Genocide!

In his book, The Impact Of Science On Society, written in 1952, Bertrand Russell wrote, “At present the population of the world is increasing at about 58,000 per diem. War, so far, has had no very great effect on this increase, which continued throughout each of the world wars … War … has hitherto been disappointing in this respect … but perhaps bacteriological war may prove more effective. If a Black Death could spread throughout the world once in every generation, survivors could procreate freely without making the world too full … The state of affairs might be somewhat unpleasant, but what of it?”

Russell is expressing a view, long held by many who might be considered “oligarchs”, and who, for many generations, have held themselves to be superior to the vast majority of the population of this planet.

The simple fact is that the world is not “too full.” It might feel like it is, sometimes, as our basic economic infrastructure crumbles round our ears, and as poverty forces the people of large parts of the planet into having large families.

Today’s hikes in oil and food prices are not the result of population fuelled demand, unavailability, or as a lack of capability to produce. They are purely artificial, as the result of Policy.

And what is that Policy?

In a word: GENOCIDE.

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Michael Reagan Advocates Murder and Genocide on the Public Airwaves -- And Gets Away With It!

As the Palestinian people prepare to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the Nakba ("catastrophe") - the dispossession and expulsion of most of our people from our land - those remaining in Palestine face escalating aggression, killings, imprisonment, ethnic cleansing and siege. But instead of support and solidarity from the western media, we face frequent attempts to defend the indefensible or turn fire on the Palestinians themselves.

One recent approach, which seems to be part of the wider attempt to isolate the elected Palestinian leadership, is to portray Hamas and the population of the Gaza strip as motivated by anti-Jewish sentiment, rather than a hostility to Zionist occupation and domination of our land. A recent front page article in the International Herald Tribune followed this line, as did an article for Cif about an item broadcast on the al-Aqsa satellite TV channnel about the Nazi Holocaust.

In fact, the al-Aqsa Channel is an independent media institution that often does not express the views of the Palestinian government headed by Ismail Haniyeh or of the Hamas movement. The channel regularly gives Palestinians of different convictions the chance to express views that are not shared by the Palestinian government or the Hamas movement. In the case of the opinion expressed on al-Aqsa TV by Amin Dabbur, it is his alone and he is solely responsible for it.

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Feature by Ilan Pappe, May 2008

Sixty years ago half of Palestine's population was expelled when the state of Israel was created. Acclaimed anti-Zionist historian Ilan Pappe looks at the legacy of the Nazi persecution of Jews, and the complicity of world leaders, past and present, in maintaining the occupation in Palestine.

Very few matrixes can be as sensitive as that of the Holocaust, Israel and the Palestinian Catastrophe of 1948 (known as the Nakba). It is no wonder that very few people in the past have attempted to comment on the nexus between the Holocaust, the Nakba and a solution for the Palestine question. To all intents and purposes, researchers, journalists and essayists who were, and still are, interested in the Palestine question preferred to deal with each of the subject matters separately - as if there is no connection whatsoever between them. But the connection is there and is highly important both for students of the Israel/Palestine question and for the future of this torn country. Sixty years after the dispossession of the Palestinians, the event that shaped the present Middle Eastern political crisis, it is high time also to involve the Holocaust and its memory in our overall attempt to understand the "conflict" and contribute towards its solution.

Various factors contributed to the demise of the Palestinians in 1948. The most important of them was Zionist ideology and later on Israeli policy. The Zionist movement wished ever since its appearance on Palestine's soil in the late 19th century to take over as much of the country as possible and create on it a Jewish state. The effort to achieve it began in earnest with the onset of British rule in Palestine in 1917. Judaising Palestine meant de-Arabising it. So an important part of the vision was an effort to have as few Palestinians as possible within the future Jewish state.

The vision became a plan and reality when Britain, after 30 years of rule, decided to leave Palestine in February 1947. About a year later, at the beginning of 1948, the Zionist leaders decided that the best means of making the vision of a Jewish Palestine possible was by forcefully dispossessing the Palestinians from their homeland. Within less than a year, between February and October 1948, the Israeli army systematically uprooted and destroyed more than 500 villages and 11 towns. Half of Palestine's native population was ethnically cleansed in those months. Their material and cultural possessions were taken over by the Israelis and their presence on the land was nearly wiped out.

British legacy