During the last couple of days, news reports have come out regarding Israel's recent military exercises preparing for an eventual attack on Iran's nuclear facilities.  Suddenly, Ari Fleischer's name comes to mind recalling a conversation I had with a friend over a year ago regarding some secret Jewish coalition raising funds in excess of $200 million to wage a propaganda war in America in an attempt to gain American support for another war against Iran. Now that story didn't seem to hang around for long until recent.  Ari Fleichser aka "Joseph Goebbels" and his Israeli warmongers are testing the waters for a possible attack on Iran
in an attempt to drag America in to the fold. Do we just stand by and allow Israel to further incite tensions bringing the world to the brink of WWIII?  

Almost every civilization known to man fell not because of external forces like Al-Qaeda, but because of internal disharmony such as racial untruthfulness, religious misunderstandings, and cultural intolerance.  Internal disharmony is a cancer in any society that quietly and systematically erodes the fabric of any civilization and brings it down to its knees.  This is the cancer that O’Reilly and Hannity of Fox news represents.  

Last year B'Tselem, the Israeli centre for human rights in the Occupied Territories, distributed video cameras to Palestinians living in the West Bank to enable them to document the realities of life under military occupation. The returned footage illustrates vividly the systematic humiliation, intimidation and abuse suffered by Palestinians on a daily basis. When the media report of a period of "calm", they are referring only to a lull in overt acts of extreme violence, such as Palestinian suicide bombings or Israeli air-strikes. But even in such periods, the constant degredation and violence that is intrinsic to the occupation, as documented in the footage sampled below, grinds on.

Guys sorry for interrupting your political discourse. There are so many hot topics to discuss on this beautiful weekend day as far as US politics is concerned but my conscience would not allow me to ignore what is going on half a world away in a country known as Zimbabwe on the African continent. It seems to me that the world is allowing Robert Mugabe to get away with strangling the life out of his people in broad daylight. It's like watching your neighbor beat the heck out of his wife and turning a blind eye to it on the grounds that it's none of your business and that they'll sort out their problems somehow by themselves. You hear the screams and the cries for help but you turn up the volume on your television set and close your windows. You have too many other things concerning your life right now to be minding your neighbor's business, you tell yourself. You don't even have the decency to call the police, you see your neighbors as nothing but low-lives and couldn't care less if they killed each other.  

Earlier this month I wroteabout how South Africa's war into Mozambique has contributed to Mozambique checking in at one of the poorest countries in the world. It seems that the apartheid past is still too close at hand to allow Mozambique ample space to regain its footing.

A week of riots and clashes sparked in the capital as the government attempted to raise fuel prices by 50%. Mozambique is often unheard of in international news, but a week of violent riots in Maputo leaving 100 injured and four dead were enough to bring the world's poorest country to the headlines. The fuel price jump was proposed as a response to the 14% rise in diesel fuel costs. Food prices have also experienced an increase due to the rise in fuel costs. The reason that riots erupted was not only because of rising fuel costs, but mainly because of the low wages that people in Mozambique make. The more interesting question may be why is Mozambique so poor and why would the government seek a 50% increase in price to meet the demand?

Here's a nice Spitting Image sketch, from the 1980s/early 1990s:

(h/t to Jews sans frontieres)

We already know about the Democrats' anti-racism efforts, but what about the Republicans--John McCain in particular?

On This Day In History.
February 11, 1990:

Leading anti-apartheid campaigner Nelson Mandela has been freed from prison in South Africa after 27 years.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/...

EXCERPT of a PUBLIC LETTER TO JOHN MCCAIN:

In 1990, the world hailed Nelson Mandela as a hero, but [McCain campaign advisor] Mr. Quinn went on the attack [writing:]

-- "After all, Mr. Mandela was put in jail 27 years ago -- not because of his humanitarian philosophy -- but because he was a terrorist who openly advocated (and personally committed) violence against the government."

-- "How many people out there across the face of America are well aware that Mandela is a bad egg, maybe even say so in the comfort and security of their homes, but are afraid to express their real opinions publicly?"

More below the fold. . ./ .

One of the most contentious topics in dailykos IP debates has always been any comparison, explicit or implicit, between Israeli policies on the West Bank and Gaza with South African apartheid.  In most cases, defenders of Israel simply reject the idea that any meaningful comparison can be made, and echoing the attacks made by major mainstream Jewish leaders on such figures as Jimmy Carter and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, it is not uncommon that people will be accused of antisemitism for raising the comparison.

Today, no less a figure than Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert weighs in with his opinion.  The AP is reporting that in an interview with Israeli daily Haaretz,

Olmert said it was a vital Israeli interest to create a Palestinian state because of the growing Arab population in the area. "The day will come when the two-state solution collapses, and we face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights," Olmert told Haaretz. "As soon as that happens, the state of Israel is finished."

More on the flip...

The Damning Facts Mount..

Deception: Pakistan, the United States, and the Secret Trade in Nuclear Weapons provides a damning indictment of the active role Republicans played in Pakistan's rogue nuclear program.

Evidence was destroyed, criminal files were diverted, Congress was repeatedly lied to, and in several cases, in 1986 and 1987, presidential appointees even tipped off the Pakistani government so as to prevent its agents from getting caught in U.S. Customs Service stings that aimed to catch them buying nuclear components in America."

This Mother Jones review supports our own accounts of Republican incompetence, a gift from hell that keeps on giving...

America is slipping dangerously close to engaging in "Apartheid" politics -- the separation of "us" and "them", obstensibly for the benefit of "them" (and "us", but that's generally framed as the secondary benefit). I highly recommend the book "Move Your Shadow" by Joseph Lelyveld if you want to understand the Apartheid mindset. I discuss the reasons for this and how it's manifest below the fold.

South African Episcopal Archbishop Desmond Tutu has an op-ed in today's Boston Globe,"Realizing God's dream for the Holy Land" (diaried by teacherken here), in which he answers critics of his stance on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.  Declaring that he is not an "optimist," he insists that as a Christian he is "constrained by [his] faith to hope against hope" for a future of peace.

He writes of his belief that "God has a dream for all his children...  More than anything else, God's dream is about a day when all people are accorded equal dignity because they are human beings....  God's dream begins the moment one adversary looks another in the eye and sees himself reflected there."

More on the flip...

I just got back yesterday from a work-related trip to South Africa, where I spent almost 2 weeks. Since it was only my second trip overseas (the other one was to Geneva, Switzerland), I obviously was excited about having such an opportunity (and admittedly, a little bit frightened as well, because I had no idea what I'd be confronting once there). I promised myself I'd write a diary about this trip before I left, upon my return.  

Well, I decided I'd need more than one diary to cover my impressions. This is part 1, which goes into my first impressions after landing at the O.R. Tombo airport in Johannesburg, and what happened the next few days. Follow me below the jump.

In Nazi Germany, what we think of the Heil Hitler gesture was officially called The German Salute. The Nazis wanted Germans to think that greeting their friends by holding their hands up palm out and saying "Heil Hitler!" wasn't Nazi but typically German. A common joke among Germans at the time was that the real German salute was the surreptitious look from side to side to make sure no stranger was listening before speaking frankly with a friend.

I read about that while researching my novel Budspy, and I recognized it instantly. To me, it was The South African Salute, and I had seen it while growing up in Apartheid South Africa.

It's not just Blackwater.

George Bush is stealing American tax dollars by the billions and siphoning off our tax dollars to pay for private killers and murderers (a.k.a. mercenaries) who are murdering Iraqi civilians by the day.  

And almost 10,000 of these private killers have been hired from South Africa's  apartheid mercenaries

The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.

Those words were given in a time of fear, of injustice, of inhumanity. For those words, and the struggle behind them to bring a more human face to a nation that had become a police state, a price would have to be paid. On the way to an organizing rally for a people under the heal of a jackboot police-state, to cry out the radical notion that those in power are only human not superior to those they control, and likewise those beaten down must be made to realize that they are also human, not inferior that a terrible toll would be exacted. For those words, and the thoughts behind them, a man was stopped by homeland security at a check-point and arrested on August 21st, under the Terrorism Act No 83.

cont. below the fold

Earlier this month, on the occasion of Israeli Independence Day / Palestinian Nakba Day, the official statistical bureaus of EACH  nation  issued demographic updates.

With all the Israeli obsession about demography, it is interesting that our mainstream media did not add up the numbers from both sources.

According to them, tiny Israel/Palestine is now officially home to about 11.1 million people - 5.4 million Jews, 5.2 million Palestinians and 0.5 million 'others' (mostly non-Jews arriving with the 'Russian' immigration, and foreign labor). Sometime over the past couple of years, Jews in the land have dropped below the symbolic 50% mark - for the first time since about 1950.

More about this and why it is significant - below the fold.

Demonization of nonviolent activists is not original or surprising. Muhatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King were also labeled provocateurs and trouble makers by those that supported the racist systems that they worked against.