April 18, 2024

Israel's sickening history of crimes against humanity

Dead on Arrival: Israel's Blowback Genocide

Ellen Cantarow

Iran puts Israel on notice

The Missiles of April

Scott Ritter

U.S. Government Bullies Weak Nations

Eric Zuesse

Does Project 2025 suggest a 'Taliban Christian' influence? 

A guide to Project 2025, the extreme right-wing agenda for the next Republican administration

Sophie Lawton, Jacina Hollins-Borges, Jack Wheatley & John Knefel

Human Dignity & World Order: The Holistic Foundations of Global Democracy

Glen T. Martin 

 Israel's sickening history of crimes against humanity

Dead on Arrival: Israel's Blowback Genocide

Ellen Cantarow

EXCERPTS

Words can’t express the horrors of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. To actually feel the nightmare, you would have to be there under the bombs, fleeing with Palestinians desperately seeking a safe place that doesn’t exist; seeing building after building destroyed; treading through blood in one of the few, only partially standing hospitals; and witnessing children and other patients sprawled on hospital floors, limbs amputated without anesthesia (Israel having blocked all medical supplies).

It has taken the Jewish state’s savagery to break decades of silence about its history of crimes against humanity. U.S. military historian Robert Pape has called the onslaught against Gaza “one of the most intense civilian punishment campaigns in history.” Former U.N. Assistant Secretary-General for Human Rights Andrew Gilmour has said that we are witnessing “probably the highest kill rate of any military… since the Rwandan genocide of 1994.” 

“Oh, your people!” he exclaimed. “Such a small people, but such a brave people!” For the first time, I felt deeply proud of being Jewish, not the sort of Jew who had (to my mind) cowered in a ghettoized Europe, but a strong, triumphant Jew with a powerful army. Soon after, my husband told me about Israel’s history — its 1948 expulsion of 750,000 Palestinian Arabs and its exploitation of the territories it illegally occupied after the 1967 war. Not long after that, I read Noam Chomsky’s first book about Israeli settler-colonialism, Peace in the Middle East?, and never looked back.

Palestine is finally an international cause. Outrage surges via global demonstrations. Israel has become a pariah in the global South. In the United States, organizations including A Jewish Voice for Peace, Code Pink, and the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights have been marching against the horrors now underway.

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Iran puts Israel on notice

The Missiles of April

Scott Ritter

EXCERPTS

I’ve been writing about Iran for more than two decades. In 2005, I made a trip to Iran to ascertain the “ground truth” about that nation, a truth which I then incorporated into a book, Target Iran, laying out the U.S.-Israeli collaboration to craft a justification for a military attack on Iran designed to bring down its theocratic government.

I followed this book up with another, Dealbreaker, in 2018, which brought this U.S.-Israeli effort up to date.

Despite having employed an extensive integrated anti-missile defense system comprised of the so-called “Iron Dome” system, U.S.-made Patriot missile batteries, and the Arrow and David’s Sling missile interceptors, along with U.S., British, and Israeli aircraft, and U.S. and French ship borne anti-missile defenses, well over a dozen Iranian missiles struck heavily-protected Israeli airfields and air defense installations.

The Iranians hit at least two runways, taking them out of service, and at least five warehouse-type structures (this from satellite imagery taken after the attack.)

Iran gave Israel a five-hour advance warning to move high value items (F-35s). Moreover, Iran did not attack barracks, headquarters, or targets that would produce casualties.

The damage may have been minor, but the message is clear — Iran can hit any target it wants to, at any time. 

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U.S. Government Bullies Weak Nations

Eric Zuesse

 Editor's note: The Earth Constitution movement provides a path for the UN General Assembly to gain democratic voting rights for its member states. It also offers the foundation for an urgently needed "new UN." This transformation of the UN rests in the hands of the  UN General Assembly whose members have been denied equal voting rights by the undemocratic UN Charter itself!  Zuesse's analysis indicates that less powerful nations are now beginning to become more independent from the Bully nations who for so long have controlled the UN and kept it undemocratic.  

-- R. Kotila, PhD

U.S. Government Bullies Weak Nations

Eric Zuesse

 Weak nations have long been terrified at the power that the U.S. regime has to destroy them such as has happened most recently with the CIA’s and U.S. military’s efforts ever since 2012 to grab control over Syria’s Government, and such as what the U.S. regime did to Iraq in 2003 and in its ever-continuing military occupation there (all on the basis of lies), and such as it did to Libya, and to so many other weak nations. 

All weak nations have been waiting decades for a day to come when they could finally tell American occupying troops in the 900 military bases that the U.S. Government has installed abroad (in addition to the 749 domestically inside the U.S. — an armed camp) to leave their country — to get out. Now that this day increasingly appears to have arrived, both because of Russia’s increasingly likely victory against the U.S. stooge regime in Ukraine that the U.S. Government installed there in February 2014, a larger and larger number of weak countries are doing just that, and are telling the U.S. Government to withdraw its troops from their territory. 

So, now, increasingly in Africa and other places where billions of poor people are still not yet free of the imperialists and the exploitation that is imposed upon them by the imperialist regime (now America’s alone) internationally, there is a popular movement to “kick the Yankees out” and to free their nation’s Government to become sovereign over its territory, in order to create the basis upon which authentic democracy can develop there. ... READ MORE copy and paste:

 https://theduran.com/u-s-government-bullies-weak-nations/

Does Project 2025 suggest a'Taliban Christian' influence?

A guide to Project 2025, the extreme right-wing agenda for the next Republican administration

Sophie Lawton, Jacina Hollins-Borges, Jack Wheatley & John Knefel

Project 2025 aims to roll back civil rights and destroy the federal government, among other proposals.

Editor's note: The revelations in this report suggest that these right wing Christians are more and more looking like 'Taliban' Christians, American style. Somewhat like the (Muslim) Taliban in Afghanistan where government policy follows the Taliban's interpretation of the Quran, we see here in the U.S. a similar plan except using the Bible rather than the Quran.  - R. Kotila 

EXCERPT

Christian Nationalism (Taliban Christians?)

• Project 2025 aims to put Christianity at the center of American government and society by turning a biblical worldview into federal law, often employing Christian nationalist talking points and narratives to support its right-wing policy proposals. In his foreword to the book, for instance, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts claims that “the Left is threatening the tax-exempt status of churches and charities that reject woke progressivism,” adding that “they will soon turn to Christian schools and clubs with the same totalitarian intent.” Project 2025 is partnered with the Center for Renewing America, the primary Christian nationalist political organization in the U.S., led by former Trump official and Heritage alumnus Russ Vought. 
• Vought’s Center for Renewing America, headed by one of Project 2025’s top advisers, reportedly listed “Christian nationalism” as one of the major priorities of a second Trump term.  
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Human Dignity & World Order: The Holistic Foundations of Global Democracy

Glen T. Martin 

(announcement of a new book)

Human Dignity and World Order

The Holistic Foundations of Global Democracy

Glen T. Martin

Online Book Launch, Sunday, April 21st 9 AM EDT = 6:30 PM IST

Join the celebration at the following link:

https://zoom.us/j/2270743911

  EXCERPTS 

  It may be that human beings today face our ultimate challenge. The global climate that sustains us is collapsing. Nuclear war appears ever more possible and imminent. The United Nations is in chaos, unable to stop a genocide going in while the entire world watches. To say we need a rebirth, a renaissance, may be an understatement. ...The entire world needs a fresh approach, a new foundation. And this new foundation must include not only political and economic transformation, but the spiritual dimension as well—the maturity and self-realization of the human spirit.

   Human Dignity and World Order: Holistic Foundations of Global Democracy is an attempt to provide this new foundation. ...

... It reexamines the opening statement of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 as a basis for this new understanding: “recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.” If this is true, and Human Dignity and World Order holds that it is true, then why is the world such a mess? ...

...That is exactly the point, although it is something not clearly understood. Our world system, composed of global capitalism interfaced with a collection of militarized sovereign nation-states, is based on wealth, power, greed, violence, and conflict. It is not based on human dignity. ...

... To be “sovereign” already means there is no democratically legislated enforceable law over the nations. The consequence of this lawlessness is that each nation feels it necessary to militarize. ...

...We live in a globalized world where both capitalism and nation-state militarism have been extended planet-wide (missiles today can deliver nuclear weapons anywhere around the planet). ...

 ... We have globalized economics and war, but not the key to justice and peace, which requires the rule of democratically legislated laws premised on human dignity. Chapters Six and Seven show that the Constitution for the Federation of Earth does just that—it globalizes democracy and in doing so converts the world system from a wealth and power system to a dignity-based system. ...

... Perhaps the tour de force of the book is found in Chapter Eleven, ... the chapter shows in what ways every normal human being is embraced by a “utopian horizon” beckoning us to transform our lives and our societies in the direction of truth, beauty, justice, freedom, and sustainability. ...

...This is named “utopian horizon value theory,” an understanding of our human situation making it clear that there is really little (except our own lack of awareness and maturity) stopping us from ratifying the Earth Constitution and inaugurating a world system premised on human dignity. ...

...This book reveals our true possibility of rebirth, of renaissance, and human liberation. It shows the way toward a “new heaven and earth” (if it is still permissible to use these symbols). -- Glen T. Martin

[Editor's note: This book's description is liberally edited to provide readers a more concise summary.]

To contact the author:  gmartin@radford.edu

Mailing address is:

Earth Constitution Institute/ World Constitution and Parliament Association

88 Oracle Way

Independence, Virginia 24348 USA

Former US Lawmaker Finally Enjoys Social Policies He Fought for --in Europe

Jessica Corbett 

 "I saw and felt what it's like to live in a community where everyone can go to the doctor. Where children aren't massacred by gun violence. It changes everything."

A former U.S. lawmaker who spent nearly half a century fighting for a nation that would have universal healthcare coverage and less gun violence is finally living in such a place—but he had to retire and move to Europe to find it.

"It was like I walked through an invisible door," McDermott told the Post's Elizabeth Becker about going to France. "Now I saw and felt what it's like to live in a community where everyone can go to the doctor. Where children aren't massacred by gun violence. It changes everything."

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