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Christian Leaders in Holy Land Denounce Israel’s 'Systematic Campaign of Abuse Against Churches'
Church Times (Britain)
A bill that would give the Israeli government the right to confiscate church land was reminiscent of laws enacted against the Jews in Nazi Germany, Christian leaders in the Holy Land said this weekend. They announced the closure of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, in protest at a “systematic campaign of abuse against Churches and Christians”. A statement issued on Sunday was signed by the Greek Orthodox Patriarch Theophilos III of Jerusalem; the Catholic Custos of the Holy Land, Fr Francesco Patton, a Franciscan priest who holds responsibility for guardianships of the holy places on behalf of the Roman Catholic Church; and the Armenian Patriarch of Jerusalem, Patriarch Nourhan Manougian.
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Seemingly unrelated events all point to a tectonic shift in which Israel has begun preparing the ground to annex the occupied Palestinian territories. Last week, during an address to students in New York, Israel’s education minister Naftali Bennett publicly disavowed even the notion of a Palestinian state. “We are done with that,” he said. “They have a Palestinian state in Gaza.” Later in Washington, Mr Bennett, who heads Israel’s settler movement, said Israel would manage the fallout from annexing the West Bank, just as it had with its annexation of the Syrian Golan in 1980. International opposition would dissipate, he said. “After two months it fades away and 20 years later and 40 years later, [the territory is] still ours.” … All evidence suggests that Washington is fully on board, so long as annexation is done by stealth.
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Even in Peace, Israeli Occupation Will Never End, Says Netanyahu
M. Schaeffer Omer-Man - LobeLog
He’s said it countless times before in myriad ways. But he usually only says it in Hebrew. This week, however, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu said in English, and on camera, that under his leadership Israel will never end the occupation of Palestine. Speaking at the Economic Club of Washington earlier this week, Netanyahu dodged a question about whether he supports a one- or two-state solution, and outlined a vision that sounds a lot like an entrenched and enhanced version of the occupation as it exists today … Even after a peace deal, or in Netanyahu’s words, “a solution,” the occupation of Palestine will continue. And without sovereign control of its territory, there would definitely be no independent Palestinian state. Netanyahu has been saying this for years.
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'Son of a Dog': Independence or Occupation
Uri Avnery (Israel)
… As a result, the President of the US totally ignores the rights of the Palestinian people and their aspirations. According to him, the Palestinians must accept what is offered to them, as a dog must accept what his master throws to him and wag his tail … Never since the emergence of the modern Palestinian nation has its situation been as dire as it is now … Throughout the world there is a lot of sympathy for the Palestinians, but no government would lift a finger for them. And the most powerful country in the world is now their open enemy … There is now a worldwide consensus in favor of Palestinian statehood and the end of the Israeli occupation. In Israel, too, this aim has a lot of supporters. “Two States” or one colonial state, independence or occupation – the choice is clear.
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More than 5,000 potential victims of modern slavery and trafficking were referred to UK authorities last year, a record number, a report has revealed. The National Crime Agency said British nationals made up the highest number of cases for the first time, followed by people from Albania and Vietnam. The number of children thought to be victims rose by 66 percent from 2016. The agency said the increase in referrals was “driven by greater awareness” of the problem. The NCA said the increase in child referrals was partly because of the growth of a drug supply route, known as “county lines”. This is where city-based gangs use young people as couriers to move drugs like heroin and crack cocaine to rural and coastal areas. “They are enticed by wealth but quickly coerced by violence,” said the NCA’s deputy director, Tom Dowdall.
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The simple truth about John Bolton’s appointment to national security adviser is that the Republicans need Sheldon Adelson’s money in order to be competitive in the coming midterms, and John Bolton is a tool of Sheldon Adelson. The appointment of course is a complete reversal of Donald Trump’s declaration during the campaign that the Iraq war – which Bolton pushed and still thinks is a great idea – was the biggest mistake ever … But Adelson was Trump’s biggest donor during the 2016 campaign, and Trump needs Sheldon Adelson’s money to keep Congress from flipping and cutting his throat. It’s little wonder that any Republican with political ambition was quick to extol John Bolton.
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Bolton Pushed for Israeli Military Attack Against Iran, Says Former Israel Defence Minister
The Times of Israel
A former Israeli defense minister and chief of staff said Sunday that John Bolton, US President Donald Trump’s incoming national security adviser, once pushed him to order airstrikes against Iran. “I know John Bolton from when he was the US ambassador to the UN. He tried to convince me that Israel needs to attack Iran,” Shaul Mofaz told a Jerusalem conference held by the Yedioth Ahronoth daily. “I don’t think this is a smart move — not on the part of the Americans today or anyone else until the threat is real,” he added. Mofaz was IDF chief of staff from 1998 to 2002, after which he served as defense minister until 2006. Bolton was appointed by US president George W. Bush and served as ambassador in the UN in 2005-2006.
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US Officials Misled Russian President Yeltsin About NATO Expansion Plans, Documents Show
Sututnik News (Russia)
A newly-published collection of documents shows that Boris Yeltsin was misled by US officials, who told him that the Partnership for Peace was an alternative to NATO expansion when in reality it was the precursor to it. Despite objections from Moscow, Washington quietly pressed on with expansion plans. The new documents, compiled by the National Security Archive from US and Russian government files, show that US officials gave misguiding statements to Russian President Boris Yeltsin about plans for the expansion of NATO. They told Yeltsin that the Partnership for Peace — a NATO program to encourage military co-operation between NATO members and other Euro-Atlantic and ex-Soviet states — was an alternative to expanding NATO. At the same time they were planning to expand NATO membership …
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Twelve of the Worst Places to Live in the U.S.
Video – Destination Tips
Are you thinking of relocating somewhere in the States? Make sure you take a look at the twelve worst places to live in the U.S. before you make any decisions about your next home base … Number two: Detroit, Michigan The city is suffering from urban decay with over 32 percent of residents living below the national poverty line. According to FBI Reports, Detroit has the highest rate of violent crime of any city over 200,000. Number one: Camden, New Jersey, has been on Forbes’ list of “America’s Most Miserable Cities” for years. Riddled with urban decay and political corruption, over 42 percent of its residents live below the poverty line. It also has 560 percent more crime than the national average.
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On Friday, President Trump signed the omnibus spending bill for 2018. The $1.3 trillion bill was so monstrous that it would have made the biggest spender in the Obama Administration blush … No one “forced” President Trump to sign the bill. His party controls both houses of Congress. He knows that no one in Washington cares about deficits so he was more than willing to spread some Fed-created money at home to get his massive war spending boost … On militarism, the Obama Administration was just an extension of the Bush Administration, which was an extension of the militarism of the Clinton Administration. And so on … Bolton is on the record calling for war with Iran, North Korea, even Cuba! His return to a senior position in government is a return to the unconstitutional, immoral, and failed policies of pre-emptive war.
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With the appointment of leading neoconservative John Bolton as National Security Advisor, the Zionist war-party takeover of the White House is nearly complete. With Mike Pompeo as Secretary of State, Nikki Haley at the U.N., and now Bolton whispering in the President’s ear, we have a fully endowed war cabinet … Bolton, the point man for Israeli-American casino billionaire and GOP kingmaker Sheldon Adelson, will be the spark plug that ignites a new round of warfare on behalf of Israel. Bolton has long been planning to attack Iran … The American soldiers and airmen who are now based in Israel are the sacrificial lambs that will guarantee U.S. entry into a war that Israel intends to start, make no mistake about that.
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John Bolton: More Questions and Controversy
J. Davidovich – The Times of Israel
The nomination of John Bolton as US national security adviser, continuing to reverberate through the Israeli media ecosystem, is being given new life by a revelation Sunday morning by former defense minister Shaul Mofaz that Bolton once tried to convince him to bomb Iran … Most Israeli politicians in the country’s right-wing government welcomed Bolton’s nomination by US President Donald Trump over the weekend … A big part of Israeli officials’ love for Bolton is that he is seen as the death knell for the Iran nuclear deal. Amos Harel writes in Haaretz that Israeli officials see increased US pressure to scrap the agreement coming just as Tehran is under increased pressure because of its military adventurism abroad and still beleaguered economy, citing an intelligence assessment.
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The Iraq War Was a Crime, So Why Don’t We Treat It As One?
Daniel Larison - The American Conservative
… It was a crime against international law and the people of Iraq, and it was a grievous blunder for American interests … We don’t call the Iraq war a crime because we don’t like to think that our government does things like that, but when we fail to confront it once it is more likely to keep happening … Iraq war opponents often complain that there is no accountability for supporters of the war, and this complaint is a legitimate one. It is frustrating that the pundits, analysts, and politicians that backed the worst foreign policy decision of the last generation have paid almost no price for getting the biggest question in decades completely wrong. The bigger problem is that the architects of an illegal war have been allowed to get away with it without any penalty.
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The Iraq War After 15 Years
Sheldon Richman
… Now we mark the 15th anniversary of a foreign-policy decision that rivals Woodrow Wilson’s entry into World War I in its recklessness and cruelty … Almost no one suffered a career setback because of the deception they contributed to — indeed, the same foreign policy “experts” are regulars on the networks and in the op-ed pages, still calling for war and insisting that we trust the intel complex’s scary accounts about Russia’s plan to end our democratic way of life. The perpetrators of the Iraq war paid no price for their crimes — take a moment to think of the cascading evils that have followed! — and the abettors in the media have gotten away with their malfeasance as well. It would be nice to see a little justice meted out.
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Fifteen Years Ago, America Destroyed My Country
Sinan Antoon - The New York Times
… No one knows for certain how many Iraqis have died as a result of the invasion 15 years ago. Some credible estimates put the number at more than one million. You can read that sentence again. The invasion of Iraq is often spoken of in the United States as a “blunder,” or even a “colossal mistake.” It was a crime. Those who perpetrated it are still at large. Some of them have even been rehabilitated thanks to the horrors of Trumpism and a mostly amnesiac citizenry. (A year ago, I watched Mr. Bush on “The Ellen DeGeneres Show,” dancing and talking about his paintings.) The pundits and “experts” who sold us the war still go on doing what they do. I never thought that Iraq could ever be worse than it was during Saddam’s reign, but that is what America’s war achieved and bequeathed to Iraqis.
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Jewish Leaders Accuse Britain’s Labour Party Leader Corbyn of Siding With Anti-Semites
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
Leaders of British Jewry in an open letter to the country’s Labour Party said “again and again” party leader Jeremy Corbyn “has sided with anti-Semites rather than Jews.” “Today, leaders of British Jewry tell Jeremy Corbyn that enough is enough,” said the letter sent Monday to John Cryer, the chair of the Parliamentary Labour Party. “We have had enough of hearing that Jeremy Corbyn ‘opposes anti-Semitism,’ whilst the mainstream majority of British Jews, and their concerns, are ignored by him and those he leads. “He is repeatedly found alongside people with blatantly anti-Semitic views, but claims never to hear or read them.” Corbyn has headed the Labour Party since 2015 … European Jewish Congress President Moshe Kantor said in a statement that his group “wholeheartedly joins” the call.
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John Bolton Has Been Vocal About Going to War With North Korea and Iran
C. Garcia - The Week
President Trump’s next national security adviser, John Bolton, is best remembered for his role in former President George W. Bush’s administration, where he advocated for the Iraq War and became U.S. ambassador to the United Nations as a recess appointment, after the Republican-controlled Senate was unable to confirm him … Bolton has been highly critical of former President Barack Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran, and in 2015 wrote for The New York Times an op-ed that stated a United States or Israeli airstrike on Iranian nuclear facilities would be a good thing. “Time is terribly short, but a strike can still succeed,” he wrote. “Such action should be combined with vigorous American support for Iran’s opposition, aimed at regime change in Tehran.”
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Bringing in Bolton, White House Appears to Stiffen Against Palestinians, Iran
Eric Cortellessa - The Times of Israel
US President Donald Trump’s decision to nominate hawkish former diplomat John Bolton as his national security adviser brings a figure known for pushing for pre-emptive strikes on burgeoning nuclear powers as well as skepticism toward Palestinian statehood into the administration’s powerful inner circle … A vocal advocate of the Iraq war, he has also advocated preemptive strikes against North Korea and war with Iran … Bolton, who’s been a resident at the conservative American Enterprise Institute since he left the Bush administration, has advocated for Israel bombing Iran to curtail its nuclear ambitions.
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Was the 'Good War' Really Good?
Tim Kelly - FFF
The Second World War is often called “the good war.” … That description comes from the war’s popular portrayal as a necessary Manichean struggle between the good Allied powers and the evil Axis powers … It is understandable that many would see the Second World War as a morally clear-cut conflict between good and evil. This view has persisted, particularly in the United States — reinforced by countless motion pictures, documentaries, and books … Since 1945, American political leaders have frequently invoked the mythology of the good war to justify their bellicose, reckless, and arrogant foreign policy. Those expressing misgivings or skepticism toward Washington’s wars have often been accused of “appeasement” or forgetting the “lessons of Munich.”
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Did Hitler Want War?
Patrick J. Buchanan
… But if Hitler was out to conquer the world – Britain, Africa, the Middle East, the United States, Canada, South America, India, Asia, Australia – why did he spend three years building that hugely expensive Siegfried Line to protect Germany from France? Why did he start the war with no surface fleet, no troop transports and only 29 oceangoing submarines? … Why did he offer the British peace, twice, after Poland fell, and again after France fell? Why, when Paris fell, did Hitler not demand the French fleet, as the Allies demanded and got the Kaiser’s fleet? Why did he not demand bases in French-controlled Syria to attack Suez?
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Orderly and Humane?: World War II as the 'Good War'
Peter Hitchens - Daily Mail (Britain)
… We shall soon be marking the anniversary of the end of the supposedly ‘Good’ Second World War … The 1939-45 conflict is still wreathed in delusions, delusions often employed to try to justify modern wars which are alleged to have comparably ‘good’ aims. The belief in its goodness is in fact ludicrous. Our main ally (rejected at the beginning with lofty scorn, embraced later with desperate, insincere enthusiasm) was one of the most murderous tyrants in human history … During and immediately after the war, as I have discussed here, we employed methods which would have disgusted our forebears and which ought to disgust us, but which were so frightful that we still lie to ourselves about them, or hide them from our consciousness.
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Solzhenitsyn’s Damning History of the Jews in Russia: Two Hundred Years Together
Jan Peczkis - Russia Insider
… Most of it [the book, Two Hundred Years Together, by A. Solzhenitsyn] consists of unremarkable information that can be found in standard, non-censored texts … His approach is balanced. He is sympathetic towards Jews as well as critical of Jews … We often hear that Communist Jews were “not real Jews”. This nonsense is equivalent to saying that Lenin and other Russian Communists were “not real Russians” — a contrived distinction that Solzhenitsyn refuses to make. (p. 117) … One can easily make lists of Jews in high positions in the Soviet Union. Influential Jews commonly occurred at a rate ten or more times the abundance of Jews in the USSR. (pp. 143-on, 225-on) … The famous mobile gas chambers were not invented by the Nazis. They were developed, in 1937, by Isai Davidovich Berg, a leading Jew in the NKVD. (p. 237).
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It may be said without hesitation that Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Two Hundred Years Together. The Jews in the Soviet Union is one of the most important books on the Russian Revolution and the early Bolshevik period ever to appear. After publication of this work with its many revelations about the role of the Jews during the Leninist period, the history of the Bolshevik October putsch will have to be rewritten, if not completely, then with substantial additions. The book title might have been even more appropriately called “The End of the Legends.”
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The Jews Who Dreamed of Utopia: The Centenary of the Russian Revolution
The New York Times
… Was it good for the Jews? Step into the Jewish Museum Vienna, just off the main shopping drag of this imperial city, and you will be greeted by a bust of Karl Marx, the descendant of rabbis … An ambitious, searching show … “Comrade. Jew. We Only Wanted Paradise on Earth” — sets the tone for an extensive overview of the dreams and nightmares of communism and international socialism, as seen through the lives and work of Jewish politicians, philosophers and artists: not just Marx, but also Leon Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg, El Lissitzky, and many others … Most Jews, of course, were not revolutionaries. But Jews did make up a disproportionate percentage of leftist utopians … In the early days of the Soviet Union, Jews not only held top political positions but also occupied central positions in the artistic avant-garde.
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Stalin's Jews: Some of History’s Greatest Murderers Were Jewish
S. Plocker – Ynet News (Israel)
… And us, the Jews? An Israeli student finishes high school without ever hearing the name “Genrikh Yagoda,” the greatest Jewish murderer of the 20th Century, the GPU’s deputy commander and the founder and commander of the NKVD. Yagoda diligently implemented Stalin’s collectivization orders and is responsible for the deaths of at least ten million people. His Jewish deputies established and managed the Gulag system … Many Jews sold their soul to the devil of the Communist revolution and have blood on their hands for eternity. We’ll mention just one more: Leonid Reichman, head of the NKVD’s special department and the organization’s chief interrogator, who was a particularly cruel sadist. In 1934, according to published statistics, 38.5 percent of those holding the most senior posts in the Soviet security apparatuses were of Jewish origin.
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Trump Names John Bolton -- Iran Hawk, Close to Pro-Israel Groups -- as National Security Adviser
Ron Kampeas - JTA
President Donald Trump named as his national security adviser John Bolton, a hawk who has said military strikes may be inevitable as a means of preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon. The White House announced Thursday evening that H.R. McMaster was leaving the position and that Bolton would take his place by April 9 … Naming Bolton suggests Trump is ready to pull out of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal by May 12, the deadline for Trump to waive sanctions. The deal trades sanctions relief for a rollback of Iran’s nuclear program. Bolton is a staunch opponent of the deal, as is Mike Pompeo, the CIA chief Trump nominated last week to replace Rex Tillerson as secretary of state. Bolton has multiple times [said] striking Iran to stop it from going nuclear may be inevitable … Bolton has close relations with the pro-Israel community …
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President Donald Trump has appointed John Bolton, the former US envoy to the UN, as his national security adviser, politically reanimating a strident Bush administration neo-conservative … Mr Bolton’s new role will prove controversial since he remains an unapologetic cheerleader of the 2003 Iraq war, which the US president himself once lambasted as “a big mistake” … Kentucky Republican Senator Rand Paul described Mr Bolton last year in an op-ed as “hell-bent on repeating virtually every foreign policy mistake the US has made in the last 15 years” … He also called in a New York Times op-ed for Iran to be bombed, and pilloried President Obama’s nuclear deal with the Islamic Republic as a “diplomatic Waterloo” … And in a recent op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, he set out the case for a pre-emptive strike on North Korea.
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The Untold Story of John Bolton’s Campaign for War With Iran
Gareth Porter - The American Conservative
… The strong likelihood that Donald Trump will now choose John Bolton as his next national security advisor creates a prospect of war with Iran that is very real. Bolton is no ordinary neoconservative hawk. He has been obsessed for many years with going to war against the Islamic Republic, calling repeatedly for bombing Iran in his regular appearances on Fox News, without the slightest indication that he understands the consequences of such a policy. His is not merely a rhetorical stance: Bolton actively conspired during his tenure as the Bush administration’s policymaker on Iran from 2002 through 2004 to establish the political conditions necessary for the administration to carry out military action. More than anyone else inside or outside the Trump administration, Bolton has already influenced Trump to tear up the Iran nuclear deal.
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America’s Foreign Policy Made in Israel
Philip Giraldi
… The real Donald Trump has emerged as a dedicated supporter of the most hardline elements in Israel, whose aspirations are fueled by the money flowing from American Jewish billionaires. And nowhere in sight is any actual American national interest … Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is facing criminal charges for corruption, is reportedly delighted with Trump and his “team.” … Beyond that, the pressure on what Netanyahu perceives as his arch-enemy, the state of Iran, has been unrelenting both from Washington and Jerusalem, with Donald Trump repeatedly asserting that he will tear up the “terrible” nuclear agreement. Some pretext for war will surely follow with the United States having to bear much of the burden as well as most of the consequences …
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Iran and the Middle East
Richard Dalton - LobeLog
President Trump has complained publicly that only cosmetic changes to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA also known more informally as the Iran nuclear deal), and some side agreements, are being offered to him … This is bullying language directed at close allies, inspired not by sober determination of US interests and capabilities, but by hatred of President Obama and disdain for the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and its protocols … Such language is used only because such people live in a parallel universe in which US desires are by definition right and require no negotiation, just submission.
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In South Africa, More White Farmers Reportedly Being Murdered and Driven Off Their Land
RT News (Russia)
Violent attacks against South Africa’s white farmers are on the rise, according to Paul Toohey, a reporter from Australia’s Daily Telegraph, who traveled to the country. Last month, South Africa’s parliament voted to allow white-owned land expropriation without compensation. That followed South Africa’s new President Cyril Ramaphosa’s pledge to return the lands owned by white farmers since the 1600s to the black citizens of the country. He claimed the land was “taken under colonialism and apartheid.” “This is normal in South Africa to be attacked on a farm,” a 39-year old farmer Berdus Henrico told the reporter … According to AfriForum, a group that was set up to draw attention to the farmers’ plight, there were a record 404 farm attacks in 2017, four times the number recorded in the country a decade ago.
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Israeli Parliament Endorses 'Nation-State Bill' For First Reading
Jonathan Cook - Aljazeera
After seven years of delays, the Israeli governing parties have agreed the final terms of controversial new legislation that would define Israel exclusively as “the nation-state of the Jewish people”. The bill is now expected to be fast-tracked through the Israeli parliament and on to the statute books in the coming weeks. Approval by the parliament’s justice committee this week of the Basic Law, which carries much greater weight than normal legislation, marks a dangerous turning-point for Palestinians, according to analysts. Amir Ohana, the committee’s chair, called it the “law of all laws”, while a government minister termed it “Zionism’s flagship bill” … In the words of one of the handful of Palestinian members of the Israeli parliament, Aida Touma-Suleiman, the bill “institutionalises an apartheid regime in the most blatant way”.
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Ending Secrecy, Israel Says It Bombed Syrian Reactor in 2007
The New York Times
Israel’s government on Wednesday publicly confirmed for the first time that it had carried out an audacious 2007 strike against a reactor in Syria that could have produced nuclear weapons fuel, lifting a decade of secrecy surrounding the episode. The country’s leaders used the occasion to warn that, if necessary, Israel would not hesitate to launch similar strikes again. “The government of Israel, the IDF and the Mossad prevented Syria from developing a nuclear capability,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, referring to the Israel Defense Forces and the country’s spy agency. “Israel’s policy has been and remains consistent — to prevent our enemies from arming themselves with nuclear weapons.”
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German Ex-Pegida Leader Deported from UK
RT News (Russia)
The German founder of an anti-Islam group has been booted out of the UK. Detained immediately on arrival, Pegida founder Lutz Bachmann landed at Stansted on Saturday night and was expelled on Sunday morning. The Home Office confirmed that Bachmann, who has in the past led protest marches of tens of thousands of people, was refused entry to the UK on the grounds that his presence was not in the interest of the public good. “Border Force has the power to refuse entry to an individual if it is considered that his or her presence in the UK is not conducive to the public good,” a spokesperson said. Bachmann planned to speak to supporters with ex-English Defence League leader Tommy Robinson in Hyde Park on Sunday.
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Teen Suicides Up Sharply Over Ten Years
The Blaze
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have reported an alarming rise in the number of teen suicides between 2006 and 2016. Differentiating between white and black youths, the data analysis shows that the number of self-inflicted deaths of white children between the ages of 10 and 17 increased 70 percent during the time span. Black children and teens are less likely to kill themselves, but their suicide rate rose even higher judging from the study: an increase of 77 percent. In a separate study from last year, CNN reported that the suicide rate among girls between the ages of 15 and 19 rose to a 40-year high in 2015. A myriad of factors is attributed to the rise, Social media, bullying, and psychotropic drugs have all been named as contributors to the problem.
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A Palestinian teenager arrested after slapping an Israeli soldier has accepted a plea deal that will see her serve eight months in prison. Ahed Tamimi had agreed to plead guilty to four of the twelve charges she faced, including assault, her lawyer said. She will also pay a fine of 5,000 shekels ($1,440) and accept a further eight-month jail term, suspended. The 17 year old was detained after being filmed confronting two armed soldiers outside her home in December … For Palestinians, Ahed Tamimi, who was 16 at the time of the incident in the occupied West Bank, is a symbol of resistance to Israeli occupation. But many Israelis regard her as a violent troublemaker seeking publicity … The incident was streamed on Nariman Tamimi’s Facebook page and video of the confrontation went viral.
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'I’m Fascinated by Mussolini': Steve Bannon on Fascism, Populism and Everything in Between
Nicholas Farrell - The Spectator (Britain)
We are in a hotel suite at the Park Hyatt Hotel in Zurich when Stephen K. Bannon tells me he adores the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini. But let’s be clear. Bannon — as far as I can tell — is not a fascist. He is, however, fascinated by fascism, which is understandable, as its founder Benito Mussolini, a revolutionary socialist, was the first populist of the modern era and the first tabloid newspaper journalist. Il Duce, realising that people are more loyal to country than class, invented fascism, which replaced International Socialism with National Socialism … Bannon is now touring Europe to weaponise what lots of European people seem to want, which is national populism.
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Vilfredo Pareto: Influential 'Fascist' Sociologist and Philosopher
James Alexander – Institute for Historical Review
… One of the most widely respected Italian political theorists and sociologists in this century is Vilfredo Pareto. Indeed, so influential are his writings that “it is not possible to write the history of sociology without referring to Pareto.” Throughout all of the vicissitudes and convulsions of twentieth-century political life, Pareto remains “a scholar of universal reputation.” Pareto is additionally important for us today because he is a towering figure in one of Europe’s most distinguished, and yet widely suppressed, intellectual currents. This broad school of thought … stands in staunch opposition to rationalism, liberalism, egalitarianism, Marxism …
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The Death and Life of the Mafia in Italy: From Suppression by Mussolini to Revival by 'Liberation'
James J. Martin
… One of the consequences of the destruction of Mussolini and his regime was a prodigious rise in criminal activities in Italy … Dominating this development was the revivified Mafia, effectively subdued for over a decade before the arrival in 1943-44 of the Anglo-American armies, and suddenly back in business everywhere with the achievement of “liberation.” … Allied military and occupation leaders were soon emptying the prisons and labor camps of the Mussolini regime, eventually turning loose upon Sicily and southern Italy a legion of convicted murderers, robbers and extortionists, as well as setting them up in business as the mayors of a long string of Sicilian communities – “Mafiosi to a man” …
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Poland Censors Israeli Mayor Who Sought to Cite Polish Holocaust Crimes at Event
The Times of Israel
A bitter dispute between Jerusalem and Warsaw over a controversial Holocaust law reached new heights on Monday, as an Israeli mayor was forced to cancel a speech he was planning to deliver to Israeli high school students on a trip to Poland after local authorities censored his prepared remarks … Before Dukorsky could deliver his address, the Radomsko municipality asked to go over his speech in light of a new law criminalizing the mention of complicity by the Polish state or nation in the Holocaust … “We reject any attempt at censorship,” said Foreign Ministry spokesman Emmanuel Nahshon. “We support the mayor’s right to make his speech as planned and not omit any word, not even a single letter.”
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Jewish-Zionist Group Calls on Major Booksellers to Drop Sale of 'Anti-Semitic' Books
Jewish Chronicle (Britain)
Major booksellers – including Amazon, Foyles, Waterstones and WH Smith – are facing calls to stop the sale of antisemitic and neo-Nazi material on their websites. Jonathan Arkush, Board of Deputies president, has said he is “dismayed” to learn retailers are profiting from the sale of “heinous books” including infamous antisemitic forgery, The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. The continued distribution of hate-filled books by high street retailers was highlighted in an investigation carried out by the Hope Not Hate organisation. Among other examples of extremist literature for sale were copies of The Turner Diaries (the inspiration for Oklahoma bomber Tim McVeigh and London nail bomber David Copeland), and the infamous Holocaust denial work Did Six Million Really Die? The Truth at Last …
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A man who posted a video of his girlfriend’s dog doing a Nazi salute on YouTube has been convicted over the “grossly offensive” footage. Mark Meechan, 29, who goes by the name Count Dankula, was arrested in April 2017 after footage of his girlfriend’s pug appearing to respond to Nazi slogans such as ‘gas the Jews’ went viral. In a case that attracted widespread attention, Meechan was found guilty on Tuesday at Airdrie Sheriff Court [in Scotland] of a charge under the Communications Act 2003. Sheriff Derek O’Carroll dubbed the video “grossly offensive” and said he did not believe Meechan’s defence that he had made it only to annoy his girlfriend. Prosecutors accused Meechan of posting material that was ‘anti-semitic and racist in nature,’ and was aggravated by religious prejudice.
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Indian Children’s Book Lists Hitler as Leader 'Who Will Inspire You'
The New York Times
An Indian publisher came under fire this week for including Hitler in a children’s book about world leaders who have “devoted their lives for the betterment of their country and people.” … The [Zionist] Simon Wiesenthal Center, which is based in Los Angeles, called for the publisher to remove “Great Leaders” from circulation and its online store, where it is sold for about $2 … Annshu Juneja, a publishing manager at the imprint, said by email that Hitler was featured because, like Barack Obama, Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Gandhi, “his leadership skills and speeches influenced masses.” “We are not talking about his way of conduct or his views or whether he was a good leader or a bad leader but simply portraying how powerful he was as a leader,” he said.
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Globalists and Nationalists: Who Owns the Future?
Patrick J. Buchanan
… The new resistance of Western man to the globalist agenda is now everywhere manifest … We see it in the political triumphs of Polish, Hungarian and Czech nationalists, in anti-EU parties rising across Europe, in the secessionist movements in Scotland and Catalonia and Ukraine, and in the admiration for Russian nationalist Vladimir Putin. Europeans have begun to see themselves as indigenous peoples whose Old Continent is mortally imperiled by the hundreds of millions of invaders wading across the Med and desperate come and occupy their homelands … To rising millions in the West, the open borders and free trade globalism they cherish and champion is not a glorious future, but an existential threat to the sovereignty, independence and identity of the countries they love.
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As America Changes, Some Anxious Whites Feel Left Behind
M. Norris - National Geographic
… The U.S. Census Bureau has projected that non-Hispanic whites will make up less than 50 percent of the population by 2044, a change that almost certainly will recast American race relations and the role and status of white Americans, who have long been a comfortable majority. Hazleton’s experience offers a glimpse into the future as white Americans confront the end of their majority status, which often has meant that their story, their traditions, their tastes, and their cultural aesthetic were seen as being quintessentially American. This is a conversation already exploding across the country as some white Americans, in online forums and protests over the removal of Confederate monuments, react anxiously and angrily to a sense that their way of life is under threat.
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Many Americans Still Think the Iraq War Was a Good Idea
Pew Research Center
Fifteen years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003, the American public is divided over whether using military force was the right decision. Nearly half (48%) of Americans say the decision to use military force was wrong, while slightly fewer (43%) say it was the right decision, according to a Pew Research Center survey, conducted March 7-14 among 1,466 adults. Current opinions about the war in Iraq are little different than in early 2014, when 50% said the decision to use force was wrong and 38% said it was right. Support for the decision to use military force in Iraq had declined considerably over the course of the war and its aftermath. In late March 2003, a few days after the U.S. invasion, 71% supported the decision to use military force, while just 22% said it was the wrong decision.
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Who Wants This War and Why
Gilbert Blythe
… On issues related to Israel, many Jews have understandably strong interests that are different from those of non-Jews, but the country as a whole should be careful not to be swept up in such partisan passions. Excessive concern for narrowly Jewish interests could damage broader American interests … Jewish spokesmen have promoted the view that terrorists attacked the United States because it is a beacon of freedom … The struggle of good against evil that many American Jews are promoting just happens to be a war against Israel’s enemies. Kristol and Kagan want us to destroy the military capacity of Iraq, Syria, and perhaps Iran, and forcibly install pliant governments in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Jordan.
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Kushner Companies Filed Dozens of False Housing Documents
Associated Press
When the Kushner Cos. bought three apartment buildings in a gentrifying neighborhood of Queens in 2015, most of the tenants were protected by special rules that prevent developers from pushing them out, raising rents and turning a tidy profit. But that’s exactly what the company then run by Jared Kushner did, and with remarkable speed. Two years later, it sold all three buildings for $60 million, nearly 50 percent more than it paid. Now a clue has emerged as to how President Donald Trump’s son-in-law’s firm was able to move so fast: The Kushner Cos. routinely filed false paperwork with the city declaring it had zero rent-regulated tenants in dozens of buildings it owned across the city when, in fact, it had hundreds.
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Zionist AIPAC Is Suddenly Getting Bad Press
Philip Weiss
One pleasurable surprise of the AIPAC policy conference in early March — the leading Israel lobby group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee — was how much bad press the organization got. It’s becoming almost fashionable to criticize the lobby for its enforcement of lockstep political support for Israel in Washington, and for its Soviet-style policy on access to the press. These criticisms are finally showing up in the mainstream press … Here are a few items. Notable among them is a report in the Washington Post of all places saying that AIPAC was born to rally American Jews to stand shoulder to shoulder behind Israeli “lies” about a massacre of Palestinians, back in 1953. And two angry pieces in the Jewish press decrying AIPAC’s blackout policy on coverage of its gatherings.
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British Judges Told to Avoid Referring to 'Jews' in Court
The Jewish Chronicle (Britain)
Judges should refrain from referring to a person as “a Jew” and instead describe them in court as a “Jewish person”, according to new advice from the organisation responsible for training the judiciary. In the latest edition of its Equal Treatment Bench Book, the Judicial College includes direction on the sensitive use of language in courts of law – and concludes that terminology once used to determine an individual’s racial or ethnic background is no longer acceptable.
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… Israel and Israeli institutions employ armies of Internet warriors — from Israeli soldiers to students — to spread propaganda online and try to get content banned that Israel doesn’t want seen … Israel and partisans of Israel have long had a significant presence on the Internet, working to promote the Israel narrative and block facts about Palestine, the Israel lobby, and other subject matter they wish covered up. Opinionated proponents of Israel post comments, flag content, accuse critics of “antisemitism,” and disseminate misinformation about Palestine and Palestine solidarity activists … General Sima Vaknin-Gil told Israeli tech developers to “flood the Internet” with pro-Israel propaganda.
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From the advent of below-article comments, anti-Israel activists have been taking advantage of online forums and social media to sew lies and hateful messaging about the Jewish state. It has taken awhile, but the government of Israel and a powerful network of pro-Israel advocates in the private sector are now proving to be a formidable opponent to the Israel-haters in countering anti-Semitic bias and spreading positive stories that represent the real face of Israel. “For the first time, BDS [Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions] groups are on the defensive,” declared Gilad Erdan, Israel’s Minister of Strategic Affairs and Public Diplomacy to a group of more than 60 social-media experts gathered in Jerusalem on Monday and Tuesday for the three-day #DigiTell18 Conference sponsored by the Ministry.
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In Winston Churchill, Hollywood Rewards a Mass Murderer
Shashi Tharoor - The Washington Post
“History,” Winston Churchill said, “will be kind to me, for I intend to write it myself.” … He was one of the great mass murderers of the 20th century, yet is the only one, unlike Hitler and Stalin, to have escaped historical odium in the West. He has been crowned with a Nobel Prize (for literature, no less), and now, an actor portraying him (Gary Oldman) has been awarded an Oscar … Words, in the end, are all that Churchill admirers can point to … During World War II, Churchill declared himself in favor of “terror bombing.” He wrote that he wanted “absolutely devastating, exterminating attacks by very heavy bombers.” Horrors such as the firebombing of Dresden were the result … Many of us will remember Churchill as a war criminal and an enemy of decency and humanity, a blinkered imperialist …
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Darkest Hour: Film Profiles Winston Churchill
Nicholas Barber - BBC News
… Joe Wright’s Darkest Hour is so breathlessly tense that at times you may forget how well the Dunkirk evacuation went. You may even forget the rest of Churchill’s triumphs. In parts of this propulsive, well-appointed and wonderfully acted period drama, his situation is so precarious it doesn’t look as if he’ll last the year, let alone the war. Never mind his battles with Hitler and Mussolini, his battles with politicians in his own party are testing enough … Wright treats his talky political drama as if it were a pulse-pounding action movie … It’s not a wholly flattering portrayal … The hero’s rants about fighting to the last man can seem dangerously fanatical, and Halifax’s measured pleas on behalf of peace talks can seem persuasively sensible.
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The Actor Who Was Churchill’s Radio Voice
The Guardian / Observer (Britain)
Proof that some of Winston Churchill’s most famous radio speeches of the war were delivered by a stand-in has emerged with the discovery of a 78 rpm record. The revelation ends years of controversy over claims – repeatedly denied – that an actor had been officially asked to impersonate the Prime Minister on air. The record makes it clear for the first time that Norman Shelley’s voice was used to broadcast some of the most important words in modern British history – including ‘We shall fight them on the beaches’ … Biographers and historians have argued ever since about whether some of the key morale-boosting speeches of the era – including the ‘We shall fight them on the beaches’ Dunkirk speech of 4 June 1940 and the ‘Their finest hour’ speech of 18 June in the same year – could have been made by an actor.
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Germany Considers Mandatory Nazi Death Camp Tours to Counter Far-Right
Zach Johnston - Uproxx
… Trips to Nazi death camps aren’t out of the ordinary. It’s already mandatory for all Bavarian students to visit Nazi death camps as part of their Holocaust curriculum. Now, with the rise of the AfD, Germans are starting to think that it’s time to expand that mandate. Sawsan Chebli, a Berlin-born politician (herself of refugee descent), made the recommendation from her Secretary of State post at the Berlin Mayor’s Office … The World Jewish Congress agreed and endorsed the idea of making death camp visits mandatory … The proposal from Chebli and the World Jewish Congress aims to fight that head-on with actual, hands-on education. They believe that it’s education that we need to fight the latest rise of the far-right.
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Turkey is “at breaking point in relations with the US,” Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said. The two major NATO partners have recently been at loggerheads over various issues. “People in Turkey have a very negative attitude towards the US because it doesn’t keep its word [and] constantly lies,” Cavusoglu stated addressing the students at Moscow State Institute of International Relations on Tuesday. The relations between our countries are “at breaking point,” he said, reminding that back in February both states had established working groups to normalize bilateral ties. Cavusoglu was apparently referring to teams set up earlier over the escalation in Manbij, where Turkey is currently conducting a military operation against the US-backed Kurds.
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Unshakeable Self-Confidence is in the Genes, Scientists Find
The Telegraph (Britain)
Scientists believe that many people are born winners with a rock solid self-confidence as much to do with nature as it is with nurture. The new belief that this is something people are born with conflicts with previous theories that confidence is based on upbringing and other environmental factors. Psychiatrists now say that the ability to perform under pressure may be something some people are born with. They have also shown that children with a greater belief in their own abilities often perform better at school, even if they are actually less intelligent … Contrary to accepted wisdom, they found that confidence is heavily influenced by genetics, at least as much as IQ is. These genes would appear to influence school performance independent of IQ genes, with shared environment having only a negligible influence.
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US Political Meddling is Very Real, Spans the Globe
Ulson Gunnar - New Eastern Outlook
… In stark contrast to the whispers of shadows cited by the US and Europe regarding Russia, to begin understanding the scope of US political meddling abroad, one needs only to visit the US State Department and corporate-funded National Endowment for Democracy’s (NED) own website. US meddling is so extensive that NED is broken into multiple subsidiaries (National Democratic Institute (NDI), International Republican Institute (IRI) and Freedom House) which in turn, are joined by parallel organizations … Within each region, NED lists its extensive funding for organizations and fronts in over 100 different nations around the globe … They collectively create the components of a political machine used to pressure incumbent governments to heed US interests, or overthrow them if they fail to.
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Newly-installed Secretary of State Mike Pompeo doesn’t have a huge amount of experience as a diplomat, so what can we expect from the former Kansas congressman now that he is heading US foreign policy? … Here’s a flavor of his previous comments on the most pressing foreign policy issues … Russia isn’t the only ‘bad guy’ out there, according to Pompeo. In a revealing interview with the BBC the then-US spy chief attacked alleged Chinese efforts to exert covert influence in the West … Pompeo, who, like Trump, had a career as a businessman before turning to politics, has reserved his strongest rhetoric for Iran and the nuclear deal signed by former US President Barack Obama. His opposition dates back to his time as a congressman when he said that the deal “won’t stop Iran from getting a nuclear bomb and places Israel at more risk.”
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Mike Pompeo on Iran
U.S. Institute of Peace (Washington, DC)
On March 13, President Donald Trump announced that he was replacing Secretary of State Rex Tillerson with Central Intelligence Agency Director Mike Pompeo … Pompeo has been outspoken on Iran both as a Republican congressman from Kansas (2011-2017) and as CIA director. The following is a collection of key remarks on Iran. .. [In July 2016 he wrote:] … “Today marks one year since Secretary of State John Kerry and Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammed Zarif agreed to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) … As a result, Congress must act to change Iranian behavior, and, ultimately, the Iranian regime.”
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US President Donald Trump has extended sanctions against Iran for another year, claiming that the Islamic Republic continues to pose “an unusual and extraordinary” threat to America. Trump signed an executive order on Monday [March 12], continuing a national emergency with respect to Iran first announced by former US President Bill Clinton in 1995. The American head of state argued that while all nuclear-related sanctions against Iran had been removed under the 2015 deal between Tehran and the six world powers – the US, the UK, France, China, Russia and Germany — Washington was going to maintain its pressure on Iran in other key areas.
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Police arrested a man for displaying a poster of soldiers killing Jews at the annual march by local veterans of two SS divisions that made up the Latvian Legion during World War II. The man was arrested Friday morning on the margins of the annual march of the Remembrance Day of the Latvian Legionnaires — soldiers from the 15th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS and the 19th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (the 1st and 2nd Latvian, respectively). A handful of veterans, flanked by hundreds of supporters waving Latvian flags, gathered around Freedom Monument for the march under heavy police guard … Many locals offered flowers to the veterans as they marched from the area around Riga’s St. Peter’s Church to the Freedom Monument.
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One hundred thousand Latvians rally in Riga in 1943 to express their rejection of Soviet tyranny, and to show solidarity with Germany and the other European nations fighting for freedom from Soviet and US domination. German-language narration. From the wartime German “Descheg” monthly newsreel, No. 22, Dec. 1943. Runtime: 1:11 mins.
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Zionist Center Calls on Publisher in India to Withdraw Book Calling Hitler a 'Great Leader'
The Times of Israel
An Indian publisher has come under fire for a children’s book that lists Adolf Hitler among a group of great world leaders. The Simon Wiesenthal Center called on Pegasus, a children’s imprint of the B. Jain publishing house, to pull the book “Great Leaders” off shelves and from its online catalog Thursday. The book’s cover includes pictures of Hitler, Barack Obama, Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi and current Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and praises them as world-leading visionaries. “In the time that feels devoid of great leadership, we have found men and women who will inspire you,” reads a description of the book on the Pegasus website … Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” is widely available in southeast Asia, and in some places he is seen as a pop culture figure and not necessarily as a sign of overt anti-Semitism.
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In Turkey, Hitler’s 'Mein Kampf' On Sale Despite Jewish Protestations
Daily Sabah (Turkey)
German dictator Adolf Hitler’s infamous autobiography “Mein Kampf” (My Struggle) is back on bookshelves in Turkey while the country’s Jewish community resents that supermarket chains also decided to sell the book … Germany successfully stopped sales of the book in Turkey in 2007 after a two-year lawsuit culminated in the book’s banning, which was published by ten publishers in Turkey. As the book became public domain last month [in 2016], Turkish publishers returned with new Turkish editions of the book to the dismay of the country’s some 23,000-strong Jewish community.
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Insane Aggression on Display
Gilad Atzmon
One would expect that Jews would have learned from past mistakes that it is a bad idea to mount pressure on their host nations to suspend their relationships with other nations … The Ruderman Family Foundation, a prominent Jewish-American Foundation launched a campaign calling for the United States to sever ties with Poland. As could be expected, it did not go well. The Jewish foundation produced an obscenely belligerent video in support of their campaign, which I urge you to watch … The video is a distressing display of the aggression that is attached to contemporary Jewish nationalist identification … Witold Jurasz, a journalist with the private Polsat broadcaster, blasted the video as “offensive and scandalous,” and said it “spits in the face of every Pole” – even those who, like him, oppose Poland’s Holocaust law.
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Finland Is World’s 'Happiest Country,' New UN Report Finds, With US Falling Further Behind
The Guardian (Britain)
Finland has overtaken Norway to become the happiest nation on earth, according to a UN report. The 2018 World Happiness Report also charts the steady decline of the US as the world’s largest economy grapples with a crisis of obesity, substance abuse and depression. The study reveals the US has slipped to 18th place, five places down on 2016. The top four places are taken by Nordic nations, with Finland followed by Norway, Denmark and Iceland … The report, an annual publication from the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, said all the Nordic countries scored highly on income, healthy life expectancy, social support, freedom, trust and generosity … The UN ranking places the UK in a lowly 19th place, the same as last year but behind Germany, Canada and Australia, although ahead of France and Spain.
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Are Trump's Moves a Springtime for Neoconservatism?
Jacob Heilbrunn - The National Interest
With his firing of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and appointment of the hawkish CIA director Mike Pompeo to replace him, Donald Trump has remained true to form … The likelihood that America will go to war against Tehran has risen. The 2015 Iran nuclear deal is now essentially null and void. In his remarks today, Trump emphasized that he and Tillerson clashed over the Iran nuclear deal … Trump’s vast expansion of the defense budget, coupled with his innate belligerence, suggest that, much like Kaiser Wilhelm in August 1914, he may lurch into a war that assumes proportions he never intended, much less expected. So if Trump goes further down the road of scrapping the Iran deal and hires Bolton, then war looms large. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is surely elated. Could this be springtime for neoconservatism?
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Retired US Colonel: Israel is Dragging the United States into World War III
D. Shahtahmasebi - MintPress News
Israel is in the process of plunging America into a war with Iran that could destroy what’s left of the Middle East and ignite a third world war, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, warned in Washington … Wilkerson, a retired army colonel who now teaches at Washington-area universities, didn’t hold back in his critique of where the status quo is leading the United States via its client state, Israel … Wilkerson explained that Israel is headed toward “a massive confrontation with the various powers arrayed against it, a confrontation that will suck America in and perhaps terminate the experiment that is Israel and do irreparable damage to the empire that America has become.”
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NBC’s Clueless Boost for Putin
Ray McGovern
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s team swept a doubleheader on March 1, with his mid-day speech claiming strategic parity with the U.S., and then the nightcap duel with NBC’s Megyn Kelly. Any lingering doubt that Putin is a shoo-in for another term as President is now dispelled. Putin might consider sending NBC a thank-you note … When Kelly asked the first time whether there is “a new arms race right now” after Putin’s announcement of Russia’s new strategic weapons, Putin reminded her that it was the U.S. that withdrew in 2002 from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty of 1972. He added that he had repeatedly warned the Bush/Cheney administration that Russia would be forced to respond to the dangerous upset of the strategic equilibrium.
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… In reality, the security of the U.S. part is a bit of a sham as AIPAC [American Israel Public Affairs Committee] in no way works to strengthen the United States or benefit the American people. Quite the contrary. The bilateral “special” relationship is a one-way street that has done considerable damage to the United States in terms of its international standing and national security. AIPAC is all about Israel and always has been. Its hundreds of staffers lobby Congress and the White House daily to support legislation and policies favorable to Israel and damaging to its enemies and critics. It works closely with the Israeli government to obtain maximum benefit from the U.S. Treasury and Pentagon, to the detriment of American citizens and genuine national interests.
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… The Battle of Moscow in the winter of 1941-1942 proved that Germany’s attempt to knock the Soviet Union out of the war in a single mighty blow had failed and that the struggle had become a war of attrition that the Soviets were rigged to win … The struggle had thus become a true war of attrition that Germany could not hope to win given the Soviet preponderance in armament and the American credit line … My argument is rather that, having reached the Volga, the Germans came close to severing the communication lines between Moscow and Baku. Had they managed to pull that off, the odds of the war would surely have evened out if not reversed outright. So, contrary to Reinhardt and my earlier claims, an operational solution of strategic significance was still on the cards in 1942.
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A Thoughtful Look at the German-Soviet Clash: Could Hitler Have Won?
Review by Joseph Bishop -- Institute for Historical Review
How close did Hitler come to winning World War II? What was the real turning point in the war, and why? In this path breaking revisionist study [Hitler’s Panzers East], Professor Stolfi provides some startling answers to these questions. If Hitler had played his cards just a bit differently, contends the author — a professor of Modern European History at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California — he could have won the war. German forces came very close to defeating the Soviet Union in 1941. Because Britain alone posed no mortal threat to German power, the defeat of Soviet Russia would effectively have ended the war, resulting in German hegemony over all of Europe. The result would have been a drastic change in the course of world history.
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Exposing Stalin’s Plan to Conquer Europe
Daniel Michaels – Institute for Historical Review
… Thus, when German forces struck [the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941], the bulk of Red ground and air forces were concentrated along the Soviet western borders facing contiguous European countries, especially the German Reich and Romania, in final readiness for an assault on Europe. In his second book on the origins of the war, “M Day” (for “Mobilization Day”), Suvorov details how, between late 1939 and the summer of 1941, Stalin methodically and systematically built up the best armed, most powerful military force in the world — actually the world’s first superpower — for his planned conquest of Europe. Suvorov explains how Stalin’s drastic conversion of the country’s economy for war actually made war inevitable.
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Major Personality Study Finds That Traits Are Mostly Inherited
The New York Times
The genetic makeup of a child is a stronger influence on personality than child rearing, according to the first study to examine identical twins reared in different families. The findings shatter a widespread belief among experts and laymen alike in the primacy of family influence, and are sure to engender fierce debate. The findings are the first major results to emerge from a long-term project at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities (UMN) … For most of the traits measured, more than half the variation was found to be due to heredity, leaving less than half determined by the influence of parents, home environment and other experiences in life … Other traits that the study concludes were more than 50 percent determined by heredity included a sense of well-being and zest for life; alienation; vulnerability or resistance to stress, and fearfulness or risk-taking.
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School Shootings are Extraordinarily Rare. Why is Fear of Them Driving Policy?
David Ropeik - The Washington Post
… The chance of a child being shot and killed in a public school is extraordinarily low. Not zero — no risk is. But it’s far lower than many people assume, especially in the glare of heart-wrenching news coverage after an event like Parkland. And it’s far lower than almost any other mortality risk a kid faces, including traveling to and from school, catching a potentially deadly disease while in school, or suffering a life-threatening injury playing interscholastic sports. We sometimes seek protection from our fears in ways that put us in greater peril. In responding to the Parkland shooting, we may be doing just that to our kids. Statistics seem cold and irrelevant compared with how the evil of a school shooting makes us feel … School shootings also trigger powerful emotions that swamp the odds.
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Poland’s leaders will not be allowed to meet with U.S. President Donald Trump or Vice President Mike Pence until Warsaw repeals its controversial new Holocaust law. Polish web portal Onet.pl (owned by Axel Springer, also a co-owner of Politico Europe) on Tuesday reported that it had obtained a memo from Washington dated February 20 about the law, which makes it illegal to suggest that the Polish state or the Polish nation were complicit in Nazi crimes. The information has been confirmed by other Warsaw-based media. U.S. State Department officials also reportedly warned that the U.S. might withhold funding for joint military projects in Poland because of the law, including the stationing of U.S. troops in the country as part of NATO defense efforts.
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Global Holocaust-Deniers Bill Passed In Knesset
The Jerusalem Post (Israel)
Legislation that would make Holocaust-denial committed overseas an offense under Israeli legal jurisdiction was approved unanimously in first reading by the Knesset on Tuesday [in July 2004]. The passage of the measure would enable Israel to demand the extradition of Holocaust-deniers for prosecution. The bill was drafted by MK Aryeh Eldad (National Union) as a move against former Palestinian Authority prime minister Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) for his doctoral dissertation 20 years ago in which he estimated that the Nazis killed less than a million Jews … The legislation expands the territorial jurisdiction of the Israeli law against Holocaust-denying outside of it borders.
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Jewish Groups and US Politicians Condemn Russia’s President For Remarks on Jews
The Washington Post
Jewish groups and U.S. lawmakers condemned Russian President Vladimir Putin’s suggestion that the 2016 U.S. presidential election may have been manipulated by Russian Jews. Putin’s remarks came during a long and occasionally surreal interview with NBC News on Saturday … “Maybe they’re not even Russians,” Putin told Megyn Kelly, referring to who might have been behind the election interference. “Maybe they’re Ukrainian, Tatars, Jews — just with Russian citizenship.” He also speculated that France, Germany or “Asia” might have interfered in the election — or even Russians paid by the U.S. government. But his remark about Jews, which seemed to suggest that a Russian Jew was not really a Russian, prompted particular outrage … Some groups compared the statement to anti-Jewish myths that helped inspire the Holocaust.
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Zionist ADL Condemns Putin’s Suggestion That Jews May Have Meddled in U.S. Election
The Jerusalem Post (Israel)
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s suggestion that Jews and other minorities in the Russian Federation could be behind the meddling in the 2016 US presidential election is deeply concerning and should be immediately retracted, the Anti-Defamation League said in a statement on Sunday. In an interview with NBC News last week, Putin rejected claims made by the highest reaches of the US security establishment that Russia was behind an online disruption campaign designed to sow chaos into election process. In response to the charges leveled by the US intelligence community, Putin said: “Maybe they’re not even Russians. Maybe they’re Ukrainians, Tatars, Jews, just with Russian citizenship …” … The comments drew a swift rebuke from many US Jewish leaders …
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Enough Russophobia!
Patrick J. Buchanan
… Russia is acting again as a great power. And she sees us as a nation that slapped away her hand, extended in friendship in the 1990s, and then humiliated her by planting NATO on her front porch. Yet, what is also clear is that Putin hoped and believed that, with the election of Trump, Russia might be able to restore respectful if not friendly relations with the United States … Yet, with the Beltway hysteria over hacking of the DNC and John Podesta emails, and the Russophobia raging in this capital, we appear to be paralyzed when it comes to engaging with Russia. The U.S. political system, said Putin this week, “has been eating itself up.” Is his depiction that wide of the mark? What is the matter with us? … All we seem to hear from our elite is endless whining that Putin has not been sanctioned enough for desecrating “our democracy.” Get over it.
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What’s in Al Jazeera’s Undercover Film on the US Israel Lobby?
A. Winstanley - The Electronic Intifada
The leading neoconservative think tank Foundation for Defense of Democracies [FDD] is functioning as an agent of the Israeli government, Al Jazeera’s forthcoming investigation on the US Israel lobby will reveal. According to a source who has seen the undercover documentary, it contains footage of a powerful Israeli official claiming that “We have FDD. We have others working on this.” … Al Jazeera’s film reportedly identifies a number of lobby groups as working with Israel to spy on American citizens using sophisticated data gathering techniques. The documentary is also said to cast light on covert efforts to smear and intimidate Americans seen as too critical of Israel. Israel lobby groups have placed intense pressure on Qatar, which funds Al Jazeera, to shelve the film, fueling speculation it may never be aired.
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The British Labour party has suspended several of its members who posted in a closed Facebook group which featured a number of anti-Semitic messages. Party leader Jeremy Corbyn was once a member of the group. The party was forced to take action after an investigation by researcher David Collier showed details of anti-Semitic posts and discussions on the Palestine Live group. Some of the posts on Palestine Live appear to include links to Holocaust denial myths, allegations of Israel’s involvement in the 9/11 and 7/7 terror attacks and the training of Islamic State fighters, and conspiracy theories involving the Rothschild family.
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Every President’s Health, Ranked
J. Belluz - Vox
… Based on interviews with 27 historians and doctors, the report revealed William Taft gobbled up 12-ounce steaks for breakfast … and Grover Cleveland — whose nickname was “Uncle Jumbo” — avoided exercise at all costs … The report ranked the presidents from healthiest to least healthy on a 100-point scale … Coming in first was Rutherford B. Hayes, the 19th president who held office from 1877 to 1881. Hayes, according to the report, had very healthy behaviors. He lived in the White House at a time when smoking, alcohol — and even profanity — were outlawed … Trump, meanwhile, ranked 26 on the list — after Abraham Lincoln and both President Bushes — mainly because he’s borderline obese and has elevated cholesterol and blood pressure levels … John F. Kennedy used sleeping pills and liked to nap during the day.
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Palestinian Official Claims Trump Peace Plan Spells 'Liquidation, Apartheid'
The Times of Israel
The US administration’s yet-to-be-announced Middle East peace plan calls for maintaining the status quo between Israel and the Palestinians, while giving the Palestinians “eternal self-rule,” Palestine Liberation Organization Secretary General Saeb Erekat said in a policy paper he presented to Fatah leaders on Friday. The plan will effectively “lead to the creation of one state with two systems, thus legitimizing apartheid and settlements in accordance with American criterion,” Erekat wrote in his report …
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Why One War When We Can Have Two?
Eric Margolis
… Few people know that it was France that first attacked Germany, not the other way around. Responding to the German invasion of Poland, France and Britain declared war on Germany. French divisions began to invade Germany’s Rhineland. But after a few skirmishes the French high command, under the inept Gen. Maurice Gamelin, didn’t know what to do next … After a brief demonstration, the French Army withdrew behind the Maginot Line. Hitler did not counter-attack in hope he could forge a peace treaty with London and Paris. Winston Churchill and his fellow imperialists furiously sought to push Britain into war with Germany. But months of inactivity went by, known as the ‘Sitzkrieg’ or ‘drôle de guerre’ until Germany acted decisively. This would also be America’s problem in a war against Russia.
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A Short History of American Empire
Review by Jeff Faux - Dissent
… In late 2013, at a time when Barack Obama’s foreign policy was widely criticized in the United States as too “soft,” a Gallup poll of around 65,000 people in 65 countries showed that the United States was considered the greatest threat to world peace (Pakistan was a distant second). The story we tell ourselves, of course, is that we are the guardians of the peace, besieged by forces of evil that hate us because of our unique national virtues of freedom, tolerance, and democracy … What word better than “empire” describes America’s role among nations? We have at least 800 acknowledged military installations around the world, the most extensive imperium in history … Since 2001, we have attacked 14 different countries. Imperialism’s default foreign policy is limited, but endless, war.
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The Impossibility of American Empire
William Pfaff
… The Empire of the United States was launched in 1898, and has since traversed a mere century, experiencing increasing ambition, and suffering increasing difficulties. Could it too last 406 years? The current evidence is not reassuring … This is what the War on Terror has come to mean. It is an attempt to create a universal empire that exists only in the American imagination, by an effort that, because its aim is impossible to achieve, is unlimited in the damage it could do to Americans and others.
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The Dangerous Course of US Foreign Policy
Mark Weber with Daniel Davis - Beyond 50 Radio - Video
The United States, says Weber, has changed from a republic focused on its own prosperity and well-being to a globally intrusive military power. This worldwide military presence reflects an entrenched American view that the US is a social-political model for all nations, and therefore has a right, based on perceived moral superiority, to intervene everywhere. He traces the evolution of this outlook from the fateful Spanish-American War of 1898, and the false pretexts and promises used since then to justify wars. Going to war to fight “evil” or “terrorism,” says Weber, is a recipe for endless strife and conflict. Video based on interview with Weber by Daniel Davis, host of the “Beyond 50” radio show. Runtime: 9:48 mins.
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The Notorious Book That Ties the Right to the Far Right : 'The Camp of the Saints'
Sarah Jones - New Republic
… Admiration, or at least cautious respect, for The Camp of the Saints seems to be where conservative commentators and politicians align with white nationalists. It offers insight into the true nature of the right’s fear of immigration, and shows the extent to which that fear has been normalized … The cartoonish violence and garish racism of Camp of The Saints have prevented it from becoming a truly mainstream work. Its influence appears limited mostly to white nationalists, and to a handful of conservative commentators. But its basic premise — that Western culture is at risk from foreign incursion — extends beyond these circles and has become deeply embedded in restrictionist rhetoric.
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This month marks the 15th anniversary of the US war on Iraq. The “shock and awe” attack was launched based on “stove-piped” intelligence fed from the CIA and Pentagon through an uncritical and compliant US mainstream media … Because the neocons who helped launch the war have never had to face the consequences of their actions, they continue to promote war with impunity … I find it disgusting that the media continues to give airtime almost exclusively to those who promote more US disasters like Iraq … We had no business going into Iraq in the first place and we have no business remaining in Iraq. Al-Qaeda and ISIS emerged in Iraq because our attack and occupation of the country 15 years ago created fertile fields for extremism. Nothing will be achieved if we remain. Let’s listen to the Iraqis and just come home!
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… The Trump administration should not squander American lives and resources in a heedless pursuit of the demonstrated impossible. Syria’s conflict matters little for American security … To expand a fight that already was illegal simply reaffirms the death of the Constitution’s demand that the legislative branch approve military action … Today American forces in Syria are being used to break up a nation, confront neighboring forces invited in by the local government, arm ethnic forces under attack by a treaty ally next door, and face off against units of a nuclear-armed power also invited in by the duly constituted government. It is a mad policy, which no administration could manage competently.
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The Trump administration’s ambitious new military buildup is at risk of being hobbled before it even starts — by a dwindling pool of young Americans who are fit to serve. Nearly three-quarters of Americans age 17 to 24 are ineligible for the military due to obesity, other health problems, criminal backgrounds or lack of education, according to government data. That’s a harsh reality check for the Pentagon’s plan to recruit tens of thousands of new soldiers, sailors, pilots and cyber specialists over the next five years.
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Child and teenage obesity levels have risen ten-fold in the last four decades, meaning 124 million boys and girls around the globe are too fat, according to new research. The analysis in the Lancet is the largest of its kind and looks at obesity trends in over 200 countries. In the UK, one in every ten young people aged five to 19, is obese. Obese children are likely to become obese adults, putting them at risk of serious health problems, say experts. These include type 2 diabetes, heart disease, stroke and certain types of cancer, such as breast and colon. The Lancet analysis, released on World Obesity Day, comes as researchers from the World Obesity Federation warn that the global cost of treating ill health caused by obesity will exceed 920 billion pounds every year from 2025.
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US State Dept. Report of 1946 Says 'Poles Persecuted the Jews as Vigorously as Did the Germans'
D. Sedley - The Times of Israel
A US State Department report from May 15, 1946, found “evidence that Poles persecuted the Jews as vigorously as did the Germans” during the World War II Nazi occupation of Poland. The declassified report was distributed Thursday by the Simon Wiesenthal Center, the same day that a Polish law making it a crime to accuse the Polish nation of Nazi-era atrocities took effect … The report highlights Polish anti-Semitism and persecution of Jews in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, and traces it back to a long history of Polish anti-Jewish legislation before World War II and anti-Jewish activities by Poles during the Holocaust. The report found that “native Poles” abetted the activities of the Germans during World War II.
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Ken Livingstone’s suspension from Labour over anti-Semitism claims has been extended pending the outcome of an internal investigation. The former London mayor’s suspension had been due to expire on 27 April. But Labour’s outgoing general secretary, Iain McNicol, has signed off on an extended extension. Mr Livingstone is facing an internal investigation into his conduct after refusing to apologise for statements he made about Adolf Hitler and Zionism … Mr Livingstone was suspended for a year in April 2016 over his claim that Adolf Hitler had supported Zionism in the 1930s.
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Zionism and the Third Reich
Mark Weber
A little-known chapter of history is the wide-ranging collaboration between Zionism and Hitler’s Third Reich. During the 1930s, Jewish Zionists and German National Socialists shared similar views on how to deal with the “Jewish Question.” They agreed that Jews and Germans were distinctly different nationalities, and that Jews did not belong in Germany. During the 1930s no nation did more to substantively further Jewish-Zionist goals than Hitler’s Germany.
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The memoirs of France’s former far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, due to hit bookstores this week, have already sold out, his publisher said Tuesday while announcing a new print run to cope with demand. Readers have reserved 50,000 copies of the first volume of Le Pen’s autobiography, which charts the political beginnings of the provocative leader and convicted Holocaust denier, according to the Muller publishing house … Also in his book, Le Pen ardently defends France’s collaborationist wartime leader Philippe Petain in his book, saying he did not dishonour himself by signing the 1940 armistice that allowed Nazi forces to occupy northern France.
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Was the Holocaust Inevitable?
Patrick J. Buchanan
… What of World War II? Surely, it was necessary to declare war to stop Adolf Hitler from conquering the world and conducting the Holocaust. Yet consider … The Holocaust was not a cause of the war, but a consequence of the war. No war, no Holocaust. Britain went to war with Germany to save Poland. She did not save Poland. She did lose the empire. And Josef Stalin, whose victims outnumbered those of Hitler 1,000 to one as of September 1939, and who joined Hitler in the rape of Poland, wound up with all of Poland, and all the Christian nations from the Urals to the Elbe.
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The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is back in Washington for its annual summit … If there is one thing that AIPAC is good at it is using its $100 million budget and 300 employees to harass lawmakers on Capitol Hill and generate policy for the United States to adhere to. Eighteen thousand supporters have gathered at the city’s Convention Center … If you want to get some idea of the money and political power represented at AIPAC this year I would recommend going through the speakers’ list, a dazzling display of precisely why the United States is in bondage to Israel and its interests … Every American president has to bow before Jewish power in the United States …
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Time For AIPAC To Register as a Foreign Agent
M. J. Rosenberg - Forward
This weekend, 18,000 Americans from all over the country are coming to Washington to participate in the annual American Israel Public Affairs Committee Policy Conference. AIPAC is one of the leading forces behind the Israel lobby, joined in recent years by the ascending Christians United for Israel. Other Jewish “pro-Israel” organizations are niche affairs, representing particular constituencies on the left or right … How can America’s representatives declare that any other country’s fight — even one as close to us as Israel is — is our fight, its cause our cause, its values our values? It’s precisely this kind of overidentification that George Washington warned against in his 1796 farewell address … It is time to require AIPAC to register as what it is: a foreign agent.
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VP Pence at AIPAC Vows Iran Nuke Deal to End 'Immediately' If Not 'Fixed'
The Times of Israel
US Vice President Mike Pence vowed the US would withdraw from the nuclear deal forged between Iran and six world powers in the coming months unless lawmakers move to fix the agreement, and called US President Donald Trump the most pro-Israel president the country has ever had. Speaking to the annual policy conference of pro-Israel lobby AIPAC, Pence also hailed the recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and said a peace proposal being crafted by the administration would not compromise on Israel’s security … “Make no mistake about it, this is their last chance. Unless the Iran nuclear deal is fixed in the coming months, the United States of America will withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal immediately,” Pence told a packed convention hall in Washington, DC.
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Washington Delivers New Ultimatum On Iran
Bill Van Auken – WSWS
The US State Department has issued a fresh ultimatum on the Iran nuclear deal to Washington’s ostensible major allies in Europe, demanding that Germany, Britain and France commit themselves to altering the agreement along the lines demanded by President Donald Trump or face its unilateral abrogation by the US … The clear implication is that Washington is embarked on a trajectory of war with Iran, either with or without the collaboration of its NATO allies in Berlin, London and Paris. Should they join with the US in ripping up the nuclear accord, it will set them on a collision course not only with Iran, but also with Russia and China, the two other signatories to the JCPOA … The European powers are pursuing their own imperialist interests in the Middle East and are increasingly at odds with US interests and strategies.
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Gary Oldman’s Anti-Semitic Language Resurfaces After Oscars Win
The Independent (Britain)
Anti-semitic language used by Gary Oldman has resurfaced after he won Best Actor at this year’s Oscars for his portrayal of Winston Churchill in the Darkest Hour … But Oldman, who received similar prizes at this year’s Golden Globes and Baftas, has faced fresh scrutiny in recent weeks over remarks he made to Playboy magazine in a 2014 interview. Defending anti-semitic comments infamously made by actor and director Mel Gibson, he used racist and sexist language. “I don’t know about Mel. He got drunk and said a few things, but we’ve all said those things,” he said, referring to Gibson’s anti-semitic rant, which saw him claim that Jews were responsible “for all the wars in the world“, during a 2006 arrest.
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Churchill 'In the Year of Trump': 'Darkest Hour' Feeds America’s Love for Winston
David Smith - The Guardian (Britain)
… The movie had another reason for high hopes as it opened in New York and Los Angeles before going nationwide in the US next month: Americans’ enduring admiration for the British wartime prime minister … Americans are generally unburdened by the multiple critiques of Churchill that have arisen in the UK in recent years, Roberts argued … Churchill – an ally in two world wars and the cold war – has become something of a cultural touchstone for politicians on both sides of the aisle, especially conservative Republicans … Such is the hero worship, more than half a century after Churchill’s death, that dissenting voices have trouble being heard.
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Why Putin’s Latest Weapons Claims Should Scare Us
Why Putin’s Latest Weapons Claims Should Scare Us Jonathan Marshall – Consortium News
Be afraid. Be very afraid of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s latest boast to his Federal Assembly that Russian scientists have come up with “a breakthrough in developing new models of strategic weapons” aimed at the United States. Don’t be afraid that he has any intention of using them. Don’t even be afraid that most of the weapons he demonstrated through animated simulations are operational. Be afraid, rather, that armchair Cold Warriors in the United States will shamelessly exploit Putin’s speech to justify billions — no, trillions — of dollars in needless spending on a pointless nuclear arms race … America’s neo-Cold Warriors instantly seized on Putin’s speech to whip up anti-Russia frenzy and call for even more military spending.
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How Hitler Protected the Vimy Ridge Memorial in France
R. Haggart - The Star (Canada)
When Hitler’s armies were advancing across France in 1940, the Canadian government put out a story that German troops were damaging the memorial at Vimy Ridge … Canadians were thoroughly familiar with Vimy Ridge, and they were outraged. There was someone else who was outraged by this story; his name was Adolf Hitler. The monument at Vimy Ridge was Hitler’s favourite memorial from World War I, because it is a monument to peace, not a celebration of war … Hitler went to Vimy Ridge on June 2, 1940, called in the world’s press as best he could and insisted they take his picture on the unscathed steps. He then assigned special troops from the Waffen-SS to guard Vimy Ridge … Hitler’s plan was a great success … The Vimy memorial is there at all because it was saved by its most infamous fan, Adolf Hitler.
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The leaders of two anti-establishment parties have each claimed they have the right to govern Italy, after voters in Europe’s fourth-largest economy did not return a majority to any single party. The Eurosceptic, populist Five Star Movement was the biggest single party with a third of the vote. But the anti-immigrant League said it had been endorsed to run the country as part of a centre-right alliance … An alliance between the far-right League and ex-Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia party is set to win the most seats in the lower house of parliament … The gains for populists represent a political earthquake that will send shockwaves to the EU in Brussels, BBC Europe editor Katya Adler says. A coalition between Five Star and the League would be a “nightmare result” for the EU, our correspondent adds.
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More than one year into Donald Trump’s presidency, Americans’ satisfaction with their national government shows no signs of improving. About a third of U.S. adults (34%) say they are “very” or “somewhat” satisfied with the size and power of the federal government, down six percentage points from 2017 but on par with most readings since 2011. Thirty-eight percent of Americans are satisfied with “our system of government and how well it works,” essentially unchanged from 2017 and much lower than it was between 2001 and 2008. Satisfaction with both the U.S. political system and the size and power of the federal government has remained at historically low levels since 2011.
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What Motivates Voters More Than Loyalty? Loathing
T. B. Edsall - The New York Times
Hostility to the opposition party and its candidates has now reached a level where loathing motivates voters more than loyalty. The building strength of partisan antipathy — “negative partisanship” — has radically altered politics. Anger has become the primary tool for motivating voters … Perhaps the most important consequence of the current power of political anger is that there has been a marked decline in the accountability of public officials to the electorate … There is no sign that the growth in negative polarization will slow down, much less reverse itself. The dominant incentive in politics right now is to capitalize on animosity to the opposition party. At a time when true swing voters have become a smaller and smaller share of the electorate, hatred, anger and animosity have proven the most effective tools to mobilize support.
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Trump’s America
Charles A. Murray
… Trumpism is an expression of the legitimate anger that many Americans feel about the course that the country has taken, and its appearance was predictable. It is the endgame of a process that has been going on for a half-century: America’s divestment of its historic national identity … Trumpism is the voice of a beleaguered working class telling us that it too is falling away … But the central truth of Trumpism as a phenomenon is that the entire American working class has legitimate reasons to be angry at the ruling class. During the past half-century of economic growth, virtually none of the rewards have gone to the working class … The bottom line is stark: The real family income of people in the bottom half of the income distribution hasn’t increased since the late 1960s.
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Putin Trumps Trump
Eric Margolis
… President Putin stunned the world by revealing a new arsenal of nuclear-armed weapons that have stolen a march on Washington and left the warlike President Donald Trump looking foolish … Maybe Putin was boasting and exaggerating, but he usually tells the truth, unlike our politicians, and rarely embellishes. As he said in his speech, ‘nobody wanted to listen to us,’ referring to Moscow’s failed attempted to restore a strategic arms agreement, cut nuclear forces and lower tensions with the West. ‘Now,’ said Putin, ‘you listen.’ But will Washington listen? … Washington’s war party has convinced itself that Russia can be intimidated and once again spent into the ground. But Vladimir Putin is too smart and deft to allow this to happen. He has neatly trumped Trump’s arms buildup and shown up Trump’s empty bullying.
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The Crumbling Consensus That Jews Were the Ultimate Holocaust Victims
Ofri Ilany - Haaretz (Israel)
… In America, as in many other parts of the world, children in recent decades have learned about the Holocaust from an early age. It’s basically perceived as the formative event of the modern era, against which the central political values of our age were shaped …The essence of the consensus is that the Jews were the ultimate victims of the Holocaust, and that the other European nations were complicit in the crime that was perpetrated against them, and are obligated to learn the lesson and teach it … The consensus concerning the Holocaust of the Jews was fundamentally linked to that political order … So it comes as no surprise that the disintegration of the world order and its institutions has also given rise to the unravelling of the consensus on the Holocaust.
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The Holocaust and the Myth of the Past as History
Howard F. Stein – Institute for Historical Review
For the Jews, the term “Holocaust” does not simply denote a single catastrophic era in history, but is a grim metaphor for the meaning of Jewish history. The “Holocaust” lies at the heart of the Jewish experience of time itself. One is either anxiously awaiting persecution, experiencing persecution, recovering from it, or living in a period that is a temporary reprieve from it … Thus the “reality” of the Holocaust is inextricably part of the myth in which it is woven — and for which myth it serves as further confirmatory evidence for the timeless Jewish theme that the world is in conspiracy to annihilate them, one way or another, at least eventually.
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… Judaism is not just “another religion.” It’s unique among the world’s major religions. The core values and ethos of Judaism are markedly unlike those of Christianity, Islam, and the other great faiths … A core message of the Hebrew scriptures is that Jews are a divinely “chosen” people — a unique community distinct from the rest of humanity … The seemingly intractable Middle East conflict is more than just a problem of Zionism or politics, or a dispute over land. Israel’s often arrogant policies, and especially its inhumane treatment of non-Jews, have roots in centuries-old attitudes that are laid out in ancient Jewish religious writings.
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How Britain Tried to Influence the US Election in 1940
C. Woolf – PRI
Plenty of Americans are concerned, to put it mildly, about the alleged Russian attempt to influence the presidential election here last year. But it might surprise many Americans to learn that this is not the first time a foreign power has tried to sway a US election … In many ways, the British campaign in 1940 has become the model for that kind of classic influence campaign. The Brits used wiretaps to get dirt; recruited journalists to plant favorable stories; invented fake stories; used dirty tricks to try to destroy opponents; and funded and coordinated pro-British activist groups. The goal was to try to change US public opinion, and to manipulate America’s political establishment toward helping Britain in its fight against the Nazis … Dirty tricks and fake news were employed to discredit individual congressmen …
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The Generation Gap in American Politics
Pew Research Center
Generational differences have long been a factor in U.S. politics. These divisions are now as wide as they have been in decades, with the potential to shape politics well into the future. From immigration and race to foreign policy and the scope of government, two younger generations, Millennials and Gen Xers, stand apart from the two older cohorts, Baby Boomers and Silents. And on many issues, Millennials continue to have a distinct – and increasingly liberal – outlook … Increased racial and ethnic diversity of younger generational cohorts accounts for some of these generational differences in views of the two recent presidents. Millennials are more than 40% nonwhite, the highest share of any adult generation …
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Most Americans Say Trump is a Racist, New Poll Shows
Associated Press
More than half of Americans, including large majorities of blacks and Hispanics, think US President Donald Trump is a racist. More than half think his policies have made things worse for Hispanics and Muslims, and nearly half say they’ve made things worse for African Americans. According to a new poll by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, 57 percent of Americans think Trump’s policies have been bad for Muslims, and 56 percent think they’ve been bad for Hispanics. Forty-seven percent, including three-quarters of blacks, think they’ve been bad for African Americans. Fifty-seven percent of all adults, including more than eight in ten blacks, three-quarters of Hispanics and nearly half of whites, said they think Trump is racist.
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'Listen to Us Now': Putin Unveils New Russian Nuclear Arsenal
RT News (Russia)
Russia has developed a number of advanced weapons systems, including a nuclear-powered cruise missile, which make all US capabilities aimed at undermining the Russian nuclear deterrent obsolete, President Vladimir Putin announced. The latest advances in Russian strategic deterrence have made America’s anti-missile systems obsolete, so Washington should stop trying to diminish Russia’s security and start talking to Moscow as an equal partner, not the dominant military power it seeks to be, Putin said. The Russian leader made the comments during his state of the nation address … Putin stressed that Russia would not need all these new weapons if its legitimate concerns had not been ignored by the US and its allies. “Nobody wanted to talk with us on the core of the problem. Nobody listened to us. Now you listen!” he said.
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America’s Illegal Sojourn in Syria
Philip Giraldi
It should come as no surprise to anyone that the Donald Trump administration has recently affirmed that it has a perfect legal right to remain in Syria as long as it wishes because it is fighting terrorism … The US intention to maintain a continued presence minus any viable al-Qaeda threat in the country is completely illegal under both domestic and international law. In short, the continued United States presence in Syria bears all the hallmarks of yet another US policy wrapped in top level ambiguity that is a failure even before it starts. Not only illegal, it is impractical, with 2,000 US advisers spread thin supporting Kurdish proxies who are already heavily engaged fighting the Turks. Eventually Washington will become weary of the effort and leave.
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Fatal Delusions of Western Man
Patrick J. Buchanan
… What is the root of these astounding beliefs — that Stalin would be a partner for peace, that if we built up Mao’s China she would become benign and benevolent, that we could reshape Islamic nations into replicas of Western democracies, that we could eradicate tyranny? Today, we are replicating these historic follies … But the greatest risk we are taking, based on utopianism, is the annual importation of well over a million legal and illegal immigrants, many from the failed states of the Third World, in the belief we can create a united, peaceful and harmonious land of 400 million, composed of every race, religion, ethnicity, tribe, creed, culture and language on earth. Where is the historic evidence for the success of this experiment, the failure of which could mean the end of America as one nation and one people?
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Why America’s Decline Will Accelerate
Mark Weber – Podcast
Americans have never been so distrustful of their country’s political leaders and major institutions, or more gloomy about the long-term future. This is much more than unhappiness about the economy and unemployment. Across the US and in Europe, there’s a profound crisis of confidence in the democratic-capitalist system. In the years ahead, American and western European society will continue to disintegrate because the factors behind the decline are still in place, and because the prevailing system operates on the basis of an ideology of egalitarianism, universalism and “diversity” that’s not grounded in historical or social reality. Runtime: 45 mins.
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The performance of the winning team in a national collegiate debate championship underscores the drastic decline in America of academic standards, accepted norms of civil discussion, and regard for reason, logic and evidence. The showy, juvenile and hyper-emotional presentations of the winning teams in this year’s Cross Examination Debate Association’s national championship, held in March 2014 at Indiana University, along with media and academic praise given to these “champions,” point up the accelerating breakdown of American cultural and intellectual life. It’s no wonder that people around the world increasingly regard the US with contempt or pity, and that, here at home, more Americans than ever view their country’s future with anxiety.
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“No-go areas” do exist in Germany, Angela Merkel admitted in an interview, adding that the arrival of “so many refugees” in the country “has raised multiple questions.” Speaking with RTL, Merkel acknowledged that there are areas in Germany where people cannot feel safe. She also made it clear that it’s time for the authorities to do something in order to ensure public safety … She then took aim at “no-go areas,” which gained notoriety all across Europe during the refugee influx that reached its peak in 2015. Merkel bluntly dismissed the claim that ‘no-go areas’ are non-existent in Germany, stressing instead that “there are such spaces, and you have to call that by name and you have to do something about it.”
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Stalinism Resurgent in Russia as Critics Warn Against Whitewashing Soviet History
H. Ridgwell - VOA News
Decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, there is fierce debate over the legacy of one of its most brutal dictators. Josef Stalin, who ruled from the 1930s until his death in 1953, is held responsible for the deaths of millions of his countrymen. Yet, an opinion poll last year crowned him as the country’s most outstanding historical figure … Stalin is lionized by many Russians for leading the Soviet Union to victory over Nazi Germany … From the dozens of monuments to memorial plaques that are springing up in towns and cities across Russia, critics say Stalin nostalgia is permeating everyday life.
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Immoral, Weak, Abusive, Untrustworthy, and Murderous: What Talmudic Sages Thought of Non-Jews
Adam Kirsch - Tablet
Should Jews be afraid of non-Jews? To the rabbis of the Talmud, the answer was obvious: They should be very afraid because every pagan could be expected to seize any opportunity to harm a Jew … Must Jews think of all non-Jews as potential killers and constant enemies? As the Koren Talmud explains, later Jewish authorities strongly rejected that idea. Starting in the middle ages, leading interpreters established the principle that the Talmud was speaking only of the pagans of the ancient world, who abided by no code of morals at all. Christians and Muslims, on the other hand, were governed by religious ethics, and so the Talmud’s strictures did not apply to them. Clearly, just like a contemporary reader, these sages were troubled by the paranoia and hostility so abundantly on display in this chapter.
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How To Take Purim Seriously
Shaul Magid - The Daily Beast
… Let’s get serious about [the annual Jewish festival of] Purim … Purim is essentially about the celebration of violence … Let us not forget it is essentially a holiday of revenge. We drink to celebrate blotting out Amalek. The Shabbat before Purim, called Shabbat Zakhor, Jews gather in synagogues to read the only biblically mandated Torah reading of the year, the verses that command genocide against the Amalekites … We must remember not only to not forget, but to blot out the enemy — not mercifully, but through genocide. It is true that the rabbis long ago were aware of the danger of this commandment and put it to rest by saying we no longer know who Amalek is.
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The Jewish Timeline – From Moses to Bibi
Gilad Atzmon
The Jewish timeline is a peculiar one-sided anti-historical narrative that inevitably begins at the point when Jewish suffering is detected and ignores the prior circumstances that may have led to that suffering. In Jewish history, the members of the chosen tribe are never the aggressors nor do they bear any responsibility for their own plight. Quite the opposite, they are always the victims of Goyim’s ‘irrational’ and ‘merciless hatred of Jews.’ Yesterday, Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu provided a remarkable window into the deceptive nature of the Jewish timeline … This unique form of delusional and/or duplicitous detachment from reality was not invented by Zionists or Israelis. It is deeply embedded in Jewish culture, Jewish ideology and even the Old Testament.
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… California ranks dead last among U.S. states in quality of life, according to a study by U.S. News, ranking behind New Jersey (49th) and Indiana (48th). The ignominious honor reflects California’s low marks in the sub-categories of environmental quality and social engagement. The latter category measures voting participation and community bonds … Homelessness has surged a stunning 75 percent in the last six years, the Los Angeles Times reports, and there are now at least 55,000 homeless people in the county. U.S. News ranked each state in seven other areas, which were weighted based on a survey that determined their importance to the public: health care, education, economy, opportunity, infrastructure, crime and corrections, and fiscal stability.
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Trump’s Aimless War in Afghanistan Expands, Again
Danny Sjursen - Defense One
Why is the U.S. bombing Chinese separatists, and what does it say about the flailing war effort in Afghanistan? / … What began as a counterterror campaign to dislodge the Taliban and destroy Al Qaeda has gone through many permutations in the intervening decades. The U.S. tried — and failed — sequentially, at nation-building, counterinsurgency, and host-nation transition. So now, it appears, rather than targeting international terrorist threats that could target the United States (or its allies), Washington has ordered our military to bomb the heck out of anyone and everyone with vaguely Islamist credentials: the Taliban, ISIS, Al Qaeda (if there are any left), and, well, Chinese separatists.
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What Made the Vikings So Superior in Warfare?
K. Sjøgren - Science Nordic
… “What made the Vikings so superior in warfare?” … One of the reasons for this was the Vikings’ superior mobility. Their longships – with a characteristic shallow-draft hull – made it possible to cross the North Sea and to navigate Europe’s many rivers and appear out of nowhere, or bypass hostile land forces … Their axes, swords, spears, bows and arrows, shields, and armour were equal to the weapons and armours of continental Europe and Britain – and often of the highest quality available at the time … Furthermore, most Vikings were skilled warriors. They lived in violent times and idealised warrior culture. It was a requirement that all male Vikings had completed weapons training so they could defend their villages during attacks … And they were not afraid of dying.
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Ex-London Mayor Livingstone Set to Return to Labour Party After Suspension for Allegedly 'Anti-Semitic' Remarks
The Times of Israel
A former London mayor appears poised to rejoin the British Labour Party as his suspension for anti-Semitic remarks comes to end. Labour penalized Ken Livingstone in April 2016, after he claimed that Adolf Hitler was initially a supporter of Zionism “before he went mad and ended up killing 6 million Jews.” With his two-year suspension set to end in April, Livingstone will again be considered a full member of the UK’s main opposition party barring the emergence of further offensive comments, Labour sources told The Observer … The decision to suspend and not expel Livingstone was strongly criticized by Jewish groups at the time, and came as the party grappled with allegations that it has been lax on anti-Semitism under leader Jeremy Corbyn.
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Zionism and Anti-Semitism: A Strange Alliance Through History
Allan C. Brownfeld
… When the term “anti-Semitism” is casually used to silence those who are critical of the government of Israel and its policies, it should be noted that Zionism’s history of alliance with real anti-Semitism has been long-standing, and this has been so precisely because Zionism and anti-Semitism share a view of Jews which the vast majority of Jews in the United States and elsewhere in the world have always rejected. This rarely discussed chapter of history deserves study, for it illuminates many truths relevant to the continuing debate, both with regard to Middle East policy and the real nature of Jews and Judaism.
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Think-Tank to Sue Google, Twitter and Yahoo Over 'Holocaust Denial' Content
The Jewish Chronicle (Britain)
A think-tank has threatened to sue Google, Yahoo and Twitter for hosting content that promotes Holocaust denial and virulent anti-Semitism. The Lawfare Project, a civil rights litigation fund which aims to pursue to antisemitic discrimination around the world, said the internet giants could face legal action for failing to address the problem in their search results. Director Brooke Goldstein announced the project had sent cease-and-desist letters to Google and Yahoo concerning Holocaust denial websites appearing in their searches. It has also sent detailed complaints to Twitter about content on the platform.
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In Israel, a Call for Focus on 'Holocaust Denial'
Arutz Sheva - Israel National News (Israel)
MK [Israel parliament member] Eytan Broshi (Zionist Union) on Monday sent a letter to Education Minister Naftali Bennett (Jewish Home), asking that this year’s Holocaust Remembrance Day studies focus on the issue of Holocaust denial and how to deal with it. In his letter, Broshi noted Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki’s statement that “Jewish perpetrators” were involved in the Holocaust, as well as his participation in an event commemorating the Polish underground, which collaborated with the Nazis. “Recent events centered in Poland are a dangerous expression of Holocaust denial and attempts to remove responsibility from those who committed crimes against Jews during the Holocaust and the Second World War,” Broshi said.
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Working With Stalin
Joseph Sobran
… We hear a lot about the evils of “Holocaust denial.” But those who question the conventional version of Nazi history are only retrospective and speculative. They don’t influence events. That can’t be said for those who assisted and glorified the Soviet Union under Stalin while it was still active and thereby facilitated its enormous crimes. I don’t mean Warner Brothers. I mean Joseph Davies. I mean Walter Duranty. And I especially mean the man who inspired this movie, Franklin Roosevelt. Stalin’s victims were in part his victims too.
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What is 'Holocaust Denial'?
Barbara Kulaszka
In recent years, considerable attention has been devoted to the supposed danger of “Holocaust denial.” Politicians, newspapers and television warn about the growing influence of those who reject the Holocaust story that some six million European Jews were systematically exterminated during the Second World War, most of them in gas chambers. In several countries, including Israel, France, Germany and Austria, “Holocaust denial” is against the law, and “deniers” have been punished with stiff fines and prison sentences … Often overlooked in this controversy is the crucial question: Just what constitutes “Holocaust denial”?
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Inequality Persists 50 Years After Kerner Report, New Study Finds
Associated Press
Barriers to equality are posing threats to democracy in the U.S. as the country remains segregated along racial lines and child poverty worsens, says a study examining the nation 50 years after the release of the landmark 1968 Kerner Report. The new report released Tuesday blames U.S. policymakers and elected officials, saying they’re not doing enough to heed the warning on deepening poverty and inequality as highlighted by the Kerner Commission a half-century ago, and it lists a number of areas where the country has seen “a lack of or reversal of progress.” “Racial and ethnic inequality is growing worse. We’re resegregating our housing and schools again,” says former U.S. Sen. Fred Harris of Oklahoma, a co-editor of the new report, and last surviving member of the original Kerner Commission created by President Lyndon Johnson in 1967.
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The Deadly Rule of the Oligarchs
Chris Hedges - Truthdig
Oligarchic rule, as Aristotle pointed out, is a deviant form of government. Oligarchs care nothing for competency, intelligence, honesty, rationality, self-sacrifice or the common good. They pervert, deform and dismantle systems of power to serve their immediate interests, squandering the future for short-term personal gain … There is little dispute that we live in an oligarchic state. The wealthiest one percent of America’s families control 40 percent of the nation’s wealth, a statistic similar to what is seen globally … They flee from the looming chaos into their gated compounds, modern versions of Versailles or the Forbidden City. They lose touch with reality. In the end, they are overthrown or destroy the state itself.
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The Eternal Lure of Nationalism
Patrick J. Buchanan
… Western elites may deplore the return of nationalism. But they had best not dismiss it, for assertions of national and tribal identity appear to be what the future is going to be all about … The French people do not want their country invaded by unassimilable millions of migrants from Africa and the Islamic world. They want France to remain what she has been. Is this wrong? Is preservation of a country, the national family one grew up in, not conservative? In Hungary and Poland, ethnonationalism, the belief that nation-states are created and best suited to protect and defend a separate and unique people, with its separate and unique history and culture, is already ascendant … In China, ethnonationalism, not the ruling Communist Party, unites and inspires 1.4 billion people to displace the Americans as the first power on earth.
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… Hungary, of course, wasn’t alone in its opposition. It decided, along with Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, to reject EU [European Union] migrant quotas, angering Brussels and earning the so-called Visegrad Four (V4) a reputation as the union’s troublemakers. But their resistance has shone a light on a profound and dangerous division within the club. Not so much a stand-off between East and West but between the older, established member states and the former communist countries which joined in 2004 … Viktor Orban’s increasingly authoritarian rule, his shift towards a self-styled “illiberal state”, also flies in the face of EU values. There are voices within the EU which hint at hitting both Poland and Hungary where it hurts most – by reducing their EU funding. This week Ms Merkel issued a veiled threat with regard to the next EU budget.
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As China Rises, the U.S. Should Stand Back and Allow Other Asians to Rise Too
Doug Bandow - China US Focus
How to respond to the People’s Republic of China is one of Washington’s more vexing foreign policy challenges. Not only is the PRC on the rise, but President Xi Jinping is pushing an increasingly authoritarian policy. The result looks ominous to many Americans. The strategy preferred by successive U.S. administrations, continued military dominance of East Asia, cannot last. This approach is not necessary to protect the U.S … As for China, the U.S. should emphasize common interests, such as bilateral trade and denuclearization of North Korea. Instead of seeking to ostentatiously contain the PRC militarily, Washington should step back. Better for the U.S. to balance from afar, relying on natural competition from Beijing’s neighbors, and especially India and Japan, to moderate what might otherwise become threatening tendencies from China.
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Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday praised the “social, literary and journalistic activities” of the editor of an ultra-nationalist newspaper who has called for a new Cold War and leveled vehemently anti-Semitic accusations against the vast country’s Jewish community. Putin, who is all but guaranteed to win a fourth Kremlin term in a presidential election next month, sent Stalinist journalist and writer Alexander Prokhanov a telegram to congratulate him on his 80th birthday. “You have taken a great professional path, you have found your calling in your columns and in your social, literary and journalistic activities,” the president said in the message … Prokhanov is the editor-in-chief of the far-right newspaper Zavtra (Tomorrow), which he founded in 1993.
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Poland’s ruling party must do everything it can to stop anti-Semitic remarks that are hurting Poland’s standing in the world and putting its interests at risk, European Council President Donald Tusk told a news conference on Friday. Tusk, a former Polish prime minister, said after he met Poland’s Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki that discussions with other European leaders showed the situation of Warsaw was “very serious” … “There is only one solution. Everything needs to be done to stop … the wave of bad opinions about Poland, which today resembles a tsunami, and the second wave of silly and indecent incidents, anti-Semitic statements in Poland,” he said.
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A leading Russian diplomat has condemned those advocating military intervention against the forces of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, whose war against rebels and jihadis has recently escalated in the last insurgent-held suburbs of Damascus. Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov said Monday that such military action would violate United Nations Security Council Resolution 2401, which was passed Sunday … “We are seriously alarmed by the reports that amid the overall increase in the rhetoric against Damascus and anti-Russian rhetoric in Washington threats are heard again of using force, which is unlawful,” Ryabkov said … “They are searching for pretexts and this fully runs counter to the meaning and content of the U.N. Security Council Resolution 2401,” he added.
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Hundreds of physicians in Iceland and some of Belgium’s top doctors came out in support of a bill proposing to criminalize nonmedical circumcision of boys in the Scandinavian island nation. The approximately 500 Icelandic physicians who backed the bill that was submitted last month to the parliament cited the World Medical Association’s Declaration of Helsinki on ethical principles … Throughout Scandinavia, the nonmedical circumcision of boys under 18 is the subject of a debate on children’s rights and religious freedoms. The children’s ombudsmen of all Nordic countries — Finland, Iceland, Denmark, Sweden and Norway — released a joint declaration in 2013 proposing a ban, though none of these countries has enacted one.
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A village in Germany has voted to keep a controversial church bell embossed with a swastika and the words “All for the Fatherland – Adolf Hitler”. The parish council of Herxheim argued that the Nazi-era bronze bell acted as a reminder for the nation’s dark past. The 10-3 vote on Monday rejected an offer to remove and replace the bell by the Protestant Church of St James … The former mayor, Roland Becker, resigned last year over comments that appeared to defend not just the bell but Nazi-era Germany. Some residents are now worried that the bell could damage the church’s reputation or draw neo-Nazi groups to the village … At Monday’s vote, the decision to keep the “Hitler bell” was met with applause from many community members …