship in an editor covering a foreign conflict troubling especially given the Times’ record of Israel-centric journalism. Times management at first refused to confirm Bronner’s situation, then refused to comment on it. Finally, public outcry forced Times Public Editor Clark Hoyt to confront the problem in a February 7th column.

The Iranian military has thousands of these types of missiles.

The following is a leaked document describing the set-up of an international group bent on countering the Boycott,Divest and Sanction movement. I suggest all my readers not only peruse this document thoroughly but forward it to everyone they know.

The Palestinian president decided he will not enter into those negotiations now ... the Palestinian side is not ready to negotiate under the present circumstances,” Amr Moussa, the Arab League Secretary-General, told reporters in Cairo.

“The talks have already stopped,” he said.

The Palestinian move came only days after they succumbed to heavy American pressure to conduct indirect talks with Israel in an attempt to kick-start the logjammed Middle East peace process.

We currently have the War Crimes Tribunals established in Kuala Lumpur and the Russell Tribunal in the United Kingdom and the Iraq Inquiry also in the UK. No one is bringing forward the case of the Genocide that is being caused by current weapons used or having been used in the Balkans – Kuwait – Iraq – Afghanistan – Pakistan – Lebanon – Gaza and now possible Somalia and Yemen.

“I challenge Israel to bring the suspects there in order to undergo a DNA test and compare them with the samples we have,” he said in an interview to the UAE-based al-Khaleej newspaper. “If it turns out that the results do not match, I will resign. You can lie about anything, but not about DNA,” he added.

Believe it or not:
For the first time in three decades, the Zionist entity feels threatened in its mere existence…

For the first time since the Israeli enemy ended its hugest wars with the Arabs in 1973, the “existential threat” appeared again in the Israeli discussion battlegrounds at all levels…

May be a difficult viewing.

Very important that everyone is familiar with what is really happening in our names.

Please repost. Host group showings. Leave copies on public transit. Be creative. Your future thanks you.

Imagine peace. In our time.

A Channel 2 News broadcast Monday night showed Tamim pointing at his own face and saying, “We know how to recognize them.” The United Arab Emirates will “deny entry to anyone suspected of having Israeli citizenship,” he said, adding that Israelis with dual nationality would be denied entry.

Paul Craig Roberts describes how disunity and bickering among Muslims have made it possible for Israel to dispossess the Palestinians, for the US to invade Iraq and for the US to rule much of the region and beyond through puppets

Dubai’s police chief said on Monday he is sure that all the suspects in the killing of a Hamas chief in a hotel room of the emirate are now hiding out in Israel to avoid arrest.

Christopher King argues that “a situation exists in which it may be in the interests of the United States to seek a ‘cold war’ situation with Russia and China as a pretext for defaulting on its external debt, attacking Iran, taking direct control of all Middle Eastern oilfields and effective control of Europe”.

Talk about cognitive dissonance. This article borders on psychopathy/madness.

Thanks to SamLowrey.

Dubai Police Chief Dahi Khalfan Tamim urged Meir Dagan, the director of Israel's Mossad, to "be a man" and admit that Israel stands behind last month's assassination of Hamas chief Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, according to a report Saturday in Emirati newspaper Al-Khaleej.

Blackwater on Trial: Murders, drugs & alcohol

American security guards charged with killing two civilians in Afghanistan had criminal records, a Senate committee has heard. They were guilty of assault, battery and drug-taking in the past. The men were in Afghanistan with a subsidiary of the private security firm Blackwater, previously accused of murdering civilians in Iraq.

Not sure if you keep track of memorial dates but we have one approaching fast. If you are not an Israeli, Palestinian, Jew, Muslim, or someone who likes to keep track of what Israeli Jews do to Palestinian Muslims, you might not have this one marked on your calendar. But I do!...

James Petras argues that Mossad’s murder of a Palestinian official in Dubai using stolen European passports presages an era of chaos in international relations and makes every European travelling in the Middle East suspected of links with Israeli death squads.

After the assassination of a senior Hamas official in Dubai, Hezbollah issues an alert against disguised entry of terrorists into Lebanon...

Paul J. Balles cautions pro-Palestinian activists against simply shouting down speakers who represent their enemy, arguing that, to win hearts and minds, they should instead “learn to express themselves well enough to challenge their adversaries” and they should prepare for and encourage debates.

We have learned in the last few days that the Dubai assassins were Mossad agents who stole identities of six UK citizens and faked at least five other European passports. Dubai Police yesterday presented footage of some of the 11 ‘Europeans’ suspected of killing Hamas commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh.

The international police agency says it has issued red notices, its highest-level alert, to its member countries worldwide for "11 internationally wanted individuals who have been charged by UAE-Dubai authorities with coordinating and committing the murder."

Gilad Atzmon argues that, given the close relationship between the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office and the Mossad intelligence agency, Premier Binyamin Netanyahu must be held to account personally for the murder of a Hamas official in Dubai by Israeli Mossad agents travelling on cloned European passports.

Paul J. Balles views some of the latest works exposing the activities of Zionists in the Middle East where Israeli barbarism manifests itself in indiscriminate "killing for the sake of killing", to the United States where the pro-Israel lobby "has long held the US Congress in thrall, strangling what little is left of American democracy".

Maidhc Ó Cathail looks at how Israel and its Zionist propagandists are cynically using the memory of the Nazi Holocaust to promote aggression against Iran, just as they did to whip up opinion in favour of aggression against Iraq.

Once is an anomaly; twice is the beginning of a pattern. Right now, we’re seeing the same sequence of events for the second time in less than a decade, and it looks like the signature American way of war in our time is coming into focus.

Jeff Gates analyses Zionism as “a strategy for targeting thought and emotion as a means to influence behaviour” and “a mental state that manifests as a dispersed form of internalized nationalism—a diaspora—that binds to an extremist enclave those who may never set foot there”. He argues that Zionism "relies for its success on deception and self-deceit".

”Law is irrelevant to those who consider themselves above the law. Morality and conscience are of no concern to those who consider themselves The Chosen—by a god of their own choosing. Such a nationalist ideology has no place in a system of nation states dedicated to the rule of law.”

Vice President Joe Biden said on Wednesday that Iran is working to develop nuclear weapons and to destabilize the Middle East by fueling an arms race in the region...

Dr. Hilal Khashan, a Palestinian-American scholar chairing of Department of Political Studies and Public Administration at the American University of Beirut, said that "the war is looming."

That's what Lebanon's Prime Minister, Saad al-Harir, claimed may be in the works today in an interview with the BBC in which he accused Israeli aircraft of repeatedly violating Lebanese air space on a daily basis.

The lawyer for an Australian woman who was arrested in
the West Bank says her detention is part of a campaign by the Israeli Government to silence pro-Palestinian foreigners.

Israeli soldiers arrested 22-year-old Bridgette Chappell in a pre-dawn raid and she is now being held in an immigration jail in Israel. The Government says she overstayed her visa.

This week the editors of The New York Times's sprang to the defense of Jerusalem Bureau Chief Ethan Bronner following weeks of controversy over his son's service in the Israeli Defense Forces. Public editor Clark Hoyt praised Bronner's track-record at the Times, in his February 6th column but nonetheless concluded that "covering Israel's conflict with a son in uniform might be cause to reassign even a superb reporter." The Times' Executive Editor Bill Keller said in a response that "the editors discussed the situation and sees no reason to change Bronner's status as bureau chief."

Arab states set to force debate that would bring Gaza war crimes claims before international court.

The United Nations is likely to refer the findings of the Goldstone report to the International Court of Justice in The Hague, diplomatic sources in New York said on Saturday.

A decision to bring the report on last year's Gaza war before the court would follow a debate in the UN General Assembly over Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon's response to the document last week.

Indications of fraud in the June 12 Iranian presidential election, together with large-scale street demonstrations, have led to claims that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad did not actually win the election, and that the majority of Iranians perceive their government as illegitimate and favor regime change.

An analysis of multiple polls of the Iranian public from three different sources finds little evidence to support such conclusions.

Ramzy Baroud’s “My Father Was A Freedom Fighter” is more than a book, it is actually a masterpiece. In an overwhelmingly evoking personal style Baroud manages to bring to light the history of the Palestinian people and their battle with Israel and Zionism. Through the story of the Baroud’s family the book outlines every event in the history of the conflict and reflects on the way it transformed the Palestinian reality.

A pair of trousers catches fire in an aeroplane close to Detroit and missiles rain down on Yemen. Is this is what is called the butterfly effect? For Mohammed Hassan, the terrorist threat is only an excuse. In this latest chapter in our series "Understanding the Muslim world", our specialist explains what is really at stake in Yemen: i.e. undermining democracy in the Gulf in order to keep control over its oil

Palestinian militant group Hamas has demanded the European Union work to prevent Israeli security services from using EU passports to carry out "targeted assassination" attempts after the killing of one of its leading members in Dubai.

Have we discussed the Goldstone Report lately? Well yesterday the highly anticipated Israeli internal investigation into the findings of the Goldstone Report were delivered. This of course was the result of the U.N. mandated investigation into Operation Cast Lead...

WEBMASTER COMMENT: If you use the WOT security plugin you will get a notice that "readers" (meaning the Megaphone people) have given this site the worst possible security rating possible. I ignored the WOT warning and checked the page out, and other than stating things Israel does not want you to hear I did not encounter any problems with the linked story. Israel is apparently hijacking WOT to use as a censorship tool, and so I can no longer recommend WOT for Firefox.

"To shoot an elephant" is an eye witness account from The Gaza Strip. December 27th, 2008, Operation Cast Lead. 21 days shooting elephants. Urgent, insomniac, dirty, shuddering images from the only foreigners who decided and managed to stay embedded inside Gaza strip ambulances, with Palestinian civilians.

Saudi airstrikes continue to target northern Yemen despite Houthis pledging to meet the key condition of not attacking Saudi Arabia set by the Yemeni government.

Houthi fighters said Tuesday that Saudi warplanes had been bombarding the country’s north, including the Al-Saqin district.

According to the fighters, Saudi forces poured rockets and artillery shells on border areas.

You hear it often said that once the Zionists invaded Palestine they “made the desert bloom” – history,on the other hand, documents a fairly different picture when it comes the region, pre-occupation.

These men,women and children had their own lives and their own stories which shall not be forgotten, regardless of how hard Zionist occupiers try and pretend that they did not exist.

If you make a point of highlighting and discussing all of the things we should all know about Israel, the Goldstone Report is the gift that keeps on giving. Seems like there is always something new to report...

Part of the testimonies is regarding “extra efforts” that female soldiers should conduct in order to be recognized and accepted by the fellow male soldiers.
Another soldier said that she saw a fellow female soldier humiliating Palestinian residents “in a way that cannot be described by words”, and added that “you have to see it to realize how she behaves, how she humiliates the Palestinians without caring about anything”.

“Everybody is doing that”, the soldier added, “Soldiers and senior officers, nobody objects”.

At least eighteen Jewish settlers, accompanied by Israeli soldiers, attacked Tuesday Palestinians in the West Bank village of At-Tuwani in the southern hills of Hebron.

Should the Palestinians agree to a land swap they would be undermining not only their rights but also any chance for peace.This is because Israel is likely to use the land swap to:

- Deny that the 4 June 1967 lines are the basis for drawing the borders of a future Palestinian state. Israel will use these lines only as a basis for determining the "size" of the land that the Palestinians should receive in compensation.

- Annex areas in the West Bank and carve off lands within or close to Jerusalem, along with land rich in ground water.

- Annex the so-called "large settlement areas", which were created originally as a means of dissecting the West Bank and deterring the creation of a viable Palestinian state.

A rally of Jewish leaders took aim at Target stores Thursday for selling a globe that omits the name Israel but instead labels the region Palestine.

I think anytime Osama bin Laden speaks it is newsworthy and he just released an audio tape. The recording was released in Arabic and directly to the Al-Jazeera news channel, a Middle Eastern news network...

Troops serving in Israel Defense Forces combat units will be allocated land upon discharge from military service, a new government initiative revealed on Monday stated.
Land will be allocated in the Galilee, the Negev desert, the Jordan valley and the Golan Heights - with the result that the move is likely to be seen as a continuation of the government's controversial policy of encouraging Israeli Jews to reside in rural regions with large Arab populations.

''How can you divide one small village between two countries? This would be a very bad situation for us to be in.''

In 2000, Israel withdrew all its troops from southern Lebanon to the UN-determined ''Blue Line'', which put half of Ghajar in Lebanon.

EDITED: Where the hell is Syria in all this??

Troops serving in Israel Defense Forces combat units will be allocated land upon discharge from military service, a new government initiative revealed on Monday stated.

In last-ditch efforts to renew peace talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, US President Barrack Obama's special envoy on Sunday met Premier Benjamin Netanyahu, even as his mission has been stalled over Israeli settlement constructions in the East Jerusalem.

Obama's special envoy for Middle East George Mitchell, has extended his stay and met Netanyahu after the Palestinians refused to return to the negotiating table.

The Saudi Arabian government has listed new casualties in its war with the Houthis of Yemen after 20 dead Saudi soldiers were found near the border...

A desert people have developed a new weapon that uses sound instead of bullets. But this time, it will be used to control crowds instead of fighting giant worms or devious members of House Harkonnen.

The Israeli Defense Ministry has contracted for the production of sonic-boom stun-guns called "Thunder Generator cannons," which they hope to use in crowd-control situations.

Hostility toward local and international human rights groups operating in the Zionist entity mounted in 2009 because of their reports on Operation Cast Lead, Human Rights Watch charged in its annual world report, released Thursday.

“Local and international human rights groups working in Israel have experienced a more hostile climate than ever before after documenting abuses committed by Israel, as well as Hamas, during the December 2008-January 2009 fighting in Gaza and Israel in connection with Israel’s ongoing blockade of Gaza,” wrote HRW executive-director Kenneth Roth in his introduction to the 612-page report.

In recent weeks Israel has escalated its practice of assassinations in the West Bank and Gaza. At the end of December, Israeli special forces broke into the Nablus homes of Anan Subih, Raed Surkaji, and Ghassan Abu Sharekh and killed them.

Official Israeli sources linked the three to the killing of Israeli settler Meir Avshalom Hai who was killed while driving to the illegal outpost in which he lived. The killings are the latest in Israel’s long-time practice of assassinations, illegal under international law. Many contradictory reports have surfaced over the December 26 assassinations. The Real News’ Lia Tarachansky spoke to the families of two of the killed.

While media reports from Haiti expressed amazement at Israel’s well-equipped medical delegation to the quake-stricken nation, some critics have warned against organ theft. The Israeli medical team dispatched to Haiti has set up a field hospital in the tremor-battered Caribbean country, winning Western media praise for doing what even their American peers have not yet managed to accomplish.

Paul J. Balles considers the USA’s use of the so-called “war on terror” as a cover for US state-sponsored terrorism against anyone who stands in the way of Washington’s global hegemonic ambitions or even questions US or Israeli policies.

On the eve of a four-day visit to the United States, hawkish Likud MK Danny Danon on Monday launched a blistering assault on President Barack Obama's Middle East policies, declaring that he would give Obama "a failing grade" for his first year in office.

"I would give Obama an 'F' for serious lack of knowledge or understanding on topics related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict," said Danon, speaking to The Jerusalem Post ahead of his US trip.

It is our duty to remember and remind the world that the Palestinian freedom fighter is a man, a woman, like any other. He loves his family. She loves her country. They seek a better future. They are willing to sacrifice everything for the sake of justice and freedom. They waited for the world to lift the blatant injustice that has befallen them since 1948. They expected the world to understand when they took up arms to lift this injustice themselves.

This has been a quick response and all of those who have been helping, donating and providing assistance should be commended. The United States has been a big pusher of a lot of this, the US news media has basically become a 24 hour ad like the ones you see asking for donations to help the orphaned children. Israel has been a big medical supplier and it has not gone unnoticed by the media either.

But, what happened during these disasters?