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The looming Temple Mount catastrophe

By Meron Benvenisti
Another Tisha B'Av passed peacefully, said the reporters, with "tense routine" on the Temple Mount. The security forces sat in the shade and watched a tired demonstration by the Temple Mount Faithful, who lugged a model of the Temple and recreated their journey with the enormous "cornerstone" during which, in the past, (Palestinian) lives were lost. But now it has lost its ability to provoke. If not for the the public security minister issuing apocalyptic warnings about the dangers to the mosque on the Mount, nobody would have paid much attention, for the 37th time, to the ticking bomb called the Temple Mount.

Indeed, the minister received credible intelligence reports - he knew that the trouble would not break out on the day it seemingly should break out, so he chose to go all the way to Finland and enjoy a football game. He left behind a police officer who would keep Jews off the Mount, "for the sake of public safety." Why should Hanegbi stick around to suffer the slings and arrows of the "nationalist circles" about his abandoning "the sacred site of the nation?"

The usual suspects - Yehuda Etzion, Kachniks, and the other Temple Mount zealots and crazies - spouted their usual slogans about getting rid of the mosques, while Shin Bet agents kept their eyes open and the newspapers filled up once again with articles about sinister plots and Armageddon.

Veterans of the Temple Mount controversy know very well that the danger of blowing up the mosques - and the threats of a nuclear world war in its wake - are repeated and recycled whenever the possibility, real or otherwise, comes up for some political move that might change the status quo in the occupied territories. The disengagement plan and the evacuation of the settlements is an excellent excuse to float plots and conspiracies, just like in the days of the Yamit evacuation and the Oslo accords.

It all looks routine, too routine - but for some reason, this time the threat looks serious. So serious that it raises doubts about whether the current Israeli government and the security services under the government's command are capable of dealing with this tangible threat.

Seemingly, the forces combating Jewish terrorism and the conspirators planning to blow up the mosques have acquired a lot of experience breaking up the conspiracies. But the experience of recent months shows that the law enforcement agencies are not capable of winning court convictions that deter, and the daring demonstrated by the lawbreakers and outright criminal outlaws among the "hilltop youth" and their ilk is ever more audacious. The general atmosphere of violence saturated with incitement encourages ever more violent expressions, which threaten the status quo on the Temple Mount.

Among the hundreds, indeed perhaps the thousands, who participate in the symposia and conferences that deal with the practical preparations for the establishment of a Third Temple, there are those who make no attempt to hide their plans to "remove the abomination." Ministers and senior officials - known to dine on non-kosher shellfish - demonstratively demand the right of every Jew to pray on the Mount and condemn the weak hand of their government, "which allows the PLO to rule the Temple Mount."

Those very same people are the ones who are warning against the actions of those who take their own incitement seriously. The chorus of inciters "against the Waqf" is joined by archaeologists, who loudly protest the activities of the Muslims, "meant to erase any evidence of the existence of the sanctuary," and thus encourage, without meaning to, of course, those who plot to erase any Muslim connection to the place.

It seems the only obstacle to catastrophe is the sweeping ban by the rabbinical establishment over praying on the Mount, a prohibition that is being undermined; and the day is not far off when it will collapse, "at least regarding that part of the Mount that was outside the Temple."

A violent action, like the one that managed to torpedo the Oslo agreement, serves as an example to those who believe that even a not fully successful attempt - but one that causes Palestinian losses on the Mount, like Goldstein in Hebron - would be enough to drown the disengagement in a sea of blood.

"It's only a miracle that events of the past did not end in a terrible disaster," writes Nadav Shragai in his comprehensive, fascinating book Har HaMerivah, "Mount of Dispute," from 1995. The chance that such a miracle will happen again is fading, and the tangible danger to the peace of the world resulting from a Temple Mount catastrophe requires taking the responsibility for the security of the mosques out of Israel's hands immediately.

The UN Security Council has intervened in less dangerous situations, and sent in international forces to prevent far lesser catastrophes than the destruction of the mosques. Internationalizing the security on the Temple Mount and the presence of international forces skilled in counter-terrorism and resistant to nationalist and religious incitement are preferable to a police force which experience shows won't always know how to respond correctly and efficiently. Maybe internationalization of the Mount is really in Israel's interest; if a disaster happens, the blame won't be on us.

Floods displace millions in Asia; at least 1,600 die

By Wayne Arnold

NEW YORK TIMES

SINGAPORE - Governments and relief agencies across Asia were racing to cope with homelessness and outbreaks of disease Wednesday after heavy rains across the southeastern Himalayan foothills caused rivers from southwestern China to northeastern India to flood vast parts of the continent.

In Dhaka, Bangladesh, as much as one-third of the city has been submerged by the worst floods since 1998.

"The situation on the whole seems to be getting worse," said Bahre Gessesse, an officer at the U.N. World Food Program in Dhaka.

Triggered by a heavy spring monsoon, floods have spread across parts of Bangladesh, China, India, Nepal and Vietnam, killing at least 1,600 people and leaving millions homeless.

In addition to relief agencies, some governments have dispatched troops to assist in relief efforts as floodwaters threatened important crop-growing regions.

The situation also may grow worse, officials warned, with more monsoon rains due in August, when a full moon has raised sea levels and kept floodwaters from receding.

In China, authorities are wrestling with both floods and drought, a combination of natural calamities that the news media have called the worst in decades. While parts of northern and eastern China bake in temperatures as high as 100 degrees, the southwestern and central provinces of Hunan, Henan, Hubei, Guangxi and Yunnan have been inundated with waters that have destroyed at least 275,000 homes and destroyed 5.16 million hectares, or more than 12 million acres, of farmland.

So far, the floods in China have killed 439 people and injured 21,600, with 1.46 million people displaced.

China's Ministry of Civil Affairs reportedly has set aside 69 million yuan, or more than $8 million, in relief funds.

The death toll is worse in India, however, with 686 fatalities so far.

Flooding along the Brahmaputra and Ganges rivers has ravaged the poor eastern Indian states of Assam and Bihar. In Bihar alone, state officials have reported 460 deaths as food shortages and waterborne diseases spread among the population.

"The situation is very alarming," the Indian prime minister, Manmohan Singh, told reporters after touring Bihar by air Tuesday. He pledged to send a high-level team next week to survey the area and recommend assistance. He also said the country's central bank would consider debt relief for affected farmers.

Farther downstream, as much as two-thirds of Bangladesh has been inundated. Many of Dhaka's 10 million residents have taken to rafts and boats to avoid waters filled with human waste by overflowing sewers.

Nearly 400 people in Bangladesh have been killed and 1.3 million people displaced, according to official estimates.

In addition to more than 3,000 medical teams, the government has dispatched troops to help reach people stranded by rising waters and to help distribute food and medicine, said Gessesse, the U.N. official. The U.N. World Food Program also has begun distributing emergency food supplies, including high-energy biscuits and rice, he said.

While waters appear to be receding somewhat, concerns are mounting that they will not ease enough before monsoon rains due next month cause further catastrophe, said Salim Bhuihan at the Flood Forecasting and Warning Center in Bangladesh.

"All concerned should be very careful," he said in an interview. "They should be prepare to face a lot of floods again in August." Aggravating the situation, he said, is a full moon due at the end of this month, which would raise the sea level and slow the flow of floodwaters into the Bay of Bengal.

As the waters recede, residents in Bangladesh and the Indian state of Assam also are dealing with an invasion of poisonous snakes and rats vying with people for shelter.

In Vietnam, flash floods have struck northern parts of the country. The state news media in Hanoi reported that as much as 25 percent of the crucial rice-growing areas of the Red River delta could be at risk. Vietnam's government has halted rice exports to prevent a shortage of the grain this year.

Flooding along the rivers of the Himalayas is a regular event, with water levels rising first with melting spring snows and then fed by a rainy season that runs from June to October. But heavy logging has increased the risk of devastating floods.

http://www.contracostatimes.com/mld.../9270313.htm?1c
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Quix this is a good one.

Dissing Israel: Am I Crazy or What?
By Kurt Nimmo

Crazy, that’s what I am. Or so said a guy on the forum here at Press Action. You see, he takes issue with my “rants” because he thinks I make things up as I go along. I invariably reach preposterous conclusions. Not about Muslims or Africans or Chechens—but about the Israelis, or at least the Likudite Israelis.

I can’t blame him. I mean, sure, if you get all your information from the New York Times and Fox News, the things I write are going to hit the floor like a wet paper sack filled with crazy conspiracy theories like a dozen eggs. For those of us unwilling or unable to accept the possibility that governments—and not strictly the Israeli government—engage in covert nastiness, even against their own people, all of this is surely going to sound like the murmuring of a crazy person, even a miscreant.

Here’s what I said:

Intelligence “services,” such as the CIA and Mossad, go out of their way to create and nurture terrorism, mostly because it works so fantastically in their favor. I said Hamas is one such Frankenstein creation. This fact was documented by Richard Sale of United Press International, a news organization not exactly in the business of spinning wild and implausible conspiracy theories. (As a side note, it is interesting that this story no longer exists on the UPI servers. Like the Fox News story about the Israeli “art” student spies, it simply disappeared. It was sucked down a corporate version of an Orwellian memory hole. But the funny thing about the internet is that a story never truly disappears. It is posted elsewhere and lives on.)

Point is, it is daffy for me to reference this story, mostly because it was something Israel did 20 years ago, back when Hamas wasn’t blowing up commuter buses and pizza joints.

Hamas, or more accurately pre-Hamas—a contrivance of the Muslim Brotherhood, an organization long ago penetrated by the CIA—served as a charitable organization back in the day, funding clinics, kindergartens, and educational programs. For the Israelis, supporting fundie Muslims was a good deal because the fundies were opposed to secular and revolutionary organizations such as the PLO. No doubt it pleased the Zionists when Islamist activists attacked the Red Crescent Society offices in 1980. Israel was happy to oblige when Islamist activists demanded they dismiss their secular opponents at the Islamic University of Gaza. For the Israelis, the Islamization of Palestinian society was a good thing. The Israeli government was all for Muslims attacking cinemas, liquor stores, casinos, and places where women mingled with men not their brothers or uncles. It tickled them pink when Hamas engaged in running gun battles with Fatah. Divide and conquer was the name of the game. It worked very well.

Naturally, things got out of hand when Ahmad Yassin and Abd al-Aziz Rantisi—both recently assassinated by Israel—declared Palestine to be an Islamic land that should never be surrendered to non-Muslims, in particular the Jews. It became particularly bad after the al-Aqsa massacre, when Hamas declared Israel its primary enemy (as opposed to the secular PLO) and put every Israeli soldier and settler on notice. I believe this is not really a sticking point for the Zionists because they still prefer wild-eyed Muslims over revolutionary Palestinian nationalists, even if innocent Israelis are killed along the way. People in Europe and America understand struggles for national liberation. Or rather educated liberals understand it. Right-wingers, on the other hand, consider “liberation” a form of commie subversion (that is unless the U.S. is delivering “liberation” to backward Arabs and Afghanis by way of shock and awe for the sake of Halliburton and Big Oil).

For the Greater Israel Zionists, any support, or at least tacit approval of Palestinian nationalism, is the worst possible thing. It’s a nightmare. So they have spent decades doing whatever they can to make the Palestinians out to be heartless and crazed terrorists. Hamas fits the bill perfectly because so many of them are obviously heartless and crazed terrorists—albeit heartless and crazed terrorists midwifed by Israeli intelligence via a rather successful false flag operation; that is to say Mossad (and the CIA) tricked Hamas into believing it is a homegrown operation doing the work of Allah when in fact it is doing precisely what the Zionists want—demonizing Muslims and Arabs through pointless suicide bombings and the like. For cynical sociopaths such as Ariel Sharon, a few dead Israelis are a price worth paying.

None of this has occurred in a vacuum. For instance, in 1954, Israeli was caught red-handed attempting to blow up diplomatic facilities in Egypt—and blame it on Arabs—including a diplomatic facility occupied by the United States. It later became known as the Lavon Affair, named after Israeli’s then Defense Minister Pinhas Lavon.

As former Mossad agent Victor Ostrovsky explains, Israel framed Libya for the murder of American soldiers in Germany—by covertly sending “terrorist” radio signals from Tripoli—and as a result Reagan attacked Libya in 1986.

Ari Ben-Menashe, in his book Profits of War: Inside the Secret U.S. - Israeli Arms Network, accuses Lt. Gen. Rafael Eitan, former chief of general staff of the IDF, of orchestrating the Achille Lauro hijacking in order to make the Palestinians out to be blood-thirsty beasts (this worked famously, since Israel’s Palestinian agents, working under a Abu Nidal false flag operation, killed a wheelchair-bound Jew named Leon Klinghoffer, and thus outraging the world and subsequently tossed Palestinian nationalism in Peabody’s “Wayback Machine” and sent it tottering back to the time Neanderthals roamed the earth).

Of course, all of this hardly scratches the surface, as evidenced by the latest espionage scandal centered on AIPAC, and thus Israeli, access to U.S. classified documents. AIPAC is nothing less than sayanim (as Ostrovsky might call them), or Israeli collaborators, an integral part of Mossad operations worldwide. As is now apparent, the Larry Franklin-AIPAC spy operation was all about Bush’s take on Iran (and Israel’s desire to influence that take, even dictate it). Iran, as we know, and Sharon tells us repeatedly, is the next target on the Straussian neocon-Likudite to-do list.

As Sharon has ranted ad nauseam for years, the Islamic fundies in Iran are working feverishly toward constructing a nuke or two with the explicit purpose in mind of not driving the Jews into the sea, but vaporizing them entirely. Naturally, this is the most obnoxious racism, but then racism against Arabs, Persians, and especially Palestinians is what present-day Zionism is all about. Greater Israel and a Second Crusade—not only in the name of the Israeli Zionists, but the seriously deluded Christian Zionists who are waiting on pins and needles for the Rapture—is so important that it has managed to capture the White House, large swaths of the Pentagon, and U.S. foreign policy wholesale.

But then I’m a loathsome miscreant for pointing all of this out. I mean, obviously, I must be smoking crack while I secretly read tomes dwelling on dark conspiracy theories about Rothschild, the Illuminati, and the Free Masons.

As Fox, the New York Times, and practically every member of Congress down to nearly the last man and woman know, Israel is our friend and we share a “special relationship.” It’s those damn Ay-rabs we have to watch out for, not Ariel Sharon and the deranged settlers who, according to B’Tselem, control more than 40 percent of the West Bank.

So special is this relationship between “friends” that in 1967 Israel attacked a U.S. ship, the USS Liberty, killing 34 American servicemen and injuring 174 others.

So special are the Israelis they are allowed to walk into the Pentagon and do whatever they want, no questions asked, as former Lieutenant Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski has pointed out in an exposé on Douglas Feith and the neocons.

So special is the tiny outlaw state—in violation of numerous United Nations resolutions simultaneously, which is quite remarkable—that they receive $3.5 billion a year from the beleaguered American taxpayer. (Actually, according to William D. Hartung of the World Policy Institute, the amount given to Israel is much higher, more like $10 billion.)

Finally, let’s not restrict this to the Israelis. After all, as James Bamford’s Operation Northwoods revelations demonstrate, governments will enthusiastically murder their own citizens if it pays off politically (under the plan, nixed by McNamara during the Kennedy administration, the Joint Chiefs were itching to launch a series of terrorist attacks in the United States and place the blame on Castro, thus setting the stage for an invasion of Cuba).

Is there any reason the Israelis would do things differently?

Nope.

As it now stands, the possibility of war in the Middle East is the most important issue facing America. The Israeli Likudites and the Straussian neocon double-dealers in the White House and the Pentagon are pushing for back-to-back wars (more accurately, invasions) against Iran, Syria, Lebanon, and ultimately Saudi Arabia. Israel realizes it cannot wage these invasions on its own, so it has worked to maneuver the United States into a position to do the fighting and dying. America will gain nothing from this—except more terrorism, dead sons and daughters, and lost treasure. If the Sharon Likudites have their way, the ultimate animosity—not only on the part of Arabs and Iranians, but on the part of most of the world community—will be horrendous.

It’s important to discuss these things—even for a crazy person like me.

Kurt Nimmo is a photographer and multimedia developer in Las Cruces, New Mexico. He is the author of Another Day in the Empire: Life in Neoconservative America, a collection of essays published by Dandelion Books. Visit his weblog at KurtNimmo.com.