The Civic Platform - A Political Journal of Ideas and Analysis » 2008

ISRAELI MINISTER WARNS OF ‘BIGGER HOLOCAUST’

By Adam Entous and Joseph Nasr Reuters
JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Deputy Israeli Defence Minister Matan Vilnai said on Friday the Palestinians would bring on themselves what he called a “bigger holocaust” by stepping up rocket attacks on Israel from the Gaza Strip.
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Gigantic sea monster uncovered

OSLO — The fossil of a 15 metre long “sea monster” found in Arctic Norway was the biggest of its kind known to science with dagger-like teeth in a mouth large enough to bite a small car, researchers said on Wednesday.

Computer spying unconstitutional

BERLIN - Germany’s highest court says that security services cannot use virus-like software or similar tactics to spy on the computer hard drives of suspected criminals and terrorists.

The Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe ruled Wednesday that using such software to spy violates the country’s constitutional protections and freedoms.

Germany’s Interior Ministry had hoped to use the tactic as part of its arsenal to investigate suspected terrorist and mafia activity.

Source.

Israeli high court upholds former president’s plea deal [vaunted Israeli justice]

JERUSALEM — Israel’s highest court upheld a much-criticized plea bargain Tuesday that allowed former president Moshe Katsav to escape rape charges and a possible prison term.

Who Are the Kikuyu? And why do Kenya’s other tribes resent them so much?

CENTRAL PROVINCE, Kenya—On the hillsides, tea is still being picked; in the valleys, women still weed rows of beans, feet stained ocher by the soil; and in downtown Nyeri, the matatu taxi vans still honk by custom. The only immediate hint that something is amiss is to be found on the veranda of the Outspan Hotel. Despite boasting one of Africa’s most stunning views—Mount Kenya stretches serenely on the far side of the plains—the Outspan is strangely quiet these days; most of its tourists have fled.

The World’s Most Wanted [Chomsky]

On Feb. 13, Imad Moughniyeh, a senior commander of Hezbollah, was assassinated in Damascus. “The world is a better place without this man in it,” State Department spokesperson Sean McCormack said: “one way or the other he was brought to justice.” Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell added that Moughniyeh has been “responsible for more deaths of Americans and Israelis than any other terrorist with the exception of Osama bin Laden.”

Germar’s new address

GERMAR RUDOLF

SCHLOSS 1

72108 ROTTENBURG

DEUTSCHLAND GERMANY

Latvia bans SS veterans’ march

Some men fought for a better Europe.

RIGA, February 26 (RIA Novosti) -Latvian authorities have banned a street march planned by a nationalist organization for March 16 to commemorate Latvians who fought for Nazi forces in WWII, Riga parliament said on Tuesday.

James Edwards Reports from American Renaissance

This past weekend my wife and I had the privilege of attending Jared Taylor’s 2008 American Renaissance Conference in Herndon, Virginia. Taking full advantage of having a few days away from home, we decided to leave Memphis early in the evening on Wednesday and drive straight through the night. It was an 850 mile, twelve-hour journey, but one that I purposefully wanted to take (as opposed to flying) because it would allow me the honor of driving through the Commonwealth of Virginia.

Finkelstein, a Victim of the Israel Lobby, Denies That It Has Power

Last fall, Norman Finkelstein lost his job at DePaul because of the Israel lobby. As he put it in his only statement on the matter:

The Town Cocaine Built [notice that the US asserts imperial jurisdiction everywhere]

At first glance, Bluefields in Nicaragua looks like any other rum-soaked, Rastafarian-packed, hammock-infested Caribbean paradise. But Bluefields has a secret.

Feminism and the English Language

How can I teach my students to write decently when the English language has become a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Academic-Industrial Complex? Our language used to belong to all its speakers and readers and writers. But in the 1970s and ’80s, arrogant ideologues began recasting English into heavy artillery to defend the borders of the New Feminist state. In consequence we have all got used to sentences where puffed-up words like “chairperson” and “humankind” strut and preen, where he-or-she’s keep bashing into surrounding phrases like bumper cars and related deformities blossom like blisters; they are all markers of an epoch-making victory of propaganda over common sense.

No, the surge is not a success

Why was President Bush’s decision a year ago to send another 30,000 troops to Iraq called the “surge”? I don’t know who invented this label, but the word surge evokes images of the sea: a wave that sweeps in, and then sweeps back out again. The second part was crucial. What made the surge different from your ordinary troop deployment was that it was temporary. In fact, the surge was presented as part of a larger plan for troop withdrawal. It was also, implicitly, part of a deal between Bush and the majority of Americans who want out. The deal was: Just let me have a few more soldiers to get Baghdad under control, and then everybody, or almost everybody, can pack up and come home.

The Sound and the Führer

Among the many acid pleasures of the work of Roberto Bolaño, who died at 50 in 2003, is his idea that culture, in particular literary culture, is a whore. In the face of political repression, upheaval and danger, writers continue to swoon over the written word, and this, for Bolaño, is the source both of nobility and of pitch-black humor. In his novel “The Savage Detectives,” two avid young Latino poets never lose faith in their rarefied art no matter the vicissitudes of life, age and politics. If they are sometimes ridiculous, they are always heroic. But what can it mean, he asks us and himself, in his dark, extraordinary, stinging novella “By Night in Chile,” that the intellectual elite can write poetry, paint and discuss the finer points of avant-garde theater as the junta tortures people in basements? The word has no national loyalty, no fundamental political bent; it’s a genie that can be summoned by any would-be master. Part of Bolaño’s genius is to ask, via ironies so sharp you can cut your hands on his pages, if we perhaps find a too-easy comfort in art, if we use it as anesthetic, excuse and hide-out in a world that is very busy doing very real things to very real human beings. Is it courageous to read Plato during a military coup or is it something else?

Leaderless Resistance by Louis Beam

The concept of leaderless resistance was proposed by Col. Ulius Louis Amoss, who was the founder of International Service of Information Incorporated, located in Baltimore, Maryland. Col. Amoss died more than 15 years ago, but during his life he was a tireless opponent of Communism, as well as a skilled intelligence officer.

MI6 SCRAPPED BALKANS ASSASSINATION PLAN

The British, like their Israeli partners in crime, have always been very good at “humanitarian” killings, done in the name of “human rights,” of course…aaah the “Perfidious Albion.”

LONDON (Reuters) - An officer of MI6 floated a plan in 1993 to assassinate a radical Serbian nationalist but the idea was immediately squashed, the inquest into Princess Diana’s death was told on Tuesday.
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