By Shimon Z. Klein 
After 8 years of Qassam rocket fire into Israel with the minimum of Israeli Army retaliation, Israel decided to react. There was no real reason for Hamas’s illogical behaviour. There is no justification for damage caused by these rockets to the population in southern Israel! The damage, apart from being physical and […]

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As CNN and other News channels in the US spent most of yesterday showing its viewers an empty US Airways Airbus 320 floating in the Hudson river, the citizens of Gaza ran for their lives from the indiscriminate bombing by the Israeli forces. But in a place as small as Gaza, there is not much […]

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Roughly a thousand people turned up at the sprawling Schara Tzedeck Synagogue on Oak St. in Vancouver on Thursday evening to a high security – no purse or back pack got through the door unexamined — “Community Solidarity Gathering for Israel”. Some in the overflow crowd at the rally organized by the Jewish Federation of […]

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The major papers here in the Philippines tend to echo the headlines of the New York Times or CNN.
So this week, all the headlines are about Gaza.
Needless to say, few here are aware of small things like Hamas having the goal to eliminate Israel, or the thousand missiles that have kept Israelis in bomb […]

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 FreeMediaOnline.org & Free Media Online Blog  The Federalist Commentary, January 6, 2009, San Francisco
Thinking About The Unthinkable
by The Federalist
If you think about the above phrase coined by the late nuclear war theorist, Herman Kahn, you might find it  both unusually appropriate and alarming when applied to US public diplomacy.
There is a fundamental flaw in the […]

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By Shimon Z. Klein

The pressure cooker had threatened to blow up for a long time. Hamas had been firing rockets indiscriminately into southern Israel turning the lives of the people living there into a living hell. This has been going on for nearly eight years and nobody, apart from Israel, protested. These inhabitants are not […]

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“There have been approximately 7,200 rockets (Grads, Qassams) and mortars launched at Israel since 2005″, according to IDFSpokesperson.com.  There are more stats at the link, but let that one sink in for a moment (especially after reading this headline).
Now consider that when Israel finally defends itself, and launches a counter-attack, with the goal, not of […]

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We prayed again for peace in church today.
The news reports that the 200 Filipinos in Gaza are safe and being evacuated to Jordan. That is good news, although one wonders why they are there: as nurses? or as maids? Drivers? Entertainers?
Filipinos are all over the place, and here one reads about the latest war by […]

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 The late Harold Pinter once asked “How many people do you have to kill before you qualify to be described as a mass murderer and a war criminal?” Well Israel’s latest bit of genocide in Gaza has reached 400 and is still on the rise. Indiscriminate slaughter of men, women and children. Actions which can […]

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Despite the initial predictable calls for a political solution to a military conflict and justified concerns that Israel’s retaliation to Hamas rocket attacks will only create a new wave of martyrs eager to attack the Jewish state in the future, Germany openly defends Israel’s right to defend itself and puts the blame squarely on those […]

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After the Mumbai terror attack, it appears that Pakistan is falling apart.
The offer by the Taliban commander that they are ready to fight along with the Army is a matter of great concern as it indicates that Taliban and Pakistan army appear to be working together.
The two comments of Taliban  made recently, namely,  that they […]

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In an opinion piece in the Sydney Morning Herald News, journalist Paul Sheehan wrote Israel’s former Chief of Staff, Moshe Ya’alon, had tough talk during an interview in Israel regarding the current regime in Iran: “confront the Iranian revolution immediately” and “all options must considered” including “considering killing” Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad.
Ya’alon was Israel’s […]

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By Shimon Z. Klein 
The US Elections have come and gone. Many of us are pleased that Barack Obama had won these elections. For us in the Middle East and especially for Israelis and Palestinians who are desirous of a solution to this conflict that has plagued us for so long, there is perhaps a tiny […]

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 By Shimon Z. Klein
After a period if relative instability because of Prime Minister Olmert’s legal problems, the dye is cast and the country is moving towards general elections. The prime minister-designate, Tzippi Livne, was unable to form a new coalition because of the religious Shas Party’s extortionist tactics and the price they demanded to be […]

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Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the radical president of Iran who regularly threatens to nuke Israel and other representatives of Satan, is planning to visit New York, using the UN as an excuse. So Jewish groups, who don’t especially want their relatives in Israel to be nuked by a madman, are holding a protest.
Hillary Clinton, the Senator from […]

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In his whirlwind tour of the world, the hope of nations, Obama, spent some time in Jerusalem.
Like others who visit there, he left a note in the wall of the Temple, AKA the Wailing wall.
Yes, the deity doesn’t need notes or photos, but it’s a human thing to do such things, and similar customs are […]

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After considering the possibility that “foreign leaders Barack Obama met with on his mid-campaign overseas trip were merely hedging their bets and don’t believe he will win the White House this fall” The Associated Press notes that many of them treated the candidate like a head of state:  
Jordan’s King Abdullah flew back early from Aspen, […]

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The American and European media have been ga-ga, gushing, cynical and sarcastic in covering Barack Obama’s Grand Tour of the Middle East and Europe – sometimes all at the same time.  
In a New York Times op-ed, Einstein Forum director Susan Neiman describes the unmistakably mocking tone several German news magazines took in their coverage […]

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David Schussler
Giving his first press conference during his Middle East tour today, Barack Obama has shown his lack of knowledge and insight not only with the military strategies of our armed forces, but the politics and circumstances of the conflicting nations there, and of a democratic government and its processes.
Although admitting that there has been […]

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 By Shimon Z. Klein
The scenes of tragedy visible on TV screens of two coffins draped with Israeli flags that passed the Lebanese border left all of us feeling helpless, identifying, and sympathizing with the Regev and Goldwasser families of the two dead soldiers. Thoughts running through my mind at that moment were thoughts of remorse […]

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Yes, it’s been twenty years, so Ibrahim Fatayer Abdelatif, now 43, has been released from an Italian jail.
A cruise ship, the Achille Lauro, was hijacked by four armed thugs, and to prove they were mean and meant their threats, they killed a defenseless elderly man in a wheelchair, Leon Klinghoffer, dumping his body over the […]

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BBC July 2, 2008 ” Nelson Mandela  taken off US Terror List”
It may not come as a shock for many readers that Nelson Mandela has been cleared from all allegations about his terrorism. The reason is easy to udnerstand. The media has portrayed him as a hero. It was George Bush who signed the paper […]

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By Shimon Z. Klein 
Israel is writhing over the exchange of Gilad Shalit, the kidnapped soldier held in Gaza by Hamas. The price is the exchange of Palestinian prisoners “with blood on their hands”. A similar scenario is taking place in the north involving the release of the terrorist, Samir Kuntar, (held for the 1979 murder […]

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I have been reading that the Muslims are cursing the knight hood given to Salman Rushdie by Queen Elizabeth. There are ways to look at these honors   and reach a conclusion. It is also a parameter to judge the jury who choose Rushdie for this honor. Let us see some reasons why Rushdie deserved this honor.
From Muslims’ Perspective: The […]

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With all the bruhaha about “petroleum addiction”, the dirty little secret is that until there is another cheap form of energy, no matter how many “trade sanctions” are imposed on Iran, that country will manage to find third parties to sell it’s oil.
The way this is done is that a third country buys the item, […]

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 By Shimon Z. Klein
In the Middle East, most of the people are following the presidential elections with great interest. They view the elections from the point of view as to which candidate serves their interests better. Will it be the Republican candidate, John McCain or the Democrat’s Barrack Obama? My gut feeling is that most […]

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From Churchill’s Parrot blog
“To me the greatest issue in this part of the world is not deserting Israel.”
- Sir Winston Churchill
There is at present but one flag upon Earth’s moon; for only a society which values the liberty and enterprise this flag represents could achieve such a miracle. That flag yet stands alone, a colorful […]

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Proving yet again that you can be a smart and politically-aware German intellectual type and still not have the slightest idea what the Berlin Wall was, photographer Kai Wiedenhoefer and his Left and Green Party supporters in Berlin’s Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg district will be exhibiting an exhibition which will equate the West Bank “Wall” with the Berlin […]

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I grew up loving Israel unquestioningly.  I come from a Christian fundamentalist background, so, much the Wahabi, I believed what I was told.  It was not until I saw Paradise Now, the groundbreaking Palestinian film, that my opinions on the matter become more open.  This is a film about that happening in the life of […]

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It’s true! Would hysterical conservatives lie to you about a Godless Muslim Koran-fondling wild man like Scary Barry? A man who doesn’t always wear a flag pin on his lapel? That was mighty careless of him. You’d think the Anti-Christ would be a little more devious than that. Since Christ was clearly a white American, […]

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