ISRAEL'S PLAN FOR THE MOSLEM WORLD, AND BEYOND

Snippit and Snappit: Funny little thing. I mistyped the word "Balkanized" and the correction brought up by the programme's speelchek was "cannibalize". Just saying.... Maybe my pc has a little political astutenes!

Aangirfan

August 31, 2012

Oded Yinon

Rememeber how the West wrecked Yugoslavia?

The West is now wrecking various Moslem countries, by causing ethnic and religious conflicts.

Think of Syria, Iraq, Libya, Egypt, Pakistan...

The plan is an Israeli one. (A Strategy for Israel in the Nineteen Eighties, by Oded Yinon.)
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The West is trying to break up the 'Greater Middle East', according to Knut Mellenthin.

31 August 2012: Junge Welt - Translate this page

According to Knut Mellenthin:

1. 

Israel wants countries such as Syria and Iraq broken up broken up into several states.

There will be a Kurdish state.

2. 

In 1982, Oded Yinon had an article published by the World Zionist Organization journal Kiwunim, entitled "A Strategy for Israel in the 1980s."

Acording to Yinon:

"Lebanon's total dissolution into five provinces will be a precedent for the entire Arab world, including Egypt, Syria, Iraq and the Arabian Peninsula...

"An Iraqi-Iranian war will tear apart Iraq..."

"If Egypt falls apart, countries like Libya, Sudan or even the more distant states will not continue to exist...

"A Coptic State in Upper Egypt alongside a number of weak states with very limited local power and without a centralized government is the key..."

All Arab and Muslim states would face "ethnic and social destruction from within, and... raging civil war."

Yinon explicitly mentioned in this context, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

3. 

Numerous policy papers published in Israel follow the Yinon line.

There were references in these to "violent action against Syria, Turkey and Jordan, among others..."

4. 

In June 2006, the U.S. military's Armed Forces Journal published an article by Ralph Peters suggesting drawing new borders in the Middle East.

Peter's "new map" included a "Kurdish state" cut out of Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran...

"The objectives of 'Yinon Africa' are to Balkanize the continent on three lines: ethno-linguistics, skin color and religion.

"The concept of an US Military Central Command in Africa (AFRICOM), was designed and promoted by the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies (IASPS), the same Zionist think tank that produced the infamous 'Clean Break' papers...

"In the Congo, where a catastrophic genocide has been occurring since 1996, in which up to 10 million people have died at a maddening rate of 1,500 a day, the profiteers of this downright insidious humanitarian disaster are almost exclusively Jewish and intimately linked to the larger network of international Zionism that has been responsible for every major conflict of the last century." 

Zionists in Africa.

THE YINON THESIS VINDICATED

snippits-and-slappits.blogspot.com/.../the-yinon-thesis-vindicated-neo...

12 Aug 2012

The Yinon Plan and the Arab World - MLK's nightmare 

The Hidden History of Zionism.

TEXAS STUDENTS REVOLT AGAINST MANDATORY RFID TRACKING CHIPS

SPY TAGS TRACK KIDS 

EVEN AFTER THEY LEAVE SCHOOL

Paul Joseph Watson
Infowars.com

August 30, 2012

Students and parents at two San Antonio schools are in revolt over a program that forces kids to wear RFID tracking name tags which are used to pinpoint their location on campus as well as outside school premises.

Students at John Jay High School and Anson Jones Middle School will be mandated to wear the tags from today which will be used to track them on campus as well as when they enter and leave school.

Andrea Hernandez is leading a group of students who refuse to wear the tags because in her words, “It makes me uncomfortable. It’s an invasion of my privacy,” she told KSN.com.

Hernandez is being backed by parents and privacy experts like Dr. Katherine Albrecht who point out that the spy chips are more about making money than keeping students safe, as the schools claim.

By reducing truancy and tardiness, the school stands to net $2 million dollars in state funding.

Hernandez points out that the system is all but useless because students will just leave their tag in their locker or hand it to a friend to avoid being monitored.

Parents and students have rallied to organize a protest against the spy chips which is set to take place today.

Hernandez also fears that the RFID chips could be used to track students outside of school, a valid concern given past examples of how such technology has been abused by school officials.

In 2010, the Lower Merion School District in Pennsylvania used school-issued laptops to spy on kids in their own home.

The controversy ignited after student Blake Robbins was disciplined for “improper behavior in his home”. It turned out that school officials had installed software on the laptops that used the computer’s webcam to send images back to the school server every 15 seconds.

Hernandez also pointed out that sexual predators could use the tracking system to stalk children because the RFID tag continues to send a signal even after students have left school premises.

“With a smart phone you can use the option to use your locator but this I can’t turn it off,” Hernandez said.

As we reported earlier this week, similar programs where students are tracked both inside and outside school are already in operation across the country.

Children in nine Austin schools are being forced to carry around GPS tracking devices everywhere they go under the justification of preventing truancy. The kids are also assigned a “mentor” with whom they must check in several times a day.

Such a system is hardly much different from prisoners who are mandated to wear a GPS ankle bracelet and regularly check in with parole officers.

Indeed, treating schoolchildren like prisoners in anticipation for their introduction into outside world, a surveillance state in which they are also expected to acquiesce to an omnipresent big brother, is seemingly the ultimate goal of such programs.

Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a regular fill-in host for The Alex Jones Show and Infowars Nightly News.

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NUCLEAR COVER-UP THREATENS GREAT LAKES REGION

By Michael Leonardi

CounterPunch

August 20, 2012

A CounterPunch Special Report on NRC Collusion With Utilities to Conceal Grave Safety Problems at Davis Besse and Palisades Reactors
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According to recent reports from the nuclear watchdog Beyond Nuclear and several Great Lakes environmental organizations, the NRC is up to its usual practices as an industry captured agency. 

Collusion and flagrant cover-ups at the Davis Besse nuclear power plant on the shores of Lake Erie and at the Palisades nuclear plant on the shores of Lake Michigan have drawn the ire of Congressmen Dennis Kucinich of Ohio and Ed Markey of Massachusetts who have called on the NRC’s investigator general to investigate NRC region 3 practices and motivations of the NRC in allowing these plants to operate with grave safety concerns.

With respect to Davis Besse it seems like a flashback to the 2002 hole in the reactor head incident documented here, as part of the history of this Nuclear Nightmare between Toledo and Cleveland on the western Lake Erie basin. In 2003 the NRC’s commissioner resigned after the General Accounting Office found the agency guilty of collusion with plant operator First Energy in their attempts to cover-up the seriousness of corrosion issues that brought Davis Besse within 3/16ths of an inch of a core containment breach and catastrophic release of radioactivity.

Then Congressman Dennis Kucinich led the call of the Inspector General’s office as he is once again after First Energy and the NRC have colluded to downplay the seriousness of widespread cracking that has been discovered over the past year throughout the concrete shield building that houses the Davis Besse reactor.

According to some alarming revelations found in NRC documents revealed through a Freedom of Information Act filing by Kevin Kamps at Beyond Nuclear found here, NRC investigators have serious reservations as to whether the Davis Besse shield building could withstand even minor seismic activity and admit that even before the widespread cracking was discovered that the shield building was never designed “for containment accident pressure and temperature.”

This means that, even when brand new and un-cracked, Davis Besse’s shield building was not capable of preventing catastrophic radioactivity releases during a reactor core meltdown. An inner steel containment vessel, a mere 1.5 inches thick when brand new, would thus be the last line of defense.

However, the environmental interveners have un-earthed NRC and First Energy documents showing that the steel containment vessel has suffered significant corrosion over the past several decades due to infiltrating and standing chemically “aggressive” groundwater in the “sand bed” region surrounding the bottom of the containment vessel (which has also degraded the shield building’s underground “moisture barrier”), as well as due to an acidic borated water leak from the refueling channel near the top of the containment vessel.
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Even Mother Nature loves nuclear power! Perched on a tree to the left of the Davis-Besse nuclear plant cooling tower is an adult bald eagle (Photo by Bill Thompson III).

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The coalition of environmental and citizens groups fighting the re licensing of Davis Besse has pointed to a 1982 study, “Calculation of Reactor Accident Consequences” (CRAC-2), commissioned by NRC, to show how bad the casualties and property damage would be downwind and downstream of a catastrophic radioactivity release which escapes Davis Besse’s corroded inner steel containment vessel and cracked outer shield building. CRAC-2 lists the following consequences at Davis-Besse:

1,400 Peak Early Fatalities; 73,000 Peak Early Injuries; 10,000 Peak Cancer Deaths; $84 billion in property damage. However, CRAC-2 was based on 1970 U.S. Census data. As reported by Jeff Donn at the Associated Press in summer 2011, populations around U.S. nuclear power plants have “soared” in the past 42 years, meaning those casualty figures near Davis Besse would likely now be much worse. And, when adjusted for inflation from 1982-dollar figures, property damage would today surmount $187 billion in 2010-dollar figures.

According to the environmental coalition’s attorney Terry Lodge, “What we have established from NRC’s own documents is that there are two Nuclear Regulatory Commissions:

some hard-working, intelligent people who set out to find out the truth of these very dangerous technical problems and their causes,

and a political class in the agency that is dedicated to pulling the plug on any investigation that threatens utility profits, above all else.

The search for truth about the shield building had to be cut off because it went too close to the cash cow.”

Michael Keegan of Don’t Waste Michigan in Monroe stated:

“These multiple crackings, complete with concrete degradation of the shield containment building, are but a metaphor for the entire dilapidated Davis Besse atomic reactor. This reactor is running on borrowed time, propped up on stilts by a captured regulator that is now under investigation for doing so.”

Kevin Kamps, of national watchdog Beyond Nuclear in Takoma Park, Maryland stated: “NRC staff and management, both at its national headquarters in Rockville, Maryland, as well as its Region 3 office outside Chicago, worked long hours, during evenings, on weekends, and even through the Thanksgiving holiday, in order to rubber stamp reactor restart approval at Davis Besse in a great big hurry, despite countless unanswered questions and unresolved concerns about the shield building cracking.”

As regards to the chronically leaking Palisade’s nuclear reactor located on the shores of Lake Michigan in southwest Michigan, the NRC’s investigator general is conducting an investigation into why recently resigned NRC chairman Gregory Jaczko was kept in the dark, along with the public, about a leak of Safety Injection Refueling Water from a storage tank into buckets in the control room when he was on a visit to the facility before meeting with nuclear watchdogs and environmentalists back in May of this year.

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 Palisades

This investigation was called for by Congressman Ed Markey of Massachusetts after it was revealed that ongoing safety issues were covered-up by the Entergy owned Palisades even while a tour of the plant was in act.  

Palisades has a terrible record of leaks, mishaps and accidents, some of which were outlined in this 2010 report “Headaches at Palisades: Broken Seals & Failed Heals,” by the Union of Concerned Scientist’s David Lochbaum.  

Most recently on the 12th of August Palisades was shut down for a leak of radioactive and acidic primary coolant, escaping from safety-critical control rod drive mechanisms attached to its degraded lid, atop what is considered by the NRC itself to be most embrittled reactor pressure vessel in the U.S..

Palisades’ operator Entergy is also in the habit of periodically releasing radioactive steam into the area due to reoccurring electrical accidents most recently in September of 2011.  

This steam may be a contributing factor to the fact that the area around South Haven is considered a cancer cluster by medical researchers from the state of Michigan Health department.

Jaczko was the subject of what Senator Reid of Nevada called a witch hunt by politically motivated commissioners angered at the fact that Jaczko had helped to mothball the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository and resigned in June.  

A December 2011 article by Andrew Cockburn provides an overview of the politically motivated actions at an NRC that has clearly distinguished itself to be nothing more than a regulatory agency under complete control by an industry always willing to put profit margins above any considerations of health, public safety of property values. 

As Kevin Kamps was quoted as saying in this article in regards to Jaczko

“He’s not ‘our guy’ by any means, he has voted to re-license plants that should probably be shut down, but he does care about safety, in ways that the others do not.”

It was also well put by CounterPunch contributor Karl Grossman, when he said

“Jaczko was insufficiently pro nuclear.”

One of the NRC commissioners responsible forcing out Jaczko was Commissioner William Ostendorff.  Ostendorff reportedly threw a temper tantrum at the NRC calling on the NRC’s Investigator General to halt her investigation into the cover-up at Palisades calling it a waste of taxpayer dollars. Now Ostebdorff finds himself under investigation for impeding an investigation. Ostendorff is an explicit representation of how the NRC operates as a captured agency through orchestrated industry deception.

The story of the NRC and nuclear regulation in the United States is one of corruption and collusion at the whim of industry dictates. Congressmen Dennis Kucinich, along with congressman Markey of Massachusetts, Senators Barbara Boxer, Bernie Sanders and Ron Wyden are some of the few voices of credibility in the wilderness of congressional complacency and acquiescence to the profit driven desires of an industry driven by the vast mythology of the “peaceful atom” that has been perpetrated by decades of propaganda from the likes of the industry front group the Nuclear Energy Institute. 

The corporations like Exelon, GE, First Energy, Entergy and their political escorts that prop them up from the white house and throughout the halls of congress continue to allow the operation of 104 reactors across the United States.

Obama has surrounded himself with nuclear industry advisors and cabinet members as part of his nuclear powered white house. Meanwhile congress people like republican representative Fred Upton, who’s district includes Palisades and democratic representative Marcy Kaptur who resides over the district that includes Davis Besse give carte blanche to the NRC, Entergy and First Energy putting what they define as “good jobs” and “economic partnership” over any concerns of health and safety for their constituents or for the entire Great Lakes ecosystem.

In regards to the cases of Palisade’s and Davis Besse, Dennis Kucinich stated

“I can’t say the cases are related, but the similarities between these two investigations are troubling. In Michigan, an effort to determine why a radioactive leak was kept from the Chairman of NRC may have been undermined. In Ohio, we witnessed agency officials give public statements that varied dramatically from what engineers had told my staff. I cannot determine what caused this change in the answers of these Region III engineers, but I am concerned that it was in response to political pressure. I hope that the Inspector General is able to restore confidence in the NRC’s ability to provide effective oversight of our nation’s nuclear power plants.”

This is a confidence that for many citizens that have been following culture of collusion and corruption at the NRC since its inception has never existed.

Jaczko has now been hunted out and replaced by Allison Macfarlane who has so far decided to keep her head in the sand when it comes to the political motivations of the NRC and its cosiness with the nuclear industry that it purports to regulate.  The commissioners responsible for Jaczko’s demise remain.

When asked about the perception of the NRC being a captured agency at a recent press conference Macfarlane feigned ignorance or maybe it is that she is truly ignorant that this perception exists. 

If she wants to “restore confidence” as Kucinich puts it or “build public confidence in the agency by improving communication and increasing transparency” as she put it, she better get on top of the ongoing investigations of her own Inspector General very quickly. The reality that the NRC is now regulating based on deception and lies does not bode well for her attempts to build public confidence.

Senator Harry Reid recently referred to NRC commissioner Bill Magwood as a “treacherous, miserable liar,” referring to questions regarding Magwood’s support for a nuclear repository at Yucca Mountain.  This repository was considered to be geologically inadequate by former chairman Jaczko and the new chair Allison Macfarlane until she jumped into the political playing field and said she would keep an open mind about the Yucca Mountain repository during her senate confirmation hearing.

Macfarlane is a geologist and expert on radioactive waste chosen at a time when the unsolvable problem of high level radioactive waste has come to the forefront once again and threatens to block any future re licensing of nuclear plants.

As another in the long line of myth perpetrators Macfarlane wants to assure the American people that a safe geological storage site to keep high level radioactive waste safe and sound for over 100,000 years is surely possible if congress has the political will to make it happen. 

So far there has been no solution to high level radioactive waste discovered anywhere by anyone in the world, until even a myth of a solution comes from the lips of Macfarlane wouldn’t it be prudent to shut down our 104 behemoth’s of poison and stop producing it?

Michael Leonardi is a writer and activist with Occupy Toledo, he currently lives with his family 25 miles from Fermi 2 and 25 miles from Davis Besse.

NATO TERRORISTS TARGET SYRIA & ALGERIA

Image: NATO's intervention in Libya has resurrected listed-terrorist organization and Al Qaeda affiliate, LIFG. It had previously fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, and now has fighters, cash and weapons, all courtesy of NATO, spreading as far west as Mali, and as far east as Syria. The feared "global Caliphate" Neo-Cons have been scaring Western children with for a decade is now taking shape via US-Saudi, Israeli, and Qatari machinations, not "Islam." In fact, real Muslims have paid the highest price in fighting this real "war against Western-funded terrorism."

By Tony Cartalucci

Land Destroyer Report

August 29, 2012

Western policy makers admit that NATO's operations in Libya have played the primary role in emboldening Al Qaeda's AQIM faction (Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb). The Fortune 500-funded Brookings Institution's Bruce Riedel in his article, "The New Al Qaeda Menace," admits that AQIM is now heavily armed thanks to NATO's intervention in Libya, and that AQIM's base in Mali, North Africa, serves as a staging ground for terrorist activities across the region.

AQIM, like their Libyan counterparts, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) are both listed by the US State Department as "Foreign Terrorist Organizations." Likewise, both the UK Home Office (.pdf, listed as GSPC) and the UN recognize both organizations as terrorists. 

Despite this, military intervention in Libya was pursued by the West and condoned by the UN with full knowledge that the militants leading so-called "pro-democracy uprisings" were in fact merely the continuation of decades of violent terrorism carried out by Al Qaeda affiliates.

The West had full knowledge of this, primarily because it was Western intelligence agencies arming and supporting these militants for the last 30 years, in Libya's case, while coddling their leaders in Washington and London.

Additionally, the US Army itself meticulously documented foreign terrorists fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, noting that the highest percentage per capita emanated from Libya's cities of Benghazi and Darnah, the so-called "cradle" of 2011's "pro-democracy uprisings" in Libya.

 

CTC at West Point's "Al-Qa'ida's Foreign Fighters in Iraq." (.pdf)

What unfolded was a premeditated lie ~ where placard waving "activists" overnight turned into battle-hardened heavily armed, tank driving, jet flying militants waging a nationwide battle against Libyan leader, Muammar Qaddafi.

In reality, it was the fruition of 30 years of covert support the West has poured into militant groups across the region ~ support that would not end with the fall of Qaddafi.

Image: Libyan terrorist manning a tank during NATO's 2011 overthrow of the Libyan government. The media expects the public to believe placard waving peaceful demonstrators had somehow, in just days, transitioned into tank driving, jet flying rebel forces ~ just like in Hollywood. 

LIFG terrorists promptly turned both east to Syria and west to Mali beyond their borders ~ a logistical matter they had perfected during their operations in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past decade. LIFG commander Abdul Hakim Belhaj, as early as November 2011, arrived on the Turkish-Syrian border to provide cash, weapons, and LIFG terrorist fighters, overseen by Western intelligence along with US funding and arms laundered through Gulf Cooperative Council (GCC) members such as Qatar and Saudi Arabia. Since then Libyan militants have been confirmed to be leading entire brigades of foreign fighters inside Syria.

And as Bruce Riedel of Brookings concedes, these weapons went west to Mali as well. Algeria had feared just such a scenario unfolding with NATO's intervention in Libya ~ a fear now fully realized. Ironically, Riedel, in August 2011, had tried to make a case for Algeria being "next to fall" in an article titled literally, "Algeria Will Be Next to Fall."

A year ago, Riedel attempted to argue that it would be the so-called "Arab Spring" that would spread into Algeria after having taken root in neighboring Libya. He had eluded to, and it has now become abundantly clear, that by ”Arab Spring," Riedel meant, US-backed subversion, and more specifically NATO-armed Al Qaeda-brand militancy and terrorism.

With the US now openly arming, supporting, and literally "cheering" Al Qaeda in Syria, it is clear that the "War on Terror" is an unprecedented geopolitical fraud perpetuated at the cost of millions of lives destroyed and an incalculable social and economic toll. NATO, with full knowledge of the consequences is literally carving out of North Africa and the Middle East, the so-called "Caliphate" Western leaders had held over their impressionable people's heads as the impetus to perpetually wage global war.

Torn from the pages of Orwell's 1984, an artificial war has been created to carry forward corporate-financier machinations both abroad and domestically. The so-called threat to Western civilization is in fact a foreign legion of Western corporate-financier interests, executing Wall Street and London's foreign policy on a global scale where and in a manner traditional Western forces cannot.

NATO's terrorist blitzkrieg across the Arab World will not end in Syria. It will continue, if allowed, into Iran, through the Caucasus Mountains and into Russia, across China's western borders, and even across Southeast Asia. The price for ignorance, apathy, and complicity in supporting the West's so-called "War on Terror" will ironically reap all the horrors and then some in reality, that were promised to us if we didn't fight this "Long War."

Our support of both the political gambits of our politicians, as well as our daily patronage of the corporate-financier interests driving this agenda have already reaped an unprecedented and still growing regional safe haven for terrorists ~ and as moderate secular governments continue to be undermined and toppled, we can only imagine the blowback, retaliation, and other consequences as this destructive foreign policy unfolds. To imagine that such meddling will not end up being visited back upon us, even if in the form of a false flag attack dwarfing 9/11, would be folly.

Already, we are suffering economic devastation and an increasingly stifling security apparatus at home, and as long as we capitulate to this current agenda instead of asserting a more rational one of our own, it will only get worse.

ARRIGONI’S MURDER TRIAL IN GAZA: ANSWERS NOT JUST A VERDICT

By Ramzy Baroud

Dissident Voice

August 29, 2012

There was once a young man from a very small Italian town called Bulciago who wished to change the world. As soon as he finished his exams, he began his quest. He traveled near and far, and when he arrived in Jerusalem in 2002, he knew he had found his calling.

In 2008, that young man, Vittorio Arrigoni, sailed the high seas on a small boat. His purpose was to help end the siege imposed on a long-suffering population living in the tiny Gaza Strip. In a journal entry that was recently published in a much anticipated book, Freedom Sailors, Arrigoni wrote:

“History is us; History is not cowardly governments; with their loyalty to whoever has the strongest military; History is made by ordinary people.”

Vittorio’s history sees ‘ordinary people’ as actors who can change the world: courageous sailors who can challenge great military powers, doctors dashing through borders and saving lives, writers, teachers, speakers, musicians and people from all backgrounds.

Vittorio’s middle name was Utopia, but his was hardly a utopian undertaking. It was very much real, and Vittorio was himself charting the way for others. Once in Gaza, he was determined to see his mission through to the very end, despite having many compelling reasons to leave. In September 2008, he was injured by the Israeli navy as he accompanied Palestinian fishermen in Gaza’s territorial waters.

A month later he was arrested ~ or more likely, kidnapped ~ by the Israeli military, and subsequently deported. A month later he returned, just in time to report on the so-called Operation Cast Lead. This was a one-sided war on Gaza between December 2008 and January 2009, following the failure of the siege to achieve Israel’s political objectives. The 22-day war killed over 1,400 people and wounded thousands more.

Vittorio was there to witness it all. As many turned the war off and on through their remote controls, Vittorio was accompanying ambulances in middle of the night, comforting the wounded, weeping with the bereaved, calling on the world to help, and surviving the war himself.

He sent daily dispatches to Italian media, blogged on his website and wrote to friends the world over. His book, Restiamo Umani (Stay Human) offers a glimpse into the courageous man’s experiences. In his first entry, he wrote as an Italian activist. By the end, he was a Palestinian man besieged in Gaza.

In the eyes of some, he was dangerous. A US-based far-right website called for his murder. It was not Vittorio the person that alarmed Israel, but the notion of what he and others like him symbolized – a challenge to the predictability of a conflict between a powerful oppressor and a powerless but defiant oppressed.

As far as Israel was concerned, an idealist from a northern Italian town had no business being in Gaza, where people are indefinitely caged in an open air prison. Neither Vittorio nor any other international activist was supposed to disturb the inhumane experiment.

Yet, Vittorio’s story had a most unexpected twist. On April, 2011, he was kidnapped and murdered. His murderers were Palestinians from Gaza, commanded by a mysterious Jordanian character whose origins and motives remain unclear. It was a horrifying, anti-climactic end to a story that was never intended to turn so wrong.

It took Palestinian society a long time to reconcile with the fact that Vittorio’s murderers were in fact Gazans, while others gloated with triumph. Vittorio’s very detractors were leading a media war defaming Palestinians, international activists and the supposedly misguided Italian who believed that the ordinary can change history.

Writing in the Jewish Chronicle, historian Geoffrey Alderman stated:

“Few events ~ not even the execution of Osama bin Laden ~ have caused me greater pleasure in recent weeks than news of the death of the Italian so-called ‘peace activist’ Vittorio Arrigoni” (as quoted in View from Jerusalem with Harriet Sherwood on May 18, 2011).

While Sherwood found the comments ‘shocking’, pleasure at the killing of a peace activist is fully consistent with Israel’s ceaseless efforts at ‘discouraging’ international activists from showing solidarity to Palestinians.

Hamas, which has controlled the Gaza Strip since the breakup with rival Fatah in 2007, seemed genuine in its attempt to capture Vittorio’s killers. An investigation quickly pointed at Salafi groups, Tawhid and Jihad, Army of Islam and others. A manhunt followed, leading to the killing of a Jordanian citizen, Abbad a-Rahman al-Brizat, and Palestinian refugee, Balal al-Omari. Others were captured, and in September 2011, a trial began.

The trial of Vittorio’s alleged killers has not exactly been a model of transparency. On September 4, a verdict is scheduled to be handed down to four men accused of involvement in the murder. Al-Brizat, the Jordanian man, was perhaps the most important key in the trial. He is gone now, and allegations that his true aim was to exchange Vittorio for an imprisoned Salafi leader, Hisham al-Saedni remain unverified.

Just eleven days before Vittorio’s murder, another activist, Juliano Mer-Khamis, was murdered in Jenin, in the West Bank. The timing of the killings is puzzling and suggests a larger plot. Hamas and other Palestinian officials suggested hidden Israeli hands in both the vile acts, but the thread is yet to be found and unraveled.

Earlier this month, Hamas freed al-Maqdissi ~the man the supposed Jihadists wanted to free ~ citing lack of evidence. A few days later, following the murder of Egyptian soldiers in Sinai, it cracked down on his group. The plot here starts to thicken beyond the ability of any straightforward narrative to explain all the missing links.

On September 4, four men will be awaiting the verdict of a Gaza military court. But much more will be on trial that day, not least the credibility of Gaza’s legal system. Many questions will need to be answered to truly understand what is transpiring in the Gaza Strip, and who is behind the hidden agendas.

The killing of Vittorio was intended to not only kill him as a person. It was also meant to destroy the very idea that sailed with him and his friends to Gaza in 2008: that ordinary people are history and that they, and only they, will eventually make the difference in a world ruled by sheer interests and military might. 

Yes, justice for Vittorio Utopia Arrigoni is paramount, but we expect the Gaza government to hand down more than a verdict, but answers to those trying to kill Vittorio’s dream – along with our humanity.

Ramzy Baroud is an author and a journalist. His latest volume is The Second Palestinian Intifada: A Chronicle of a People's Struggle (Pluto Press, London). He can be reached at ramzybaroud@hotmail.com. Read other articles by Ramzy.