Ariel Sharon

The “five dancing Israelis” intrigue lives on twenty years after the September 11 attacks. But the reality behind the incident may have been more mundane. A bizarre incident in which a group of Israelis were arrested on September 11, 2001 has led to theories about the men’s role in the attack on New York City’s World Trade Center that day. After twenty years of conjecture and speculation, an investigation by The Grayzone indicates that the infamous incident was the product […]

Most nations have dealt with their fair share of institutionalized racism and bigotry, and Israel is no exception. However, when it comes to Israel, the volume of racism expressed by prominent political figures is both astounding and concerning.
 
Prime Minister David Ben Gurion with his chief aide, Shimon Peres. In background: defense minister Moshe Dayan and Ben Gurion aide, Teddy Kollek.

It seems the UK trains killers and supplies weapons with no regard for the humanitarian consequences.
The toxic situation (by which I mean the continuing mega-slaughter of innocents) surrounding the Saudi crown prince’s royal welcome to London will have reminded many of the Vietnam-era chant of peace activists in response to the lies and blunders and excuses at that time: “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?”

Not a day passes without a prominent Israeli politician or intellectual making an outrageous statement against Palestinians. Many of these statements tend to garner little attention or evoke rightly deserved outrage.

Shimon Peres and the Massacre of Palestinians at Tel al-Zaatar By Michael Hoffmanwww.RevisionistHistory.org"As prime minister, Peres oversaw the 1996 Israeli shelling of a UN shelter in Qana in Lebanon, which killed more than a hundred refugees.

Winston Churchill once described the Soviet Union as a ‘puzzle wrapped inside an enigma’. The same could be said for Russian President Vladimir Putin today. From the intricate and sometimes unpredictable diplomatic maneuvers of his foreign policy to his contradictory and sometimes ambiguous pronouncements on the legacy of the USSR, enigmatic is perhaps one of the most apposite words to describe him. This enigma is particularly evident in his approach to the politics of the Middle East and Israel in particular.

The decision to outlaw the northern wing of the Islamic Movement in Israel was announced by Benjamin Netanyahu’s government on November 17, 2015, days after attacks claimed by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, left 130 dead in Paris. Although the ban had been long in the making, the timing was patently opportunistic, with Netanyahu even comparing Israel’s Islamic Movement to ISIS.

A stinging defeat for Abbas, but no great victory for Israel … Netanyahu persuaded Nigeria to abstain as UN Security Council rejected Palestinian statehood, but could only muster US and Australian opposition, and the French let Israel down.
— Times of Israel

An image speaks a thousand words – and that is presumably what Israel’s supporters hoped for with their latest ad in the New York Times.
Two photographs are presented side by side. One, titled ISIS, is the now-iconic image of a kneeling James Foley, guarded by a black-hooded executioner, awaiting his terrible fate. The other, titled Hamas, is a scene from Gaza, where a similarly masked killer stands over two victims, who cower in fear.
A headline stating “This is the face of radical Islam” tries, like the images, to equate the two organisations.