WARNING: Death Lurks In your Microwave!

Dr Stephen Opuni, FDB

By Ekow Mensah.

Being modern has always come with cost and some of the things we take for granted are the very ones which rush us into our graves prematurely.

Scientists have now established that microwaving food wrapped in plastic is damaging to health and should be avoided.

According to the Harvard Medical School Family Health Guide, “when food is wrapped in plastic or placed in a plastic container and microwaved, substances used in manufacturing the plastic may leak into the food”.

It warns what fatty foods such as meat and cheeses cause a chemical know as diethythexyl   adipate to leach out of the plastic.

As a result of these scientific findings, the Food and Drug Administration in the United States of America is rigorously regulating plastic containers and materials that come into contact with food.

The FDA insists that manufacturer must test plastic containers to meet its standards and specifications.

Gary Rouberg, an expert on the issue, writes that If not labeled microwave safe, plastic takeout containers, water bottles and tubs made to hold margarine, yogurt, whipped topping, cream cheese, mayonnaise, and mustard are potentially hazardous. According to Plastics Info, "unless a product is labeled for microwave suitability, you won't have the assurance of knowing that an item was tested and evaluated for this purpose. 

The concern is that, if used inappropriately, an item may warp or melt when exposed to extremely hot foods, and accidental burns could occur." Environmental Working Group agrees: "Microwaves heat unevenly, creating hot spots where the plastic is more likely to break down." Scratches and abrasions to microwave-safe containers may render them unfit for microwaving as well.

The FDA notes that according to the American Plastics Council, if you don't vent containers properly by lifting the edge of a lid or cover, microwaving can result in a dangerous buildup of steam that can cause burns. Green Living Online states, "Both the FDA and Health Canada warn that using plastic containers and wrap for anything other than their original purpose can cause health problems. In most cases this means not reusing plastic containers or water bottles. The main concern is with food becoming contaminated due to leakage of the chemicals used to manufacture plastic, especially when the plastic is heated or damaged."

Editorial

PASTORIAL DICTATORSHIP

If you have ever been to church, you will have no doubt about the authority of the clergy and the extent to which that authority is protected by convention and sometimes bye-laws.

When priests speak, no one is allowed to talk back even if what they say is demonstrably false.

 The assumption is that they are God’s own representatives on earth and that what they say could not be the result of their ignorance and sometimes their selfish pursuits .

It is somehow believed that once they mount the pulpit whatever pours out of their mouths is the expression of God’s will and therefore cannot be challenged.

Unfortunately, both recent and ancient history is replete with pastoral deeds which subvert the church and society, which  do irreparable damage to the interest of the underprivileged and make the concept of God  unattractive.

There are stories of priests who abuse children for their own gratification and others who steal from the church. There are some who are bare faced liars and others who are political opportunists.

In our view, if the church is to make a meaningful contribution to the development of society, then it needs to be democratised to enable members hold priests accountable.

 The current situation in which pastoral dictatorship holds sway in the church is unhealthy both for the church itself and society.

Oil: How Could Liberians Settle for Only Five Percent?

Liberian Oil Blocks

By Honourable Saka

Liberians heaved a deep sigh of relief when Liberia recently announced to have discovered oil in commercial quantities, joining her West African sisters: Ghana, Nigeria and some others. Oil deposits in the West African coast have existed for decades. In my opinion, there is no discovery of oil anywhere in West Africa, but the exploitation of the oil belt that runs along the coast of the entire region which the oil executives knew about for decades but did not care to build rigs till now as they tried to gain control over the unstable situations of the Middle East at that time.

Africans must not be deceived. The oil scavengers are now looming over West Africa and if we are not careful to choose rightly between the Nigerian and Ghanaian models of exploitation, there will be no real benefit and this political bonanza could definitely be a curse for the Liberian people in the long run.

Obviously, like their Ghanaian neighbours, Liberians look forward to the prosperity that the oil and gas finds will bring to their country. If well managed, the black gold could transform the destiny of the entire country for generations to come through improved living standards.

 Unfortunately, these aspirations may turn out to be a nightmare if the people do not rise up to the government to adequately scrutinize the oil agreements and set up a national platform for dialogue on the best way forward, so that together, there will be dialogue to secure a reasonable percentage share (70% and above) for the people whose interest the government claims to serve.

According to a statement issued by the Nobel Peace Prize winner, President Ellen Johnson, the American Oil company, Exxon Mobil will own a whopping 80% of the oil shares discovered in Liberia, while their Canadian neighbours, the Canadian Overseas Petroleum Limited (COPL), will own 20%. Many people are wondering: where does this place the people of Liberia? What share does the government of Liberia have in this oil deal? The African people would want to know.

Again, why the rush to explore the oil without first putting adequate measures in place to guard against the challenges that may accompany the oil exploration in the near future? Where is the government rushing to? Is President Ellen Johnson considering early retirement in the coming months? Has the government considered building local refineries to process the crude oil or Liberia will follow the Nigerian model where the raw crude is shipped to Europe and the refined product is shipped back to the country at ridiculous prices? Has the government considered training local engineers to take over the management of the oil industry within the shortest possible time? Why must African leaders always allow such sensitive sectors of their economy to be held hostage by a few foreign corporations?

 We (Africans) have a major problem. We rush to commission most projects without taking time to plan against the unforeseeable challenges that may likely show up in the near future.

 Is Liberia well-prepared to deal with corruption in the oil and gas sector? Is the government prepared to face the angry youth who are likely to take up arms as we see in Nigeria? In Nigeria, many agitated so-called rebel groups rose up and took arms to fight the corruption in the oil and gas sector, a situation which is currently out of control. Will Liberia learn some lessons from Nigeria or as usual, wait unprepared for the problems to come up before they run to NATO for solutions?

Although President Ellen Johnson has not said what would happen to the Liberian share, the President and CEO of the National Oil Company of Liberia (NOCAL), Dr. Randolph McClain, explained that the negotiating team of the Liberian government secured a 5% citizens participation share in LB-13 and a further 5% royalty on oil produced from wells drilled under water depths of 1500 meters. Angered by the shocking news, Okechuku, a PhD student at Oxford University wondered:

When Liberia was in crisis, did the US and Canada send any help? I’m shocked at how a country's wealth is being giving away for peanuts. Is this the reason why the president was awarded the Nobel Prize some months ago? Ellen Johnson has always been the World Bank’s darling girl anyway. You don’t get a Nobel Peace Award without signing such deals.

 The man is absolutely right! Of course that is the price the people pay when our leaders are given such awards by special interest foreign groups. Remember Ellen Johnson was given the Nobel Prize somewhere last year? Yeah, that was when the actual oil deal was sealed. The selfishness of our leaders is the reason for our underdevelopment. Our people must say no to all NGOs that are buying-off our leaders and our independence. It's a shame. How can a country that has suffered over a decade of economic hardship, settle for some 10% royalty in a multi-billion resource like oil?

Is this all that our forefathers died for? Is this the hope and the dream the government sought to build when the people gave out their mandate? But more seriously, how much of this 10% will end up in the offshore accounts of many of these negotiating teams? This still remains unclear.

Meanwhile at the moment, although early indications are positive, the exact extent of oil deposits found in the country still remains unknown. Leaders have already settled for peanuts from big oil corporations as they hand over the oil reserves to the western firms with virtually nothing left for the ordinary Liberian in the near future.

The Canadian Overseas Petroleum Limited (COPL) recently disclosed offering the politicians, a mere U$45m in cash toward the purchase of block 13 of Liberia's oil industry, a move which will see Liberia lose billions of dollars every year to the COPL. I wonder why these politicians will just sell the oil reserves for merely $45m when the actual oil deposit is yet unknown. How many of the poor Liberian families will benefit from the $45m given to the politicians?

Liberian politicians have been blinded by the mere $45millon they received as signature fee, forgetting about the long term financial loses, the environmental damage and all the hardships the country will endure while their foreign donors bag a whopping 95% profit shares on a monthly basis! Why are African leaders keen on the few millions today, while they ignore the billions which the big oil companies will be reaping in the coming years?

Why are such sensitive agreements held in the corridors of secrecy when the destiny of entire generations depends on them? Why must the good people of Liberia allow a few selfish, greedy and corrupt politicians to negotiate on their behalf in camera?

For a country like Liberia which had been plunged into civil war and suffered decades of economic hardship, seeing the need to put such oil agreements in the public domain, and discussing them in consultation with leaders of the regional block would have been a better decision. But as usual, African leaders never consult their colleagues during such critical moments. Only a few millions into their offshore accounts and the agreement is sealed, leaving the poor masses to their fate.

Will Liberia Repeat Nigeria and Ghana’s Mistakes?

 In Nigeria for instance, as western oil companies loot some $140 Billion a year of the country’s oil, two-thirds of the country’s 160 million people live on less than $2 a day. Western oil companies are literally looting Nigeria’s oil, paying as little as a 9% royalty. Simply put, at $100 a barrel, the western oil companies get $91 and Nigeria only gets $9. Or more shockingly, Big Oil makes $140 billion a year vs. Nigeria’s $10 Billion, writes Thomas C. Mountain as he reveals the shocking reasons why many Nigerians remain the poorest in Africa despite the country’s plenteous oil and gas.

 Ghana's Oil Has Been Sold Off Already.

Fmr President Kufuor, a puppet of the West

 Today in Ghana, when Tullow Oils makes a profit of $3 billion, Ghana gets only $3 million out of that. Can this agreement truly better the lives of Ghanaians? Yet, former president Kuffuor, the man who recently suggested that bad leadership is Africa’s problem, was the same president who signed this oil agreement with foreign firms. This is what happens when foreign corporations are allowed to secretly finance our politicians into power during election periods!

 African citizenry must rebel against such dangerous oil agreements. Legislations must be introduced to ban all politicians from sourcing for funds from abroad during elections periods. The country’s planners should not neglect other sectors of the economy. They should diversify to avoid exogenous shocks due to volatility in the prices of oil on the international markets.

Privatization of state resources must cease with immediate effect. Governments cannot continue with the habit of selling off every strategic resource without adequate long term planning. African leaders must train more engineers to help build our industries so that we can manage the exploitation of our resources. Africans must develop the habit of managing their own affairs.

Late Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez

This is the beginning of a long walk to perpetual poverty and economic impoverishment in Liberia as Big Oil corporations begin to loot Liberian worth. For very $100billion of profits made by the oil corporations, Liberians will only get some few $100 million donations.

I miss Chavez, I miss Gadhafi. These leaders showed oil-rich Africans the way, but due to corruption and selfishness, our leaders will not follow their steps. Ghanaians have already settled for some 10% share in their most-talked about oil. Nigerians have quietly accepted 9% for more than 50yrs. Liberians must never settle for 5%! Anything less than 70% must be rejected by the people.

This is the only way we can fight poverty and say enough to the foreign corporations who continue to enrich themselves with African resources while the African people wallow in poverty.

It’s time we said enough is enough!

The US budget sequestration cuts have now been triggered. When the dust settled, we found the big cyber war scare was copied in all the other major Western countries. That showed us it was closely coordinated to create what is called an echo chamber effect in the Intel trade, actually psychological operation of sorts.

The usuals were listed at the “bad guys”, China, Russia, and Iran... but Israel, as usual, was left off the list despite its being one of the real bad boys and on the cutting edge of the technology along with the US. The others have actually been playing catch up to a Pandora's box that we opened.

Why the big scare routine, why now? Well, with budget cuts looming in the militaries of all Western countries, being exempted from cuts required some public support. Fear has always been the weapon of choice for creating that because it has worked so well in the past.

My earlier article, Israel's cyber war operations against the US, still has 84,000 Google hits and generated a lot of calls and email with readers happy to see someone was finally bringing this 'oversight' out into the sunlight. Israel's cyber attacks against Iran have of course gotten Western media attention, but there remains a black out on its 'friendly country' attacks.

The biggest questions and tips we received have generally involved the ease with which Israel has penetrated not only business IT for industrial espionage, but also Homeland Security. The huge number of contractors is an additional big target.

I still remember by first shock when reading about our Zionist DHS head Michael Chertoff flying an entire briefing crew over to Israel to put on 'fast track' seminars for Israel companies. He was showing them how to get in on the gold rush as America shoveled out huge sums of post-9/11 deficit budget funding. They had to move fast to grab some of the communication contracts which were a gold mine in themselves for secretly tapping into security communications for many years.

We all still remember from the Clinton/Monica Lewinsky scandal, one of the transcripts of a White House phone call where Bill told her they had to be careful what they said because the Israelis were listening. What a great moment in American intelligence history!

The complaints and concerns that came were not hard to get as there are many people in the IT security business that are enraged with what the Israelis are allowed to get away with here, virtually a free pass in terms of prosecution. There is a simmering rage about it, and the endless questioning of “why don't we just roll up all of their operations and be done with them?” They really know why, though... political corruption.

But we had what I felt was a perfect example sent in to us this week of a classic cyber spying operation, compliments of the Israelis. One of the first things you need in this game is a fishing pole and some bait. In the IT world, that would be a website where you would obviously feel very protected. And from the spy side, one that would pull in targeted people and companies where you wanted to penetrate their computers for an extended period.

The smokescreen was provided by a private Israeli University, the Interdisciplinary Center (IDC) Herzliya. They had a double hook website set up with the key one being the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism. Its a perfect hook site because it would draw a lot of international Intel and security people notice if for nothing other than going there, on their computers, to see what they had.

But an infecting 'back door' code was waiting for them. You can guess for yourselves whether the Israelis got nailed here or they set this all up. I have already placed my bet. If any of you think that some outside hackers put a 'backdoor' code on an Israeli counter-intelligence website, I can promise you that did not happen. They put it there. It's what they do. They suck you in with the “we are hear to help you,” and then stick the knife in and give it a twist.

I have abridged the technical explanation to cover just the key points for simplification.

“That file is then written to the Windows local machine’s temporary folder and executed to infect the computer with a persistent backdoor...The backdoor service is actually installed under a registry key called “RAT”, which is not very discreet, to say the least, and the backdoor connects to a C2 that is recognized by our service as suspicious hxxp://interfacet.oicp.net:88. It appears that oicp.net is a web host that is located in China. Custom hosts on the site have been found to be involved in targeted attacks in the past (1 2); however, the specific host actually points to an IP address of 65.19.141.XXX located in Fremont, California, United States.”

Okay... installing back doors on people's computers so you can steal information is an old game in the cyberwar business. You can steal all you can right away, monitor the work done on the computer and take small bits at a time, or hide unnoticed until something very important happens and then go to work. The latter would be like for planting something in a power system network to use potentially at a future date or event.

And unless you are a dummy, if your back door code was found, you would want to lay a wild goose chase bread crumb trail to someone else's door. The best way to do this is to tie your operation into a host site in a country that has been getting a lot of bad publicity for cyber spying, like China.

The above Fremont, Ca. location is a big international web hosting data center. So the trail came back to the US computer address where the stolen data could be coming, only to be bounced around through ten other hosts before its final destination.

Would the Israelis want it actually going to Israel in a traceable way? Of course not. Why not have it go to a place where Israeli espionage is virtually never prosecuted, like the US, or Canada, or Australia? Computer dead drops can be set up to receive info, then closed and abandoned in an ongoing process.

Israeli IT security contractors and defense people actually work tours of duty in US Homeland Security where they can learn where the holes are in the system to exploit. We make it easy for them, so even more money has to be spent on cyber security.

If you are getting the feeling that a lot of his is a big ongoing shakedown game, you are on your way to becoming an Intel analyst. And if you think this is all a big huge waste of money and that it might be better for all involved to have a peace convention where they might be able to work out a truce, you get a peace activist gold star.

But who do you think would show up to such a cyber war peace convention? Who would even propose such a thing, even though they have been trying to scare us with cyber war mass destruction? We need to knock some sense into their heads that we are getting tired of it, really tired. 

Busia made “big mistakes” – Arthur K

Kofi Abrefa Busia

Former Presidential Aspirant of the main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP), Dr. Arthur Kennedy says Ghana’s late Prime Minister Prof. Kofi Abrefa Busia made some “big mistakes” as a Leader.

In a piece to reflect on the centenary anniversary of the late Prime Minister, Dr. Kennedy bewailed Busia’s aliens’ compliance order which led to the repatriation of non-Ghanaians, including Nigerians from Ghana in the early 70s.

He also believes Prof. Busia’s defiance of a court ruling in the “Sallah case” was a further blot on his reputation although the “positive side of Busia’s ledger outweighs the negative part by a lot”.

He however said none of those mistakes were unlike those made by other Ghanaian Leaders.

Read Dr. Arthur Kennedy’s full statement below

Last week, members of the Danquah-Busia-Dombo tradition celebrated the centenary of the birth of Dr. Kofi Abrefa Busia. The celebration should have been done by the whole nation, not just those who take their inspiration from the afore-mentioned tradition.

Even before entering politics, the diminutive Professor had left his footprints on the sands of time. He had earned the distinction of being the first African to be a Professor at Legon as well as one of the first blacks to be District Commissioners under the colonial government.

In politics, he made a difference, for better.

While all the praise-singing last week was deserved, he made some big mistakes, like most of our leaders.

He was perhaps, in the spirit of the times, too deferential to the IMF in negotiating the devaluation in 1971 that led to his overthrow. The implementation of the Aliens Compliance Order was too precipitous and insensitive to our Nigerian brethren. His policy of dialogue with South Africa was too far ahead of its time—indeed, it would take Nelson Mandela nearly two decades to reach the same conclusions that Busia had reached about dialogue with South Africa. His handling of the “Sallah case” leading to the “no-court” pronouncement could have been handled better. Today, he might be hauled in front of the Supreme Court for such a comment.

All these were blemishes but the positive side of Busia’s ledger outweighs the negative part by a lot.

Former US President Richard Nixon confessed in his memoire that when he attended Ghana’s independence celebration in March, 1957, he had been more impressed by the then opposition leader, Busia than by the new Prime Minister, Kwame Nkrumah!

When he became Prime Minister, he showed a commitment to ordinary people only matched by Nkrumah and an insight into development that even Nkrumah could not match. He decided that the key to our nation’s development was rural development, based on the premise that we needed to make living in rural areas humane and tolerable to stop migration into urban areas. Nearly four decades later, the potency of what Busia did was brought home to me powerfully in the Abura-Asebu-Kwamankese constituency. I was campaigning in a village when a chief asked me, “Doc, do you know why this village is an NPP village?” I asked him to educate me and he said, “When you were driving here, did you notice the small strip of coal-tar in the middle of the road? It is the remnants of the road built by Busia in 1970 to help get our produce to the market. Doc, we know that we probably will never see coal-tar here in our lives again. That is why we vote NPP.”

By that singular act, Dr Busia made the Danquah-Busia tradition, a party of ordinary people and a mass movement. All of a sudden, we ceased to be the party of elites and elitists. Also, he introduced the National Service Scheme that helped introduce the youth to the idea of sacrifice. In addition to these, Prof. Busia, though a royal, could speak the language of commoners. Unlike many of his contemporaries and many who followed him, he knew that words did not mean anything if they were not understood by one’s audience. And Prof. Busia was RESPECTFUL. He did not insult his opponents and he did not permit others to insult them.

Also, he fought the corruption that has undermined virtually every government since independence. He was perhaps the only leader in whose overthrow corruption was not cited as a major reason.

Dr Arthur Kennedy

As a leader, the Professor was tolerant, often to a fault. Once, before an event at Legon, a student went to sit in the chair reserved for the then Prime Minister and was arrested. He ordered the student to be released immediately. In a conversation in 2006, I asked late Da Rocha to reflect on Busia. He said, “Even though Busia was many years my senior, I never felt uncomfortable disagreeing with him or asking him questions. He was a confident man who always saw my questions as an opportunity to educate me. 

While he persuaded me to his views most of the time, occasionally, he would change in response to my arguments. He was a very special and decent man. Ironically, even as the ages of our leaders have gotten closer to my own, it has become more and more uncomfortable to disagree with them.” To back this up, many of his contemporaries spoke of vigourous debates in his cabinet, involving stalwarts like Paa Willie, Victor Owusu and Adade.

Despite all these attributes, it was his role as party leader that was truly exemplary. Once a week, whenever he was in Accra, the Professor would spend the afternoon at party headquarters receiving party members who wanted to see him, regardless of rank. He knew that a leader must make time to listen to his followers. He showed respect for the sacrifice of others. Then, those who advanced were those who had served the party and knew its offices, officers and foot-soldiers.

Finally, when he intervened in local politics, he did so for the larger interests of the party. According to reports, when J.H. Mensah was parachuted into Sunyani, Prof. Busia and other leaders pleaded with Lawyer Barimah, who would have been nominated for the seat to make way because Mr. Mensah would be needed in cabinet and Parliament to spearhead economic policy. And Barimah yielded to the larger interest of the party.

On the occasion of his centenary celebration, let our nation and the Danquah-Busia-Dombo tradition rediscover Busia.

Rediscovering rural development and a distaste for corruption will make Ghana better.

Rededicating itself to the man whose humility, eloquence, respect for the common man and commitment to our party made us a party of government will make us, once again, the governing party. 

Let us move forward—together.

Arthur Kobina Kennedy
Orangeburg, South Carolina.
15th July, 2013

RUSSIA’S FEARS

Typewriter

Following the revelations of global surveillance programs by the US National Security Agency (NSA), Russia has decided to resort to the traditional method of typewriting documents to avert the theft of classified information.

It is more than a month since Edward Snowden, a former contractor at the US agency, revealed to the world that the NSA is spying on Americans and the citizens of other countries through phones and the Internet.

The leaked documents also showed that NSA spies based in Britain intercepted the top-secret communications of the then Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev, during his visit to Britain for the G20 summit in London in 2009.

The NSA paper was entitled: "Russian Leadership Communications in support of President Dmitry Medvedev at the G20 summit in London - Intercept at Men with Hill station."

Three years ago, Julian Assange, the founder of the anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks, shocked the world by publishing hundreds of thousands of classified American documents.

"After the scandal with the circulation of classified documents by Wikileaks, the revelations made by Edward Snowden and reports that [Prime Minister] Dmitry Medvedev's phone was tapped during his visit to the G-20 summit in London, it has been decided to expand the use of paper documents," a Russian official has told Izvestia, a Russian newspaper.

According to a tender posted on the government’s procurement website, the Russian government has approved $15,000 for the purchase of typewriters, ribbons and correction tape to be used by the Federal Protection Service-Russia’s equivalent of the U.S. Secret Service-which guards Russian officials, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Each typewriting machine has a unique handwriting which makes it easy to trace the document to its source, reports say.

Israeli Settlements on Palestinian Land. Netanyahu and ‘Acts of Hooliganism’

By Robert Fantina

One knows things are bad in Palestine when even Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, known for his brutal heavy-handiness against the Palestinians, has to decry what he calls ‘acts of hooliganism’ against them. These behaviors, known as price-tag attacks, are committed against Palestinians and Israeli security forces by Jewish youth living in violation of international law in Israeli settlements on Palestinian land. The point, apparently, is to extract a ‘price’ for actions taken against their illegal settlements. What actions Israeli security forces are taking, or have taken, were not mentioned.

In response, Mr. Netanyahu made this astounding statement:  “I wish to condemn two phenomena that we have witnessed recently: Racism against Israeli Arabs and acts of hooliganism against Palestinians, without any provocation or justification”. He promised to “act with all legal means at our disposal to stop them.”

This writer finds these to be most bewildering statements. How, he asks himself, can Mr. Netanyahu decry ‘acts of hooliganism’, which include brutal and vicious assaults, when his Israel Defense Forces (IDF) comprise one of the most brutal and vicious terrorist organizations in the world, killing, maiming and terrorizing Palestinians, on their own land, on a daily basis? How can he promise, with a straight face, to ‘act with all legal means at our disposal to stop them’, when he continually shows his complete disdain for international law by increasing settlement activity on Palestinian land?

And Israel has now devised a new way to torture and humiliate Palestinians. It has somehow developed a horrible smelling substance, ostensibly for use in breaking up unruly crowds of Palestinian demonstrators. The liquid is sprayed on people, and the smell is so offensive that they flee from it.

Well, one supposes this is better than the rubber bullets, which are about the most benign weaponry Israel ever uses against Palestinians and internationals supporting them.  Yet current reports indicate that IDF terrorists go into peaceful neighborhoods, and spray the putrid fumes on private homes, where the occupants are merely trying to live as normally as possible under cruel and horrific occupation. Business as usual for apartheid Israel.

But getting back to the original point, Mr. Netanyahu seems to define ‘hooliganism’ somewhat differently than this writer understands the term. Some minor vandalism, graffiti on walls or cars, etc., might be viewed as hooliganism, but the term seems to stop short of assault and battery, and attempted murder. So these rampaging Israeli youths, attacking Palestinians because they dare to object to the theft of their land, are not, in this writer’s view, hooligans. They are criminals, guilty of hate crimes, and should be prosecuted as such. But in an apartheid nation such as Israel, that just isn’t going to happen.

But perhaps these ‘childish’ expressions of displeasure on the part of Israeli youths are excusable. The director of Child and Adolescent Clinical Services, Ruth Pat-Horencyzyk, said that these ‘youngsters’ probably suffer the psychological effects of surviving terrorist acts.  Said she: “Those adolescents were exposed to terrorist attacks and developed post-traumatic symptoms… they tend to exercise twice as much risk-taking behaviors. Attacking innocent people just because they are Arabs, with no provocation whatsoever. And that’s very typical to people who feel in survival mode state.”

Since 2000, at least 8,000 Palestinian children have been arrested by the IDF. Have they, and all Palestinians, not also been ‘exposed to terrorist attacks and developed post-traumatic symptoms’? Is this only an excuse for Israeli youths living in illegal settlements to attack Palestinians, but isn’t seen as justification for any violence perpetrated by Palestinian youths, most, if not all, of whom experience horrific terrorist attacks on a frequent basis, including the destruction of their homes to make way for Israeli-only roads and settlements, constant harassment by IDF terrorists, and the continued humiliation of their parents? Is there no sympathy for them when they throw a rock at a U.S.-provided tank that is patrolling their street, taking their land and making them homeless?

Mr. Netanyahu and his co-Zionists will not be satisfied until every vestige of Palestinian existence is purged from Palestine. That in 2013, one country can, with impunity, perpetrate the horrors that Israel inflicts on the Palestinians is beyond shocking. Not in the U.S. , of course, where the American Israel Political Affairs Committee (AIPAC) has bought and paid for most of Congress and the White House. In those hallowed halls, such lofty concepts of ‘human rights’ and peoples’ right to self-determination are only offered conditionally. 

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, widely seen as the frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016, said this about Syrian rebels in 2012: “…we cannot ask the opposition to unilaterally give up their struggle for justice, dignity, and self-determination.” 

Yet during Israel’s barbaric bombardment of the Gaza Strip in November of 2012, she made this amazing statement: “The rocket attacks from terrorist organizations inside Gaza on these (Israeli) cities and towns must end and a broader calm restored.” No comments now about not asking ‘the opposition (Palestine) to unilaterally give up their struggle for justice, dignity, and self-determination.’ Without a powerful lobby to influence and purchase U.S. so-called representatives, Palestinian human rights are not even considered.

If Mr. Netanyahu considers that barbaric assaults by Israeli youths on Palestinians are acts of hooliganism that must be stopped, he might want to consider his own such acts, on steroids, and think about stopping them. But no, a few words to the press to show his great concern, yearning for peace, desire for a fair and equitable solution, etc., etc., are always sufficient to mask his land theft, torture and terrorism towards the Palestinians. The U.S. press is always happy to report those oh-so-appealing sound bites, but somewhat more hesitant to inform their readers and listeners about the unspeakable sufferings endured by the Palestinians at the hands of apartheid Israel.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, the weak, spineless leader of Fatah which supposedly rules the West Bank, hesitates to petition the International Criminal Court for redress. Did he displease his U.S. puppet masters so severely last year, when he successfully petitioned the United Nations for recognition, that he dare not do it again? One can think of no other reason for him not to utilize Palestine’s new position in the United Nations to assist the suffering Palestinian people. Does he think Mr. Netanyahu will suddenly be filled with compassion for the Palestinians? Does he think U.S. president Barack Obama will decide to stop funding Israel and its terrorists? No, even Mr. Abbas is not so naïve.

It is long past time for Palestine’s incompetent and corrupt leadership to risk the financial wrath of the U.S. and go to the United Nations to seek redress for Israel’s countless crimes against Palestine. With each delay, more illegal settlements are planned and built, more Palestinian land is lost, and the prospects for a free, independent and prosperous Palestine fade. It is an unspeakable disgrace that the world community has tolerated this for so long, but it took a giant step toward rectifying the situation last November, when Palestine was admitted to the U.N. as a Non-Member Observer State. With Mr. Abbas recognized internationally as Palestine’s leader, the next move is his to make. That he has delayed this long only compounds his disgrace.