Look, Mummy. There’s an airplane up in the sky.
Oooooooo ooo ooo ooooh
Did you see the frightened ones
Did you hear the falling bombs
Did you ever wonder
Why we had to run for shelter
When the promise of a brave new world
Unfurled beneath a clear blue sky
Oooooooo ooo ooooo oooh
Did you see the frightened ones
Did you hear the falling bombs
The flames are all long gone
But the pain lingers on
Goodbye blue sky
Goodbye blue sky
Goodbye
Goodbye
Music and lyrics by Pink Floyd
Sderot cinema. Israelis bringing chairs 2 hilltop in sderot 2 watch latest from Gaza. Clapping when blasts are heard. (Photo from Twitter/@allansorensen72)
An image of Israelis in Sderot who gathered on a hill to watch and celebrate Gaza being bombed has gone viral on Twitter. The photo posted by a Danish journalist caused uproar online.
Allan Sørensen, the Middle Eastern correspondent for the Danish newspaper Kristeligt Dagblad, said that he took the image on Wednesday in Sderot, a city about two kilometers from Gaza.
In just a few days the scandalous image has gathered about 8,500 retweets.
The picture sparked confusion and outrage among social media users, with many questioning the morality of making a scene of murder a public spectacle and celebrating it.
Source: RT News
Israelis sit on a hill to watch air strikes on Gaza, some bring drinks and snacks as they cheer the explosions a few miles away (Andrew Burton/Getty Images)
Front seats please. Hebron squatters from Brooklyn watching the #Gaza show. (Photo from Twitter/@elsaidst)
Nikola Tesla (10 July 1856 – 7 January 1943) was a Serbian-born American inventor, electrical engineer, mechanical engineer, physicist, and futurist best known for his contributions to the design of the modern alternating current (AC) electricity supply system.
See also: The Unknown Genius of Nikola Tesla
Last sentence a 3-year-old Syrian said before he died: “I’m gonna tell God everything”
It’s impossible to verify but the picture tells a story about the pain and suffering that exists in Syria right now. There are many in the media who would like to say this is because president Bashar al-Assad is a ruthless killer. And that’s half true. Like other government leaders he has engaged in war and with that war has come the death of tens of thousands and the displacement of over 1 million Syrians now living in refugee camps.
But this hasn’t always been the case. This is the inevitable result of a covert war being waged by the U.S., Israel and other Sunni countries like Qatar and Saudi Arabia. Our interests in taking down the Syrian dictator al-Assad are all about geo politics. If we take out Syria we neuter Iranian influence in the region. It has gotten so bad that al Qaeda is now fighting on the same side as the United States government and Bashar al Assad and his government are fighting al Qaeda. And Syrians are all the victim of this massive global covert proxy war.
It has gotten to the point where we don’t even know if the chemical weapons that were used in Syria were the result of al Qaeda or the Syrian government. When it comes to matters of intelligence and propaganda it’s very hard to discern truth from fiction. But no one can deny that Syria was a very stable country until we decided to go in all guns blazing. We’re not bringing democracy to the world that’s the sound of imperialism baby.
Hat tip: Cerebration
At a right-wing protest in Jerusalem a sign reads “May God avenge their blood” and a youth wears a sticker stating “Kahane was right,” referring to the Brooklyn-born violent settler movement leader, 1 July.
From the moment three Israeli teens were reported missing last month, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the country’s military-intelligence apparatus suppressed the flow of information to the general public. Through a toxic blend of propaganda, subterfuge and incitement, they inflamed a precarious situation, manipulating Israelis into supporting their agenda until they made an utterly avoidable nightmare inevitable.
Israeli police, intelligence officials and Netanyahu knew within hours of the kidnapping and murder of the three teens that they had been killed. And they knew who the prime suspects were less than a day after the kidnapping was reported.
Rather than reveal these details to the public, Israel’s Shin Bet intelligence agency imposed a gag order on the national media, barring news outlets from reporting that the teens had almost certainly been killed, and forbidding them from revealing the identities of their suspected killers. The Shin Bet even lied to the parents of the kidnapped teens, deceiving them into believing their sons were alive.
Instead of mounting a limited action to capture the suspected perpetrators and retrieve the teens’ bodies, Netanyahu staged an aggressive international public relations campaign, demanding sympathy and outrage from world leaders, who were also given the impression that the missing teens were still alive.
Meanwhile, Israel’s armed forces rampaged throughout the occupied West Bank and bombarded the Gaza Strip in a campaign of collective punishment deceptively marketed to Israelis and the world as a rescue mission.
Full article at The Electronic Intifada
Ukrainians attended the funeral ceremony of three men killed in the eastern city of Slovyansk, after a fatal gun battle erupted near a makeshift checkpoint manned by pro-Russian separatists.
As many as 478 civilians have been killed and 1,392 more injured in the area of the anti-terrorist operation (ATO) in eastern Ukraine, the Ukrainian Health Ministry has reported.
“I can say that 1,392 people, including 104 women and 14 children, have been injured,” Deputy Health Minister Vasyl Lazoryshynets said at a press conference in Kyiv on Thursday.
“478 were killed. They include 30 women and seven children. These are civilians,” he added.
According to the ministry, 279 people are undergoing treatment in medical institutions.
Source: Interfax Ukraine
Canadian ecologist Patrick Moore (Image from flickr.com by TEDx Vancouver)
Ecologist Dr. Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace, warned “I fear a global cooling,” during his keynote address to the Ninth International Conference on Climate Change in Las Vegas on Tuesday.
Moore noted that a cooling would adversely impact agriculture, and said: “Let’s hope for a little warming as opposed to a little cooling. I would rather it got a little warmer.”
Moore noted that “the U.S. is currently been cooling” and noted that there has been “no global warming for nearly 18 years.” He also mocked the notion that “everything is due to global warming.”
“If it warms two degrees, hopefully more in Canada in the North…maybe it would be a good thing if it did,” Moore explained.
Moore noted that carbon dioxide is a trace essential gas in the atmosphere and is not the control knob of the Earth’s climate.
“CO2 is the most important nutrient for all life on earth,” he noted.
“There are so many [climate] variables that we can’t control and when you do an experiment you have to control all the variables except the one you are studying if you want to get a clean result. There are even variables we do not even understand that we cannot control,” he said.
“So it is virtually impossible to think of doing an experiment where we would be able to tweeze out the impact of CO2 versus the hundreds of other variables at work. Which is why you could never make a model that would predict the climate,” he added.
Moore also took criticized President Barack Obama.
“The President seems to say it is sufficient to say the ‘science is settled’. It is hollow statement with no content,” Moore noted.
He also warned that the education system was failing children when it comes to climate change science.
“Change the way our kids are being taught about this subject because if we don’t there will be a whole generation of people who are just blindly following this climate hysteria,” Moore said.
“Our children are not taught logic, they are not taught what the scientific method is, and they are taught that carbon dioxide is pollution. They are told it is carbon now as if it were soot,” he added.
Source: Climate Depot
A day before Palestinian teenager Muhammad Abu Khudair was kidnapped and burned alive allegedly by six Israeli Jewish youths, Israeli lawmaker Ayelet Shaked published on Facebook a call for genocide of the Palestinians.
It is a call for genocide because it declares that “the entire Palestinian people is the enemy” and justifies its destruction, “including its elderly and its women, its cities and its villages, its property and its infrastructure.”
It is a call for genocide because it calls for the slaughter of Palestinian mothers who give birth to “little snakes.”
If Shaked’s post does not meet the legal definition of a call for genocide then nothing does.
Shaked is a senior figure in the Habeyit Hayehudi (Jewish Home) party that is part of Israel’s ruling coalition.
Her post was shared more than one thousand times and received almost five thousand “Likes.”
Full article at The Electronic Intifada
Palestinian protesters burn an Israeli flag during clashes with Israeli troops near Israel’s Ofer Prison, near the West Bank city of Ramallah May 16, 2014. (Reuters/Mohamad Torokman)
By John Wight
Most empires and colonial projects fall under the weight of their own contradictions, but usually over a protracted period of resistance, both passive and active, on the part of its victims. At the same time the material privileges gained from the exploitation and expropriation of a colonized people acts as a slow-acting corrosive on the society of the colonizing state, poisoning it with racism and hatred for those it has colonized as it seeks to justify the material privileges and psychological sense of supremacy and national pride that accrues from that colonization. This moral decay is commonly reflected in the degeneration that takes place in the armed forces of the state in question, where the emphasis of the troops shifts from self-sacrifice and heroism in support of a just and galvanizing cause to personal survival as demoralization sets in.
The romantic ideals attached to the pioneering spirit of the founders of Israel, along with international sympathy for a people who’d suffered such grotesque brutality at the hands of the Nazis, imbued the nascent state with a sense of purpose and destiny that helped mask the atrocities being carried out in its name.
A mythology of heroism and bravery was already well on the way to being constructed in 1948 when it came to Zionist militia organizations like the Haganah and Irgun. It was a mythology that continued on into the ranks of IDF when Israel was founded in 1948, embodied in the adoption of the state’s guiding “purity of arms” ethos, one designed to give romantic flavor to the militarism that sits at its heart. Yet in truth the ranks of the Haganah, Irgun and various other militia groups were filled with racist killers massacring men, women and children in order to fulfill the biblical and national destinies previously mentioned.
This toxic mix of racism and exceptionalism has led to the existence of a state that since its formation has viewed its repeated violations of international law and its crimes against humanity entirely justified. So deeply ingrained is the biblical and historical justification for Israel’s continued depredations against the Palestinians that when it comes to international condemnation of its crimes, rather than a cause for reflection and introspection within Israeli society, for many it merely serves to reaffirm Israel’s view of itself as the last bastion of defense of the Jewish people in a hostile world.
The day-to-day reality of this corrosive outlook involves young Israeli soldiers, mostly conscripts, humiliating, intimidating and brutalizing civilians at checkpoints, or killing Palestinians and Arabs in general in the knowledge they are able to do so with relative impunity.
But when those same soldiers come up against a determined and dogged resistance on the ground, such as they did in 2006 during the brief war against Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, their resolve crumbles and they are defeated. This is key to understanding why Israel, just like its chief sponsor the US when it comes to its own military operations, has come to rely on an advanced arsenal of missiles, aircraft, helicopter gunships, drones and tanks in its continuing conflict with the entire population of Gaza for the crime of exercising its right to elect a government of its own choosing.
Such would be the demoralizing effect not only on the troops but also and more importantly on Israeli society at large. Israel knows it cannot afford to sustain heavy casualties during its repeated military operations against a largely unarmed population.
Israel as an apartheid state has no future. Only as a state which embraces the concept of universal human rights, justice and dignity for all who share the same land can it ensure the peace and security of its people. More than any other this is the abiding lesson of history.
Full article at RT Op-Edge
A stunning interview conducted by pan Arab al-Maydeen TV with Sheikh Nabeel Naiem, the former founder of the Jihad Organization and an expert in Islamist groups.
Full transcript at Syria News
Against the Grain 