Friday, February 29, 2008

"Israel threatens to unleash 'holocaust' in Gaza"




"Israel threatens to unleash 'holocaust' in Gaza"


In the Times of London, February 29, 2008, at:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article3459144.ece


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Meanwhile...

A video on what Israel, and its supporters, have done.

To see this video, YouTube requires you to create an account, to certify that you are at least 18 years old, and to sign in, at:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqFiFzUXA7A



Joan Lowenstein, Dog for the Racist State of Israel
Added: 1 month ago
Views: 833

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Thursday, February 28, 2008

Israel kidnapped 700,000 Palestinians since 1967.

Racism comes with jail cells.



"A comprehensive report on Israeli detention camps and prisons"

Saturday August 25, 2007 00:33
author by Saed Bannoura - IMEMC
Report this post to the editors

On the Web at:

http://www.imemc.org/article/50072


"Israeli Prisons, graves for living Palestinian detainees"


A comprehensive report prepared by Abdul-Nasser Farawna, an ex-detainee, a specialist in Palestinian Detainee’s Affairs and the head of the census department of the Ministry of Detainees and Freed Detainees, prepared a comprehensive report on Palestinian detainees imprisoned by Israel.

detainees_2.jpg


The report revealed that Israel kidnapped 700.000 Palestinians since it occupied the Palestinian territories in 1967.


The report also stated that Israel is violating the rights of the detainees which are guaranteed by the International Law.


Farwana said in his report that Israeli prisons are “graves for living Palestinian detainees” as Israel violates their rights, tortures, isolates and medically neglect the detainees in addition to its illegal practices which violate the international law.


He said that since Israel occupied the rest of Palestine in 1967, it carried and is carrying crimes against the Palestinian people who already suffered from Israeli violations in 1948 and were displaced from their land.


Therefore, he added, resistance emerged, as a natural and legitimate response to the Israeli crimes.


He also stated that Israel demolished thousands of homes, annexed lands, and carried different sorts of violations, and implemented what it describes as “Emergency law” which allows the army to kidnap any resident who is suspected to be member of the resistance, or resisting the occupation in any form, even using peaceful means.


The Emergency law allows the army to kidnap and detain any resident without charges or trial, and this procedure violates that Ninth article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.


Since 1967, Israel arrested nearly 700.000 Palestinians and imprisoned them in old prisons that were used by Jordan and the British mandate. Those prisons were expanded in 1970 and later on the Israeli occupation built more prisons and detention facilities in various parts of the country.


Most of the prisons are within the areas Israel captured in 1948. Those prisons are located in areas that are not safe and subjected to war conditions which violates the Fourth Geneva Convention, article number 83, which states that the detainees cannot be imprisoned in areas that are subjected to danger of war.


Israel also deported dozens of detainees in direct violation to article number 49 of the Geneva Convention which bars the deportation of the detainees of occupied territories to any other state or the land of the occupying country.


Main prisons and detention facilities:


Be’er Shiva; it has two branches, Eshil (570 detainees), and Ohali Qidar (480 detainees); it is located east of Be’er Shiva city on the Eilat Road. It is in the desert and considered the first prison which was built by Israel. It was officially opened in Januray 3, 1970. Detainee Ishaq Maragha was the first detainee who died in that facility in November 16, 1983.


Nafha Prison, in the south of the Negev Desert, 820 detainees are currently imprisoned there; it was opened in 1980. Some of the detainees who died at the facility are Rasem Halawa, Ali Al Ja’fary, both carried hunger strike in 1980. Waleed Amro, died in 2003, and Shadi Al Sa’ad, who died in 2007. All of them died of medical neglect.


Ramon Prison, a new prison built in the Negev in 2006, and includes 540.


Asqalan Prison,25 kilometers to the north of the Gaza Strip, it includes 585 detainees. It was opned in the late 60’s. Some of the detainees who died there are Abdul-Qader Abu Al Fahim, Omar Al Qasim, and Anis Doula.


Shatta Prison, 370 detainees, opened in 1953 in the Jordan valley, south of Tiberius Sea.


Galboa’ Prison, 780 detainees, near Shatta prison, was built in 2004, it is considered one of the most guarded prisons, and was built under the supervision of Italian experts. Detainee Bashar Bani Odah died there in June 23, 2006, cause of death; medical negligence.


Al Damoun Prison, it has to branches; minors and adults, it was built by the British Mandate as storage for cigarettes; in 1948 Israel reopened it and used it as a prison, and it was closed, but was reopened in April 2002.


Trusta Prison built in 1948 for Israeli women imprisoned for criminal conducts, and for Palestinian female political detainees.


Al Ramla Prison, on the road between Lod and Ramla; was built by the British Mandate in 1934. In 1948 the Israeli army used it as a military base, and then in 1953 was used to detain Palestinian fighters. One of the detainees who died of torture in Al Ramla Prison is Ibrahim Mahmoud Al Ra’ey, who was tortured to death in April 1988.


Ayalon Prison; and independent prison but considered one of the branches of Al Ramla Prison, there are 12 administrative detainees imprisoned in it.


Nitzan Prison, opened in 1978, considered one of the branches of Al Ramla Prison, it includes 250 detainees.


Telmond Prison, on the old road leading to Khadera, between Tulkarem and Natania. It includes two branches; one for women and one for children.


Hadarim prison, two branches, 3 and 8, near Natania, relatively new and built using American Prison standards, it includes 256 detainees, fist time detainees were imprisoned there was in 1999.


Hasharon Prison; three branches: women, children, and men. It includes 530 detainees. Detainee Mahmoud Karaja died in it of medical negligence in 2006.


Benjamin Prison; near Hebron and includes 50 detainees.


Atleet “Carmel” Prison opened in 1985 and includes 20 detainees.


Kfar Yuna Prison, south of Haifa, opened in 1968 and was previously used as an Israeli military base.


The secret prison 1391, was exposed three years ago. It is located in an area in the center of Israel and became known to the Palestinians as Guantanamo for its resemblance to the Guantanamo American prison in Cuba.


Ansar 3 Prison, in the Negev desert in a closed military zone. Was initially used as a military camp for the Israeli army. It contains 2300 detainees, 700 of them are Administrative detainees held without declared charges. It was opened in 1988, closed in 1996 and reopened in 2002.it was under the control of the Israeli Prison Administration but in 2006 the Israeli army took over. Two of the detainees who died there are As’ad Al Shawwa and Bassam Al Samoudi.


Majiddo Prison; considered part of the boundaries of Jaffa, located northwest of Jenin and southwest of Al Affoula, it includes 1400 detainees. It was under the control of the army and became under the control of the Israeli Prison Administration in 2005. Some of the detainees who died in it are Mohammad Al Dahameen in 2001, Ahmad Jawabra in 2002, Basheer Oweiss in 2003, Fawwaz Al Bolbol in 2004, and Rasim Abu Ghazza in 2005.


Ofer Prison, south of Ramallah, was built in 1988 and was closed in the late 1990’s but was reopened in 2002. It concludes 900 detainees. Detainee Sabri Mansour was shot dead by soldiers guarding the facility.


Interrogation facilities


There are several interrogation facilities and they all are under the supervision of the internal security Services in Israel.


Al Jalama detention facility, between Haifa and Nazareth, it includes 20 detainees and was reopened during the Al Aqsa Intifada.


Beit El, south east of Ramallah, it includes 30 detainees and considered a center for different Israeli intelligence, police and military facilities.


Petah Tikva, 20 detainees, and is an interrogation facility.


Al Maskobiyya, in Jerusalem, and includes 45 detainees. One of the detainees who died in it due to torture is Qasim Abu Aker from Jerusalem. He died in 1969.


Huwwara Prison near Nablus, in the northern part of the West Bank. It is part of a military camp and is considered a primary interrogation center before the detainees are moved to other prisons.


Al Majnouna detention facility, 18 detainees. It is located south of Hebron and is in a military camp.


Salem Prison, west of Jenin and includes 25 detainees.


Qadumim, located in Qadumim Israeli settlement in the West Bank, near a military base. It includes 24 detainees who are imprisoned close to a fire range used by the army for training.


Eretz detention, in the border area with the Gaza Strip.


Kfar Azion, an interrogation center near Hebron.


There are several other prisons which were closed after Israel withdrew from some of the Palestinian territories. Some of these prisons were in Gaza, including one interrogation center which was known as “the slaughter house” infamous for brutality against the detainees, it was established by the British Mandate in the thirties, became a compound for government offices by the Egyptian regime and after Israel occupied the Gaza Strip in 1967 it became a prison and a central interrogation camp known as the slaughterhouse.


Ansar 2, was located on the Gaza shore, was used as a military camp and in 1984 the army used part of it as a detention camp for youth and students who protest against the occupation. In 1987, after the first Intifada started, it was expanded and thousands of Palestinians were imprisoned there.


Other prisons are Hebron prison, Ramallah prison, Jneid Prison in Nablus, Jenin Prison, and Al Far’a Prison near Jenin.


Israeli prisons that existed in southern Lebanon


During the Israeli occupation to southern Lebanon, Israel opened several prisons which were used to detain Palestinian and Lebanese residents. One of them is Ansar which was opened in 1982 in southern Lebanon, it was closed in 1985.


Al Khiam Prison, in southern Lebanon, it was first established in 1933 by the French army during the French mandate over Lebanon. After the Lebanese independence, the Lebanese army took over the prison in 1943, but in 1978, the first Israeli invasion to southern Lebanon; the prison was controlled by Sa’ad Haddad militias, which cooperated with Israel.


In 1985 Al Khiam became a huge Israeli prison which included 67 cells and more than 20 solitary confinement cells. It was shut down after the Israeli withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 2000.


Farawna said that Israeli prisons are old cement constructions that became uninhabitable due to natural causes, lack of maintenance, dark rooms; small windows lack of ventilation, humidity, bugs, and other issues, but are still used for holding Palestinian detainees.


Other detention camps are centers with tents, every group of tents is surrounded by fences and heavily armed guards.


Farwana also said that the Israeli jailors always intend to abuse the detainees, attack them, insult them, and torture them.


All detention facilities provide bad food to the detainees, and the soldiers carry repeated attacks against them.


Hot water, cleaning materials, and other basic stuffs are rare to find which increases the presence of skin diseases.


Some of the violations carried against the detainees are forcing them to undress under the pretext if searching them, while in some cases sexual assaults were reported.


category palestine | prisoners | news report author email saed at imemc dot org

torture.jpg

torture1.jpg


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Racism comes with jail cells-

One out of every nine Black men, between the ages of 20 and 34, is in jail.

So says the New York Times, February 28, 2008:


"1 in 100 U.S. Adults Behind Bars, New Study Says"


NEW YORK TIMES

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/28/us/28cnd-prison.html?_r=3&oref=login&ref=us&pagewanted=print&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

"...Incarceration rates are even higher for some groups. One in 36 Hispanic adults is behind bars, based on Justice Department figures for 2006. One in 15 black adults is, too, as is one in nine black men between the ages of 20 and 34.


"The report, from the Pew Center on the States, also found that only one in 355 white women between the ages of 35 and 39 is behind bars, but that one in 100 black women is."


___________________________________


Wednesday, February 27, 2008

When the "Michigan Daily" stood against Apartheid Israel:

Rabbi criticizes "Michigan Daily" for printing "baseless lies" and "obscenities" against Israel:


Click on image, a couple of times, to enlarge it:


"Protesters Allege Land Bias in Israel:
"Ann Arbor Dinner Draws Pro-Palestinian Group"


DETROIT FREE PRESS
April 10, 1989

"ANN ARBOR - Chanting 'Free, free Palestine' , in the driving snow, about 60 people protested Sunday outside a fund raising dinner for the Jewish National Fund, a group the demonstrators said discriminates against Palestinians on land the group owns in Israel..."


_______________________________________

"Michigan Daily" Editors:
"...Zionism is from its inception a racist construct."


Click on image, a couple of times, to enlarge it:


"Students Critical of Israel are Under Fire"
DETROIT FREE PRESS
March 1, 1989

"...The Daily's editorial board-- which includes a number of Jewish students-- has backed the right of self-determination for Palestinians...

"...Three of the Daily's staffers-- Adam Shrager, 20, editor-in-chief, Jackie Miller, 21, display advertising manager, and Amy Harmon, 20, co-editor pf the editorial page-- are Jewish and defend the editorials..."

#
_______________________________________

The Black Holocaust-
"we have as far as possible closed every avenue by which light may enter their minds..."

You can learn a lot about the Holocaust which the Zionists are pushing, against the Muslim world, against the Arab world, and most acutely against the Palestinian people, by studying the Holocaust against Africa.


To learn a little about the Holocaust committed against the Black world, read this, by Henry Berry, Esq., in the Virginia House of Delegates, January 20, 1832:


"Sir, we have as far as possible closed every avenue by which light may enter their [the slaves'] minds; we have only to go one step farther,--- to extinguish the capacity to see the light, and our work would be completed ; they would then be reduced to the level with the beasts of the field, and we should be safe; and I am not certain that we would not do it if we could find out the necessary process, and that under the plea of necessity..."

- Henry Berry, Esq., himself a slaveholder, in the Virginia House of Delegates, January 20, 1832.
Berry's is one of a number of panicked speeches delivered shortly after Nat Turner's revolt against slavery in Southampton, Virginia.


The capture of Nat Turner (1800-1831) by Benjamin Phipps on 30 October 1831: colored engraving.

The capture of Nat Turner (1800-1831) by Benjamin Phipps on 30 October 1831.

_______________________________


Berry's speech is taken from "The Testimony of God Against Slavery", Second Edition, by Rev. La Roy Sunderland (Boston: Isaac Knapp, 1836), pages 148-149.

The same speech by Berry, with more background detail, is found in "The Roving Editor: Or, Talks with Slaves in the Southern States", by James Redpath (1859), on pages 100-102.

______________________________________


Those who made the ultimate sacrifice for African liberation:



Nameless thousands have resisted even unto death for the liberation of African people, beginning on the shores of the Mother continent itself and continuing through the Middle Passage, Slavery, Jim Crow, the Civil Rights Struggle, the Black Liberation Struggle, and the struggles of today.

The fact that the names of many of those individuals are not known does not reduce the significance of their contribution to the struggle for Black Liberation.

This compilation is an attempt to recognize and pay homage to those individuals who made the ultimate sacrifice for the liberation of Black/African people and should not be looked upon as discrediting the thousands, perhaps even millions of others that have also struggled for true freedom, justice, and equality. Our generation must now accept the torch that has been passed to us to guarantee our existence and our children's future. The Struggle Continues!


Zumbi dos Palmares (1655 - 1695)
Killed on November 20, 1695, in an ambush by Portuguese soldiers while conducting a guerilla campaign to maintain the independence of the Quilombo known as Palmares located in modern day Brazil. He was post-humously decapitated and his head impaled and placed on public display.

Camuanga dos Palmares (? - 1704)
Killed by Portuguese soldiers while leading a guerilla campaign to re-establish the independence of the Palmares Quilombo.

Gabriel Prosser (? - 1800)
Executed: October 7, 1800 by state of Virginia for plotting slave insurrection in Norfolk County.

Toussaint L'Ouverture (1743 - 1803)
Died due to complications related to imprisonment in a cold, mountain cell in France.

Denmark Vesey (1767 - 1822)
Executed: July 2, 1822 by state of South Carolina along with 34 other Blacks for plotting slave insurrection in Charleston.

Bob Ferebee (? - 1823)
Executed: July, 1823 by state of Virginia for leading slave insurrection in Norfolk County.

David Walker (1785 - 1830)
Died under mysterious circumstances in Boston shortly after the publication and circulation of his widely read "Walker's Appeal". Believed to be poisoned.

Jean Dessalines (? - 1806)
Assassinated: October 17, 1806 while functioning as the Revolutionary leader of Haiti.

John Copeland (? - 1859)
Executed: December 16, 1859 for participating in raid on Harper's Ferry in Virginia.

Shields Green (? - 1859)
Executed: December 16, 1859 for participating in raid on Harper's Ferry in Virginia.

Nat Turner (1800 - 1831)
Executed: November 11, 1831 by state of Virginia for leading slave insurrection in Southampton County.

Sam Sharpe (1801 - 1832)
Executed: October 24, 1865 in Montego Bay, Jamaica by British colonialists.

Paul Bogle (1815 - 1865)
Executed: October 24, 1865 along with 438 supporters in Morant Bay, Jamaica by British colonialists.

Antonio Maceo CRP (1848 - 1896)
Killed in battle while fighting to liberate the island of Cuba from the Spanish colonialists.

Samoury Toure (? - 1900)
Died on June 2, 1900 while imprisoned in France.

Marcus Garvey [UNIA, ACL] (1887 - 1940)
Died in exile after being wrongly convicted of mail fraud by the U.S. Government and deported. Garvey was subsequently denied entry into most countries and their colonies where he enjoyed a strong following in an attempt to isolate him from his organizational apparatus.

Josina Machel [FRELIMO] (1945 - )
Killed while fighting the Portuguese Colonialists.

M'Balia Camara (? -1955 )
Murdered by agents of the French Government.

Dedan Kimathi (?-1957)
Leader Of Mau-Mau murdered by agents of the British Government

Felix Moumie [UPC] (? - 1960)
Poisoined: November 3, 1960 by French imperialist agents in Cameroon.

Patrice Lumumba [Prime Minister - Congo] (1925 - 1961)
Assassinated: January 17, 1961 by U.S. CIA backed counter-revolutionary forces while in the custody of the illegitimate Katanga government.

Medger Evers [NAACP] (1928 - 1963)
Assassinated: June 12, 1963 in Mississippi by convicted murder Byron De La Beck member of the kkk

Malcolm X [MMI, OAAU] (1925 - 1965)
Assassinated: February 21, 1965 in New York City. Assassins believed to be FBI infiltrators.

T. Hainyeko [PLAN] (? - 1967)
Killed on May 18, 1967 while fighting the South African government.

Martin Luther King [SCLC] (1929 - 1968)
Assassinated: April 4, 1968 in Memphis. James Earl Ray convicted but believed to be part of a larger government conspiracy.

Arthur Glenn Carter [BPP] (1940 - 1968)
Assassinated: March, 1968 by government agents in Los Angeles.

Bobby "L'il Bobby" Hutton [BPP] (1950 - 1968)
Assassinated: April 6, 1968 by Oakland Police.

Steve Bartholemew [BPP] (1947 - 1968)
Assassinated: August 5, 1968 by Los Angeles Police.

Robert Lawrence [BPP] (1946 -1968)
Assassinated: August 5, 1968 by Los Angeles Police.

Tommy Lewis [BPP] (1950 - 1968)
Assassinated: August 5, 1968 by Los Angeles Police.

Welton "Butch" Armstead [BPP] (1951 - 1968)
Assassinated: October 5, 1968 by Seattle Police.

Sidney Miller [BPP] (1947 - 1968)
Assassinated: December 2, 1968 - Shot in the head at point blank range by a racist businessman in Seattle who was never charged for the crime.

Frank "Capt. Franco" Diggs [BPP] (1928 - 1968)
Assassinated: December 19, 1968 by unknown assailants in Los Angeles.

Alprentice "Bunchy" Carter [BPP] (1942 - 1969)
Killed: January 17, 1969 In Revolutionary Action.

John Huggins [BPP] (1946 - 1969)
Killed: January 17, 1969 In Revolutionary Action .

Eduardo Mondlane [FRELIMO] (? - 1969)
Assassinated: February, 1969 with a parcel bomb in Tanzania by Portuguese agents.

Alex Rackley [BPP] (1944 -1969)
Assassinated: 1969 in New Haven in an atmosphere of confusion engineered by the FBI's COINTELPRO campaign. Body was discovered May 21, 1969. Circumstances surrounding his death remains a controversy to date.

Sylvester Bell [BPP] (? - 1969)
Assassinated: May, 1969 in San Diego by members of the US organization apparently resulting from tensions engendered by the FBI's COINTELPRO campaign.

John Savage [BPP] (1948 - 1969)
Assassinated: May 23, 1969 in San Diego by members of the US organization apparently resulting from tensions engendered by the FBI's COINTELPRO campaign.

Larry Roberson [BPP] (1949 - 1969)
Assassinated: Died on September 4, 1969 from gunshot wounds sustained by Chicago Police on July 16, 1969.

Nathaniel Clark [BPP] (1950 - 1969)
Assassinated: September 12, 1969 as he slept by unknown assailants in Los Angeles.

Walter "Toure" Pope [BPP] (1949-1969)
Assassinated: October 18, 1969 by the Los Angeles Metro Squad.

Carlos Marighela (? - 1969)
Assassinated: November 4, 1969 in ambush by Brazilian police.

Spurgeon "Jake" Winters [BPP] (1950 - 1969)
Assassinated: November 13, 1969 by Chicago Police.

Fred Hampton [BPP] (1948 - 1969)
Assassinated: December 4, 1969 While sleep in a pre-dawn raid in Chicago by the Special Prosecution Unit acting on behalf of the State Attorney Office. Believed to have been drugged by FBI informant William O'neil prior to the raid.

Mark Clark [BPP] (1947 - 1969)
Assassinated: December 4, 1969 While sleep in a pre-dawn raid in Chicago by the Special Prosecution Unit acting on behalf of the State Attorney Office.

Ron Black [BPP] (? - 1969)
Assassinated: April 5, 1969 - In Detroit.

Allah fka (Clarence "Puddin" Smith) [NGE] (1928-1969)
Assassinated: June 12, 1969- in the elevator of M.L.K. Towers on 112 St. In East Harlem

Eugene Anderson [BPP] (? - 1969)
Assassinated: October, 1969 - In Baltimore.

Sterling Jones [BPP] (1952 - 1969)
Assassinated: December 25, 1969 - Shot in the face at point blank range by an unknown assailant in Chicago.

Ralph Featherstone [SNCC] (? - 1970)
Assassinated: March 9, 1970 by a car bomb in Maryland outside of the court house where H. Rap Brown was to stand trial.

Che Payne [SNCC] (? - 1970)
Assassinated: March 9, 1970 by a car bomb in Maryland outside of the court house where where H. Rap Brown was to stand trial.

Larry Ward [BPP] (? - 1970)
Assassinated: May 15, 1970 - In Seattle.

Babatunde X Omowale [BPP] (1944 - 1970)
Assassinated: By Chicago Police who mutilated his body beyond recognition by placing it across railroad tracks. Fragments of his remains were found July 27, 1970.

Carl Hampton [PP] (? - 1970)
Assassinated: July 28, 1970 by Houston Police.

Jonathan Jackson [BPP] (1953 - 1970)
Assassinated: August 7, 1970 by San Quentin Prison Guards as he led an attempted prison break at Marin County Courthouse. single-handed, with a satchel full of handguns, an assault rifle and a shotgun hidden under his raincoat. To reporters gathering quickly outside the
courthouse, Jonathan shouted, "You can take our pictures. We are the
revolutionaries!"


Fred Bennett [BPP, PA] (? - 1971)
Assassinated: Victim of fratricide orchestrated by COINTELPRO following the internal "split" of the Party. Fragments of what was reported to be his remains were found February, 1971.

Robert Webb [BPP] (1949 - 1971)
Assassinated: March 8, 1971 - Victim of FBI orchestrated fratricide following the internal "split" of the Party.

Samuel Napier [BPP] (? - 1971)
Assassinated: April 17, 1971 by unknown assailants in Queens.

George Jackson [BPP, PA] (1941 - 1971)
Assassinated: August 21, 1971 by San Quentin Prison Guards
after numerous failed attempts on his life, the State
finally succeeded in assassinating George Jackson, then Field Marshall of
the Black Panther Party, in what was described by prison officials as an
escape attempt in which Jackson allegedly smuggled a gun into San Quentin
in a wig. That feat was proven impossible, and evidence subsequently
suggested a setup designed by prison officials to eliminate Jackson once
and for all.


Sandra "Red" Pratt [BPP] (? - 1971)
Assassinated: November, 1971 in Los Angeles while visibly in her eighth month of pregnancy and stuffed in a garbage dumpster.

Kwame Nkrumah [CPP, AAPRP] (?-1972)
Assassinated: April 27, 1972 poisoned by the CIA

Jimmy Carr [BPP, PA] (? - 1972)
Assassinated: April 6, 1972 - In San Francisco.

Joseph "Joe-Dell" Waddell [BPP] (1951 - 1972)
Assassinated: June 13, 1972 by Central Prison Guards in Raleigh.

Cindy Smallwood [BPP] (1955 - 1973)
Died due to complications associated with car accident while conducting Party business in Oakland.

Zayd Malik Shakur [BPP, BLA] (? - 1973)
Assassinated: May 2, 1973 by New Jersey State Troopers on the New Jersey Turnpike.

Twymon Myers [BPP, BLA] (1952 -1973)
Assassinated: November, 1973 by agents of the FBI in Manhattan.

Rory Hithe [BPP, BLA] (? - 1973)
Assassinated: November 13, 1973 at a community meeting in San Francisco. His assailant was released only days following the assassination.

Amilcar Cabral [PAIGC] (? - 1973)
Assassinated: January, 1973 in Guinea by Portuguese agents.

Herbert Chitepo [ANC] (? - 1975)
Assassinated: March 17, 1975 in Zambia.

Steve Bantu Biko [BCM] (1946 - 1977)
Assassinated: September 12, 1977 while in custody of pro-aparthied South African Police.

Mangaliso Sobukwe [PAC] (1924 - 1977)
Died of cancer shortly after release from prison at Robben Island in pro-apartheid South Africa. Believed to be exposed to carcinogens while in prison.

Fred Ahmed Evans (1928 - 1978)
Died of cancer while imprisoned in the Ohio State Penitentiary. Believed to be exposed to carcinogens while in prison.

Agostinho Neto [President - Angola] (1922 - 1979)
Died September 10, 1979 while serving as Angola's first President. Believed to be poisoned by Portuguese agents.

Walter Rodney [WPA] (1942 - 1980)
Assassinated: June 13, 1980 by a car bomb planted by agents of the CIA backed Guyana government.

Robert Nesta Marley (1945-1981)
Died under mysterious circumstances in a Florida hospital.

Mtayari Shabaka Sundiata (? - 1981)
Killed on October 20, 1981 while attempting to expropriate funds from an armoured truck to finance underground Revolutionary activities.

Maurice Bishop [Prime Minister - Grenada] (1944 - 1983)
Executed: October 19, 1983 in a counter-revolutionary military coup led by forces loyal to Bernard Coard.

Jacqueline Creft [Member of Cabinet - Grenada] (1946 - 1983)
Executed: October 19, 1983 in a counter-revolutionary military coup led by forces loyal to Bernard Coard.

Fitzroy Bain [Member of Cabinet - Grenada] (1946 - 1983)
Executed: October 19, 1983 in a counter-revolutionary military coup led by forces loyal to Bernard Coard.

Norris Bain [Member of Cabinet - Grenada] (1946 - 1983)
Executed: October 19, 1983 in a counter-revolutionary military coup led by forces loyal to Bernard Coard.

Vincent Noel [Member of Cabinet - Grenada] (1946 - 1983)
Executed: October 19, 1983 in a counter-revolutionary military coup led by forces loyal to Bernard Coard.

Unison Whiteman [Member of Cabinet - Grenada] (1946 -1983)
Executed: October 19, 1983 in a counter-revolutionary military coup led by forces loyal to Bernard Coard.

Kuwasi Balagoon [BPP, BLA] (1946 - 1986)
Died while imprisoned due to complications associated with the AIDS virus. Believed to be exposed to the virus while serving prison term.

Samora Machel [President - Mozambique] (1933 - 1986)
Killed: October 19, 1986 in a mysterious plane crash over South Africa.

Peter Tosh fka (Winston H. McIntosh) [Pan-Africanist - Reggae Artist] (1944-1987)
Murdered: September 11, 1987 by Jamaican Government Agents.

Thomas Sankara [President - Burkino Faso] (1950 - 1987)
Assassinated: October 15, 1987 in a counter-revolutionary military coup led by troops loyal to Capt. Blaise Compaore.

Huey P. Newton [BPP] (1942 -1989)
Murdered: 1989 by a supposedly low level drug dealer.

Chris Hani [ANC, SACP] (? - 1993)
Assassinated: April 10, 1993 by pro-apartheid forces in South Africa.

Ken Saro Wiwa, John Kpuinen, Barinem Kiobel, Baribor Bera, Daniel Gbokoo, Felix Nuate, Saturday Dobee, Paul Levura and Nordu Eawo [Ogoni Patriot] Murdered: November 10, 1995, by the corrupt Nigerian Government working in the interests of multinational oil companies

Kwame Ture fka (Stokley Carmichael) [SNCC, BPP, AAPRP] (1941-1998)
Assassinated: November 15, 1998 by the united snakes of amerikkka, poisoned with a "fbi-cia induced cancer".

Dimitri Tsafendas died: October 1999 while in the pro-apartheid South African government's custody for the 1966 elimination of racist Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd

Rosie Douglas Prime Minister Of Dominica Assassinated October 2000 with poison from british agents

Khallid Abdul Muhammad [NBPP] February 2001 dies under mysterious circumstances in a North Georgia hospital

Note:
Marcus Garvey is one of two individuals included on this list whose life, as far as can be determined, did not end as a direct result of involvement in the liberation struggle, however, he is considered a martyr by this author because the impact he made internationally had the direct result of his imprisonment, deportation, and the inability to bring his movement to its logical conclusion due of his forced isolation which contributed greatly to his demise.

Elijah Muhammad- this Brother, more so than any others, instilled a sense of pride, dignity and respect among the lost and found Brothers and Sisters in amerikkka, and who society had totally given up on, what this master teacher taught was do for self, build your own and his program gave backbone to many Brothers and Sisters.


=====================================

Monday, February 18, 2008

McMaster University bans the phrase "Israeli Apartheid"--

If you don't loudly exercise your right to say "Israeli Apartheid"...

...watch your university simply forbid you from saying it.

Yes, the McMaster Student Union, and the McMaster administration, have banned the on-campus usage of the phrase "Israeli Apartheid":


____________________________________


UNITED FOR STUDENT RIGHTS (U4SR) PRESENTS

A Public Forum
"Rights & Responsibilities in Political Discussion on Campus:
"Who Speaks for McMaster?"
Thursday, February 28, 2008 at 12:00pm
Details to be determined
United for Student Rights (U4SR) is holding a Public Forum to discuss the recent shocking decision by McMaster Student Union (MSU) and administration to unequivocally ban on campus the usage of the phrase "Israeli Apartheid".

This decision was first passed by the McMaster Provost office, which is second in authority only to that of the President's office. It has been accepted by McMaster Human Rights & Equity Services (HRES) and, in turn, the MSU. This information was communicated to Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights (SPHR) and McMaster Muslims for Peace & Justice (MMPJ) early in February 2008 by the MSU and HRES.

Due to this decision, these MSU approved clubs have not been able to get approval for various initiatives related to Israeli Apartheid. It is the MSU that is directly enforcing this decision, as it is the only campus body with jurisdiction over student clubs. MSU President, Ryan Moran, explained that though the MSU is not bound by this decision, it has chosen to implement it none the less. U4SR is calling on the MSU to rescind this decision immediately as part of opening up the discussion for all to decide.


Statement of Human Rights & Equity Services:

"The university has taken the position that literature which refers to "Israeli apartheid" and activities promoted under the banner, "Israeli Apartheid Week" are unacceptable. The university takes the position that this phrase is in violation of the university's efforts to ensure that all people will be treated with dignity and tolerance."


According to the statement of HRES, banning Israeli Apartheid organizing is a matter of dignity and tolerance. In the view of those who use the term, opposing Israeli Apartheid is a matter of dignity and tolerance for the peoples of the Middle East and world over who are fighting for justice and for human rights. Clearly, there is a contradiction of a political nature between these two views.

U4SR considers this decision unacceptable especially given that the recent decision of the Provost is in keeping with consistent efforts by the McMaster administration, MSU and even Hamilton Police to repress Palestinian solidarity work over the last six years. At every point, Palestinian solidarity views have been presented as anti-Semitic and a matter of hate crimes.

The most recent decision by the Provost is a ramping up of longstanding attempts to criminalize the views of students who oppose Zionist violations of the human and national rights of Palestinians. Such efforts overlook the importance of political engagement and discussion on university campuses, while making political issues a matter of policy and decisions taken behind closed doors by various offices of the university. This history provides an important context for understanding that the banning of terms diverts from the violation of the political and human rights of students attempting to defend a just peace for Palestine.

These are not simple matters to be decided arbitrarily and in private. They are related to profound questions of rights and responsibilities on campus and in society at large. It is unjust to require that the students most affected should submit to this decision or simply engage in an unequal private dialogue with the administration.

A Matter for All to Decide

It is important to note that the administration has an obligation to society to respect the basic legal and moral rights of the university community. Despite all its efforts to claim that the university can act like a private corporation, McMaster is a public institution that plays a central role in the development of youth and intellectual thought. In turn, Human Rights & Equity Services is mandated to defend and elaborate issues of human rights on campus, and this function has ramifications for all of society. Similarly, the MSU plays an important role in supporting and intervening in society, as the organized front of students. In sum, the functioning of all these parts of the McMaster University and their recent decision are a matter that concerns all students, faculty, and the general Hamilton and Canadian society.

For this reason, U4SR is holding a public forum so that everyone's views can be heard. We are inviting the administration and MSU to be part of this discussion and no longer use their positions of power to impose their views on the conscience of students. We are also calling on all students, faculty, staff and members of the Hamilton community to join the discussion. Organisers will ensure that everyone's participation and comments are respected.

We, as Canadian students, are taking up our responsibility to society. We are working to end the marginalization of the McMaster community and Canadian polity at large from the decision-making processes that affect their lives and the political orientation of our society. This struggle at one university campus is a converging point for all those who believe that Canadian society should decide political matters in a public and transparent way. Join us!

United for Student Rights is an ad-hoc committee of McMaster University and Hamilton community members that was formed to facilitate public involvement in this issue. For information please contact: unitedforstudentrights@gmail.com
____________________________________

Rally Against Occupations of Iraq, Palestine, and Afghanistan

---University of Michigan, on the Diag

A spirited anti-war demonstration and march was held in the center of the University of Michigan campus on Friday, February 15, 2008.

The signs, speakers, and demonstrators loudly protested the occupation of Iraq, Palestine, and Afghanistan.

Then, they marched from the Diag through downtown Ann Arbor.

See the coverage from the "Michigan Daily" (Ann Arbor, Michigan)--



February 18, 2008


"PEACEFUL PROTEST"


Front page of the Michigan Daily, at:

http://www.michigandaily.com/media/paper851/documents/fulvaaak.pdf


CHANEL VON HABSBURG-LOTHRINGEN/Daily

"A few minutes after a rally against the war in Iraq concluded at the center of
campus Friday, a protester rests her sign on the bricks in the center of the Diag."


__________________________________


Sunday, February 17, 2008

Methodist church considering divestment from Apartheid Israel


"Methodists to Weigh Divestment as Tool to Shift Israel"
by Rachel Pomerance
Religion News Service
WASHINGTON POST

Saturday, February 16, 2008;
Page B08

On the Web at:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/15/AR2008021503272.html


The United Methodist Church is poised to become the next U.S. church to consider divestment from a company or companies operating in Israel, a strategy that has embroiled the Presbyterian Church (USA) and other denominations in controversy.


At the church's quadrennial General Conference in April in Fort Worth, the Methodists, with more than 8 million U.S. members, will debate whether to pull church holdings in Caterpillar, which provides the Israel Defense Forces with bulldozers.


The proposal from the Methodists' General Board of Church and Society comes as the church's women's division offers a 224-page study guide on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that Jewish groups have slammed as "inflammatory, inaccurate and polemical."


Citing references that compare Israelis to Nazis and characterizing the creation of Israel as "original sin," four U.S. Jewish women's groups told Methodist leaders the guide "would simply take anyone who turns to it . . . on the wrong path."


The guide is "anti-Israel and anti-Jewish from cover to cover," said Ethan Felson, assistant executive director for the Jewish Council for Public Affairs.


The author of the report, the Rev. Stephen Goldstein, who works for the church's General Board of Global Ministries, was unable to be reached for comment.


James Winkler, general secretary of the General Board of Church and Society, said he had just received the study report and had not read the "troubling quotes." However, he explained the rationale for divestment.


"The board felt that after 40 years of statements and resolutions from our denomination, as well as from many other churches and other organizations, urging Israel's withdrawal from occupied lands in the West Bank, that something more needed to be done," he said.


"The feeling was that economic pressure was needed." Winkler said.


Caterpillar was chosen because Israel uses its products to "destroy Palestinian homes, build bypass roads and build the wall of separation."


About $5 million of the United Methodist Church's $17 billion portfolio is invested in Caterpillar.


In a statement, Caterpillar said it complies with foreign and domestic laws, stating that "for the past four years, activists have wrongly included Caterpillar in a publicity campaign aimed at advancing their much larger political agenda" and that protests "neither change the facts nor our position."


Whether the Methodist church's divestment proposal will meet the same as counterparts in other churches remains to be seen.


In June 2006, the Presbyterians replaced a 2004 call for a "phased, selective divestment in multinational corporations operating in Israel" with a plan for more peace-oriented investment in the region. The United Church of Christ, Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and the Episcopal Church have all stymied or reversed course on attempts at divestment.


For its part, the United Methodist Church is not of one mind on divestment.


"It seems grossly unfair that the church exclusively target Israel for divestment," said Mark Tooley, director of the Methodist program at the Institute on Religion and Democracy, which takes an conservative approach to public policy.


The church's social policy arm "has always been very, very critical of Israel like other mainline Protestant agencies have been, and will fault Israel almost exclusively for the lack of peace," Tooley said.


The Rev. Timothy Bias, pastor of First United Methodist Church in Peoria, Ill., where Caterpillar chief executive James Owens is a member, said the divestment proposal helps "raise the consciousness of the conflict."


But he regrets that the church did not first broach the issue with Caterpillar. "If we're going to make resolutions, we need to have conversations with all parties involved," Bias said.


_________________________________________


Saturday, February 16, 2008

London School of Economics Students' Union:

Overwhelming vote to divest from Israeli occupation.


"LSE Union Demands Divestment from Israel"


James Caspell, Emiliano Huet-Vaughn and Sadia Kidwai | 15.02.2008 13:50 |

On the Web at:
http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2008/02/391427.html

The London School of Economics Students' Union (LSESU) yesterday voted overwhelmingly to call on its university and the National Union of Students (NUS) to divest from companies that provide military and commercial support for the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land, condemning the decades of human rights abuses and systematic oppression that has occurred as a result.



Photo: LSE Students' Union General Meeting

Click on photo to enlarge it.
_____________________________


A motion, brought to the weekly Union General Meeting of more than 400 LSE students by the LSESU Palestine Society, resolved to lobby the LSE and NUS to divest from companies that provide military support for the Israeli occupation, facilitate the maintenance of the illegal "annexation" wall or operate on illegally occupied land or within Jewish only settlements. With a six to one margin, the Union voted to support the aim of targeted divestment until companies cease such practices or until Israel ends its discriminatory oppression and colonisation of Palestinian communities.

The Union also resolved to affiliate to the international campaign to end the siege on Gaza and engage in education campaigns to publicise more widely the injustices of Israel's discriminatory polices. This includes working with Palestine solidarity organisations such as Jews for Justice for Palestinians, the British Committee for Universities in Palestine (BRICUP), the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, Zochrot and the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD), in a bid to end the legalised racial and religious discrimination in Israel.

This has been the result of much debate on LSE's campus over recent weeks, following an earlier motion which acknowledged growing public comparisons made between Apartheid South Africa and the legalised ethnic segregation that has been imposed for decades by the Israeli state. As such, the original proposed motion was amended to provide consensus across the Union in unequivocally condemning Israel's policy of ethnic segregation, with 339 students voting in favour of divestment compared to just 46 against.

Irene Calis of the LSESU Palestine Society stated: "This is an historic moment in the struggle for justice and peace for all citizens of the Middle-East. It is time for us to demand our universities divest and stop funding Palestinian oppression. By putting political and economic pressure on the Israeli state, the student movement can not only show continued solidarity with the Palestinian people, but also expedite the end of the Israeli occupation"

Emilano Huet-Vaughn, who spoke in favour of the motion added, "The resounding support for divestment after lengthy debate shows growing awareness of Israel's systematic discrimination against the Palestinian people and a disgust with the colonial settler regime in the West Bank, and the brutal siege of the Gaza Strip. As a result many LSE students of all backgrounds have voted to take a stand for justice, equality and human rights for all."

James Caspell, Emiliano Huet-Vaughn and Sadia Kidwai
- e-mail: su.soc.palestine@lse.ac.uk

_________________________________________

Thursday, February 14, 2008

Photos:
Why Israel is a genocidal state.


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Palestinian home, destroyed by Israeli military.
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Rachel Corrie, trying to oppose Israeli army bulldozing of another Palestinian home.
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Rachel Corrie's assassination by the Israeli army.
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Palestinian man, half-buried by the Israeli military, for humiliation and torture.
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Unarmed Palestinian man, assassinated by the Israeli military.
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______________________________

Community physician is fired for "human rights activities on behalf of the Palestinian people."

Packard Community Clinic
3174 Packard Road
Ann Arbor, MI 48108

Phone: 734.971.1073
________________




"Doctor claims her activism got her fired:

"Packard Community Clinic says Catherine Wilkerson refused to sign contract"


Thursday, February 14, 2008

BY JO COLLINS MATHIS

"The Ann Arbor News" (Ann Arbor, Michigan)

Full article is on the Web at:

http://www.mlive.com/news/annarbornews/index.ssf?/base/news-26/120300363145120.xml&coll=2


Ann Arbor physician Catherine Wilkerson says she's been fired from the Packard Community Clinic for her political activism.


Officials with the clinic insist that's not the case and say she was dismissed for refusing to sign an employee contract.


Wilkerson said she refused to sign the contract because it included a vague clause that violates her freedom of speech and is unlike anything she's seen in a contract in her 30 years in medicine.

"I think the clause was put in as a tool to force me out of the clinic,'' she said.


Jim Frenza, chairman of the clinic's board of trustees, said the contract is among the standard papers given to all clinic employees.


"Obviously, we're concerned because there are two stories out there,'' said Frenza. "One I think is factual, and the other is the story she's providing people.''


Frenza said several weeks ago Wilkerson was offered a contract identical to the one the clinic's other two physicians were given, and she failed to sign it within the required four weeks. She also refused to sign a letter of acceptance that went along with a new employee manual. Signing the letter is a condition of employment, he said, and others signed it.


"We obviously take a very, very strong exception to what she's saying on her Web site,'' he said, referring to http://www.defendwilkerson.org/ , which is organizing an online petition drive in support of Wilkerson.


Wilkerson, who has worked at the clinic for five years, is an outspoken critic of the local Jewish community's support for Israel.


Last December, she was found not guilty in a trial after she was charged with interfering with police and emergency responders during a disturbance at a guest lecturer's speech at the University of Michigan in November 2006.


Wilkerson claims that last October, before the trial, clinic medical director Ray Rion told her she was not a good fit for the clinic because of her political activities, citing the publicity surrounding the approaching criminal trial and her human rights activities on behalf of the Palestinian people.


Three weeks after a jury found her not guilty on Dec. 3, Wilkerson said Rion gave her a contract requiring her to refrain from conduct, both at work and outside of work, which reflects negatively on the reputation and public image of the clinic; which negatively affects the ability of the clinic to retain current patients, attract new patients or attract donations; or which may otherwise in Rion's judgment reflect poorly upon the public image of Wilkerson or the clinic.


Calls to Rion were referred to Frenza.


The clinic has offered Wilkerson a severance agreement and a letter of recommendation related to her clinical skills. Wilkerson said she wants a contract, not a severance agreement.


Wilkerson said she's exploring her options for the future, but is still willing to sit down and negotiate a fair contract with the clinic.


Frenza said two other employees have also resigned, including her nurse and a care provider who worked one day a week. He said he's concerned about the clinic's reputation because of the controversy surrounding Wilkerson, but noted that the clinic has a 35-year history in the area with many loyal patients.


The clinic, at 3174 Packard Road, is a primary and mental health care practice that serves patients regardless of ability to pay. More than 50 percent of patients are uninsured.


Jo Mathis can be reached at jmathis@annarbornews.com or 734-994-6849.


___________________________________________

Wednesday, February 13, 2008

Zionists & Apartheid South Africa: Vampires in the Congo--



Brief excerpt from the "Dissident Voice" article below:

"Dan Gertler’s grandfather, Moshe Schnitzer (d. November 2007), was known in Israel as “Mr. Diamond;” in youth he joined the pre-state underground organization Etzel (Irgoun), an Israeli military cell self-defined as an “untra-nationationalist Jewish militia,” but one that committed acts of terrorism in service to the Israeli cause.8

"Moshe Schnitzer assumed a major role in the Africa-Israeli diamond trade in the 1950’s in a partnership business called Schnitzer-Greenstein. Schnitzer later founded the Israel Diamond Exchange in Tel Aviv in 1960, which today brings Israel $14 billion annually in blood business, and is the country’s second-largest industry, but Israel’s top export. King Leopold III of Belgium decorated Schnitzer in recognition of his activities favoring the close relationship of Belgium, Israel and the DeBeers diamond cartels, and Schnitzer was also President of the Harry Oppenheimer Diamond Museum in Israel.80


===============================================


"Gertler’s Bling Bang Torah Gang:

"Israel and the Ongoing Holocaust in Congo (Part 1)"


Maurice Templesman is one of the top funders of Barrack Obama and Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party. Templesman was the unofficial ambassador to the Congo (Zaire) for years, but a new Israeli-American tycoon has replaced him. In the world of bling bling and bling bang, some things change, some stay the same. The CIA, the MOSSAD, the big mining companies, the offshore accounts and weapons deals—all hidden by the Western media. The holocaust in Central Africa has claimed some six to ten million people in Congo since 1996, with 1500 people dying daily.1 But while the Africans are the victims of perpetual Holocaust, the persecutors hide behind history, complaining that they are the persecuted, or pretending they are the saviors. Who is responsible?


For Israeli-American Dan Gertler, business in blood drenched Congo is not merely business, it is a quest for the Holy Grail. Young Dan Gertler goes nowhere—does nothing—without the spiritual guidance of Brooklyn-born Rabbi Chaim Yaakov Leibovitch, a personal friend of Condoleeza Rice.2 Gertler and Leibovitch are two of the principals behind a diamond mining company, Emaxon Finance Corporation, involved in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Gertler and gang won the majority rights to the diamonds from the state mining company, Société Minière de Bakwange, MIBA, found near the government-controlled town of Mbuji-Mayi, the rough diamond capital of the world.


Emaxon Finance Corp. has apparently out-maneuvered diamond competitors, especially the big rivals Energem and De Beers. Energem is one of the many shady mining companies connected to Anthony Teixeira, a Portuguese born businessman now residing in South Africa whose daughter married Congolese warlord Jean-Pierre Bemba. The warlord’s deadly battle in Congo in March 2007 was a bid between rival agents—Jean-Pierre Bemba and Joseph Kabila—to be the black gatekeeper for the mining cartels run by dynastic families like Templesman, Oppenheimer, Mendell, Forrest, Blattner, Hertzov, Gertler and Steinmetz, and for companies like NIKANOR, whose stock prices rose early in July 2006 in expectation of a July 30th “win” for Joseph Kabila.3 Africa Confidential called President Kabila’s 2003 visit to the Bush White House a “coup” for the Israeli diamond magnates Dan Gertler and Beny Steinmetz.


Canadian-based Energem, formerly DiamondWorks, is owned by British mercenary Tony Buckingham and its director/shareholders include Mario and Tony Teixeira, J.P. Morgan, and Gertler’s partner Israeli-American Beny Steinmetz (50%).4 Through subsidiary Branch Energy, the Energem-DiamondWorks gang has perpetuated war in 11 African countries.5 In December 2007, Energem re-launched itself on the London Stock Market with the newly laundered image of a renewable energy company. Regarding diamonds, it said only it “had decided to give up exploration rights in the Central African Republic.”6 The Energem spokesman explained that Tony Teixeira “had a clean bill of health” etc., etc. Of course, Energem “quit” the C.A.R. because Jean-Pierre Bemba marched his troops into C.A.R., where they raped and pillaged widely.7 Energem is still operating in Congo, but Dan Gertler is the new, unofficial ambassador to the Congo for the George W. Bush gang.


Gertler and partners like Beny and Danny Steinmetz, Nir Livnat, Chaim Leibovitz and Yaakov Neeman run a hornet’s nest of companies involved in African hotspots, including: Dan Gertler International (DGI), Steinmetz Global Resources, International Diamond Industries, NIKANOR and Global Enterprises Corporate.


“Dan Gertler is ‘the new kid on the block,’” writes Yossi Melman in Israel’s Haaretz news. “Bold, sophisticated, brutal, he is an adventurer with a short fuse.” Haaratz confirmed that Dan Gertler owns a complex network of interconnected companies, often registered in offshore tax havens and involved in India, Russia, Belgium and the United States, and that Dan Gertler is looking to God for guidance.8


THOU SHALT NOT STEAL


“In the diamond industry,” Melman wrote, “Gertler is considered something of an odd bird. He maintains few ties with the other merchants and is not very sociable… Alongside his business affairs, most of his energy is channeled into matters of faith. He is a donor to religious institutions and from time to time makes a pilgrimage to the rabbi he most admires, Rabbi David Abuhatzeira, from Nahariya, in order to consult with him and receive his blessing. Gertler is surrounded mostly by religious people and laces his speech liberally with praise to God.”8


In 2003, Condoleeza Rice, then Assistant to President Bush for National Security Affairs, introduced Dan Gertler and Chaim Leibovitch to U.S. official Jendayi Frazer, a Harvard Kennedy School affiliate and former National Security Council agent focused on Africa. On December 6, 2006, Frazer, then Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, was one of seven special Bush delegates sent to the inauguration of Congo’s newly installed President Joseph Kabila in Kinshasa.9


When Dan Gertler and Chaim Leibovitch and their friends visit the luxury Gertler villa in Lumumbashi, the capital of Katanga, Congo’s large southern province, their kosher meals arrive by private plane from Kinshasa. The special executive jet that flies their kosher meals a few hundred miles over the roadless Congo costs some $US 23,000 per trip.10


The average income for Congolese citizens each year—if they survive it—is about $95. Shootings at mining facilities and diamond mines are common, land is stolen from Congolese people, strikes are crushed by security forces that companies are partnered with, and black overseers of state terror routinely arrest and torture any vocal opposition—and sometimes disappear them—in support of white bosses. The Société Minière de Bakwange—MIBA— and the diamond fields of Mbuji-Mayi in Congo have a long history of bloodshed backed by Western powers, including Israel, from the beginning.11 Amnesty International points out that not a single state agent has ever been prosecuted for the extrajudicial executions of suspected “illegal” miners in Mbuji-Mayi.12


After a century of exploitation and slavery, we find MIBA consistently withholding payment of salaries to starving Congolese laborers and middle managers for months at a time. April and May 2007 saw strikes and protests leading to the Kabila government’s arbitrary arrest, detention and torture of trade union organizers like Leon Ngoy Bululu; police have also shot protestors.13 So-called ‘illegal’ diamond workers—disenfranchised local Congolese people forced into “criminal” activities to survive—were summarily executed on MIBA concessions in Mbuji-Mayi. MIBA security guards have also been sniping unemployed diamond miners.14


Meanwhile, Dan Gertler’s kosher meals depart Kinshasa, the capital of the big Congo, through the arrangements of Rabbi Chlomo Bentolila, high priest of the Chabad of Central Africa. Rabbi Chlomo Bentolila has been a Kinshasa Rabbi since 1991, and he was a spiritual force who survived the terrorism of the old dinosaur, Mobutu Sese Seko, the way most elites did: by working with him. Rabbi Bentolila is a member of the Chabad Lubavitch Global Emissary Network, headquartered in Brooklyn, New York, and his wife Miriam is the sister of Rabbi Mena’hem Hadad, a high priest in Brussels.15


“Kosher does not mean that a Rabbi blesses the food,” Rabbi Betolila corrected me, “but rather that the food was supervised by a Rabbinical Thora [sic] authority who sees that the ingredients were in accordance with the laws of Kashrut expressed in the Bible (Leviticus and Deuteronomy).”16


Dan Gertler often flies people into Congo, on his private jet, for sacred Jewish rituals. For the Bar Mitsvah of Rabbi Chlomo Bentolila’s son Binyamin Avrahim in June 2005, guests included eminent Rabbis, Hassidic singer Yoni Shlomo and special orchestra Yossef Brami, all arriving in “special flights” from Israel, New York and Brussels. The reception was held at the luxurious and exclusive Memling Hotel. Joseph Kabila sent a sizeable delegation but did not attend: his closest advisers provided a blessing on his behalf.17


The Gertler, Steinmetz and Templesman interests are advanced in part through the support of the Committee of the Jewish Community of Kinshasa—le Comité de la Communauté Israélite—that is tightly coordinated with the power structure in Kinshasa to exert influence and assure control of Israeli-Belgian-Anglo-American interests over the geopolitical arena.


From June 26-30, 2007, the Communaute Israelite de Kinshasa received a visit from the Israeli Ambassador Yaakov Revah, director of the Africa Department of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs; Revah also flew to Lumumbashi for meetings with Dan Gertler and his agents, including Moishe (Moses) Katumbi, the Governor of Katanga, and they most likely enjoyed a lovely, $23,000 kosher meal sent from the Chabad in Kinshasa.18 The Communaute Israelite de Kinshasa maintains very intimate political relations with President Joseph Kabila’s PPRD party, the People’s Party for Reconstruction and Democracy. On March 1, 2006, in a formal ceremony, the President of the Communaute Israelite de Kinshasa, Ashlan Piha, was awarded the Congo’s Medal of Civil Merit.


THOU SHALT NOT COVET


Before his assassination on January 16, 2001, Laurent Desire Kabila—the President of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)—made a deal with the Gertler gang that would play out in favor of the current President Joseph Kabila and, it seems, be a central factor in relation to both Congo’s ongoing war and the bloody warlord’s battle in Kinshasa in March 2007.19


Back in 2000, former Congolese president Laurent Kabila offered a monopoly on Congolese diamonds, and 88% of the proceeds, to Gertler’s International Diamond Industries (IDI) in exchange for Israeli military assistance to his new government.20 Top Congolese military officials apparently flew to Israel in 2000 to negotiate the deal. Gertler pledged military assistance to President Laurent Kabila through top Israeli officials.21


The original Gertler-Kabila deal fell through after Laurent Kabila was assassinated for not cooperating with the Great White Fathers of industry (January 2001), but Gertler and Leibovitch and their disciples formed another company, Dan Gertler International, and advanced their Congo plan.22 By 2002 Gertler’s company was the leading exporter of Congolese gems, controlling a diamond mining franchise worth about $US 1 billion annually.23


In 2003, the mighty Congolese diamond parastatal Societe Miniere De Bakwanga (MIBA)—which has been forever controlled by the Great White Fathers in Belgium, Israel and America—signed an exclusive contract with Gertler’s startup company, Emaxon Finance International. The deal involved Israeli’s Foreign Defense Assistance and Defense Export Organization (SIBAT), and high-level Israeli defense and intelligence officials. Gertler and his buddies reportedly bribed Congolese officials and Angolan generals who, on and off, have commanded Angolan Army troops protecting Kinshasa, Congo’s capital.21,24


Security for mining operations in Congo is provided by exclusive security companies like Overseas Security Services (OSS) one of the many DRC interests of Belgian billionaire tycoon Philippe de Moerloose. A member of the Kinshasa elite, de Moerloose supplies jets and other presidential toys to DRC President Kabila. In 2006, President Joseph Kabila’s campaign helicopter was at the centre of a legal battle involving Philippe de Moerloose.25 De Moerloose’s companies operated in Mobutu’s Zaire from at least 1991, backing state terrorism and Western corporate plunder that was rendered invisible by the Western media. De Moerloose is also an adviser to European Union (EU) Commissioner—and diamantaire—Louis Michel.


Dan Gertler and Philippe de Moerloose were, reportedly, the only two white men who attended the wedding of Joseph Kabila and the two clearly share interests in “security” provided by OSS at MIBA and elsewhere in Congo. The April 2003 secret agreement signed between the Gertler/Steinmetz company Emaxon Finance and the Kabila government involved MIBA and two de Moerloose companies, OSS-Congo and Demimpex, and other firms.


Overseas Security Services (OSS) operations are apparently grounded in the experience of top expatriate security operatives formerly involved with the biggest security firm in Mobutu’s Zaire.26 According to OSS public relations materials, “these persons have a not unimportant experience in the safety of this country.”26 Providing mine security, body-guard and protection services, OSS operates in Burundi, Ivory Coast, Rwanda, Dubai, South Africa, Republic of Congo (Brazzavile) and Belgium, placing them in cahoots with all sides warring and plundering eastern Congo today.27


Emaxon Finance International is a real gem, one of these octopuses of mining tangled up with interlocking companies and subsidiaries based in specious geographical offshore “tax havens” that work to shield from prosecution people who are responsible for money laundering, weapons and drugs operations, assassinations and other terrorism.


NIKANOR is registered as an Isle of Man (UK) company, an offshore tax haven that helps to conceal criminal activities and maximize profits. NIKANOR directors include Dan Kurtzer, former U.S. ambassador to Israel (2001-2005) and Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence and Research under Madeleine Albright. NIKANOR partners include Mende and Moshe Gertner [sic], Israeli property tycoons with vast holdings in London who control 22 percent of NIKANOR. Another partner is Israeli-born Nir Livnat, managing director of Johannesburg-based Ascot Diamonds, a member of the Steinmetz Group of Diamond Companies, and a principal involved in numerous U.S.-based businesses from Miami to New York.28


THOU SHALT NOT BEAR FALSE WITNESS


Back in 2001, when the Gertler enterprises surfaced in dirty diamond deals, public relations was handled by Lior Chorev, the “Special Strategic and Communications Consultant” to International Diamond Industries (IDI), and Chorev continued in this role to support Dan Gertler businesses.29 Today, Lior Chorev is partnered with the brothers Yuval and Eyal Arad as director-owners of the Israeli marketing and public relations firm, ARAD Communications.30


“We do work for Mr. Gertler on some of his business issues,” said Lior Chorev.31 ARAD’s many clients include Dan Gertler companies, Los Angeles-based Coral Diamonds and an Israeli aeronautics weaponry manufacturer producing Unmanned Aerospace Vehicles (UAVs)—robotic weapons and intelligence platforms like those being used against the people of Congo today.32 As a political strategist, Lior Chorev has worked for Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and current Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.33 He has also participated in Israel-NATO defense planning conferences.34


Dan Gertler is close to Israeli politicians, especially Avigdor Lieberman, head of the right-wing Yisrael Beiteinu party, and he is very close to diamantaire Beny Steinmetz, a good friend of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. Gertler’s inseperable friend, Chaim Leibovitz, is also very close to Lieberman, and was “a regular fixture” in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s offices.35


Beny Steinmetz is considered to be one of the richest billionaires in Israel. The Steinmetz Group, controlled with his brother Daniel, is one of the biggest clients of the de Beers diamond syndicate. Steinmetz is also involved in an Israeli real estate group that purchased the assets of the British Haslemere real estate company for $1.46 billion. Steinmetz’s real estate partners include the billionaire Israeli investors David and Simon Reuben, and the Saudi Arabian Olayan Group, an investment company that is deeply connected with Bechtel Corporation.36 The Steinmetz web site map of operations hides their involvement in war-torn Congo.37


Seems Dan Gertler’s land grabs and exclusion in Congo have a lot in common with the current crimes against humanity being committed by Israel through its illegal partition in the Middle East. On January 3, 2008, the Jerusalem Post reported that Lior Chorev was an integral part of past Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s advisers, and he was recently quoted to say that even though Sharon did not get to finalize Israel’s final borders (he suffered a debilitating stroke in 2006), the route of the security fence—which he decided—would ultimately serve as the basis for the border and as Sharon’s lasting legacy.38


“He felt he needed to set the border because he didn’t trust the younger generations,” Chorev was quoted to say. “He knew the fence route by heart and the reason for every stretch of land being on one side or the other.”38


In 2003, the U.N. Panel of Experts on war in Congo revealed that Emaxon Finance International is controlled by Israeli diamond traders Chaim Leibovitz and Dan Gertler.39 Emaxon lists as its address an office in Montreal, Canada, but Emaxon’s majority shareholder is listed as FTS Worldwide, a nebulous global corporation whose business address is that of a firm of lawyers, Mossack Fonseca & Company, in Panama City. FTS Worldwide is registered with the U.S. Securities Exchange Commission to lawyer Andre Zolty of Geneva Switzerland. A copy of the MIBA-Emaxon contract was signed on 13 April 2003 by Israeli-Americans Yaakov Neeman and Chaim Leibovitz.40


Yaakov Neeman is a founding partner of Herzog, Fox and Neeman, Tel Aviv, one of Israel’s top law firms, and he has held Israeli government cabinet and ministerial positions.41 Neeman is on the Advisory Board of Markstone Capital Group, a very influential group of investment bankers, with Eli Hurvitz. On the board of Israel’s Teva Pharmaceutical Industries with Eli Hurvitz is Northrup-Grumman director Philip Frost.42 Both Philip Frost and Maurice Templesman are top-level councilors for the American Stock Exchange. Eli Hurvitz sat on the International Advisory Counsel of Harvard University’s Belfer Center, 2002-2005, during the period when the Belfer Center and their intelligence operative Robert Rotberg formalized the “Kimberley Process” to officially whitewash blood diamonds.43 Yakov Neeman is also a governor of the World Zionist Organization and Jewish Agency for Israel.


One of the main objectives of the Kimberley Process, and the Harvard Belfer Center’s role, was to protect the South African Oppenheimer and De Beers diamond cartels and their leading buyers and agents like Maurice Templesman and Beny Steinmetz.44 Added to those diamond industry firms whitewashed by the Kimberley Process are all the Zionist diamond dealers and cartels that have risen like a phoenix out of the ashes of the Holocaust.


The Israeli-American enterprises of the Gertler/Steinmetz gang have proliferated and today are major shareholders or owners of diamond concessions in Congo’s Kasai province and copperbelt concessions in Katanga. The copperbelt is the big money in Congo. Copper prices recently hit an all time high due to monopoly control by corporations and new applications in transportation, aerospace and weaponry. Cobalt is used in dye and paint processes for manufacturing. More importantly, it is elemental to superalloys used for tank armor, spacecraft, turbines, ship hulls, ship hulls, blast furnaces, refineries, petroleum drilling rigs, nuclear reactors and nuclear weapons. Like coltan, or columbium-tantalite, cobalt is also used in cell phone batteries. The Katanga copperbelt is also rich in germanium, a rare metal used in optical fibers, infrared lenses and telecommunication satellites.45


The entire military-industrial-prisons complex revolves around minerals like cobalt, niobium and heterogenite (cobalt oxide), yet the truth about what happens to African people in lands taken over by these mining companies is hidden by the corporate media. More and more land is being stolen, more and more atrocities committed, with less and less transparency, and less and less accountability, and fewer and fewer voices for the voiceless. And, as usual, there are always a lot of empty promises.


THOUGH SHALT HAVE NO OTHER GODS


Over the past fifty years, elite Israeli nationals have perpetrated conflict and injustice in Africa, fueled by and for minerals. Operatives associated with the Israeli military or intelligence services—the Mossad—maintain strategic criminal syndicates in competition and in partnership with other syndicates involving men like Philippe De Moerloose, Louis Michel, Viscount Etienne Davignon, John Bredenkamp and Tony Buckingham.


Israeli trained shock troops became Mobutu’s bodyguards, with Mossad advisers. According to a report by the American Jewish Committee: after 1980 “Mossad agents, military emissaries, and a small group of private businessmen… replaced diplomats as Israel’s main interlocutors with African leaders and political (mainly opposition) groups.” The report cites rising involvement of private defense and security interests, especially in Angola, DRC and Central Africa Republic, since 1992.46


Israeli operatives and “businessmen” appear everywhere there is egregious suffering and dispossession. Dan Gertler’s forays into the bloody world of diamonds involve Israeli arms dealers Yair Klein, who is reportedly wanted by the U.S. for training Medellin drug-cartel militias in Colombia, and Dov Katz.47 Klein was convicted by Israel (1991) for his involvement with groups that targeted and assassinated Colombian politicians, journalists, and police. Jailed in Sierra Leone in 1999, Klein was a field representative for Gertler in war-torn Sierra Leone and Liberia. Gertler also mingles with the Russian Military Brotherhood, a group of “retired Russian generals whom Gertler describes as good friends.”48,49


Retired Israeli Defense Forces Colonel Yair Klein reportedly organized arms for diamonds networks in Sierra Leone and Liberia after President Charles Taylor was deposed. In 1999, Klein was arrested in Sierra Leone on charges of smuggling arms to the rebel Revolutionary United Front.50 The U.N. also documented collaborations between Sierra Leone’ rebels and Lazare Kaplan agent Damian Gagnon; Lazare Kaplan International is one of the organized crime syndicates of Jewish American Maurice Templesman.51


The Steinmetz Group of companies are also involved in the bloody diamond fields of Sierra Leone, along with Energem (formerly DiamondWorks), the company described above that is connected to the white mercenaries depicted in Hollywood’s Blood Diamond propaganda film.52 In December 2007, local people in Sierra Leone struggling to gain the smallest livelihood from their own resources were shot by police during peaceful protests against the Steinmetz-controlled Koidu Holdings site. It’s the same old local people’s story happening everywhere. These were people from communities driven off their own land by mining companies that promised the world, cajoled the trusting people, and gave nothing after. The Steinmetz gang called in the local paramilitary, a curfew was imposed and people were shot; the police, as usual, falsely claimed that protesters were armed.53


Like most mining mafias in Africa, the Israeli octopus—organized crime syndicates, offshore subsidiaries, interlocking directorships and affiliated mercenaries—has gripped the very heart of Congo like an octopus grips and stuns its prey. Mining regulates the pulse of Congo, and foreign mining companies with their black sell-out agents are sucking the blood out of the people and the wealth out of the land.


THOU SHALT NOT KILL


Beyond the intriguing Jewish rivalry for diamonds in the heart of darkness, this tale takes a chilling turn with the involvement of certain German firms and New York City lawyers. NIKANOR, another Gertler/Steinmetz company of dubious origins operating in DRC, has a subcontract with the notorious ThyssenKrupp conglomerate, a company comprised of two former Nazi weapons manufacturers linked to the New York law firm of Sullivan and Cromwell, to Brown Brothers Harriman & Co., Lehman Brothers, Chase Manhattan Bank, J.P. Morgan, DuPont and IBM, in the great Nazi-American money plot.54


These companies were all behind the Jewish Holocaust. The infamous German Krupp firm is the industrial corporation that collaborated with former CIA director Allen Dulles and former U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. Clients of the Dulles brothers’ law firm Sullivan and Cromwell included Adolph Hitler.54 Ted Terry, one of the senior counselors of the law firm Sullivan and Cromwell today, is also a director of a philanthropy called the Harold K. Hochschild (HKH) Foundation, named for the mining magnate behind AMAX, a company operating in the copperbelt in Zambia, but whose parent company, Phelps Dodge, operates in Katanga, Congo. Harold K. Hochschild was close to the CIA, and he appears to have backed the Katanga succession in the 1960’s just as Dan Gertler in recent years backed the reorganization of power in Congo by force. Sullivan and Cromwell was also the law firm for AMAX. 55,56


Brown Brothers Harriman & Company (BBH) was the primary Wall Street connection for German companies and the U.S. financial interests of Fritz Thyssen, an early financial backer of the Nazi party. BBH bought and shipped millions of dollars of gold, steel, fuel, coal, and U.S. treasury bonds to Germany. These were used to build Hitler’s war machine, and the ties proliferated even after the Nazi concentration camps began churning out skeletons. The horrors of the concentration camps at Auschwitz, Birkenau and Buckenwald became public knowledge long before they became public outrage. It is the same story for Congo.


A PRAYER FOR THE DEAD


There are no records or statistics of the numbers of people brutalized or killed in the diamond or cobalt mining areas, like Kolwezi, Mbuji Mayi, Tshikapa, Banalia, or Kananga in DRC, or Ndola in Zambia, and many of the victims of security abuses will never be known.


When Gertler and Steinmetz and their buddies came to Congo it was soon clear that they had to challenge Zimbabwean tycoons John Bredenkamp and Billy Rautenbach—two cronies of dictator Robert Mugabe involved in pillaging Congo and Zimbabwe for decades. The United Nations Panel of Experts on DRC named both men for plundering copper and cobalt from Katanga, and both deal globally in weapons. Bredenkamp is one of the fifty richest men in England and he reportedly owns a mansion several doors down from Margaret Thatcher’s residence in London.


On November 7, 2007 it was reported that Dan Gertler was instrumental in putting together a deal in which Katanga Mining Ltd. would buy rival NIKANOR for $2.1 billion and merge their adjacent mine projects in Congo to form the world’s largest cobalt company. Also announced was a joint venture between the Central African Mining & Exploration Company (CAMEC) and another Gertler-controlled firm called Prairie International Limited.


The CAMEC/Prairie joint venture will exploit DRC’s Luita copper processing facility, develop the Mukondo Mountain cobalt mine—called the world’s richest cobalt mine—and work on “other” exploration properties. Prairie is majority owned by the family of Dan Gertler. CAMEC is connected to Zimbabwean/South African/British tycoon Billy Rautenbach.57 The DRC government effectively banned controversial Zimbabwean businessman Billy Rautenbach from the country by declaring him persona non grata in July 2007, but this doesn’t seem to stop him from getting what he wants. Rautenbach is also wanted in South Africa on 300 charges of fraud, corruption and theft.


Rautenbach is a former motor car rally driver who controls a business empire in Southern and Central Africa through a British Virgin Islands company called Ridgepoint Overseas Development Limited. In 1998, the short-lived President of Congo, Laurent Kabila, named Rautenbach the managing director of La Générale des Carrières et des Mines (Gécamines), one of Africa’s biggest cobalt mines, the Katanga properties of the Union Miniere de Haut Katanga formerly developed by the Belgian colonial government. Rautenbach today is one of the Africa’s largest exporters of heterogenite (cobalt ore) from the DRC through his Congo Cobalt Company (CoCoCo), but he also has shares in two other lucrative DRC mining firms—Boss and Mukondo—which reportedly earn over US$100 million a month.58


While there has been a lot of Western media fanfare over the Kabila governments’ supposed “independent” review of mining contracts, little substantive change can be expected.59 Structural factors exploit the Congolese people and lands and benefit white businessmen, arms dealers, bankers, and their embraceable black agents. Big business benefits from perception management articles well-placed in media to give the impression that the international system is just, that there are watchdogs, checks and balances.


However, while the DRC and the World Bank present a propaganda front about their ostensible attention to mining reform and the new mining code, NIKANOR—Mining Journal reports—“is in the advantageous position of having entered into a post mining-code contract, ‘which makes us [NIKANOR] relatively comfortable’”60 In other words, the mining review is a sham, it may force some changes, but it will be cosmetic at best.


Dan Gertler and the Steinmetz Group’s partner Jewish-American Nir Livnat is also a director of Anglovaal Mining with Rick and Brian Menell and Basil Hersov of the South African Menell and Hersov dynasties.61 Hersov has been named as a beneficiary of fraud and racketeering involving British BAE Systems weapons deals with shady offshore companies.62


The octopus of South African connections is a story in itself, with links to top officials from Britain to Canada, like Canadian Senator J. Trevor Eyton, and offshore mining companies involved in all the big money (diamonds, gold, petroleum, cobalt) and big corporations with interlocking directorships: Coca Cola, Nestlé, General Motors, and the Bush-connected Barrick Gold Corporation. Barrick, of course, is partnered up with the Oppenheimer/De Beers firm Anglo-American Corporation at six sites in Africa, including Congo.


Rick Menell is a director of Bateman Engineering—owned by Benny Steinmetz—the junior partner of the NIKANOR projects in Katanga. Britain’s Earl of Balfour is a director of both Bateman and NIKANOR. Menell is also the director of Teal Exploration and Mining, whose directors include Joaquim Chissano, former President of Mozambique; Murray Hitzman, a Clinton administration official with the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (1994-1996); Hannes Meyer, who worked with Anglo-Gold Ashanti in Congo, 1999-2006, when militias in Ituri were funded to get the gold out. Teal Exploration also has ties to Anvil Mining and Anglo-American Corporation.63


Brian Menell, Nir Livnat’s associate on the board of Anglovaal, is on the board of Energem (formerly DiamondWorks) with Tony and Mario Teixeira. The Livnat connection ties Teixeira into networks that have supported both Joseph Kabila and Jean-Pierre Bemba in Congo’s bloody wars. Energem is also involved in the trans-Uganda-Kenya pipeline, along with Nexant, a subsidiary of the deep intelligence and defense insider Bechtel Corporation.64


Brian Menell is also on the board of First Africa Oil, which operates in seven African countries, and First Africa Oil director John Bentley is a director of Osprey Oil and Gas, whose directors include Carol Bell, a director of the Rockefeller’s Chase Manhattan Bank. Bentley is also on the board of Adastra Minerals—formerly America Mineral Fields (AMF, AMFI, AMX), a company based in 1995 in Hope, Arkansas—and set up by Robert Friedland and Max and Jean-Raymond Boulle, notable “friends of Bill” Clinton. Since 1995, American Mineral Fields has been involved in Brazil, Russia, Norway, Zambia, Angola and the DRC. A criminal backer of the war in DRC, Jean-Raymond Boulle, who holds 36.4 % of the company stock, was the former General Director of De Beers in Zaire, part of the Templesman alliance of terrorism under the Mobutu regime.65,66


The Gertler/Steinmetz interests apparently curry huge favors with Congo’s number two most powerful man, Augustine Katumba Mwanke, one of Joseph Kabila’s closest allies and financiers, former Governor of Katanga (1998-2001) and director of Australia’s Anvil Mining. The UN Panel of Experts (2002) cited Mwanke for illegal arms deals and plunder of Congo: Mwanke negotiated arms purchases through Belgian banks and the DRC mining company MIBA.67 Reportedly, Mwanke personally clears $US 1,000,000 a day through his interests in Katanga mining deals.68


Anvil Mining has been involved in massacres in DRC.69 Anvil directors include former U.S. Ambassador Kenneth L. Brown, who served at U.S. embassies in Brussels, Kinshasa, Congo-Brazzaville and South Africa. Brown was Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Africa (1987-1989) under George Schultz and George H.W. Bush and Director of Central African Affairs (1980-1981). The former top internal intelligence and security chief of the United Nations Observer’s Mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo (MONUC) has been worked for Anvil mining in Katanga since 2006.70


THOU SHALT NOT RAPE AND PLUNDER


Gertler/Steinmetz interests have also been jostling for copper and cobalt concessions with Kinross-Forrest Group. Gertler has bought up or invested heavily in companies just to close them down. George Forrest also made the UN hit list of Congo’s looters and Forrest and his three sons helped bankroll Joseph Kabila’s 2006 election “victory”.71 George Forrest’s daughter is reportedly married to the son of Louis Michel. Malta and George Forrest are controlling directors in Katanga Mining Limited.

Born as Entreprise Générale Malta Forrest, the Belgian Forrest interests have been pillars of exploitation in Congo since at least 1922, when they launched mining operations in Katanga. Forrest’s Katanga Mining directors include: three Canadians; Congo’s Jean-Claude Masangu Mulongo, a former Governor of DRC and high official at the IMF and World Bank; and the current Governor of the Central Bank of DRC. The Forrest dynasty has munitions factories in Belgium and Kenya, and has partnered with OM-Group, in Ohio [USA], dealing in Congo’s cobalt and coltan. Forrest International also operates in Europe, Burundi—involving him on both sides of Congo’s bloody war—and the Middle East.72 Forrest interests in DRC include aviation, foods, plantations, construction, logging, copper and cobalt mining. Forrest companies are enmeshed in the coltan plunder in eastern Congo.

Katanga is the world’s richest mining metropolis, part of the vast copper belt that stretches across northern Zambia and southern Congo—and the home to unprecedented human misery due to state orchestrated repression and communities overrun with toxic mining, tuberculosis, cancers, immune disorders, racial discrimination and slavery. The Zambian copperbelt concessions over the border involve many of the same companies and interests mentioned above, and others.73

Workers and communities in and around these mines suffer all the standard treatable maladies (typhoid, malaria, tetanus, polio, malnutrition) as well. However, such stories are off the agenda for the North American, European, Japanese, Australian and Israeli media corporations providing the mainstay of English language indoctrination meant to instill racial superiority and a vast ignorance and obliviousness that leaves westerns populations shaking their heads and wringing their hands and clicking their tongues, while all the while wondering “what is to be done?” It does not cross people’s minds that their own hands are dirty, that their own consciousness has been falsified, as all the raw materials from Congo enrich the lives of people in the United States, Canada, Europe and Israel.

The immediate capital investment required for just one Gertler project in Katanga—the Komoto Oliveira Virgule (KOV) project—is reportedly $US 1.8 billion dollars, income to kick start billions of dollars of unused equipment mothballed in the middle Mobutu era. There are rumors that Bechtel is involved, but the KOV project involves ThyssenKrupp AG as a minor player.74

The Krupp firm is one of several German firms involved in the plunder in eastern Congo, exploitation which involves the DeutscheGesellschaft für technische Zusammenarbeit—GTZ—a “German technological cooperation agency” whose Supervisory Board has representatives of four Federal [German] Ministries.75 Krupp industries use coltan and cobalt for superalloys.76 Dr.-Ing. Ekkehard D. Schultz, a ThyssenKrupp director, is also a director of Bayer AG, the Germany firm whose subsidiary H.C. Starck was named for its involvement in the ongoing illegal plunder of coltan and cassiterite (tin) in eastern Congo. NIKANOR director Jay Pomrenze is also a consultant for the Deutsche Bank.77 Certain German and U.S. firms benefit from the military occupation of Rwandan-backed warlord Laurent Nkunda in North Kivu, DRC, where Nkunda controls the Lueshe niobium mine “owned” by Gesellschaft fuer Elektrometallurgie GmbH, a subsidiary of New York-based Mettalurg Group.78,79


HONOR THY FATHER AND THY MOTHER


Dan Gertler’s grandfather, Moshe Schnitzer (d. November 2007), was known in Israel as “Mr. Diamond;” in youth he joined the pre-state underground organization Etzel (Irgoun), an Israeli military cell self-defined as an “untra-nationationalist Jewish militia,” but one that committed acts of terrorism in service to the Israeli cause.8


Moshe Schnitzer assumed a major role in the Africa-Israeli diamond trade in the 1950’s in a partnership business called Schnitzer-Greenstein. Schnitzer later founded the Israel Diamond Exchange in Tel Aviv in 1960, which today brings Israel $14 billion annually in blood business, and is the country’s second-largest industry, but Israel’s top export. King Leopold III of Belgium decorated Schnitzer in recognition of his activities favoring the close relationship of Belgium, Israel and the DeBeers diamond cartels, and Schnitzer was also President of the Harry Oppenheimer Diamond Museum in Israel.80


The diamond jewelry trade in the United States is more than $30 billion annually, and 99%—everything that is not synthetic or artificial diamonds—involves blood diamonds and the above organized crime syndicates. Israel buys more than 50% of the world’s rough diamonds, and the U.S. buys two-thirds of these. The diamond factories are located in Nethanya, Petach Tikvah, Tel Aviv, Ramat Gan, Jerusalem, and other cities around the country, but most of the offices were in Tel Aviv in the financial district on Ahad Ha’am Street.81 Dan Gertler’s father, Asher Gertler, and his uncle, Shmuel Schnitzer, manage the original family business, and Shmuel is Vice-Chairman of the Belgian-based World Diamond Council—the entity that spends more money promoting the false image of “conflict-free” diamonds than it does helping any of the people dispossessed or brutalized by the diamond industry.48


On August 16, 2007, Rabbi Bentolila in Kinshasa received a communication asking: “What does the Torah say about men exploiting other men for vast profits while other men are starving and dying all around them? Is there some hierarchy to the Torah that suggests, for example, that black people or Africans are lesser beings, and therefore not to be a concern where profound profits are being made?”


There was no reply from Rabbi Bentolila, he was apparently busy readying for another Bar Mitsvah in Belgium. Unfortunately for Dan Gertler and his spiritual advisers, the Torah says that a Jew can keep a slave, but a Jew kept as a slave must be redeemed, and that—an empty, foolish justification for exploiting innocent people—is how religion falsifies spirituality.


  1. In January 2008 the International Rescue Committee, who is also discussed in this article, released its second survey of mortality in the Democratic Republic of Congo, estimating that 5,400,000 people have died, or some 1500 people every day. Mortality in the Democratic Republic of Congo: an Ongoing Crisis, International Rescue Committee, January 2008. However, IRC statistics are highly biased and politicized. See: keith harmon snow, “Over Five Million Dead in Congo?Dissident Voice, February 4, 2008. #
  2. Personal interview, Democratic Republic of Congo, August 2006. #
  3. keith harmon snow, “Warlord’s Deadly Battle, Toward Freedom, 2007. #
  4. Officers: Antonio Teixeira, President & CEO; Robert G. Rainey, CFO; Brett Thompson, COO, Mining; Dimitri (Jimmy) Kanakakis, Vice President, Corporate & Legal Affairs; Bernard Poznanski, Corporate Secretary; Board Members: Brian Menell, Richard Dorfman, Bruce Holmes, Robert Rainey, Antonio Teixeira. #
  5. See: “Africa/Diamonds: Rough diamonds,” Africa Confidential, 5 March 2004, Vol. 45, No. 5; and “Equatorial Guinea: All Theft is Property,” Africa Confidential, 17 Nov. 2006, Vol. 47, No. 23: p. 12. #
  6. Tim Hoare, the head of the advisers that launched it, Canaccord Adams, sits alongside rock star and champion of Africa Bob Geldof on the board of the television-production company Ten Alps. See: Ben Laurance, “Energy firm link to blood diamonds,” The Sunday Times, December 30, 2007. #
  7. See: keith harmon snow, “A People’s History of Congo’s Jean-Pierre Bemba,” Toward Freedom, September 18, 2007. #
  8. Yossi Melman and Asaf Carmel, “Diamond in the rough,” Haaretz, March 24, 2005. # # #
  9. See: keith harmon snow, “Congo’s President Joseph Kabila: Dynasty or Travesty?Toward Freedom, November 13, 2007. #
  10. Private interview, Kinshasa, August 2006. #
  11. See: “Terror in the Diamond Fields: Excessive Force and Impunity in the DRC,” Amnesty International Canada; Democratic Republic of Congo: Government should investigate human rights violations in the Mbuji Mayi diamond fields, Amnesty International, October 22, 2002. #
  12. Making a Killing: The Diamond Trade in Government Controlled DRC, Amnesty International, 2002, AFR 62/017/2002 22/10/2002. #
  13. See: “ICEM protests Congo’s Transport, Diamond Injustices,” International Federation of Chemical, Energy, Mine and General Worker’s Union, May 7, 2007. #
  14. Diamond miners killed in DR Congo,” BBC News, 7 August 2006. #
  15. See: Jewish Africa and Chabad. #
  16. Private communication, Rabbi Chlomo Bentolila, August 16, 2007. #
  17. Lag Baomer in Kinshasa,” June 2005. #
  18. Visite de l’Ambassadeur Revah a’ Kinshasa,” Kadima 010, June-September 2007. #
  19. See: keith harmon snow, “Behind the Scenes: Warlord’s Deadly Battle in Congo,” Toward Freedom, August 9, 2007. #
  20. Nicole Gaouette, “Inside Israel’s diamond trade: a family affair,” Christian Science Monitor, 21 February 2002. #
  21. Yitzhak Danon, “Top Israelis accused of illegal diamond deals: Israel: Lawsuit claims corruption in Congo diamonds for arms deal,” Globes (Israel), 18 February 2004. See also: “Column One: What Lieberman Wants,” Jerusalem Post, October 20, 2006. # #
  22. Christian Dietrich, “Blood Diamonds: Effective African-Based Monopolies,” African Security Review, Vol. 10, No 3., 2001. #
  23. Yitzhak Danon, “Top Israelis accused of illegal diamond deals: Israel: Lawsuit claims corruption in Congo diamonds for arms deal,” Globes (Israel), 18 February 2004. #
  24. See: keith harmon snow, “Behind the Scenes: Warlord’s Deadly Battle in Congo,” Toward Freedom, August 9, 2007. The Angolan military protected Kinshasa during the so-called “rebellion” involving Rwanda and Uganda. The Angolans do not like the Rwandans or Ugandans due to their military and commercial relations with Angolan rebels, the União Nacionalpara a Independência Total de Angola (UNITA), and because Rwandan and Ugandan soldiers invaded Angola after their failed bid to control the Congo’s strategic Inga Dam power station and Matadi port between 1998 and 2001. Angola sent troops to Congo in July and August 2006, and there were black Angolan troops amongst the European Union mercenary forces—EUFOR—sent to quell any possible rebellions during the “historic national elections.” Angola also sent troops to Congo to back Kabila during the warlord’s deadly battle of March 2007. #
  25. “Presidential Chopper,” Africa Confidential, Vol. 47 Number 23, November 17, 2006. #
  26. See: Overseas Security Services Congo sprl web site. # #
  27. OSS-Congo owner Philippe de Moerloose communicated with this author after his name appeared in a prior story mentioning OSS-Congo and offered to meet in Europe and provide the author with the “correct” information about his companies operations in Congo. Repeated communications with De Moerloose seeking clarifications and information for this story were not answered. #
  28. See e.g., SEC info on Lenorth Holdings and SDG Marketing. #
  29. Lior Chorev, The First [DRC] Diamond Polishing Plant to Move into Full Production, Press Release, DGI Group of Companies, January 11, 2005. #
  30. ARAD Communications web site. #
  31. Private communication, Lior Chorev, January 19, 2008. #
  32. See: keith harmon snow, “Over Five Million Dead in Congo?Dissident Voice, February 4, 2008. #
  33. Private email communication, Lior Chorev, January 19, 2008. See also: Gil Hoffman, “Olmert, Netanyahu Rivalry Gets Personal,” Israel.jpost.com, March 26, 2006; “Sharon allies and foes joust over new party as March 28 elections are set,” Associated Press, November 22, 2005. #
  34. NATO Transformation, the Mediterranean Dialog, and NATO-Israel Relations, October 23, 2006. #
  35. Yossi Melman and Asaf Carmel, “Diamond in the Rough,” Haaretz, March 24, 2005. #
  36. The Olayan Group web site. #
  37. The Steinmetz Group. #
  38. Gil Hoffman, “Politics; Unconscious Legacy,” Jerusalem Post, features.jpost.com, January 3, 2008. # #
  39. United Nations Panel of Experts Confidential Report. #
  40. Under the contract Emaxon granted Miba loans totaling $5-million in 2003, and a further $10-million subsequently. In exchange, Emaxon gained rights to 88% of Miba’s production at a discount, formally, of 5%. #
  41. Herzog, Fox and Neeman web site. #
  42. Tevapharm. #
  43. See: keith harmon snow and Rick Hines, “Blood Diamond: Doublethink and Deception About those Worthless Little Rocks of Desire,” Z Magazine, June and July, 2007. #
  44. On Neeman and Hurvitz, see Markstone Capital Group; on Robert Rotberg, Maurice Templesman and the Harvard Belfer Center, see: keith harmon snow and Rick Hines, “Blood Diamond: Doublethink and Deception About those Worthless Little Rocks of Desire,” Z Magazine, June and July, 2007. #
  45. Criminal rackets known to the United Nations security were or some time illegally shipping uranium and cobalt out of Katanga by road to Zimbabwe and Tanzania (private interview, U.N. Official, 2006). #
  46. Israel and Africa: Assessing the Past, Envisioning the Future, The Africa Institute American Jewish Committee and The Harold Hartog School Tel Aviv University, May 2006. #
  47. Ron Ben-Yishai and Molly Camprier-Kritz, “The Murder Request Went to the Wrong Address,” Yediot Aharonot weekend supplement on 19 September 1999. #
  48. Nicole Gaouette, “Inside Israel’s diamond trade: a family affair,” Christian Science Monitor, 21 February 2002. # #
  49. For a discussion of the veracity of these facts and more on the “Russian Military Brotherhood” see: Central Africa Minerals and Arms Research Bulletin, Edition 2, International Peace Information Service, June 18, 2001. #
  50. Jimmy Johnson, “Israelis and Hezbollah Haven’t Always Been Enemies,” Appearing in Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions USA, 6 September 2006. #
  51. Report of the Panel of Experts Appointed Pursuant to UN Security Council Resolution 1306 (2000), Paragraph 19, in Relation to Sierra Leone, December 2000. #
  52. Energem web site; and also: keith harmon snow and Rick Hines, “Blood Diamond: Doublethink and Deception About those Worthless Little Rocks of Desire,” Z Magazine, June and July, 2007. #
  53. Mineweb. #
  54. Charles Higham, Trading With The Enemy: The Nazi-American Money Plot, 1933-1949, Delacorte Press, 1983. # #
  55. Susan Mazur, “Deeper Into the Dillon-Euphronios Nexus with David N. Gibbs,” SCOOP, April 26, 2006. #
  56. David Gibbs, The Political Economy of Third World Intervention: Mines, Money and U.S. Policy in the Congo Crises, University of Chicago Press, 1991. #
  57. Eric Onstad, “UPDATE 2-CAMEC shares soar after agrees Congo joint venture,” Reuters, Nov. 7, 2007. #
  58. Brenna Chigonga, “Zimbabwe: Meet Country’s Richest People,” The Herald, July 14, 2007. #
  59. See: Maurice Carney, “Congo’s Contract Review,” Pambazuka News, January 17, 2008. #
  60. Martin Creamer, “Funded NIKANOR presses on with $1,8bn copper mine, refinery,” Mining Weekly, September 21, 2007. #
  61. Julie Walker, “Hersovs and Menells are in no hurry to yield control of Anglovaal,” Sunday Times. #
  62. Evelyn Groenink, “Arms deal: Who got R1bn in pay-offs?Mail & Guardian, January 12, 2007. #
  63. Teal Exploration & Mining web site. #
  64. Press Release: Kenya-Uganda Oil Products Pipeline, Kenya-Uganda Joint Co-coordinating Commission for Extension of Oil Pipeline, August 17, 2005; see also: Energem web site. #
  65. François Misser and Olivier Vallée, “Des matières premières toujours convoitées. Les nouveaux acteurs du secteur minier Africain,” Le Monde Diplomatique, May 1998, p.24-25; also Wayne Madsen, Genocide and Covert Operations in Africa, 1993-1999, Mellon Press, 1999. #
  66. Diamond Fields International Management. #
  67. ‘Inculpations à la Belgolaise’, Le Libre Belgique, 4 June 2004. #
  68. Private interview, Kinshasa, DRC, April 2007. #
  69. Norm Dixon, “Congo Massacre: Australian mining company’s managers indicted,” Green Left Review, November 4, 2006. #
  70. His name is known, but he threatened to track down and break the author’s legs if he is revealed. #
  71. See: Barry Sergeant, “NIKANOR’s Quandry: Meet Dan the Man, King of the Congo,” MoneyWeb, 4 April 2007; “Congo Kinshasa: After the Election” Africa Confidential, Vol. 47, No. 23, 17 Nov. 2006; and United Nations Security Council Report to the Secretary General, S/2003/1027, 23 October 2003. #
  72. George Forrest International. #
  73. Personal investigation, Ndola, Zambia copperbelt mines, 2000. #
  74. Nikanor. #
  75. These are: the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ); Federal Foreign Office; Federal Ministry of Finance; and Federal Ministry of Economics and Labor. Since 1998 the Supervisory Board Chairman has been State Secretary Erich Stather from the BMZ. #
  76. Karen Hayes and Richard Burge, Coltan Mining in the Democratic Republic of Congo: How tantalum-using industries can commit to the reconstruction of the DRC, Fauna & Flora Int’l, 2003. #
  77. NIKANOR web site. #
  78. Metallurg Group. #
  79. See keith harmon snow, “Three Cheers for Eve Ensler? Propaganda, White Collar Crime, and Sexual Violence in Eastern Congo,” Z Magazine on-line (Z-Net), October 24, 2007. #
  80. Moshe Schnitzer: Un Legende s’en est Allee,” Kadima 010, June-September 2007. #
  81. The Israel Diamond Exchange — Kiryat Moshe Schnitzer”, Diamond Key, 2002. #


Keith Harmon Snow is an independent human rights investigator and war correspondent who worked with Survivors Rights International (2005-2006), Genocide Watch (2005-2006) and the United Nations (2006) to document and expose genocide and crimes against humanity in Sudan and Ethiopia. He has worked in 17 countries in Africa, and he recently worked in Afghanistan. Read other articles by Keith.

31 comments on this article so far ...

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  1. sk said on February 9th, 2008 at 6:55 am #

    Moving to another raped continent of the Global South, here’s some info on another staunch “supporter of Israel”–desribed by Elie Wiesel as a “a deeply, deeply religious man”–whose mining operations in La Oroya, Peru are having a negative effect on property values there (not to mention the humans, 97% of whose children are lead-poisoned):

    Ira Rennert, the New York billionaire who owns the Peruvian smelter, lives on 63 acres of pristine beachfront property in the Hamptons. Mr. Rennert’s mansion, Fair Field, is a 100,000-square foot compound with 29 bedrooms and 39 bathrooms, according to blueprints and reports filed with the Southampton Assessor’s office. In June, the assessor’s office, relying on construction costs provided by Mr. Rennert’s builder, appraised the home at $185 million.

    Mr. Rennert’s critics say he got rich at the expense of families living near his factories and the people who invested in them. Mr. Rennert, who owns nearly 100 percent of a private corporation called the Renco Group, has built a portfolio of companies with annual revenues exceeding $2 billion. Those businesses include the lead smelter near St. Louis, a magnesium plant in Utah and a steel mill in Ohio.

    Mr. Rennert and his companies face dozens of lawsuits, and federal prosecutors are determined to “pierce the corporate veil” and make the 71-year-old industrialist personally pay fines for the way his companies conduct business. In Utah alone, the Department of Justice is seeking fines that could reach hundreds of millions of dollars for alleged illegal handling and dumping of hazardous waste. Company officials deny breaking the law and are fighting the case.

    Mr. Rennert refused repeated attempts to respond directly for this story.

    Here’s a pic of Mr. Rennert’s beachront “home”, background of another in Jerusalem “that served as a secret headquarters of the Hagannah, Israel’s pre-state army” (aside: anyone knows of any other country that had a “pre-state army”?), and news of the recently acquired apartments for the girls.

    --Lloyd Rowsey
    said on February 9th, 2008 at 12:26 pm #

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