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October 29, 2006

Superpower in Decline:
America’s Middle Class is Globalization’ s Loser
Gabor Steingart — Der Spiegel (Germany)
http://www.spiegel. de/international /0,1 518,439766,00. html
…The United States is still a superpower. But it’s a superpower facing competition from beyond its borders as well as internal difficulties. Its future rosier than the present, millions of households are borrowing so much money that they end up endangering the very future they’re looking forward to… The feedback effects involved in globalization are especially intense for the US economy — so much so that large parts of the US workforce are now standing with their backs against the wall. The rise of Asia has only led to a relative decline of the US national economy. At least so far. But for many blue- and white-collar workers, this decline is already absolute because they have less of everything than they used to.

A ‘Powerful’ New Book on Israel’s Power in the US
Stephen Lendman — VHeadline.com
http://www.vheadlin e.com/readnews. asp? id=70829
James Petras’ powerful new book is titled ‘The Power of Israel in the United States.’ It’s a work of epic writing and essential reading documenting the enormous influence of the Jewish Lobby on US policy in the Middle East. It focuses like a laser to assure that policy conforms with Israel’s long-term goal for regional hegemony. The Lobby’s influence is broad and deep enough to include officials at the highest levels of government, the business community, academia, the clergy, and the mass media. Petras shows how together they’re able to assure the full and unconditional US support for all elements of Israel’s agenda going back decades even when that agenda harms our interests…

The Blue and Gray and Black:
New Civil War Museum Evokes Passions
The Washington Post
http://www.washingt onpost.com/ wp- dyn/content/ article/2006/ 10/06/AR20061006 01819.ht ml
In some parts of the country, the Civil War is still being fought. And perhaps nowhere are the aftershocks and viewpoints as evident as in Richmond, where a new museum is attempting to tell the history of the war from three angles. That would be: the Union, the African American and the Confederate. The American Civil War Center, which opens today, argues that each of the three had distinct ideas about freedom — and few would challenge that. Its inaugural 10,000-square- foot exhibition, “In the Cause of Liberty,” suggests that in this complicated story there were more lines crossed than the military ones. Each side was passionate. Each found justification for its goals in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Each suffered many casualties.

Britain Originally Opposed Iraq War,
Says New Book by CIA Official
Newsweek
http://www.msnbc. msn.com/id/ 15365157/ site/newsweek/
The CIA won’t say so, but the U.K. initially opposed war in Iraq. A new book by Tyler Drumheller, former chief of the CIA’s European ops, describes how, the day after 9/11, a “powerful delegation from a very close European ally” visited CIA Director George Tenet at HQ. In his book “On the Brink,” Drumheller says the foreign-team leader said “his government stood by us … and that we could count on it for any and all support.” But the foreign rep cautioned, “I hope we can all agree that we should concentrate on Afghanistan and not be tempted to launch any attacks on Iraq.” In Drumheller’s account, Tenet replied, “Absolutely, we all agree on that.”

American CIA Tried to Silence Europe On Torture Flights
The Guardian (Britain)
http://www.guardian .co.uk/usa/ story/0,, 1 931693,00.html
The CIA tried to persuade Germany to silence European Union protests about the human rights record of one of America’s key allies in its clandestine torture flights program, the Guardian can reveal. According to a secret intelligence report, the CIA offered to let Germany have access to one of its citizens, an al-Qaida suspect being held in a Moroccan cell. But the US secret agents demanded that in return, Berlin should cooperate and “avert pressure from EU” over human rights abuses in the north African country… The disclosure is among fresh revelations about how the CIA flew terrorist suspects to locations where they were tortured, and Britain’s knowledge of the practice known as “secret rendition”.

Fifty Years After Suez, US Hegemony Ebbing Fast
Jim Lobe — Inter Press Service
http://www.ipsnews. net/news. asp? idnews=35261
As the Middle East prepares to mark the 50th anniversary on Oct. 29 of the Suez Crisis that effectively ended European colonialism, a half century of U.S. hegemony in the region also appears to be coming to an end, according to a growing number of analysts… The Bush administration’ s failure to exercise any demonstrable pressure on Israel to seriously engage the Palestinians in a peace process, its transparent support for Israel’s military offensive and bombing campaign in Lebanon last summer’s war with Hezbollah, and its rejection to date of renewed Arab efforts to promote the 2002 Saudi peace plan in the wake of the Lebanon conflict have effectively destroyed the image of Washington as an honest broker.

Israel Tells Vatican to Halt Beatification of Pius XII
The Times (London)
http://www.timesonl ine.co.uk/ articl e/0,,13509-2423592, 00.html
Israel has urged the Vatican to halt procedures putting Pius XII, the controversial wartime Pope, on the path to sainthood. Oded Ben-Hur, the Israeli Ambassador to the Holy See, said: “I am asking the Vatican to block the beatification process for Pius XII.” Pius XII, formerly the papal nuncio to Germany and later Pius XI’s Secretary of State as Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, is accused of turning a blind eye to the Holocaust and remaining silent about Nazi anti- Semitism.

Neocons Preparing to Jump a Sinking Ship
Matthew Parris — The Times (London)
http://www.timesonl ine.co.uk/ articl e/0,,6-2414249, 00.html
The good ship Neocon is going down. She has struck the Iraqi rocks, the engine room is awash, and on the deck in anxious pursuit of something to float them away is a curious assembly. They are building a lifeboat for their reputations. The task is urgent. It is no small thing to find oneself on the wrong side of an argument when the debate is about the biggest disaster in British foreign policy since Suez… no small thing — in the name of Atlanticism — to have shackled our own good name to a doomed US presidency and crazed foreign-policy adventure that the next political generation in America will remember only with an embarrassed shudder.

Second Children’s Crusade
Jon Basil Utley
http://www.antiwar. com/utley/ ? articleid=9867
Who better to lead America on a Second Children’s Crusade than our president, known to his friends as King George the Incurious, a tabula rasa with the naiveté and faith of a born-again convert? …Many Christian fundamentalists consider America comparably innocent and therefore favored by God to make war on the evil Muslims who hate us because, as our president said, we are so good, so prosperous, and so free.

The Children’s Crusade of 1212
Steven Runciman
http://www.historyg uide.org/ ancient/children .html
One day in May 1212 there appeared at Saint-Denis, where King Philip of France was holding his court, a shepherd-boy of about twelve years old called Stephen, from the small town of Cloyes in the Orléannais… Towards the end of June the children massed at Vendôme. Awed contemporaries spoke of thirty thousand, not one over twelve years of age. There were certainly several thousand of them, collected from all parts of the country, some of them simple peasants, whose parents in many cases had willingly let them go on their great mission.

How I Was Fired by Bill Buckley
Joseph Sobran
http://www.mecfilms .com/universe/ articles/ fire d.htm
In October 1993 I was fired by National Review, the magazine I’d written for since 1972. It wasn’t unexpected. Bill Buckley had threatened to fire me a couple of years earlier, and he writes in his book In Search of Anti-Semitism that he’d nearly fired me on yet another occasion, of which I’d had no inkling. So this time, when I wrote a column critical of him and disputing his account, it was a near certainty that the axe would fall. But how strangely different it all became from what I’d expected.

Thanks for the Cheap Gas, Mr. Hitler!
Daniel Gross - Slate
http://www.slate. com/id/2152036/ ? nav=ais
…The [South Africa] apartheid regime picked up where the Nazis left off when it came to producing gasoline from coal. Nazism, apartheid, and international sanctions created a fuel source that might never have existed in a better world. The circuitous travels of the Fischer-Tropsch process, a chemical technique to convert natural gas and coal into liquid fuels, provide an object lesson in historical irony. Used by the Nazis to make oil from coal during World War II, it was commercialized by the century’s second-most- odious racial supremacist regime in the 1950s through South Africa’s state energy company.

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IHR News and Comment
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October 28, 2006
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Elie Wiesel for President?
Daniel McGowan
http://www.counterp unch.org/ mcgowan1025 2006.html
Israel’s Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has suggested Elie Wiesel to replace Moshe Katzav as President of Israel. Katzav is being forced to resign amid charges of rape. Wiesel’s qualifications for the job are unimpeachable. He is the icon of what Norman Finkelstein has called “The Holocaust Industry’ and as such he has served as a prop to “get the Jewish vote” by every American President since Gerald Ford… In 1948 Wiesel worked as a journalist for the Irgun, a gang of Jewish terrorists who committed the massacre at Deir Yassin, arguably one of the most pivotal events in twentieth century Palestinian history. Yet this “world-renowned humanitarian” refuses to apologize or even acknowledge the murder, mayhem, and ethnic cleansing caused by his employer.

Elie Wiesel: A Prominent False Witness
Robert Faurisson
http:/ /www.ihr.org/ leaflets/ wiesel.shtml
Elie Wiesel passes for one of the most celebrated eyewitnesses to the alleged Holocaust. Yet in his supposedly autobiographical book Night, he makes no mention of gas chambers. He claims instead to have witnessed Jews being burned alive, a story now dismissed by all historians. Wiesel gives credence to the most absurd stories of other “eyewitnesses. ” He spreads fantastic tales of 10,000 persons sent to their deaths each day in Buchenwald. When Elie Wiesel and his father, as Auschwitz prisoners, had the choice of either leaving with their retreating German “executioners, ” or remaining behind in the camp to await the Soviet “liberators, ” the two decided to leave with their German captors.

Wiesel and the Catholics
David O’Connell — Culture Wars
http://www.culturew ars.com/2004/ Weisel.htm
Wiesel delights in desecrating what is for many Catholics the beloved memory of Pope Pius XII, routinely trashing him for his supposed “silence” during World War II. No other Jewish media voice even comes close to Wiesel in terms of the frequency and the vitriol of his insults to the Catholic memory of that Pope… Over the course of his career, Wiesel has told many tall tales about his alleged experiences during World War II. They can be called “true lies,” since they are meant to edify and are told with supposedly good intentions, even though they are not true. In the following pages, I shall examine closely one of these “true lies.” It has to do with his internment at Buchenwald.

Wiesel Words
Christopher Hitchens
http://www.thenatio n.com/doc/ 20010219/ hitche ns
Is there a more contemptible poseur and windbag than Elie Wiesel? I suppose there may be. But not, surely, a poseur and windbag who receives (and takes as his due) such grotesque deference on moral questions… In a propaganda tour of recent history, he asserts that in 1948, “incited by their leaders, 600,000 Palestinians left the country convinced that, once Israel was vanquished, they would be able to return home.” This claim is a cheap lie and is known by Wiesel to be a lie. It is furthermore an utterly discredited lie, and one that Israeli officialdom no longer cares to repeat.

Asia Set to Withstand Looming US Economic Recession
The Economist (Britain)
http://www.economis t.com/busine ss/displaystory. cfm?story_ id=8049652
A sharp slowdown in the American economy could be offset by the growing and largely unrecognised power of Asia’s consumers… According to conventional wisdom, American consumers have single-handedly kept the world economy chugging along, whereas cautious Europeans and Asians have preferred to save. Yet the importance of America’s role in global growth is often exaggerated. .. The real driver of the world economy has been Asia, which has accounted for over half of the world’s growth since 2001.

Bush’s Useful Idiots:
The Strange Death of Liberal America
Tony Judt — London Review of Books
http://lr b.co.uk/v28/ n18/judt01_ .html
It is one thing for the US unconditionally to underwrite Israel’s behaviour (though in neither country’s interest, as some Israeli commentators at least have remarked). But for the US to imitate Israel wholesale, to import that tiny country’s self- destructive, intemperate response to any hostility or opposition and to make it the leitmotif of American foreign policy: that is simply bizarre. Bush’s Middle Eastern policy now tracks so closely to the Israeli precedent that it is very difficult to see daylight between the two… The United States now has an Israeli-style foreign policy and America’s liberal intellectuals overwhelmingly support it.

BBC Admits Bias on Religion and Politics
Ynet (Israel)
http://www.ynetnews .com/articles/ 0,7340,L-3318582, 00.html
An internal memo, recently discovered by the British media, revealed what the BBC has been trying to hide. Senior figures admitted in a recent ‘impartiality’ summit that the BBC was guilty of promoting Left- wing views and anti-Christian sentiment. Most executives admitted that the corporation’s representation of homosexuals and ethnic minorities was unbalanced and disproportionate, and that it leaned too strongly towards political correctness, the overt promotion of multiculturalism, anti-Americanism and discrimination against the countryside.

No American Will for Empire
Niall Ferguson
http://www.tel egraph.co.uk/ opinion/main. jhtml;jsessionid =UZ3KC325R P5M5QFIQMFSFFOAVCBQ 0IV0? xml=/opinion/ 2006/10/22/ do2202.xml
…American foreign policy suffers from a similar pathology. The primacy of domestic politics, in the form of bureaucratic in-fighting and electoral manipulation, explains why the Iraq enterprise has, from the outset, been so chronically undermanned. .. In Colossus, I suggested that the European Union was a new kind of political entity: an “impire”, which expanded by consensus rather than by coercion. Now I understand what I didn’t see before: that behind the facade of military might, the United States is an impire too. It expands by importing, not exporting, people.

We’ve All Been Veiled From the Truth
Robert Fisk — The Independent (Britain)
http://www.informat ionclearinghouse .info /article15375. htm
Yes, the film O Jerusalem — loosely based on the epic history of the birth of Israel by Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins — has reached Europe (mercifully, not yet Britain) and it is everything we have come to expect of the Hollywoodisation of Europe… What I object to is the deliberate distortion of history, the twisting of the narrative of events to present Jews as the victims of the Israeli war of independence (6,000 dead) when in fact they were the victors, and the Arabs of Palestine - or at least that part of Palestine that became Israel in 1948 - as the cause of this war and the apparent victors (because the Jews of East Jerusalem were forced from their homes after the ceasefire) rather than the principal victims.

Jewish Leader Demands New German Holocaust Exhibition
Agence France Presse
http://w ww.ejpress.org/ article/11289
German rail provider Deutsche Bahn has come under fire from Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld for refusing to allow an exhibition on Jewish children sent to death camps to be shown in its stations… He was referring to Deutsche Bahn chief Hartmut Mehdorn, who has said that stations were not a suitable setting for the exhibition highlighting the plight of 11,000 Jewish children who were deported from France to the Auschwitz death camp between 1942 and 1944. “The subject is too serious. It deserves more than commuters’ divided attention as they run to catch their trains while gulping down a sandwich,” he told the German press. Mehdorn added that Deutsche Bahn’s museum in Nuremberg in southern Germany already deals with the subject.

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phone: 949-631-1490
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