Many Poles Regard Visiting Israelis as Nuisance
Anna Szulc -- Przekroj (Poland)

The list of losses Israeli teenagers' visits leave behind is long and costly. It begins with burned carpets in Polish hotels, and ends with Jewish teenagers' trauma... Israeli teenagers cause one scandal after another. It happens sometimes, that somewhere between Majdanek and Treblinka, young Israelis spend their time on striptease ordered via the hotel telephone. It happens sometimes, that the hotel service has to collect human excrement from hotel beds and washbasins. It happens sometimes, that hotels have to give money back to other tourists, who cannot sleep because Israeli kids decided to play football in hotel corridor.

Churchill Feared Growing 'Coloured Population’ in Britain
The Telegraph (Britain)

Winston Churchill considered blocking all immigration to Britain because he feared a growing "coloured population" was posing a threat to Britain 's social stability. Churchill, then 79, told Cabinet colleagues that he did not "want a parti-coloured UK." At a Cabinet meeting on February 3, 1954, the prime minister told colleagues: "Problems will arise if many coloured people settle here. Are we to saddle ourselves with colour problems in UK?" Churchill said immigrants were attracted to Britain by the welfare state and he said: "Public opinion in UK won't tolerate it once it gets beyond certain limits."

Unfailingly admiring the Jewish people, Winston Churchill, throughout his long career, had close Jewish friends and associates, ardently supported the Jewish cause in Palestine and believed, in his characteristically exuberant idiom, that the Jews were "the most formidable and the most remarkable race which has ever appeared in the world." Sir Martin Gilbert, the prolific historian and Churchill's official biographer, has been collecting material on this subject for nearly 40 years. No one knows this topic better, and readers of this [new] volume [Churchill and the Jews] will be persuaded, as I am, that the great man's affinity was both sincerely felt and tenaciously pursued.

Winton Churchill: An Unsettled Legacy
Mark Weber

The well-entrenched idealization of Churchill is part and parcel of a drastically misleading view of the Second World War that Americans have been fed for decades. One common deceit is to give the impression that Hitler sought war against Britain and France, and that Germany aggressively attacked those two countries… Churchill's enduringly stellar image is all the more remarkable considering that his views on a range of issues were, by today's standards, hopelessly backward and politically incorrect… Along with most Britons (and Americans) of his era, he was also an unabashed racist.

Popularity of Wagner’s Music Declined During Third Reich
The Guardian (Britain)

According to popular belief, Nazi-era Germans flooded opera houses to be enthralled by Rhinemaidens and Valkyries. But Richard Wagner, far from being the Third Reich's "house composer", actually became much less popular during Adolf Hitler's rule, according to new research … By 1938-39 the highest-ranked Wagner opera, Lohengrin, was at only 12th place. Puccini's Madama Butterfly was third. And by the war years, Verdi, not Wagner, was Germany 's most performed opera composer. Wagner's market share dropped to less than ten percent.

Growing Trend to `Delegitimize’ Israel Worries Jewish Leaders
Haaretz (Israel)

The trend toward delegitimizing Israel 's existence as a Jewish state is growing not only in Europe, but also in the United States, according to Jewish-American academics and community leaders. Anti-Israel attacks are even beginning to affect Jewish supporters of Israel, who have been accused of trying to silence public debate, they said… Brandeis University President Jehuda Reinharz told Haaretz that American academics are at the forefront of those denying Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state.

US Loses Track of 190,000 Weapons in Iraq
BBC News

The US military cannot account for 190,000 AK-47 assault rifles and pistols given to the Iraqi security forces, an official US report says. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) says the Pentagon cannot track about 30 percent of the weapons distributed in Iraq over the past three years. The Pentagon did not dispute the figures, but said it was reviewing arms deliveries procedures… Correspondents say it is now feared many of the weapons are being used against US forces on the ground in Iraq.

Imports Now Lead Car Sales in US
Los Angeles Times

The monthly sales reports released by the world's automakers Wednesday carried a double dose of bad news for the U.S. Trouble in the housing market has spread to dealer showrooms, with worrying implications for the broader economy, and Detroit is no longer the carmaker of choice for the majority of Americans. In July, import brands grabbed a majority share of the U.S. market for the first time as sales by the Big Three nosedived.

Iraq Hasn’t Even Begun: Long-Term Consequences Looming
Timothy Garton Ash

… The U.S. has probably not yet fully woken up to the appalling fact that, after a long period in which the first motto of its military was “no more Vietnams,” it faces another Vietnam. There are many important differences, but the basic result is similar: The mightiest military in the world fails to achieve its strategic goals and is, in the end, politically defeated by an economically and technologically inferior adversary … Looking back over a quarter of a century of chronicling current affairs, I cannot recall a more comprehensive and avoidable man-made disaster.

Washington to Increase US Military Backing for Israel
American Jewish Committee

The American Jewish Committee lauds the U.S. State Department announcement today that it soon will conclude a new ten-year military assistance agreement with Israel … Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice confirmed today that the U.S. "will move soon to conclude a new ten-year military assistance agreement with Israel ." This agreement will provide, among other elements, "a total of $30 billion to ensure Israel's ability to defend itself."

Mob Wars Hit New Heights in Israel
Associated Press

When an explosion goes off on a busy Israeli street these days, it seems as likely to be a mob hit as a Palestinian attack. Rival underworld gangs are waging bloody battles for control of gambling and protection rackets, targeting each other with bullets, bombs and anti-tank missiles… The mob wars have killed dozens of gangsters and at least eight bystanders in the last three years, and exposed law enforcement officers in scandalous complicity… Criminal violence has several times turned city streets and upscale neighborhoods into battlegrounds.

Wrong Again!: Bush's Logic and Ours
Tom Engelhardt

In fact, no set of images from elsewhere in life can do real justice to the Bush administration and the Washington it exists in. In our normal lives, no one could get it so wrong so often and still be given the slightest credence… Only in Washington would a group of officials with such a record still be able to set the basic ground rules for debate. No individual would go back to the lot that sold you a string of automotive lemons, or let the doctor who had repeatedly misdiagnosed your disease (and maybe killed your neighbor with an overdose of anesthetic), operate on you.

The New Drumbeat for War on Iran
Stephen Kinzer – The Guardian (Britain)

... The larger question is whether Iran's involvement in Iraq - even if Iran could be found directly responsible for the death of Americans - is so outrageously provocative that it justifies an American attack. History argues that it is not … During the Vietnam War, the Soviet Union supplied North Vietnam with weapons and ammunition that killed thousands of American soldiers. Yet no one in the Johnson or Nixon administrations ever considered attacking Moscow in retaliation.

Bush, Mideast Wars and End-Time Prophecy
JP Briggs II and Thomas D. Williams – Truthout

President George W. Bush has become dangerously steeped in ideas of Armageddon, the Apocalypse, an imminent war with Satanic forces in the Middle East, and an urgency to construct an American theocracy to fulfill God's end-of-days plan, according to close observers. Historians and investigative journalists following the "end-time Christian" movement have grown alarmed at the impact it may be having on Bush's Middle East policies, including the current war in Iraq, the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian crisis, the strife in Lebanon and the administration's repeated attempts to find a cause for war against Iran.

War, Foreign Policy, and the Church
Laurence M. Vance

... Throughout the twentieth century, interventionism was the guiding principle of U.S. foreign policy under either political party. The 9/11 attacks were just the beginning of a worldwide revolt against U.S. imperialism and empire. Of all people, Christians should know the truth and speak the truth about the evils of U.S. wars and foreign policy. They should see Bush’s rhetoric about extending "the benefits of freedom across the globe" and enlarging "the realm of liberty" for what it is: plain, old-fashioned interventionism, pure and simple. 

Washington Builds Case for Attack on Iran
The Guardian (Britain)

US military spokesmen, officials and analysts are gradually adding flesh to the bones of allegations of official Iranian collaboration with Shia and Sunni insurgents in Iraq, including elements linked to al- Qaida. The development comes amid reports that the White House is leaning towards military action against Iran over its suspect nuclear activities and supposed meddling in Iraq, and growing expectations that George Bush will extend the military "surge" to at least next summer. A senior US official in Baghdad told the Guardian in May that Iran was fighting a proxy war in Iraq.

Putting Terrorism In Perspective
Gwynne Dyer 

… An occasional terrorist attack is one of the costs of doing business in the modern world. You just have to bring a sense of proportion to the problem, and in general people in Europe do… Most Europeans, while they dislike terrorist attacks, do not obsess about them…  As ridiculous as it sounds to outsiders, Americans are regularly told that their survival as a free society depends on beating the “terrorists.” They should treat those who say such things as fools or deliberate liars, but they don’t.

Solzhenitsyn Chides West on Russia Policy
Associated Press

Nobel laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn has accused the West of trying to ignore and sideline Russia . The 88-year old author, who documented the murderous Soviet prison camp system based on his own seven-year experience as a prisoner of the gulag, said the Western criticism of Russia was often unfair, according to an interview with Der Spiegel magazine republished Tuesday in the Russian daily Izvestia.

A Declaration of Independence From Israel
Chris Hedges

The alliance between Israel and the United States has culminated after 50 years in direct U.S. military involvement in the Middle East.  This involvement, which is not furthering American interests, is unleashing a geopolitical nightmare.  American soldiers and Marines are dying in droves in a useless war.  The impotence of the United States in the face of Israeli pressure is complete.  The White House and the Congress have become, for perhaps the first time, a direct extension of Israeli interests.  There is no longer any debate within the United States . 

More Japanese Regard Kamikaze Pilots as Models for Youth
Associated Press

… For many, such words are redolent of the militarism that drove Japan to ruin in World War II. But for an increasingly bold cadre of conservatives, Uchida's words symbolize something else: just the kind of guts and commitment that Japanese youth need today… A museum about the kamikazes in the southern town of Chiran, near the airstrip where Uchida and others took off, gets more than 500,000 visitors a year… The renewed hero-worship of the kamikazes coincides with a general trend in Japanese society toward seeing the country's war effort as noble, and mourning the fading of the ethic of self-sacrifice amid today's wealth.

The Simon Wiesenthal Centre has urged Denmark 's Prime Minister … to void a monetary award by the Arts Council at the Danish Ministry of Culture to Erik Haaest, known as the "Holocaust Skeptic". Dr. Shimon Samuels, Wiesenthal Centre's Director for International Relations, wrote to Rasmussen … that "Haaest's citations from Holocaust denial literature go back to the 1959 volume of the Journal of Historical Review published by the institute of the same name, frequented by neo-Nazis worldwide." … "Your government's award to Haaest (...) legitimizes (...) Holocaust denial, incitement to antisemitism and is an offence to Holocaust survivors and to the families of all victims of Nazism."

French Justice, Justice on its Back
Robert Faurisson

In the course of a discussion program on the Arte television channel last November, Robert Badinter lied outright in saying that in 1981 he had won a court ruling against me “for being a falsifier of history”. I therefore sued him for libel. On May 21, 2007, the 17th division of the Paris criminal court, presided by Nicolas Bonnal, held that R. Badinter had indeed libelled me BUT… IN GOOD FAITH … Consequently I thus have to disburse 5,000 euros to R. Badinter for his lawyers’ fees and pay court costs as well. 

Giuliani Stacks Campaign Staff With Pro-Israel Hawks
Forward (New York)

As the roster of Republican presidential hopefuls grapples with the seeming implosion of one-time front-runner John McCain’s candidacy, Rudolph Giuliani is taking steps to claim his place as the field’s leading hawk. The former New York City mayor announced last week that he had assembled a team of foreign policy advisers featuring several prominent neoconservatives, including one of the movement’s founders, Norman Podhoretz. In addition to being an unwavering supporter of the war against Iraq, Podhoretz…has grabbed headlines in recent months as one of most vocal proponents of American military action against Iran .

World `Losing Fight’ Against AIDS
BBC News

US President George W Bush’s top adviser on HIV/Aids has said the world is losing the battle against the virus. Dr Anthony Fauci told a conference in Sydney that progress had been made, but more people were being infected with HIV than were being treated. “For every one person that you put in therapy, six new people get infected. So we’re losing that game, the numbers game,” he said. Dr Fauci was speaking at a gathering of the world’s leading HIV/Aids experts.

Bleak Assessment of Bush Iraq Policy in US Intelligence Report
McClatchy Newspapers

The Shiite Muslim-dominated government of Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki has made only 'halting efforts' to end the power struggle fueling the war between Iraq's religious and ethnic communities, a new US intelligence report said Wednesday… The report, reflecting the consensus of all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies, cast new uncertainty about the chances of success for President Bush's plan to contain the war through the deployment of an additional 28,000 U.S. troops, mostly in and around Baghdad .

An impressive record of scholarship was not enough to ensure tenure for DePaul University Professor Norman Finkelstein. An unprecedented yet predictable campaign of hate and slander waged by Israel Inc., commandeered by Alan Dershowitz, the noted Harvard plagiarist, strident enemy of human rights, and America's leading apologist for Israeli state terrorism.

Georges Theil – a 67-year-old retired senior executive of a large state corporation … -- was sentenced in 2005 in Limoges and in 2006 in Lyon for openly engaging in revisionist activities. The Limoges court case was about a few dozen copies of Theil's 2002 published autobiography… Georges Theil has done nothing more than dare to write and speak out about the sufferings of our nations in the West and of the Palestinian people, which he deems intolerable in a civilised world.

Idiots in Israel, along with those American idiots in the punditocracy who can't see where they are going because their vision is blocked by Israeli backsides, are trying to pressure our idiots in the White House to commit an act of insanity. That act of insanity is launching a military attack against Iran because the idiots and their followers believe, despite a total lack of evidence, that Iran is pursuing a nuclear bomb… The neocons are not only idiots, they are evil. They show a complete disdain for peace, a callous disregard for human life, and utter contempt for the rule of law.

A Racist Jewish State
Haaretz (Israel) -- Editorial

Every day the Knesset has the option of passing laws that will advance Israel as a democratic Jewish state or turn it into a racist Jewish state. There is a very thin line between the two. This week, the line was crossed. If the Knesset legal counselor did not consider the bill entitled “the Jewish National Fund Law” as sufficiently racist to keep it off the agenda, it is hard to imagine what legislation she will consider racist … This bill reflects an abasement of the Zionist enterprise to lows never imagined in the Declaration of Independence.

… From its inception, the campaign to depict and treat Iran as pure, unadulterated Evil has been driven by this manipulative and dishonest attempt to conflate Iran’s posture toward Israel with its posture toward the U.S. … What is beyond dispute is the centrality of Israel and its right-wing American supporters in shaping the president’s moralistic and absolutist view of Iran … When the realization begins to dawn that at least one substantial factor as to why America waged Middle Eastern war(s) is because influential individuals with an overarching devotion to Israel pushed for war against Israel’s enemies, then an anti-Israeli backlash is highly likely to occur. 

Tonkin Gulf II and the Guns of August?
Patrick J. Buchanan

Is the United States provoking war with Iran, to begin while the Congress is conveniently on its August recess? … As Congress prepares for its August recess, the probability of U.S. air strikes on Iran rises with each week. A third carrier, the USS Enterprise, and its battle group is joining the Nimitz and Stennis in the largest concentration of U.S. naval power ever off the coast of Iran.

The Fall of America's Meanest Law Firm: Milberg Weiss
Peter Elkind – Fortune

For decades, few things have inspired as much fear and loathing in the executive suites of corporate America as the law firm of Milberg Weiss and the two outsized personalities who ruled the place, Mel Weiss and Bill Lerach. Through creativity and ruthlessness, they transformed the humble securities class-action lawsuit into a deadly weapon… Weiss and Lerach have also found themselves in the cross hairs of federal prosecutors. In the most extraordinary federal case now afoot in the land, Milberg Weiss has been indicted for allegedly paying three plaintiffs $11.4 million in illegal kickbacks in about 180 cases spanning 25 years - and then repeatedly lying about it to the courts.

Hamas’ Stand
Mousa Abu Marzook (Hamas official)

...Hamas has never supported attacks on Westerners, as even our harshest critics will concede; our struggle has always been focused on the occupier and our legal resistance to it — a right of occupied people that is explicitly supported by the Fourth Geneva Convention. Yet our movement is continually linked by President Bush and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to ideologies that they know full well we do not follow, such as the agenda of Al Qaeda and its adherents.

Major Bank Warns of Danger From Credit Spree
The Telegraph (Britain)

The Bank for International Settlements, the world's most prestigious financial body, has warned that years of loose monetary policy has fuelled a dangerous credit bubble, leaving the global economy more vulnerable to another 1930s-style slump than generally understood… The BIS, the ultimate bank of central bankers, pointed to a confluence a worrying signs, citing mass issuance of newfangled credit instruments, soaring levels of household debt, extreme appetite for risk shown by investors, and entrenched imbalances in the world currency system.

The balance in the internal White House debate over Iran has shifted back in favour of military action before President George Bush leaves office in 18 months, the Guardian has learned. The shift follows an internal review involving the White House, the Pentagon and the state department over the last month. Although the Bush administration is in deep trouble over Iraq, it remains focused on Iran. A well-placed source in Washington said: "Bush is not going to leave office with Iran still in limbo."

Israel’s Strategic Affairs Minister Avigdor Lieberman said Wednesday that Israel would put the final touches on its preparations to counter Iran's nuclear threat in the near future. "I hope that soon we will be prepared for all the possibilities and developments … the State of Israel has to take into account that it will have to deal alone with the same threat," he told the Knesset plenum in reference to Iran's nuclear program.

Predicting that sanctions will ultimately fail to stop Teheran's nuclear program, Brig.-Gen. (res.) Yossi Kuperwasser, former head of Military Intelligence's Research Division, told The Jerusalem Post on Monday that time to launch an effective military strike against Iran's nuclear installations was running out. According to Kuperwasser, who stepped down from his post last year, Iran is "very close" to the point that it will cross the technological threshold and have the capability to enrich uranium at an industrial level.