How troublesome the Muslims of the Middle East are. First, we demand that the Palestinians embrace democracy and then they elect the wrong party - Hamas - and then Hamas wins a mini-civil war and presides over the Gaza Strip.

And we Westerners still want to negotiate with the discredited President, Mahmoud Abbas. Today "Palestine" - and let's keep those quotation marks in place - has two prime ministers. Welcome to the Middle East.

Who can we negotiate with? To whom do we talk? Well of course, we should have talked to Hamas months ago. But we didn't like the democratically elected government of the Palestinian people.

They were supposed to have voted for Fatah and its corrupt leadership. But they voted for Hamas, which declines to recognise Israel or abide by the totally discredited Oslo agreement.   more »

All this flag-waving propaganda glorifies

the military and war, thinking violence is

the way to accomplish its goals

It fosters a cult of death

(it is heroic to die for the fatherland)

It thinks attacking other peoples and nations is just fine

It fosters racist attitudes and uses

racist ideas to argue for its positions

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Keywords: patriotism, jingoism, flag, fascism, rightwing

Mike Evans, founder and president of Lovers of Israel Inc., offers biblical justification for the continuation of American support for Israel. In his book, Israel, America's Key to Survival, he writes:

"Only one nation, Israel, stands between Soviet-sponsored terrorist aggression and the complete decline of the United States as a democratic world power...

"I believe this is the greatest hour to be alive, and the key is unity, standing tall, proclaiming with a voice of love our commitment to the House of Israel, and to the God of Israel."

While many would not necessarily go as far as Mike Evans, it is nevertheless assumed by a large proportion of Christians in Britain and America that it is their biblical responsibility to support the State of Israel and that God’s blessing on them is conditional on their blessing Israel.   more »

"You don't need to bomb Al Jazeera to change its direction. There is a softer way to influence its direction by taking it over from within and it can happen quietly almost as if in slow motion.

You ‘broaden' some programs, announce new ‘guidelines,' issue new edicts reinforcing top-down control, purge some professionals you don't like, and then give more positive unchallenged airtime to backers of U.S. foreign policy.

Washington would not be open about any behind the scenes role it is playing in all this for fear of triggering a very negative public reaction."

In typical, reactionary fashion the right wung in America call al-Jazeera Terrorist TV", a slogan designed to discredit its news and programming, which was first only seen in Arabic but now has a separate English channel.   more »

Faced with the fear that things may get even worse, one must not lose sight of the causes of the events in Gaza, their connection with the situation in Lebanon and Iraq and above all the lies the media use to defend the interests of the West and Israel at the expense of the Palestinians.

It is all too well known that laboratory researchers subject small rodents to stressful situations to provoke illness and aggression. It is also well-known that Gaza is a huge prison.

Israel holds the keys, until a short while ago had its prison warders inside and now keeps them on the land and sea frontiers, as well as policing the airspace.

Life there has been simply inhuman since Israel occupied it militarily in 1967.

For many years now it has been a laboratory using human beings instead of rats, the main difference being that rats get fed while the Palestinians do not.   more »