polly7
polly7's JournalFor Israel, imperialism isn’t enough
"So what of Gaza? What does it mean when Israel threatens, bombs, and kills to ensure its compliance? Its compliance with what?
Note that the territorial and demographic reality that is the Gaza Strip is itself, to begin, an ominous reflection of Israeli colonial strategy to date: When transfer doesnt work, concentration is tried.
In 1948, the greater part of Palestines population was forcefully displaced beyond Israels pre-1967 sphere of control to clear the way for Israels anachronistic pioneering. A great number of the transferred ended up in the Gaza Strip. Their nearby existence quickly gave rise to an abiding Israeli wish: If I believed in miracles, declared David Ben-Gurion in an October 1956 Knesset speech, I would pray that Gaza would be washed down into the sea.[8] After 1967, Gazas inhabitants not only remained above water but came under direct Israeli rule.
Several decades later, they surely arent taking up very much room. Taken in isolation, Darryl Li wrote in 2006, the Gaza Strip is often described as one of the most densely populated places on earth: 1.4 million Palestinians crowded into 365 square kilometers. But in the broader Zionist calculus of minima and maxima, this fact can be redescribed as follows: some 25 percent of all Palestinians living under Israeli control have been confined to 1.4 percent of the territory of the British Mandate of Palestine.
http://www.zcommunications.org/for-israel-imperialism-isn-t-enough-by-dan-freeman-maloy
Netanyahu’s Wink at History
By Ted Snider
Wednesday, September 19, 2012
Netanyahus calls for sanctions go back a long way. Five and a half years ago at the Interdisciplinary Security Conference now tellingly entitled Still Time to Stop Iran, which was held in the Israeli city of Herzliya in January of 2007, Netanyahu defended his demand by drawing on the historical precedent of the sanctions imposed on South Africa. . . .[W]e are taking action to advance voluntary sanctions on Iran, Netanyahu told the delegates. There is no need to wait for the United Nations to impose significant sanctions in the Security Council. A historic example of this is the action take [sic] against the Apartheid regime in South Africa.
Fortunately, Netanyahu had his fingers crossed when he said this. Or he should have. Because Israel officially and systematically violated those very sanctions that Netanyahu says the world should emulate.
On April 1, 1987, the U.S. congress stated that Israel appears to have sold military systems . . . and provided technical assistance on a regular basis despite a mandatory United Nations arms embargo imposed on South African ten years earlier in November 1977. And two years later, on July 5, 1989, the White House confirmed that the CIA had discovered that Israel was still supplying missile components to South Africa after promising to honour the sanctions and cease all military ties with South Africa two years earlier.
http://www.zcommunications.org/netanyahu-s-wink-at-history-by-ted-snider
The Most Brutal Genocide Money Can Buy
By Andre Vltchek
Source: Counterpunch
Wednesday, September 19, 2012
The border is called Bunagana. I drive there, I film, and I talk to a few people. There is tension, everybody is edgy locals and refugees. One cannot tell who is who. Both Ugandans and Congolese know, but, the outsider cannot tell the difference; it is one region, one area. People were coming back and forth for years and decades, people were mixing, staying at both sides of the border legally and illegally.
One had to look at the colonialism and then move to the Cold War, one had to revisit the IMF practices and then the direct support of the West to potentially murderous but loyal regimes. One had to study the circumstances of the assassination of Lumumba and then to understand how, a few decades later, Paul Kagame was brought to power.
http://www.zcommunications.org/the-most-brutal-genocide-money-can-buy-by-andre-vltchek
Robert Fisk: The Forgotten Massacre
By Robert Fisk
Source: The Independent
Tuesday, September 18, 2012
"The memories remain, of course. The man who lost his family in an earlier massacre, only to watch the young men of Chatila lined up after the new killings and marched off to death. But like the muck piled on the garbage tip amid the concrete hovels the stench of injustice still pervades the camps where 1,700 Palestinians were butchered 30 years ago next week. No-one was tried and sentenced for a slaughter, which even an Israeli writer at the time compared to the killing of Yugoslavs by Nazi sympathisers in the Second World War. Sabra and Chatila are a memorial to criminals who evaded responsibility, who got away with it.............
Khaled Abu Noor was in his teens, a would-be militiaman who had left the camp for the mountains before Israel's Phalangist allies entered Sabra and Chatila. Did this give him a guilty conscience, that he was not there to fight the rapists and murderers? "What we all feel today is depression," he said. "We demanded justice, international trials but there was nothing. Not a single person was held responsible. No-one was put before justice. And so we had to suffer in the 1986 camps war (at the hands of Shia Lebanese) and so the Israelis could slaughter so many Palestinians in the 2008-9 Gaza war. If there had been trials for what happened here 30 years ago, the Gaza killings would not have happened."
He has a point, of course. While presidents and prime ministers have lined up in Manhattan to mourn the dead of the 2001 international crimes against humanity at the World Trade Centre, not a single Western leader has dared to visit the dank and grubby Sabra and Chatila mass graves, shaded by a few scruffy trees and faded photographs of the dead. Nor, let it be said in 30 years has a single Arab leader bothered to visit the last resting place of at least 600 of the 1,700 victims. Arab potentates bleed in their hearts for the Palestinians but an airfare to Beirut might be a bit much these days and which of them would want to offend the Israelis or the Americans?
It is an irony but an important one, nonetheless that the only nation to hold a serious official enquiry into the massacre, albeit flawed, was Israel. The Israeli army sent the killers into the camps and then watched and did nothing while the atrocity took place. A certain Israeli Lieutenant Avi Grabowsky gave the most telling evidence of this. The Kahan Commission held the then defence minister Ariel Sharon personally responsible, since he sent the ruthless anti-Palestinian Phalangists into the camps to "flush out terrorists" "terrorists" who turned out to be as non-existent as Iraq's weapons of mass destruction 21 years later."
http://www.zcommunications.org/the-forgotten-massacre-by-robert-fisk
Rule by the Rich
By Jerry Mander
Source: New Left Project
Monday, September 10, 2012
What is striking about the recovery, growth, and expansion of the worlds billionaires is how dependent their accumulation of wealth is based on pillage of state resources; how much of their fortunes are based on neo-liberal policies which led to the takeover at bargain prices of privatized public enterprises . . . that the statenot the marketplays the essential role in facilitating the greatest concentration and centralization of wealth in world history . . . The sources of billionaire wealth are, at best, only partially due to entrepreneurial innovations.
http://www.zcommunications.org/rule-by-the-rich-by-jerry-mander
Myths About Industrial Agriculture
By Vandana Shiva
Friday, September 07, 2012
When this biodiversity rich food system is replaced by industrial monocultures, when food is commoditized, the result is hunger and malnutrition. Of the worlds 6.6 billion, 1 billion are not getting enough food; another billion might get enough calories but not enough nutrition, especially micro nutrients. Another 1.3 billion who are obese suffer the malnutrition of being condemned to artificially cheap, calorie rich, nutrient poor processed food.
Half of the worlds population is a victim of structural hunger and food injustice in todays dominant design for food. We have had hunger in the past, but it was caused by external factors wars and natural disasters. It was localized in space and time. Todays hunger is permanent and global. It is hunger by design. This does not mean that those who design the contemporary food systems intend to create hunger. It does mean that creation of hunger is built into the corporate design of industrial production and globalised distribution of food.
more: http://www.zcommunications.org/myths-about-industrial-agriculture-by-vandana-shiva
In doing a search for duplicates, I came across this thread from way back: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x556691
Are the Water Wars Coming?
Al Jazeera / By Chris Arsenault
Almost half of humanity will face water scarcity by 2030 and strategists from Israel to Central Asia prepare for strife.
In March, a report from the office of the US Director of National Intelligence said the risk of conflict would grow as water demand is set to outstrip sustainable current supplies by 40 per cent by 2030.
"These threats are real and they do raise serious national security concerns," Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, said after the report's release.
Internationally, 780 million people lack access to safe drinking water, according to the United Nations. By 2030, 47 percent of the worlds population will be living in areas of high water stress, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's Environmental Outlook to 2030 report.
cont'd: http://www.alternet.org/water/are-water-wars-coming
We Are Writing the Epilogue to the World We Knew
Published on Friday, August 31, 2012 by Common Dreams
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/08/31
We Are Writing the Epilogue to the World We Knew
by John Atcheson
While politicians fiddle, the world burns. While the press plays he-said, she-said, the ice melts, the seas rise.
In 1990 we could have averted this disaster and saved money doing it. As late as 2010 we still had a shot at avoiding it. But now, the die is cast, the future foretold. What follows will be an epilogue to civilization, as we knew it.
This seems to be the truth no matter where I look anymore. It's like we really have given up and all that's left is to fight for the scraps.
Beneath Melting Antarctica, Powerful Greenhouse Gas Lurks
Published on Thursday, August 30, 2012 by Common Dreams
Beneath Melting Antarctica, Powerful Greenhouse Gas Lurks
Study suggests as much as 4 billion tons of methane sits beneath melting ice sheets
- Common Dreams staff
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2012/08/30
The carbon stored under Antarctic ice is on par with the amount held in the northern hemispheres frozen permafrost soils and the lower end of estimates for methane trapped under the Arctic Ocean, according to Jemma Wadham, professor of Glaciology at the U.K.s University of Bristol and lead author of a study in the journal Nature yesterday.(Photographer: Torsten Blackwood/AFP/Getty Images)
An enormous and previously unknown reservoir of potent methanea greenhouse gas 25 times more potent than carbon dioxidecould be locked beneath the Antarctic ice sheet, a new study in the journal Nature warns.
The scientists behind the study calculate that as much as 4 billion tons of methane gas could exist beneath the ice, and that if the alarming rate of polar melting continues and the vast reserve escapes into the atmosphere, the feedback loop of climate change already underway would accelerate dramatically.
If the scientists are correct, these southern deposits would roughly match recent estimates of the amount of methane lurking beneath the northern Arctic ice sheets.
Charts: US Overseas Arms Sales More Than Tripled in 2011
By Asawin Suebsaeng| Wed Aug. 29, 2012 3:05 AM PDT
10
http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2012/08/charts-us-arms-sales-overseas-triples
In just one year, the US more than tripled its revenue in arms deals with foreign countries. The $66.3 billion also sets a new cash total record, easily surpassing the previous record of $31 billion in sales in fiscal year 2009.
If you're having trouble putting those hefty sums in perspective, $66.3 billion is amounts to an extra $9.50 in lunch money for every man, woman, and child alive today. And if you're still having some trouble putting this in perspective, here's a pie chart that shows just how much our global share in arms deals with developing countries ticked up in that one year:
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