WATER PROBE, MD Challenges Report of Committee

Mr Kweku Botwe, MD Ghana Water Company

Mr. Kweku Botwe, Acting Managing Director of The Ghana Water Company Limited has challenged the contents of a report which recommended his prosecution for bulk breaking of contracts.

In a letter to the Minister of Water Resources, Works and Housing, Mr Botwe said a copy of the report has not been made available to him.

The letter dated January 9, 2013 was copied to the two deputy Ministers at the Ministry, the chairman of the Board of Directors of the Ghana Water Company limited and K .Archyee co, a law firm.

Mr. Botwe wrote “At an Emergency Board Meeting held on December 20, 2012, this repot was discussed in my absence. Again the report which I have not been privy to, has appeared in a newspaper (copy attached) and been discussed extensively on both radio and television.

“In fairness to me and others whose names have appeared in the said report I demand as a matter of right, a copy of the report to enable me respond appropriately to issues raised in the said report”.

The fact-finding Committee set up by the ministry of Water Resources, Works and Housing recommended that “the law must be invoked “against the acting Managing Director.

Breaking of contract into smaller bids to avoid the threshold of the Board is in breach of the provisions of the Public Procurement Act of 2003, Act 663.

The penalty for the offence is summary conviction of a fine not exceeding 1,000 penalty units or a term of imprisonment not exceeding five years or both.

E.T Mensah, Out Going Minister of Water Resources Works And Housing

The Committee claimed that in December 2008, the water company carried out a pipe laying project in some communities in the Central Region in which 88 contracts were awarded.

“In the opinion of the committee, the contracts were awarded by the Managing Director with the intent to avoid the threshold of the Board which is Ghana Ȼ10,000.00 and largely to circumvent the procurement process” the report said.

So far the Ministry of Water Resources, Works and Housing has not reacted to the current development.

The Insight is informed that the report has been forwarded to the Chief of Staff at the presidency for action.

Editorial

WATCH OUT

Some developments within the National Democratic Congress (NDC) must be very worrying for all those who cherish the values of democracy.

All of a sudden the level of sycophancy is rising steadily in the NDC.

It appears that some of the leading lights of the party have come to the conclusion that the only way to get on is to sing a cacophony of praises to the President.

Within the twinkling of an eye, President John Mahama has earned many nick names including King Solomon, John The Fourth and Old man.

The other day, a leading member of the NDC went to the ridiculous extent of saying that God predestined John Mahama to become the President of Ghana.

Another jumped beyond everybody else and claimed that President Mahama is the most qualified Head of State Ghana has had.

These sycophants know what they want with their discordant praise singing but we insist that the growing level of sycophancy can only harm the Mahama administration.

The President must be told the truth at all times and one such truth is that he is as human as all Ghanaians.

The other is that the era of the divine rule of kings is over.

Those who want to help President John Dramani Mahama must start by telling him the truth all the time.

NDC CADRES SPEAK OUT!

A Statement Issued At A Press Conference In Accra

Good morning ladies and gentlemen of the press.

Good morning Cadres and friends, Mr. Chairman;

NDC Logo

The Cadre front of the NDC, as some of you may be aware of, is an umbrella organization of all the Cadre groupings that prosecuted the 31^st December Revolutionary process. Namely, the P.D.C's, WDC's, CDR's, ACDR's, DYLG, 31^st December women's movement, C.D.O's, Patriot Club of Ghana, June Four Movement, F.L.O, U.C.F, The forum and many
others.

Having said this, you will agree with us that we do not only share in the vision of a peaceful Ghana, but have contributed monumentally. In the defining of the peaceful and democratic Ghana that we enjoy today. This we did at the Peril of our lives, when we were all budding youth with a desire to ensure equity, social justice and an improved standard of living for our people.

Ladies and gentlemen of the press, it is in this light that we deem it fit to publically commend President John Maharna and his administration for ensuring the availability of the necessary resource and logistics for the conduct of a Free, Fair, Transparent and internationally acclaimed election that has elected him to run his Better Ghana Agenda for another four years term.

Lt. Col. Gbevlo Lartey

We also wish to specially congratulate the Special Security Advisor, Brigadier General Nunro Mensah and his able National Security Co-coordinator, Lt. Co! (Rtd) Larry Gbevlo - Lartey, for the able and professional conduct of their men and women in the security services who ensured a peaceful, free and fair election.

Ladies and gentlemen, we have an estate that has grown from leaps to bounds over the years. An estate that has discharged itself creditably in the coverage of election 2012. We cannot help but commend you, the media, for the professionalism and sacrificial zeal that you employed before, during and after the election.

. To you we say, Ayekoo.

We also acknowledge the immense role of our Islamic and Christian clergy, who through their prayers Bought divine Intervention for a peaceful election.

       

We cannot forget our traditional authorities who by the day, called on their subjects to maintain the peace. We will single out for special mention, Otumfuo Osei Tutu II, the Asantehene who In consonance with the Institute of Democratic Governance organized the famous Kumasi declaration, which unfortunately was flouted by a political party.

However, R11 the other political parties headed the tenets of the declaration and this accounts largely for the peace we enjoy today.

We say (kudos to all civil society organizations, observers both local and foreign, executives and members of all political parties and last but not the least, Ghana Peace Council who stood the test of intolerance, came out with flying colours and ensured that Ghana remained in peace and not in pieces .

President John Dramani Mahama

Reorganization Of Party Structures

Mr Chairman, it cannot go without mention that thought the N.D.C won the elections, the performance of the party structures was undoubtedly woeful.  

The emerging charisma of President John Mahama and the tactical strategy of the dynamic campaign team co-ordinated by associate comrade Elvis Afriyie Ankrah helped to shore up that deficiency.

To this end, we call on the leadership of the NDC to ensure the total re-organization of the structures of the party to allow for vibrancy and dynamism.

In short, party executives who have outlived their usefulness must be replaced according to our constitutional procedures. The Electoral College for election of party executives should also be enlarged to include all branch, constituency, regional and national executives.

Appointments

We wish to state without fear nor embarrassment that we believe in the judgment of His Excellency President John Mahama. We are therefore convinced that he will come out with a bunch of Ministers and appointees, the kind of which will move this country to the highest realm.

In so doing, however, we wish to enjoin him to look beyond personality and affiliation. He should look at Honesty, Dedication and Commitment.

We urge him to uncover the gems that have prematurely been consigned into the dustbin of history by the crafty design of bootlickers and sycophants.

The telescopic searchlight must burrow into all the integral components of the National Democratic Congress, cutting across regional boundaries, religious sentiments, gender balance and Cadre aspirations. It is in the light of fairness and meritorious reward that we call for the office of the Presidential Staffer for voluntary organizations to be revitalized.            

We are convinced without measure that a crop of deserving talented countrymen and women, Including Cadres will receive appointments to carry on the Better Ghana Agenda.

Electoral Promises

Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen of the press.

Residents of Offuman in Brong Ahafo share the rivers with cattles

There is a saying in our local parlance that a promise is a debt to be paid.

We are aware of the promises we made to the good people of Ghana. We wish to state that we as a party in Government, should not rest on our oars .

We should pursue with relentless vigour, the realization and coming into fruition of the promises. We hereby avail ourselves to assist in this realization, just as we did in the forests, harbours, cocoa farms and trenches of the early 1980's.

Toilet facilty for Offuman Senior High School in Brong Ahafo

Our strength might not measure up to those days, but we shall use our intellectual and vocational aptitudes acquired during two decades of dereliction and relegation to ensure total success.

Cadres in Agriculture

As part of our contribution to the growth of the economy and to be financially self-reliant with the aim of looking after the welfare needs of our compatriots, the Cadre Corps will organise to go into large scale Agriculture and Aqua-Culture. 

It is envisaged that about two thousand acres of land will be cropped by Cadres in all the ten regions of Ghana.
 

Crops being considered for cultivation will depend on soil suitability and commercial viability.

Political Situations

The Cadre Corps have followed with keen interest recent political developments. We have been disappointed by the behaviour of the New Patriotic Party, who have proved to be bad losers. They should take a cue from the NDC who lost gallantly in 2000 and 2004.

We condemn the shooting of our member in Kumasi.

We condemn the killing of our member in Labone in Accra

We condemn the killing of our member near Iran Clinic in Accra.

We condemn the killing of our member at Abeka (free pipe) in Accra, and all other acts of
violence.

Again, it is, refreshing that the N.P.P has finally landed in court. We agree that this is the
proper thing to do and we wish them well.

Solidarity

In conclusion, we wish to assure His Excellency the President of our unflinching support and loyalty. We will stand by him through thick and thin in the pursuit of our Better Ghana Agenda.

Ghana will not die.

Aluta Continua.

NPP CHAIRMAN ADDRESSES PRESS CONFERENCE

We welcome you, ladies and gentlemen of the press, to our maiden press encounter in 2013. We wish you all a blessed and prosperous 2013 and hope that this New Year will see an even better partnership between us in helping to deepen our democracy.

Today, we’d like to provide you with an update on NPP’s recent activities in pursuit of justice and the status of the petition brought before the Supreme Court of Ghana by three distinguished members of our party.

NPP Chairman Jake Obetsebi

We undertake this battle of justice – not merely for the more than 5 million people who voted for our party, and certainly not for the glory of our Presidential candidate – but on behalf of all Ghanaians, including those yet unborn, and indeed Africans from across the continent who are watching our case and looking to Ghana to pave the way forward.

Our nation has always been at the forefront of democratic change and political progress, and we are confident that the wisdom and foresight of our justices will make our beacon of democracy shine even brighter.

It is very important that everyone understand that the election, the inauguration, and the Supreme Court case are linked together by our Constitution. And so long as we follow the letter of the law in our Constitution, these 3 events cannot be separated. They are linked together by the rule of law.

The 1992 Constitution, in its wisdom, fully envisioned the possibility of a disputed election. It foresaw a circumstance where those in power and desperate to hang on to it would conspire to violate the sovereign will of the Ghanaian people.

As such, the Constitution allows a provision to challenge that fraud in the Supreme Court of Ghana. Article 64 states that a challenge petition must be filed within 21 days of the electoral result being officially announced, and of course that is what we did at the end of last month.

The next steps in the Constitutional process are the replies of the respondents; namely the EC and John Mahama, who was the beneficiary of the malpractices. The EC reply was entered on Monday afternoon and made public yesterday, and I shall discuss it shortly. We await the reply of the President today so that the Supreme Court can get down to business and begin hearing testimony and evaluating evidence.

The framers of the 1992 Constitution fully envisioned a President being declared the winner of an election, a challenge being entered 21 days later, and just a week after that, the inauguration taking place on the basis of the original declaration.

Thus, the court case to determine the validity of the challenge, and therefore of the inauguration itself, takes place – in the evaluating of evidence, calling of witnesses, and deliberations of the justices – after the inauguration has taken place and the President sets about the business of state. However – and this is the most important point that all Ghanaians and in fact the world over must remember at all times – the inauguration is NOT a point of no return.

The specific language states: “A declaration by the Supreme Court that the election of the President is not valid shall be without prejudice to anything done by the President before the declaration.

What this means is that the Court can declare, as we are confident that they will do in the interest of justice shortly, that the election of December 7 and 8, when corrected for invalid and fraudulent votes, actually resulted in the victory of Nana Akufo-Addo.

Therefore John Mahama must vacate the Castle and a new inauguration of the proper President must take place immediately. Once in office, President Akufo-Addo will respect whatever laws may have been enacted by his predecessor, no matter how short the duration of the invalidated mandate.

The Ghanaian people expect this constitutional transition to the validly elected president to be smooth, unencumbered and peaceful.

The Supreme Court is the final arbiter of all electoral disputes. And, thanks to the Almighty, they will be able to deliberate in a national environment of peace without any threat of violence whatsoever. Indeed, the many frustrated voters who feel that their sovereign will has been violated have been patient, because they are expecting justice to be done by the Supreme Court.

Essentially, there are 5 main categories that invalidate votes, all of which are drawn from the pinksheets. We have over 24,000 of them, on which we have conducted a painstaking analysis. The 5 categories are:

1. Overvoting
2. Voting w/o verification
3. Lack of EC signature
4. “Ghost” polling stations
5. Mismatching words and numbers

We contend that when all of these 5 categories are combined, over 1 million 342 thousand votes will be invalidated. That is a monstrous sum! Imagine: 1 in every 8 votes declared by the EC were invalid.

Consider that only 300,000 votes separated the 2 candidates in the EC announcement, yet that sum, plus 1,000,000 more, will be invalidated. That is the astonishing and devastating evidence on the pinksheets.

Consider that only 150,000 invalid Mahama votes are required to push him below 50% and therefore force a runoff, yet nearly 6 times that amount have been identified as invalid Mahama votes.

Consider that only 520,000 invalid Mahama votes are required to give Nana Akufo-Addo a 1-touch victory outright, yet nearly double that amount have been identified.

I want all Ghanaians to remember the following numbers: 2, 4, 6, 8, 12, 127.

Let me tell you why they are important:

• 2 – for the over 200,000 invalid votes as a result of no EC signature on the pinksheet
• 4 – for the over 400,000 invalid votes cast without verification
• 6 – for the over 600,000 invalid votes cast due to overvoting – more votes were recorded than ballots were distributed in a polling station
• 8 – 1 in every 8 votes that the EC declared will have to be invalidated
• 12 – 12% of the votes were invalid!
• 127 – 127,000 voters that the EC says are a “mistake”

Of course, we have based our case on this solid evidence of arithmetic and we will stick to the evidence.

So, how did the EC respond to that evidence? What did they have to say about our numbers: 2, 4, 6, 8, 12, 127?

Well, they had nothing to say about the details of the case.

They spend more time and energy debating vocabulary by quoting definitions of adjectives from dictionaries than they spent defending to the Ghanaian people why, despite being funded by the taxpayers to the tune of hundreds of millions of cedis, they ran an election in which 1 in every 8 votes will have to be thrown out.

Their document was full of arrogance and irreverence, and offered no justification for the flaws, other than pathetic excuses about signatures not passing through 3 sheets of carbon paper and suggesting that there were nearly a ¼ million voters added to the rolls late because they were Foreign Service or NGO officials, students abroad on government scholarships, or international peacekeepers.

The EC certainly did not explain why they chose to annul the results of certain polling stations with minor violations of verification or overvoting, yet over 1.3 million were declared valid without any problem.

We look forward to facing the EC in court, backed by 24,000 of their very own pinksheets.

Elections, we insist, are about those who cast the votes and not those who count, record or declare. This case is necessary for renewing public confidence in our elections, hence, our democracy. We have presented before the court what we believe to be incontrovertible evidence that John Mahama did not win the 2012 presidential election and rather that Nana Akufo-Addo won.

We will prove, just from documented evidence from the EC itself, that over 12% (1.34 million) of votes counted were in fact illegal and ought not have been included in the declared total, and that over 2/3 of this sum, numbering some 916,000, wrongly went to John Mahama for an election in which he crossed the mandatory 50% mark by less than 154,000.

We have noticed that the NDC has spent the last few days since we filed our petition attacking not the substance of evidence we have presented in court, but raising by-the-way issues citing the irregularities present in every election.

Granted there are minor irregularities in every election what the people of Ghana are saying, by supporting our petition is that, a manipulated total in which 1 in every 8 votes should not have been included cannot be whitewashed with the term “irregularity” and implied to have been simple, isolated, innocent errors.

The EC cannot substitute your vote, our votes, with that of an illegal voter called “irregularity”. We don't accept that and cannot accept that.

Elections in Ghana must not be determined by who has the capacity to rig or buy the vote with connivance from some corrupted elements within the body tasked to supervise a clean and fair process.

We hope that at the end of this case the Supreme Court will give a ruling that will not only declare Nana Akufo-Addo the rightful winner but will also set in place a process that will lead to reforming the electoral process and secure the fate of our democracy forever.

The evidence is on our side and we believe that when considered by the justices of the Supreme Court, it will be so pronounced.

In conclusion, I would like to state once again that this is not about Nana Akufo-Addo and his Presidential aspiration; it's about our country and its future generations. On behalf of them, we trust the court to do what’s right and we will remain patient and peaceful in anticipation of that justice.

Choosing to petition the Supreme Court in line with our Constitution’s provisions actually reinforces the rule of law and seeks to let justice underpin our peace. It is this path that will bring justice to bear on any grievance. If a grievance festers in the absence of justice, that is the surest way to lead to a disturbance of the status quo and a breach of the peace.

Very often on the African continent, electoral disputes have resulted in armed conflicts and violence.

NPP Party Officials apologizes to multi media after its reporters were beaten by NPP thugs

The NPP, coming from one of Africa's oldest democratic traditions, has been committed since its inception to peace and democracy and has chosen to rely on the rule of law and appeal for justice in its action at the Supreme Court.

The party should therefore be commended and upheld as a shining example.

This case will make or break our democracy, and all of Africa and indeed the world is watching us.

Soon the party leadership will embark on a national tour to thank its supporters for their peaceful conduct and for their patience in anticipation of justice, and for coming out in their numbers to vote for transformation, education, health and jobs and against corruption, incompetence, lies and propaganda.

And, Insha Allah, we are very confident that sooner than later the true impact of their vote shall manifest.

Making sense of a massacre

By Timothy Bancroft-Hinchey

You cannot make sense out of something that does not make sense, in any culture or any country or creed or part of the world. You cannot grand-stage or try to score political points from a massacre which involves children. However, if you have 61 massacres in 30 years, you have problems.

The most important thing to say at the start of a piece like this is that nobody in their right mind would even think about grand-staging such an event, would think about lumping all Americans together in a gratuitous anti-USA article, would entertain the notion of using such a horrendous event as a means of trying to place the blame for all the world's ills at the feet of the citizens of the United States of America.

Neither would anyone in their right mind use this outrage to foster their political-religious agenda, claiming that the end of the world is nigh and yes, let's all remember once and for all the Mayan prophecy for December 21 (which, sorry to spoil the fun, spoke of the end of a cycle, not of an era and the beginning of a new cycle, not a catastrophe).

What happened on December 14, 2012 in Connecticut will enter the annals of history for all the wrong reasons and these reasons, as many and as deep as they are, will not for a long time make part of any rational thought processes of the victims because they have lost far more than a historical statistic. They have lost part of their lives and in the case of the parents of the children who passed on today, they have lost, in some cases, a reason to get up tomorrow.

Hopefully counseling can enable them to come to terms with the tragedy and realize that they have far more to do. And counseling is part of the solution, if not the solution to the problem. And here we reach the crux of the question.

And the crux is this: the composition of the United States of America will continue to engender such outrages both domestically and around the world. Why? Because it is caught in the vortex between a country (a geo-political unit with a determined culture) and a collection of micro-states, loosely bound together (decreasingly) by language.

Washington is increasingly seen as a pariah and those who have managed the country's affairs over the last two centuries are regarded with suspicion. This is only natural for a nation so young, in which the county and the State may mean more for the average citizen than the Union.

Inside this vortex, it is not surprising that those who have always controlled the United States of America (the Establishment) which today includes Washington and Tel Aviv and AIPAC, have found the means to grow almost invisibly. 

So today while some troubled young man is shooting his parents and murdering dozens of young children, an act which has happened no less than sixty-one times in three decades, the armed forces of the United States of America are massacring civilians overseas, are raping women, sodomising detainees, using military hardware against civilian structures, and so on and so forth.

This does not mean that I intend to write an article forgetting the tremendous trauma the families of the deceased suffered today, neither does it mean that I am callous enough to grand-stage such an event taking it to a point where I make a gratuitous attack on the USA and its citizens.

What it does mean is that those who manage the affairs of the United States of America have a collective responsibility for their own subjects and also are accountable for their acts overseas, particularly when these breach international law, of which the cases abound in recent years.

The bottom line is, if those who govern the USA have not managed to rule their own affairs in the last three decades, and who have seen 31 massacres happen since 1982, then how the hell are they supposed to have the moral high ground to impose their values on the rest of the world?

What it does mean (and writing an opinion piece should be about providing solutions as well as criticizing) is that while the mentally ill have rights, and while care in the community may sound great as a sound-bite and save money for the corporations (which run the USA), the community also has rights to be protected against those who would destroy it.

Providing public services costs money, true; however let us investigate how much membership of NATO costs (and for what? Against an invasion from Saturn?), let us see how much has been spent in illegal wars (hundreds of billions of dollars) and then let us investigate how the same funds could have been employed better.

Until the USA takes a deep and honest look at itself and does something tangible about it, then unfortunately, such massacres are going to go on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on and on...

Depardieu and the New Capitalism

By Vadim Nikitin

Actor Gerard Depardieu

WHEN the French actor Gérard Depardieu collected his Russian passport this week, the English language media erupted with puzzlement and mockery. One online commentator called the corpulent defector “shameless” for becoming “a citizen of a dictatorship just to avoid taxes.”

Tax exile is nothing new, of course. European countries have a long history of wooing one another’s rich with offers of bigger salaries and smaller government.

Last year, Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain announced that he would “roll out the red carpet” for any French businessmen willing to take up his country’s lower tax rates.

Yet while few batted an eye when a slew of prominent Parisian financiers moved their families (and bank accounts) en masse across the channel in December, Depardieu’s action seems to have crossed an imaginary line in many people’s minds.

For if by moving to Belgium or Britain the actor could be criticized merely for valuing money over motherland, in decamping to authoritarian Russia he seems to have placed money ahead of even democracy itself.

In this way, he might be said to have forsaken not just his country, but also the fundamental Western notion that rights and freedoms are inalienable and non-negotiable.

Yet in another sense, it’s odd that people should feel so shocked by Depardieu’s decision. After all, in escaping from a messy, expensive democracy to a cheaper and simpler autocracy, the actor is only doing what thousands of Western multinational corporations do every day by moving their factories to China, and their management to the United Arab Emirates.

For example, when it invests in China, a company like Apple can reap all the benefits of totalitarianism — streamlined governance, low wages and no labor unrest — at the same time as it opts out of the abuses, restrictions and indignities faced by ordinary Chinese people.

Depardieu has done the same thing.

Russian President Vladimir Putin

In Russia, he can benefit from the double standards the country affords members of the pro-government elite vis-à-vis the general public. Due to his personal friendship with President Vladimir Putin, Depardieu will benefit from the country’s low taxation and other perks of dealing with a democratically unaccountable system, such as having his citizenship fast-tracked by presidential decree while ordinary people have to wait years to get their passports.

Such ability to opt in or out at will is a defining feature of neoliberalism, as is the persistent race to the bottom in terms of the prices countries and people are willing to charge to attract investment. Democracy and human rights are not cheap: So it’s not surprising that countries like Russia and China enjoy an advantage over their Western competitors.

Some of Depeardieu’s critics on the French left have characterized his behavior as motivated by greed. Such reactions are not dissimilar to those widely applied to Wall Street bankers in the wake of the financial meltdown. Both explanations, however, conflate symptom with cause.

As the political philosopher Michael Sandel suggests in his latest book “What Money Can’t Buy,” “we are moving toward a society in which everything is up for sale.” It is a world in which “the logic of buying and selling no longer applies to material goods alone,” but “increasingly governs the whole of life.” This includes both citizenship and labor rights.

Thus it is markets, rather than human greed or even Depardieu’s stomach, that have expanded beyond all boundaries, creating a kind of commercial panopticon.

As long as more and more previously un-commodified things — such as citizenship in a tax haven or labor rights in a totalitarian country — come up for grabs, it is difficult to blame a man, or a company, with the means to acquire them for doing exactly that.

Vadim Nikitin is a freelance journalist and blogger based in London.

AGENCE GLOBAL

© 2013 The New York Times Company

Israel pursues Nazi-style occupation  

By Wayne Madsen

Adolf Hitler and other top Nazis were fond of saying, "Heute Deutschland, morgen die Welt!" (“Today Germany, tomorrow the world!”), when describing the Nazi Party’s goals for global domination.

Many of Israel’s dominant political parties espouse the same goals for Zionism, which many observers believe take a page from the Nazi playbook when it comes to expansion not only in the occupied territories of Palestine but beyond to the Golan Heights of Syria, southern Lebanon, Sinai, eastern Libya, northern Iraq, and even further afield.

The top polling Israeli political parties heading into the January 22 election all advocate varying degrees of expansion.

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud alliance with former Foreign Minister illegal settler-based Yisrael Beitenu is staking their election bid on building thousands of new housing units in occupied east Jerusalem, starting in the Gilo area.

There are also plans to build thousands of more illegal housing units in occupied West Bank towns, including Ariel, Hebron, and the north Dead Sea and Jordan River Valley.

As expansionistic as the Likud-Beitenu bloc is, the rising star of Naftali Bennett, a dual U.S.-Israeli national who leads the new Home Party is even more nationalistic, with its platform centered on annexing 60 percent of the West Bank, referred to as “Area C” in the now all-but-dead Oslo Peace Accords.

Palestinians would exercise nominal control in a Palestine fully dependent on Israel that would resemble the “bantustans” created for blacks by the apartheid government of South Africa: non-contiguous reservations that would be at the mercy of further encroachment by a militarily-dominant Israel.

But just as the Zionists contend that it is entitled to control what it refers to “Judea and Samaria” based on some mythological prose written in ancient Hebrew, they will not stop with controlling the West Bank.

There are calls by many Zionists for Israel to expel the 1.7 million Palestinians from the Gaza Strip and forcibly relocate them in other Arab countries. Other right-wing Israelis wish to abrogate the peace treaty with Muslim Brotherhood-ruled Egypt and seize back control of the Sinai Peninsula, which Israel occupied from 1967 to 1982.

The Zionists were always hungry for Sinai. During their occupation of Sinai, Sharm-el-Sheikh was renamed Ofira by the Israelis and settlements were established in the occupied Egyptian territory.

Israel has also established settlements in the Golan Heights, with some 20,000 Israelis living in the occupied Syrian territory. It is clear that with the destabilization of Syria by NATO and the Wahhabist kingdoms and statelets of the Arabian Peninsula, not only the Golan but territory deep within Syria seen by the Zionists as ancient Jewish areas of domination will be ripe for the taking, especially if the religious Zionists who support Bennett and the ultra-Jewish Orthodox Shas Party followers have their way.

Israel has also seen southern Lebanon, occupied by Israel and their proxy South Lebanon Army from 1982 to 2000, as an area vulnerable to an expansion of Israel’s northern border.

The discovery of a possible 1.7 billion barrels of oil and 3,500 billion cubic meters of natural gas in what is known as the Levant Basin Province that stretches from the Jordan River to Turkey and west to Cyprus has Israelis chomping at the bit for extending land and sea boundaries.

The discovery of oil and natural gas, coupled with disputes over water resources, is what is truly driving many Israeli regional expansionists. Israel is fond of using its mythological texts as a front for expanding its economic control over the Middle East.

The lure of oil also has Israelis resorting to ancient lore to stake claims on Iraqi lands said to have been the home of Jewish slaves during the so-called “Babylonian Captivity.” Israel has plans to relocate thousands of Kurdish Jews from Israel to the Iraqi Kurdish areas around Mosul and Nineveh under the guise of religious pilgrimage to and security protection of ancient Jewish religious shrines. The Kurdish area is also rich in oil and Israeli companies would like nothing more than to cash in on the oil business by re-establishing the old Mosul-Haifa oil pipeline.

With 400 nuclear weapons, including those that can be fired from submarines, launched by missiles, and dropped by fighter bombers, at its disposal, Israel can permit its propaganda organs to stake claims on other ancient Jewish places, including Cyrene, the present-day Tripoli, Libya, and Berenice, present-day Benghazi.

The Libyan rebels who overthrew Muammar Qaddafi received massive support from European Zionists, including Bernard-Henri Levy of France, who acted as a liaison between the rebels and Netanyahu. There were early Zionist plans to establish a Jewish national homeland in the Green Mountains of Cyrenaica.

And any country where Jews once lived or played a role is seen as a potential area of expansion for some Zionists who dream of a one-world Zionist state.

Although Israel is bent on expelling as many non-Jewish black Africans and brown-skinned Asians from the Jewish state as possible, it has given citizenship to Falasha Jews from Ethiopia and Bnei Menashe from India.

 The latter, originating in Mizoram and Manipur on the Indian-Myanmar border, claimed they were banished to India in the 8th century B.C. and, therefore, are a “lost tribe” of Israel.

As Israeli passport holders, these “new Jews” will be permitted to return to India, a nation already overrun with Chabad House-cover Mossad operatives and Israel Defense Force regulars involved in cross-border operations in Pakistan, protective services for the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala, and drug and gem smuggling.

It is only a matter of time before Israel stakes a claim to Afghanistan as more oil and rare earth mineral reserves are discovered and as Western military forces retreat from the country.

After all, some Jewish scholars claim the Pathans of Afghanistan and northwest Pakistan represent another “lost tribe of Israel.” Conveniently for Israel, many Pathans are also members of the Taliban.