by Ghali Hassan

…The term ‘anti-Semitism’ has nothing to do with religion. It originated in 18th century Europe where philologists used the term ‘Semite’ to distinguish languages from each other by grouping them into ‘families’ originating from the so-called ‘mother’ tongue to which they are related. Despite the lack of a common ancestral language, Arabic, Aramaic, Amharic, Assyrian, Hebrew, etc. where grouped as ‘Semitic’ languages. For both Arabic and Hebrew, the classification was incorrect. In other words, neither Arabic nor Hebrew is Semitic.

With the rise of European racism against minorities in the 19th century, European Jews where targeted. Differences between Jews and other European citizens have to be manufactured. Since European Christians (the Protestant Reformists) adopted the Hebrew bible, religion was not an option for those differences. The Jews were identified as ‘Semites’ based on the incorrect assumption that their ancestors spoke Hebrew, which wasn’t the case. Ancient Hebrew tribes were Aramaic speakers.

Therefore, the Europeans who hated Jews were identified in philological taxonomy as ‘anti-Semites’. In a word, European Jews became the object of hatred by European anti-Semitism, at a time when Muslims, Arabs in particular, were not present in Europe. The term was first used in 1879 by the German, William Marr, who founded the ‘League for Anti-Semitism’. Marr’s racist views (Europe’s biological racism) were that Jews constituted a distinct racial group which was both physically and morally inferior. Hence, ‘anti-Semitism’ is a form of European racism specific to Europe, and not to be confused with any anti-Jews outside Europe. Since then Zionism, which is an anti-Semitic racist ideology, has used the term ‘Semite’ to racially identify Jews for political purposes.
axisoflogic.com

MAR DEL PLATA, Argentina – An anti-American rally turned violent Friday as more than 1,000 rioters clashed with police, setting bonfires in the streets and destroying storefronts across about six square blocks less than a mile from the inauguration of the fourth Summit of the Americas.

The violence in Argentina came after a massive, peaceful march by about 10,000 demonstrators who listened to Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez urge them to fight U.S. policies, including a proposal to create a hemisphere-wide free trade agreement.

Later, a group of demonstrators wearing bandanas over their faces and beating wooden clubs against the pavement faced off with riot police, who responded by firing tear gas.

Car sirens wailed as frightened pedestrians fled. Police held fast behind the barricade and prevented what appeared to be an attempt by the demonstrators to break through.

Demonstrators then lit American flags on fire, while others shot rocks with slingshots at police. Several shops, including a minimarket and a pastry store, had their windows shattered during the rioting.
news.yahoo.com

AUSTIN, Texas – Texas’ chief justice said Friday his decision to appoint a Democrat to preside over Republican Rep. Tom DeLay’s campaign-finance case stands, despite prosecutors’ objections to the justice’s political connections.

In a letter to District Attorney Ronnie Earle and defense lawyer Dick DeGuerin, Chief Justice Wallace Jefferson said that the duty to make judicial appoints rests with him.

On Thursday, Jefferson named Senior Judge Pat Priest, a Democrat from San Antonio, to oversee DeLay’s conspiracy and money laundering trial. The former House majority leader is accused of illegally funneling corporate contributions to Republican candidates for the state Legislature.

If it is shown that Priest cannot preside impartially, the assignment of Priest — but not the power of the chief justice to assign — can be challenged, Jefferson wrote.

The judge who was originally assigned to the case was removed Tuesday at DeLay’s request because of his contributions to Democrats. Then the administrative judge who was supposed to pick a new judge for the case withdrew at Earle’s request because of his contributions to GOP candidates.

The responsibility for picking a judge then fell to Jefferson.

Prosecutors complained that Jefferson, too, had ties to Republicans that could pose a potential conflict.

Among other things, Jefferson’s 2002 campaign treasurer, Bill Ceverha, was treasurer of DeLay’s Texans for a Republican Majority political action committee. Jefferson also received a $25,000 donation from the Republican National State Elections Committee, a group at the heart of the money laundering charge against DeLay.
news.yahoo.com

…On its own, the public fallout from Libby’s indictment on five counts of perjury, false statements, and obstruction of justice will be minimal. One could even add that the indictment of Karl Rove would make less difference in the court of popular opinion than most followers of the case think. Poll after poll has shown that only about half of Americans have ever heard of Rove. The gravity of his loss would be strategic: Without him, the great orchestra of White House staffers, congressional GOP foot soldiers, and the Washington press corps would be without a conductor. Meantime, only a very few pundits of the right made mention of the shoe that has not yet dropped. Proving again that crazy is not the same as stupid, Ann Coulter told CNN that the extension of special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald’s investigation “is, like, the worst possible outcome.” She is right, too.

Where is Fitzgerald’s case headed now? The arc of Plame leak coverage in the press underscores the futility of reading too much into any particular leak from the grand jury. As recently as last Friday, the New York Times and Washington Post were diametrically opposed on the very basic question of whether the probe would continue. (The Times said yes, the Post no.) The trouble is that all the leaks seem to be coming from defense attorneys close to the case, and criminal lawyers a) don’t know Fitzgerald’s theory of the case, only what he has said to them regarding their clients; and b) are duty-bound, wherever possible, to spin any disclosures they make so as to aid their clients.

But there is one point on which every major news outlet, and presumably every leaker, has fallen into accord in the past week or two. Last Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal put it concisely: “With the grand jury in the CIA leak case expected to vote as soon as today to bring charges against White House officials, the two-year probe appears to be focused on the office of Vice President Dick Cheney, one of the chief architects and defenders of the administration’s Iraq war policy.” The accent belongs on the last clause. Cheney’s office is the Pandora’s Box of the Bush administration campaign to invade Iraq. Most of the planning as to both the waging and selling of the war occurred under his direction, along with that of Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz at the Pentagon.
citypages.com

by Joshua Frank

Oh, what a farce it was. On Tuesday November 1, the Senate Democrats pulled a rare maneuver, kicked the press and the public out of their hallowed chambers, slammed the doors, and for 3 1/2 long hours purportedly took the Republicans to task. The Democrats demanded that the Republicans give them what was promised: an investigation into the Bush administration’s misuse of intelligence leading up to the invasion of Iraq.

It sounds noble enough and predictably their act, which was led by Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, has been praised by a flurry of antiwar pundits and bloggers who claim the Democratic Party must finally be warming up to their side of the war question.

But just because something sounds noble, doesn’t mean it is.

Writing for The Nation online, John Nichols gushed,

“Remarkable as it may sound, there is reason to believe that Congressional Democrats may finally be waking from their long slumber and stirring into a functional opposition party … [Reid] merits the high praise of being referred to not as a Democrat or a Republican but as the leader of the opposition that this country has so sorely needed.”

Opposition to what? Calling for an investigation into how the Bush administration manipulated the public (forget that the Democratic leadership throughout the1990s up until, well, November 1, were propagating the same lies about Saddam’s threat) isn’t called “leadership,” let alone the makings of “functional opposition party,” as Nichols believes. It was all just a silly ruse. The Democrats certainly know how the Republicans misrepresented and inflated intelligence about Saddam’s WMD.

But there is a much bigger charade going on here that most have missed: despite their newly found tenacity, the Democrats still have not taken a sound position on the war in Iraq.
counterpunch.org

CNN.com reports that as the heart of a hurricane-ravaged New Orleans filled with sewage-tainted floodwaters and corpses, Mayor Ray Nagin urged people to cross a bridge leading to the dry lands of the city’s suburban west bank.

And there begins the story of what might become the worst American civil rights episode ushering in the 21st Century.

The lead actors in this two-bit replay of the Bloody Sunday attempted crossing of the Edmund Pettus Bridge 40 years ago by blacks demanding the right to vote, are a police chief and a sheriff who are now as famous as Bull Connor. But sadly, share some of his attributes, too.

It is reported that during the 1980s, Jefferson Parish Sheriff Harry Lee ordered special scrutiny for any black people traveling in white sections of the parish. He is quoted by the New Orleans Gambit as having said, “It’s obvious that two young blacks driving a rinky-dink car in a predominantly white neighborhood . . . They’ll be stopped.”

In 1994, the Gambit reports Sheriff Lee withdrew his officers from a predominantly black neighborhood after protests erupted when two black men died while in his care. He is reported to have said, “To hell with them, I haven’t heard one word of support from one black person.”

In April of this year, blacks complained that Jefferson Parish officers were using a caricature of a black man for target practice.
Sheriff Lee laughed when presented the charges and is reported to have commented, “I’ve looked at it, I don’t find it offensive, and I have no interest in correcting it.”

In May of this year, a 16-year old joy rider in a stolen car was murdered when 110 shots were fired into the stolen truck, striking the 16-year old and injuring two other teenaged passengers. In response to criticism from black ministers over the incident, Sheriff Lee is reported to have responded, “They can kiss my ass.”
counterpunch.org

…A hole in space seems to make no sense at all, yet scientists are convinced that these prisons of light are for real, even though they have never really been seen and the only evidence for their existence is circumstantial.

But astronomers have now got close to staring a black hole in the face. With the help of an array of 10 radio telescopes in America, they have pictured the void at the centre of our own Milky Way galaxy 26 million light years away, where a supermassive black hole sits invisibly like the transparent eye of a hurricane.

This particular black hole is estimated to have a mass equivalent to four million Suns and yet the latest measurements, published in the journal Nature, suggest it occupies a volume with a radius less than the distance between the Earth and the Sun.

This is less than half the size previously estimated, indicating that astronomers are close to defining the crucial outer boundary of one of the most elusive phenomena in cosmology – one that has mystified scientists for decades. “We’re getting tantalisingly close to being able to see an unmistakable signature that would provide the first concrete proof of a supermassive black hole at a galaxy’s centre,” said Zhi-Qiang Shen, of Shanghai Astronomical Observatory in China, one of the leaders of the study.
independent.co.uk

Kitty Kelley’s forthcoming book The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty, could revist some of the clan’s open and unspoken secrets, such as “alleged sex offenses against minors by Dubya’s father.” I say “revisit,” but in fact this will be a new one for most Americans. Because no scandal in American history was disappeared more efficiently than that of the Franklin Credit Union. Despite the salacious mix of sex and violence in high places, few have ever heard of it. Why, I wonder, would that be?
rigorousintuition.blogspot.com

In the words of the person who called my attention to this story: holy crapoley

by John Walsh
All governments lie as I. F. Stone famously observed, but some governments lie more than others. And the neocon Bush regime serves up whoppers as standard fare every day. Why this propensity to lie? There are many reasons, but it is not widely appreciated that the neocons believe in lying on principle. It is the “noble” thing for the elite to do, for the “vulgar” masses, the “herd” will become ungovernable without such lies. This is the idea of the “noble lie” practiced with such success and boldness by Scooter Libby and his co-conspirators and concocted by the political “philosopher” Leo Strauss whose teachings lie at the core of the neoconservative outlook and agenda, so much so that they are sometimes called “Leocons.”
counterpunch.org

Arrested Syrian may be key al-Qaida suspect
A Syrian man believed to be a key figure in Osama bin Laden’s terrorist network in Europe may have been captured by Pakistani security agencies, officials said today.

Authorities were investigating whether one of two arrested al-Qaida suspects was Mustafa Setmarian Nasar, alleged to have had a key role in the Madrid train bombings and to be linked with the July 7 London bombings, a senior government official said. He spoke on condition of anonymity, saying he was not allowed to comment publicly on the investigation.

Rome within Iran missile range: Israeli FM
TEL AVIV, Israel, Nov. 2 (UPI) — Rome is within range of Iran’s nuclear-capable missiles, Israel’s foreign minister has warned.

Israeli Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom gave the warning Tuesday to his visiting Italian opposite number, Foreign Minister Gianfranco Fini, during a discussion on the Iranian nuclear crisis, the Tel Aviv newspaper Yediot Aharonot reported on its ynet.com Web site.

Fini told a press conference following their meeting that should Iran acquire nuclear weapons, it would severely threaten not only Israel but the entire international community. He said the United Nations Security Council must deal with the Iranian matter as soon as possible.

Fini told Shalom that the Italian government of Silvio Berlusconi saw the Iranian nuclear threat eye to eye with Israel, ynet.com said. He also told Shalom that he intended to participate Thursday in a mass protest demonstration opposite the Iranian Embassy in Rome, initiated by the Italian newspaper Il Foglio.

Ahmad Chalabi’s Comeback Tour

It looks like Judy Miller isn’t the only discredited war instigator who might be making a comeback.

Ahmad Chalabi, the neocon-darling-turned-persona-non-grata-turned-Iraqi-Deputy-Prime-Minister, is coming to Washington this month — his first visit to DC since the White House soured on him back in May 2004 and those Pentagon checks stopped coming.

For his comeback tour, Chalabi has lined up meetings with Condi Rice, John Snow, and national security advisor Stephen Hadley (no word on whether he and Hadley will have a friendly showdown to see who helped pass along the most bogus pre-war intel. I can see Chalabi offering up Curveball only to have Hadley top him with the phony yellowcake info he passed along).

And no word on whether Chalabi will be calling on his old pal Scooter Libby, to whom he turned when the CIA stopped buying his bull, and who gave him a direct line to the White House. Just as he once convinced Libby that American troops would be greeted as liberators, Chalabi could now convince him there is light at the end of the indictment tunnel: “Trust me, Scooter, I’ve been through much worse. You just gotta put your head down and keep scheming!”

Chalabi’s visit is the political version of getting the band back together.

And, having orchestrated the greatest career makeover since Paris Hilton went from Internet porn curiosity to Vanity Fair cover girl, Chalabi has now set his sights on becoming Iraq’s new prime minister following the next round of voting on Dec. 15.

Not bad for a guy who, less than two years ago, was being accused by the Bush administration of passing intelligence to Iran that could ‘get people killed.’