"On June 1, 2022 dozens of Israeli soldiers and JCB, Volvo and Caterpillar bulldozers raided the villages Al-Fakheet and Al-Markez and demolished seven residential tents and animal shacks, leaving families, along with their herds,s homeless. This is the second time these families lost their homes in less than a month. On May 11, 2022, the Israeli occupation, Volvo and JCB bulldozers ... razed 19 homes and animal shacks to the ground. Insisting on [keeping] their land, the owners of the destroyed homes rebuilt them again; some of which were among the seven demolished homes yesterday. ...
Masafar Yatta, in the south of Hebron, is home to 20 Palestinian communities, which have been living and herding their livestock in the area [for] generations. Classified as a firing zone, the expulsion of the eight communities would be a culmination of decades-long apartheid and settler colonial practices in the area. The forcible expulsion of these communities paves the way for Israel to annex Masafer Yatta and further consolidate its illegal settlement enterprise. Land confiscation, including through the pretext of ‘military needs’ has been highlighted by the UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in the OPT in his latest as one of the salient features of Israeli apartheid. Villages in Masafer Yatta, such as Um Al-Khair have been highlight as a case study, in Amnesty International’s groundbreaking report on Israeli apartheid. ...
JCB, the world’s third largest construction company is not only used to destroy Palestinian homes. The company’s exported equipment to Israel is also used to construct illegal settlements, settlement industrial zones and apartheid infrastructure in the occupied West Bank and Syrian Golan Heights. JCB machines were involved in the construction of the Apartheid Wall on stolen Palestinian Land. According to Who Profits, the British-based company’s track and wheel excavators and wheel loaders were documented during the construction of the wall near the Palestinian villages of Al-Walaja, Anata and Beit Jala."
-->British and US companies supplying the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. How many Americans are aware of that? The information is simply not there in the mainstream media.
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The Conversation (academic rigor, journalistic flair)
" 'The Assange case is the story of a man who is being persecuted and abused for exposing the dirty secrets of the powerful, including war crimes, torture and corruption.
It is a story of deliberate judicial arbitrariness in Western democracies that are otherwise keen to present themselves as exemplary in the area of human rights.It is the story of wilful collusion by intelligence services behind the back of national parliaments and the general public.
It is a story of manipulated and manipulative reporting in the mainstream media for the purpose of deliberately isolating, demonizing, and destroying a particular individual. It is the story of a man who has been scapegoated by all of us for our own societal failures to address government corruption and state-sanctioned crimes.' ...
That is one of the findings of the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture, Nils Melzer, whose investigation of the case against Assange has been laid out in forensic detail in [his recent book] 'The Trial of Julian Assange.' "
-->The order has come down from the top. Only personal stories will be printed about Julian Assange. Nothing about the war crimes that he has exposed. That's how the empire's propaganda machine works.
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Activist Radio Point of View:
One might say that the Israel Lobby isn't much worse than some of the biggest of corporate advocacy groups. Big Oil, Big Pharma, Big Banks, and the weapons makers spend millions on campaign contributions and flood DC with their lobbyists. Is Israel doing anything different?
Well, most lobby groups don't spend a lot of time spying on the American people. Certainly not to the extent the Israeli Lobby does, using its huge collection of personal data to destroy the job prospects of college students and professors. In fact the lobby goes beyond that to infiltrate American human rights organizations, even using the Israeli spyware company NSO to trace their communications and locations. Pro-Israel reporters have infiltrated our major media, like Isabel Kershner for the New York Times, whose son served in the Israeli Army and husband works for an Israeli propaganda group (the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies in Tel Aviv).
The Israel Lobby has a close relationship with groups that fan Islamophobia in US campuses and communities. The Clarion Fund distributed copies of the racist film "Obsession" to millions of people in the same year it was awarded $18 million from the Donors Capital Fund, a group that links conservative causes to overseas funders operating in Israel. Jewish Voice For Peace has recently identified at least seven major foundations involved in creating and funding anti-Muslim sentiment in the US.
The Israeli Lobby is, in fact, much more destructive to our democracy than corporate advocacy groups.
