Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org)
Home > On Holocaust Remembrance Day, Israel Army Deputy Chief Warns Israeli
Society Exhibiting Similarities to 1930s Germany
________________________________________
On Holocaust Remembrance Day, Israel Army Deputy Chief Warns Israeli Society
Exhibiting Similarities to 1930s Germany
By David Sheen [1] / AlterNet [2]
May 5, 2016
Across the world and especially in the West, it is widely considered to be
highly offensive to suggest that there are similarities between the State of
Israel and Nazi Germany, the racist regime responsible for the murder of
millions of Jews. But after seven years of a succession of arguably the most
right-wing governments in the country's history, Israelis themselves are
beginning to make the shocking comparison with ever-increasing frequency.
On Wednesday night, as Israelis marked Yom HaShoah - Holocaust Remembrance
Day - the country's second-highest-ranking military officer courted
controversy when he publicly compared contemporary Israeli racists with
anti-semitic attackers in Germany on the eve of the Holocaust.
According to the Israeli daily Ha'aretz, IDF Deputy Chief of Staff [3] Major
General Yair Golan said, "If there's something that frightens me about
Holocaust remembrance it's the recognition of the revolting processes that
occurred in Europe in general, and particularly in Germany, back then - 70,
80 and 90 years ago - and finding signs of them here among us today in
2016."
Golan's comments have surely disturbed officials in Jerusalem, but they are
also likely to irk Israel's supporters in the United Kingdom, who have in
recent days fiercely attacked the suggestion that Zionists could be capable
of collaborating with Nazis. In the past week, Labour party lawmakers have
slammed and suspended members from their own ranks for dredging up
decades-old embarrassing associations between certain Zionist leaders and
Nazi government officials.
Israeli officials have long asserted that harsh criticism of the country is
tantamount to inciting hatred of Jewish people. Israeli Justice Minister
Ayelet Shaked [4] made this very claim just yesterday in an interview with
the Washington Post, pointing her finger at the U.K.: "In the past, we saw
European leaders speaking against the Jews. Now, we see them speaking
against Israel. It is the same anti-Semitism of blood libels, spreading
lies, distorting reality and brainwashing people into hating Israel and the
Jews."
Shaked's efforts to cast criticism of the Israeli government as racist
against Jews were especially ironic, as they were published on the same day
as the sentencing of the murderer of Palestinian teen Mohammed Abu Khdeir
[5]. Two summers ago, Shaked uploaded a screed calling upon Israelis to
commit genocide against the Palestinian people [6]. Hours later, a group of
Israelis kidnapped Abu Khdeir, choosing him randomly because he was
Palestinian, and burned him to death from the inside out.
Just months after the incident, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who
himself had incited anti-Palestinian violence on the same day by calling for
"vengeance" [7], appointed Shaked to his cabinet. While former London mayor
Ken Livingstone is demoted for recalling the historical fact that some
Zionists shamefully worked with a genocidal regime, Israeli lawmaker Ayelet
Shaked is promoted to minister after actually calling to commit genocide and
inciting a brutal torture and racist lynching.
When Major General Golan spoke of "revolting processes" that he sees signs
of in Israel today, we can presume that he was not speaking about Israel's
military attacks on Palestinian people, since he is in part responsible for
them. Rather, we can presume that what he had in mind were the public
expressions of raw racism that have become increasingly common in Israel in
recent months and years.
A Pew poll [8] conducted in March found that four-fifths of Jewish citizens
of the state want to have more rights and privileges than their non-Jewish
counterparts, and that half of Jewish citizens want to strip non-Jews of
their citizenship altogether and expel them out of the country. As calls for
the ethnic cleansing of non-Jews become commonplace, so do the Nazi
comparisons, both at home and abroad.
In fact, the term 'Nazi' has long been used by Jewish Israelis [9] to
describe fellow Jewish Israelis who are their ideological opponents.
Israel's first Prime Minister David Ben Gurion used the term on multiple
occasions against his right-wing rival, Vladimir Jabotinsky. And the severe
invective goes both ways: just this week, the historical association
affiliated with Netanyahu's ruling Likud party - named for that same
Jabotinsky - published a political cartoon comparing Israeli socialists to
Nazis [10].
But in recent years, we are witness to an Israeli phenomenon even more
frightening: casting one's opponents as the Jews to be genocided, and
assuming the rhetorical role of the Nazi themselves. At stadium matches,
some Israeli football fans are not ashamed to hold up banners calling for a
"Holocaust" [11] to be carried out on the opposing team, even picking a
specifically Nazi methods of murder to be exacted on their enemies: Zyklon-B
gas chambers and crematoria.
In 2008, a year before Netanyahu returned to power as premier, Deputy
Defense Minister Matan Vilnai of Israel's Labor party threatened
Palestinians in Gaza with a Shoah [12], the Hebrew word for Holocaust: "The
more Qassam fire intensifies and the rockets reach a longer range, they will
bring upon themselves a bigger Shoah because we will use all our might to
defend ourselves," Vilnai forewarned, according to the Guardian.
During the summer of 2014, as the Israeli army again attacked Gaza, killing
over 500 children, a popular Israeli street gang took this absurdity one
step further, claiming to be both figurative Jews and metaphorical Nazis in
the same breath. Protesting the wedding of a Muslim and a Jew with chants of
"Death to the Arabs!", gangsters inspired by Israeli fascist party founder
Meir Kahane held signs proclaiming, "Intermarriage [sic] is a Holocaust for
the Jewish people". Yet at the same racist rally, the gang's spokesperson
told Israel's top-selling paper Yediot Ahronot, "Hitler was right, but about
the wrong nation; we are the chosen race [13]".
Decades ago, open calls to ethnically cleanse non-Jews were offensive even
to Israel's ruling right-wing Likud party. Back in 1985, a Likud lawmaker
compared Kahane's ideas to Nazism [14] from the floor of the Knesset, and
his party mates later voted to expel Kahane from the parliament altogether.
Thirty years later, now under Netanyahu's lead, Likud legislators invite
Kahane's protoges [15] into the Knesset to give expert testimony on race
relations. As for Netanyahu himself, his top political funder is also the
lead financier of supremacist groups [16] that are led by Kahane's acolytes.
While Netanyahu has done little to distance himself from these local
supremacist thugs - even posing for a selfie with the gang leader's adult
son [17] the day before last - he has no compunction over smearing his
non-Jewish geo-political rivals as new incarnations of the Nazis. In the
last year alone, he has compared both Palestinian [18] and Iranian [19]
leaders to Nazis. At the same time, he has fostered a law that would make it
illegal for any of his political opponents to hurl the slur back at him.
Two years ago, Netanyahu government lawmaker Shimon Ohayon proposed a bill
which would make it a crime to call anyone in Israel a Nazi [20]. According
to the bill's preamble, its aim was to protect Holocaust survivors'
feelings: "Unfortunately, the phenomenon of using Nazi symbols and
terminology has only become more prevalent in recent years. The unbearable
ease with which these things are used on a day-to-day basis as part of
public and political discourse represents grave disrespect for the feelings
of holocaust survivors and their descendants."
But Ohayon's political program - which includes deporting all non-Jewish
African refugees from the country - lends credence to the suspicion that it
may have been his own feelings he had hoped to protect. Just three days
after receiving ministerial approval for the bill, he led a rowdy rally in
Tel Aviv calling for the refugees to be kicked out of the country [21] and
decrying the fact that Israel contains too many non-Jews: "In every
direction, too many to count, all kinds of non-Jews residing here."
The bill was never voted into law, but if it had been, Israel's current
President Reuven Rivlin might well have faced criminal charges under one of
its clauses. In 2013, the Israeli government built desert detention centers
and began to round thousands of non-Jewish African refugees into them. But
back in 2010, when the Knesset first started discussing the issue, Rivlin
told Ha'aretz: "As a democrat and a Jew, I have a hard time with
concentration camps [22], where people are warehoused. [They are] not camps
in the sense of extermination. But every camp where people are warehoused is
difficult."
In the years that followed, it became evident that Rivlin did not have such
a hard time with the camps after all. In 2012 and 2013, he ended up voting
twice for the legislation that formally established the camps [23].
True, comparing someone to a Nazi has not yet been criminalized in Israel,
but it can still entail financial risks. Just this week, co-founder of a Tel
Aviv soup kitchen for African refugees and former candidate for Tel Aviv
City Council Orly Feldheim [24] was forced to pay a fine of 5700 shekels
($1500) for suggesting that Israeli officers who round up African refugees
off the streets of Tel Aviv and into desert detention centers are similar to
Nazis. Her offending Facebook post read: "The Nazis too were normal people
who just carried out orders".
Outside of Israel, comparing Israeli racists to Nazis and racist Israeli
policies to Nazism is likely to remain taboo, for fear of offending Jewish
Holocaust survivors and their descendants who take exception to the analogy.
But inside of Israel, where political dissidents bear witness to the
government's worst excesses and may live in fear of Jewish supremacist
street gangs, the social prohibition on using the term Nazi continues to
lose its sway.
Two years ago, Israel's most celebrated author and co-founder of the group
Peace Now, Amos Oz, called out these racist gangs that torch Palestinian
property with increasing regularity: "We also have Hebrew neo-Nazi groups
[25]," he said. "There is nothing the modern-day neo-Nazis in Europe do that
those groups don't do here." Sadly, Oz's warning went unheeded: within
weeks, those groups moved from burning Palestinian property to burning
Palestinian people. Whatever we choose to call this dangerous progression,
it seems to show no signs of slowing down.
David Sheen is an independent journalist and filmmaker. His website is
www.davidsheen.com [26] and he tweets from @davidsheen [27].
Share on Facebook Share
Share on Twitter Tweet
Report typos and corrections to 'corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx'. [28]
[29]
________________________________________
Source URL:
http://www.alternet.org/grayzone-project/holocaust-remembrance-day-israel-ar
my-deputy-chief-warns-israeli-society-exhibiting
Links:
[1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/david-sheen
[2] http://alternet.org
[3] http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-1.717948
[4]
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/05/04/israeli-ministe
r-criticizing-israel-is-the-new-anti-semitism/
[5]
https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/charlotte-silver/killer-palestinian-tee
n-gets-life-parents-fear-hell-go-free
[6]
https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/israeli-lawmakers-call-gen
ocide-palestinians-gets-thousands-facebook-likes
[7] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7MFAkZeWRVk
[8] http://www.pewforum.org/2016/03/08/israels-religiously-divided-society/
[9] http://www.haaretz.com/blogs/the-axis/.premium-1.569420
[10]
https://www.facebook.com/135115243187010/photos/a.146932282005306.21580.1351
15243187010/1155184264513431/?type=3&theater
[11] https://forum.12p.co.il/index.php?showtopic=145762
[12] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/feb/29/israelandthepalestinians1
[13] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obyMraYBg6M
[14] http://www.o139.org/2012/02/blog-post_11.html
[15] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qkZPyW9StY
[16] http://uriblau.com/fa/
[17] https://twitter.com/kahane_zadak/status/727485175320424448
[18] http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/1.681525
[19]
http://www.timesofisrael.com/speaking-to-wwii-veterans-netanyahu-compares-ir
an-to-nazis
[20] http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-1.568161
[21] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1FvafQ_0cc
[22]
http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/features/knesset-speaker-racist-rabbi-s
-letter-shames-the-jewish-people-1.329625
[23] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URroQn9Bwnk
[24]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kmrb_drqma8&list=PLu0pG8zxXK_kbLyS1Vtrr7
l_TQBZ_YkGb
[25] http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/1.589849
[26] http://www.davidsheen.com/
[27] http://www.twitter.com/davidsheen
[28] mailto:corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx?Subject=Typo on On Holocaust
Remembrance Day, Israel Army Deputy Chief Warns Israeli Society Exhibiting
Similarities to 1930s Germany
[29] http://www.alternet.org/
[30] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org)
Home > On Holocaust Remembrance Day, Israel Army Deputy Chief Warns Israeli
Society Exhibiting Similarities to 1930s Germany
On Holocaust Remembrance Day, Israel Army Deputy Chief Warns Israeli Society
Exhibiting Similarities to 1930s Germany
By David Sheen [1] / AlterNet [2]
May 5, 2016
Across the world and especially in the West, it is widely considered to be
highly offensive to suggest that there are similarities between the State of
Israel and Nazi Germany, the racist regime responsible for the murder of
millions of Jews. But after seven years of a succession of arguably the most
right-wing governments in the country's history, Israelis themselves are
beginning to make the shocking comparison with ever-increasing frequency.
On Wednesday night, as Israelis marked Yom HaShoah - Holocaust Remembrance
Day - the country's second-highest-ranking military officer courted
controversy when he publicly compared contemporary Israeli racists with
anti-semitic attackers in Germany on the eve of the Holocaust.
According to the Israeli daily Ha'aretz, IDF Deputy Chief of Staff [3] Major
General Yair Golan said, "If there's something that frightens me about
Holocaust remembrance it's the recognition of the revolting processes that
occurred in Europe in general, and particularly in Germany, back then - 70,
80 and 90 years ago - and finding signs of them here among us today in
2016."
Golan's comments have surely disturbed officials in Jerusalem, but they are
also likely to irk Israel's supporters in the United Kingdom, who have in
recent days fiercely attacked the suggestion that Zionists could be capable
of collaborating with Nazis. In the past week, Labour party lawmakers have
slammed and suspended members from their own ranks for dredging up
decades-old embarrassing associations between certain Zionist leaders and
Nazi government officials.
Israeli officials have long asserted that harsh criticism of the country is
tantamount to inciting hatred of Jewish people. Israeli Justice Minister
Ayelet Shaked [4] made this very claim just yesterday in an interview with
the Washington Post, pointing her finger at the U.K.: "In the past, we saw
European leaders speaking against the Jews. Now, we see them speaking
against Israel. It is the same anti-Semitism of blood libels, spreading
lies, distorting reality and brainwashing people into hating Israel and the
Jews."
Shaked's efforts to cast criticism of the Israeli government as racist
against Jews were especially ironic, as they were published on the same day
as the sentencing of the murderer of Palestinian teen Mohammed Abu Khdeir
[5]. Two summers ago, Shaked uploaded a screed calling upon Israelis to
commit genocide against the Palestinian people [6]. Hours later, a group of
Israelis kidnapped Abu Khdeir, choosing him randomly because he was
Palestinian, and burned him to death from the inside out.
Just months after the incident, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who
himself had incited anti-Palestinian violence on the same day by calling for
"vengeance" [7], appointed Shaked to his cabinet. While former London mayor
Ken Livingstone is demoted for recalling the historical fact that some
Zionists shamefully worked with a genocidal regime, Israeli lawmaker Ayelet
Shaked is promoted to minister after actually calling to commit genocide and
inciting a brutal torture and racist lynching.
When Major General Golan spoke of "revolting processes" that he sees signs
of in Israel today, we can presume that he was not speaking about Israel's
military attacks on Palestinian people, since he is in part responsible for
them. Rather, we can presume that what he had in mind were the public
expressions of raw racism that have become increasingly common in Israel in
recent months and years.
A Pew poll [8] conducted in March found that four-fifths of Jewish citizens
of the state want to have more rights and privileges than their non-Jewish
counterparts, and that half of Jewish citizens want to strip non-Jews of
their citizenship altogether and expel them out of the country. As calls for
the ethnic cleansing of non-Jews become commonplace, so do the Nazi
comparisons, both at home and abroad.
In fact, the term 'Nazi' has long been used by Jewish Israelis [9] to
describe fellow Jewish Israelis who are their ideological opponents.
Israel's first Prime Minister David Ben Gurion used the term on multiple
occasions against his right-wing rival, Vladimir Jabotinsky. And the severe
invective goes both ways: just this week, the historical association
affiliated with Netanyahu's ruling Likud party - named for that same
Jabotinsky - published a political cartoon comparing Israeli socialists to
Nazis [10].
But in recent years, we are witness to an Israeli phenomenon even more
frightening: casting one's opponents as the Jews to be genocided, and
assuming the rhetorical role of the Nazi themselves. At stadium matches,
some Israeli football fans are not ashamed to hold up banners calling for a
"Holocaust" [11] to be carried out on the opposing team, even picking a
specifically Nazi methods of murder to be exacted on their enemies: Zyklon-B
gas chambers and crematoria.
In 2008, a year before Netanyahu returned to power as premier, Deputy
Defense Minister Matan Vilnai of Israel's Labor party threatened
Palestinians in Gaza with a Shoah [12], the Hebrew word for Holocaust: "The
more Qassam fire intensifies and the rockets reach a longer range, they will
bring upon themselves a bigger Shoah because we will use all our might to
defend ourselves," Vilnai forewarned, according to the Guardian.
During the summer of 2014, as the Israeli army again attacked Gaza, killing
over 500 children, a popular Israeli street gang took this absurdity one
step further, claiming to be both figurative Jews and metaphorical Nazis in
the same breath. Protesting the wedding of a Muslim and a Jew with chants of
"Death to the Arabs!", gangsters inspired by Israeli fascist party founder
Meir Kahane held signs proclaiming, "Intermarriage [sic] is a Holocaust for
the Jewish people". Yet at the same racist rally, the gang's spokesperson
told Israel's top-selling paper Yediot Ahronot, "Hitler was right, but about
the wrong nation; we are the chosen race [13]".
Decades ago, open calls to ethnically cleanse non-Jews were offensive even
to Israel's ruling right-wing Likud party. Back in 1985, a Likud lawmaker
compared Kahane's ideas to Nazism [14] from the floor of the Knesset, and
his party mates later voted to expel Kahane from the parliament altogether.
Thirty years later, now under Netanyahu's lead, Likud legislators invite
Kahane's protoges [15] into the Knesset to give expert testimony on race
relations. As for Netanyahu himself, his top political funder is also the
lead financier of supremacist groups [16] that are led by Kahane's acolytes.
While Netanyahu has done little to distance himself from these local
supremacist thugs - even posing for a selfie with the gang leader's adult
son [17] the day before last - he has no compunction over smearing his
non-Jewish geo-political rivals as new incarnations of the Nazis. In the
last year alone, he has compared both Palestinian [18] and Iranian [19]
leaders to Nazis. At the same time, he has fostered a law that would make it
illegal for any of his political opponents to hurl the slur back at him.
Two years ago, Netanyahu government lawmaker Shimon Ohayon proposed a bill
which would make it a crime to call anyone in Israel a Nazi [20]. According
to the bill's preamble, its aim was to protect Holocaust survivors'
feelings: "Unfortunately, the phenomenon of using Nazi symbols and
terminology has only become more prevalent in recent years. The unbearable
ease with which these things are used on a day-to-day basis as part of
public and political discourse represents grave disrespect for the feelings
of holocaust survivors and their descendants."
But Ohayon's political program - which includes deporting all non-Jewish
African refugees from the country - lends credence to the suspicion that it
may have been his own feelings he had hoped to protect. Just three days
after receiving ministerial approval for the bill, he led a rowdy rally in
Tel Aviv calling for the refugees to be kicked out of the country [21] and
decrying the fact that Israel contains too many non-Jews: "In every
direction, too many to count, all kinds of non-Jews residing here."
The bill was never voted into law, but if it had been, Israel's current
President Reuven Rivlin might well have faced criminal charges under one of
its clauses. In 2013, the Israeli government built desert detention centers
and began to round thousands of non-Jewish African refugees into them. But
back in 2010, when the Knesset first started discussing the issue, Rivlin
told Ha'aretz: "As a democrat and a Jew, I have a hard time with
concentration camps [22], where people are warehoused. [They are] not camps
in the sense of extermination. But every camp where people are warehoused is
difficult."
In the years that followed, it became evident that Rivlin did not have such
a hard time with the camps after all. In 2012 and 2013, he ended up voting
twice for the legislation that formally established the camps [23].
True, comparing someone to a Nazi has not yet been criminalized in Israel,
but it can still entail financial risks. Just this week, co-founder of a Tel
Aviv soup kitchen for African refugees and former candidate for Tel Aviv
City Council Orly Feldheim [24] was forced to pay a fine of 5700 shekels
($1500) for suggesting that Israeli officers who round up African refugees
off the streets of Tel Aviv and into desert detention centers are similar to
Nazis. Her offending Facebook post read: "The Nazis too were normal people
who just carried out orders".
Outside of Israel, comparing Israeli racists to Nazis and racist Israeli
policies to Nazism is likely to remain taboo, for fear of offending Jewish
Holocaust survivors and their descendants who take exception to the analogy.
But inside of Israel, where political dissidents bear witness to the
government's worst excesses and may live in fear of Jewish supremacist
street gangs, the social prohibition on using the term Nazi continues to
lose its sway.
Two years ago, Israel's most celebrated author and co-founder of the group
Peace Now, Amos Oz, called out these racist gangs that torch Palestinian
property with increasing regularity: "We also have Hebrew neo-Nazi groups
[25]," he said. "There is nothing the modern-day neo-Nazis in Europe do that
those groups don't do here." Sadly, Oz's warning went unheeded: within
weeks, those groups moved from burning Palestinian property to burning
Palestinian people. Whatever we choose to call this dangerous progression,
it seems to show no signs of slowing down.
David Sheen is an independent journalist and filmmaker. His website is
www.davidsheen.com [26] and he tweets from @davidsheen [27].
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
Report typos and corrections to 'corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx'. [28]
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.[29]
Source URL:
http://www.alternet.org/grayzone-project/holocaust-remembrance-day-israel-ar
my-deputy-chief-warns-israeli-society-exhibiting
Links:
[1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/david-sheen
[2] http://alternet.org
[3] http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-1.717948
[4]
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/05/04/israeli-ministe
r-criticizing-israel-is-the-new-anti-semitism/
[5]
https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/charlotte-silver/killer-palestinian-tee
n-gets-life-parents-fear-hell-go-free
[6]
https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/israeli-lawmakers-call-gen
ocide-palestinians-gets-thousands-facebook-likes
[7] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7MFAkZeWRVk
[8] http://www.pewforum.org/2016/03/08/israels-religiously-divided-society/
[9] http://www.haaretz.com/blogs/the-axis/.premium-1.569420
[10]
https://www.facebook.com/135115243187010/photos/a.146932282005306.21580.1351
15243187010/1155184264513431/?type=3&theater
[11] https://forum.12p.co.il/index.php?showtopic=145762
[12] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/feb/29/israelandthepalestinians1
[13] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obyMraYBg6M
[14] http://www.o139.org/2012/02/blog-post_11.html
[15] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qkZPyW9StY
[16] http://uriblau.com/fa/
[17] https://twitter.com/kahane_zadak/status/727485175320424448
[18] http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/1.681525
[19]
http://www.timesofisrael.com/speaking-to-wwii-veterans-netanyahu-compares-ir
an-to-nazis
[20] http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-1.568161
[21] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1FvafQ_0cc
[22]
http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/features/knesset-speaker-racist-rabbi-s
-letter-shames-the-jewish-people-1.329625
[23] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URroQn9Bwnk
[24]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kmrb_drqma8&list=PLu0pG8zxXK_kbLyS1Vtrr7
l_TQBZ_YkGb
[25] http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/1.589849
[26] http://www.davidsheen.com/
[27] http://www.twitter.com/davidsheen
[28] mailto:corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx?Subject=Typo on On Holocaust
Remembrance Day, Israel Army Deputy Chief Warns Israeli Society Exhibiting
Similarities to 1930s Germany
[29] http://www.alternet.org/
[30] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
