Showing posts with label Imperialism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Imperialism. Show all posts

Thursday 20 November 2014

Death Aid 30 - Do They Know it's Global White Imperialism..?



Of course they do. 

Well, tonight Thank God it's them instead of you...










Israel’s efforts to alleviate poverty and develop local economies in Africa is noble yet it needs to do more, Irish singer-activist Bob Geldof said at a conference on Israel and Africa held in Herzliya on Sunday.

The former Boomtown Rats front man, known for his role in fighting poverty in Africa, addressed hundreds of people at the event organized by the relief group IsraAid with the help of the Melbourne-based Pratt Foundation.

“There’s something noble about the fact that Israel, a country born in misery and suffering, aspires to assist Africa,” Geldof said. “The Israeli government needs to start spreading resources to support friends that would assist us down the road. Israel has agriculture, hi-tech and information that are needed in Africa now. They need Africa.”

Geldof said the unsolved conflicts between Israel and the Palestinians and other neighbors need not preclude the Jewish state from reaching out to the impoverished continent.

“I know we’re preoccupied with our problems in the region, but just because you’re stuck in the gutters doesn’t mean you can’t watch the stars,” he said.

Hundreds of people attended the conference, which examined the sometimes complicated ties between Israel and Africa. The participants included several prominent Israeli figures with connections to the continent.

“We had journalist Itai Engel and singer Idan Raichel, who spoke about their experiences in Africa, as well as people from [Israeli drip irrigation company] Netafim who spoke about the vast amount of cooperation and work in Western and Eastern Africa,” IsraAid head Shachar Zahavi said. “We brought our lawyer from Rwanda talking about partnership with the Hebrew University on human rights and refuge.”

Most attendees at the Daniel Hotel were too young to remember the golden age of Israel in Africa. Back in the 1950s and ’60s, the Jewish state was one of the biggest per capita providers in the world of aid to developing countries – at one point second only to France. An extensive network of Israeli technical advisers and agricultural experts fanned out across Africa, cultivating ties with new nations that, like Israel, had only just gained independence from colonial rule.

Yehuda Paz, chairman of the Negev Institute for Strategies of Peace and Development and one of the speakers at Sunday’s conference, was one of those Israeli advisers.

“Every aid project has a political element and a financial one,” the 80-year-old Brooklyn- born resident of Kibbutz Kissufim said. “These are worthy things, but that’s not why Israel got involved in Africa.

“First, it had to do with what Israel should be in the eyes of the world. It’s hard to understand today, but Prime Minister Ben-Gurion wanted to show the world we were founded on mutual aid and justice. We thought that after 2,000 years Israel will be based on values, not just interests,” Paz said.

“Second, Israel was seen as an example in the fields of agricultural and rural development.

Third, Israel was a leader in the cooperative movement with hundreds of thousands of members worldwide as well as in the labor union movement.”

In 1974, however, relations soured significantly. In the wake of the Yom Kippur War, the majority of sub-Saharan countries sided with the Arab states and severed ties with Israel. A feeling of betrayal has lingered and Israeli aid to Africa has never returned to its pre-war levels.

“It was terrible and was caused by two things,” Paz said. “First, the oil crisis; the Arabs used oil as a weapon and the prices skyrocketed to $20 [a barrel]. The Arabs promised aid to African countries, but they never fulfilled their promise. The second was the political power of the Non- Aligned countries.”

During those years, Israel also strengthened its ties with apartheid South Africa, partly as a reaction to its treatment by the rest of the continent, creating yet more tension with sub-Saharan states. Still, Israeli experts never entirely left the region.

“The now defunct Afro-Asian Institute I headed had ties with 50 countries including in Africa all that time,” Paz said. “In later years most African leaders admitted they had made a mistake cutting ties with Israel. I know several leaders of African states who not only personally expressed regret but some of them even expressed shame.”

Israel is now increasing its involvement in the continent through several projects, albeit not on the same scale as in the past.

“Africa as you know is undergoing a great boom, it is slowly accelerating its economic development although Israeli involvement there isn’t always beneficial – but that’s another issue,” Paz said. “One has to remember that less than 1 percent of Israel’s imports and less than 5% of its exports are with Africa.”

One factor motivating greater Israeli involvement in Africa is that the continent’s problems are now showing up on its own doorstep. In recent years a growing number of people from Sudan, Eritrea and other African countries have illegally entered Israel seeking work and refuge. But solving that problem might be beyond Israel’s capacity, Paz said.

“For Israel to stop migration it needs to be an impoverished nation,” he said. ”You have to understand there are a billion people in the world who live on less than a dollar a day. One person in eight is hungry. It’s not that they aren’t eating enough steak, they’re starving. They have no future, no hope for their children and they will do everything they can to give them hope.”




Bob Geldof has become the poster boy for the JNF (Jewish National Fund) by declaring that "The JNF Got it Over 100 years Ago" and that he "told everyone how the JNF & Israel understood the idea of sustainability & the importance of water - from the beginning". This is yet another strategy used by the JNF to cloak its crimes against the Palestinians. The Fund is a multi-national organisation with offices in about a dozen countries. It receives millions of dollars from donors around the world, most of which are tax-exempt.

The JNF has illegally expropriated most of the land belonging to the 372 Palestinian villages which had been ethnically cleansed by Zionist forces in 1948. The owners of this land and their descendants today constitute over half of the UN-registered Palestinian refugees. Today the JNF controls over 2,500 sq.km. of Palestinian land, which it leases to Jews only, as well as bulldozing more Palestinian villages. It also planted 100 parks on Palestinian land, especially to disguise destroyed Palestinian villages, such as the wood "God TV" planted on the village of El Araqib, which has been repeatedly destroyed in 2011-2012.

In addition, the JNF has a long record of discrimination against Palestinian citizens of Israel, as reported by the UN. The Fund has also extended its range by directly or by proxy operating in the occupied West Bank [including occupied East Jerusalem]. All this is in clear violation of International Law and particularly of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which forbids confiscation of property and the settling of the occupier's citizens on occupied land.

Ethnic cleansing, expropriation of property and destruction of houses are war crimes. Moreover, the use of tax-exempt donations to these ends violates the JNF is domiciled.

JNF greenwashing (by planting trees of on stolen land) must be condemned. The Fund's crimes do not deserve to be praised. This is our moral responsibility towards Palestinians who have been discriminated against and denied their basic human rights from the 1948 Al-Nakba (Catastrophe) until the present.



Tuesday 18 November 2014

Maurice Templesman


Good Morning -

This ain't Vietnam still

People lose hands, legs, arms for real

Little was known of Sierra Leone
And how it connect to the diamonds we own

When I speak of Diamonds in this song
I ain't talkin bout the ones that be glowin

I'm talkin bout Rocafella, my home, my chain

These ain't conflict diamonds, is they Jacob? don't lie to me mayne

See, a part of me sayin' keep shinin',
How? when I know of the blood diamonds

Though it's thousands of miles away
Sierra Leone connect to what we go through today

Over here, it's a drug trade, we die from drugs
Over there, they die from what we buy from drugs

The diamonds, the chains, the bracelets, the charmses

I thought my Jesus Piece was so harmless
'Til I seen a picture of a shorty armless...

- Jay-Z, Diamonds from Sierra Leone (Remix) 







"Belgian-born Maurice Tempelsman has a long and bloody history in Africa. When Congo’s first Premier, Patrice Lumumba, pledged to return diamond wealth back to the newly independent Congo in the early 60’s, Tempelsman, who began with De Beers in the 1950’s, helped engineer the coup d’etat that consolidated the dictatorship of 29 year-old Colonel Mobutu, and the coup against Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah; diamonds were at stake in each.

    “I believe this was the beginning of what we now know of as conflict diamonds in the Congo,” says blood diamond expert and investigative journalist Janine Roberts, author of the book Glitter and Greed: The Secret World of the Diamond Cartel. “From then on diamonds would be extensively used to discreetly fund wars, coups, repression and dictatorships, in Africa.”

    Maurice Tempelsman is Chairman of the American Jewish Congress, a Zionist pressure group that claims it works closely with the Israeli military. SEC filings show that LKI directors are high-rolling Zionist lawyers and investment bankers: one director belongs to the law firm that once represented President Kennedy—another Tempelsman friend. LKI is also connected to the euphemistically named United States Agency for International Development (USAID).

The Tempelsman empire remains rock solid behind Leon Tempelsman & Sons, De Beers, and Lazare Kaplan International—supplier of Tiffany’s and Cartier’s diamonds.

- [2007] Chloe's Blood Diamond 
by Keith Harmon Snow   



He had known her for more than 30 years and had been her constant companion for more than a decade, sharing everything: the daily victories, big and small, the adventures and frustrations of her complex life, and then her final months of suffering. He walked with her in the park in her last days, steadying the frail body with his hand, and he was at the bedside Thursday night when she died.
Maurice Tempelsman always seemed to be there for Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. To the general public, which had rarely seen them together and had not even known his name until recent days, his central role in yesterday's ceremonies may have seemed astonishing.
But to those who knew them, it seemed unremarkable, perhaps even quite fitting, when he stood with her children at the funeral in New York and at the graveside at Arlington National Cemetery yesterday and bade a loving, poetic farewell to the woman he had never married.
"And now the journey is over, too short, alas, too short," he said in a personal commentary after reading a favorite poem, "Ithaka" by C. P. Cavafy, at the service at St. Ignatius Loyola Roman Catholic Church. "It was filled with adventure and wisdom, laughter and love, gallantry and grace. So farewell, farewell." Third Man in Her Life
Mr. Tempelsman, a 64-year-old financier who amassed a fortune as a diamond dealer and industrialist, was the third man in her life, friends said, but he has never been divorced from his wife of 45 years, Lily, the mother of his three grown children.
Born in Belgium in 1929 to a Yiddish-speaking, Orthodox Jewish family that fled to the United States in 1940 as war spread across Europe, he went to work for his father, a diamond broker, when he was 16. Early in his career, he established a lasting connection with the DeBeers diamond empire in South Africa.
Mr. Tempelsman met Mrs. Kennedy in the 1950's, when he arranged a meeting for then-Senator John F. Kennedy with South African diamond interests. After she was widowed a second time with the death of Aristotle Onassis in 1975, Mr. Tempelsman became her financial adviser. He is reported to have quadrupled her $26 million inheritance.
Beginning in the early 1980's, Mr. Tempelsman and Mrs. Onassis were seen together with increasing frequency at private dinner parties, consular affairs and other discreet occasions. The relationship was kept low-key; he once sought -- and got -- a retraction from a gossip columnist who said they would marry. He told friends that he was not free to marry because his wife, as an Orthodox Jew, would never grant him a divorce.
It was about 1982, acquaintances said, that he moved into Mrs. Onassis' 15-room apartment on Fifth Avenue and began assuming the host's role. It seemed to some an unlikely pairing. Unlike the dashing President Kennedy, Mr. Tempelsman was short, portly, baldish, and he was not a billionaire like Onassis.
But Rose Schreiber, a cousin of Mr. Tempelsman, described him as a charming, worldly but gentle man with other qualities that appealed to Mrs. Onassis: a sharp wit, a sensitive and unassuming manner, and a respect for scholarship and learning.
They spent their summers together at her oceanfront estate on Martha's Vineyard, passed weekends at her horse farm in New Jersey and sailed aboard his 70-foot yacht, the Relemar. Last summer, they entertained President and Mrs. Clinton aboard the yacht off Martha's Vineyard.
At home in New York, they entertained friends at quiet dinner parties and occasionally went to small restaurants on the East Side. They often conversed in French, discussing her work as an editor with Doubleday or fighting to preserve a landmark. Friends said they had often strolled in Central Park, looking for all the world like any older, devoted couple.
Since last winter, when her lymphatic cancer was diagnosed, he had been with her almost constantly. He was at her side when she died Thursday night, and he was there to greet every guest at an informal wake for family and friends Sunday.
He chose to read "Ithaka" at the funeral. A translation by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard for "C. P. Cavafy/Collected Poems," (Princeton University Press, 1992), reads:
As you set out for Ithaka
hope the voyage is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
Laistrygonians and Cyclops,
angry Poseidon -- don't be afraid of them:
you'll never find things like that on your way
as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,
as long as a rare excitement
stirs your spirit and your body.
Laistrygonians and Cyclops,
wild Poseidon -- you won't encounter them
unless you bring them along inside your soul,
unless your soul sets them up in front of you.
Hope the voyage is a long one.
May there be many a summer morning when,
with what pleasure, what joy,
you come into harbors seen for the first time;
may you stop at Phoenician trading stations
to buy fine things,
mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
sensual perfume of every kind --
as many sensual perfumes as you can,
and may you visit many Egyptian cities
to gather stores of knowledge from their scholars.
Keep Ithakacq always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you are destined for.
But do not hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you are old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you have gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.
Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her, you would not have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.
And if you find her poor, Ithaka won't have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you will have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.



 “Tempelsman’s role in the confluence of public policy and private profit as a middleman for the De Beers diamond cartel may have shaped every major U.S. covert action in Africa since the early 1950s. Declassified memos and cables between former U.S. presidents and State Department officials over the last four decades directly linked Tempelsman to the destabilization of Zaire/Congo, Sierra Leone, Angola, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Rwanda and Ghana.”
 For over 35 years Maurice and son Leon Tempelsman worked the diamond connection behind the repression of Mobutu Sese Seko and his Israeli-trained shock troops. Now, 47 years later, the Tempelsman empire remains rock solid behind three companies: Leon Tempelsman & Sons, De Beers, and Lazare Kaplan International; LKI supplies Tiffany’s and Cartier’s. A client of Adelai Stevenson’s law firm during the first Congo crises (1960-1970), Tempelsman later hired Lawrence Devlin, a CIA station chief responsible for covert operations in Katanga, to maintain the Mobutu diamond/cobalt connections into the late 1980’s.
 Tempelsman’s capacity to sway governments and leverage markets is unrivaled. In 2002, Tempelsman offered Namibia’s President Sam Nujoma an $80 million interest free “loan” to bridge Namibia's budgetary shortfall against future sales of Namibia’s gemstones.
 Namibia is the leading producer of offshore deep sea diamonds, through DeBeers and Diamond Fields, and South Africa second. Offshore diamond mining has expanded to Papua New Guinea and New Zealand waters, and global mining investors call it the “new gold rush,” but scientists compare deep-sea dredging to destroying an eco-system as complex as a tropical rain forest. Specialized deep-sea crawler vessels like DeBeers “The Peace in Africa” reflect the expertise of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. Maurice Tempelsman is an honorary trustee and an honorary member of the corporation of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.
 Tempelsman is the deep pockets of the Democratic party, a regular supporter of the campaigns of John Kerry (D); Ed Royce (R); Tom Daschle (D); Barack Obama (D); Maxine Waters (D); John Rockefeller (D); Richard Gephardt (D); Howard Wolpe (D); Patrick (D) and Edward Kennedy (D); and the 1988 win of George H.W. Bush. Tempelsman also exploited ties with Anthony Lake, Clinton’s National Security adviser, who intervened at the U.S. Export-Import Bank on Tempelsman’s behalf.
 Tempelsman contributed some $500,000 to Clinton for president, and he is backing Hillary (D). He traveled at Clinton’s side on the 1998 Presidential Africa tour—along with National Security Council staffer John Prendergast, now an International Crises Group “expert” and leading “Save Darfur!” cheerleader. The Clinton’s Botswana visit was not about an Okavango Delta wildlife reserve safari. Botswana’s President Mogae attended the 1999 Attracting Capital to Africa Summit in Houston (TX), organized by the Corporate Council on Africa (CCA), the “who’s who” of multinational corporations. CCA chairman Maurice Tempelsman organized the summit, where 10 African heads of state met with half of Clinton's Cabinet and 200 corporate representatives. Tempelsman and the CCA organized the U.S.-Africa Business Summit in Africa in 2001, featuring DRC President Joseph Kabila, coordinated with an Africa Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) meeting involving President G. W. Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powel.
 Maurice Tempelsman was Jackie Onassis Kennedy’s lover and he reportedly courted Madeline Albright. Tempelsman is Chairman of the American Jewish Congress, a Zionist pressure group that claims it “works closely with the Israeli military.”  He sits on the boards of nationalist American think tanks that also seat Madeleine Albright. As Vice-Chairman of Lazare Kaplan International, Tempelsman’s annual base pay is $458,833, with a bonus of $80,000; as principal director/shareholder in Leon Tempelsman and Sons he gets a comparable amount again. SEC filings show that LKI directors are high-rolling Zionist lawyers and investment bankers: one director belongs to the law firm that represented President Kennedy—another Tempelsman friend. LKI is also connected to the euphemistically named United States Agency for International Development (USAID).Selling to the U.S. Diamond Stockpile and to his private profits, Tempelsman companies have plundered tens of billions of diamond dollars from Congo/Zaire—alone—in the past five decades.

- [2007] BLOOD DIAMOND DOUBLETHINK & DECEPTION OVER THOSE WORTHLESS LITTLE ROCKS OF DESIRE 
by Rick Hines & Keith Harmon Snow