Pacific Free Press was launched in March 2007 by Dutch-Canadian Richard
Kastelein of V.O.F. Expathos, in the Netherlands along with Chris Cook- CFUV radio journalist and Editor in Chief of Pacific Free Press. Cook is based in , Victoria, British Columbia.
The mission of Pacific Free Press is simple: to dig out nuggets of truth from
the slag-heap of lies, ignorance and witless diversion that has buried
public discourse today. Pacific Free Press provides a new venue for
disseminating hard news and insightful, fact-based analysis of the
harsh realities too often ignored or distorted by the mainstream press.
“And they bend their tongues like their bow for lies: but they are not valiant for the truth upon the earth; for they proceed from evil to evil, and they know not me, saith the Lord. … shall not my soul be avenged on such a nation as this?” (Jeremiah 9:3, 5:29)
Nothing in the past 60 years revealed the true face of Israel to the world at large (and perhaps to the Lord above) as its illegal invasion of Lebanon. Never before has the Israeli government allowed the world to witness the depth of its brutal aggression as it defied international law with its collective punishment of the innocent. At no time in the past has Israel lost control of the flow of information allowed into or out of Israel and the occupied territories until it abandoned its borders and invaded Lebanon. That mistake ripped away the veil of “victim hood” that the Israeli propaganda machine had constructed around the tiny, beleaguered state beset with fanatics intent on erasing it “from the map” and suicide bombers that threatened death in the streets.
For a full month the world watched as Israel let loose the enormous power of its military might on small towns, on cities, on roads and bridges, on electric power plants and water supply stations, on ports and ships, on oil tanks and beaches, and on the innocent who fled by car, truck, and foot. The condemnation from the world communities appeared universal, until one turned to America. Here our representatives crawled before AIPAC begging them to pen a resolution that would show our absolute commitment to the devastation being wrought on the Lebanese.
Fortunately, our representatives do not represent the American people any more than our main stream media represents what the people of the United States feel regarding the state without mercy, the reprehensible state of Israel. Indeed, the Jewish state of Israel does not represent the Jews of America. Listen to what Jews with a conscience say to the state of Israel: “There is no Jewish safety, nor claims to justice, reason, or equity, beyond Jewish commitment to the unconditional safety and liberation of the peoples of Palestine, Lebanon and the other Arab and Muslim countries currently under attack by Israel, the U.S. and its allies.” Real Jews, those committed to the morals that give strength to Judaism, demand of Israel that “(1) it stop its brutal siege on Gaza and on Lebanon and call for an unconditional cease fire; (2) it stop expansion of the Israeli Wall of Separation, dismantle the completed sections, and completely withdraw from Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem; (3) the United States support the United Nations resolutions demanding that Israel uphold international law and support the sanctions against Israel necessary to enforce these resolutions; (4) the United States end military and economic aid to Israel; (5) that Israel support reparations for the Palestinian and Lebanese people for the death and destruction they have suffered and for the aid towards the rebuilding of their countries.” (Petition for U.S. Jewish Solidarity with Muslims and Arab Peoples).
Once the state of Israel realized that its mask of “victim hood”
had been lifted and that the world had turned against its atrocities,
it quickly accepted intervention by the UN. But its belligerence and
defiance of the United Nations and international law continues, most
brutally in the millions of unexploded cluster bombs left for the
displaced people of Lebanon when they returned home and with the ever
present war planes that invade Lebanese air space daily. Now the TV
cameras are gone. The world no longer watches the wanton slaughter. Yet
Israel has not abandoned its slaughter in Palestine; it’s now into the
fourth month, hidden behind the prison walls erected by Israel to keep
the cameras out and the people in.
No one sees inside Gaza; no TV anchor man or woman goes to Gaza
to show the world what true terror is; nothing seeps through the locked
gates that strangle the people inside; nothing reveals to the outside
world that Israel and the U.S. are systematically and silently starving
over a million people who suffer intense malnutrition; no statistics
reveal the rate of unemployment that devastates a people unable to send
its produce out or bring goods in; no information tells the world that
Israel prevents medical supplies from reaching the people, that
hospitals operate on generators only, that medical staff have been
murdered, that access to care has been curbed; no one explains to the
world the crippling impact this imprisonment has on the minds and souls
of children who live in constant fear beneath the boots of an occupying
army; no one talks about this calculated genocide behind walls as
impenetrable as those at Auschwitz-Birkenau. No one is witness to this
nation without mercy.
Inside Palestine there is a group that monitors the abominations
committed on behalf of the Jewish state by the IDF, the Palestine
Center for Human Rights. Consider just a handful of the statistics they
have gathered that are relevant to the siege of Gaza. For the past
four months the state of Israel has wrecked havoc on the people of Gaza
killing over 320, roughly one third the number Israel slaughtered in
Lebanon, including about 60 children, an abomination in any language.
Two Israeli soldiers have been killed. As this sixth year of the
Israeli occupation of Palestine comes to an end, the IDF killed 3859
Palestinians, 3069 of them civilians (79%). In this last year, Israel
killed 504 Palestinians, 398 civilians and 93 children (23%). In
targeted killings, Israeli language for assassinations, 376 died, 209
civilians not targeted, including 71 children. Roughly 80% of those
killed by Israelis are civilians (PCHR Reports).
Why mention such statistics: Americans never see them, their
Congress is immune to them, and the United Nations is powerless to act
since the United States, the power behind Israel, vetoes any action
raised against this state that has no mercy. I mention these facts for
two reasons, to mark the most recent and evident atrocity executed by
the state of Israel against the people of Palestine, especially those
trapped in the prison of Gaza, and to protest the absence of debate
about the perils to the United States brought about by our Congress and
the Executive branch’s absolute support for the state of Israel as it
carries out untold illegal acts of collective punishment on the people
of Palestine.
Let’s put it plainly: Israel is the real “axis of evil,” the
primary cause that has brought forth on the United States the terror it
fears, as the 9/11 Commission understood but did not report. This
government of the Bush administration, working with a Congress that
capitulates to the desires of the American Israeli Political Action
Committee, not only supports but encourages the outrages committed by
this state without mercy. Perhaps we should not be surprised by this,
after all this Congress on September 28th passed the Military
Commissions Act which, like the laws existing in Israel, “codifies
racial and political discrimination, legalizes kidnaping and torture of
those the government deems its political enemies, and eliminates habeas
corpus – the ancient precept that prevents the police from arresting
and holding without cause – a basic protection common to all modern
legal systems, and one that dates to the Magna Carta.” (“America’s
Nuremberg Laws,” Ted Rall, Commondreams 10/12/06)
It is precisely because this government supports an apartheid
state that employs draconian and manifestly illegal laws in the areas
it occupies that has turned the Arab countries of the mid-east and,
with an ever growing hostility to America’s arrogant hypocrisy in its
support of Israel, the nation states of the EU and Asia against the
United States.
What is the true nature of this state of Israel that commands the allegiance of the American people?
It is a state without mercy, a state without morals, a state premised on racism, a state built on deception and lies,
*a state defiant of international law, the Universal Declaration
of Human Rights, and the Geneva Conventions that apply to occupying
powers,
*a state, unlike North Korea or Iran, the other identified Axis
of Evil states, that has invaded neighboring states and occupies them,
*a state, unlike all nations in the mid-east, that possesses
weapons of mass destruction including hundreds of nuclear weapons and
refuses to sign the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty,
*a state that uses cluster bombs and internationally banned
weapons of warfare, not only against the innocent people of Lebanon,
but the defenseless people of Palestine,
*a state that proclaims itself above the law as it executes
individuals without arrest, without charges brought, without counsel,
without habeas corpus and trial by jury,
*a state that imprisons over 10,000 Palestinians without charge and without due process of law,
*a state that tortures those it imprisons,
*a state that constructs a wall, in defiance of the International
Court of Justice and the United Nations, that encircles the
Palestinians with full intention of decimating their economy and hence
their livelihood as well as their chance to create a state of their
own, while inflicting a psychological humiliation that is inhumane and
in defiance of every principle of the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights,
*a state that has systematically confiscated, appropriated,
annexed, and assimilated virtually all land belonging to the
Palestinians in a 60 year period of time leaving them approximately 14%
of their original land making it the greatest visible land theft known
to human kind in our day,
*a state whose laws protect a group that belongs to a religion
and denies equality of citizenship to all others including the
indigenous people of the land,
*a state that has defied more than 160 UNGA and 39 UNSC
Resolutions demanding it act as a civilized state abiding by
international law and protocol,
*a state that will not tolerate interference by the UN in its calculated genocide of the Palestinian people,
*a state that, through its Zionist supporters in America,
particularly AIPAC, influences U.S. policy in the mid-east that has
resulted in the unlawful invasion of Iraq and irrational economic and
political procedures against Syria and Iran,
*a state that has convinced our Congress that it provide billions
of dollars to ensure that the state of Israel continues this genocide
of the Palestinian people,
*a state that proclaims itself a democracy but is not and, with
malicious intent, confiscates the money belonging to a democratically
elected government in Palestine and arrests their representatives
without charge or trial,
*a state that proclaims peace but creates conditions that prevent peace,
*a state that, like the U.S. under Bush, has reached the nadir of
the civilized state, a return to lawless barbarism inflicted on the
weak by the strong, the imposition of the will of the few on the many,
*and, finally, in all brazen hypocrisy, a state that cries to the
world that it is the victim of unspeakable cruelty and in constant
peril of obliteration by forces within and without. And we wonder why
the U.S. is castigated throughout the world when it supports this rogue
state, this state without mercy.
Consider what Israel has done to the Palestinians. It has
disfranchised a people in full defiance of international law when, in
1967, the Israeli government declared and treated inhabitants of
occupied Palestine as non-citizens and foreign residents. Residents
absent during this time period, approximately 250,000, were not allowed
to return. The IDF withdrew IDs from thousands of Palestinians when
their visas expired thus disfranchising them making them permanent
residents but not citizens.”Today, more than half of the eight million
or so Palestinians are considered to be de jure stateless persons.” The
state of Israel created these conditions by issuing three laws: the
Absentees’ Property Law, the Law of Return (that granted citizenship to
Jews from anywhere in the world and denied Palestinians right of
return), and the Israel Citizenship Law. These laws “nullified the
rights of the displaced non-Jewish population.” Yet, Article 15 of the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 (to which Israel is a
signatory) declares that “everyone has the right to a nationality.”
These actions have resulted in devastating conditions for Palestinians
both economically and psychologically. (Abbas Shiblak, “Palestine
Displacement”). Israel as an occupying power acted in defiance of
international law.
From its very founding the state of Israel contained the seeds of
apartheid. “The Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel
– known as ‘Israel’s Declaration of Independence – does not declare
Israel an independent State, nor does it declare Israel a sovereign
State, it rather declares Israel a Jewish State ... the Jewish State in
the political Zionist sense of the term was to be an apartheid state.”
(Uri Davis, Apartheid Israel). Dr. Davis refers particularly to the
illegalities committed by Israel against the Palestinians by noting the
acts of “ethnic cleansing of the majority of the native indigenous
Palestinian Arab people from the territories that came under the
control of the Israeli army and razing some 400 Palestinian rural and
urban localities to the ground ...” and the plantation of Jewish
settlements and subsequent annexation by the State in “violation of
both the UN Charter and of international law.” He further stipulates
that “Israeli claims to west Jerusalem, Safad or Jaffa ... are as
thoroughly invalid as Israeli claims to East Jerusalem, Hebron or Gaza
...” In short, the present state of Israel as proclaimed by its current
government does not legally exist and has not been legally sanctioned
by the international community.
Anyone with eyes to see traveling from West Jerusalem to East
Jerusalem cannot help but grasp the intentional and cynically
calculated manner by which the Israeli state destroys the mental and
physical well being of the Palestinian people. Herded like cattle,
branded with ID cards, deprived of normal conveyance, forced to stand
in long lines in intense heat or freezing cold, humiliated by teenagers
dressed in uniforms and wielding an arrogant and insulting tongue, the
people move back and forth between the squalor of their cramped homes
and the splendor of the new Jerusalem, constructed in good measure with
American tax payer money. Now, the people of Gaza, after four months of
siege, unable to act in their own behalf since the Israeli military
controls all access and egress from this sliver of land, one of the
most congested in the world, await the inevitable – a slow agonizing
journey into malnutrition, disease, depression and death.
Consider, finally, what must be considered the two most glaring
acts of torture perpetrated by the Israelis on both the inhabitants of
the West Bank and Gaza: the Walls that imprison them and the
demolitions that eradicate their homes. Under Sharon and Olmert, the
Jewish state has moved to systematically incarcerate the entire
population, to imprison them collectively against international law and
the UN resolutions. An occupying force has responsibility to provide
for the welfare of those it occupies; not Israel. It establishes full
military control by creating a Wall that confiscates not only land but
natural resources from the people, particularly water and farm land,
and then prevents them from selling what little remains by locking the
gates that give access to the outside world.
Add to the torture inflicted on the people by the Wall, the
introduction of a policy of home demolition that has resulted in the
displacement of 80% of the Palestinians from what is now called Israel,
and the viciousness of Zionist policies to eradicate the Palestinians
from their “historic land,” becomes manifest, not to the outside world
that never sees this policy in action, but to those who have been
forcefully evacuated from their homes and land. This is a form of
collective punishment, “either for ‘deterrence’ or for purposes of
intimidation.”
Throughout Israel homes continue to be demolished. I’ve had lunch
prepared by the displaced family in a home that had been demolished
three times, always at night without warning, always with the children
clinging to their parents as the bulldozers ram the walls and tear
apart the home they were forced to evacuate. This home, built to house
a family that could not get a permit to build, a policy that Israel
enforces in order to eliminate Palestinians from land Israel wishes to
confiscate, rebuilt its home with the help of international groups and
peace loving Israelis, until they were finally forced to rebuild their
home as a “peace center” to which outside groups were invited so they
could witness the consequences of Israel’s demolition policy.
“Israel is the only Western country and Jerusalem the only city
that systematically deny permits and demolish houses of a particular
national group. These actions, reminiscent of apartheid-era South
Africa and the Serbs in Kosovo, clearly violate international covenants
of human rights.” (Jeff Halper, “The Message of the Bulldozer”). “The
Global Strategy for Shelter to the year 2000, adopted by the UN General
Assembly (Resolution 43/181. 20 December 1988), declares that ‘The
right to adequate housing is universally recognized by the community of
nations. Governments [must] accept a fundamental obligation to protect
and improve houses and neighborhoods, rather than damage or destroy
them.”
When torture is undertaken to elicit information that might
reveal future harm to the torturer, one might excuse the act by denying
the reality that no truth comes from the mouth of one in pain; but when
torture is done for the sheer delight of witnessing pain and suffering,
of delighting in the humiliation inflicted on the weak and helpless, of
sick enjoyment derived by seeing children stricken in fear, mothers
torn with grief, old women and aged men fallen in the ruins of what had
been their life’s work, their fruit trees demolished, their homes
leveled, their belongings strewn and broken beneath the crumbled walls,
then there is no human excuse for such acts, only the recognition that
people who can inflict pain will and will defend their sickness with
excuses that have no basis in civilized justice. The Nazis justified
their experiments with a scientific rationale that mocked the reality
of their evil. We now witness a justification of an equal evil as
securing the safety of a population that has broken every known
civilized law against another people to protect it from the wrath of
those it has devastated. Such is the unmitigated gall of the state
without mercy.
Having arrived now at the reality behind the mask Israel and the
Bush administration present to the international community and
especially the American people, it behooves us to consider solutions to
the dilemma that creates the backlash America faces and, indeed,
Britain, that has cast its lot with us, as they see their soldiers
become the icons to destroy rather than the icons to thank for bringing
“freedom” to Iraq and the “new Mid-East.” By yoking itself to the Zionist cause,
the eradication of the Palestinians and the theft of their land, the
U.S. President and the Congress have ensured a continuing supply of
“terrorists” for years to come.
Ironically, the international community has faced this issue over
and over again in the UNGA and the UNSC in the 100s of Resolutions it
has placed before Israel, yet nothing is done because the U.S. vetoes
the voice of outrage there. And in muting the voice of the UN, the U.S.
has silenced the voice of the main stream media and hence the voice of
the American people. But, as we have noted, the moral conscience of
true Jews has spoken on this deceit and presented a plan for change. It
appears as well that in America the people have become conscious of the
masks worn by their representatives, the righteous face of Tom DeLay,
Dick Cunningham, Denny Hastert, Mark Foley, the whole crew that
proclaim their morals before their constituents and then slither behind
closed doors to commit their sins.
The Israeli people have yet to show similar signs of an
awakening. But the mask has been torn off and fear of exposure, of loss
of the Zionist cause, of loss of Judaism’s cohesiveness hangs in the
balance. The clarion voices of Uri Davis, Uri Avnery, Gideon Levy, Ilan
Pappe, in the midst of the battlefield, calls the Jews for peace to
rise once again so that justice can be done to the Palestinians.
Whatever crew of new representatives the American voters put in
office this November must not become the lackeys of AIPAC and march to
the drum of Kadima. 39% of Americans know the danger of this linkage
with evil, with a nation driven by zealots and merciless men. They know
the destructive power of yoking this nation to one that is racist and
driven by an ideology of destruction, oblivious to international law
and human rights. It’s the people who must demand that those they put
in office serve them, not themselves, that they protect our Bill of
Rights, not dismantle it, that they respect and uphold the values
collectively agreed upon in 1948 in the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights, not join with forces who have demonstrated their desire to
ethnically cleanse a people of their land to enlarge their own.
Ultimately, it’s the voice of the people in the U.S. that must join
forces with the voices of the international community as represented in
the General Assembly and force Israel and the U.S. government to
acquiesce to justice in favor of genocide.
The American moralist, Nathaniel Hawthorne, in the first half of
the 19th century, captured the plight of the innocent Young Goodman
Brown as he was led deep into the black forest to witness man’s
inhumanity to man, and, while still young, came home a wiser but bitter
man. What he witnessed was the hypocrisy of those who proclaim their
goodness while they inflict their wickedness, a curse perhaps that
inflicts all of human kind and for that reason he lived out the rest of
his life in gloom and horror. We too can witness the wickedness that
one people inflict on another if we will but open our eyes, see what
the TV cameras saw when the veil was lifted in Lebanon, understand the
inconceivable wrath that envelopes the Palestinians, done with the
blessing of this Bush government in our name, and cry out to the Lord
that his soul be avenged on such a nation as this, that justice be done
and genocide cease for that alone holds in our time the promise of
peace.
Related - Video of George Galloway on Lebanon-Israel crisis
Thank you for this article. My congressional members seem blind and deaf when it comes to this issue. They are owned by AIPAC. I keep speaking up, however.
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Americans are condmned written by Dr.Joji Cherian (India),
October 24, 2006
Americans are condmned to go down all the way to oblivion because of your inability to shake away the razor that the Jews hold over your jugular. Of late we haer some voices demure. But I think it is too late.The fearsome tide of hatred engendered by by the Zionist centered policies are going to take its toll onyou. Meanwhile the Zionists are planing to ditch America and planing make it to emerging forces like China since men like Charles Krauthamer, Dennis Rose, Abe Foxman, (all extermely loyal Americans ofcourse) have decided that America's decline will be complete by 2020 and by that time they should find new suckers.Report in Haretz about the meeting of these worthies in Wye Plantations in Merrland
Writings 
Nothing in the past 60 years revealed the true face of Israel to the world at large (and perhaps to the Lord above) as its illegal invasion of Lebanon. Never before has the Israeli government allowed the world to witness the depth of its brutal aggression as it defied international law with its collective punishment of the innocent. At no time in the past has Israel lost control of the flow of information allowed into or out of Israel and the occupied territories until it abandoned its borders and invaded Lebanon. That mistake ripped away the veil of “victim hood” that the Israeli propaganda machine had constructed around the tiny, beleaguered state beset with fanatics intent on erasing it “from the map” and suicide bombers that threatened death in the streets.
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