Kuffar....... Israel can't hide under a bushel ferom these great writers.

The very best correspondents and authors are:

Robert Fisk

John Pilger

Naom Chomsky

Ilan Pappe

Half a world away from the Islamic Republic of Iran, officials at the International Criminal Court in The Hague are also considering the possibility of opening an investigation of Israeli actions during the war in Gaza.

Last month Katrin Bennhold reported on The Lede’s sib-blog DealBook that the international court was “looking into a request by the Palestinian Authority” to investigate Israeli actions during the war in Gaza. Soon after that, Marlise Simons of The New York Times quoted Béatrice Le Fraper, an aide to the international court’s chief prosecutor, saying that the prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, “has agreed to explore if he could have jurisdiction in the case.” Still, as Ms. Simons reported, “accepting jurisdiction would not automatically set off a criminal investigation.”

This week, though, Peter Beaumont of The Guardian reported that the court “is considering whether the Palestinian Authority is ‘enough like a state’ for it to bring a case” and “is examining every international agreement signed by the P.A. to decide whether it behaves — and is regarded by others — as operating like a state.”

Why Avigdor Lieberman is the Worst Thing That Could Happen to the Middle East

By Robert Fisk

Only days after they were groaning with fury at the Israeli lobby's success in hounding the outspoken Charles Freeman away from his proposed intelligence job for President Obama, the Arabs now have to contend with an Israeli Foreign Minister whose - let us speak frankly - racist comments about Palestinian loyalty tests have brought into the new Netanyahu cabinet one of the most unpleasant politicians in the Middle East.

The fact is that the Israeli Prime Minister-to-be has made it perfectly clear there will be no two-state solution; and he has planted a tree on Golan to show the Syrians they will not get it back. And now he's brought into the cabinet a man who sees even the Arabs of Israel as second-class citizens.

Lieberman's first visit to Washington will be a gem. AIPAC – posing as an Israeli lobby when in fact it works for the Likudists – will fight for him and Lady Hillary will have to greet him warmly at the State Department. Who knows, he might even suggest to her that she imposes a loyalty test for American minorities as well – which would mean demanding an oath of faithfulness from Barack himself. The horizon goes on forever.

In Egypt, Avigdor Lieberman will have a tough time. Hosni Mubarak can be a soft touch for the Americans but it was Lieberman who, complaining that the Egyptian President should visit Israel or "go to hell", deeply offended a man who has taken great risks in maintaining his country's peace with the Israeli state.

Egyptians have been outraged to read in their newspapers that Lieberman has talked of drowning Palestinians in the Dead Sea or executing Israeli Palestinians who talked to Hamas. Last night, a supporter of Lieberman appeared on Al Jazeera television to describe Hamas as "an anti-Semitic, barbarous organisation" – even though Israeli army officers spoke openly with this supposedly "barbarous" group both before and after the Oslo agreement.

But the growth of such an extremist administration in Israel and the hopeless response of the Obama administration to the so-called supporters of Israel who destroyed Freeman's career, can only be dangerous news for the Middle East. The Jeddah-based Arab News called the Freeman disaster "a grave defeat for US foreign policy". But while uttering all the usual platitudes, the Arab press has been playing up the pusillanimous remarks of US press secretary Robert Gibbs when asked why Obama was "standing mute" in the Freeman affair. "I've watched with great interest how people perceive different things about our policy and during the campaign about whether we were too close to one group or too close to the other. So I don't give a lot of thought to those." Asked for "straight answers", Gibbs said: "I gave you as straight a one as I can get."

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embarrassment with Zhou En-Lai on the famous trip to China. Twenty years later, as an Arabic speaker, he was interpreting George H.W. Bush—a fellow Yaleman and blueblood who fixed his name forever as “Chas”—to King Fahd as ambassador to Saudi Arabia during the Gulf War. Freeman is a throwback. He celebrates his Puritan roots and the idea of wide historical reading for its own sake. He is also completely dedicated. He lost his third son in India because of poor medical treatment. He lost a 30-year marriage in Saudi Arabia during the long hours of the Gulf War.

“Frankly I was hoping to see him become a secretary of state,” says Edward Kane, a former CIA official who heads the Cosmos Club’s program on foreign affairs.

Freeman’s position on the Middle East made such ambitions pointless. In fact, he had resisted being sent to the region in the 1980s because of the “totalitarian” character of debate over American policies there—the lobby’s “virtual hammerlock on American foreign policy,” as he told an interviewer in the mid-’90s. He went on bluntly:

The American Jewish community, which had always been extremely suspicious of people who trafficked with the Arabs … became increasingly hostile to Arabists in the State Department. It essentially became difficult, if not impossible, for Foreign Service officers dealing with the Arab world, or with the Middle East generally, to take anything other than a stance that was assertively loyal to causes espoused by the Israelis… By the ’80s, as AIPAC … achieved the transcendent influence in the Congress that it did, there was an atmosphere of intimidation, worthy of the McCarthy era, in many respects, imposed on Arabists.

Following his retirement from government in 1995, Freeman took over from George McGovern as head of the Middle East Policy Council, a think tank that gets Saudi support and seeks to educate Americans about the Arab and Muslim world.

I asked him whether he is an Arabist. “What is an Arabist?” he countered. “Maybe it’s just someone who speaks Arabic. Someone who understands the Arabs. Obviously, that’s a bad thing. We shouldn’t understand the Arabs. We might actually think they have justice on their side. We might want to negotiate with them rather than clobber them.”

continued

He continued:

I believe that the inability of the American public to discuss, or the government to consider, any option for U.S. policies in the Middle East opposed by the ruling faction in Israeli politics has allowed that faction to adopt and sustain policies that ultimately threaten the existence of the state of Israel. It is not permitted for anyone in the United States to say so.

Freeman’s ability to say so to a wide audience was electrifying and unique. His charge was soon mentioned in the chief boroughs of liberal opinion, National Public Radio, the Washington Post, and the New York Times. Time’s Joe Klein called his exit “an assassination,” and The Atlantic’s Andrew Sullivan said it was a “scalping.” Unlike countless other incidents in which American policy on the Middle East has been compromised behind closed doors, this time the Israel lobby was seen fleeing the scene of the crime.

The drama began on Feb. 19, when the Foreign Policy blog reported that Blair, a retired Navy admiral, was planning to name Freeman to chair the National Intelligence Council, which sorts out the reports of the many intelligence agencies and presents them to the White House. In 2007, one of its assessments, concluding that Iran had halted its nuclear-weapons program following the invasion of Iraq, chilled the neoconservative drive to attack Iran. “No one has ever made the case that it’s a primary policy-making role,” says William Quandt, the longtime expert on the Middle East.

Freeman is hardly a cipher. An outspoken and formidable thinker firmly in the realist camp, he spent four decades in the State Department marked by his poise in the presence of heads of state. In 1972, at age 29, having mastered Mandarin, he was saving Richard Nixon, whom he regarded as “totally lacking in personal grace, with no sense of the proper distance to keep in human relations,” from embarrassment with Zhou En-Lai on the famo.......................................

Freeman's Fight

The Israel Lobby Gets Its Man-And Tips Its Hand.

By Philip Weiss

Charles Freeman Jr.'s withdrawal of his acceptance of a high-level intelligence position in the Obama administration was a national-security drama more riveting than an episode of "24." The moral was clear: even a president who owes his job to a progressive movement in American politics could not support a longtime public servant who had made the mistake of criticizing Israel. Fierce advocates of the Jewish state, notably Sens. Chuck Schumer and Joe Lieberman and Reps. Eric Cantor and Steve Israel, played important roles in Freeman’s exit, while present and former officials of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee flitted in and out of the wings.
The message to all office-seekers is obvious. “They want to kill the chicken to scare the monkeys. They want other people to be intimidated,” Freeman told The American Conservative just before he withdrew his name to be chairman of the National Intelligence Council. He went on, “If the administration does not stick with me, then it’s destroying the argument that the Israel lobby is only a mythic entity and does not control the public space. … It will show the world that it is not able to exercise independent thinking on these issues.”

If there was encouraging news in the administration’s collapse, there it was. When Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair announced Freeman’s withdrawal late on the afternoon of March 10, the matter was on center stage, in plain sight of what Freeman calls “the American political class.”

Three hours later, Freeman issued a statement directly accusing the Israel lobby of “doing widening damage to the national security of the United States.” He wrote that its tactics “plumb the depths of dishonor and indecency and include character assassination, selective misquotation, the willful distortion of the record, the fabrication of falsehoods, and an utter disregard for the truth.” He continued:

The Israeli GENOCIDE in GAZA has parallels with former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic's war crimes, and then there was a trial in The Hague, Netherlands. We hope to eventually take Israel down that road.

It is very interesting to look back on Milosevic and compare him to Nethanyu. Substitute ISRAEL for Kosovo in the UN text.

It is alleged that the operations targeting the PALESTINIANS (Kosovo Albanians) were undertaken with the objective of expelling a substantial portion of the PALESTINIAN (Kosovo Albanian) population from PALESTINE (Kosovo) in an effort to ensure continued Serbian control over the province. The Indictment goes on to describe a series of well-planned and coordinated operations undertaken by the forces of the IDF (FRY) and US (Serbia).