Israel's shame as Holocaust victims die in poverty

About 80,000 Holocaust survivors emigrated to Israel after WW2. Instead of finding ease and opportunity, many discovered only loneliness and grinding poverty. They accuse Israel of failing to give them the compensation paid by Germany. They say millions of dollars that was meant for them has been used to build the country instead.

Gazans still struggle to cross Rafah border even after the whole world supported Egypt's freedom

Crowds gather outside the office of Gaza's Borders and crossings Authority, in the southern city of Rafah. The people who have come here hope to register their names with border officials in order to gain permission to leave Gaza.

Government officials announced that the registration office would open its doors Sunday morning for the first time since anti government protests broke out in Egypt on January 25th. Since then the Rafah border, the only entrance into the Gaza that bypasses Israel, has been fully closed.
But the Egyptian authorities only authorize travel through the Rafah terminal for people who fall into 4 categories: patients with medical referrals, foreign passport holders, people with visas to other countries, who go straight to the airport, and students with proof of enrollment in their universities. For all others hoping to cross the border remains unrealized.
Approximately 1400 Gazans who were stranded in Egypt during the popular revolution were finally allowed to return home. But not all were fortunate enough to make it. Finally after obtaining travel permission this man accompanied his son, sick with Cancer, to Egypt. When they got there the country fell into turmoil and they returned home without seeing the doctor. The young man died only minutes after they crossed the border back into Gaza.

His illness progressed as we were waiting for travel permission. Even if we had seen the doctors in Egypt we knew it was too late by the time we got there because he fell into a coma. He is at peace now.

As Gaza is cut off form the outside world following years of Israeli siege, government officials have announced that negotiations with Egypt to fully open the border crossing are ongoing, and observers view the gradual easing of the closure as a good sign.

The former Egyptian regime enabled the Israeli siege on the Gaza Strip by closing its borders with the territory, and with both Palestinian and Egyptian figures calling for the full opening of the border, Gazans can only wait and hope that with a new Egyptian leadership the 4 year long isolation of the territory will finally come to an end.

Safa Joudeh, Press TV, Gaza

http://www.presstv.ir/detail/166204.html

4.5 Million Orphans in Iraq: Protests Over Food and Shelter

Orphans join Iraq protests over food, shelter. Orphans join protests in Iraq to call for a better standard of living. Deborah Lutterbeck reports.

BAGHDAD — Fadel Mohammad Ra'ad, 10, is one of thousands of children who have lost their parents to the endless violence that has been gripping Iraq since the 2003 US-led invasion.

"My parents were killed in an explosion at the center of Baghdad last year, leaving me and my sister to no one," the child told IslamOnline.net in a Baghdad orphanage. "I have relatives but all of them have refused to take us in," he added choking at the memory. "We were forced to work to survive."

Children, like many other civilians, are the silent victims of violence in war-torn Iraq. "Violence in Iraq has vast characteristics. Sectarian violence, resistance against US troops, traditional behaviors and the fight against the hungry," explains Haydar Hassan Kareem, a sociologist.

The Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs estimate that around 4,5 million children are orphans. Nearly 70 percent of them lost their parents since the invasion and the ensuing violence. From the total number, around 600,000 children are living in the streets without a house or food to survive. Only 700 children are living in the 18 orphanages existing in the country, lacking their most essential needs.

"Unfortunately the budget allocated to projects that help street children and orphans is decreasing day in and day out," notes an Iraqi Red Crescent employee refusing to give his name. "Worse still, almost no NGO is dedicating itself to this group of kids who are subject to trafficking and sexual abuses in the streets."


http://tv.globalresearch.ca/2011/02/45-million-orphans-iraq-protests-over-food-and-shelter

The Terrorizing Truth About 9/11: It's Not A Matter of Keeping Secrets, But Maintaining a Grand Myth

The truth about 9/11 is slowly gaining the status of common knowledge, but it's been a real and frustrating decade-long struggle to set the historical record straight. The are still many people who can't believe that the Bush administration, and powerful decision-makers in the U.S. security apparatus could, first of all, pull off such a treacherous fraud, and second, that they were able to keep it a secret from other members of the U.S. government, the media, the American people, and the world for such a long period of time. Such a denial of the truth about the 9/11 attacks can't be attributed to blindness, or the cowardly avoidance of reality, but an underestimation of the power of myths in shaping our lives and our thoughts, and influencing the way we register facts and events in our world.

People who still believe the official 9/11 story often make the mistake in thinking that if the Bush administration really did 9/11 then there would be leaks, or government officials would come forward and speak to the media. Former CIA officer Valerie Plame expressed the widely shared view that 9/11 couldn't be a big lie because the American government can't keep a secret when she was asked at a recent public event in the University of Florida about supporting a new 9/11 investigation. The Gainesville Sun's Nathan Crabbe reported:

Several 9-11 truthers — who believe the fall of the World Trade Towers was a conspiracy — questioned Wilson about whether she supported a new investigation into the event. She dismissed the idea that such a conspiracy could be kept under wraps.

"Having worked for the government, I know it's really, really hard to keep a secret," she said.

The view that America's secretive government can't keep a secret is wrong for so many reasons, especially considering the fact that an even more secretive and criminal cabal is working within the government, doing everything in their power to misinform and bamboozle the American people. Their ability to keep secrets among themselves is well proven. If it wasn't for the courageous and truth-seeking Tillman family and others, we would've never known the truth about the death of Pat Tillman. Top military officials deliberately lied, and kept the truth hidden in order to sell a public myth about Tillman.

This "government can't keep a secret" view overlooks the reality that the Bush administration operated more like a gang than a government. In truth, the U.S. government as we know it didn't attack America and then lie to the world about the event. Instead, 9/11 was done by a few, well-organized individuals who hijacked the White House in 2000, and abused the machinery of government to promote their own evil ends. This small, tight-knit group that was involved in the planning and execution of 9/11 are not interested in revealing the truth, but in keeping secrets. Why would they leak secrets? If they spilled their guts about how they caused and covered up the greatest crime of the century they would be charged, and most likely found guilty, and then killed and/or imprisoned for life.

Individuals who lend their support to heinous and immoral acts like 9/11 most likely believe that such violence and deception is necessary and justifiable in the grand scheme of things. They believe that rulers have god-like status and can kill innocent people. Such violence is committed for a greater purpose in their minds, and to achieve many new changes that previously would've been resisted by both members of the government and the public. The new changes that 9/11 caused is obvious, they include: 1) public support for a global war on terror, and American wars in the Middle East; 2) the acceleration of the destruction of America's constitutional government and the further rise and influence of the National Security State; 3) profit for a few connected corporations and individuals that are close to the military-industrial complex; 4) the creation of new federal departments like Homeland Security that are unconstitutional and function as a police state to repress the American people and keep them from making serious political change; and, 5) 9/11 caused a deep psychological change in the people, making them fear that "terrorism" presents an existential threat to their personal safety, and the safety of their country.

http://disquietreservations.blogspot.com/2011/01/terrorizing-truth-about-911-its-not.html