@dustcirclenews - 10 FREE DOCUMENTARIES: Food Speculator, Collective Evolution, Why Bob Dutko Fails, Terminal Democracy, Darfur Diaries, Greatest Truth Never Told, Bible's Giants, Death's Beliefs and Fears, Eye of the Illuminati, Saudi Style Justice.

 http://www.dustcircle.com

The Food Speculator
Assuming the role of a speculator, director Kees Brouwer tries to find out whether he is merely taking advantage of the opportunity offered to investors by the food scarcity, or that, through this abstract world of financial products, he is drastically interfering in poor people’s lives.


















The Collective Evolution
The documentary addresses this need for change through five individual yet interrelated structures society has come to rely upon – finance, education, religion, entertainment/media, and health/food.

Bob Dutko: Why He Fails
Christian radio talk-show host and apologist Bob Dutko took the time to reply to the first video of the 10-part series, Top Ten (Failed) Proofs for God’s Existence.


















Terminal Democracy
What if people were either so distracted or so disillusioned with the political process that they simply gave up on democracy?



















Darfur Diaries: Message from Home
This film seeks to provide space for the marginalized victims of atrocities to speak and to engage with the world. Amnesty International is using the film to educate its members and the public about the situation in Darfur.

The Greatest Truth Never Told

The paradigm which we operate under is mathematically going to end. The end of the world as we know it does not mean it is the end of the world. The way of life we are currently leading is pulling humanity down and should be shown the door. We cannot change the world to make our self happy or free.

Giants of the Bible

The Bible describes many individuals as giants, and it also mentions several giant people groups. Interpreters have speculated about the size of these people with guesses ranging anywhere from 6 feet to more than 30 feet in height. Also, a great deal of misinformation about biblical giants has been proliferated on the Internet along with some fake pictures of supposed giants. So did these giants really exist?

Belief and Fear of Death

So, who’s afraid of death? Some of us find the question itself to be distasteful. We don’t even want to think about it. To know would be depressing, and perhaps if it were to be sooner than later, well, that would put a damper on things.

Eye of the Illuminati

Eye of the Illuminati is an in depth look at the state of the world, and the agenda of secret societies and the ruling class of the developed one world government system.

Justice: Saudi Style

In Saudi kingdom death sentence is given to murderers, rapists, and drug traffickers. The execution is usually carried out through severing off the heads of the victim with a sword. Pretty gruesome stuff – as you can imagine. This is an acceptable standard in that country.

Israel, the 51st State?

AlterNet / By Alex Kane

 30 COMMENTS

How the GOP Is Courting West Bank Settlers to Vote for Mitt Romney

Republicans are using President Obama's policy toward Israel as a cudgel to score political points and woo Jewish voters and donors.

July 23, 2012  |  

 

Photo Credit: Shutterstock.com

 

 

LIKE THIS ARTICLE ?

Join our mailing list:

Sign up to stay up to date on the latest headlines via email.

 

 

 

 

 

Critics of the Israel lobby’s influence in US politics often say, tongue-in-cheek, that Israel should be named the 51st state. But this presidential election season, that sentiment comes close to the reality of how the Republican Party is treating the country. Israel, like the 50 states in the US, will be a source for votes and money and a backdrop for presidential campaigning.

The Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC) has partnered with an Israeli group to encourage Israelis who are American citizens--including West Bank settlers--to vote in the 2012 elections. The effort is also being promoted by a group called Republicans Abroad Israel. The partnership, and presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s plan to visit Israel in late July, makes clear that the Republicans will use President Barack Obama’s policy towards Israel as a cudgel to score political points and woo Jewish voters and donors -- though most American Jews vote Democratic. The politicking about how Obama is an “anti-Israel” president obscures the reality that Obama has not touched the sacrosanct US-Israeli alliance and has continued to lavish aid and diplomatic support to the Jewish state.

Approximately 250,000 American citizens live in Israel--and many of them lean right. According to the Los Angeles Times, 75 percent of Americans in Israel voted for John McCain in the 2008 election, essentially the same share of American Jews who voted for Obama overall.

RJC and a group called iVoteIsrael, whose mission is to encourage Americans who are also Israeli citizens to vote in US elections based on “who will support and stand by Israel,” held a number of events in Jerusalem in early July promoting their campaign. RJC executive director Matt Brooks and Ari Fleischer, an RJC board member and the former press secretary for George W. Bush, were the ringleaders of this effort, and they wasted no time criticizing Obama’s Israel policy.

“The choice is between pushing Israel around as President Obama has done, and Governor Romney, who will stand strong by Israel’s side,” Fleischer told an audience of Israeli-American voters. He also told them that “there is a possibility that a large number of absentee ballots coming into Florida, Pennsylvania and Ohio can make the difference.”

While RJC and Republicans Abroad Israel are clearly partisan, iVoteIsrael claims that its effort is nonpartisan. But the Times of Israel reported that “key staffers [of iVoteIsrael] have been closely affiliated with right-wing parties in Israel, the US and elsewhere.”

iVoteIsrael’s ideology is clearly right-leaning--you only have to look to where the organization’s “regional directors” and “drop boxes” for registration forms are located to find that out. A number of locations iVoteIsrael works from are in illegal Jewish-only settlements that are seen as violating Palestinian human rights and blocking a contiguous Palestinian state. iVoteIsrael locations include Ma'ale Adumim, a major Jewish settlement outside of Jerusalem, and Gush Etzion, another major settlement.

iVoteIsrael’s strategy, and its links to American settlers in Jerusalem and the West Bank, comes as no surprise to MJ Rosenberg, a former employee of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and a blogger who now criticizes the Israel lobby.

“They’re people living in places the US thinks are illegal,” said Rosenberg, referring to longstanding US policy that Israeli settlements are illegitimate. “Mitt Romney speaks to the settlers, and the Republican Party speaks to the settlers.”

Rosenberg has also criticized iVoteIsrael for what he called an “anti-Arab” videoproduced by the organization. In the video, the narrator warns that “an Arabic campaign poster rallied the Arab New Jersey community” in a close congressional race and defeated a “a defender of Israel.” Congress may not always be “reliably pro-Israel,” so “we Americans in Israel...[can’t] let them win.”

The RJC/iVoteIsrael effort is only the latest ploy to drum up support for Romney on the issue of Israel. Romney, who has boasted about his friendship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has repeatedly criticized Obama’s record on Israel. He famously said that Obama “threw Israel under the bus” for saying that the 1967 borders (with land swaps) should be a starting point for negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians, despite the fact that this is the international consensus and the position of the US since Lyndon Johnson's presidency. Funding Romney’s super-PAC with millions of dollars is Sheldon Adelson, a right-wing casino mogul with close ties to Netanyahu and an ardent opponent of a Palestinian state. Adelson also sits on the RJC board. And other Romney campaign fundraisers have formerly supported Obama but flipped to Romney over the issue of Israel.

The Romney campaign recently announced that its candidate would be traveling to Israel in late July. A $50,000 per plate fundraiser was scheduled in Jerusalem, but had to be rescheduled because the chosen date coincided with a Jewish day of mourning.

But Romney and the Republican Party’s rhetoric wholly distorts Obama’s record on Israel. While the Obama administration voiced criticism of Israeli settlements in the beginning of his term, that rhetoric has largely disappeared after pushback from the powerful Israel lobby. Ehud Barak, the Israeli defense minister, has said that “the Obama administration is backing the security of Israel...in a way that could hardly be compared to any previous administration.”

Regardless of the facts, the Romney campaign and RJC are trying to outflank Obama on the right on Israel. And they’re stooping so low as to court Americans who live in illegal settlements that stated US policy regards as an obstacle to peace.

Alex Kane is AlterNet's New York-based World editor, and a staff reporter forMondoweiss. Follow him on Twitter @alexbkane.

Millions of Evangelical Christians Want to Start WWIII to Speed the “Second Coming”

Neocons are Using Religion to Rile Them Up to Justify War Against Iran

By Washington's Blog
[REPRINT]

................. The Founding Fathers weren’t particularly anti-Islam.

But millions of Americans believe that Christ will not come again until Israel wipes out its competitors and there is widespread war in the Middle East. Some of these folks want to start a huge fire of war and death and destruction, so that Jesus comes quickly.

According to French President Chirac, Bush told him that the Iraq war was needed to bring on the apocalypse:

In Genesis and Ezekiel Gog and Magog are forces of the Apocalypse who are prophesied to come out of the north and destroy Israel unless stopped. The Book of Revelation took up the Old Testament prophesy:

“And when the thousand years are expired, Satan shall be loosed out of his prison, And shall go out to deceive the nations which are in the four quarters of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them together to battle and fire came down from God out of heaven, and devoured them.”

Bush believed the time had now come for that battle, telling Chirac:

“This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people’s enemies before a New Age begins”…

There can be little doubt now that President Bush’s reason for launching the war in Iraq was, for him, fundamentally religious. He was driven by his belief that the attack on Saddam’s Iraq was the fulfilment of a Biblical prophesy in which he had been chosen to serve as the instrument of the Lord.

And British Prime Minister Tony Blair long-time mentor, advisor and confidante said:

“Tony’s Christian faith is part of him, down to his cotton socks. He believed strongly at the time, that intervention in Kosovo, Sierra Leone – Iraq too – was all part of the Christian battle; good should triumph over evil, making lives better.”

Mr Burton, who was often described as Mr Blair’s mentor, says that his religion gave him a “total belief in what’s right and what’s wrong”, leading him to see the so-called War on Terror as “a moral cause”…

Anti-war campaigners criticised remarks Mr Blair made in 2006, suggesting that the decision to go to war in Iraq would ultimately be judged by God.

Bill Moyers reports that the organization Christians United for Israel – led by highly-influential Pastor John C. Hagee – is a universal call to all Christians to help factions in Israel fund the Jewish settlements, throw out all the Palestinians and lobby for a pre-emptive invasion of Iran. All to bring Russia into a war against us causing World War III followed by Armageddon, the Second Coming and The Rapture. See this and this.

This all revolves around what is called Dispensationalism. So popular is Dispensationalism that Tim LaHaye’s Left Behind series has sold 65 million copies.

Dispensationalists include the following mega-pastors and their churches:

• Jerry Falwell

• Pat Robertson

• Billy Graham

They are supported by politicians such as:

• Newt Gingrich

• Joseph Lieberman

• John McCain

• Texas Senator John Cronyn

• Former House Minority Whip Roy Blunt

• Former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay

• And others

Dr. Timothy Webber – an evangelical Christian who has served as a teacher of church history and the history of American religion at Denver Seminary and Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Vice-President at Northern Baptist Theological Seminary in Lombard, IL, and President of Memphis Theological Seminary in Tennessee – notes:

In a recent Time/CNN poll, more than one-third of Americans said that since the terrorist attacks of 9/11, they have been thinking more about how current events might be leading to the end of the world.

While only 36 percent of all Americans believe that the Bible is God’s Word and should be taken literally, 59 percent say they believe that events predicted in the Book of Revelation will come to pass. Almost one out of four Americans believes that 9/11 was predicted in the Bible, and nearly one in five believes that he or she will live long enough to see the end of the world. Even more significant for this study, over one-third of those Americans who support Israel report that they do so because they believe the Bible teaches that the Jews must possess their own country in the Holy Land before Jesus can return.

Millions of Americans believe that the Bible predicts the future and that we are living in the last days. Their beliefs are rooted in dispensationalism, a particular way of understanding the Bible’s prophetic passages, especially those in Daniel and Ezekiel in the Old Testament and the Book of Revelation in the New Testament. They make up about one-third of America’s 40 or 50 million evangelical Christians and believe that the nation of Israel will play a central role in the unfolding of end-times events. In the last part of the 20th century, dispensationalist evangelicals become Israel’s best friends-an alliance that has made a serious geopolitical difference.

***

Starting in the 1970s, dispensationalists broke into the popular culture with runaway best-sellers, and a well-networked political campaign to promote and protect the interests of Israel. Since the mid-1990s, tens of millions of people who have never seen a prophetic chart or listened to a sermon on the second coming have read one or more novels in the Left Behind series, which has become the most effective disseminator of dispensationalist ideas ever.

***

During the early 1980s the Israeli Ministry of Tourism recruited evangelical religious leaders for free “familiarization” tours. In time, hundreds of evangelical pastors got free trips to the Holy Land. The purpose of such promotional tours was to enable people of even limited influence to experience Israel for themselves and be shown how they might bring their own tour group to Israel. The Ministry of Tourism was interested in more than tourist dollars: here was a way of building a solid corps of non-Jewish supporters for Israel in the United States by bringing large numbers of evangelicals to hear and see Israel’s story for themselves. The strategy caught on.

***

Shortly after the Six-Day War, elements within the Israeli government saw the potential power of the evangelical subculture and began to mobilize it as a base of support that could influence American foreign policy. The Israeli government sent Yona Malachy of its Department of Religious Affairs to the United States to study American fundamentalism and its potential as an ally of Israel. Malachy was warmly received by fundamentalists and was able to influence some of them to issue strong pro-Israeli manifestos. By the mid-1980s, there was a discernible shift in the Israeli political strategy. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the Jewish state’s major lobbying group in Washington, D.C., started re-aligning itself with the American political right-wing, including Christian conservatives. Israel’s timing was perfect. It began working seriously with American dispensationalists at the precise moment that American fundamentalists and evangelicals were discovering their political voice.

**

Probably the largest pro-Israel organization of its kind is the National Unity Coalition for Israel, which was founded by a Jewish woman who learned how to get dispensationalist support. NUCI opposes “the establishment of a Palestinian state within the borders of Israel.”

***

In their commitment to keep Israel strong and moving in directions prophesied by the Bible, dispensationalists are supporting some of the most dangerous elements in Israeli society. They do so because such political and religious elements seem to conform to dispensationalist beliefs about what is coming next for Israel. By lending their support-both financial and spiritual-to such groups, dispensationalists are helping the

future they envision come to pass.

***

Dispensationalists believe that the Temple is coming too; and their convictions have led them to support the aims and actions of what most Israelis believe are the most dangerous right-wing elements in their society, people whose views make any compromise necessary for lasting peace impossible. Such sentiments do not matter to the believers in Bible prophecy, for whom the outcome of the quarrelsome issue of the Temple Mount has already been determined by God.

Since the end of the Six-Day War, then, dispensationalists have increasingly moved from observers to participant-observers. They have acted consistently with their convictions about the coming Last Days in ways that make their prophecies appear to be self-fulfilling.

***

As Paul Boyer has pointed out, dispensationalism has effectively conditioned millions of Americans to be somewhat passive about the future and provided them with lenses through which to understand world events. Thanks to the sometimes changing perspectives of their Bible teachers, dispensationalists are certain that trouble in the Middle East is inevitable, that nations will war against nations, and that the time is coming when millions of people will die as a result of nuclear war, the persecution of Antichrist, or as a result of divine judgment. Striving for peace in the Middle East is a hopeless pursuit with no chance of success.

***

For the dispensational community, the future is determined. The Bible’s prophecies are being fulfilled with amazing accuracy and rapidity. They do not believe that the Road Map will-or should-succeed. According to the prophetic texts, partitioning is not in Israel’s future, even if the creation of a Palestinian state is the best chance for peace in the region. Peace is nowhere prophesied for the Middle East, until Jesus comes and brings it himself. The worse thing that the United States, the European Union, Russia, and the United Nations can do is force Israel to give up land for a peace that will never materialize this side of the second coming. Anyone who pushes for peace in such a manner is ignoring or defying God’s plan for the end of the age.

***

It seems clear that dispensationalism is on a roll, that its followers feel they are riding the wave of history into the shore of God’s final plan. Why should they climb back into the stands when being on the field of play is so much more fun and apparently so beneficial to the game’s outcome? As [one dispensationalist group's] advertisement read, “Don’t just read about prophecy when you can be part of it.”

 

Not a Problem with Judaism … Or Christianity
 

Most Americans confuse Zionism and Judaism.
 
But many devout Jews are against Zionism, and Zionists can be Christian.
 
Those who say that criticizing Zionism is anti-semitic are misleading people for their own ulterior motives which have nothing to do with ensuring the safety of the Jewish people.
 
Israeli Zionists are no more true to the cultural heritage of the Jewish people than Christian Zionists are.
 

Atheist War Hawks Manipulate Believers to Beat the Drums of War
 

Leo Strauss is the father of the Neo-Conservative movement, including many leaders of the current administration.

Indeed, many of the main neocon players – including Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Stephen Cambone, Elliot Abrams, and Adam Shulsky – were students of Strauss at the University of Chicago, where he taught for many years.

The people pushing for war against Iran are the same neocons who pushed for war against Iraq. See this and this. (They planned both wars at least 20 years ago.) For example, Shulsky was the director of the Office of Special Plans – the Pentagon unit responsible for selling false intelligence regarding Iraq’s weapons of mass. He is now a member of the equivalent organization targeting Iran: the Iranian Directorate.

Strauss, born in Germany, was an admirer of Nazi philosophers and of Machiavelli. Strauss believed that a stable political order required an external threat and that if an external threat did not exist, one should be manufactured. Specifically, Strauss thought that: 

A political order can be stable only if it is united by an external threat . . . . Following Machiavelli, he maintained that if no external threat exists then one has to be manufactured

(the quote is by one of Strauss’ main biographers).

Indeed, Stauss used the analogy of Gulliver’s Travels to show what a Neocon-run society would look like:

“When Lilliput [the town] was on fire, Gulliver urinated over the city, including the palace. In so doing, he saved all of Lilliput from catastrophe, but the Lilliputians were outraged and appalled by such a show of disrespect.” (this quote also from the same biographer)

Moreover, Strauss said:
 

Only a great fool would call the new political science diabolic . . . Nevertheless one may say of it that it fiddles while Rome burns. It is excused by two facts: it does not know that it fiddles, and it does not know that Rome burns.

So Strauss seems to have advocated governments letting terrorizing catastrophes happen on one’s own soil to one’s own people — of “pissing” on one’s own people, to use his Gulliver’s travel analogy. And he advocates that government’s should pretend that they did not know about such acts of mayhem: to intentionally “not know” that Rome is burning. He advocates messing with one’s own people in order to save them from some “catastophe” (perhaps to justify military efforts to monopolize middle eastern oil to keep it away from our real threat — an increasingly-powerful China?).

What does this have to do with religion?

Strauss taught that religion should be used as a way to manipulate people to achieve the aims of the leaders. But that the leaders themselves need not believe in religion.

As Wikipedia notes:

In the late 1990s Irving Kristol and other writers in neoconservative magazines began touting anti-Darwinist views, in support of intelligent design. Since these neoconservatives were largely of secular backgrounds, a few commentators have speculated that this – along with support for religion generally – may have been a case of a “noble lie”, intended to protect public morality, or even tactical politics, to attract religious supporters.

So is it any surprise that the folks who planned war against Iraq and Iran at least 20 years ago are pushing religious disinformation to stir up the evangelical community?

I’ve recently seen a swarm of spam claiming that all Muslims are evil, that they want to take over the world and establish a Muslim caliphate, and that they want to nuke Iran. They misquote Muslims and use false statements to try to stir up religious hatred.

They are simply promoting the Straussian playbook: stir up religious sentiment – even if you are personally an atheist – to create and demonize an “enemy”, so as to promote war …

Postscript 1: While there are certainly some Arab terrorists, Islam cannot be blamed for their barbaric murderous actions, just as Christianity cannot be blamed for the Norwegian Christian terrorist – Anders Behring Breivik’s – actions.

University of Chicago professor Robert A. Pape – who specializes in international security affairs – points out:

Extensive research into the causes of suicide terrorism proves Islam isn’t to blame — the root of the problem is foreign military occupations.

And the 9/11 hijackers used cocaine and drank alcohol, slept with prostitutes and attended strip clubs … but they did not worship at any mosque. See this, this, this, this, this, this, this, and this.

Postscript 2: Neoliberals and Neoconservatives are very similar in many ways. And because Neocons are not conservative, nothing in this post is meant to criticize conservatism.

Postscript 3: Most evangelicals are not dispensionalists, and so do not want to bring on armageddon.

An Ex JW on Religion and Atheism

Why Religion Saddens Me

From: VanCoffeeChick | July 13, 2008

Excerpt:

I clearly remember my days as a bible-thumping Jehovah's Witness; looking forward to the End of the World with ill-concealed glee. Of course there was always underlying trepidation which came from hoping that I'd done enough to be found worthy of God's salvation. But in spite of that, the end of the world was something that was vividly imaginable. Illustrations in the Watchtower literature depicted violent scenes of God's wrath dealt upon on wicked mankind, usually with a small group of happy, smiling people (Jehovah's Witnesses) simply walking away from it all. As a young, impressionable woman I could picture myself as one of those people. Someone who had been delivered from all of the world's suffering and pain, and about to embark on a historic journey to a paradise earth, just like God originally intended..."