Transparency International urges bottom score states to take radical steps

Transparency International urges bottom score states to take radical steps

BY FRANK AMAN

22nd February 2015

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Research on Poverty Alleviation (REPOA)

A global coalition against corruption, Transparency International has called on countries at the bottom line of the 2014 Corruption Perceptions Index to adopt radical anti-corruption measures in favour of their people.

 

According to the 2014 CPI report recently published by the global accountability pressure group, corruption is a problem for all countries. A poor score is likely a sign of widespread bribery, lack of punishment for corruption and public institutions that don’t respond to citizens’ needs. 

 

In this context, Transparency International called on countries at the top of the index where public sector corruption is limited to stop encouraging it elsewhere by doing more to prevent money laundering and to stop secret companies from masking corruption

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The Origin of the Palestine-Israel Conflict

As the periodic bloodshed continues in the Middle East, the search for an equitable solution must come to grips with the root cause of the conflict. The conventional wisdom is that, even if both sides are at fault, the Palestinians are irrational “terrorists” who have no point of view worth listening to. Our position, however, is that the Palestinians have a real grievance: their homeland for over a thousand years was taken, without their consent and mostly by force, during the creation of the state of Israel. And all subsequent crimes — on both sides — inevitably follow from this original injustice.

This paper outlines the history of Palestine to show how this process occurred   and what a moral solution to the region’s problems should consist of. If you care about the people of the Middle East, Jewish and Arab, you owe it to yourself to read this account of the other side of the historical record.

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Secret author of Balfour Declaration

Who engineered the Balfour Declaration? 

Manifestation of gross injustice and annihilation of human life in modern and so call civilize  world today.

 In a recent news interview, Alison Weir discussed the real author of the Balfour Declaration. Weir, who is president of the Council for the National Interest and executive director if If Americans Knew was one of three people being interviewed on the 95th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration.

The others were Sameh Habeeb of the Palestine Return Center (speaking from London), and Mukhaimer Abu Sa’ada, a professor at the Gaza al-Azhar University, (speaking from Gaza). Weir was speaking from California.

In the interview Weir said:

In terms of the British responsibility especially regarding the Balfour Declaration, there’s a very, very important back story to this that is probably one of the most covered up aspects of this very covered up issue.

This came out in an article by Professor William Rubenstein, a very well regarded Jewish British historian: a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and former president of the Jewish Historical Society of England.

Rubinstein wrote that the true author of the Balfour Declaration was not Mr. Balfour. It was actually a man name Leopold Amery who was in fact a Zionist and a British man of Jewish background.

In his article, The Secret of Leopold Amery, published in History Today, Rubinstein called this "the most remarkable example of concealment in 20th century British history."

Amery not only wrote the Balfour Declaration, he later took credit for it... there’s a quote in which he says, “I seem to have had my finger in the pie not only of the Balfour Declaration but of the genesis of the present Israeli army.

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Against Our Better Judgment

The following is a short excerpt. To read more, order this book written by Alison Weir.

The History of US-Israel Relations

Against Our Better Judgment

Louis Brandeis, flanked by Rabbi Stephen Samuel Wise, founding secretary of the American Federation of Zionists (right) and Nathan Straus, co-owner of Macy’s (Source: Library of Congress)

The hidden history of how the United States
was used to create Israel.

How the U.S. "Special Relationship" with Israel came about

While many people are led to believe that U.S. support for Israel is driven by the American establishment and U.S. national interests, the facts don't support this theory. The reality is that for decades U.S. foreign policy and defense experts opposed supporting the creation of Israel. They then similarly opposed the massive American funding and diplomatic support that sustained the forcibly established state and that provided a blank check for its aggressive expansion. They were simply outmaneuvered and eventually replaced.

Like many American policies, U.S. Middle East policies are driven by a special interest lobby. However, the Israel Lobby, as it is called today in the U.S. consists of vastly more than what most people envision in the word "lobby."

As this book will demonstrate, the Israel Lobby is considerably more powerful and pervasive than other lobbies. Components of it, both individuals and groups, have worked underground, secretly and even illegally throughout its history, as documented by scholars and participants.

And even though the movement for Israel has been operating in the U.S. for over a hundred years, most Americans are completely unaware of this movement and its attendant ideology – a measure of its unique influence over public knowledge.

The success of this movement to achieve its goals, partly due to the hidden nature of much of its activity, has been staggering. It has also been at almost unimaginable cost.

It has led to massive tragedy in the Middle East: a hundred-year war of violence and loss; sacred land soaked in sorrow.

In addition, this movement has been profoundly damaging to the United States itself.

As we will see in this two-part examination of the pro-Israel movement, it has targeted virtually every significant sector of American society; worked to involve Americans in tragic, unnecessary, and profoundly costly wars; dominated Congress for decades; increasingly determined which candidates could become serious contenders for the U.S. presidency; and promoted bigotry toward an entire population, religion and culture.

It has promoted policies that have exposed Americans to growing danger, and then exaggerated this danger (while disguising its cause), fueling actions that dismember some of our nation's most fundamental freedoms and cherished principles.

All this for a population that is considerably smaller than New Jersey's.

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The Messianic Jewish/Christian Zionist Complex

Over the years, you may have become familiar with Jews for Jesus, the organization that was founded more than forty years ago, and focuses on converting Jews to Christianity. It is less likely, however, that you're acquainted with Messianic Jews, who, although relatively small in numbers, are establishing relationships with Christian Zionists and have the potential to become a more influential political force.In an article posted at christianity.about.com, Jack Zavada defined Messianic Jews as those who "accept Jesus (Yeshua) as the Messiah yet retain a Jewish lifestyle. After conversion, they continue to observe Jewish holidays, rituals, and customs." Here's the kicker, writes Zavada, their "theology tends to vary widely among Messianic Jews." Some critics have maintained that some people calling themselves Messianic Jews were never Jewish in the first place. Other critics see Messianic Jews allying with conservative evangelical Christians to establish a Messianic Jewish/Christian Zionist Complex.

In the U.S., "'There are now tens of thousands of Messianic Jews [with]; some estimate as many as 1.2 million,' according to the Messianic Jewish Alliance of America (MJAA), [an organization] founded in 1915," Melissa Nordell and Mark Ellis wrote last month at blog.godreports.com. MJAA maintains that "Messianic synagogues [are] springing up in almost every major city across the U.S."

Last year, in a move that stirred controversy within the Jewish community, former President George W. Bush spoke at the Messianic Jewish Bible Institute's (MJBI) annual banquet "to help raise funds for its mission to persuade Jews that Jesus is the messiah," Religion Dispatches' Sarah Posner reported.

This year's banquet, earlier this month in Fort Worth, Texas, featured "Phil and Alan Robertson, the patriarch and eldest son of the Christian reality television show Duck Dynasty."

After his controversial interview with GQ, Phil Robertson has taken on the mantle of mainstream television's number one homophobe. Both Phil and Alan are the executive editors of the forthcoming book, "The Duck Commander Faith and Family Bible."

At cnsnews.com, Michael W. Chapman described MJBI as an organization "dedicated to evangelizing the Jews and convincing them to accept that Jesus Christ is the true Messiah as foretold in the Old Testament and detailed in the New Testament."


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The Ivory Tower’s Nazification of Israel

"Turkey’s prime minister Tayyip Erdoğan, in their treatment of the Palestinians, Israel has demonstrated that “. . . their barbarism has surpassed even Hitler’s.”

“What if the Jews themselves were Nazis?” mused French philosopher, Vladimir Jankélévitch in 1986. “That would be great. We would no longer have to feel sorry for them; they would have deserved what they got.”

The recasting of Israelis, and, by extension, Jews as Nazis has, in fact, taken place, just as Jankélévitch envisioned. This summer’s Israeli incursion, Operation Protective Edge, provided anti-Semites and loathers of the Jewish state with resurgent justifications for assigning the epithet of Nazi on the Jews yet another time, together with oft-heard accusations of “crimes against humanity, “massacres,” genocide,” and, according to recent comments by Turkey’s prime minister Tayyip Erdoğan, in their treatment of the Palestinians, Israel has demonstrated that “. . . their barbarism has surpassed even Hitler’s.”

The Nazification of Israelis—and by extension Jews—is both breathtaking in its moral inversion and cruel in the way it makes the actual victims of the Third Reich’s horrors a modern-day reincarnation of that same barbarity. It is, in the words of Boston University’s Richard Landes, “moral sadism,” a salient example of Holocaust inversion that is at once ahistorical, disingenuous, and grotesque in its moral and factual inaccuracy.

In reflecting on the current trend he perceived in the burgeoning of anti-Israelism around the world, Canadian Member of Parliament, Irwin Cotler, once observed that conventional strains of anti-Semitism had been masked, so that those who directed enmity towards Jews were now able to transfer that opprobrium to the Jew of nations, Israel. How had they effected that? According to Cotler, they did so by redefining Israel as the most glaring example of those human predations, what he called “the embodiment of all evil” of the Twentieth Century: apartheid and Nazism. He defined the process of grafting this opprobrium on Israel as “ideological anti-Semitism,” one which “involves the characterization of Israel not only as an apartheid state—and one that must be dismantled as part of the struggle against racism—but as a Nazi one.”

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Venezuelan MP Claims: The Zionists Financed Hitler

Venezuelan MP Claims: The Zionists Financed Hitle

In a recent interview, Venezuelan MP Adel Al-Sughayar said that Hitler's main financiers had been the Zionists.

A Venezuelan member of parliament recently claimed that while Hitler had killed Jews during World War II, he did not kill any “Zionist Jews”.

In an interview with Hezbollah’s Al-Manar TV, Venezuelan MP Adel Al-Sughayar said that Hitler's main financiers had been the Zionists, and especially the Bush family.

"Hitler killed those Jews who belonged to progressive organizations... You will not find on those lists any representatives of global Zionism," said Al-Sughayar, who is chairman of FEARAB Venezuela, a federation of Arab societies in Latin America.

The interview, which aired on November 14, was translated by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI).

“If we look into who financed Hitler before World War II, we will see that the main financiers were the Zionists – the Bush family, in fact. The Bush family made its fortune as a result of what happened in World War II. The goal was to destroy Europe in order to impose the American economy and the dollar currency on it,” claimed Al-Shughayar.

“If you study the history of the killing of the Jews in Europe, you find that Hitler killed those Jews who belonged to progressive organizations, progressive journalists, and so on. You will not find on those lists any representatives of global Zionism. This proves that… In 1934, they even issued a coin repressing the friendship between Zionism and German Nazism,” he continued.

Venezuela is not known as a friend of Israel’s. Its late president, Hugo Chavez, was known to be a good friend of former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who travelled to Venezuela to attend Chavez’s funeral in 2013.

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