Boycott Israel: Boycott Derails Jerusalem’s Transit System

An ill-fated light railway under construction in Jerusalem was originally heralded by Israeli officials as a way to cement the city’s “unification” four decades after the city’s Palestinian half was illegally annexed to Israel.

But the only unity generated among Jewish and Palestinian residents after four years of disruptions to the city’s traffic and businesses is general agreement that the project is rapidly becoming a white elephant.

Read more here.

Jewish Internet Defense Force fails to make #ShanaTova trending Twitter topic

As I reported the other day, the Jewish Internet Defense Force scheduled yet another Twitter campaign for yesterday, September 16, with the goal of making #ShanaTova a trending topic in order to “raise awareness of Rosh Hashanah,” and to “draw attention to the plight of suffering children.”

Unlike their previous Twitter campaign which managed to make #GiladShalit, an IDF prisoner of war who has been in the custody of Hamas since 2006, the number two trending topic for about a day, the #ShanaTova campaign failed miserably.

It should come as no surprise that the #ShanaTova campaign was largely unsuccessful due to the fact that it was marketed in part to “draw attention to the plight of suffering children” when in fact the Jewish Internet Defense Force actively defends and supports the murder of innocent children almost every single day in their unbridled support for Israel’s policy of ethnically cleansing Palestinians.

In light of the #ShanaTova failure, David Appletree, the founder of the Jewish Internet Defense Force and self-proclaimed social media expert lamented*, “I’m thankful as I learned some extremely valuable things from the #ShanaTova campaign,” which he assured, “are going to help with whatever I do next.”

Hopefully, whatever he decides to do next is not a campaign designed to promote the violation of international laws as he and his supporters so often do.

Not that it matters, since his self-proclaimed social media expertise has been exposed for what it truly is in the wake of the #ShanaTova failure, a great big delusion.

*Since publishing my last article about the Jewish Internet Defense Force, out of fear of being exposed, David Appletree has protected his tweets.

Jewish Internet Defense Force embarks on new #ShanaTova Twitter campaign

The Jewish Internet Defense Force, an internet collective of Jewish activists that I recently wrote about, has embarked on yet another Twitter campaign. This time the stated goal is to raise awareness of “Rosh Hashanah and suffering children,” by making the hashtag #ShanaTova a trending topic.

Despite having labeled all practicing Muslims, including children, as terrorists and defending the murder by Israeli soldiers of Palestinian civilians, including children, the JIDF claims to want to raise awareness of “suffering children.”

Given the shady history of the JIDF, their Islamophobia and support of human rights violations according to international law, one has to wonder whether including the cause of raising awareness of “suffering children” in their #ShanaTova Twitter campaign is simply a cold and calculated marketing strategy.

The press release for their latest campaign reads, “‘Tweet #ShanaTova’ is a non-political, non-denominational campaign to remind people to think about those less fortunate than themselves, particularly children suffering from life-threatening diseases such as cancer and other debilitating chronic and genetic conditions.”

If they expect non-political and non-denominational support of their campaign, Jewish Internet Defense Force activists and supporters would do well to worry more about the direct effects of their undying support of Israel’s murderous policies which have resulted in the deaths of countless children before shallowly claiming to care about “children suffering from life-threatening diseases such as cancer and other debilitating chronic and genetic conditions.”

Unless, of course, that claim is simply a cold and calculated marketing strategy.

Death of Asaf Ramon highlights mainstream media bias towards Israel

Ward Raymond
Sept. 14, 2009

The mainstream media bias towards Israel was once again made evident yesterday when the death of Israeli fighter pilot Asaf Ramon made international headlines while the death of 25 year old Palestinian journalism student Obeida Al-Qudsy Ad-Dweik, who was shot by Israeli troops on August 26 and succumbed to his wounds yesterday, did not.

A Google news search of Obeida Dweik returned only 4 results while a search of Asaf Ramon returned around 600.

9/11: Our Truth, and Theirs

On September 11, 2001, nineteen hijackers, wielding nothing more lethal than box-cutters, commandeered four airliners, and turned them into lethal missiles, three of which managed to hit their targets – the World Trade Center and the Pentagon – while a fourth crashed in a field before it could strike its intended target — the White House. One of the hijackers had been in the United States since the mid-1990s, and the others, according to subsequent investigations, entered, exited, and re-entered the United States regularly starting in 2000. Continue reading….

How 9/11 Should Be Remembered

On September 11, 2001, a fellow New Yorker and friend of mine, a public health historian who knew instantly what the dangers were, bicycled directly into the smoke, ash, and chemicals that hung over lower Manhattan searching for his daughter whose school was only blocks away from the collapsed buildings. She was, it turned out, “safe” in that same pall of dangerous smoke. She had been evacuated to the street with her class in time to see people leaping or falling to their deaths from the upper floors of one of the crippled towers. You probably couldn’t live in New York City that day and not be connected, however indirectly, to someone who died. In my case, it was the father of a classmate of my son’s, a photographer, who also advanced into the chaos near one of the towers, leaving behind an eerie, moving trail of photographs.

Read the rest here.

Israel and U.S. jointly target Sweden in propaganda blitzkrieg

By Wayne Madsen
Online Journal Contributing Writer

(WMR) — After the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet published an expose of the Israeli Defense Forces harvesting the organs from young Palestinians killed by its forces in the West Bank, Israel’s propaganda machine, which has its tentacles in the world’s largest media companies and the Pentagon, went to work on demonizing Sweden.

Our sources in Finland report that Finnish television is stating that Israel’s Mossad was behind the hijacking of the Maltese-flagged, Russian-crewed, and Russo-Finnish chartered ”Arctic Sea” in Swedish territorial waters. The charter firm is Solchart Arkhangelsk Ltd. of Helsinki. The Russian Prosecutor General’s Office Investigation Committee says it is cooperating with authorities in Malta, Estonia, Latvia, Finland, and Sweden on the hijacking of the “Arctic Sea.” Israel is noticeably absent from the list of cooperating countries.

Read the rest here.

Here’s What Israel Is Really Costing American Taxpayers

By John Tiffany
American Free Press

IT IS OFTEN REPORTED THAT ISRAEL receives about $9.2 billion every year in the form of economic aid from the U.S. government, but there are many billions of dollars more in hidden costs and economic losses lurking beneath the surface. A recently published economic analysis concluded that U.S. support for the state of Israel has cost U.S. taxpayers nearly $3 trillion. About 60 percent of those costs (about $1.7 trillion) arose from the U.S. defense of the ever-expanding Israeli empire.

Support for the empire comes to $1.8 trillion, including special trade advantages, preferential contracts, or aid buried in other accounts.

In addition to the financial outlay, U.S. aid to Israel costs some 275,000 American jobs each year. The trade-aid imbalance with Israel is between $6 billion and $10 billion. The largest single element in the costs has been the series of oil-supply crises that have accompanied the Israeli-Arab wars and the construction of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. These have cost the U.S. $1.5 trillion, excluding the additional costs incurred since 2001.

The cost of supporting Israel increased drastically after the 1973 Israeli-Arab war. U.S. support for Israel during that war resulted in additional costs for the American taxpayer of between $750 billion and $1 trillion. When Israel was losing the war, President Richard Nixon stepped in to supply the Jewish state with U.S. weapons. Nixon’s intervention triggered the Arab oil embargo, which cost the U.S. as much as $600 billion in lost GDP and another $450 billion in higher oil import costs.

Read the rest here.

Populist Says Healthcare Debate A Ruse to Cover Corporate Welfare

American Free Press – 645 Pennsylvania Avenue SE, Suite 100 Washington, D.C. 20003

FORGET ABOUT EVERYTHING YOU HAVE READ on so-called healthcare reform, says Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio). The purported uproar over private versus public health insurance options is really a ruse to cover up a proposal for taxpayer-funded subsidies that will be paid to the billion- dollar private insurance industry.

Under new “compromise” language inserted into the 1,000-page health care bill, titled the “America’s Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009” (H.R. 3200), Americans will be forced to choose which for profit
health insurance company they want to take. If you can’t afford any of the private health insurance plans, the government will pick one for you and then front you the money. But the catch is: you will still be obligated to pay all of the premiums, the co-pays and the high deductibles.

“The hotly debated H.R. 3200, the so called ‘healthcare reform’ bill, is nothing less than corporate welfare in the guise of social welfare and reform,” said Kucinich.

The public option will be gone, he said, leaving only government aid to private insurance companies. Worse still, the federal government will force taxpayers to pay for it all without pressing for cost controls and no guarantees of coverage from any of the participating private insurers.

Read the rest here.

Make the Palestinian state an essential fact on the ground

Ziad Asali
September 9, 2009

The Palestinian prime minister Salam Fayyad’s blueprint for what he has called “de facto Palestinian statehood” offers a new and important element to the quest for peace in the Middle East.

Peace between Israel and the Palestinians hinges on recognition and security for Israel and freedom and independence for a Palestinian state. Mr Fayyad’s model emphasises the importance of the reality of the Palestinian state as a functioning entity, irrespective of international recognition and grand diplomatic gestures. By doing so, Mr Fayyad challenges the sole reliance on political and rhetorical tools of diplomacy and international recognition, the traditional path through which Palestinians have sought statehood. Mr Fayyad is saying that if Palestinians build governing and civil society institutions, Palestine can become a state in reality, whether negotiations are moving forward or not. Palestine will be a fait accompli, rather than a distant aspiration. If you build it, the state will come.

Read the rest here.