israeli reaction to a photograph of peace sign flashing, palestinian kids

The Palestinian kids are flashing the internationally recognized Peace sign , I notice.  The Israeli reaction to  them doing the same thing they  do when they set up  their outposts is  ------

“Castrate them!” “Burn them!” “Bullet in the head!”: Facebook Israelis react to photo of Palestinian kids

Submitted by Ali Abunimah on Fri, 03/22/2013 - 22:01

boys_in_tent.jpg

An image of three Palestinian boys sparked an outpouring of violent and sadistic fantasies after it was reposted to an Israeli Facebook page (Original source and screenshot of context).

 (Shadi Hatem)

But this may be the worst yet. On Wednesday, the picture above of three Palestinian boys in a tent was posted on a popular Facebook page titled in Hebrew “We are all in favor of death to terrorists.” Under the picture is the following caption:

Arab boys in the illegal Arab outpost established near Maale Adumim. What should the Israeli army do to them?

This is an apparent reference to the peaceful “Bab al-Shams” encampment established by Palestinians near Jerusalem to protest Israel’s plans to seize more land for settlements. The protest was timed to coincide with the visit of US President Barack Obama.

Soldiers and adults join in the virtual pogrom

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Kfir Brigade sergeant Ohad Halevy believes Palestinian children peacefully protesting should be “slaughtered” (Source).

But others, such as Shlomo Levi, are clearly already army-age adults. His suggestion?

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Shlomo Levi thinks Palestinian children should be gassed to death (Source).

“I’d have thrown nerve gas into the tent and closed it and made them breath it until the end”

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Kfir Infantry Brigade member David Kozolovski justifies violence against Palestinian children (Source).

David Kozolovski wrote, “To all those comparing Jews to Nazis, Jews did not try to kill German civilians,” thereby justifying the orgy of violent fantasies against the children.

Kozolovski’s profile pictures on Facebook include images of him in his Israeli army uniform bearing the insignia of the Kfir Infantry Brigade.

Ohad Halevy, another soldier in the Kfir Brigade simply wrote “Slaughter them!” of the three children in the photo.

“May you die garbage Arabs, amen!”

This is only a small selection of therepresentative and typical comments posted under the picture of the three boys in the tent. All of these comments were in Hebrew and have been translated:

• “Disgusting. Burn the tent” - Oriel Diller
• “Eliminate” - Zevika Gvirz
• “Artillery training ‘mistake’ ” - Igor Gonopolskiy
• “Burn them” - Yaron Gringauz
• “May you die garbage Arabs, amen!” - Shahar Dayan
• “Run them over and shoot them. It’s not complicated!” - Elad Sender
• “Take the tent with the people in it, put it on a trailer and dump them back where they came from” - Sharon Carmi
• “A hand grenade inside the tent!” - Dvir Dagan
• “Put a couple of bullets in their heads and we’re done” - Adi Maman
• “Set them on fire” - Yosef Porotzky
• “Fuck them” - Aria Yehudai
  
  
  
  

  The violence is not just virtual

  In at least one case we know of, an Israeli soldier, Maxim Vinogradov, announced on Facebook his intention to assist in the “annihilation” of Arabs just days before he went out and shot father of two Ziad Jilani at a checkpoint in Jerusalem for no known reason in 2010.
  An example of the Israeli army’s routine brutality against children was on display on the very day Obama landed when dozens of children as young as eight were abused and kidnapped by Israeli soldiers as they were on their way to school in Hebron  a harrowing scene caught on video.
  
  
  http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/castrate-them-burn-them-bullet-head-facebook-israelis-react-photo-palestinian

the dollar as WMD . W$D

Old history  the article below ,  is not.  

Iran has its own Oil bourse and it sells its oil in currencies  other than the US dollar. Is it any surprise, then, that it has to be taken out? That it is a target   is beyond all doubt. It has been  one for a long time now.  It's having or not having a  nuclear weapon programme will not matter. It has oil that it is selling in  other currencies.  Cause enough to destroy it and slaughter millions of Iranians. And aim again at Regime  Change  in Venezuela. 
Re-denominating Iraqi oil in U. S. dollars, instead of the euro

by Sohan Sharma, Sue Tracy, & Surinder Kumar

Z magazine, February 2004

 

What prompted the U.S. attack on Iraq, a country under sanctions for 12 years (1991-2003), struggling to obtain clean water and basic medicines? A little discussed factor responsible for the invasion was the desire to preserve "dollar imperialism" as this hegemony began to be challenged by the euro.

The unprovoked "shock and awe" attack on Iraq was to serve several economic purposes: (1) Safeguard the U.S. economy by re-denominating Iraqi oil in U.S. dollars, instead of the euro, to try to lock the world back into dollar oil trading so the U.S. would remain the dominant world power-militarily and economically. (2) Send a clear message to other oil producers as to what will happen to them if they abandon the dollar matrix. (3) Place the second largest oil reserve under direct U.S. control. (4) Create a subject state where the U.S. can maintain a huge force to dominate the Middle East and its oil. (5) Create a severe setback to the European Union and its euro, the only trading block and currency strong enough to attack U.S. dominance of the world through trade. (6) Free its forces (ultimately) so that it can begin operations against those countries that are trying to disengage themselves from U.S. dollar imperialism-such as Venezuela, where the U.S. has supported the attempted overthrow of a democratic government by a junta more friendly to U. S. business/oil interests.

The U.S. also wants to create a new oil cartel in the Middle East and Africa to replace OPEC. To this end the U.S. has been pressuring Nigeria to withdraw from OPEC and its strict production quotas by dangling the prospects of generous U.S. aid. Instead the U.S. seeks to promote a "U.S.-Nigeria Alignment," which would place Nigeria as the primary oil exporter to the U.S. Another move by the U.S. is to promote oil production in other African countries-Algeria, Libya, Egypt, and Angola, from where the U.S. imports a significant amount of oil-so that the oil control of OPEC is loosened, if not broken. Furthermore, the U.S. is pressuring non-OPEC producers to flood the oil market and retain denomination in dollars in an effort to weaken OPEC's market control and challenge the leadership of any country switching oil denomination from the dollar to the euro.

To break up OPEC and control the world's oil supply, it is also helpful to control Middle East and central Asiatic oil producing countries through which oil pipelines traverse. The first attack and occupation was of Afghanistan, October 2001, in itself a gas producing country, but primarily a country through which Central Asia and the Caspian Sea oil and gas will be shipped (piped) to energy-starved Pakistan and India. Afghanistan also provided an alternative to previously existing Russian pipelines. Simultaneously, the U.S. acquired military bases-19 of them-in the Central Asian countries of Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Turkmenistan in the Caspian Basin, all of which are potential oil producers. After the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq, the U.S. controlled the natural resources of these two countries and, once again, Iraq's oil began to be traded in U.S. dollars. The UN's oil for food production program was scrapped and the U.S. Iaunched its Iraqi Assistance Fund in U.S. dollars. In December 2003, the U.S. (Pentagon) announced that it had barred French, German, and Russian oil and other companies from bidding on Iraq's reconstruction.

Oil for euros would be far more helpful if oil-importing underdeveloped countries could develop some form of barter arrangement for their goods to obtain oil from OPEC. Venezuela (Chavez) has presented a successful working model of this. Following Venezuela's lead, several underdeveloped countries began bartering their undervalued commodities directly with each other in computerized swaps and counter trade deals, and commodities are now traded among these countries in exchange for Venezuela's oil. President Chavez has linked 13 such barter deals on its oil; e.g., with Cuba in exchange for Cuban doctors and paramedics who are setting up clinics in shanty towns and rural areas. Such arrangements help underdeveloped countries save their hard currencies, lessening indebtedness to international bankers, the World Bank, and IMF, so that money thus saved can be used for internal development.

 

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Iraq/Iraq_dollar_vs_euro.html

american "smart power" and a smart analysis of' afghan' literature

At times like these ,one needs to read the occasional 'literary' analysis. This is one of the best that I have come across.

Melodrama in the Service of Empire

“Smart Power” and the Afghanistan Novel

by PADMAJA CHALLAKERE

In the context of the much-talked about Afghan drawdown of 2013-14, it is relevant to consider the successful Afghanistan novel and the work it has done in waging the Afghanistan war. One could argue that the Afghanistan Novel is the ghost in this war machine. Novels like Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite-Runner (2003) and A Thousand Splendid Suns(2007) and the torrent of immensely popular “blue burqa” books like My Forbidden Face: Growing Up Under the Taliban (2002) and Behind the Burqa (2002) produce a televisual feeling for Afghanistan history which has influenced the form and content of literary novels like Nadeem Aslam’s A Wasted Vigil or Philip Hensher’s The Mulberry Empire.

But more fundamentally, the blockbuster Afghanistan novel has generated  our support for and acquiescence to the long and bloody NATO war on Afghanistan. These novels provide the “narrative container” into which truth (figured as surplus) about Afghanistan’s war-torn history must be confined. The gestures that this container allows are, of course, predictably narrow in range: sensational narratives of violence (never ours), or a catastrophism which declares that Afghanistan is “the wall against which empires crash” or “the land where Empires go to die” (Philip Hensher’s The Mulberry Empire) or, the most sensational horrorism wherein the Afghan woman is brutally assaulted (Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns) or, narratives of self-exoneration or self-indemnity (Hosseini’s The Kite-Runner).

First and foremost, there is complete silence about the NATO war on Afghanistan in these novels and in memoirs like Asne Seierstad’s The Book-Seller of Kabul (2002) or, in the now discredited Three Cups of Tea (2006) or, in  Suraya Sadeed’s Forbidden Lessons in a Kabul Guesthoust (2011). The appeal of these texts and the positive reviews they garner lies in the way in which they produce affect by minimizing culpability and accountability. What is also missing in these books is the long history of  US support for the most violent and reactionary Islamistmujahideen who now go under the banner of Northern Alliance, our current allies in the war against the Taliban.

The immense energy spent in transforming the “invasion of Afghanistan” into a narrative about “the Afghanistan tragedy” has its own political history, one which shows this war to be, to quote Chomsky, “the most doctrinal and the ideological war of our times.” This political history has to do not merely with differentiating between good violence (ours) and bad violence (theirs) but about producing new fictions of evil which offer a salve to those most deeply implicated in the violence in Afghanistan. The popular novels and memoirs have played a significant role not only in sensationalizing or selling violence but in licensing our aggression and recovering our innocence.

The one exception is Malalai Joya’s memoir A Woman Among Warlordswhich reverses the truism about improving conditions of Afghan women as a result of the NATO war:

We are caught between two enemies: the Taliban on one side and US/NATO forces and their warlord hirelings on the other…. Obama’s military build-up will only bring more suffering and death to innocent civilians…. I hope that the lessons in this book will reach President Obama and his policymakers in Washington, and warn them that the people of Afghanistan reject their brutal occupation and their support of the warlords and drug-lords. (p. 5)

Where, she asks, is the much-touted  “progress in the condition of the Afghan women” when it passes without notice among the US intelligentsia that the “U.S.-backed Afghan president Karzai signed a law which, among other horrors, allows men to deny food and housing to their wives if the husbands’ sexual demands are not met, and prohibits a woman from leaving her home without her husband’s permission.” And in plain speech, Joya’s memoir details the vast destruction brought on by the US invasion:

The people of Afghanistan are fed up with the occupation of their country and with the corrupt, Mafia-state of Hamid Karzai and the warlords and drug lords backed by NATO…. It is clear now that the real motive of the U.S. and its allies, hidden behind the so-called “war on terror,” was to convert Afghanistan into a military base in Central Asia . . . . But those who get their news from the corporate media may not realize that allied attacks on supposed al-Qaeda and Taliban targets are also killing, maiming, and terrorizing innocent Afghan civilians. We live everyday of our lives in the terror of an endless war. (196)

This is the kind of anchoring that is required in times like this when Suzanne Nossel, a former State Department Official (known for coining the term “Smart Power” which was adopted as Obama administration’s foreign-policy slogan) is now the Executive Director of PEN–the “world’s oldest literary and human rights organization.” Yes, “Smart power” has the right sound, both of homage and parody to absolute power, welded during the Obama administration through the expanded use of drones and of the CIA.

When Suzaane Nossel was at the helm of Amnesty International, this organization, known for opposing the Iraq War and the prison at Guantanamo Bay, was making common cause with the US government. Now that Nossel, hot on the heels of securing the passage of the Afghan Women and Girls Security Promotion Act of 2012, is getting ready to “promote literature and free expression,” we can surely expect a lot many more “redemptive” novels about the “Afghanistan tragedy.”

If Tarantino’s “Django Unchained” can be sold as “empowering for blacks” and as “healing the wounds of slavery,” by the same logic, the Afghanistan novel can make us feel good about the violence of our wars. For, supporting war today is not illiberal but rather most committedly liberal.

Padmaja Challakere lives in St. Paul, MN and teaches in the English Department at Metropolitan State University.  

http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/03/22/smart-power-and-the-afghanistan-novel/

Iraq to Iran. disaster capitalism.

• B

The Iraq war is a perfect example of what Naomi Klein called  'DISASTER CAPITALISM' ! Expect more of the same . In Libya, Syria, Africa and , hopefully not, Iran. 

Who really won the Iraq war? Oil barons, big business and mercenaries

23 Mar 2013 10:00

10 years after the fall of Saddam, we examine who were the winners and losers of the conflict

US President George W. Bush aboard the nuclear aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln in May 2003

Getty

There has been no shortage of Western leaders and military chiefs willing to declare victory in the Iraq War.

Six weeks after the US-led invasion rolled into Iraq to topple Saddam Hussein, George W Bush addressed the world in front of a banner that boasted: Mission accomplished.

Shortly afterwards, Tony Blair told British troops: “The way you won the war was extraordinary.”

And in 2009 when the 20th Armoured Brigade lowered its flag over the garrison in Basra to finally mark the end of British combat operations in Iraq, then-PM Gordon Brown hailed the conflict a success.

But now – a decade after the war began on March 20, 2003 – one group can toast victory most of all.

They are the oil bosses, mercenaries and tycoons who cashed in when the war’s aftermath turned into a multi-billion-pound goldrush.

This gravy train has paid out as more than 100,000 people have been killed in Iraq’s decade of turmoil.

Just 18 months after the invasion, commercial airliners packed with security personnel and business investors were flying daily into the capital Baghdad.

Private security contractors from the UK, European, South African and US special forces were lured by the offer of £1,000 a day to guard dignitaries and prime terror targets.

Tycoons had their eyes on the big prize – a slice of the first £6.6billion in reconstruction money being flown into the city on US military aircraft.

This cash belonged to Iraq. It was the proceeds from the sale of

oil that funded the UN’s Oil For Food Programme and was intended to be used to rebuild the ravaged country.

Disgracefully, much of the money ended up in the pockets of crooks or corrupt officials.

In one case, American Robert Stein, the Coalition Provisional Authority’s controller in the central Iraq city of Hilla, was jailed in 2007 for nine years after admitting his role in a multi-million-pound corruption scandal.

Between 2003 and 2004, when he was in charge of distributing reconstruction money, Stein used a rigged bidding process to hand contracts worth £5.7million to his co-conspirator – construction contractor Philip Bloom – who was also jailed.

That is just one example. In 2004, the Americans began to build a sewer and water system in Fallujah, west of Baghdad. Originally planned to cost £23million and take 18 months to complete, the project has already cost £129million and is still unfinished.

Iraq has been a test bed for the privatisation of war and apart from making lots of businessmen rich, it is not a model for reconstructing a country. The US government, eager to reduce casualties and convinced that private firms could do the job more efficiently, awarded huge contracts, mostly to US firms.

It was the birth of the truly privatised modern war. In the Second World War, there was one contractor deployed for every seven soldiers. During the 2003 invasion, that number had increased to two in five. By 2006, contractors in Iraq were outnumbering the soldiers.

Opponents of the war have claimed the real reason for the invasion was for the West to get its hands on Iraq’s massive oil reserves.

Suspicions were heightened when oilfield specialists Halliburton, which used to be run by ex-US Vice President Dick Cheney, profited from the war he helped to launch.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney used to run Halliburton

AP/MEET THE PRESS

Between 2003 and 2010, Halliburton’s subsidiary KBR earned £20billion in US Government contracts in Iraq. KBR was accused of overcharging and investigators found that £365million in payments should be held back.

British firm Amec won a joint £600million contract to rebuild Iraq’s water supply, while a group of companies led by BP is set to earn £1.3billion per year to develop Iraq’s Rumaila oil field.

Iraq’s oil wealth has the potential to transform the country but it still has regular power cuts and many of its people rely on untreated water.

Tony Blair, who has urged British firms to invest in Iraq, is thought to earn £20million a year, including £2.5million from his role as an adviser to US investment bank JPMorgan.

The tycoons who made fortunes from Mr Blair’s decision to wage war probably would not begrudge him a penny.

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/iraq-war-winners-were-oil-1779740

wake up, america !

A long but very worthwhile read - including the comments and the  updates..

  
One year ago, after his breathtakingly beautiful Iranian drama, "A Separation," won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film, writer/director Asghar Farhadi delivered the best acceptance speech of the night.

"[A]t the time when talk of war, intimidation, and aggression is exchanged between politicians," he said, Iran was finally being honored for "her glorious culture, a rich and ancient culture that has been hidden under the heavy dust of politics." Farhadi dedicated the Oscar "to the people of my country, a people who respect all cultures and civilizations and despise hostility and resentment."



Such grace and eloquence will surely not be on display this Sunday, when Ben Affleck, flanked by his co-producers George Clooney and Grant Heslov, takes home the evening's top prize, the Best Picture Oscar, for his critically-acclaimed andheavily decorated paean to the CIA and American innocence, "Argo."

Over the past 12 months, rarely a week - let alone month - went by without newpredictions of an ever-imminent Iranian nuclear weapon and ever-looming threats of an American or Israeli military attack. Come October 2012, into the fray marched "Argo," a decontextualized, ahistorical "true story" of Orientalistproportion, subjecting audiences to two hours of American victimization and bearded barbarians, culminating in popped champagne corks and rippling stars-and-stripes celebrating our heroism and triumph and their frustration and defeat. Salon's Andrew O'Hehir aptly described the film as "a propaganda fable," explainingas others have that essentially none of its edge-of-your-seat thrills or most memorable moments ever happened.  O'Hehir sums up:

The Americans never resisted the idea of playing a film crew, which is the source of much agitation in the movie. (In fact, the “house guests” chose that cover story themselves, from a group of three options the CIA had prepared.) They were not almost lynched by a mob of crazy Iranians in Tehran’s Grand Bazaar, because they never went there. There was no last-minute cancellation, and then un-cancellation, of the group’s tickets by the Carter administration. (The wife of Canadian ambassador Ken Taylor had personally gone to the airport and purchased tickets ahead of time, for three different outbound flights.) The group underwent no interrogation at the airport about their imaginary movie, nor were they detained at the gate while a member of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard telephoned their phony office back in Burbank. There was no last-second chase on the runway of Mehrabad Airport, with wild-eyed, bearded militants with Kalashnikovs trying to shoot out the tires of a Swissair jet.

One of the actual diplomats, Mark Lijek, noted that the CIA's fake movie "cover story was never tested and in some ways proved irrelevant to the escape." The departure of the six Americans from Tehran was actually mundane and uneventful.  "If asked, we were going to say we were leaving Iran to return when it was safer," Lijek recalled, "But no one ever asked!...The truth is the immigration officers barely looked at us and we were processed out in the regular way. We got on the flight to Zurich and then we were taken to the US ambassador's residence in Berne. It was that straightforward."


http://www.wideasleepinamerica.com/2013/02/oscar-prints-the-legend-argo.html

Hollywood hasbara . seen through an Iranian woman's eyes.

Iran is the real target now. It always has been. That is where the real "men' were supposed to go after the boys had conquered Iraq.  Syria was also a target along the way. It  is a strategic flank that has to be taken out before Iran can be invaded.  

The propaganda drive to brainwash the Americans into accepting the next war is what Argo is about.  this article by an Iranian woman now living in exile in the west  should make u think about   the grand strategic  plans driving the  slaughter of millions across   the lands where 'civilization' was born. 

The Argo Deception: How Hollywood Masks the Ugly Truth of Iran-US Relations

by Lila Ghobady

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I am an Iranian woman living in exile in the West. I would like to think that I am in a better place now and that the country which has allowed me to express myself freely and to be comfortable with my femininity does not depend on fictions, propaganda, government orders and the fabrication of reality, to portray historic events.

Then I see Michelle Obama present “Argo” with the award for Best Picture, and my illusions come crashing down around me one more time.

For the first time in the history of Hollywood and the Oscars, a member of the White House presented the Oscar while surrounded by American army personnel. It was a powerful illustration of how important it is for the American government to maintain a false image of hostility between the US and the Iranian regime – exactly the kind of antagonistic relationship portrayed in the movie, Argo.

It may appear that Argo makes the Islamic Republic of Iran the villain and the US the innocent victim of radical hatred, but parts of the film spin documented historical facts into fiction:

First, while Argo portrayed Ayatollah Khomeini as the architect of the revolution, Khomeini and his goons had nothing to do with the people who actually overthrew the Shah's regime. In fact, only in 80s at least twenty thousand true revolutionaries were massacred by the murderous Khomeini regime, who highjacked the progressive People’s Revolution with American and Western support. The violent purge dovetailed nicely with the "Green belt" plan conceived by Carter aide Zbigniew Brzezinski, who aimed to exploit fundamental Islamist regimes as a counterweight to Soviet power. (Brzezinski’s scheme foreshadowed Western accommodation with political Islam to spread neoliberal economics to the Middle East).

Second, Khomeini’s regime, unlike what Argo claims, never posed a danger to America. Many documents currently available to the public show that American and Western governments made a deal with Khomeini in Paris for Iranian oil and more before sending him to Iran in order to steal the People’s Revolution in 1979. Later on, America cut further backroom deals with this so-called "enemy", including postponing the release of American hostages because of an American presidential election – the now-infamous “October surprise.”

For years, the West has portrayed the regime of Iran as a “radical Islamic enemy” in public while making mutually beneficial deals in private with figures who share their fundamental political and economic interests. This keeps the fires going in the Middle East, driving up oil profits and providing growth for American and Israeli military budgets, as well as a convenient boogeyman for the West in the absence of a Soviet competitor.

Meanwhile, the people of Iran live under real oppression of monster Mullahs inspired by a medieval theology that is foreign to the kind of Islam traditionally practiced in the region. Their power lies not just in their authoritarian vision, but in their ability to exploit the illusion of an existential clash of civilizations with the West.

Argo does not depict these deals made with Khomeini. Instead, it portrays the Khomeini regime as sincerely "anti-American" – “The Enemy” -- reinforcing this long-standing and destructive illusion.

Just like in politics, Hollywood movies demand a familiar bad guy. So who better than the regime of the Islamic Republic of Iran? Once a puppet, always a puppet.

The future unfolds

The little exiled girl inside of me still passionately chants for the stolen childhood of my generation and those born after me:

"Down with the murderous Islamic regime of Iran and all its supporters anywhere in this world!"

Lila Ghobady is an exiled Iranian writer-journalist and filmmaker living in Canada since 2002. She has been involved with human rights since working as a journalis in Iran and has continued her work in Canada when she arrived as a refugee. She has worked as a Producer and associate Director of internationally-praised underground films along fellow exiled filmmaker Moslem Mansouri before leaving Iran. Her recent film,Forbidden Sun Dance, has been well-received in several countries. For more information, please read her blog at: www.banoufilm.blogspot.com. Lila can be contacted by e-mail at:lilacforfreedom@gmail.com.

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/03/22-5