Study: U.S. regime has killed 20-30 million people since World War Two

Source: countercurrents.org

By: James A. Lucas

After the catastrophic attacks of September 11 2001 monumental sorrow and a feeling of desperate and understandable anger began to permeate the American psyche. A few people at that time attempted to promote a balanced perspective by pointing out that the United States had also been responsible for causing those same feelings in people in other nations, but they produced hardly a ripple. Although Americans understand in the abstract the wisdom of people around the world empathizing with the suffering of one another, such a reminder of wrongs committed by our nation got little hearing and was soon overshadowed by an accelerated “war on terrorism.”

But we must continue our efforts to develop understanding and compassion in the world. Hopefully, this article will assist in doing that by addressing the question “How many September 11ths has the United States caused in other nations since WWII?” This theme is developed in this report which contains an estimated numbers of such deaths in 37 nations as well as brief explanations of why the U.S. is considered culpable.

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Top 5 Conspiracy Theories That Are True! (Video)

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How the British Divided Up the Arab World

Source: http://lostislamichistory.com/

The development of the modern nation states throughout the Arab world is a fascinating and heartbreaking process. 100 years ago, most Arabs were part of the Ottoman Empire/Caliphate, a large multi-ethnic state based in Istanbul. Today, a political map of the Arab world looks like a very complex jigsaw puzzle. A complex and intricate course of events in the 1910s brought about the end of the Ottomans and the rise of these new nations with borders running across the Middle East, diving Muslims from each other. While there are many different factors leading to this, the role that the British played in this was far greater than any other player in the region. Three separate agreements made conflicting promises that the British had to stand by. The result was a political mess that divided up a large part of the Muslim world.

Gaza: why Israel is losing the social media war

By: Paul Mason

Source: http://blogs.channel4.com/

When Shujaiya was attacked by the Israeli Defence Force, killing dozens of civilians, the first I heard about it was via Twitter, early Sunday morning.

An activist on the ground I follow tweeted: “people running out of Shujaiya, bodies lying on ground”.

Soon after, Mohammed Omer an award-winning Palestinian journalist who tweets as @Mogaza – reported:

“Israel refuse allowing ambulance crew to get into Shejaia now! scores of dead bodies in all streets now! #gaza”

Not long after that, numerous western TV journalists stationed alongside Palestinian ambulance crews, including my colleague, Jonathan Miller, reported the same things. There was immediacy, corroboration and – with pictures – evidence.

Now compare that to the Israeli Defence Force Twitter feed, @IDFSpokesperson, as news emerged of the massive bombardment and civilian deaths. These are the first three tweets:

Nothing in those three tweets constitutes either a defence of, or explanation for, the killing of tens of non-combatants. But in the space between them, anybody following the Gaza conflict from both sides would have seen tens of independently shot images and accounts of civilian death and the destruction of housing and civilian infrastructure.

The incident shows who is winning the social media war over Gaza. It is evidence of a massive change in the balance of power between social media and the old, hierarchical media channels we used to rely on to understand wars.

Specifically social media has the power to do three things: first, to show people reality or a version of it independent of what TV networks show. Second, and I think just as important, journalists on the ground are using social media to report, necessarily short-circuiting the normal editorial processes that used to filter what they said. Third, to get into your real life consciousness much more powerfully than the old media.

Let’s work through each of these new powers and understand their impact. In a society where the media is supposed to observe balance and impartiality, getting real-time access to corroborated facts independently of TV stations is not so revolutionary.

But modern-day America is not one of those countries. Its media is traditionally heavily skewed towards the pro-Israeli view. My colleague, Matt Frei, tweeted that CNN’s Wolf Blitzer interview with Netanyahu was less a grilling more “a warm bath and a back rub”. Others used more profane metaphors.

But now, for the first time in a major Arab-Israeli conflict, the American public has other sources of reality. All research says that young people everywhere regard Twitter as essentially a news service, and via your social network you can easily get served up words and pictures more impactful than anything on TV. By the time many Americans woke up on Sunday, these pictures were of dead Palestinian children.

Netanyahu complained the Hamas strategy was to provide “telegenically dead” people: but where Israel is losing the hearts and minds of the world is not via “tele” anything: it is in the JPEGs that stream into millions of people’s mobile phones every time they glance at the object in the palm of their hand.