Bethlehem: Beyond the Christmas Story

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Image by Arizona Parrot via Flickr

Day of Discovery

Join us on a fascinating tour of the city of Bethlehem, the birthplace of Christ. Hosts Jimmy DeYoung and Bonnie Keen will lead you on a journey to key locations throughout Bethlehem—from Manger Square to the Shepherds’ Fields. Gain a better understanding of the place where Christmas began and the impact that event still has on Bethlehem today.

What Is Happening to Muslims Will Happen to the Rest of Us by Chris Hedges

by Chris Hedges
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
Truthdig
October 1, 2012

Image by Tim Pearce, Los Gatos via Flickr

The decision by the European Court of Human Rights last week to refuse to block the extradition of the radical Muslim cleric Abu Hamza al-Masri and four others to the United States on terrorism charges removes one of the last external checks on our emerging gulag state.

Masri and the four others, all held in British jails, will soon join hundreds of other Muslims tried in Article III federal courts in the United States over the last decade. Fair trials are unlikely. A disturbing pattern of gross infringements on basic civil liberties, put in place in the name of national security, has poisoned our legal system. These infringements include intrusive surveillance, vague material support charges, the use of prolonged pretrial solitary confinement, classified evidence that the accused cannot review, and the use of political activities, normally protected under the First Amendment, to demonstrate mind-set and intent.

Debating Taboos: Is there a double standard with anti-Semitism?

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Image by VvVAmobile via Flickr

Jun 21, 2012 by AAIUSA

Is there a double standard in the response to anti-Semitism against Arab Americans compared with the response to anti-Semitism directed against American Jews? AAI President Jim Zogby joined renowned Arab American author and professor Jack Shaheen to debate the question with Josef Olmert, adjunct professor at the University of South Carolina, and Kenneth Marcus of the Brandeis Center for Human Rights. The debate was moderated by Patrick Sloyan, former Newsday reporter and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Journalism.

Sri Lankan Buddhists Burn Muslim Flag by Suren Surendiran

by Suren Surendiran
Featured Writer
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http://www.tamilsforum.com
28 April 2012

Issued for immediate release

PRESS STATEMENT
28 April 2012

Global Tamil Forum stands in solidarity with the Muslims in Sri Lanka

Global Tamil Forum (GTF) strongly condemns the Sri Lankan Government’s complicity in the orders for the removal of the Muslim mosque in Dambulla, central Sri Lanka. GTF is profoundly disturbed by the attacks on the mosque by a minority, yet in their thousands as reported, of extremist Sri Lankan Buddhists led by monks on 20 April 2012, calling for its destruction claiming it was constructed illegally.

First They Come For the Muslims by Chris Hedges

by Chris Hedges
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
Truthdig
April 16, 2012

Image by Daquella manera via Flickr

Tarek Mehanna, a U.S. citizen, was sentenced Thursday in Worcester, Mass., to 17½ years in prison. It was another of the tawdry show trials held against Muslim activists since 9/11 as a result of the government’s criminalization of what people say and believe. These trials, where secrecy rules permit federal lawyers to prosecute people on “evidence” the defendants are not allowed to examine, are the harbinger of a corporate totalitarian state in which any form of dissent can be declared illegal. What the government did to Mehanna, and what it has done to hundreds of other innocent Muslims in this country over the last decade, it will eventually do to the rest of us.

The destruction of Libya by William Blum

by William Blum
Featured Writer
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www.killinghope.org
Nov. 1, 2011

It doesn’t matter to them if it’s untrue. It’s a higher truth.

“We came, we saw, he died.”
— US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton,
giggling, as she spoke of the depraved murder of Moammar Gaddafi

Imagine Osama bin Laden or some other Islamic leader speaking of 9-11: “We came, we saw, 3,000 died … ha- ha.”

Clinton and her partners-in-crime in NATO can also have a good laugh at how they deceived the world. The destruction of Libya, the reduction of a modern welfare state to piles of rubble, to ghost towns, the murder of thousands …

Is Washington Using Famine in the Horn of Africa to Embark on Yet Another Illegal War? by Finian Cunningham

by Finian Cunningham
Featured Writer
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East Africa
19 October 2011

US Drones Coordinate Air Power For Kenyan Ground Invasion of Somalia

The large troop deployment by Kenya into Somali territory is taking on the form of a full-scale invasion, rather than a temporary incursion as initially reported.

What is also emerging – but largely unreported – is that the US appears to be providing coordinated aerial firepower to help the advance of the Kenyan military against Al Shabab Islamic militants who have held power in the southern Somali territory.

Ben Bella: Revolutionary Internationalist by Gaither Stewart

by Gaither Stewart
Featured Writer
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crossposted at The Greanville Post
September 24, 2011
Rome, Italy

Image via Wikipedia

ARCHIVES: In Remembrance of the Algerian Struggle for Independence

Editors Note: With the US and its NATO accomplices once again bent on “repackaging” the Arab Maghreb and the Gulf region via overt and covert bloody interventions in Iraq, Libya, Bahrain, Egypt, Tunisia, Syria, and other nations, apparently a new age of colonialism  has arrived.

Of course, chiefly for the benefit of the perennially bamboozled American public, the pretense that we’re doing this to secure peace, freedom, and democracy in the region will likely continue indefinitely.

The sad legacy of 9/11 is that the assholes, on each side, won by Chris Hedges

by Chris Hedges
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
Truthdig
Sept. 10, 2011

Image by Smeerch via Flickr

I arrived in Times Square around 9:30 on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. A large crowd was transfixed by the huge Jumbotron screens. Billows of smoke could be seen on the screens above us, pouring out of the two World Trade towers. Two planes, I was told by people in the crowd, had plowed into the towers. I walked quickly into the New York Times newsroom at 229 W. 43rd St., grabbed a handful of reporter’s notebooks, slipped my NYPD press card, which would let me through police roadblocks, around my neck, and started down the West Side Highway to the World Trade Center.

Paul Thompson: 9/11-A mind-boggling journey + Sibel Edmonds: 9/11, Ron Paul, Israel and more

Updated: Sept. 17, 2011; added Part 3. Sept. 6, 2011; added Part 2 of the interview

by Peter B. Collins and Sibel Edmonds
Featured Writer
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Originally published by Boiling Frogs Post
Sept. 1, 2011

Image by Vitamin-K via Flickr

This is Part I of our three-part one-of-a-kind interview series with author and researcher Paul Thompson. For additional background information please visit the complete 9/11 Timeline Investigative Project at HistoryCommons.Org and Richard Clarke’s interview by John Duffy and Ray Nowosielski at SecrecyKills.Com.

The US Dictatorship and its White House Servant ‘President’ by Finian Cunningham

by Finian Cunningham
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
1 August, 2011

Image by SS&SS via Flickr

If there is one thing that the office of President Barack Obama demonstrates it is that democracy does not exist in the United States. This may seem a rather outlandish statement. For many people, the fact that the 44th president is the first black man to preside over the White House – with its American colonial-style architecture – is a tribute to the triumph of US democracy.

Fundamentalism Kills by Chris Hedges

Image by Dandelion Salad via Flickr

by Chris Hedges
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
Truthdig
July 26, 2011

The gravest threat we face from terrorism, as the killings in Norway by Anders Behring Breivik underscore, comes not from the Islamic world but the radical Christian right and the secular fundamentalists who propagate the bigoted, hateful caricatures of observant Muslims and those defined as our internal enemies. The caricature and fear are spread as diligently by the Christian right as they are by atheists such as Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens.

Obama Reaction To Norway Massacre Betrays US “War on Terror” Fundamentalism by Finian Cunningham

by Finian Cunningham
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
July 23, 2011

Image by OhaIt via Flickr

Within hours of Norway’s deadly bomb and gun attacks claiming at least 91 victims it has become clear that the horror was perpetrated by a Norwegian loner with rightwing Christian fundamentalist affiliations.

Yet President Barack Obama reacted immediately to the news of the atrocity to insinuate an Islamic connection and to justify America’s war on terror.

No Justice in Kafka’s America by Chris Hedges

by Chris Hedges
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
Truthdig
June 13, 2011

Image by micmol  via Flickr

In Franz Kafka’s short story “Before the Law“ a tireless supplicant spends his life praying for admittance into the courts of justice. He sits outside the law court for days, months and years. He makes many attempts to be admitted. He sacrifices everything he owns to sway or bribe the stern doorkeeper. He ages, grows feeble and finally childish. He is told as he nears death that the entrance was constructed solely for him and it will now be closed.

Ralph Nader: Maybe Israel Should Give Aid to Us (2010)

photo by Rusty Stewart
Attribution Noncommercial
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Ralph Nader presents the Keynote Speech at the ADC National, June 5th 2010.

ADC National
http://blip.tv