Anlässlich eines ihrer seltenen Auftritte vor dem Parlament, vor dem die britischen Geheimdienstchefs aussagen mussten, verbargen diese kaum ihre Empörung darüber, dass sie Fragen von Parlamentsabgeordneten über durchgesickerte Überwachungsprogramme beantworten mussten, die gravierende Bedenken an ihrem vergleichsweisen Mangel an Aufsicht äußerten.

It‘s a sad and shameful comment on the state of the US government today that this question needs to be asked, no matter what the eventual answer is. We‘ve strayed very very far from the ideals that this country is supposed to embrace.

#FreeWomenOfEgypt

During the four months since the beginning of the military coup, Egypt lived through the worst repression and murderous military tyranny in its entire history, even worse than periods of oppression under occupation forces and the worst totalitarian regimes, especially with regard to public and private rights and freedoms of women and children, in particular.

The worst of the junta’s repressive practices is the involvement of the judiciary in order to cast a legal shadow on the coup commanders and collaborators’ bloody and brutal atrocities, like the arbitrary arrest and detention of more than 15,000 people, many of whom minors and children, using flawed legal grounds and procedures and false evidence.
Moreover, the Interior Ministry and police apparatus have been transformed from the protector of security, responsible for upholding justice, to a department dedicated to organized and systematic use of armies of thugs to kill, terrorize and arrest citizens, as documented in many videos and photographs, in a phenomenon devised by the Mubarak regime that has become a feature of all totalitarian regimes..

The family of Egypt‘s toppled president visited him in prison on Thursday, their first face-to-face contact with him since a popularly-backed military coup ousted him from power four months ago, his wife said.

A court in September had outlawed the Brotherhood after the army overthrew President Mohamed Morsi in July following mass protests against his rule.

The case against Brotherhood was brought by a lawyer from the leftist Tagammu party, which cited the need to protect Egyptians from violence.

Egypt said on Friday it would hold parliamentary elections in February or March, with presidential polls in early summer, and that the political arm of ousted president Mohamed Mursi‘s banned Muslim Brotherhood could participate.

UNESCO has suspended the voting rights of the United States and Israel, two years after both countries stopped paying dues to the U.N.‘s cultural arm in protest over its granting full membership to the Palestinians.

US-Außenminister John Kerry sowie seine europäischen Kollegen Laurent Fabius (Frankreich), Guido Westerwelle (Deutschland) und William Hague (Großbritannien) hatten überraschend beschlossen, sich am Freitag den Gesprächen zwischen dem iranischen Außenminister Mohammed Dschawad Sarif und Unterhändlern aus der Sechsergruppe in Genf anzuschließen.

When the Zionist movement appeared in Eastern Europe in the 1880s, it found it very difficult to persuade the leading rabbis and secular Jewish thinkers of the day to support it.

The leading rabbis saw the political history in the Bible and the idea of Jewish sovereignty on the land of Israel as very marginal topics and were much more concerned, as indeed Judaism as a religion was, with the holy tracts that focused on the relationship between the believers themselves and in particular their relations with God.

Secular liberal or socialist Jews also found the idea of Jewish nationalism unattractive. Liberal Jews hoped that a far more liberal world would solve the problems of persecution and anti-Semitism while avowed socialists and communists wished peoples of all religions, not just the Jews, to be liberated from oppression.

Even the idea of a particular Jewish socialist movement, such as the Bund, was a bizarre one in their eyes. “Zionists who were afraid of seasickness” is how Russian Marxist Georgi Plekhanov called the Bundists when they wanted to join the international communist movement.

The secular Jews who founded the Zionist movement wanted paradoxically both to secularize Jewish life and to use the Bible as a justification for colonizing Palestine; in other words, they did not believe in God but He nonetheless promised them Palestine.

This precarious logic was recognized even by the founder of the Zionist movement himself, Theodore Herzl, who therefore opted for Uganda, rather than Palestine, as the promised land of Zion. It was the pressure of Protestant scholars and politicians of the Bible, especially in Britain, who kept the gravitation of the Zionist movement towards Palestine.

For them it was a double bill: you get rid of the Jews in Europe, and at the same time you fulfill the divine scheme in which the second coming of the Messiah will be precipitated by the return of the Jews — and their subsequent conversion to Christianity or their roasting in hell should they refuse.

From that moment onwards the Bible became both the justification for, and the map of, the Zionist colonization of Palestine.

Ilan Pappé (Hebrew: אילן פפה‎; born 1954) is an Israeli historian and socialist activist. He is a professor with the College of Social Sciences and International Studies at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom, director of the university‘s European Centre for Palestine Studies, and co-director of the Exeter Centre for Ethno-Political Studies.

Pappé was born in Haifa, Israel. Prior to coming to the UK, he was a senior lecturer in political science at the University of Haifa (1984–2007) and chair of the Emil Touma Institute for Palestinian and Israeli Studies in Haifa (2000–2008).He is the author of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2006), The Modern Middle East (2005), A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples (2003), and Britain and the Arab-Israeli Conflict (1988). He was also a leading member of Hadash,[4] and was a candidate on the party list in the 1996 [5] and 1999 [6] Knesset elections.

“We can confirm that Arafat did not die because of age or disease, he did not die a natural death,” Tawfiq Tirawi said at a news conference in Ramallah in the West Bank today. “We say again Israel is the only one involved in this.” He said the panel would approach the United Nations once its inquiries were complete.

(26.09.2007) Der Plenarsaal der Vereinten Nationen in New York war nur noch spärlich besetzt, als die Kanzlerin sprach

While a nuclear military capability needs uranium enriched more than 90% and Iran has succeeded in enriching uranium to a maximum 20% to feed its nuclear research reactor in Tehran which produces radioisotopes for medical purposes, including cancer treatment, the Israeli prime minister said the 20-percent enrichment capability enables Iran to build an atomic bomb.

http://t.co/3Qbf5AI5L5

„Scahill is a one-man truth squad.“ Bill Moyers

(23.04.2013) In Dirty Wars, Jeremy Scahill, author of the New York Times best-seller Blackwater, takes us inside America’s new covert wars. The foot soldiers in these battles operate globally and inside the United States with orders from the White House to do whatever is necessary to hunt down, capture or kill individuals designated by the president as enemies. Drawn from the ranks of the Navy SEALs, Delta Force, former Blackwater and other private security contractors, the CIA’s Special Activities Division and the Joint Special Operations Command ( JSOC), these elite soldiers operate worldwide, with thousands of secret commandos working in more than one hundred countries. Funded through “black budgets,” Special Operations Forces conduct missions in denied areas, engage in targeted killings, snatch and grab individuals and direct drone, AC-130 and cruise missile strikes. While the Bush administration deployed these ghost militias, President Barack Obama has expanded their operations and given them new scope and legitimacy.

Dirty Wars follows investigative reporter Jeremy Scahill, author of the international bestseller Blackwater, into the hidden world of America‘s covert wars, from Afghanistan to Yemen, Somalia, and beyond. With a strong cinematic style, the film blurs the boundaries of documentary and fiction storytelling. Part action film and part detective story, Dirty Wars is a gripping journey into one of the most important and underreported stories of our time.

(April 1, 2013) By the bestselling authors of The Command: Deep Inside the President‘s Secret Army: Marc Ambinder, editor at large at The Week, contributing editor at GQ and the Atlantic, who has covered Washington for CBS News and ABC News; and D.B. Grady, a correspondent for the Atlantic, national security columnist for The Week, and former U.S. Army paratrooper and Afghanistan veteran.

(27.02.2013) 1. GREYSTONE, or GST. GREYSTONE, all in caps, was what the CIA used to control information about its post-9/11 extraordinary rendition and enhanced interrogation technique programs. GST is the trigraph that‘s blacked out on many documents that the government has released through the Freedom of Information Act and other lawsuits. The term „GST“ was revealed to the world by Dana Priest, but the government confirmed it accidentally, as I reported in 2009. The GST program was heavily compartmentalized. The torture part was kept separate from the travel part, for example, which is standard government practice. We still deal with the ramifications of this program today. Its legacy haunts our diplomacy, provides endless debates about our values and principles, and is still an open wound within the CIA.

(27.02.2013) More than a decade after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, a set of extraordinary and secretive surveillance programs conducted by the National Security Agency has been institutionalized, and they have grown. These special programs are conducted under the code name Ragtime, and are divided into several subcomponents, according to the new book Deep State: Inside the Government Secrecy Industry, by Marc Ambinder and D.B. Grady. (…)

At the NSA‘s headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland, a program called Xkeyscore processes all intercepted electronic signals before sending them to different „production lines“ that deal with specific issues. Here, we find another array of code names.