Some of the most influential Muslim scholars in India have passed a resolution condemning all forms of violence in the name of Islam.

The Deoband is an influential Islamic school inspiring tens of thousands of religious study centres across the world, which some say has even inspired the Taliban’s ideology in Afghanistan.

Prerna Suri reports on the weight of the school’s declaration.

The United Nations, the United States and the European Union have all called on Israel to stop the illegal eviction of Palestinians and the demolition of their homes.

Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary-general, urged Israel to end its “provocative actions” in East Jerusalem, while calling for it to freeze all settlement activity in the occupied West Bank.

Despite that, the sight of Palestinians in East Jerusalem being forced out of their homes has become an all too familiar scene.

Al Jazeera’s Jacky Rowland reports from occupied East Jerusalem.

MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann Interviews Democratic Rep Alan Grayson About The Health Care Public Option – 11/02/09

Twenty years after that shameful symbol of division was torn down, ultra-liberal capitalism needs its own perestroika

By Mikhail Gorbachev

Twenty years have passed since the fall of the Berlin wall, one of the shameful symbols of the cold war and the dangerous division of the world into opposing blocks and spheres of influence. Today we can revisit the events of those times and take stock of them in a less emotional and more rational way.

The first optimistic observation to be made is that the announced “end of history” has not come about, though many claimed it had. But neither has the world that many politicians of my generation trusted and sincerely believed in: one in which, with the end of the cold war, humankind could finally forget the absurdity of the arms race, dangerous regional conflicts, and sterile ideological disputes, and enter a golden century of collective security, the rational use of material resources, the end of poverty and inequality, and restored harmony with nature.

Another important consequence of the end of the cold war is the realisation of one of the central postulates of New Thinking: the interdependence of extremely important elements that go to the very heart of the existence and development of humankind. This involves not only processes and events occurring on different continents but also the organic linkage between changes in the economic, technological, social, demographic and cultural conditions that determine the daily existence of billions of people on our planet. In effect, humankind has started to transform itself into a single civilisation.

At the same time, the disappearance of the iron curtain and barriers and borders, unexpected by many, made possible connections between countries that until recently had different political systems, as well as different civilisations, cultures and traditions.

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It wasn’t really a debate because they didn’t appear together, but Ron Paul appeared on Larry King Live last night after Michael Moore and responded to his diatribe against capitalism:

The American Bankers Association (ABA) was met by a robust and vocal group of protestors in Chicago who would like the banks, in collusion with the Government, to stop stealing their money.

On October 14, Lord Christopher Monckton gave a presentation in St. Paul, MN on the subject of global warming. In this 4-minute excerpt from his speech, he issues a dire warning to all Americans regarding the United Nations Climate Change Treaty that is scheduled to be signed in Copenhagen in December 2009.

A draft of the treaty can be read here:
http://www.globalclimatescam.com/docu…

Page 18: Section 38 of the “Share vision for long-term cooperation action plan” contains the text for forming the new government.

Page 44-45: Section 46 “Objectives, scope, and guiding principles” contains the text for enforcement and establishment of the rule of law.

There has been considerable debate raised about Monckton’s conclusion that the Copenhagen Treaty would cede US sovereignty. His comments appear to be based upon his interpretation of the The Supremacy Clause in the US Constitution (Article VI, paragraph 2). This clause establishes the Constitution, Federal Statutes, and U.S. TREATIES as the supreme law of the land. Concerns have been raised in the past that a particularly ambitious treaty may supersede the US Constitution. In the 1950s, a constitutional amendment, known as the Bricker Amendment, was proposed in response to such fears, but it failed to pass. You can read more about the Bricker Amendment in a 1953 Time Magazine article:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/art…,9171,806676-1,00.html

Lord Monckton served as a policy adviser to Margaret Thatcher. He has repeatedly challenged Al Gore to a debate to which Gore has refused. Monckton sued to stop Gore’s film “An Inconvenient Truth” from being shown in British schools due to its inaccuracies. The judge found in-favor of Monckton, ordering 9 serious errors in the film to be corrected. Lord Monckton travels internationally in an attempt to educating the public about the myth of global warming.

sraeli forces have clashed with Palestinians at Haram Al Sharif, or Temple Mount compound in Jerusalem.

Several Palestinians were arrested and dozens more were lcoked inside the Al-Aqsa mosque.

Al Jazeera’s Jacky Rowland reports from East Jerusalem.

Now Pakistan

By LIAQUAT ALI KHAN

A conspiratorial view of the world is frequently inaccurate, exposing more the paranoia of the view rather than the reality of the world. The sequential destruction of Muslim nations — Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, (and Iran is on the list) — may or may not be a conspiracy hatched in Washington D.C., but it is becoming an international reality.  It is no secret that the United States and Europe, with varying degree of mutual cooperation and some make-believe internal discord, superintend the sequential destruction of Muslim nations. This War of Sequential Destruction (WSD), despite Nobel-Laureate Barack Obama’s denials, refuses to go away.

The WSD is multi-frontal. It crosshairs Al-Qaeda, Taliban, Hezbollah, Hamas, Al-Bashir,  Ahmadinejad, Sunni, Shia, Wahabi, Gaza, Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Iran, Afghanistan, and now Pakistan. Many Western policymakers rarely see Muslim nations, including allies, with any inherent respect.  Vice President Dick Cheney described the Muslim world as “brute and nasty.” Obama advisers, though more guarded in their word choices, see Muslim nations no differently. The idea that Islam is inherently violent, openly expressed during the Bush administration, continues to animate foreign policy. The White House holds a new President but Congressional leadership and Washington policymakers are more or less the same. Anti-Islamic policies of warfare and destabilization are intact.

Therefore, the WSD will continue and gather momentum. The picture is not pretty. Palestinians are penned in misery and their territorial cage is constantly shrinking to meet the “natural growth” of vociferous settlers. Oil-rich Iraq is under American occupation and its communities have been torn apart with irreversible harm. Afghanistan, one of the poorest nations in the world, is placed under the boots of Western armies. Thousands of Afghans have been murdered, their houses bombed, their villages devastated. The International Criminal Court headquartered in Holland has indicted the first sitting head of the state, the Muslim President of Sudan. The United States and Europe, themselves armed with thousands of nuclear heads, are strategizing to punish Iran for asserting a treaty-based right to produce nuclear energy, leaving open the option of attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities.

After razing Iraq and Afghanistan, the WSD has now turned to ravage an ally, Muslim Pakistan. Pakistan is a nation that the British, in 1947, carved out of India and that India, in 1971, broke into two, liberating Bangladesh from the murderous clutch of the Pakistani military. Over the past sixty-two years, Pakistan’s military and civilian rulers, one after the other, and without exception, have turned to America for military training, weapons, money, and strategic instructions.  Eager to send their sons and daughters to Western cities for education and employment, Pakistani politicians, generals, and bureaucrats all look for ways, and create the ways, to oblige Western capitals, particularly Washington D.C.  Partly for personal interests and partly out of faulty readings of geopolitical situations, Pakistani rulers, like most rulers in Muslim nations, frequently compromise national sovereignty and public welfare.

The Pakistani orientation for self-destruction serves American interests. Facing a failing campaign in Afghanistan, Obama advisers decided to expand the war into Waziristan and other parts of Pakistan.  The United States desperately solicited the Pakistani military to join the Afghan war. Pakistani rulers, this time a democratically elected government, listened to the American call. They first permitted the CIA to fly drones armed with missiles, which killed a few militants but hundreds of civilians in the tribal areas. The United States later urged Pakistan to invade Swat to kill militants. Pakistan did. Millions of civilians were made homeless.

Source// COUNTERPUNCH

Stewart Nozette, 52, arrested after demanding Israeli passport during FBI sting

A former Nasa scientist who helped discover evidence of water on the moon has been charged with attempting to sell Israel secrets about America’s military satellite systems.

Stewart Nozette, 52, from Maryland, was arrested in an FBI sting after demanding cash and an Israeli passport in return for classified information obtained when he worked with a high security clearance for the US space agency, the Pentagon and an energy department laboratory where he helped to develop a radar that indicated there is ice on the south pole of the moon.

Although the indictment does not allege that Israeli agents had already recruited Nozette, it says that he had already been paid a substantial amount of money to work as a consultant to an Israeli state-owned defence firm in return for “answering questions from the company”. During an FBI surveillance operation before the sting, Nozette also allegedly acknowledged to a colleague that he had committed a crime and threatened to flee the country and tell everything he knows to Israel.

The case is potentially a further embarrassment for Israel at a time of unusually strained relations with the US after a number of cases of Americans accused of spying for the Jewish state in recent years.

The prosecutor in Washington, Channing Phillips, said: “Those who would put our nation’s defence secrets up for sale can expect to be vigorously prosecuted.”

The FBI launched its sting last month when an agent contacted Nozette posing as a spy for Israel’s intelligence agency, Mossad. The scientist and undercover agent met later in the day at a hotel and discussed an exchange of classified information for cash. Court papers say that Nozette told the agent he had access to much of what the “US has done in space”.

“These are among the most sensitive subjects and it will have to be recreated from memory over some time,” he said.

It was then agreed that the scientist would pass his information at a post office. “I don’t get recruited by Mossad every day. I knew this day would come,” Nozette is heard saying on a wiretap, according to the court papers.

In the following weeks, the FBI left two envelopes with a total of $11,000 (£6,700) in cash and questions about classified information for the scientist to answer. Nozette replied with information about the US satellite and military early warning systems, and its attack response system.

The undercover agent also supplied the scientist with a mobile phone to send text messages and gave him an alias that was supposedly to appear on his new Israeli passport.

Investigators have not said why they latched onto Nozette. But according to court papers, the scientist worked for more than a decade as a technical consultant for Israel Aerospace Industries, a government-owned defence firm during which he was paid $225,000 to answer “the company’s questions and, in return, Nozette received regular payments from the company”.

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