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India’s brutality has turned Kashmir into a living hell

“But you’re a Westener. You see how
things are here. We have been living like this for twenty years. When
you go back to your country you tell them. You ask them why they aren’t
helping us.”

By Giorgiana Violante on Sunday,
August 29th, 2010 – 1,325 words.


 480Share


Police
brutality in Kashmir

This is the first time in weeks I have had access to the
internet. I have not been allowed to receive or send text messages for
three months. Just like all Kashmiris my telephone has been barred from
such contact. The local news channels have been banned. India controls
everything here. And then kills it. The situation is horrific. Over
these months of food rationing and persistent curfew whereby all is
closed and the streets totally deserted in utter silence, suddenly a
protest arises and then spreads throughout the whole city in a surge
of frustrated and famished rioters shouting ‘AZADI AZADI AZADI’
(freedom) until it dissipates suddenly into a cacophony of gunshots and
clouds of teargas.

I observe all this going on at a  safe remove of only one metre
by a big thick brick wall interrupted by the Mevlana Rumi gate to
Kashmir University, where I am residing. I see through the iron bars
hordes upon hordes of protesters being shot at randomly, and I stand
there repellently incapable of doing anything. An endless cycle of
silence and violence. The Indian army own total control and freedom to
shoot at will, to shoot to kill, anyone whom they choose to.

Last week a seven-year-old child was beaten to death. You
cannot accidentally beat a seven-year-old to death. It is not like a
bullet that goes astray. I cannot see how a stone thrown by a
seven-year-old child can do sufficient damage to any man to warrant his
being beaten to death. Children in this part of the world are tiny. A
seven-year-old is the size of a three-year-old westerner. So what kind
of person beats a tiny child to death when his stone throw must carry
so little force that it barely deserves a shrug? This is such a common
occurrence here.

The other day I left the university grounds to visit a
professor only one minute away. True there is curfew but his house is
in a private road attached to the university so I thought I would risk
it. When I returned a roofless sumo vehicle full of ten Indian army
thugs laughing and shouting came charging through the street waving
their batons and guns. They headed for an old man and tried to hit him
and then they knocked a four-year-old boy off his tricycle. For fun. He
was only 50 centimetres outside his house’s garden so that hardly
counts as disobeying the curfew and yet they charged at him on purpose.
They knocked him off the tricycle and then headed for me, which as a
western woman I did not expect.

I am living here within the deserted university grounds, alone with
the security guards and a few random professors and clerks. The
university was evacuated three months ago when the troubles commenced
and the students and school children all over the valley have
experienced, as they always do, a great void in their education.

The Indian army gun down eleven-year-old girls banging on the doors
of pharmacists when it is clear that their disobedience of the curfew
is purely out of desperation. How can a full grown man gun down and
kill an eleven-year-old girl banging on a pharmacy door in an empty
street? A woman kneeling on the pavement covering her face with her
hands had her hands beaten to a pulp and they had to be amputated. Two
weeks ago, on a Friday, I heard the usual impassioned pleads for
freedom hailing from Hazratbal Mosque, which is just outside the
university. For an hour the calls of ‘Azadi’ escalated and escalated
until suddenly I heard a spray of gunshots. The shots continued
sporadically over the next hour. I later found out that the mosque was
raided by the army and people were beaten severely. Some died, of
course.

The Indian army have the right and the freedom to behave like
this, invading places of worship simply because of impassioned calls
for freedom by a people who are being totally crushed and obliterated.
This sort of thing happens every day. Total abuse of power by the
occupying forces. But the people of Kashmir have no right to retaliate.
Nor the freedom to even leave their homes. I cannot bear my complete
and utter uselessness in this situation. As a rich westerner even I
cannot get food. The other day myself and seven boys shared two carrots
between us and a handful of rice.

So how can these Kashmiris be managing when they have not
been able to open their businesses for three months? How can they even
have the money to afford food, even if there WAS food to be had from
somewhere? You risk your life in order to get food. How can you get
food without leaving home? Yesterday a young boy working as a clerk in
the university showed me his mauled arms and the gash in his thigh.
His arms were black and purple with crusted blood from last week. His
legs were obscene. Flesh made hell.

‘I went to get medicine’ he said, ‘and the army caught me’. I smiled
and said, ‘Oh you people are always getting caught on the way to get
medicine. Rubbish it was medicine. You went to get biscuits.’

‘Aren’t biscuits medicine?’ he replied, smiling the same smile as
mine.

Last week as I circled the admittedly beautiful university grounds, a
forest of chinar trees and endless rows of roses in full bloom, moghul
gardens outside every department (Why are these gardens perfectly
tendered? Given the situation outside how do these people have the
strength and hope to even care to tend their gardens? Everything here is
death and hopelessness. I would have expected the gardens to have been
left to run to desolation), I saw a thin little old man with a cotton
bag full of lumps. Usually one doesn’t see bags. Certainly not ones
with lumps in them. Not in these conditions. My mind viciously wondered
how he got the food? Who he got it from? Had he bribed one of the army
pigs at the university gates? I suddenly realised I was frowning and
in a very ugly-minded manner. The ugly things hunger does to a person’s
mind is shocking. His bag was probably full of dirty laundry.

Sometimes someone will address me angrily as I pass by, something
along the lines of:

“Hey you, America! Why aren’t you helping us? You do something.”

“What can I do?” I reply, “I’m neither a politician nor a journalist.
I’m just trapped here like you.”

“But you’re a Westener. You see how things are here. We have been
living like this for twenty years. When you go back to your country you
tell them. You ask them why they aren’t helping us.”

“It’s your own fault,” I reply. “Why should we bother saving your
country when its got no natural resources worth raping? All you’ve got
is apples, goats and saffron. You’re doomed.”

A few seconds of silence will be followed by a warm invitation to
tea. Muslim hospitality. At this time when every tea leaf is precious
these people will share even their last few crumbs of powdered milk
with you. And you sit there sipping the tea wondering how and where
they managed to procure it and how much it cost them in beatings.

Five Creepy Ways Video Games Are Trying to Get You Addicted

By David Wong Mar 08, 2010 2,505,604 views
article image

So, the headlines say somebody else has died due to video game addiction. Yes, it’s Korea again.

What the hell? Look, I’m not saying video games are heroin. I totally get that the victims had other shit going on in their lives. But, half of you reading this know a World of Warcraft addict and experts say video game addiction is a thing. So here’s the big question: Are some games intentionally designed to keep you compulsively playing, even when you’re not enjoying it?

Oh, hell yes. And their methods are downright creepy.

#5.
Putting You in a Skinner Box

If you’ve ever been addicted to a game or known someone who was, this article is really freaking disturbing. It’s written by a games researcher at Microsoft on how to make video games that hook players, whether they like it or not. He has a doctorate in behavioral and brain sciences. Quote:

“Each contingency is an arrangement of time, activity, and reward, and there are an infinite number of ways these elements can be combined to produce the pattern of activity you want from your players.”

Notice his article does not contain the words “fun” or “enjoyment.” That’s not his field. Instead it’s “the pattern of activity you want.”


“…at this point, younger gamers will raise their arms above their head, leaving them vulnerable.”

His theories are based around the work of BF Skinner, who discovered you could control behavior by training subjects with simple stimulus and reward. He invented the “Skinner Box,” a cage containing a small animal that, for instance, presses a lever to get food pellets. Now, I’m not saying this guy at Microsoft sees gamers as a bunch of rats in a Skinner box. I’m just saying that he illustrates his theory of game design using pictures of rats in a Skinner box.

This sort of thing caused games researcher Nick Yee to once call Everquest a “Virtual Skinner Box.”

So What’s The Problem?

Gaming has changed. It used to be that once they sold us a $50 game, they didn’t particularly care how long we played. The big thing was making sure we liked it enough to buy the next one. But the industry is moving toward subscription-based games like MMO’s that need the subject to keep playing–and paying–until the sun goes supernova.

Now, there’s no way they can create enough exploration or story to keep you playing for thousands of hours, so they had to change the mechanics of the game, so players would instead keep doing the same actions over and over and over, whether they liked it or not. So game developers turned to Skinner’s techniques.

This is a big source of controversy in the world of game design right now. Braid creator Jonathan Blow said Skinnerian game mechanics are a form of “exploitation.” It’s not that these games can’t be fun. But they’re designed to keep gamers subscribing during the periods when it’s not fun, locking them into a repetitive slog using Skinner’s manipulative system of carefully scheduled rewards.

Why would this work, when the “rewards” are just digital objects that don’t actually exist? Well…

#4.
Creating Virtual Food Pellets For You To Eat

Most addiction-based game elements are based on this fact:

Your brain treats items and goods in the video game world as if they are real. Because they are.

People scoff at this idea all the time (“You spent all that time working for a sword that doesn’t even exist?”) and those people are stupid. If it takes time, effort and skill to obtain an item, that item has value, whether it’s made of diamonds, binary code or beef jerky.


I have easily 500 hours in Zelda bottles.

That’s why the highest court in South Korea ruled that virtual goods are to be legally treated the same as real goods. And virtual goods are now a $5 billion industry worldwide.

There’s nothing crazy about it. After all, people pay thousands of dollars for diamonds, even though diamonds do nothing but look pretty. A video game suit of armor looks pretty and protects you from video game orcs. In both cases you’re paying for an idea.


Happy anniversary, honey.

So What’s The Problem?

Of course, virtually every game of the last 25 years has included items you can collect in the course of defeating the game–there’s nothing new or evil about that. But because gamers regard in-game items as real and valuable on their own, addiction-based games send you running around endlessly collecting them even if they have nothing to do with the game’s objective.

It is very much intentional on the developers’ part, an appeal to our natural hoarding and gathering instincts, collecting for the sake of collecting. It works, too, just ask the guy who kept collecting items even while naked boobies sat just feet away. Boobies.

As the article from the Microsoft guy proves, developers know they’re using these objects as pellets in a Skinner box. At that point it’s all about…

#3.
Making You Press the Lever

So picture the rat in his box. Or, since I’m one of these gamers and don’t like to think of myself as a rat, picture an adorable hamster. Maybe he can talk, and is voiced by Chris Rock.

If you want to make him press the lever as fast as possible, how would you do it? Not by giving him a pellet with every press–he’ll soon relax, knowing the pellets are there when he needs them. No, the best way is to set up the machine so that it drops the pellets at random intervals of lever pressing. He’ll soon start pumping that thing as fast as he can. Experiments prove it.


See? Proof.

They call these “Variable Ratio Rewards” in Skinner land and this is the reason many enemies “drop” valuable items totally at random in WoW. This is addictive in exactly the same way a slot machine is addictive. You can’t quit now because the very next one could be a winner. Or the next. Or the next.


“Holy shit! We almost won.”

The Chinese MMO ZT Online has the most devious implementation of this I’ve ever seen. The game is full of these treasure chests that may or may not contain a random item and to open them, you need a key. How do you get the keys? Why, you buy them with real-world money, of course. Like coins in a slot machine.

Wait, that’s not the best part. ZT Online does something even the casinos never dreamed up: They award a special item at the end of the day to the player who opens the most chests.


And that’s hardly the most ridiculous aspect of the game.

Now, in addition to the gambling element, you have thousands of players in competition with each other, to see who can be the most obsessive about opening the chests. One woman tells of how she spent her entire evening opening chests–over a thousand–to try to win the daily prize.

She didn’t. There was always someone else more obsessed.

So What’s The Problem?

Are you picturing her sitting there, watching her little character in front of the chest, clicking dialogue boxes over and over, watching the same animation over and over, for hour after hour?

If you didn’t know any better, you’d think she had a crippling mental illness. How could she possibly get from her rational self to that Rain Man-esque compulsion?

BF Skinner knew. He called that training process “shaping.” Little rewards, step by step, like links in a chain. In WoW you decide you want the super cool Tier 10 armor. You need five separate pieces. To get the full set, you need more than 400 Frost Emblems, which are earned a couple at a time, from certain enemies. Then you need to upgrade each piece of armor with Marks of Sanctification. Then again with Heroic Marks of Sanctification. To get all that you must re-run repetitive missions and sit, clicking your mouse, for days and days and days. Boobies be damned.

Once it gets to that point, can you even call that activity a “game” anymore? It’s more like scratching a rash. And it gets worse…

Read more: http://www.cracked.com/article_18461_5-creepy-ways-video-games-are-trying-to-get-you-addicted_p1.html#ixzz0yZP6X5BF


Top 10 USB Thumb Drive Tricks

Top 10 USB Thumb Drive TricksWhat can you do with a few gigabytes and a USB port? Quite a lot, with the right software. Learn how to encrypt your work, run whole systems, rescue Windows, and customize your thumb drive with these USB-geared tricks.

Photo by Debs (ò?ó)?.

Note: Gina previously rounded up 10 thumb drive tricks in April 2007, and we’ve borrowed a few of those ideas here. But many of the apps have updated, some have been replaced with better offerings, and a few totally new cool things (Chrome OS! XBMC!) have made their way into this mix.

10. Give Your Drive a Custom Icon

Top 10 USB Thumb Drive TricksAn “oldie” but goodie. If you use multiple USB drives, or just want to make your USB drive more recognizable at a glance, you can give it a custom icon. The root of the trick is keeping a .ico file on the drive—you can create one from any image with any number of tools, including the ConvertIconwebapp. Now when you plug in your USB drive, you’ll know which one you’re looking at on your desktop and explorer windows.

9. Try Out Chrome OS Now

Top 10 USB Thumb Drive TricksGoogle’s fast and light netbook operating system, Chrome OS, isn’t due out until late fall, but thumb drive owners can jump into an open-source build of the code so far. As explained by Gina, you can run a custom build of Chrome OS from Hexxeh from your thumb drive and try out Chrome as it stands today. Isn’t open source development cool? (Original post)

8. Browse and Work Securely with DemocraKey

Top 10 USB Thumb Drive TricksIf you’re on vacation, or working somewhere else where the security, tracking, and privacy conditions are unknown, you’ll be glad you have theDemocraKey bundle. It’s a set of Windows-based apps—including a browser, image editor, email client, and encryption suite—that makes browsing and working much more anonymous and secure. (Original post)

7. Run an XBMC Media Center From It

Top 10 USB Thumb Drive TricksXBMC Live, a version of the awesome XBMC media center software built for thumb drives, is great for showing off XBMC to your friends and relatives on their own gear, but also loading onto your netbook or laptop when it primarily pulls other duty with a standard operating system. It’s also how Adam starts off the process of building a silent, cheap media center, providing a peek at how well things will run when XBMC is going full-force.

6. Save Your Windows System

Top 10 USB Thumb Drive TricksIf you’ve chosen to put an Ubuntu system on your thumb drive, you’ve already got everything you need to fix a Windows system that just isn’t working. From an Ubuntu thumb drive, you can scan and fix viruses, recover files, analyze and clean up disk space, fix partitions, and recover lost Windows passwords. All that is covered in ourcomplete guide to saving your Windows system with a thumb drive.

5. Prevent Leaving Your Drive Behind

Top 10 USB Thumb Drive TricksUSB drives are small, light, and look like any other peripheral—so, yeah, a good share get lost and left behind. If you’re trading your drive between Windows systems, Flash Drive Reminder can pop up a window when you’re starting to log off or shut down, reminding you that you’ve got a drive plugged in and, hey, won’t you yank it out while you’re thinking of it? (Original post)

4. Install a Portable Windows App Suite

Top 10 USB Thumb Drive TricksIf you’re short on space for Windows, or you just like to keep certain apps with you or contained on a separate disk, your USB drive can function as a full-fledged launcher. PortableAppsoffers no-install-needed versions of Firefox, Chrome, Pidgin, GIMP, Notepad++, and many other favorite bits of open source software. There areother suites out there—some accused of playing fast and loose with licenses and software property—but PortableApps remains the most consistent and up-to-date collection of free, go-anywhere Windows software. (Original post)

3. Encrypt and Set Your Drive to Self-Destruct in Emergencies

Top 10 USB Thumb Drive TricksNot physically self-destruct, as cool as that would be. But with USB Safeguard, you can make it so that either your entire drive requires an encryption drive, or just select files do. In more unique fashion, USB Safeguard can be set to wipe your files entirely if someone tries to access them without your password too many times. Losing a cheap thumb drive is much better than losing the keys to your checking account. (Original post)

2. Sync the Files You Need

Top 10 USB Thumb Drive TricksRather than manually copy the files you need back and forth between USB and hard drive, why not automatically sync what you need? It’s the least you can do to help your thumb drive keep up with Dropbox. Tools like SyncBack Freeware or Microsoft’s own SyncToy give you the option to automatically copy, or delete, the files that stick out on either side.

1. Keep a Portable Linux OS Handy

Top 10 USB Thumb Drive TricksLinux systems have long been handy on a USB drive—they’re fast, free, and very customizable. We rounded up the major thumb drive systems, and found thatPuppy Linux and the various Ubuntu flavors (including the lightweight Xubuntu) found the most favor among readers (and editors, too, for that matter). As for making the drives, we recommend the uSbuntu or Unetbootin tools on Windows for making read-only systems, and Universal USB Installer for making a persistent system of any Linux OS on any drive. (Original posts: Universal USB, Unetbootin, uSbuntu)


What’s the most valuable player on your own USB drive? What tools make your thumb drive fit into your workflow? We’re all ears in the comments.

Send an email to Kevin Purdy, the author of this post, at kevin@lifehacker.com.

The last days of old Kashgar

Thursday, September 02, 2010 (20:27 UTC)

Kashgar, in China’s remote far-west Xinjiang province, lies on a fertile crescent at the convergence of ancient caravan routes linking India, Central Asia and China. For over a millenium, this fabled city was a crucial link in the Silk Route economy, and its culture thrived.

I have long wanted to visit Kashgar. In May 2009, traveling there took on some urgency when it became apparent that the Chinese local government had begun implementing plans to demolish 85% of the remaining old town. The New York Times sounded the alarm; the news raised hackles from preservationists around the world, because Kashgar’s old town was until then regarded as “the best-preserved example of a traditional Islamic city to be found anywhere in central Asia.”

I finally managed to visit Kashgar in late July 2010, and stayed for over a week, walking through practically every alley I could find, documenting the the old town’s transformation and photographing its people.


Click on Kashgar photos to enlarge

The photos I took are up on Flickr, but a project like this is made to be published on Google Earth, so I georeferenced the photos using GPS. I also mapped the demolished areas as I walked through them. The resulting files — georeferenced photos, GPS tracks and a superimposed map — can be downloaded as a KMZ file for Google Earth. This is a documentary snapshot of Kashgar circa August 1, 2010.

What did I find? I can report that almost half of the remaining old town has been razed, and much of the rest is set to go. Most of the buildings facing the old town’s main streets have been preserved, but the areas behind them are being hollowed out. Many alleys now end in wide-open spaces, empty save for the occasional denuded hold-out home whose exterior walls show the interior decorations of vanished neighbors. Here and there, a lone tree marks the spot of a demolished courtyard. Children have colonized these open spaces as a massive romping ground, for now.

In other parts of the old town, where the bulldozers were only just beginning to venture, I found families busily gutting their own homes, dragging out metal staircases, recovering bricks, salvaging what is salvageable for use in their new home. They looked resigned but not despondent, and were always happy to have me around taking photos. (Kashgaris are extraordinarily friendly and engaging, young and old alike.)

I have learned from living in Shanghai and now Beijing that Chinese authorities — and to a certain extent mainstream Chinese culture — do not attach much importance to protecting traditional vernacular architecture. Imperial palaces and grand religious temples are worthy of preservation or even reconstruction, but not on the whole the hutong of Beijing or the lane houses of Shanghai, which are deemed too ordinary, especially when there is money to made building high-rises in their stead.

In Europe, by contrast, entire towns can remain unmolested, from Óbidos to San Gimignano to Visby. The West’s record is not unblemished, of course: In New York City, Robert Moses was able to do some damage before he found his match in Jane Jacobs, whose 1961 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities redefined how we view and value lower-income urban communities. In Europe, wars did far more damage than Moses ever could, but even there the destruction set in place a process of valuing what was lost, with towns like Ypres and Dresden choosing to meticulously reconstruct their destroyed cores.

Moses might also have had a go at Kashgar, so we Westerners shouldn’t feel too smug; as recently as 1961, when Jane Jacobs’s book was educating us, the Chinese had far more pressing concerns, namely avoiding being among the 35 million who perished through famine in Mao’s Great Leap Forward.

As anyone who has been to Kashgar can attest, the alleys do not divulge much by way of opulence. The public-facing walls of the old town’s homes are bare — made of mud- or baked yellow brick rising 2-3 stories. A wooden door, if open, reveals a curtain preserving the privacy of a shady courtyard inside. The exteriors are not beautiful in an aesthetic sense, though that is not where the effort lies; it’s on the inside that these homes reveal their real wealth, through the ornate woodwork on covered verandas and the intricate stucco interiors.

As old Kashgar is dismantled, the remaining homes are losing their shared exterior walls, affording just for a brief moment a view into their covered courtyards. It’s a swan song, however; soon enough these homes too will disappear, once compensation is agreed to.

(Or if their owners hold out indefinitely they’ll be denied electricity and water until their cause is made irrelevant by “facts on the ground”:)

How are these empty spaces being refilled? It is already possible to discern a two-pronged strategy. Encroaching on the perimeter of the old town, contiguous to main roads or previously built modern construction, 4-6 story medium-rise residential buildings are sprouting. Meanwhile, in the interior of the old town, work crews are constructing 2-3 story reinforced concrete frameworks, at roughly the same scale as the structures they replace. In at least a few cases, I saw new owners filling in the walls themselves with bricks recovered from their old homes. The new construction I’ve seen differs from the old in three ways: It does not in the main conform to the traditional layout of a central covered courtyard; the new alleys are wider, allowing vehicle access; and because they are wider, there is little opportunity to expand homes by building across alleys, as was often done with the old homes.

Work is progressing rapidly. The most recent imagery in Google Earth right now, dated October 26, 2009, shows just the beginning phases of the demolition. When a section has been demolished, crews start prepping the ground for new construction while the next section is cleared. The razing and rebuilding of Kashgar is thus happening concurrently. At this pace, it looks to me like they can get all of it done by mid-2012.

But why does this need to happen at all, let alone so quickly? Some reports (such as the one in Time Magazine) espouse theories portraying the demolition of old Kashgar as an attempt by the majority Han to better subjugate the Uyghurs. The problem with this theory is that demolition on such a scale is not just foisted on China’s ethnic minorities. In Beijing I cycle daily past newly demolished hutong districts. Here too, the process is not transparent, residents are not consulted, and in general are told only at the last possible moment when to vacate homes up for demolition. (Michael Meyer’s The Last Days of Old Beijing is a great read if you want to know more.)

One reason given to journalists for the demolition is that the whole region is earthquake-prone, and thus the only way to preëmptively save Kashgari lives is to destroy their unsafe homes. I mooted that explanation to a local Uyghur guide, who scoffed at it, pointing out that these buildings have survived for centuries. More likely, I think, is that Chinese bureaucrats surveying old Kashgar saw only embarrassing poverty, and unilaterally decided to drag it into the 21st century. These officials may never have been inside a meticulously decorated Uyghur courtyard home, or perhaps they visited a few but did not care much for them. The prospect of handing out building contracts could also have helped the decision to demolish.

But even if I were convinced of the need for a Kashgar makeover, why does it need to happen so quickly? Why not gradually renovate over a 10-15 year period, one neighborhood at a time, replacing just the most precarious structures and bringing modern amenities to the rest? To make a forestry analogy, why clearcut when you could fell selectively, removing just the dead wood, preserving the special character of an old-growth forest?

I can think of a few reasons. First, blunt instruments are cheaper. Second, just as in Beijing, speedy implementations of opaquely arrived-at demolition orders thwart opportunities for organized local resistance. Third, 10-15 year-long projects take too long to be compatible with the hoped-for career trajectories of the local Communist Party bosses, eager to take credit for their initiatives now. (Separately, I fear to think what happens to all the archaeological material that must become visible when an entire city strata is churned over. At this pace, there cannot possibly be time for proper excavations.)

Why hasn’t tourism been a better incentive for preservation? You do see the occasional westerner exploring the town, but the overwhelming majority of tourists in Kashgar are affluent visitors from within China, and they uniformly travel in bussed tour groups, deposited at various locales where they are led to photogenic spots by guides bearing portable loudspeakers. Among these destinations are the two officially protected parts of the old town, the 15% where bulldozers won’t tread. These neighborhoods have been turned into open-air museums, with an entrance fee (RMB 30, USD 4.40) that entitles access to various courtyard homes and souvenir shops. I suspect that the Chinese authorities think these two areas should suffice for the majority of tourists. Depressingly, they may be right.

But tourism alone shouldn’t motivate preservation. Traditional urban geography anchors local culture through the unique social interactions it facilitates; Kashgar’s alleys, with their many small mosques and nearby teahouses, foster micro-neighborhoods safe enough for bare-bottomed toddlers to play unsupervised. Preserving a token part of the old town for touristic purposes is of no value to the ex-residents who have lost their particular neighborhood.

Will old Kashgar’s urban culture survive the wholesale uprooting of its building stock? A number of residents are opting to spend their compensation on apartments in new high-rises at the edge of the city, which promise decent plumbing and insulation — as did one guide I talked to. (I too like my amenities, so I cannot blame them). Perhaps the new 2-3 story buildings at the center of the old town will be similar enough in scale and function that they can simulate the old urban geography. I hope so, though I fear that the character of old Kashgar will soon change irrevocably, not through necessity or war or natural disaster, but through fiat. And that would be a great pity.

My Muslim friends: another View of Muslim Women
Susan Roylance
Issue date: 6/17/09 Section: Opinion

The word “Muslim,” for many people in the United States, conjures up memories of 9-11 and fears of terrorism. But for me, the word invokes deep gratitude for my dear Muslim friends, and also for official Delegates to the United Nations from Muslim countries, who work tirelessly on international treaty and document policies that protect families.

While you hear much about the subjugation of women in Islamic cultures, the women I have met portray a totally different image.

Dr. Rasha is professor of Islamic Studies at the University of California. I met her at the U.N. Fourth World Conference on Women in China, where she served as a translator and interpreter for Arabic speaking delegates. As we parted for home, at the Beijing airport, I hugged her as a “sister.” But later, I was embarrassed to learn that while I slept, she and other Muslim women stayed up all night during the final negotiations – to support the delegates from Muslim countries. Their efforts helped remove the words “sexual orientation” from the document, and a paragraph proposing abortion on demand. They also retained language which supported “cultural and religious values.”

A few weeks later, Dr. Rasha stayed in our home, as she prepared to participate in a “Women and Development” seminar at Brigham Young University. I observed her respect for the modest clothing and head cover of the Muslim women, and her diligence in performing daily prayers and sacred washings. She was a devout Muslim, but she was also a well educated woman – a teacher of Islamic Studies at the University of California. She was also grateful for her role as a mother and wife.

I met Laila in Rome, at the World Food Summit. As we talked about the various proposals in the Summit document, we discovered that we had much in common. Later, she invited me to participate in a Women’s Conference in her home country of Sudan. I soon discovered that Laila owns several businesses in Khartoum, and exerts considerable political influence.
Laila and I shared our Muslim and Christian faiths at the close of the
conference. We were struggling to compile the conclusions of several
workshops into a proposed Khartoum Declaration. I asked if she would
mind if I said a Christian prayer, to ask God to help us in preparing
the Declaration. She agreed, and after the prayer she asked if I would
say a prayer at the end of the conference. I hesitated, but finally
agreed to say a Christian prayer, if she would also say a Muslim
prayer. To say the least, it was an unexpected experience for the
conference participants, but a spiritual unity we will not forget.

Camilla
is a happy, bubbly, woman from Egypt. I met her in the halls of the
U.N. in New York City. At the time, I was also struggling to learn
Arabic. By example, she taught me three phrases: “shukran” (thank you),
“insha’allah” (God willing), and “alhamdulillah” (thank God). Whatever
the project or plan we discussed, she always added “insha’allah”.
Camilla had great faith that Allah would help us, if we gave all honor
and glory to Him.
Eleven months before 9/11, I was invited to speak
at the creation of a Pakistan Islamic Women’s organization, and the
opening of a new Women’s University in Islamabad.

My guide and
interpreter in Pakistan was another well educated woman – but she had
to give up her participation in theater and music when she married a
devout Muslim. I was sad for her. But she was not sad – she loved her
husband and her children.

The invitation to Pakistan followed an
amazing pro-family victory at the five-year review of the Women’s
Conference in Beijing. It was the Pakistan delegation that saved the
“family friendly” language in the final document.

It was the
Iranian Delegation that provided leadership at the U.N. Commission for
Social Development – to re-establish the International Year of the
Family. And the country of Qatar hosted an international conference
which drafted the Doha Declaration – a landmark document recognizing
the importance of the family unit in society.

Through my experiences with Muslim women, I discovered that they are just like me. They love their husbands, and their children, and they want to preserve a world where their children can live in peace.

The Zionist Gang that Bankrupted General Motors

Christopher Bollyn
Thursday, 18 June 2009
http://www.ziopedia.org/articles/money/the_zionist_gang_that_bankrupted_general_motors/

General Motors did not fall due to natural forces. Like the twin towers on 9-11, GM was taken down. Like 9-11, GM was sabotaged from the inside. The corporate raiders who took down GM are part of the same network of Jewish Zionists who brought down the World Trade Center.

The bankruptcy of General Motors (GM) is very similar to the collapse of the twin towers of the World Trade Center on 9-11. Both catastrophic events are described in the controlled media as having occurred due to natural forces, while actually they are both the results of sabotage carried out by insiders. In both cases, the people who brought down the operation were Trojan Horses, people who had bought their way into positions of control in order to destroy them. The people behind the destruction of GM and the WTC are corporate raiders of the worst kind.

General Motors did not simply collapse as a result of market forces; it was bankrupted by corporate raiders who had infiltrated the company and taken control of its finances. Likewise, the evidence indicates that the twin towers of the World Trade Center did not collapse due to the stresses associated with the plane crashes; they were prepared in advance to be demolished using extremely powerful explosives, including tons of nano-thermite, or super-thermite. This was facilitated by the people who had obtained control of the towers shortly before 9-11, namely Larry Silverstein and the former Israeli commando Frank Lowy.

What is most remarkable is that these events are closely related. The same people are involved in the conspiracy to plunder and destroy both the World Trade Center and General Motors. This article identifies some of the key people and reveals the strategy behind the destruction of one of America’s oldest companies.

BANKRUPTING GENERAL MOTORS

General Motors Corp. filed for bankruptcy on June 2, 2009, as the Zionist-run Obama administration provided unprecedented federal funding and oversight. The bankruptcy filing by GM was the third-largest in American history and the largest ever in U.S. manufacturing. Now that GM is facing restructuring, its assets will be taken over for pennies on the dollar. The notorious corporate raider Carl C. Icahn, for example, is reportedly looking at taking over Delphi Chassis Systems.

So, how did GM go bankrupt? If one looks at the sales figures for GM, it simply does not make sense. In 2007, GM was the largest producer of vehicles in the world, manufacturing 13 percent of the total, and had the largest slice of the U.S. car and truck market with 23.4 percent of domestic sales.

In 2007, GM led in global production and U.S. market share. Graphics from Wikinvest.

Globally, GM sold 9.4 million cars and trucks in 2007, an increase of 3 percent over 2006. GM’s 2007 tally was, in fact, the second best global sales total in the company’s 100-year history and marked the third consecutive year the company had sold more than 9 million vehicles. That doesn’t sound like a company on the brink of collapse, does it? In its 100-year history GM had been through much worse downturns, such as the Great Depression and the Second World War, yet GM managed to survive and thrive. What is so different about the management at GM in the past few years that it caused America’s biggest auto manufacturer to go into bankruptcy despite three consecutive bumber years of global sales?

George Richard (Rick) Wagoner became president and chief executive officer of GM on June 1, 2000. The value of GM stock started the month of May 2000 at its peak of over $93 per share. The day Wagoner became CEO the stock finished at $69.81. By the end of the year it was worth less than $51 per share. GM stock had fallen to about $35 when Wagoner was elected chairman on May 1, 2003. Why promote a CEO who was clearly taking the company down the drain?

Despite the falling stock price, Wagoner remained CEO and chairman of GM until March 29, 2009. Under Wagoner’s leadership GM suffered more than $85 billion in losses — losing $82 billion in the last 4 years! Why wasn’t Wagoner replaced earlier? How was GM selling more cars than ever but losing more and more money? It simply doesn’t make sense.

Were his hands tied? Rick Wagoner (center) with Mark Neporent (left), COO of Cerberus, and Eric Feldstein (right), chief executive of GMAC and treasurer of General Motors Corp. This photo is from the 2006 announcement of the Cerberus deal for a majority stake in GMAC in which Bernard Madoff’s partner-in-crime, J. Ezra Merkin, became chairman of GMAC. Is Wagoner responsible for $85 billion in losses at GM – or was he just a useful idiot?

In 2008, GM sold 8.35 million cars and trucks globally under the following brands: Buick, Cadillac, Chevrolet, GMC, GM Daewoo, Holden, Hummer, Opel, Pontiac, Saab, Saturn, Vauxhall and Wuling. GM’s largest market is the U.S., followed by China, Brazil, the United Kingdom, Canada, Russia, and Germany. Despite three years of record sales, GM lost $18.8 billion during the first 6 months of 2008; by late October, its stock had dropped 76 percent, and it was considering a merger with Chrysler.

At the time the GM-Chrysler merger was being considered, Chrysler was primarily owned (80.1 percent) by the private equity firm Cerberus Capital Management, L.P., headed by Stephen A. Feinberg and Jacob Ezra Merkin. Cerberus is named after the mythological three-headed dog of Hell. It should be noted that Feinberg and Merkin also controlled General Motors Acceptance Corp. (GMAC), the financial services branch of GM.

GM sold 51 percent of GMAC in 2006 to Feinberg’s private equity firm Cerberus Capital Management LP, and Jacob Ezra Merkin became chairman of GMAC. Had the merger gone through, Feinberg and Merkin would have probably become majority owners of both GM and Chrysler. This appears to have been the plan. Feinberg and Merkin, the owners of GMAC, had plundered and conspired to bring down GM so that they could take it over.

When Cerberus gained control of GMAC, they hurt GM’s domestic sales by raising the credit requirements for car loans. Feinberg and Merkin reportedly raised the credit requirements so high that they caused a very sizable chunk of sales to be lost due to customers’ inability to secure financing. Cerberus reportedly used this tactic to pressure GM into selling or trading their remaining stake in GMAC.

Ezra Merkin became a controlling owner of Israel’s Bank Leumi shortly before he got his hands on GMAC in 2006. Here he shakes the hand of the notorious war criminal Ariel Sharon as he hands him a check for $500 million. Ehud Olmert (center) held secret meetings in New York City on September 10, 2001. Merkin’s private Israeli bank has a branch in Switzerland that contains billions of stolen dollars held in secret numbered accounts.

Merkin is clearly a criminal. He is one of the key players of the multi-billion dollar criminal fraud carried out by Bernard Madoff. Merkin secretly diverted untold billions to Madoff’s fraudulent investment fund. One of Merkin’s funds lost $1.8 billion of investor cash with Madoff. Merkin was seen as “the Golden Boy controlling the Golden Goose.”

Feinberg and Merkin were also controlling co-owners of Israel’s Bank Leumi, which had been privatized in 2005 under finance minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Bank Leumi also has off-shore banks and a branch in Switzerland in which billions of dollars are held in secret numbered accounts.

It was reported on December 30, 2008, that the U.S. Treasury would provide $6 billion more for GMAC, headed by Merkin and the extremely secretive Feinberg. Feinberg is so secretive his Who’s Who biography says he is deceased!

Stephen A. Feinberg, Ezra Merkin’s partner-in-crime.

The U.S. Treasury was reportedly buying a $5 billion stake in GMAC and lending $1 billion to GM. This “loan” was in addition to $13.4 billion of taxpayer dollars the Treasury had already lent to GM and Chrysler LLC. Once again, a plundered and bankrupted company was being “bailed-out” with taxpayer funds.

Merkin had been chairman of GMAC since November 2006. GMAC reportedly lost nearly $8 billion while Merkin was in charge. Despite Merkin’s huge losses at GMAC and his involvement in the Madoff criminal scam, the U.S. government evidently had no problem providing billions of taxpayer dollars to Merkin, whose Ariel Fund was one of the largest funds feeding billions to Bernie Madoff’s financial black hole. Madoff reportedly “lost” some $50 billion, or more.

Jacob Ezra Merkin, orthodox Jew and devoted Zionist, finally resigned as chairman of GMAC on January 9, 2009. How was Merkin allowed to remain in control of the privately-held GMAC operation for so long despite his history of financial fraud?

WHO RAN GMAC?

GMAC is a very interesting operation. A wholly owned subsidiary of General Motors since 1919, GMAC provided customers with more than $1.4 trillion in credit to finance more than 162 million vehicles. Originally designed to provide financing for people buying GM vehicles, it branched out into other fields, such as real estate. GMAC Commercial Mortgage (GMACCM), for example, provided the funds for Larry Silverstein and the former Israeli commando Frank Lowy to take over the World Trade Center in July 2001. The towers served as the collateral. GMAC Commercial Mortgage sold $563 million in bonds backed by a loan to Silverstein Properties for its purchase of the towers. If Silverstein and Lowy were part of the conspiracy to destroy the World Trade Center, the people controlling GMACCM would probably also be. Who was controlling the purse strings at GMAC in 2001 when Silverstein was negotiating to obtain control of the World Trade Center?

Larry Silverstein, here with his daughter Lisa, made billions of dollars from the destruction of the World Trade Center. He is the former chairman of the UJA-Federation of New York, the largest Zionist fund-raising organization in the world.

At GMAC, the person in charge of the money was Eric A. Feldstein, born in Brookline, Mass. in 1959. Feldstein had worked in the office of the treasurer at GM Corp. from 1981-91 and was regional treasurer in Europe from 1991-93. In 1993, he returned to New York as assistant treasurer. In March 1996, he was named executive vice president and chief financial officer of GMAC and chairman of the GMAC Mortgage Group, where he oversaw corporate activities responsible for general finance, audit, and worldwide borrowings.

Feldstein became treasurer of General Motors in November 1997, and was elected vice president the following month. In June 2001, Feldstein was named General Motors’ vice president, finance, and corporate treasurer. When GM and GMAC failed in 2008, Feldstein went to work for Feinberg and Merkin at Cerberus, joining the team named after the three-headed dog of Hell. At Cerberus, Feldstein was made executive vice president.

Eric Feldstein, the treasurer of GM, laughs with Rick Wagoner and Mark Neporent, COO of Cerberus, as the Zionist-run fund took majority control of GMAC. By this point, GM was well on its way to losing $85 billion – all during Feldstein’s term as GM corporate treasurer and vice president in charge of finance.

Eric Feldstein is the son of Donald Feldstein, a high-ranking member of a number of Zionist organizations in New York and New Jersey. The elder Feldstein is one year older than Larry Silverstein and has a long history of leadership in the same Zionist organization as Silverstein. Donald Feldstein was an executive director of the United Jewish Appeal-Federation Jewish Philanthropies in New York City from 1976-81. This is the huge Zionist fund-raising organization that Larry Silverstein headed as the chairman of the board and where he is an honorary board member. The connection between Donald Feldstein and Larry Silverstein at this Zionist organization certainly played a role in Eric Feldstein’s decision to use GMAC money to back Silverstein’s bid for the World Trade Center. It is through such Zionist organizations like the UJA-Federation and the secretive order of B’nai B’rith, an international organization of Jewish Freemasons, that the Zionist network functions. In this way actions and decisions that affect whole nations can be made without anyone outside the “community” being aware.

GMAC Commercial Mortgage Corp., under the leadership of Donald Feldstein’s son, provided an $800 million loan to fellow Zionists Silverstein and Lowy to back their bid for the soon-to-be privatized World Trade Center in the summer of 2001. This privatization deal, initiated by the Zionist Ronald Lauder and managed by Lewis Eisenberg of the Port Authority, was finalized at the end of July 2001. The WTC complex was finally put into private hands – Zionist hands – only 6 weeks before it was demolished and pulverized with super-thermite.

FELDSTEIN JOINS ETON

After being fired from GMAC, Eric Feldstein went to work for Cerberus in March 2008. Three months later he became CFO at Eton Park Capital Management. Eton Park is a hedge fund run by 42-year-old Eric M. Mindich, formerly with Goldman Sachs, and Alan R. Batkin, the vice chairman of the fund. Batkin, 64, is the senior partner at Eton Park. Although Feldstein lost billions as the head of GMAC and was fired because he had destroyed the 90-year-old company, Mindich and Batkin made him chief financial officer at Eton Park. Feldstein’s colossal failure at GMAC evidently did not bother them. He was clearly being rewarded for a job well done.

Alan Batkin, the vice chairman at Eton Park, is very highly connected. Batkin was, for example, vice chairman of Kissinger Associates Inc. from 1990 through 2006. It is, however, his executive positions at some of the biggest companies of Israel, such as Israel Discount Bank (IDB) and Discount Investment Corporation, Ltd., that reveal the intense Israeli character of Eton Park. (The IDB has been privatized and is also closely tied to the Madoff scam.)

Alan R. Batkin is a member of the board of governors of Tel Aviv University and is treasurer of PEC Israel Economic Corp. (part of Discount Investment Corporation, Ltd.) where he has served as CEO, president, and director. He also served as the Chief Executive Officer and President of Orama Ltd. (a venture capital firm founded in 1999 to support companies in the Israeli technology sector; a subsidiary of IDB Group, Ltd.)

From 1972 to 1990, Batkin was an investment banker at Lehman Brothers, where he a Managing Director for 14 years. Batkin has been, since 1999, a director of Overseas Shipholding Group Inc. (OSG), which owns and manages a large fleet of transatlantic oil tankers. As a director of OSG, Batkin works with Solomon Merkin, the brother of Jacob Ezra Merkin. Their father, Hermann Merkin, was one of the owners of the company along with the Recanati family of Israel Discount Bank. Batkin is also vice chairman and a director of Hasbro Inc. since 1992.

Solomon Merkin

Batkin was a director of Infinity Broadcasting Corp. since April 1992. Infinity provided popular talk radio with a distinctly pro-Israel point of view. Foremost among Infinity’s talk show staff was Howard Stern, a vulgar and controversial radio personality. Other national radio performers employed by Infinity included Don Imus, Larry King, G. Gordon Liddy and Rush Limbaugh. Infinity merged with CBS Radio in 1997.

Alan Batkin is a scion of the intensely Zionist Batkin and Tenzer families and the son of Stanley Irving Batkin, a leading Zionist figure since the 1930s. Stanley Batkin is a recipient of Israel’s Prime Minister’s Medallion (1974) and the City of Jerusalem Medal (1976). These awards are given to Zionists for extraordinary service to Israel. The elder Batkin has served, since the founding of the state of Israel, as an executive of the following organizations (among many others): the Zionist Organization of America; the State of Israel Bond Committee; the Jewish Theological Seminary; State of Israel Bonds; Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science; Friends of Bezalel Academy of Arts & Design, Inc.; and Yeshiva University Museum.

Recommended Reading:

Bollyn, Christopher, “The Israeli Who Will Run the Obama White House,” November 6, 2008
Bollyn, Christopher, “Update on Madoff’s Guilty Plea,” March 12, 2009
Bollyn, Christopher, “Who is Bernard Madoff, the man behind the $50 billion fraud?” updated March 24, 2009
General Motors Data, Wikinvest
General Motors’ U.S. Sales History, Domestic Brands, 1908-2008, Automotive News, June 1, 2009
General Motors’ Top Ten Markets in Europe, 2008
“Obama gambles on reviving GM from bankruptcy,” Reuters, June 2, 2009
Source: Christopher Bollyn

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WORLD VIEW NEWS SERVICE

Jewish terrorists rampage through Arab village

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Eyewitnesses: settlers went from house to house shooting indiscriminately

Israeli occupation troops and paramilitary Jewish settlers on Saturday rampaged through several Palestinian population centers in the West Bank, killing at least one Palestinian civilian and injuring several others, including three people suffering critical gunshot wounds.

The most serious incident took place at the village of Asira al Qibliyeh, south of Nablus, when heavily armed Jewish settler terrorists rampaged through the village, shooting indiscriminately on Palestinians and vandalizing their homes and property.

According to the head of the local village council, dozens of armed settlers took part in the rampage which lasted for several hours.

Hosni Sharaf said the settlers carried out their aggression in broad daylight as Israeli soldiers were watching passively.

“It was abundantly clear that the soldiers were not dealing seriously with the terrorists. The settlers behaved and acted as if they had received a green light from the army.”

According to local and hospital sources, at least six villagers were injured, including two who reportedly suffered critical gunshot wounds.

One eyewitness described the settler rampage as “barbarian acts against innocent civilians.”

“I am speaking about heavily armed rabid fanatics ganging up on innocent and unprotected men, women and children,” said Ibrahim Asayrah.

“And they did what they did in full view of Israeli occupation soldiers who did try to stop the thugs.”

The settlers said they were retaliating for an earlier incident in which a settler boy was lightly hurt reportedly at the hands of an Arab boy.

Palestinian sources described the incident as a small altercation between two boys. The settlers however insisted that Palestinian boy stabbed a 9-year-old settler minor.

There was no third-party affirmation of what exactly happened.

However, it was clear that the wanton settler rampage against Palestinian villagers had no justification, irrespective of the exact circumstances surrounding the earlier incident involving the two boys.

“There was an incident involving an Arab boy and a Jewish settler boy. Does that give these herds of barbarians (the settlers) the right to carry out a rampage of terror and bloodshed against our village,” asked Asayrah.

An Israeli peace group, Peace Now, denounced army flaccidity toward the settlers and urged the Israeli government to revoke the gun licenses of the settlers.

“It is obvious that the settlers don’t miss any opportunity to cause harm to Palestinians and endanger human lives,” said Peace Now Secretary General Yariv Oppenheimer.

Human rights organizations operating in the West Bank have argued forcefully that the Israeli army is effectively encouraging settler terror against Palestinian civilians by refusing to arrest let alone prosecute Jewish terrorists.

Indeed, following Saturday’s violence near Nablus, not a single armed settler was arrested despite the gravity of what happened.

The latest attempted pogrom by messianic Jewish terrorists near Nablus coincided with other terrorist acts by the Israeli army against Palestinian civilians, which observers in Palestine contend underscores the harsh treatment Palestinians are receiving at the hands of the Israeli occupiers.

In Hebron in the southern West Bank, an Israeli army military vehicle driving at high speed on Saturday ran over a Palestinian child.

The child, identified as Mehran al Jabaari, was reportedly critically injured with a brain hemorrhage. He was transferred to the emergency unit at the Ahli hospital.

Earlier, an Israeli army officer manning a notorious roadblock outside the city of Nablus deliberately prevented a Palestinian woman in labor from proceeding to hospital, causing her to give birth to a stillborn baby boy.

The woman’s husband said he pleaded with the officer in charge to allow his wife to proceed to hospital in order to save the baby, but to no avail.

“My wife, my mother, my sister and I arrived at the Huwwara checkpoint at 12:00 midnight after my wife started to feel the labor contractions. However, the officer was so callous and inhuman. He told me he would shoot me if stepped forward again.” said Muayad Abu Reeda.

“My wife gave birth to a baby boy we had decided to name Zayd. But Zayd needed a special care since he was two months premature. But because the Israelis wouldn’t allow my wife to reach hospital, the baby died a few minutes later.”

According to Palestinian eyewitnesses, when the Israeli officer in charge made sure that the baby was dead, he allowed the mother and the husband to proceed to Nablus .

“On the next day, said Muayad, “we carried our baby in a small cardboard box to bury him in the graveyard of the village. On our way home, and while passing through the same inauspicious checkpoint, the soldiers started to laugh telling each other ‘do you want to see a dead child, come over here. He is there inside the box.’ “

A spokesman for the Israeli army acknowledged the “gravity” of what happened, saying that the company commander involved in the incident has been sentenced to two weeks in jail for his role in the death of the Palestinian baby.”

In another deadly incident, Israeli occupation soldiers on Saturday shot and killed a Palestinian boy at the village of Tquo’o near Bethlehem .

The latest victim of organized Israeli terror was identified as 16-year-old Hassan Humeid.

The Israeli occupation army has killed and maimed hundreds of Palestinian civilians, especially children and minors, involved in the mostly innocuous stone-throwing.

Israeli troops are instructed to shoot to kill stone-hurling Palestinian boys even if soldiers’ lives are not directly at risk.

In contrast, however, soldiers have absolute orders to refrain from shooting at settlers under any circumstances, even if the settlers are seen committing acts of murder.

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The language that absolves Israel
A special political vocabulary prevents us from being able to recognize what’s going on in the Middle East.
By Saree Makdisi
June 19, 2009

On Sunday night, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivered a speech that — by categorically ruling out the creation of a sovereign Palestinian state — ought to have been seen as a mortal blow to the quest for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

On Monday morning, however, newspaper headlines across the United States announced that Netanyahu had endorsed the creation of a Palestinian state, and the White House welcomed the speech as “an important step forward.”

Reality can be so easily stood on its head when it comes to Israel because the misreading of Israeli declarations is a long-established practice among commentators and journalists in the United States.

In fact, a special vocabulary has been developed for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the United States. It filters and structures the way in which developing stories are misread here, making it difficult for readers to fully grasp the nature of those stories — and maybe even for journalists to think critically about what they write.

The ultimate effect of this special vocabulary is to make it possible for Americans to accept and even endorse in Israel what they would reject out of hand in any other country.

Let me give a classic example.

In the U.S., discussion of Palestinian politicians and political movements often relies on a spectrum running from “extreme” to “moderate.” The latter sounds appealing; the former clearly applies to those who must be — must they not? — beyond the pale. But hardly anyone relying on such terms pauses to ask what they mean. According to whose standard are these manifestly subjective labels assigned?

Meanwhile, Israeli politicians are labeled according to an altogether different standard: They are “doves” or “hawks.” Unlike the terms reserved for Palestinians, there’s nothing inherently negative about either of those avian terms.

So why is no Palestinian leader referred to here as a “hawk”? Why are Israeli politicians rarely labeled “extremists”? Or, for that matter, “militants”?

There are countless other examples of these linguistic double standards. American media outlets routinely use the deracinating and deliberately obfuscating term “Israeli Arabs” to refer to the Palestinian citizens of Israel, despite the fact that they call themselves — and are — Palestinian.

Similarly, Israeli housing units built in the occupied territories in contravention of international law are always called “settlements” or even “neighborhoods” rather than what they are: “colonies.” That word may be harsh on the ears, but it’s far more accurate (“a body of people who settle in a new locality, forming a community subject to or connected with their parent state”).

These subtle distinctions make a huge difference. Unconsciously absorbed, such terms frame the way people and events are viewed. When it comes to Israel, we seem to reach for a dictionary that applies to no one else, to give a pass to actions or statements that would be condemned in any other quarter.

That’s what allowed Netanyahu to be congratulated for endorsing a Palestinian “state,” even though the kind of entity he said Palestinians might — possibly — be allowed to have would be nothing of the kind.

Look up the word “state” in the dictionary. You’ll probably see references to territorial integrity, power and sovereignty. The entity that Netanyahu was talking about on Sunday would lack all of those constitutive features. A “state” without a defined territory that is not allowed to control its own borders or airspace and cannot enter into treaties with other states is not a state, any more than an apple is an orange or a car an airplane. So how can leading American newspapers say “Israeli Premier Backs State for Palestinians,” as the New York Times had it? Or “Netanyahu relents on goal of two states,” as this paper put it?

Because a different vocabulary applies.

Which is also what kept Netanyahu’s most extraordinary demand in Sunday night’s speech from raising eyebrows here.

“The truth,” he said, “is that in the area of our homeland, in the heart of our Jewish homeland, now lives a large population of Palestinians.”

In other words, as Netanyahu repeatedly said, there is a Jewish people; it has a homeland and hence a state. As for the Palestinians, they are a collection — not even a group — of trespassers on Jewish land. Netanyahu, of course, dismisses the fact that they have a centuries-old competing narrative of home attached to the same land, a narrative worthy of recognition by Israel.

On the contrary: The Palestinians must, he said, accept that Israel is the state of the Jewish people (this is a relatively new Israeli demand, incidentally), and they must do so on the understanding that they are not entitled to the same rights. “We” are a people, Netanyahu was saying; “they” are merely a “population.” “We” have a right to a state — a real state. “They” do not.

And the spokesman for our African American president calls this “an important step forward”?

In any other situation — including our own country — such a brutally naked contrast between those who are taken to have inherent rights and those who do not would immediately be labeled as racist. Netanyahu, though, is given a pass, not because most Americans would knowingly endorse racism but because, in this case, a special political vocabulary kicks in that prevents them from being able to recognize it for exactly what it is.

Saree Makdisi is a professor of English and comparative literature at UCLA. He is the author of, among other books, “Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation.”

How Women Were Lured Out of the Home in the USA

Areeba bint Khalid
Friday, June 26, 2009
http://www.ummid.com/news/June/26.06.2009/and_they_called_it_women%27s_liberation.htm

From the 1800s to the present day, family life in the West has
remarkably changed. While the West calls this change part of the
women freedom movement, a look at history may show otherwise.

America before the 1800s was a farming country and ninety percent of
the population lived and worked on private farms. Households were
mainly self-sufficient–nearly everything needed was produced in the
house. The few things that could not be produced at home were bought
from local craftsmen. Some other things, especially imports from
Europe, were bought from stores. Males would take care of the fields
and females would take care of the home. In addition, they would
engage in spinning, knitting, weaving, and taking care of the farm
animals.

Industrial Revolution

The Industrial Revolution, which began around the early 1800s,
brought a major change to this way of life. In 1807, in the wake of
the war between Great Britain and France, President Jefferson signed
the Embargo Act, which stopped all trade between Europe and America.
The Act meant that European goods would no longer be available in
the US and Americans would have to produce them. One major European
import to America was cloth, and so merchants used this opportunity
to create a cloth industry in America.

In 1814, Francis Cabot Lowell, a man from Boston opened the first
modern factory. Work here was to be done way faster than before.
Instead of manually making things in houses, things were to be made
at higher speeds in a factory and all stages of the work were to be
completed under the same roof. Now what Lowell needed were workers.
He found out that women, especially unmarried daughters of the
farmers, were more economical to use in labor than men. They were
also more willing to work as hired people in factories.

But Lowell had to make the working outside of home acceptable in a
society which was not used to it. He assured parents that their
daughters would be taken care of and kept under discipline. And he
built a boarding community where the women workers lived and worked
together.

Soon after, more and more factories emerged across America. Factory
owners followed Lowell’s example of hiring unmarried women. By 1850
most of the country’s goods were made in factories. As production of
goods moved from the country to the city, people too moved from the
country to the city.

For money to be earned, people had to leave their homes. When women
worked on the farm, it was always possible to combine work and
family. When work for women moved outside the home, however, the
only women who could follow it were those without family
responsibilities or those who had no husband or no income. Likewise,
the only women who could take care of their families were the ones
that didn’t have work.

This working out of home became a part of life for unmarried women.
They would work until their marriage. But as time passed, women
found family life interfering with their work life and instead of
viewing working out of home as optional, they viewed family life as
such. Many women started delaying marriage even more and some
decided to stay single.

Married women however stayed home and dedicated their time to their
children. Now that there wasn’t any farm work to do, women had even
more time to spend with the children. In 1900 less than about 5.6%
of married women worked outside. If a married woman were to work, it
would be considered that her husband was invalid or that she was
poor.

World War I

The first major entry of married women to the workforce came during
World War I in 1914. Men went to fight the war and the country
needed workers to take over the jobs they left behind. Unmarried
women were not sufficient for the labor needs, so employers started
to invite married women too, to work. By 1919, 25% of the women in
the workforce were married. But this was only the beginning.

Another change World War I brought was the entry of women to the
army. About 13,000 women enlisted in the US Navy, mostly doing
clerical work–the first women in US history to be admitted to full
military rank.

Great Depression

The Great Depression came in the 1930s. The unemployment rate
climbed from 3.2% in 1929 to 23.6% in 1932. Jobs became scarce for
skilled people and men. Fathers went to search for jobs. Some, under
despair, deserted their families. The responsibility of earning fell
on mothers in many families.

Most women and children, however, found jobs more easily than men
because of the segregation of work categories for men and women.
Although 80% of men during the Great Depression opposed their wives
entering the workforce under any circumstances, economic factors
made it necessary for the women to work. Hours were long and pay was
low. Twenty percent of white women were in the workforce.

World War II

World War II came in the early 1940s. Men were drafted to fight, and
America needed workers and supplies. Again, the employers looked
towards the women for labor. Unmarried and married women were
invited to work, as had been done during World War I.

But still, public opinion was generally against the working of
married women. The media and the government started a fierce
propaganda campaign to change this opinion. The federal government
told the women that victory could not be achieved without their
entry into the workforce. Working was considered part of being a
good citizen, a working wife was a patriotic person.

The government founded the Magazine Bureau in 1942. The Bureau
published Magazine War Guide, a guide which told magazines which
themes stories they should cover each month to aid war propaganda.
For September 1943, the theme was “Women at Work”. The slogan for
this was “The More Women at Work the Sooner We Win.” Magazines
developed stories that glorified and promoted the placement of women
into untraditional jobs where workers were needed. The idea was that
if smaller, unexciting jobs were portrayed as attractive and noble
more women would join the work force.

The media created Rosie the Riveter, a mythical character to
encourage women into the workforce. Rosie was portrayed as a
patriotic woman, a hero for all American women. “All the day long,
Whether rain or shine, She’s a part of the assembly line. She’s
making history, Working for victory, Rosie the Riveter… There’s
something true about, Red, white, and blue about, Rosie the
Riveter.”

The propaganda efforts worked. More than six million women joined
the workforce during the war, the majority of them married women. In
1940, before the war, only 36% of women workers were married. By
1945, after the war, 50% of women workers were married. The middle
class taboo against a working wife had been repealed.

Post World War II

The 1950s marked an era of prosperity in the lives of American
families. Men returned from war and needed jobs. Once again, the
government and media got together to steer the opinion of the
public. This time, however, they encouraged women to return home,
which shows that the women were brought out not for their freedom
but because workers were needed.

But this effort was not as successful and was abandoned quickly.
First, women from lower economic ranks had to remain in the
workforce because of economic necessity. And second, there came the
rise of consumer culture.

The baby boom took place during the 1950s as well. Women who
returned home dedicated their lives once again to their children.
But around the same time an important change had come in the
American life. This was the spread of the television. By 1960, 90%
of the population owned at least one set. Families would gather
around the screen for entertainment. In the early days, everything
including commercials was watched with great interest.

Most middle-class families could not afford the goods the television
declared necessary to maintain or enhance quality of life with one
paycheck alone. Many women returned to work in order to live
according to “the American standard of living,” whatever that meant
to them.

The number of American women in the workforce from 1940 to 1950
increased by nine percent. From 1930 to 1940 there had only been a
three percent increase.

Effects

As mothers returned to work, the television became the most
important caretaker of a child. Children in the 1950s spent most of
their non-sleeping hours in front of the television screen.

In 1940, less than 8.6% of mothers with children under eighteen
worked. By 1987, 60.2% of women with children under eighteen were
working.

As wives assumed larger roles in their family’s financial support,
they felt justified in demanding that husbands perform more
childcare and housework. Across the years, divorce rates doubled
reaching a level where at least 1 out of 2 marriages was expected to
end in divorce. Marriage rates and birthrates declined. The number
of single parent families rapidly increased. People grew unhappy
with their lives, when compared to the lives of people on
television.

Women working affected the society in many different ways. The first
and most important of these was that children with working mothers
were left alone without the care of a mother. As the number of
working women increased, the number of children growing up
unsupervised increased, and with this increased crime among teens.

Since most women placed their career ahead of family life, family
life was greatly affected since unmarried women were generally able
to make more money than married ones. For example, according to a
study by a Harvard economist, women physicians who were unmarried
and had no children earned thirteen percent more per year than those
who were married and fifteen percent more than those with children.

Today

The majority of women still work at the lower levels of the economic
pyramid. Most are employed in clerical positions, factory work,
retail sales, or service jobs. Around 50% of the workforce is
female. While about 78% of all cashiers and 99% of all secretaries
today are female, only 31% of managers and administrators are
female. Equality in the workplace has been a mirage but it has
conned millions of women into leaving their homes and destroying the
family structure.

It was only when economic or political factors made it necessary to
get more workers that women were called to work. The Industrial
Revolution, the Great Depression, and the World Wars, all the major
events which increased the proportion of women workers, were times
when the capitalists required more workers in order to be successful
in their plans and so they used women.

The move of women from home to the public workforce has been
gradual. First poor women went. Then unmarried women. Then married
women without children. Then married women without young children.
And then, all women. The same thing can be seen to be happening in
developing countries around the world, as the West spreads its
propaganda of freedom for women to work. The results of this move
will probably be the same too.

Bibliography

-Hawes, Joseph M., ed. American Families: A Research Guide and
Historical Handbook. New York: Greenwood Press,- 1990.

-Mintz, Steven. Domestic Revolutions. New York: the Free Press,
1988.

-Gary B. Nash, American Odyssey. New York: Glencoe McGraw-Hill,
2002.

-Wilson, Margaret Gibbons. The American Woman in Transition.
Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1979.

-Goldstein, Joshua S. War and Gender: How Gender Shapes the War
System and Vice Versa. Cambridge University Press, 2001.

-U.S. Department of Labor, Women’s Bureau. Women in the Force,
1900-2002. http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/0/1/0/4/6/7/A0104673.html

-The Library of Congress Rosie the Riveter: Real Women Workers in
World War II. http://www.loc.gov/rr/program/journey/rosie-transcript.html

*

Israel Honors Jewish Terrorists Who Attacked America

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Far left: Golda Meir meeting with the man who planned the Lavon Affair: Pinhas Lavon. Next, the photo that appeared in Haaretz with the caption “President Katzav presented three surviving members of the ‘Lavon affair’ with certificates of appreciation at a Jerusalem ceremony Wednesday.”

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Israel honors Jewish terrorists who attacked America
– Israeli President calls them “heroes”

By David Duke

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How does America deal with a country that commits terrorism against us and then honors the terrorists?

Answer: We give it billions of dollars every year as well as our most advanced military technology.

The Israeli President, Moshe Katzav, in recent formal ceremonies honored the Israeli agents who made terrorist attacks against American sites in Egypt hoping to provoke an American war with Egypt.

In ceremonies reported by the major Israeli daily newspaper, Haaretz, Israeli President Moshe Katsav stated the following at a ceremony honoring the Jewish terrorists who attacked American facilities:

“Although it is still a sensitive situation, we decided now to express our respect for these heroes,” President Moshe Katzav said after presenting the three surviving members of the bomber ring with certificates of appreciation at a Jerusalem ceremony.

In the Lavon Affair, named for the Israeli Defense Minister at the time, Pinhas Lavon, the Israeli government launched a false flag, terrorist operation against American sites in Egypt hoping to provoke American bombing, retaliation and war against that nation. The Israeli terrorists targeted American sites such as American Cinemas and American libraries around Cairo. Only the premature detonation of one of the Jewish terrorist’s bombs led to the exposure and halt of the plot before the extensive loss of life and property.

If this terrorist operation would have been successful, not only would it have cost many American lives, it would have launched an American war against an innocent nation which in turn would have caused the death of many thousands of innocent American and Egyptian lives as well as untold billions of dollars.

Israel’s terrorist plot against the United States in the Lavon Affair was one greatest acts of treachery that any nation has ever committed against an ongoing ally. There have certainly been many times in history where a nation attacked a supposed ally, but I know of no cases where an “ally” attacked another and then the attacked nation remained an ally and continued to support the attacking nation financially and militarily! For that to occur there has to be an incredible level of subversion in the attacked nation. And shockingly, this was only the first Israeli act of treachery against the nation that stood by Israel more than any other: America. There have repeated acts of Israeli terrorism and treachery against the United States of America.

In 1967, Israel attacked the USS Liberty with both fighter jets and torpedo boats in a surprise terrorist attack that killed 34 Americans and wounded 173. Both the U.S. Secretary of State at the time, Dean Rusk, and the Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Thomas Moorer, both have stated that it was a pre-meditated attack against the United States. (see “Attack on the Liberty” at www.davidduke.com)

In the Jonathan Pollard case, an Israeli spy devastated America’s Eastern European Intelligence Network, and Israel honors Pollard today as a hero and lobbies for his release from American prison. (see “The Pollard Case” at www.davidduke.com)

And very recently, important figures in the Israeli lobby AIPAC, arguably the most powerful lobby in Washington, D.C., are under investigation by the FBI for spying against the United States. The fact that the President of the United States and most of the members of Congress have close ties to this lobby for a foreign nation, a lobby which is now in the middle of spy scandal should obviously be a huge story in America’s press, but it is suppressed in the Jewish dominated American media.

Israel knew that the U.S. Government would certainly respond to terrorist attacks against it (supposedly by Egypt) — with bombing and war against that nation. Terrorist acts of war were committed against America and traditionally nations respond to such in kind.

But, once America discovered that it was Israel who committed such terrorist acts of war, why was there no military retaliation against the offending nation?

In fact, American money and even military equipment continued to Israel unabated. Such shows the high level of Israeli subversion and dare I say it, treason, in the United States Government. It also clearly reveals the Jewish supremacy in the press that has whitewashed and kept this treachery from the knowledge of 99 percent of American people. In fact, 99 percent of Americans will never hear of the Lavon Affair nor will they know anything about the recent Israeli government official ceremony that honored the Israelis who committed these terrorist acts against America.

For years Israel denied knowledge of the event, just as Israel denied the murderous attack on the USS Liberty, denied their involvement with the damaging spying of Jonathan Pollard, and denied the overwhelming evidence that indicates Israeli prior-knowledge of the 911 attack. (See my article, “How Israel Caused the 911 Attacks” at www.davidduke.com) The Israeli defense minister, Pinhas Lavon had to resign after the bungled terrorist attacks in Egypt, and the excuse was given that it was a “rogue operation.” Yet, obviously, launching terrorist attacks against United States installations in Egypt that included American cinemas and libraries, would have certainly had to have been approved by the Israeli Prime Minister at the time, Golda Meir.

But now, the Israel government is having formal, public ceremonies honoring the Jewish terrorists that attacked American facilities! Now that’s enormous Chutzpah when one considers Israel is receiving billions of American tax dollars every year, the lion’s share of America’s entire foreign aid budget, and the fact that America is the only major nation that defends Israeli crimes against the Palestinians in the U.N. Yet, it shows just how firmly Israel has the government and media of America in its grip that they can get away with honoring terrorists who have attacked America!

How can America still support a nation that formally honors those Jews who clearly committed terrorism against the United States?

Any President, Congressman or Senator that who supports sending Israel American tax dollars after the clear record of unrepentant Israeli terrorism and treachery against the United States, is equivalent to any American who sent money to the Japan after the attack at Pearl Harbor!

It is important to note that no Arab or Muslim government, including that of Saddam Hussein, has ever launched a terrorist attack against America. No Arab or Muslim government has ever had even a single, highly placed spy do damage to the United States. No Arab or Muslim nation has corrupted our political process with massive bribery, threats and coercion of thousands of U.S. politicians.

In truth, the Iraq War is just another form of a false flag operation like the Lavon Affair.

It was spawned by Israeli loyalists in the United States, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and coterie of Jewish supremacists (including the man in charge of the evidence of Iraqi misdeeds in the CIA , Stuart Cohen, who was behind much of the false intelligence) that led America into a war against Iraq, a nation that had never harmed and posed absolutely no threat at all to America.

This treasonous war was never a war for America, but only a war for Israel. It has so far led to the death of almost 1600 Americans, grievous injuries of up to 20,000 of our men and women, expenditures of a national treasure of over 300 billion dollars, damage to American business around the world, trillions of dollars in higher costs for oil and gas, and has only increased hatred against America and increased support for Al Qaeda and other anti-American terrorists.

And again, for what is all this the blood and treasure lost?

For Israel, that’s what, a nation that honors terrorists who bombed American facilities!

My God in Heaven, when will real Americans wake up to this treachery and treason!

Here are some excerpts from the article in Haaretz and the article on the terrrorist attack in Wikpedia

Israel honors Egyptian spies 50 years after fiasco Wed., March 30, 2005 Adar 2 19, 5765

By Reuters

After half a century of reticence and recrimination, Israel on Wednesday honored nine Egyptian Jews recruited as agents-provocateur in what became one of the worst intelligence bungles in the country’s history. Israel was at war with Egypt when it hatched a plan in 1954 to ruin its rapprochement with the United States and Britain by firebombing sites frequented by foreigners in Cairo and Alexandria.

But Israeli hoped the attacks, which caused no casualties, would be blamed on local insurgents collapsed when the young Zionist bombers were caught and confessed at public trials. Two were hanged. The rest served jail terms and emigrated to Israel.

Embarrassed before the West, the fledgling Jewish state long denied involvement. It kept mum even after its 1979 peace deal with Egypt, fearing memories of the debacle could sour ties.

“Although it is still a sensitive situation, we decided now to express our respect for these heroes,” President Moshe Katzav said after presenting the three surviving members of the bomber ring with certificates of appreciation at a Jerusalem ceremony.

What went wrong in the “Lavon Affair” — after Pinhas Lavon, Israel’s defense minister when the plot came to light — remains a matter of debate in a country more used to tales of espionage coups…

The situation recurred in 1985, when U.S. Navy analyst Jonathan Pollard was sentenced to life imprisonment in the United States for passing military secrets to Israel’s scientific liaison office…

“As with Pollard, this (Lavon Affair) was a rogue operation,” said David Kimche, a former Mossad deputy chief. “We knew never to go down that road again…

Meanwhile, the agents locked up in Egypt were ignored, excluded from several prisoner exchanges with Israel after the wars of 1956 and 1967. Now that they have been officially recognised in Israel, the former agents are campaigning for a full account of their operation to be included in the high-school syllabus.

“This is a great day for all of us, those who were hanged and those who died,” said Marcelle Ninio, the only female member of the cell. “We are happy we’ve got our honour back.

And here is the Wikipedia article on this terroristic attack:

Lavon Affair
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
(Redirected from Lavon affair)

The aim of the 1954 Israeli Mossad project, codenamed Operation Suzannah was to bomb United States installations in Egypt, such as the United States Information Service offices, and blame Arabs, hoping it would harm Egyptian-American ties. It became known as the Lavon Affair or the Unfortunate Affair (Hebrew: ???? ???? pronounce: haesek habish), after the Israeli defense minister Pinchas Lavon who was forced to resign because of the incident.

Israeli Mossad agents from “Unit 131? 1 planted bombs in several buildings, including a United States diplomatic facility, and intentionally left behind evidence implicating Arabs as the culprits. The conspiracy was intended to disrupt U.S. relations with Egypt but one of the bombs detonated prematurely and the Egyptian police swiftly found one of the terrorists. This arrest quickly led to the capture of eleven of the thirteen members of the spy ring. Some of the spies were Israeli, while others were Egyptian Jews recruited by Mossad. Two of the conspirators were sentenced to death and executed. Six others were sentenced to lengthy prison terms.

Lavon claimed that he had no knowledge of the conspiracy and he attempted to scapegoat and fire his deputy, Shimon Peres. The Prime Minister of Israel, Moshe Sharett, appointed a board of inquiry consisting of Israeli Supreme Court Justice Isaac Olshan and the first chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces, Ya’akov Dori. The board failed to uncover who had ordered the conspiracy yet Lavon resigned in disgrace from his position as minister of defense and David Ben-Gurion resumed the post under Sharett. Lavon became head of the Histadrut.

Six years later, a district court found the intelligence operations chief guilty of perjury and forgery during testimony presented to the Olshan-Dori board of inquiry. Lavon demanded that Ben-Gurion clear his name but Ben-Gurion refused. The controversy broke out into open Knesset debates, fatally wounding the ruling Mapai Party. Eventually the Mapai Central Committee voted to expel Lavon from his position in the Histadrut.

The legacy of the Lavon Affair was especially unpleasant for Egyptian Jews and for Jews living in other Arab countries. They faced suspicion as a potential Fifth column and even persecution (including having their banks accounts frozen). While the Lavon affair may have acted as one catalyst for emigration to Israel, it could add little to the overall persecution of Jews which started roughly at 1948, and which reached a peak in the wake of the 1956 Suez War, when the Egyptian government expelled almost 25,000 Egyptian Jews and confiscated their property, and sent approximately 1,000 more Jews to prisons and detention camps. The Lavon Affair also generated deep suspicion of Israeli intelligence practices and encouraged speculation and conspiracy theories that terrorist attacks against Arab and American targets could be the result of Israeli false flag intelligence operations or agent provocateurs working on behalf of Israeli intelligence, a belief that is still popular (especially in Arab countries).

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