AFP

Mon Apr 28, 3:48 AM ET

Four children, aged one to five, their mother and a Palestinian gunman were killed during Israeli military operations in the Gaza Strip on Monday, Palestinian emergency services said.

Mussab Abu Maateq, one, Hana Abu Maateq, three, Rudeina Abu Maateq, four, and Saleh Abu Maateq, five, were killed along with their mother when a tank shell hit their home in Beit Hanun, doctors at the Kamal Radwan hospital said.

An armed man was killed in an exchange of fire with Israeli troops in the same area, the medics added.

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Apr 27, 2008

We have just passed the l00th anniversary of the birth of Edward R Murrow who younger people may remember because he was fictionalized in the George Clooney produced movie Good Night and Good Luck. Murrow was a hero of mine back in the days when I believed journalism would change the world. It was Murrow who stood up to Joe McCarthy and investigated shameful migrant labor practices among so many other stories.

It was Murrow who defined CBS News in its glory days.

Were he alive today, he would troubled, if not shocked, by what’s become of CBS News and its signature “investigative” program 60 Minutes. In fact, the buzz is that CBS is about to get out of the news biz and contract news gathering to CNN. Not sure if that’s true but it probably couldn’t hurt.

I tune in, more out of habit than anything else for the occasional good story–can’t take Lara Logan’s pro-war segments— but last night it looked like The Israeli Lobby got there first by arranging super-access for Bob Simon to glamorize the Israeli Air Force in the same week that its fighter pilots killed a young girl in Gaza. The piece was largely uncritical and seemed to be chearleading for an military attack on Iran and was filled with strident and unexamined propaganda,

Here’s the CBS “news” story about the segment:

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(updated below)

John McCain was on a conference call with right-wing bloggers yesterday and boasted:

I think that people should understand that I will be Hamas's worst nightmare.

What possible reason would a U.S. President have for turning himself and our country into a "nightmare" for Hamas, let alone its "worst nightmare"? Hamas is a single-issue Palestinian group, focused exclusively on its "territorial dispute" with Israel (and, in light of its victory in the U.S.-demanded election, is also now preoccupied with governing the Palestinian Authority). Is there anyone who thinks that Hamas has tried to, will try to, or ever could attack the U.S.? Hamas is an enemy of Israel, not the U.S. Is that a distinction we even recognize any more?

What exactly is the point of feeding Israel billions of dollars every year in military aid if we're going to deem every one of its fights to be our fight, and every one of its enemies to be our Enemy? Is that actually what Americans want to do: insinuate ourselves even more into other endless, intractable religious and ethnic conflicts in the Middle East?

More disturbingly still, this chest-beating threat from McCain is merely the latest in a long line of adolescent, mindlessly belligerent war cries emanating from the Serious foreign policy candidate. In a GOP debate in May of last year, he bellowed that he would "follow [Osama bin Laden] to the gates of hell" only thereafter, according

to ABC News

, to then "crack[] a smile which gave the impression to some viewers that perhaps he viewed his own answer as being over the top." But he's since

repeated

that demonic formulation

on numerous occasions

, followed by the same creepy, self-satisfied smirk:

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Tuesday-Thursday, April 29-May 1, 2008

THE U.S. POWER STRUCTURE

Part Two

Frank’s Morrow’s specialty is the U.S. power structure. He gained his PhD from the University of Texas in 1984 and his 600+ page thesis was on the subject. He produced almost 600 segments of the two-decade run of the best political TV show in history, Alternative Views.

This in-depth interview covers much ground and makes it clear that what we see in the U.S. political scene is not real. Frank goes into detail about how we have come to live in a unipolar world that is controlled by people who may not have names that are recognizable to the general public

ML: What made the ruling class come so closely together?

FM: Before World War I, the United States was a debtor country. The economy was controlled mainly by England. But, after WWI, the United States had wealth. The other countries were laid low by the war, so the U.S. had all this power. The Brits and their sympathizers from the U.S. came up with an organization called the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). That’s still the bedrock of the U.S. power structure.

The power is based on control of institutions: the big corporations, the financial institutions, the media and then with that, they can control the political system.

ML: When you read about the CFR, you always see that the group prides itself on the diversity of its members. Is this an illusion?

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Part One

The Christian Science Monitor

Let's start treating the world's 6 billion non-Americans as equals.

By Helena Cobban

from the April 25, 2008 edition

Washington - What kind of relationship do Americans want to build with the world's 6 billion other people in the years ahead? This question is urgent, since the past seven years have seen an unprecedented drop in our country's global favorability rating. In today's hyper-connected world, that has huge consequences for Washington's ability to protect American interests.

To fix this problem, many experts – and even the presidential candidates – are promoting agendas to rebuild America's position of world leadership. They are right to try to repair our image abroad. But their focus on "American leadership" is misplaced. A smarter approach would be for us to build a new relationship with the world that embraces the key principles of human equality and mutual respect among all peoples.

Starting to see themselves as "merely" equal to everyone else may seem slightly scary to some Americans. But history should assure them.

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By Jonathan Martin

April 27, 2008

Two candidates not named John McCain got a combined 219,913 votes in the Pennsylvania Republican primary Tuesday, and one of them is still in the race.

***

“We believe that we’re going to carry about 50 pledged delegates" to the convention in St. Paul, said Paul spokesman Jesse Benton. “A lot of people are technically pledged to other candidates but are going to be there and letting everybody know that they support Ron Paul.”

That’s because even though their candidate has largely returned to his day job on Capitol Hill, his supporters are flocking in droves to county and state conventions, hoping to be elected as delegates to the convention.

While they’ll likely be stymied from having much impact on the platform, Paul supporters are hopeful their guy will secure a speaking slot — and hint that they may stage a visible distraction to McCain and the GOP if their request is not fulfilled.

“We remain hopeful and would be honored if the RNC would extend a speaking invitation,” Benton said. “If that doesn’t happen, Dr. Paul will have an off-site presence and will address supporters.”

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A counterproductive Washington policy in recent years has been to boycott and punish political factions or governments that refuse to accept U.S. domination. This policy deters the ability of revolutionary or uncooperative leaders to moderate their attitude and demands.

A notable example is Nepal. About twelve years ago, Maoist guerillas launched an effort to modify or overthrow the monarchy and force changes in the nation's political and social life. Although the United States declared the revolutionaries to be terrorists, The Carter Center agreed to help mediate the dispute among the three major factions: royal family, old-line political parties and Maoists.

Six months after the oppressive monarch was removed from power, a cease-fire agreement was consummated. Maoist combatants lay down their arms and the Nepalese Army agreed to remain in barracks.

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Debbie Almontaser dreamed of starting a public school like no other in New York City. Children of Arab descent would join students of other ethnicities, learning Arabic together. By graduation, they would be fluent in the language and groomed for the country's elite colleges. They would be ready, in Almontaser's words, to become "ambassadors of peace and hope."

Things have not gone according to plan. Only one-fifth of the 60 students at the Khalil Gibran International Academy are Arab-American. Since the school opened in New York last fall, children have been suspended for carrying weapons, repeatedly gotten into fights and taunted an Arabic teacher by calling her a "terrorist," staff members and students said in interviews.

The academy's troubles reach well beyond its cramped corridors in the Boerum Hill area of Brooklyn, New York. The school's creation provoked a controversy so incendiary that Almontaser stepped down as the founding principal just weeks before classes began last September. Almontaser, a teacher by training and an activist who had carefully built ties with Christians and Jews, said she was forced to resign by the mayor's office following a campaign that pitted her against a chorus of critics who claimed she had a militant Islamic agenda.

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More on the Likudist Fronts

Just to add a little to last month’s post, “Is the Pentagon Policy Shop Funding Likudist Fronts?”, on Devon Gaffney Cross’ London-based Policy Forum for International Security Affairs, Jeffrey Gedmin’s (?) Case for Freedom, and Anatol Sharansky’s OneJerusalem.org, all of which appear to have as a common denominator — and a common, Israel-based IP address — interlocking directorates, their participation at last June’s Prague Conference on Democracy and Security Conference (about which I’ve written twice, here and here) and OneJerusalem’s director, a New York-based attorney named Allen Roth, who, it turns out, is a long-time aide and adviser to Ronald Lauder. It was Lauder, a major supporter of former Israeli Prime Minister and Likud chief Binyamin Netanyahu, who reportedly gave $1 million to OneJerusalem to launch a campaign against President Bush’s Annapolis conference last fall, apparently because he feared that renewed, U.S.-backed negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians could lead to a divided Jerusalem. It was also in his capacity as president of the World Jewish Congress, a post to which he was elected in 2007, that Lauder appealed in a controversial open letter to the current prime minister, Ehud Olmert, not to do anything that would compromise Israeli sovereignty over the entire city.

The first thing worth noting is that both the Policy Forum and Case for Freedom websites appear to be moribund. Despite the $79,000 Pentagon grant it received last September and its new mandate to reach out beyond the elite media “to the active, curious, and engaged public” in Great Britain and Europe, the Policy Forum site — which is entitled Policy Forum for International Affairs but which refers to itself internally as Policy Forum for International Security Affairs — apparently hasn’t been updated since last June when it ran some opinion pieces on the U.S. presidential campaign.

The Case for Freedom site, which describes itself as a “dynamic community for dissidents and freedom’s advocates across the globe,” appears nearly as dead as Policy Forum’s. Its last news entry is a link to a February 26 article from the Daily Telegraph entitled “China Mounts Dissident Assault before Games.” Aside from its dynamic self-description, the inactivity on the Case for Freedom site is particularly remarkable given the fact that it was launched at Sharansky’s Prague Conference (at which Bush himself gave a high-profile address over the objections of the State Department) and the peculiar role played by Gedmin, the president of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), in the launch. Indeed, ten months after the group’s founding, Gedmin’s interview of Gary Kasparov remains the featured item on the group’s home page.

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The Presidential Election and the Lobby

part 2