THE INSANE BRUTALITY OF THE STATE OF ISRAEL

by Kathleen Christison:
Kathleen Christison is a former CIA political analyst and has worked on Middle East issues for 30 years. She is the author of "Perceptions of Palestine," and "The Wound of Dispossession".

Atrocities in the Promised Land
Words fail; ordinary terms are inadequate to describe the horrors Israel daily perpetrates, and has perpetrated for years, against the Palestinians. The tragedy of Gaza has been described a hundred times over, as have the tragedies of 1948, of Qibya, of Sabra and Shatila, of Jenin -- 60 years of atrocity perpetrated in the name of Judaism.
But the horror generally falls on deaf ears in most of Israel, in the U.S. political arena, in the mainstream U.S. (and Australian…ed) media. Those who are horrified -- and there are many -- cannot penetrate the shield of impassivity that protects the political and media elite in Israel, even more so in the U.S., and increasingly now in Canada and Europe, from seeing, from caring.

But it needs to be said now, loudly: those who devise and carry out Israeli policies have made Israel into a monster, and it has come time for all of us - all Israelis, all Jews who allow Israel to speak for them, all Americans who do nothing to end U.S. support for Israel and its murderous policies - to recognize that we stain ourselves morally by continuing to sit by while Israel carries out its atrocities against the Palestinians.

A nation that mandates the primacy of one ethnicity or religion over all others will eventually become psychologically dysfunctional. Narcissistically obsessed with its own image, it must strive to maintain its racial superiority at all costs and will inevitably come to view any resistance to this imagined superiority as an existential threat. Indeed, any other people automatically becomes an existential threat simply by virtue of its own existence.
As it seeks to protect itself against phantom threats, the racist state becomes increasingly paranoid, its society closed and insular, intellectually limited. Setbacks enrage it; humiliations madden it. The state lashes out in a crazed effort, lacking any sense of proportion, to reassure itself of its strength.

The pattern played out in Nazi Germany as it sought to maintain a mythical Aryan superiority. It is playing out now in Israel. "This society no longer recognizes any boundaries, geographical or moral," wrote Israeli intellectual and anti-Zionist activist Michel Warschawski in his 2004 book "Towards an Open Tomb: The Crisis of Israeli Society".
Israel knows no limits and is lashing out as it finds that its attempt to beat the Palestinians into submission and swallow Palestine whole is being thwarted by a resilient, dignified Palestinian people who refuse to submit quietly and give up resisting Israel's arrogance.
We in the United States have become inured to tragedy inflicted by Israel, and we easily fall for the spin that automatically, by some trick of the imagination, converts Israeli atrocities to examples of how Israel is victimized.

§ But a military establishment that drops a 500-pound bomb on a residential apartment building in the middle of the night and kills 14 sleeping civilians, as happened in Gaza four years ago, is not a military that operates by civilized rules.
§ A military establishment that drops a 500-pound bomb on a house in the middle of the night and kills a man and his wife and seven of their children, as happened in Gaza four days ago, is not the military of a moral country.
§ A society that can brush off as unimportant an army officer's brutal murder of a 13-year-old girl on the claim that she threatened soldiers at a military post -- one of nearly 700 Palestinian children murdered by Israelis since the intifada began -- is not a society with a conscience.
§ A government that imprisons a 15-year-old girl -- one of several hundred children in Israeli detention -- for the crime of pushing and running away from a male soldier trying to do a body search as she entered a mosque is not a government with any moral bearings.
(This story, not the kind that ever appears in the U.S. media, was reported in the London Sunday Times. The girl was shot three times as she ran away and was convicted to 18 months in prison after she came out of a coma.)

Critics of Israel note increasingly that Israel is self-destructing, nearing a catastrophe of its own making. Israeli journalist Gideon Levy talks of a society in "moral collapse."
Michel Warschawski writes of an "Israeli madness" and "insane brutality," a "putrefaction" of civilized society, that have set Israel on a suicidal course. He foresees the end of the Zionist enterprise; Israel is a "gang of hoodlums," he says, a state "that makes a mockery of legality and of civil morality. A state run in contempt of justice loses the strength to survive."
As Warschawski notes bitterly, Israel no longer knows any moral boundaries - if it ever did. Those who continue to support Israel, who make excuses for it as it descends into corruption, have lost their moral compass. https://www.ziopedia.org/content/view/730/1/

ISRAEL TO GET U.S. 'BUNKER BUSTER' BOMBS

LET 'EM EAT LUNCH BREAKS

by James Reed
Wal-Mart, the world's largest retail company must pay US$200M to workers who were illegally denied lunch breaks (source The Independent on-line edition, 25/12/05).
The Californian decision refutes denials by the company that it has been cutting corners to keep labour costs down. This case is the first the company has lost. Around 40 other cases are in the legal pipeline alleging that the stores violate US labour laws, not paying overtime to workers, denying lunch breaks and so on.
Critics of the Wal-Mart superstore concept see such stores as eroding communities and underpaying workers. Many employees rely upon government food stamps to survive because wages are so low.

This is the sort of world which the elites have offered as a counter to social credit philosophies. The social dividend, based upon the enormous technological productivity of modern society, (and the cultural heritage) would have supplied to all citizens a living wage/dividend which would ensure freedom of the individual.
There can be no effective democracy where people are reduced to mere mechanisms in a global machine.

American capitalism, with the cardboard box lifestyle of the working poor is an example of the antithesis of social credit. So too was the Soviet-style government controlled labour camps and so is the Asiatic sweatshop of today.
These systems all are founded upon the exploitation and degradation of the individual. By contrast, social credit is about the elevation and dignity of the individual.

ALL THE WORLD IS NOT A WORD

by Brian Simpson
I dropped out of philosophy as an elective at university, but I do recall from some lectures that I managed to stay awake in, that "postmodernists" - the latest trendy literary version of the Left - believe that there can be no objective truth.
All understanding is mediated in a sea of language and language is purely arbitrary construction. Reality is screened from our understanding by language. However, recent research published in the influential "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences" by Elizabeth Brannan of Duke University questions this.

In a study of infants it was found that babies have a grasp of mathematics. Other research has indicated that non-verbal creatures such as monkeys also have an internal representation of numbers. So language doesn't determine thought: rather it is thought that determines language. Postmodernism is the philosophy underlying much of Australia's secondary school English and literary studies.
But it is a philosophy as false, as distorted - and as dangerous as its cousin Marxism.

THE NEW AGE CURRICULUM

by James Reed
Much of my critical energies are focused upon criticising writers and material published in The Australian, Australia's only national (not to be confused with the term "nationalist") newspaper.
However the paper over the last twelve months has done well in exposing the dumbing down that is occurring in the Australian education system due to outcomes based education, put in place by left0-wing education elites.
Thus The Australian of 16 June 2006 reports of a Western Australian year 12 science exam which quotes from a new age philosopher that humans are causing the "greatest mass extinction" on earth. The comment is from a philosopher, not a biologist.

In South Australia one primary school even allows children to design their own learning plan. The justification is that although children need mathematics and language skills, they need to learn about "how to learn" because they will be changing jobs several times in their career lifetimes.
This is crazy logic: surely one gets sound basics first then you permit autonomy of learning. Most children don't have this capacity for autonomy. Most high school students and a sizable number of university students lack it. It is too demanding and advanced - a recipe for failure. That is why increasing numbers of parents are choosing home schooling to save their children's minds from ideological contamination.

A DOWNER ON CHINA

by David Whiteside
Foreign Minister Alexander Downer is best known for not knowing what was going on in the AWB wheat scandal and for obstructing the UN inquiry into the affair (while simultaneously not knowing what was going on).
Downer though has been dancing with the stars on the world stage (such as Condoleezza Rice) in cautioning the hawks in the Bush administration that see China as a threat. Threat? What threat?
"Our message is that we don't support a policy of containment of China," he said (The Australian, 16/3/06, p.1) The power of China should be "harnessed to the advantage of the region."

How exactly this was to be done was not detailed. It never is. Australia's elites cannot see past the short term dollar gains from China. At least America's elites are slightly more critical, with concerns about China's human rights violations, its genocidal activities in Tibet and its sinister military expansion.

Listening to the rhetoric of kow-towing Australian business leaders and politicians one would almost surprised to learn that China is still ruled by a non-democratic Communist regime. China has no respect for intellectual property and its firms produce cheap counterfeit goods that have cost the Western nations, especially the US, billions of dollars a year.
The Chinese pegged the yuan to the US dollar at an artificially low rate so that they could exploit US Free Trade policies and flood the US with cheap goods which they dumped on the market, causing a sky rocketing effect in the US trade deficit. China plays economic hardball all the time and doesn't believe in Western free trade myths.

This is the nation which Alexander Downer does not want contained. No doubt he and his followers look forward to China becoming the dominant power of the 21st century. They are now set to sell uranium to the Chinese military giant in an act of foolishness that the Western world will record with dismay. Beware of the coming tyranny.

CHINESE RIP-OFFS

"RACISM" AND THE RULE OF LAW

by Ian Wilson LL.B.
Townsville District Court Acting Chief Judge Tony Skoien has agreed to move the trial of an Aboriginal man accused of leading the Palm Island riots, because he was presented with a study which allegedly showed that the locals were a bunch of racists who could not beat down their prejudices to give a Palm Island Aboriginal a fair trial. ("Racism leads to Palm Riot Trial Shift," The Weekend Australian 15-16/7/06, p.3).
Note that if a person in the community has a criticism of Palm Island Aborigines, under this new methodology, the criticism is by definition racist. Never is there a concern to examine whether there could be a basis, even in part, to these opinions.

The law requires justice to be blind:
Further, even if some opinions were "racist", an opinion poll has been used by a court of law to rule out an entire community of peers from constituting a jury and for classifying an entire population as "racist".
Townsville activists and lawyers have now called for a quota of Aboriginal people in all criminal trials involving Aboriginal defendants. (The Australian 17/7/06, p.1)
Presumably this will lead to, ultimately, a quota for gays, if the offender is homosexual. But what if the offender is of mixed race (Asian/Aboriginal), gay, physically disabled, Islamic, dwarf (i.e., height challenged), aged, female, psychopath?
Would that mean that only Australian academics would be able to sit on a jury? Raced-based juries have been rejected in the United States and they should not be implemented here. The rule of law requires that justice be blind - and a randomly selected jury insures that.

VALLEY OF THE WOLVES

by James Reed
Now here is a movie that you probably won't be hiring from the local video shop while you buy the milk; "Valley of the Wolves" is a $6 million Turkish production about the Iraqi war. It has been greeted with howls of protest for being "anti-Semitic".
A surgeon is shown removing organs from Iraqi prisoners á la Nazi death camp doctor Joseph Mengele. American GIs are portrayed murdering innocent guests at a wedding party. The film is a box office smash in Turkey and in Germany over 130,000 people, mainly young Muslims, have flocked to see the film. The audiences often stand and chant, "Allah is great" at regular intervals, especially when an American is killed.

The film's distributor in Germany, Alin Sahin, has said to the Daily Telegraph (27 February 2006):
"When a cartoon insults two billion Muslims it is considered freedom of opinion, but when an action film takes on the Americans it is considered demagoguery. Something is wrong." Indeed, something is very wrong indeed.

Joseph Wakim, founder of the Australian Arabic Council and a former multicultural affairs commissioner ("Blind to Humanity from the Race-Tinted Glasses," The Australian 20/6/06, p.14) says that logic has a limited role when dealing with "racism".
"Racism" is Pauline Hanson wanting to stop the "Asian Invasion" and broadcaster Alan Jones calling to reclaim Cronulla Beach from Lebanese gangs, I infer from comments in his article, and the context of the remarks. Racism is dealt with things that go to the heart such as the facilitation of relationships. And, one "of the most compelling mediums for addressing such fears is the medium that has capitalized on Islamophobia in the first place: Hollywood films."

Thus Schindler's List is a counter to any anti-Semitic propaganda and Rabbit-Proof Fence for those critical of indigenous Australians.
Mr. Wakim says that we "have yet to see similar epics on Arab or Muslim characters whose true stories will stir our hearts." I look forward to his comments on "Valley of the Wolves".

FUTURE WAR, TODAY

by James Reed
Kevin Mitnick, a computer hacker had no difficulty breaking into government computers in the US. A sixteen-year-old Austrian hacker a little time ago, shut down the computers of Eastern Europe.
The US government today employs virtually an army of computer hackers to break into the computer systems of Islamic terrorists, to destroy their systems, plant bugs and viruses or change information.
In turn, perhaps now or into the future, Islamic terrorists or maybe even disturbed computer geniuses may attack the entire financial and industrial infrastructure of society and shut down society itself.
I recall seeing a television documentary on this where an Indian hacker said that his main goal in hacking was to "cause a meltdown of the internet." In a globally connected techno-world, such an attack would result in social chaos.
Technology has given us many useful and amazing things, but it has also given the capacity for creating havoc to those who should never have such power.

JOBS BEFORE BABIES' BREAST-FEEDING

by James Reed
Breast feeding is best for babies and is necessary for maximum IQ development. It is far superior to all substitutes. However Endeavour Forum (No.123 July 2006, p.6) reports that a scientific study published in Acta Paediatrica has found that mother's employment is preventing even the initiation of breast feeding. Caren Lanting (et al) concludes "Employment is generally considered a factor that has a negative impact on breast-feeding initiation."
And her study of Dutch infants found that the maintenance of women's work also negatively affected breast-feeding practices. The Endeavour Forum article concludes:
"In country after country, it appears clear that maternal employment means infants are denied the benefits of breast feeding."

Editor's comment - by their fruits you will know them:
What should be stated loud and clear is that no matter what Liberal or Labour politicians continue to 'mouth off', whatever fine-sounding 'motherhood statements' they keep parroting - ad nauseam - the fruit of the policies of both parties demonstrate they are anti-family.
Politicians don't say outright they want women in the workforce, thus making it more difficult for the women to have babies and give those babies the best start in life; or that they want the babies who are born to be sent to 'day-care' nurseries as soon as possible, to be indoctrinated with the latest sociological propaganda.
They don't say that, but look carefully at what their policies force our young women and mothers to do!
In an age of super-abundant-production, women/mothers are forced into the workforce, no matter how menial or unnecessary the job, through the finance/economic policies of the present government (and the Opposition's policies are no better).
Let's see governments put in place policies that will enable our women to have babies and enjoy motherhood.
Let's see them support the mothers who want to give their babies the very best chances in early-childhood especially the so important mothers' role of breast-feeding. Let's see government support families - full stop!

WHEN IS A 'WAR CRIME' NOT A 'WAR CRIME'?

When it is conducted by young 'Australian-Israeli' men with dual citizenship who freely travel from America, the U.K. and Australia to Israel and take up arms for - what is to Australians - a foreign country.

A FAIR GO FOR DAVID HICKS
We have received a request from an "independent, not-for-profit community campaigning group", who "use new technology to empower Australians to have their say on important national issues".
The group is named "GetUp" and one of their targets is the basic rights of Australian David Hicks who has been incarcerated in that hellhole at Guantanamo Bay.
They report:
Standing up for the basic right to a fair trial is what GetUp's campaign to repatriate Australian David Hicks is all about.
The tide is turning and tens of thousands of us are making waves: nearly 40,000 people have signed the letter of demand so far. With this support, we've been busy ramping up the pressure on the Australian Government, and we wanted to share how the actions of so many GetUp members are being noticed around the world.
On Thursday, GetUp published full-page advertisements in major national and metropolitan newspapers calling on the Government to take action. We then assembled a press conference with a diverse alliance of community leaders to voice why they believe David Hicks should be brought home.
These events received widespread local, national and international media coverage. At the press conference, Catholic Bishop Kevin Manning said: "When Australia fails to act to guarantee the human rights of one of its citizens, then we are all diminished."
Major Michael Mori, David Hicks' US military lawyer has posted a 'blog' on GetUp's website outlining why he believes his client has been abandoned by the Australian Government.
For those On Target readers who want to register their signatures on the petition presented to the present government go to: www.getup.org.au/campaign/DefendAustralianRights

RALLY IN MELBOURNE - RACIAL AND RELIGIOUS TOLERANCE ACT:

The COALITION FOR FREE SPEECH (Victoria) will hold a rally at:
§ Parliament House, Spring Street, Melbourne
§ Tuesday 8th August 2006. Be there! What time? 12.30 - 2.00pm.
§ for Repeal of the Religious sections in the Victorian "Racial and Religious Tolerance Act.
More details: www.coalitionforfreespeech.com