Three surprising things I just learnt

"Today the Palestinians are the Jews of the Israelis." Primo Levi, author of "If This is a Man" an account of his time in Auschwitz, in 1982 during a June 1982 interview with Filippo Gentiloni for the leftist Italian newspaper Il Manifesto. He was talking after the Sabra and Shatila massacres, where Israeli-allied Christian Phalangist militias killed thousands of Palestinian refugees while Israeli forces surrounded the camps.

“For years the Dalai Lama was on the payroll of the CIA, an agency that has perpetrated killings against rebellious workers, peasants, students, and others in countries around the world. His eldest brother played an active role in a CIA-front group. Another brother established an intelligence operation with the CIA, which included a CIA-trained guerrilla unit whose recruits parachuted back into Tibet to foment insurgency. The Dalai Lama was no pacifist. He supported the U.S./NATO military intervention into Afghanistan, also the 78 days' bombing of Yugoslavia and the destruction of that country.” -Michael Parenti, The Nobel Peace Prize for War (2012)


"It was Yugoslavia's resistance to the broader trends of political and economic reform, not the plight of Kosovar Albanians, that best explains NATO's war.”  John Norris, who served as the communications director for Strobe Talbott the U.S. Deputy Secretary of State during the 1999 NATO attack on Serbia in Collision Course: NATO, Russia, and Kosovo (2005). Strobe Talbot wrote the introduction. Odd that a retired senior State Department diplomat I know says even now that NATO is a purely defensive organisation.