Crimes against humanity

The first-ever “truth commission” in Israel, to be held on Wednesday, will feature confessions from veteran Israeli fighters of the 1948 war who are expected to admit to perpetrating war crimes as hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were expelled from their homes.
The commission is the culmination of more than decade of antagonistic confrontations between a small group of activists called Zochrot, the Hebrew word for Remembering, and the Israeli authorities as well as much of the Jewish public.

Somebody on CNN suggested the other day that the dismissal of Chuck Hagel as Defense Secretary spells the end of Barack Obama’s notion of a “team of rivals.” (Recall how that term was used after the 2008 election to refer to the new president’s decision to include former rivals, notably Hillary Clinton, in his administration. It was derived from the title of a book by presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin celebrating Abraham Lincoln’s cabinet formed in 1860 that included three former opponents.)

In the wake of the recent events in the synagogue at Har Nof, Uri Avnery has written an article. Like all his work, Avnery’s article is informative, original and beautifully written. But it has a glaring omission.
Har Nof from Yad Vashem
Here, Dan McGowan fills him in:
Dear Uri:

Oh say can you see by the star spangled machine, with modern weapons in hand it conquers foreign lands. If uninhabited, these lands would be up for the taking. And while the U.S. Declaration of Independence says “all men are created equal” with “inalienable rights”, the U.S. has a history of internal conflicts arising from violating those principles domestically and through foreign policy. Since the event of 9/11 the U.S.

Israeli policy is longstanding. Reflecting anti-Palestinian state terror. Institutionalized racism writ large. Vicious repression.
Brutalizing Muslims for not being Jews. Enforcing militarized occupation harshness. Denying Palestinians rights everyone deserves.
According to Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD) director Jeff Halper:

“You didn’t know about the decision of the Singapore government to join the fight against ISIS?” she asked.
I was catching up with another Singaporean, Lynette (a pseudonym to respect her privacy), who had previously worked in Kabul and who was back in Afghanistan to do a month-long community-based survey with a U.S. university, looking at the impact of disability on Afghan communities.

Instinct for survival is genetically coded in our DNA, and it’s likely few, if any of us, would be here without it. Until the advent of agriculture some 12,000 years ago, humans were foraging and scavenging hunters while population growth, was and still is, automatically limited by the amount of resources in any geographic area. This inevitably brought competition between ancient clans and tribes as populations grew. The competitive spirit is no doubt tied to our survival instincts which seek advantages for continuing our bloodline into the future.

The new book by academics Nadia Abu-Zahra and Adah Kay — Unfree in Palestine: Registration, Documentation and Movement Restrictions (PlutoPress, 2013) — is a brilliant achievement, and a landmark in the study of both the ongoing Israel genocide in Palestine,1 and national liberation struggles in general.

teleSUR | October 29, 2014 Eighteen years have passed and those who were forcefully sterilized in Peru have obtained no justice even though the issue was key for the electoral victory of current president Ollanta Humala. On Wednesday, author and researcher Alejandra Ballon accused the current administration of president Ollanta Humala of using the case […]

Context doesn’t matter with clever kitty videos, but politics is different
BuzzFeed, moving up from cute-cat-tricks to catty-Senator-tricks, caused a few ripples in the political swamp on October 22 with its belated, skewed reporting of Republican Senator John McCain calling U.S. Admiral John Kirby an “idiot” on a right wing radio show in North Carolina on October 15. OK, nobody really expects BuzzFeed News to publish honest news.