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Hillary's Enemies List
.. .. The United States is certainly the world's leading supporter of terrorists that actually kill people, mostly in places like Iran, under direction from the CIA and military special ops but its actions are not described in the report. Israel too, engages in terrorism through its intelligence service Mossad, most recently assassinating a Hamas official in Dubai in January, and its armed forces and police regularly engage in terrorism directed against the Palestinian people in an attempt to demoralize and intimidate them into submission. But, according to the State Department, soldiers and other government employees cannot be considered terrorists. The State Department report sometimes seems like a press release for the Israeli Foreign Ministry.
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Amazon's: DEBATING THE HOLOCAUST: A New Look At Both Sides by Thomas Dalton
For a dispositive exposé of Plan Dalet, see Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oxford: Oneworld, 2006). Pappé is an Israeli historian. Emphasis mine. ST
The secrets in Israel's archives: Evidence of ethnic cleansing kept under lock and key
by Jonathan Cook
Global Research, August 18, 2010
History may be written by the victors, as Winston Churchill is said to have observed, but the opening up of archives can threaten a nation every bit as much as the unearthing of mass graves.
That danger explains a decision quietly taken last month by Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, to extend by an additional 20 years the country's 50-year rule for the release of sensitive documents.
The new 70-year disclosure rule is the government's response to Israeli journalists who have been seeking through Israel's courts to gain access to documents that should already be declassified, especially those concerning the 1948 war, which established Israel, and the 1956 Suez crisis.
The state's chief archivist says many of the documents "are not fit for public viewing" and raise doubts about Israel's "adherence to international law", while the government warns that greater transparency will "damage foreign relations".
Quite what such phrases mean was illustrated by the findings of a recent investigation by an Israeli newspaper. Haaretz revisited the Six Day War of 1967, in which Israel seized not only the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza, but also a significant corner of Syria known as the Golan Heights, which Israel still refuses to relinquish.
The consensus in Israel is that the country's right to hold on to the Golan is even stronger than its right to the West Bank. According to polls, an overwhelming majority of Israelis refuse to concede their little bit of annexed Syria, even if doing so would secure peace with Damascus.
This intransigence is not surprising. For decades, Israelis have been taught a grand narrative in which, having repelled an attack by Syrian forces, Israel then magnanimously allowed the civilian population of the Golan to live under its rule. That, say Israelis, is why the inhabitants of four Druze villages are still present there. The rest chose to leave on the instructions of Damascus.
One influential journalist writing at the time even insinuated anti-Semitism on the part of the civilians who departed: "Everyone fled, to the last man, before the IDF [Israel Defence Forces] arrived, out of fear of the 'savage conqueror' … Fools, why did they have to flee?"
However, a very different picture emerges from Haaretz's interviews with the participants. These insiders say that all but 6,000 of the Golan's 130,000 civilians were either terrorised or physically forced out, some of them long after the fighting finished. An army document reveals a plan to clear the area of the Syrian population, with only the exception of the Golan Druze, so as not to upset relations with the loyal Druze community inside Israel.
The army's post-war tasks included flushing out thousands of farmers hiding in caves and woods to send them over the new border. Homes were looted before the army set about destroying all traces of 200 villages so that there would be nowhere left for the former inhabitants to return to. The first Jewish settlers sent to till the fields recalled seeing the dispossessed owners watching from afar.
The Haaretz investigation offers an account of methodical and wholesale ethnic cleansing that sits uncomfortably not only with the traditional Israeli story of 1967 but with the Israeli public's idea that their army is the "most moral in the world". That may explain why several prominent, though unnamed, Israeli historians admitted to Haaretz that they had learnt of this "alternative narrative" but did nothing to investigate or publicise it.
What is so intriguing about the newspaper's version of the Golan's capture is the degree to which it echoes the revised accounts of the 1948 war that have been written by later generations of Israeli historians. Three decades ago -- in a more complacent era -- Israel made available less sensitive documents from that period.
The new material was explosive enough. It undermined Israel's traditional narrative of 1948, in which the Palestinians were said to have left voluntarily on the orders of the Arab leaders and in the expectation that the combined Arab armies would snuff out the fledging Jewish state in a bloodbath.
Instead, the documents suggested that heavily armed Jewish forces had expelled and dispossessed hundreds of thousands of Palestinians before the Jewish state had even been declared and a single Arab soldier had entered Palestine.
One document in particular, Plan Dalet, demonstrated the army's intention to expel the Palestinians from their homeland. Its existence explains the ethnic cleansing of more than 80 per cent of Palestinians in the war, followed by a military campaign to destroy hundreds of villages to ensure the refugees never returned.
Ethnic cleansing is the common theme of both these Israeli conquests. A deeper probe of the archives will almost certainly reveal in greater detail how and why these "cleansing" campaigns were carried out -- which is precisely why Mr Netanyahu and others want the archives to remain locked.
But full disclosure of these myth-shattering documents may be the precondition for peace. Certainly, more of these revelations offer the best hope of shocking Israeli public opinion out of its self-righteous opposition to meaningful concessions, either to Syria or the Palestinians.
It is also a necessary first step in challenging Israel's continuing attempts to ethnically cleanse Palestinians, as has occurred in the last few weeks against the Bedouin in both the Jordan Valley and the Negev, where villages are being razed and families forced to leave again.
Genuine peacemakers should be demanding that the doors to the archives be thrown open immediately. The motives of those who wish to keep them locked should be clear to all.
Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His latest books are "Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East" (Pluto Press) and "Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair" (Zed Books). His website is www.jkcook.net.
A version of this article originally appeared in The National (www.thenational.ae), published in Abu Dhabi.
"True, there remain secularists in Istanbul who revere the legacy of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, founder of the Republic of Turkey. But they have no hold over the key government ministries, and their grip over the army is slipping. Today the talk in Istanbul is quite openly about an "Ottoman alternative," which harks back to the days when the Sultan ruled over an empire that stretched from North Africa to the Caucasus.
If Turkey can no longer be relied on to move towards the West, who in the Muslim world can be? All the Arab countries except Iraq—a precarious democracy created by the United States—are ruled by despots of various stripes. And all the opposition groups that have any meaningful support among the local populations are run by Islamist outfits like the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood."
What do the controversies around the proposed mosque near Ground Zero, the eviction of American missionaries from Morocco earlier this year, the minaret ban in Switzerland last year, and the recent burka ban in France have in common? All four are framed in the Western media as issues of religious tolerance. But that is not their essence. Fundamentally, they are all symptoms of what the late Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington called the "Clash of Civilizations," particularly the clash between Islam and the West.
Huntington's argument is worth summarizing briefly for those who now only remember his striking title. The essential building block of the post-Cold War world, he wrote, are seven or eight historical civilizations of which the Western, the Muslim and the Confucian are the most important.
The balance of power among these civilizations, he argued, is shifting. The West is declining in relative power, Islam is exploding demographically, and Asian civilizations—especially China—are economically ascendant. Huntington also said that a civilization-based world order is emerging in which states that share cultural affinities will cooperate with each other and group themselves around the leading states of their civilization.
The West's universalist pretensions are increasingly bringing it into conflict with the other civilizations, most seriously with Islam and China. Thus the survival of the West depends on Americans, Europeans and other Westerners reaffirming their shared civilization as unique—and uniting to defend it against challenges from non-Western civilizations.
Huntington's model, especially after the fall of Communism, was not popular. The fashionable idea was put forward in Francis Fukuyama's 1989 essay "The End of History," in which he wrote that all states would converge on a single institutional standard of liberal capitalist democracy and never go to war with each other. The equivalent neoconservative rosy scenario was a "unipolar" world of unrivalled American hegemony. Either way, we were headed for One World.
President Obama, in his own way, is a One Worlder. In his 2009 Cairo speech, he called for a new era of understanding between America and the Muslim world. It would be a world based on "mutual respect, and . . . upon the truth that America and Islam are not exclusive and need not be in competition. Instead, they overlap, and share common principles."
The president's hope was that moderate Muslims would eagerly accept this invitation to be friends. The extremist minority—nonstate actors like al Qaeda—could then be picked off with drones.
Of course, this hasn't gone according to plan. And a perfect illustration of the futility of this approach, and the superiority of the Huntingtonian model, is the recent behavior of Turkey.
According to the One World view, Turkey is an island of Muslim moderation in a sea of extremism. Successive American presidents have urged the EU to accept Turkey as a member on this assumption. But the illusion of Turkey as the West's moderate friend in the Muslim world has been shattered.
A year ago Turkey's President Recep Erdogan congratulated Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on his re-election after he blatantly stole the presidency. Then Turkey joined forces with Brazil to try to dilute the American-led effort to tighten U.N. sanctions aimed at stopping Iran's nuclear arms program. Most recently, Turkey sponsored the "aid flotilla" designed to break Israel's blockade of Gaza and to hand Hamas a public relations victory.
True, there remain secularists in Istanbul who revere the legacy of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, founder of the Republic of Turkey. But they have no hold over the key government ministries, and their grip over the army is slipping. Today the talk in Istanbul is quite openly about an "Ottoman alternative," which harks back to the days when the Sultan ruled over an empire that stretched from North Africa to the Caucasus.
If Turkey can no longer be relied on to move towards the West, who in the Muslim world can be? All the Arab countries except Iraq—a precarious democracy created by the United States—are ruled by despots of various stripes. And all the opposition groups that have any meaningful support among the local populations are run by Islamist outfits like the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood.
In Indonesia and Malaysia, Islamist movements are demanding the expansion of Shariah law. In Egypt, Hosni Mubarak's time is running out. Should the U.S. support the installation of his son? If so, the rest of the Muslim world will soon be accusing the Obama administration of double standards—if elections for Iraq, why not for Egypt? Analysts have observed that in free and fair elections, a Muslim Brotherhood victory cannot be ruled out.
Algeria? Somalia? Sudan? It is hard to think of a single predominantly Muslim country that is behaving according to the One World script.
The greatest advantage of Huntington's civilizational model of international relations is that it reflects the world as it is—not as we wish it to be. It allows us to distinguish friends from enemies. And it helps us to identify the internal conflicts within civilizations, particularly the historic rivalries between Arabs, Turks and Persians for leadership of the Islamic world.
But divide and rule cannot be our only policy. We need to recognize the extent to which the advance of radical Islam is the result of an active propaganda campaign. According to a CIA report written in 2003, the Saudis invested at least $2 billion a year over a 30-year period to spread their brand of fundamentalist Islam. The Western response in promoting our own civilization was negligible.
Our civilization is not indestructible: It needs to be actively defended. This was perhaps Huntington's most important insight. The first step towards winning this clash of civilizations is to understand how the other side is waging it—and to rid ourselves of the One World illusion.
Ms. Ali, a former member of the Dutch parliament, is the author of "Nomad: From Islam to America—A Personal Journey through the Clash of Civilizations," which has just been published by Free Press.
Organizers: All-woman Lebanese aid ship to set sail for Gaza Sunday
Women instructed to carry blood type info in case 'they need blood transfusions in the event of being attacked by Israeli forces.'
The organizers of a Lebanese ship aiming to break Israel's Gaza blockade said Thursday that they plan to set sail from Lebanon on Sunday.
Lebanese Gaza-bound aid ship 'Julia' awaiting green light to set sail. Photo by: AP
Samar al-Hajj says the ship, the Mariam, named after the Virgin Mary, will be carrying medicine for the seaside strip. Al-Hajj said all the passengers will be women activists.
Lebanon and Israel are technically at war and Israeli officials have warned Beirut not to allow the boat to sail.
Al-Hajj said Lebanon's president, prime minister and parliament speaker refused to meet with her, which appeared to signal the government's lack of support for the venture.
In May, the Israeli Defense Forces forcibly intercepted a flotilla of Gaza-bound aid ships. On one of the ships, violent clashes broke out and nine Turkish activists were killed.
Al-Hajj said the ship would first head for Cyprus, although it was unclear if the Cypriot authorities will grant permission for it to continue on to Gaza.
"All on board were instructed to carry details of their blood groups in case they need blood transfusions in the event of being attacked by Israeli forces," she said.
"There are nuns, doctors, lawyers, journalists, Christian and Muslim women on board," said Hajj. The group includes Lebanese singer May Hariri and a group of nuns from the United States, she added.
Earlier Thursday, Channel 10 quoted Palestinian media as saying that an aid ship bound for the Gaza Strip had departed Algeria.
According to the Palestinian paper "Palestine Today", the ship, sponsored by the Algerian government, departed with religious leaders and political officials on board along with supplies of food, medicine, and educational materials.
The ship was organized by religious leaders and businessmen to "express solidarity with the Palestinian people," the report said.
In July, a Libyan-sponsored aid ship attempted to reach Gaza but diverted to the Egyptian port of El Arish, where its cargo was unloaded and delivered to Gaza by land.
Another Aid Ship left today from Algeria....
Algerian aid ship sets course for Gaza
Algerian aid ship left port today destined for Gaza. Aboard are political and religious leaders. The vessel is carrying educational and medical supplies in addition to food. The ship will unload at the Egyptian port of El-Arish where the supplies will travel by road through the Rafah crossing. Egypt is reported to have agreed to the transshipment.
Women Are Our Allies
August 19, 2010
Posted: 18 Aug 2010 07:48 PM PDT
One will find video of the conference in its entirety at the A3P YouTube page.