Link to Press Release and Updates

Updated @1453 on 14 March 2009:
Mazin Qumsiyeh writes:

A good friend of ours, Tristan Anderson (US Citizen) was critically injured yesterday (Friday) and is in intensive care. Other friends there reported that the Israeli soldiers were not in any danger when they fired new kinds of projectiles and other weaponry. Tristan was actually to the side and was hit while standing and observing the attack by the Israeli soldiers on the Palestinian and International nonviolent and unarmed demonstrators. So far in the last 9 years over 6000 Palestinians and several Internationals were murdered by Israeli occupation forces (including a 23 year old American student Rachel Corrie). Of course none of the killers will be brought to justice because they are occupation soldiers “doing their duty” (to colonize, murder and oppress). This week an Israeli court acquitted an Israeli French settler after he repeatedly stabbed a Palestinian taxi driver (24 y.o. Tayseer Karaki) to death. The court claimed he was not guilty by reason of insanity despite the fact that even Israeli psychiatry experts who examined him after the incident ruled him sane and fit for trial. None of the 12-13,000 Palestinian political prisoners in Israeli jails could claim the insanity defense because after 60 years of colonial occupation, apartheid and slavery and massacres, we are all very sane!

Action: Let us test if the new US State Department is more open to human rights than the old fascist state Department. Email them your thoughts. This link will take you to the state Department comment page

http://tinyurl.com/c88y8d

by Michael Gillespie, Atlantic Free Press, 11 March 2009

Stunned and outraged, the world watched as Israeli air and ground forces ushered in the new year by slaughtering defenseless, captive Palestinians in Gaza. From the surprise air attack that caught children on their way home from school, through the repeated targeting of unarmed families, women, children, and United Nations personnel, to the last hours before Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert announced a unilateral ceasefire so the bloody massacre would not distract from news coverage of the inauguration of U.S. President Barack Obama, the wildly disproportionate violence of the Israeli military campaign revealed the hideous reality of the world’s most heinous crime, genocide.

[Read the report]

By Christopher Ketcham, Counterpunch, 12 March 2009

Scratch a counterintelligence officer in the U.S. government and they’ll tell you that Israel is not a friend to the United States. This is because Israel runs one of the most aggressive and damaging espionage networks targeting the U.S..

The fact of Israeli penetration into the country is not a subject oft-discussed in the media or in the circles of governance, due to the extreme sensitivity of the U.S.-Israel relationship coupled with the burden of the Israel lobby, which punishes legislators who dare to criticize the Jewish state. The void where the facts should sit is filled instead with the hallucinations of conspiracy theory — the kind in which, for example, agents of the Mossad, Israel’s top intelligence agency, engineer the 9/11 attacks, while 4,000 Israelis in the Twin Towers somehow all get word to escape before the planes hit. The effect, as disturbing as it is ironic, is that the less the truth is addressed, the more noxious the falsity that spreads.

[Read the report]

Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy
11 March 2009

Chicago radio host Ray Hanania and Grant Smith discuss an upcoming IRmep report about the US-Israel Free Trade Area (FTA):

1. Impact of AIPAC and the Israeli government’s acquisition of business confidential information provided by concerned US industries to the US Trade Representative during negotiations;

2. Ongoing commercial espionage in weapons systems design, pharmaceutical clinical dossiers, and other intellectual property;

3. Why the agreement is the only bilateral FTA producing multi-billion dollar yearly deficits now totaling $71 billion and negative jobs impact of 126,000 manufacturing related jobs;

4. Measures the Obama administration should take as it begins reevaluating FTAs against the new trade agenda.

The program is now available for download as an .mp3 audio file.

Basic Cable Personality Clash Skirmish ’09

Related:
David Kurtz: Stop Whining!

Breaking: Jim Cramer on The Daily Show Thursday!

Updated @1622 on 11 March 2009:

Julie Satow: Jim Cramer Shorting Stocks, Manipulating Markets, Saying The SEC Doesn’t Understand