Go Brasscheck TV! Showing it like it is

A bit late, but no less applicable. The only difference is that bombs are now falling.

Blue Ibis
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The real neo-Nazis

Brasscheck TV:
Thu, 11 Dec 2008 02:14 UTC

The western world lives in fear of "neo-nazis"- mostly clueless, ineffectual baffoons who march around in support of the racist, whites-uber-alles principles of the Third Reich.

However, when looking for real world Nazi-like behavior, one need look no further than Israeli's ongoing "blockade" of Gaza and other areas occupied by Palestinian refugees.

The "ghetto-ization" of the Palestinians by Israel is the exact same tactic the Nazis used in their plan to destroy Jewish communities throughout Europe.

The Nazis forced Jews to live in walled-in, segregated communities (ghettos) and then choked off the normal flow of trade to those communities - depriving them of the normal supports of life.

Comment: One thing that becomes very apparent when you leave the US news media bubble is that Americans do not receive real news on conditions in Palestine.

When Palestinians are portrayed in the US news media its exclusively as poverty cases, malcontents, and "terrorists."

The fact that Palestinians have a history and a culture, and that they were removed from their lands and orchards at gunpoint and herded into "refugee camps" is completely censored.

With dual US-Israeli citizen , son of a member of an Israeli group designated as terrorist by the British government, actingas Barrack Obama's right hand man, this moral blindness is unlikely to change.

Here's one of the stories you'll never see
on US TV.

Israeli Gaza Blockade, Rahm Emmanuel, ghettoization. US fascism, Brasscheck TV

Warsaw Then, Gaza Now

The oppressed have now become the oppressors. One would think that having undegone the unspeakable horrors of the Nazi's attempts to obliterate the Jewish people, they would be the last to ever visit those same horrors on another. But psychpathy knows no cultural or ethnic boundries. Whatever ideals those who sincerely believed in a "corner of the world where Jews would be safe" were horribly misled by the psychopathic leaders of the Zionist movement. It was almost too easy. Ponerology explains:

To individuals with various psychological deviations, the social structure dominated by normal people and their conceptual world appears to be a "system of force and oppression". Psychopaths reach such a conclusion as a rule. If, at the same time, a good deal of injustice does in fact exist in a given society, pathological feelings of unfairness and suggestive statements emanating from deviants can resonate among those who have truly been treated unfairly. Revolutionary doctrines may then be easily propagated among both groups, although each group has completely different reasons for favoring such ideas."

Gaza is the outcome of how misled the normal segment of the Jewish population has been. Once again they are embroiled in a tragedy, this time of their own making.

Blue Ibis
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Warsaw Ghetto and Gaza: Disturbing Parallels

Arab News
Sun, 02 Mar 2008 00:33 UTC
Steve Hutcheson

I saw a photo last week of a father holding his 6-month-old baby son. The father's face was devoid of expression; the child in his arms was dead. The boy's name was Mohammed Al-Borai; he along with several others had been killed in a blast fired indiscriminately by an Israeli cannon into the densely populated areas of Gaza.

There were more photos, one of a group of young boys holding flowers standing around the battered and bloodstained body of the baby boy. That struck me as the most poignant. I had been having a discussion about the cause of suicide bombers among Palestinians and it will be this image more than any other that will concern me more than most. In their minds the young dead boy will have more impact on their future than anything any one might tell them.

It was then that I started to contemplate perhaps more fully the plight of the Palestinians today and the parallels in the history of the Jews that led to their mass exodus from their own countries to immigrate to the land that was at the time known as Palestine.

The Warsaw Ghetto during the Jewish Holocaust holds special significance to the European Jews. It was a place of oppression and the pathway to the ultimate death of thousands of their population that has become symbolic with their struggle for recognition. Yet what they are failing to acknowledge as their descendants press forward with their own brand of Jewish and Zionist idealism is the parallel set of conditions that they are now imposing on the Arab people of Palestine.

The Nazis rounded up the Jews of Poland and quartered them in a small area of Warsaw, building a barricade around the perimeter to prevent them leaving.

So too have the Israelis through conflict and force pushed many of the Arab inhabitants out of Israel into an enclave that now has a population density of 4,200 people per sq. km which is 14 times that of the surrounding area of Israel which has 360 people per sq. km.

The Nazis deprived the ghetto inhabitants of food and essential supplies.

So too has the Israeli government stopped the flow of goods to the 1.4 million inhabitants of Gaza by limiting the convoys of supplies to a mere trickle.

The Nazis reduced the average calorie intake of the Jewish inhabitants of the ghetto to 241 calories per day.

So too have the Israelis reduced the calorie intake of the Palestinians in Gaza. According to a UN report, it is presently at 61 percent of the average daily requirements.

The Nazis restricted public utilities such as water and electricity.

So too has the Israeli government.

The Nazis restricted the inhabitants from adequate health care.

Israelis restrict the health care in Gaza by limiting the medical supplies in or the treatment of cases that need to be done outside.

The Jewish inhabitants through the ZZB and the ZOB resisted the oppression by the Nazis albeit too late and their rebellion was brutally crushed without concern for who was in the way.

So too have the Palestinians of Gaza through their own resistance organizations, in particular Hamas, rebelled against their oppressors and so too do the Israelis use all means available to crush the rebellion without concern for who is in the way or who they maim or kill in doing so.

The Nazis destroyed the structure of the ghetto leveling it to the ground in a broad quest to rout the resistance to their oppression.

Israelis indiscriminately level buildings and the infrastructure in Gaza in a quest to rout out the resistance to their oppression.

The Nazis assigned the Jewish people to a lesser status of all their inhabitants depriving them of their rights as citizens and even as humans.

Israel assigns the refugees held in Gaza less status than is given to the Jews worldwide and deprives the Palestinians of their rights to return to their former lands.

The Nazis applied whatever was at their means to break the will of the Jewish inhabitants of the ghetto.

Israelis do the same thing; they use whatever is at their means to break the will of the Palestinians.

The Nazis killed the Jewish inhabitants of the ghetto indiscriminately.

Don't the Israelis kill indiscriminately the inhabitants in forcing their control over Gaza?

The Jews of Israel and elsewhere are quite right to protest at the inhumanity of the Nazis in their treatment of them and oblige the world not to allow the same situation to happen again. The Palestinians protest at the inhumanity of the Israeli treatment, yet in a bizarre twist of events, the world still allows the oppression to happen and continue.

It was after the Jews in the ghetto had been largely killed or transported that the world stood up and felt guilty in not acting sooner.

With the picture of Mohammed Al-Borai in my mind I question when the world will stand up and say: Enough is enough, there is not going to be a repeat of the Warsaw Ghetto and particularly when its perpetrators are those who suffered the most by its conduct.

There is a basic conflict of inhumanity occurring to the Palestinian people of Gaza that the world is deliberately ignoring. An inhumanity that was inflicted by the Nazis on the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto is now more than ever closely paralleling that which they are inflicting on the people of Gaza. They learned a hard lesson but it was not a lesson learned well. They have been given the power to practice humanity but have decided instead that they will treat the concerns of the Palestinians in the same inhumane way the Nazis treated them.

A future monument will no doubt contain photos of Mohammed Al-Borai in the arms of his father and the world will decry the injustice.

---

Steve Hutcheson has worked in crisis recovery in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Indonesia for the past several years and is now based in Thailand. He can be contacted at: steve50 @ mail.com

Moving Beyond Political Activism: Deprivation and Desperation in Gaza

A month later, and tragically, even more true. So much for "good will to ALL men"

Blue Ibis

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Moving Beyond Political Activism: Deprivation and Desperation in Gaza

Information Clearing House
Mon, 24 Nov 2008 21:42 UTC

Joe Mowrey

As conditions in the Gaza strip approach a catastrophic level of deprivation, the world media, and in particular the U.S. media, remain largely silent. The United Nations, whose truckloads of food and medical supplies continue to be denied entry into Gaza by Israel, appears to be one of the few international voices of dissent concerning the collective punishment of 1.5 million human beings. This, despite the fact that more than 50% of the population in Gaza is comprised of children under the age of 15.

Israel claims to be defending itself against the crude, often homemade rockets which militant factions in Gaza fire randomly into southern Israel. Though it may be considered politically incorrect, this writer refuses to precede his remarks with the requisite, "It's wrong for militant Palestinians to be firing rockets into Israel." The ethics of Palestinian resistance to the Zionist colonization of Palestine and the dispossession of the Palestinian people is a subject for another article. The issue at hand is one of collective punishment. Regardless of the actions of certain factions in Gaza, the fact remains that Israel (with the approval of the U.S.and the world community) is depriving an entire civilian population of food, medicine and clean drinking water in response to the violent actions of a few among that population.

Comment: And there's the twist, the lie that we are repeatedly told, in blatant disregard for the facts, in the hope that we will swallow it and turn away. The collective punishment of terror that is waged upon the entire Palestinian population is not 'in response to the violent actions'. Rather, those 'violent actions' are a combination of the desperate last attempts at survival in response to the Israeli reign of terror and genocide, and also a continuing manufactured Israeli manouevre, to justify their ongoing bloodthirsty rampage - as has been demonstrated many times, false flag operations are a standard Israel procedure which they use to further their agenda.

By any civilized standard this behavior is wrong and should be condemned vociferously. To paraphrase the words of an alien from another planet in a not-so-great Hollywood movie of some years ago, every sentient being knows the difference between right and wrong.

Comment: By any human standard this behaviour is wrong. Perhaps the perpetrators are not quite human?

Apparently not. Israel's Foreign Minister and likely future Prime Minister, Tzipi Livni, recently dismissed the notion that Israel's actions in Gaza amount to collective punishment and claimed those actions were a justifiable response to the rocket attacks on Israel. She stated, "The international community must be more decisive in making itself heard and in using its influence in the face of these attacks."

To suggest that the international community should condemn "these attacks" by militant Palestinian factions, yet ignore the humanitarian disaster being imposed on Gaza by the government of Israel demonstrates a nearly incomprehensible level of hypocrisy. But more importantly, the fact that Jews are the ones perpetrating these unconscionable actions in Gaza is a tragedy of historic proportions. The Geneva Conventions, particularly those articles addressing the collective punishment of civilian populations, were largely crafted in response to the treatment of Jews by the Nazis during World War II. Has the sense of exclusivity and entitlement created by the Zionist experiment in Israel become so great that people there no longer see themselves in the mirror of their own history? The irony of Jews, among the most egregiously persecuted and maligned people in history, denying food to hundreds of thousands of children in order, allegedly, to insure their own security, is breathtaking. Who could ever have imagined such a thing?

As people of Gaza suffer, here in the U.S., the vast majority of so-called progressives continue to revel in the recent election of the first Black man to the Presidency. While Obama has garnered a great deal of political and financial support by pledging his unconditional support for the Zionist regime in Israel, he remains completely silent on the plight of the children of Gaza. Our first Black President not only refuses to speak out against the collective punishment of an oppressed people, he actively supports and encourages the regime responsible for this behavior. This too is a tragedy of historic proportions. Have we come this far in the struggle against racism in our country only to see Barack Obama put a minority face on U.S. support for violations of international law and essential human dignity by Israel? Again, one has to say, who could ever have imagined such a thing?

Each morning I peruse the alternative media online and hope to see at least some minor degree of outrage at the situation in Gaza. A small but courageous handful of progressive web sites dare to criticize Israel and speak out against the abuse of the Palestinian people. But for the most part, the glorious and powerful "NetRoots" movement is too busy congratulating itself on the so-called victory it has achieved in the recent elections, too busy celebrating the illusion of change which Barack Obama represents, to admit the absence of any indication of substantive change in U.S. foreign policy in Palestine or the Middle East under his coming administration.

Does it ever occur to those who so blindly and passionately rallied 'round their candidate for the Presidency that they might now use their voices to encourage him to oppose the human rights abuses being orchestrated in Gaza? The sad reality is, not even a chorus of such voices is likely to alter the course Obama appears to have taken. He has surrounded himself with a familiar cast of armchair militarists, corporatists and hard core pro-Zionist zealots who will continue to give their unconditional support to Israel regardless of what barbaric tactics the government there uses to advance the colonization of Palestine. He is choosing to turn his back on the men, women and children in Gaza and the West Bank who suffer chronic malnutrition, desperate poverty, dispossession and daily humiliation at the hands of the Israeli military.

We should stand up in opposition to instances of human rights abuses whenever and wherever they occur. The situation in Gaza is only one on an unfortunately long list, locally, nationally and internationally. And U.S. government (that means you and me) support for and complicity in many such instances is no secret. If each of us were to do just one thing per week to address these issues, the result might surprise us all. Take a minute out from the long and endless chatter of day to day living and speak to a friend about the idea of social equality. Write one letter to the editor of your local paper in support of human rights. Spend just one percent of your online hours learning the truth about our complicity as U.S. citizens in the exploitation and degradation of other people and their cultures. Turn off your television. Go stand on a corner with a sign to protest war. Wear a button promoting peace and justice. One small thing at a time.

To those who became politically active, possibly for the first time, and expended their valuable enthusiasm and energy in order to see Barack Obama elected: thank you for being a part of history. Now why not try on the mantel of social activism? Write our President-elect a letter and suggest that he at least acknowledge the suffering of the people in Gaza. It is doubtful it will change him or his policies, but it may change you. And that truly is "change we can believe in."

Every sentient being knows the difference between right and wrong. The question is, why do so few of us act on that knowledge?

Isrealis speak out: "Our West Bank system like apartheid."

Finally. Those with both hearts and brains are making themselves heard in Israel. Who knows where it may lead?

Blue Ibis
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Protest from within: Israeli rights group says "Our West Bank system like apartheid."

Agence France-Presse
Sun, 07 Dec 2008 21:37 UTC

Israeli Left-wing activists protest in Tel Aviv

Israel's discrimination between Jewish settlers and Palestinians in the West Bank is increasingly reminiscent of white South Africa's apartheid system, an Israeli human rights group said on Sunday.

Jewish settlements in the Palestinian territory "have created a situation of institutionalised discrimination and segregation," the Association for Civil Rights in Israel said on Sunday.

"The discrimination in services, budgets and access to natural resources between the two groups in the same territory constitutes a stark violation of the principle of equality, which (is reminiscent) in many and increasing ways (of) the apartheid regime that was applied in South Africa," ACRI said.

The group's report, published ahead of Wednesday's 60th anniversary of the signing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, notes that the 2.3 million Palestinians in the West Bank outside annexed Arab east Jerusalem are subject to military law and administration.

By contrast, the 250,000 settlers live under Israeli civilian law.

While the settlers use a modern and developed road system restricted to Israeli cars, the Palestinians are forced to use "winding and dangerous roads," the report said.

In addition, Israel imposes strict restrictions on construction in Palestinian towns and villages and does not develop basic infrastructure there.

The report cited UN figures showing that some 65 percent of roads leading to the 18 most populous Palestinian West Bank towns are blocked or controlled by military checkpoints. The United Nations says more than 600 roadblocks impede Palestinian movement around the West Bank.

The question is among the key issues in US-backed efforts to bolster Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas's rule as part of the sluggish Middle East peace launched late last year.

"The travel restrictions hamper the transportation of sick people and medical staff to hospitals. There is a shortage in medicine and medical supplies," the report said.

In comparing the system with apartheid, ACRI did point out that "in South Africa the criteria was racially based unlike the ethnic-national criteria applied in the territories."

The report also decried the economic situation of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, where Israel has imposed a crippling blockade since the Islamist Hamas movement seized power in June 2007.

"The blockade policy has almost completely destroyed the industry. Unemployment and poverty are surging... The blockade caused the collapse of local authorities that are struggling to provide residents basic services such as water, sewage and sanitation.

Israeli Apartheid West Bank Human Rights Israeli Gaza Blockade military law economic blockade

Discerning the Programming - Media Shaping Your Opinions

Here is an object lesson that perfectly illustrates the previous entry. Scroll down until the caption in the picture below is covered. All you see are two distraught fathers running with their dead children. A tragedy that anyone with a conscience can imagine. Now scroll back up. Have your reactions changed?

Be HONEST.

Did you detect a twinge of sympathy more for the father on the left. Or you may find yourself subliminally thinking that the father on the right "brought it on himself". Yet nothing has changed except the words attached to essentially the same image.

There, you have just identified where your opinions have been shaped by the Zio-con control of the mass media. Now, notice the difference in reporting when sadly, children are killed on either side. The Israeli child will always be named, the families interviewed, their suffering detailed, how scared they are when the rockets come. Are there any such details given for a Palestinian child. A name? An interview with the grieving parents? No, usually it is just the number of children, because usually more than one, plus it is ALWAYS because they were unfortunate enough (or willfully stupid enough? that is always implied) to be in the "most moral military in the world" 's line of sight along with "militants".

Blue Ibis
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Victims of Israeli Collective Punishment: Gaza blackouts as fuel runs low

Aleem Maqbool
BBC News
Sun, 11 May 2008 19:25 EDT

There have been widespread electricity blackouts in the Gaza Strip after the territory's only power plant shut down.

It ran out of fuel because Israel has not allowed any fuel deliveries for the past five days, officials say.

Last year, the Israeli cabinet approved the use of fuel cuts to put pressure on Palestinian militants in the territory.

But aid agencies are warning that essential civilian services will be badly affected unless fuel shipments are permitted soon.

Gaza's power station supplies electricity to about a third of the territory's homes, with most of the rest supplied directly by Israel.

But for more than 24 hours it has been closed.

Officials there say they ran out of fuel on Saturday, and did not receive an expected shipment on Sunday.

While the fuel is paid for mainly by the European Union, as Gaza has no functioning air or sea terminals its delivery is dependent on passage through Israeli borders.

Last autumn, in response to frequent rocket attacks by Palestinian militants, the Israeli government declared Gaza a "hostile entity" and restricted fuel supplies.

The country's high court did set a minimum amount of fuel that had to be allowed in to Gaza, but aid agencies like Oxfam say that has not happened.

They warn of a serious impact on health provision if that is not rectified soon.

Israeli officials have cited security reasons for stopping fuel deliveries, but say they will resume soon.

There have been several militant attacks on crossing points in recent weeks.

The United Nations has condemned these, but, as Gaza's 1.5 million residents face frequent shortages of many everyday supplies, it has also condemned Israel's response as "unjust". [Quite the understatement]