alanjjohnstone
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For peace to be achieved in Northern Ireland and in South Africa, it had to be accepted that the settlers, the Ulster Protestants and the Boers/Whites were entitled to stay and the idea of removal was an impossibility.I think you forget that it was more than the US/UK who approved the creation of the state of Israel. It was the UN and the USSR also supported it and Stalin was instrumental in its creation. An Israeli born on independence day is now 70 years old. Those over 65 is now less than 10% so 90% were born within Israel.There is no good raising racial definitions such as Khazars (supposedly the origin of Ashkenazi Jews) as i often find in the comments of websites. I suspect DNA studies when it comes to determining race and nationality.We oppose the proposed state of Palestine as much as we do the existing state of Israel The Al-Masri family practically dominates the economy of the West Bank and a future Palestine would serve their interests not the workers as witnessed today
A truce !!http://www.bbc.com/news/business-44190169China and the US say they will halt imposing punitive import tariffs, putting a possible trade war "on hold".
Donald Trump’s administration will reinstate a decades-old policy that will strip federal funds from family planning clinics providing abortion or related services. The move would revive a policy first implemented by Ronald Reagan in 1988, which effectively barred reproductive health organizations that received federal grants from providing or even discussing abortion with patients. Dawn Laguens, the executive vice-president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said in a statement, “Everyone has the right to access information about their health care – including information about safe, legal abortion – and every woman deserves the best medical care and information, no matter how much money she makes or where she lives. No matter what. They won’t get it under this rule.”Doctors’ groups and abortion rights supporters say a ban on counseling women trespasses on the doctor-patient relationship. They also believe such rules would prevent patients from being able to obtain birth control or other preventive care from reproductive health care providers, and undermine access to safe, legal abortion, particularly among low-income women.The notion that you would withhold information from a patient does not uphold or preserve their dignity,” said Jessica Marcella of the National Family Planning & Reproductive Health Association, which represents family planning clinics. “I cannot imagine a scenario in which public health groups would allow this effort to go unchallenged.”https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/may/18/trump-administration-abortion-gag-rule-reagan-era
You make some points i agree with and some i don't.Yes it should have been more balanced, drawing attention to the Russian/Iranian /Hezbollah intervention on behalf of Assad. It is a geo-political war now and therefore there exists ulterior motives of the participants. However your other point i have reservations about.The civil war could not have been sustained nor maintained at the level it reached without the interference of foreign powers financing and facilitating armed opposition and arrival of foreign fighters.Our blog Socialism or Your Money Back has followed the development of the 2011 Arab Spring civil disobedience demonstrations and the consequent militarisation of those protests into what evolved as the Free Syrian Army which then attracted the support outside forces. Use its search On this forum there has been an active exchange of opinions and views on this threadhttps://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/forum/general-discussion/syria-will-west-attackIt should be noted, that it was the West who insisted as a precondition of a negotiated settlement, Assad's removal and encouraged the belief that this was imminent. But this was not so. As indicated by the recent statement of the Labour Party's Shadow Foreign Secretary popular support for Assad was underestimated and as the opposition became more sectarian, many minorities leapt from the fence towards Assad's side….better the devil you know, especially if he is secularWithout outside support i think militarily the war would have ended many years ago as did the earlier Hama uprising of 1982. For sure, that resulted in thousands of deaths but nothing on the scale of today's casualties and miseries. I do not believe that Turkey's involvement or Saudi Arabia's or Qatar's as minor. They were instrumental in escalating the civil war and thwarting any peace talks. I think within the first year or so, hopes of the overthrow of Assad and the growth of a democracy disappeared. I also think personally that the remote chance of victory over Assad would have led to the Muslim Brotherhood taking power, as it did in Egypt. I don't think we have adopted is conspiratorial but stuck to the analysis…the only war worth fighting is the class war…But as Marx said in the Communist Manifesto we should settle our accounts with our own capitalist class first…and that is perhaps why the emphasis has been overly placed upon the UK/US role.
Pope promotes humane capitalism againThe Vatican called for more regulation of markets and financial systems.Two Holy See departments drafted a document saying economic crises showed markets were not able to govern themselves and needed a strong injection of morality and ethics.It said profit for the sake of profit and not for the greater good was "illegitimate" and condemned a "reckless and amoral culture of waste" that has created oligarchies in some countries while leaving great masses of impoverished people "without any means of escape". The document attacked the "economic cannibalism" of some financial practices.The 15-page document uses technical terms such as credit stocks, subprime mortgages, high-frequency trading, credit fault swaps, derivatives, shadow banking systems, capital outflow and interbank loans to illustrate what is says is vulnerability to abuse and illegality. It also speaks of executive salaries.Saying that the material well- being of a greater part of humanity depended on markets, they need to have a strong ethical foundation in order to help all, including people who live in conditions of extreme poverty. The document, called "Considerations for an Ethical Discernment Regarding Some Aspects of the Present Economic-Financial System," was jointly prepared by the Vatican's doctrinal office and its department on human development."The recent financial crisis might have provided the occasion to develop a new economy, more attentive to ethical principles, and a new regulation of financial activities that would neutralize predatory and speculative tendencies and acknowledge the value of the actual economy," it said.https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/17/vatican-says-amoral-financial-system-needs-infusion-of-ethics-more-regulation.html
https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/brain-learning-music-language-efficient-research-baycrests-rotman-research-institute-a8356886.htmlNow i now why i am dumbIf you’ve taken the time to learn music or to speak another language, you’ve also trained your brain into being more efficient, according to a new study.
http://money.cnn.com/2018/05/17/media/media-trump-animals-immigrants/index.htmlTrump was taken out of context, apparently, by the media.He was responding to the gang MS13Regards Hitler, i found this Quro citationhttps://www.quora.com/Is-it-right-to-say-that-Hitler-valued-animals-more-than-Jews
A confession of sortsThe shadow foreign secretary said Mr Assad “There is an argument that if [President Assad] had been as overwhelmingly unpopular as the rebels told the West at the outset, then he wouldn’t be there. “I think there has been a depth and a breadth of support for Assad that has been underestimated.” Thornberry said foreign forces, including Britain, which has struck Isis targets as well as the Syrian regime's chemical weapons facilities, need to leave the country. "They're not fighting for the sake of the Syrian people," she said. Thornberry refused to denounce Russia for vetoing 11 UN Security Council resolutions, saying: "People will always block resolutions. If you look at the number of resolutions America has blocked, I mean that’s the way of politics.”https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/assad-syria-emily-thornberry-support-underestimated-jeremy-corbyn-russia-a8355241.html
i think the Party still has some members from a Jewish background, so it would be interesting to have their input.
Just to muddy the waters,http://www.dw.com/en/skripal-poisoning-germany-got-novichok-chemical-sample-from-russia-in-1990s/a-43818626"Some countries used the information about "Novichok" to produce small quantities of the nerve agent to produce countermeasures."
Hamas V. Fatahhttps://dissidentvoice.org/2018/05/hamas-and-fatah-why-the-two-groups-are-failing/Jonathan Cook is an on-site credible reporter Ghassan Khatib, a former cabinet minister in the Palestinian Authority (PA), “Neither the armed resistance of Hamas nor the diplomacy of Fatah has made any gains,” he told Al Jazeera. “They are failed governments, and the public is deeply dissatisfied.” …events are also likely to underscore how much ground they have lost to Israel – and how the pressure for new thinking is coming from the ground up, not from the leadership. “But there are strong vested interests that will try to maintain the current situation,” he said, pointing to the Palestinians’ dependence on foreign donors, Israel’s control over the transfer of income to the PA, and in turn the vast number of families relying on PA salaries. “Neither Fatah nor Hamas are in a position to advance popular struggle. They are bureaucratic governments, with structures, leaders and ideologies that militate against non-violence as a tactic.”Ahmed Al-Naouq, a youth activist in Gaza, pointed out that the focus of the protests was the demand that the refugees – a large majority of Gaza’s population – be allowed to return to the lands, now in Israel, they were expelled from in 1948.“In Gaza we are more creative and flexible in our thinking because we have no other choice. We want to break out of this prison,” he told Al Jazeera. “My father worked for many years inside Israel. We are ready to live alongside Israeli Jews in peace – they need to set aside their fears.”Diana Buttu, a former legal adviser to the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) “It is significant that there has been a steady increase in support for one state among the Palestinian public, now at around 30 per cent,” Buttu said. “That is surprising, given that today not one Palestinian party, in the West Bank and Gaza or the 48 areas [of Israel], publicly supports it…Gradually Hamas has adopted the two-state formula, plus, in its case, a long-term truce with Israel…Thrall observed that what happens in occupied East Jerusalem could prove decisive. Israel, he noted, was extremely concerned about large numbers of Palestinians there seeking Israeli citizenship and voting in city elections. If a majority starts applying for citizenship that could prove to be a deadly blow to a two-state solution, and it could happen very rapidly,” he said. That might be the point at which other Palestinians were driven into mass protests for equal rights in a single state, along the lines of a civil rights or anti-apartheid struggle.I recall many years ago, Bill Martin suggesting the very same strategy and i have never forgotten it.
The battle of words and picturesAccording to a report in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Israeli military spokesman Lt Col Jonathan Conricus, told members of the Jewish Federations of North America: “We haven’t been able to get that message out of how it is from our side, what we are defending – and the ‘winning picture’ overwhelmingly, by a knockout, unfortunately, have been the graphics from the Palestinian side. The amount of casualties has done us a tremendous disservice, unfortunately, and it has been very difficult to tell our story.”https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/may/16/un-human-rights-council-special-session-gazaAn in-depth 2013 Pew Research study found a decline in attachment to Israel among non-religious American Jews. Only 38% of Jewish-American respondents overall said the Israeli government was making a sincere effort to establish peace with the Palestinians.The massacre by Israeli soldiers of dozens of Palestinians in Gaza this week has prompted a new round of protests by progressive Jewish-American groups who object to the relocation of the US embassy to Jerusalem – and who lump the Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu administrations together as enemies of peace in the region. Groups such as IfNotNow, Jewish Voice for Peace, J Street, Jews for Racial and Economic Justice and others began to step up protest activity – marches, vigils and community meet-ups. American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and other influential US-based institutions are increasingly being taken to task by groups with younger members and different views on what it means to support the Jewish state. Ethan Miller, a spokesman for IfNotNow said, “We’re actually going to be taking action and building a movement within our communities to make sure that we’re no longer part of supporting the occupation, and our community is actively working against it…What we’ve realized is that on the one hand the American Jewish community teaches its people about the values of social justice, of looking out for your neighbor – and on the other hand there are large institutions that do a lot of work to support and uphold the occupation.“And that’s a hypocrisy that we’re no longer willing to accept. We know that we have to put our values first.”Rebecca Vilkomerson, executive director of Jewish Voice for Peace, said, “Monday I thought was one of the most disgraceful days in the history of the Israeli relationship to Palestinians, with the celebration of annexation – even as Palestinians, the vast majority of whom are refugees, were being gunned down, just for protesting their basic rights to live in dignity and freedom. The idea that this is being done in our name, or being justified in our name, is absolutely unacceptable…there’s a lot of people who feel alienated from their Jewishness, because of the way that Jewish institutions are mindlessly supporting Israel. People are finding their way back to us, and back to their Jewishness, through places like JVP.”” “For several decades, the Jewish establishment has asked American Jews to check their liberalism at Zionism’s door, and now, to their horror, they are finding that many young Jews have checked their Zionism instead,” the editor and writer Peter Beinart warned in an influential 2010https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/may/16/israel-palestine-protests-american-jewish-groups
An article on American media representations of the Gaza shootings that under-play Israels killing of civilianshttps://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/may/16/israel-palestine-us-news-headlines-mysterious-deaths
http://www.dw.com/en/syria-chemical-weapons-watchdog-confirms-chlorine-gas-attack-in-saraqeb/a-43802628Chlorine gas "was likely used as a chemical weapon" in an attack in the northern Syrian town of Saraqeb in February, the Organization for the Prevention of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), has now said.In a statement, the watchdog said:Investigators had "determined that chlorine was released from cylinders" in the Ali Talil neighborhood of Saraqeb in the northern province of Idlib. The organization found two cylinders and an analysis found both had previously contained chlorine.The organization also found an "unusual presence of chlorine in the local environment."Investigators also talked to local witnesses and patients at hospitals who had shown symptoms of exposure to chlorine.The Douma case which led to the US/UK/French missile attacks in still ongoing.
