Thursday, June 24, 2010

Moral Debts and Ethical Deficits

Our heads are filled with stories about the danger of trillions of dollars in debt and deficits , with little if any mention of the real problem they represent. It is not the debt but what we are indebted for that threatens the future of our nation . If we owed hundreds of trillions of dollars - which may soon be the case - and every American was employed, housed, educated, cared for without question in time of ill health or economic need and safe from warfare and violence from inside the nation or out , such debt would not be any problem at all.

Borrowing today and paying back tomorrow shouldn't mean we lavishly spend most of the borrowed money on weapons , waste, cosmetics and pets , causing us to scrimp on health, education and social life while complaining that we have too much debt. We need to control our spending on things only a minority of us actually need or really want, and begin changing priorities to satisfy the shared needs and wants of the great majority. This can’t happen under the domain of forces that mislead us into social divisions by exaggerating differences and minimizing similarities to protect a commodity culture and a perverse political order that defines minority rule as democracy.

The present renewal of the drive to dismantle Social Security and turn it over to private profiteers is one among many of the lies and distortions offered as suggested solutions for our problems which will only make them much worse. Increasing budgets for war and decreasing budgets for social service only make sense to anti-social forces which profit from divide and conquer policies that reduce Americans, especially the working majority, to special interest and identity groups whose common cause is sacrificed to competition while ruling minorities practice a lucrative socialism at their expense.

Our common condition has been ignorance for much too long and it needs to become a common cause of democracy and transformation of our economy before we are transformed by it into a totally failed society.

All people need housing, safe communities, health care , education, transportation and the time and effort necessary to pursue interests other than simply working to maintain those needs. But we are socialized to accept a lack of any and all of those things for far too many of our number , believing that those who don't have them are simply undeserving. This divisive condition is part of the political economy that replaces citizenship with consumerism and substitutes anti-social competition for social cooperation.

When people can go to places of religious community and entertain belief in invisible forces that call for solidarity and love among humanity and leave those places and practice competitive individualism and economic warfare amongst themselves, the society in which they practice this split personality is suffering more than a collective mental disorder. That disorder is part of the economic foundation that is taught to us as a natural order of god’s universe, except when god is being communed with at church, ashram, temple or other place of worship of the beautiful immaterial ideal in order to escape the ugly material reality. This fractured dualism makes it possible for a society to be in great debt in order to make war, create poverty and destroy the natural environment, while lacking the material and spiritual sustenance of life for a majority of the human community.

If , as many good people believe , we are all god’s children we need to stop treating some of our kin folk like excrement. The human family is dysfunctional under profit and loss rules in which family values that sound good in words about love and brotherhood turn out to be deeds of pillage, waste and murder. We cannot be ethical people practicing high minded morals in the midst of a collectively immoral economy that trashes ethical behavior with murderous attack on humans and all other parts of the natural environment. The earth is treated as a profit making commodity and we see it erupting in gushers of oil that threaten far more than the profit margin of one petroleum company. Humans are treated as nothing more than commodities by the same system, and it cannot and should not be blamed on corporate CEOs or political and media gas bags who simply follow the systemic dictates of creating profit for some at the expense of all. That is the religion of the market under private control, creating profit for a minority and loss for the great majority. That loss is being reflected in greater numbers of personal lives as this economy suffers what is called a recession, but even more telling signs are revealed in the rapid breakdowns in life support systems that can no longer withstand the ravages of being treated like commodities rather than what they are; the substance of our lives.

Nature is our nature and not some product which we can simply market and sell at profits. When we incur massive debts in order to create massive destruction of nature, we are in process of destroying the very substance of ourselves. That cannot go on and will only be changed by a motivated and informed public that demands service to humanity - itself - before service to a commodity market . The growing global numbers who profess that another world is possible are voicing the necessity, not just the possibility. We will have that other world or we will not have any world at all. And creating that future organism is worth far more debt than anything we have incurred for this present failing mechanism.

Copyright (c) 2010 by Frank Scott. All rights reserved.

This text may be used and shared in accordance with the
fair-use provisions of U.S. copyright law, and it may be
archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that
the author is notified and no fee is charged for access.
Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on
other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author


frank scott
email: frankscott@comcast.net

Thursday, June 17, 2010

Finally: True Communist Death Toll Revealed

There has long been speculation among scholars , academics, researchers , fortune tellers and other fascists as to the actual death toll inflicted on the slaves of communist regimes. Figures range from Stalin’s murder of twenty million to Mao’s murder of sixty million to a total of more than 90 or 100 million killed, collectively, by the deranged collectivists who attempted to organize society on the basis of human needs rather than private profits. After extensive search through archives of the Soviets, the Chinese , the John Birch Society and the Three Stooges, Legalienate has been able to arrive at a figure which will stand up to the most rigorous academic study:

The evil communist monsters actually murdered four and a half billion
people, wiping out the entire population of earth except for the evil ones themselves. They then imported alien life forms from other parts of the universe and , diabolically using depraved science learned from Dr. Mengele and Dr. Kevorkian , shaped and cloned them into creatures replacing all of those they had murdered. And thus we have the United Nations, the USA , Israel, the Tooth Fairy , Brittany Spears, Fox TV, Black Helicopters, White People and other everyday phenomena.

The research department at the Garlic News Bureau of Legalienate wishes to thank the members of the American Security Society Home Of Lost Engrams for their help with this study and hopes its results will offer a clearer view of our history, our science and our navels.

Israel Bombs Psychiatrist Flotilla!

World Recoils in Shocked Horror; White House Regrets “Brutal but Understandable” Massacre of “Well-Meaning” but “Incredibly Depraved” Shrinks

by Michael K. Smith
Legalienation News Bureau

The Israeli Air Force today bombed a flotilla of psychiatrists attempting to bring elephant tranquilizers to increasingly rabid Israeli leaders, whose stubborn defiance of rationality has caused Prime Minister Netanyahu’s and Defense Minister Ehud Barak’s psychiatrists to commit suicide in recent days.

Forty-six psychoanalysts were killed and ninety-three wounded in the bombing of the convoy of ships dubbed Tranquility shortly after it left port in Cyprus. Ayal Shavit, an Israeli military spokesperson, bluntly declared the attack legal, stating, “We have every right to defend Jewish sovereignty in Cyprus.”

International reaction to the flotilla disaster quickly poured in from around the world. Speaking from the State Department’s palatial new headquarters in Jerusalem, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton pronounced the killings “well-executed,” while expressing regret that a few “bad apples” had infected the Free Israel Movement with “terrorist aspirations.” She cautioned against anti-Semitic overreaction, pointing out that, “If the boats hadn’t deliberately and provocatively set sail from Cyprus, Israel’s bombs would have fallen harmlessly in the ocean.”

President Obama withheld comment in the interest of remaining neutral, and speedily dispatched a new shipment of attack helicopters to Israel.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid in Washington rejected “the Orwellian notion” that bombing the flotilla constituted an attack. “Those terrorist shrinks had to be stopped,” he said. “The quest for mental health is a dagger pointed at Israel.” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi concurred, stating that “psychiatry makes itself a tool of the terrorists if it begins to promote indiscriminate mental health.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu denounced the flotilla as “Disease Boats,” not “Cure Boats,” and complained bitterly of the hostile reception Israeli commandos received after boarding the burning wreckage and peacefully engaging the bleeding survivors with stun grenades, tasers, machine guns, and tear gas. One commando suffered a brutal paper cut when a hurled copy of “Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis” struck him on the left forearm. Netanyahu pronounced it “a miracle” that the man survived, and called for the psychiatrists to be put on trial in The Hague for crimes against humanity.

Pressed for a solution to the endless violence, Netanyahu said he supports an outcome based on two states living side by side, Israel above ground, and Palestine below. His new psychiatrist, replacing the late Moshe Yatom, was unavailable for comment, as he fled to France after a rabies shot failed to cure his patient.

The Free Israel movement’s desperate effort to chemically pacify Israeli leaders has come after years of fruitless attempts to bring them to sanity by traditional means. Orthodox psychoanalysis has proven itself inadequate in that the “cathartic” or emotional acting-out treatment initially favored by Freud provides only temporary relief to Zionists, while producing tragically permanent effects on others. In a dramatic recent case a psychiatrist was stabbed 93 times after encouraging his Jewish patient to “go with” his feelings about implementing an equitable political settlement with Palestinian Arabs. In another, an Israeli settler “free associating” to the term “Palestine” caused his analyst to go deaf by screaming expletives into his ear for 36 consecutive hours, only stopping when he developed permanent lockjaw.

Free Israel psychiatrists concede that Israeli leaders are “the toughest nuts we’ve ever had to crack,” but remain optimistic they can fulfill their mission to “liberate the inmates from the giant mental hospital Israel has become.” Dr. Geoffrey Mann, a colleague of Moshe Yatom’s, whose recent suicide touched off the international shrink solidarity movement, reminded BBC viewers yesterday that Freud devised his psychoanalytic method treating “severe hysteria,” which is exactly what afflicts Israeli leaders today. Mann stated that Freud’s initial remedy - hypnosis - has not worked well with Israeli leaders only because “they are already hypnotized by Zionist ideology.” To induce a still deeper trance apparently runs the risk of permanent coma, which is not generally regarded as a desirable psychiatric outcome, though it cannot be denied that the late Ariel Sharon’s conduct improved markedly after he lapsed into a coma.

Rumors that the Israeli commandos burned books after boarding the flotilla turned out to be false. According to the Dissociated Press, what actually happened is that the commandos piled all the psychiatry books on the ships’ decks and riddled them with bullets, while shouting, “Now maybe you’ll see that your arguments are full of holes!”

-----Michael K. Smith is the author of "Portraits of Empire" and "The Madness of King George," from Common Courage Press. He co-blogs with Frank Scott at http://legalienate.blogspot.com. He can be reached at proheresy@yahoo.com

Tuesday, June 15, 2010

Second Psychiatrist Suicide Rocks Israel

Defense Minister’s Analyst Overdoses on Valium - Wave of “Shrinkicides” Feared

by Michael K. Smith for Legalienation News Bureau

Just one week after Benjamin Netanyahu’s psychiatrist Moshe Yatom killed himself in despair over his failure to develop an effective treatment for the Prime Minister, a second psychiatrist suicide has left Israel reeling.

Yigal Peleg, 61, a colleague of Yatom’s who had been treating Defense Minister Ehud Barak for Security Addiction Disorder (SAD), was found dead at his home in Tel Aviv Monday evening from an overdose of Valium. A suicide note indicated that Yatom’s failure had provoked widespread despair in Israel’s psychiatric community, which fears a therapeutic remedy for doublethink is much more remote than previously believed. Security Addiction Disorder, often characterized by blizzards of doublethink, is also now believed to be well nigh incurable.

The loss of two such highly successful analysts to clinical depression in such a short time has left Israel fearing a wave of “shrinkicides” may be in the offing. Many government officials are currently undergoing analysis, with virtually all of them sporting the same penchant for doublethink that drove Yatom and Peleg over the edge. If current treatments continue to prove ineffective, a psychiatric “Jonestown” could well be the result.

“Laypeople don’t realize the stress involved in treating ideology-induced psychosis,” observes Dr. Rafael Eilam, best-selling author of Zionist Lunacy On The Couch: The Perilous Quest For a Cure (Sanity Books, 2010). “Take Security Addiction Disorder. A client afflicted with this illness simply cannot perceive that domination and security are not the same thing. To dominate another is to guarantee insecurity, since the dominated instinctively seek to escape domination by any means available.” Given the almost total blindness of SAD patients to their own aggression, psychiatrists who treat them often can’t resist impulses to bash their own brains out with the nearest blunt object. This tends to reduce the quality of their subsequent research.

Similar problems confront psychoanalysts treating Massive Attack Disorder (MAD), which is said to be rampant among Israeli leaders. Patients afflicted with this dread disease lack the maturity to understand their own needs, let alone those of others, and destroy everything in their vicinity like a cranky toddler smashing his toys. The illness has a poor prognosis, as victims typically don’t notice that they are worse off in the wake of each tantrum. According to Dr. Eilam, Israel’s savage attacks on Lebanon and Gaza in recent years may be credited to their MAD proclivities, with both attacks having contributed substantially to Israel’s current pariah status.

In a somewhat surprising development, psychiatrists world-wide are rallying to support their embattled Israeli colleagues by forming a Free Israel movement. As their first major action they are planning to sail a flotilla to Tel Aviv loaded with humanitarian relief supplies for Israeli psychoanalysts and their high-profile patients; that is, tons of anti-depressants for the former and elephant tranquilizers for the latter. Flotilla organizers admit that these are only palliatives, but argue that the elephant tranquilizers in particular have been shown to be at least moderately effective in calming the symptoms of Zionist Infantile Outburst Neurosis (ZION), the most serious of which is a chronic impulse to rob, swindle, torture and murder all those who, in the victim’s judgment, which is by definition infallible, impede the onward march to the Zionist paradise.


-----Michael K. Smith is the author of "Portraits of Empire" and "The Madness of King George," from Common Courage Press. He can be reached at proheresy@yahoo.com

Tuesday, June 8, 2010

Psychiatrist of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu Commits Suicide

Anguished Suicide Note Cites ‘Deluge of Doublethink’ In Driving Kind-Hearted Shrink to Despair

Michael K. Smith
Legalienation News Bureau

Moshe Yatom, a prominent Israeli psychiatrist who successfully cured the most extreme forms of mental illness throughout a distinguished career, was found dead at his home in Tel Aviv yesterday from an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound. A suicide note at his side explained that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has been his patient for the last nine years, had “sucked the life right out of me.”

“I can’t take it anymore,” wrote Yatom. “Robbery is redemption, apartheid is freedom, peace activists are terrorists, murder is self-defense, piracy is legality, Palestinians are Jordanians, annexation is liberation, there’s no end to his contradictions. Freud promised rationality would reign in the instinctual passions, but he never met Bibi Netanyahu. This guy would say Gandhi invented brass knuckles.”

Psychiatrists are familiar with the human tendency to massage the truth to avoid confronting emotionally troubling material, but Yatom was apparently stunned at what he called the “waterfall of lies” gushing from his most illustrious patient. His personal diary details the steady disintegration of his once invincible personality under the barrage of self-serving rationalizations put forth by Netanyahu.

“I’m completely shocked,” said neighbor Yossi Bechor, whose family regularly vacationed with Yatom’s family. “Moshe was the epitome of the fully-integrated personality and had cured dozens of schizophrenics before beginning work on Bibi. There was no outward indication that his case was any different from the others.”

But it was. Yatom grew increasingly depressed at his complete lack of progress in getting the Prime Minister to acknowledge reality, and he eventually suffered a series of strokes when attempting to grasp Netanyahu’s thinking, which he characterized in one diary entry as “a black hole of self-contradiction.”

The first of Yatom’s strokes occurred when Netanyahu offered his opinion that the 911 attacks on Washington and New York “were good.” The second followed a session in which Netanyahu insisted that Iran and Nazi Germany were identical. And the third occurred after the Prime Minister declared Iran’s nuclear energy program was a “flying gas chamber,” and that all Jews everywhere “lived permanently in Auschwitz.” Yatom’s efforts to calm Netanyahu’s hysteria were extremely taxing emotionally and routinely ended in failure. “The alibi is always the same with him,” complained another diary entry. “The Jews are on the verge of annihilation at the hands of the racist goyim and the only way to save the day is to carry out one final massacre.”

Yatom was apparently working on converting his diary into a book about the Netanyahu case. Several chapters of an unfinished manuscript, entitled “Psychotic On Steroids,” were found in his study. The excerpt below offers a rare glimpse at the inner workings of a Prime Minister’s mind, at the same time as it reveals the daunting challenge Yatom faced in seeking to guide it to rationality:


Monday, March 8

“Bibi came by at three for his afternoon session. At four he refused to leave and claimed my house was actually his. Then he locked me in the basement overnight while he lavishly entertained his friends upstairs. When I tried to escape, he called me a terrorist and put me in shackles. I begged for mercy, but he said he could hardly grant it to someone who didn’t even exist.”


-----Michael K. Smith is the author of "Portraits of Empire" and "The Madness of King George," from Common Courage Press. He can be reached at proheresy@yahoo.com

Saturday, June 5, 2010

Ventriloquist Dummy For Israel - The "Free Press" Responds to Israeli Piracy on the High Seas

by Michael K. Smith

Unlike in most of the rest of the world, journalists and editors in the U.S. corporate media are consumed by fantasy when it comes to anything having to do with Israel, especially its appalling treatment of Palestinians. In their eyes, the worst the Holy State can ever be guilty of is tactical error, not criminal brutality, and there is no deed too bloodthirsty to sanitize for their American readers.

Consider Israel's recent mass murder of peace activists in international waters. While the rest of the world recoiled in shocked outrage at the news, the New York Times smeared the victims by editorializing ("Israel and the Blockade," New York Times, June 1) that Free Gaza activists "had more than humanitarian intentions" (emphasis added) in trying to deliver humanitarian supplies to besieged Gazans. The group "made its motives clear" in advance, said the Times' editors, by stating that, "A violent response from Israel will breathe new life into the Palestine solidarity movement, drawing attention to the blockade." The inference is that the Free Gaza activists wanted a violent response from Israel in order to promote themselves and discredit the blockade.

As usual with the Times, there is no compelling logic linking the premise to the conclusion. The Free Gaza activists might just as well have been attempting to deter an attack on their members by pointing out to Israel the unpleasant consequences it could expect if it were to resort to violence, but the Times' editors are so blindly devoted to apologetics for the Holy State that they can't see the obvious.

To them, Israel is not guilty of piracy and mass murder, but of having "completely mishandled the incident" - a tactical blunder. The attack on the Mari Marmara "left nine activists dead" (but not murdered), and "opened Israel to a torrent of criticism," the latter being the more important consideration.

Incredibly, the Times' editors characterize the mass murder as a "grievous, self-inflicted wound," as though the Israeli commandos had turned their guns on themselves. The lives of the dead activists do not count, except insofar as they cause bad publicity for Israel. The important considerations are that the killings have "damaged Israel's ties with Turkey . . . given the Hamas-led government in Gaza a huge propaganda boost; and complicated peace talks with the Palestinian Authority." They have also "made it much tougher for the Obama administration to persuade the United Nations Security Council to put new sanctions on Iran's nuclear program," which is a "top priority" for Israel.

For these reasons, and not because it is a crime to shoot passengers in international waters after forcibly boarding their ship, the "Israeli attack was unacceptable."

The Washington Post's David Ignatius likewise accused Israel of an error, not a crime. Ignatius wrote ("Flotilla Raid Offers Israel a Learning Opportunity, Washington Post, June 2") that Israel's killings were well-intentioned because they were part of "an effort to enforce their blockade on the Gaza Strip and thereby weaken the grip of the extremist Hamas movement there." Unfortunately, the noble raid "backfired," causing Israel otherwise avoidable bad publicity. The subtext is that carrying out mass murder against Gazans via blockade is legitimate, but murdering activists on the high seas who act in solidarity with them is a tactical mistake.

For Ignatius the situation in Gaza is "infuriating," but not for Gazans, rather for Israel! This is because Israel (1) "is combating a terrorist adversary in Gaza;" (2)"its friends in Europe and the United States are increasingly unreliable"; (3) "its key Muslim ally, Turkey, is buddying up with Iran"; (4) "and the Turkish organizers of the Gaza relief mission have links with the Israel haters in Hamas."

In short, Hamas and Iran are evil, the Free Gaza Movement is linked to evil, and Israel has no choice but to defeat evil by murdering as many Gazans and solidarity activists as it deems necessary. As a fairy tale, this would be too embarrassing to read to a kindergarten class; as editorial commentary it is beyond ridiculous.

Translating to standard English, Ignatius finds the situation in Gaza infuriating because (1) Hamas responds to Israel's wholesale terror with retail terror (i.e., it commits violent acts on a far smaller scale) (2) Israel's revolting barbarity is costing it what few allies it has, turning it into a pariah state (3) Turkey is moving closer to Iran, which is terrible, because Iran is independent of Zionist control (4) Turkish activists refuse to let Israel determine who they interact with in their efforts to liberate Gaza.

It is difficult to see what is terrible about any of this, since all of the stated concerns would evaporate overnight if Israel ceased stealing land and murdering the people to whom it belongs.

In any event, Ignatius goes on to warn that "the Gaza blockade is not sustainable," though if it were, the starvation and misery it produces would be tolerable, if not laudable. He also states, oddly, that the solidarity activists on the Gaza flotilla were armed with cellphones and video cameras, consumer items that are not ordinarily considered weapons. He concludes by framing the issue of the Gaza blockade, not as a quest for justice - heaven forbid - but as a search for "the right diplomatic formula," a technical gimmick that can somehow resolve "the Gaza mess," which Ignatius suggests should be thrown in the lap of the U.N. (while Israel continues colonizing the West Bank).

Meanwhile, the Post's editors declare they have "no sympathy for the motives of the participants in the flotilla" ("The flotilla fiasco," Washington Post, June 1), while finding Israel's murder of the solidarity activists to be merely "misguided and badly executed," not criminal. The Free Gaza activists are owed no sympathy because their declared humanitarian aims were "secondary to the aim of provoking a confrontation," the evidence being that "the flotilla turned down an Israeli offer to unload the six boats and deliver the goods to Gaza by truck." Furthermore, they "ignored repeated warnings that [they] would not be allowed to reach Gaza."

It is always difficult to know how best to respond to impenetrable denseness. Just why solidarity workers eager to get humanitarian relief supplies to the people of Gaza would entrust delivery to the government that celebrates the slow starvation it has inflicted on them for years now is somewhat less than crystal clear. As for ignoring Israeli threats to prevent the boats from arriving in Gaza, since when do pirates have the right to invent new law? Not only do the Post's editors not have sympathy for Free Gaza's solidarity activists, they have no sympathy for the law. For them, Israel is the law.

The Wall Street Journal, true to form, proved itself even more deluded than the "liberal" press, announcing without shame that "food, medicine, and electricity continue to flow to Gaza," so there is no problem of deprivation ("Israel's Gaza Choices," Wall Street Journal, June 1) Of course, food, medicine, and electricity continue to flow to the people of Cuba as well, so the Journal's editors should be prepared to concede that Communist rule is no obstacle to the fulfillment of economic aspirations on the island. Don't hold your breath.

The Journal's editors also immediately side with Israel's version of events about what transpired on the morning of the commando raid, insisting that "the humanitarians aboard the ship assaulted the commandos with clubs and knives," not mentioning the fact that this claim is very much in dispute. Nor do they offer any explanation as to why Israel is not to be condemned for forcibly boarding ships in international waters, which the law does not permit.

In a show of false generosity the editors "suppose [that] Israel could have allowed the flotilla to pass to avoid the political fallout it is now enduring," but not to spare innocent lives that it chose to cruelly snuff out. Once again, the problem posed concerns the practical difficulties Israel is experiencing as a result of its murderous behavior, not the loss of life and limb by those who seek to make the Jewish state obey the law. The latter are apparently too trivial to merit attention.

The Journal's editors speculate that allowing humanitarian aid to go through "would have merely created a channel through which Hamas could be supplied with ever more advanced weaponry (much of it courtesy of Iran), thus setting the stage for an even bloodier future war in Gaza." Of course, this is sheer fantasy, as no evidence has been produced to demonstrate that the Free Gaza Movement has any such intention, nor that port authorities in Cyprus and Greece would permit arms smuggling if they did. In any case, on the pretext of avoiding a future war anything can be rationalized - like dropping an atomic bomb on Washington D.C., which would surely prevent a lot of future wars.

Killing people in the present in order to avoid having to kill even more people in the always hypothetical future is sheer insanity. Nobody knows what the future will bring, but everyone knows that sanctioning lawless behavior is a recipe for permanent disaster.

Israel and its lapdog in Washington are that permanent disaster. It is high time that the American people took note of it, and put an end to the relentless exploitation of the Palestinian people, who have done nothing to merit the boundless contempt with which they are treated.


-----Michael K. Smith is the author of "Portraits of Empire" and "The Madness of King George," both from Common Courage Press. He can be reached at proheresy@yahoo.com

Friday, June 4, 2010

The Spirit of Barbarity: The Roots of Israel's Mass Murder on the High Seas

"Israelis believe in the Mad Dog strategy attributed to Moshe Dayan or Pinchas Lavon: 'Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother.' So, they pretend to be crazier than they actually are. However, if they can't be contained, mad dogs have to be shot."

-----Israel Shamir

Assuming Israeli sovereignty over international waters 65 miles from the Gaza coast, crazed Jewish commandos ignored white flags and attacked a peaceful ship trying to deliver humanitarian supplies to blockaded Palestinians in a pre-dawn raid Memorial Day morning. At least nine people were killed in the assault on the Turkish ferry, Mavi Marmara, with scores more wounded. The ferry was part of the “Gaza Freedom Flotilla,” which was carrying humanitarian aid and 600 peace activists from dozens of nations, including the U.S., among whom were 35 parliamentarians.

The horrifying attack came eleven months after Israeli warriors hijacked the Free Gaza movement's "Spirit of Humanity," which was engaged in a similar undertaking, imprisoning its 22 nonviolent human rights activists for having the audacity to attempt delivery of items that Israel for two years had refused to let into Gaza, including toys, crayons, school books and urgently-needed medical supplies.

Predictably, Israeli officials attempted to shift blame for their illegal attack onto the backs of their victims, claiming they were hate-filled terrorists on a murderous mission, though the flotilla had been pronounced peaceful and weaponless at multiple ports of call before being attacked by the Israeli pirates.

The flotilla was attempting to break Israel's three year old blockade of Gaza and repair some of the damage done by the Jewish state's wholesale slaughter of Gazans a year-and-a-half ago. On December 27, 2008, Israel launched a major attack on the Strip, killing approximately 1400 people, 850 of them civilians, and leaving more than five thousand wounded and some 70,000 homeless. Jewish soldiers trapped people in their homes and apartments and murdered them when they tried to come out carrying white flags. Tanks and snipers deliberately targeted women and children, hospital workers, ambulance drivers, doctors, medics, mobile clinics, hospitals, the UN school in the Jabaliya refugee camp, and the UN university. Palestinian non-combatants were forced to act as "human shields" for marauding Jewish soldiers, protecting them as they entered homes in search of Hamas fighters, a war crime under the Geneva Conventions. Israel also used white phosphorous weapons - another war crime, supplied by the United States. These weapons were fired in Gaza's dense urban neighborhoods, refugee camps, and near a UN compound.

The accompanying physical damage was enormous: 5000 houses were destroyed and another 11,000 damaged; mosques, colleges, factories, hospitals, small businesses, UN property, orange and olive groves, were wrecked or harmed. Much of Gaza City was reduced to rubble, as though by a giant earthquake.

The White House gave complete support to the invasion, accompanied by nearly unanimous House and Senate votes endorsing the slaughter. Two weeks into the carnage, just five House members voted against a resolution expressing "vigorous and unwavering commitment" to "the survival of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state," as well as Israel's "right to act in self defense to protect its citizens against Hamas's unceasing aggression, as enshrined in the United Nations Charter." [For the record, Hamas achieved national political power by winning elections pronounced free and fair by that dangerous radical Jimmy Carter. Since their election in January 2006 Hamas leaders have stated clearly that their operative goal is a long-term truce with Israel, the right of return for Palestinian exiles, and creation of a Palestinian state in the 1967 occupied territories. Their social agenda is conservative, not extremist, and neither Israel nor the U.S. has any right to dictate their politics, let alone use them as pretext for denying human rights to the entire Gazan people.]

The Democratic Party's presidential standard bearer in 2004, John Kerry, found the Gaza attack entirely right and just. Democratic majority leader Harry Reid took note on the floor of the Senate that the upper chamber's resolution reaffirmed "Israel's inalienable right to defend [itself] against attacks from Gaza." Two weeks later at Hillary Clinton's swearing-in ceremony, President Obama proved himself equally in favor of Jewish aggression: "America is committed to Israel's security," and "will always support Israel's right to defend itself against legitimate threats."

No one in Washington argued that Gazans had a right to defend themselves against Israel. This in spite of the fact that the civilian population of Gaza was being collectively punished by policies that UN Special Rapporteur for the Palestinians Richard Falk condemned as a crime against humanity. Israel had been provoking Palestinians in Gaza by holding their territory under almost total siege since June 2007, blocking their access to food, medicines, humanitarian assistance, travel, and much else, instigating a major humanitarian crisis that caused a minister for the Vatican's Council for Justice and Peace to compare Gaza to a "big concentration camp."

Entombing hundreds of Gazans in rubble, Israel's assault left carnage everywhere - in city streets, at a mosque, in hospitals, police stations (almost all police departments and other security-related installations were hit), a jail, a university bus stop, a plastics factory, a TV station. The strikes were carried out mostly with F-16 bombers and Apache attack helicopters, both supplied to Israel through U.S. military aid grants of about $3 billion in taxpayer money every year. The U.S. was complicit in the attacks because it confirmed it was fully aware of Israel's plans, which commenced six months in advance.

U.S. media coverage of these events took care to reverse the roles of victimizer and victim, so that Palestinian responses to Israeli bombardment were defined simply as "terrorism," and Palestinians resisting attack as "militants," as though meekly submitting to mass slaughter would have been a more reasonable reaction. On the other hand, Israeli violence rooted in structures of oppression and dispossession that have killed dozens of times more victims than anything attributable to Palestinian "terror" were given the ennobling labels of "self-defense" and "retaliation."

The Goldstone Commission, a U.N. Fact-Finding Mission, found that the Israeli attack on Gaza was carried out not against "terrorists," however defined, but against the "people of Gaza as a whole," with the intent "to punish, humiliate, and terrorize a civilian population." Results ranged from the destruction of life and limb to the "destruction of food supply installations, water sanitation systems, concrete factories and residential houses," and, in short, "the economic capacity of the Gaza Strip." Such collective punishments, are, of course, illegal, and the Commission determined that responsibility lay "with those who designed, planned, ordered and oversaw the operations," who could boast a kill ratio of 100 Palestinians for every dead Israeli.

None of this, of course, is new. Israel has been engaged in political violence from birth, not in self-defense as it likes to claim, but to impose Jewish-supremacist politics on an overwhelmingly Arab part of the world. Among its perpetually criminal policies are targeted assassination of political and military leaders, hostage taking, "reprisal" bombings, collective punishment of civilians under military occupation, torture, building of Jewish settlements on Arab land, demolition of homes, uprooting of orange and olive groves, eviction of residents, building mazes of roadblocks and checkpoints, shooting at ambulances, preventive detention, use of shock grenades, water cannon, rubber coated bullets, tear gas, and live ammunition against peaceful protesters, ignoring an International Court ruling that its enormous separation wall is illegal, stealing land and water from Palestinians and giving it to Jewish settler-fanatics, freely attacking across borders in an endless series of raids, wars, and assassination programs, refusal to accept a Hamas election victory on the West Bank, enforced starvation, blackouts, mass arrests, beatings, imprisonment of political enemies - including Parliament members and children, sexual humiliation, denial of medical care, and blowing up electrical and water systems.

Apart from their sheer destructiveness, these policies are also blatantly racist, with Israeli leaders regularly referring to Palestinians as "grasshoppers," "roaches" and "two-legged beasts." Unfortunately, this does not deter U.S. leaders from declaring their "solidarity" with Israel, which they say forms an "unshakeable bond" with the Jewish state, one that does not allow for any "space" between Washington and Tel Aviv on the issues. Hillary Clinton insists the bond between the U.S. and Israel is eternal and evinces an "absolute commitment to Israel's security," that is, its ethnic cleansing operations. Vice President Joe Biden has publicly declared himself a "Zionist," adding that Israel forms "the center of my work as a United States Senator and now as vice president of the United States." These sentiments characterize Washington's political class across the board.

Meanwhile, in Gaza there are regularly no medical supplies or drugs for hospitals, no fuel for the electricity plant or for generators during the long blackouts (the lack of fuel means that sewage and treatment stations cannot function properly, which decreases the supply of potable water to Gazans and results in tens of millions of liters of untreated or only partially treated wastes being dumped in the sea). There is no private sector and no industry. Gaza's agricultural crops have been destroyed and Israel continues to shoot at farmers trying to plant and tend fields near the border. Most productive activity is simply impossible. The overwhelming majority of Gaza's population of 1.4 million is dependent on humanitarian food aid to meet basic needs.

The regularly invoked claim of "global terrorism," though a crucial pretext in U.S. efforts to justify its support for Israeli occupation and apartheid, is false. Acts of violence carried out by Palestinians are indigenous responses to foreign occupation and would cease if foreign occupation ceased. Washington's attempts to equate all Islamic forces that resist U.S. hegemony with Al Qaeda terror are transparent efforts to justify further crimes.

The root of the conflict is aptly summed up by economist Edward Herman: "The Israeli leadership has never been willing to make a peace settlement with the Palestinians because that would require agreeing to a Palestinian border when the Israeli objective has always been to keep dispossessing and seizing land, easier done under an occupation than after a negotiated settlement."

As peace activist Jeff Halper notes, if Israel had the good intentions it claims for itself, the whole nightmare would have been over long ago: "If peace and security were truly the issue, Israel could have had that 20 years ago if it would have conceded 22 percent of the country required for a viable Palestinian state."

Sources:

Becker, Andrea, "No Lights, No Food, No Medicines: No Change," January 2009, Z Magazine.

Bennis, Phyllis, "The Gaza Crisis," February 2009, Z Magazine

Bennis, Phyllis, "Bush Launches A New Middle East Initiative," September 2007, Z Magazine.

Bix, Herbert P. "The Israeli-U.S. Gaza War and Its Aftermath," May 2009, Z Magazine

Chomsky, Noam, "Turning Point?" July/August 2009, Z Magazine

Chomsky, Noam, "Cold War II," October 2007, Z Magazine

Fleming, Eileen, "The Good Out of the Misery in Gaza," February, 2010 , Z Magazine

Herman, Edward S. "More Nuggets From a Nut House," November 2007, Z Magazine

Herman, Edward S. "Kafka Era Double Standard," March 2009, Z Magazine

Herman, Edward S. "Protecting Israel's 'Ethnic Cleansing' by Calling It Protecting Israel's 'Security'" May 2010, Z Magazine

Herman, Edward S. "The Annapolis War Preparation Conference," January 2008, Z Magazine

McCloskey, Stephen, "Palestine at the Crossroads," March 2010, Z Magazine

Weil, Alison, "Ethan Bronner's Ties To The IDF: The Rule Not The Exception?" April 2010, Z Magazine

Herman, Edward S. and David Peterson, "The Politics of Genocide," (Monthly Review, 2010)

Chomsky, Noam, "Hopes and Prospects," (Haymarket, 2010)

-----Michael K. Smith is the author of "Portraits of Empire" and "The Madness of King George," from Common Courage Press. He can be reached at proheresy@yahoo.com

Thursday, June 3, 2010

What Is To Be Done

Israel’s most recent outrage has meant harsh criticism from almost everywhere but the USA. Our captive nation status continues as those who usually echo our commands express embarrassment at the conduct of the world’s most self righteous regime. But Americans who demand that Israel come to its senses need to come to their own. Nothing about Israel will change until everything about America’s uncritical support for Israel changes.

The blanket of distortion that covers any Israeli crime with tales of savage terrorists bent on annihilation were fully employed once again in this case. When will this idiocy end? Will we hear that the concrete on those ships was to be used by Hamas to construct gas chambers and crematoria to carry out its plot to exterminate the Jewish people? Continuing the attempt of all humanity that isn't Jewish to murder the minority of humanity that is? Under the control of Ahmadinejad of Iran? And given the incredible garbage that fills their heads and passes for news of the world, how many unfortunate Americans might believe such nonsense?

Had Iran attacked a ship in international waters and killed nine people, the unholy trinity of Obama-Biden-Clinton would be screeching “terrorism” to the high heavens and unleashing military violence on that nation. Shamefully, they express blatant support or cowardly avoidance of criticism when Israel responds to protest against its racist rule by killing innocents and claiming self defense. Pressure must be exercised on that renegade nation but expecting it to come from our government under its present status amounts to praying that extraterrestrials will save our planet.

We need to challenge and transform the American government and not continue useless calls for morally just behavior from an Israeli state founded on immorality and injustice. And for all its claims of uniqueness , why should it be any different from the rest of what is called “western civilization”? A major part of that civilization’s rise has been the near total destruction of indigenous people while claiming divine right and racial superiority in colonizing every corner of the world. That world is now under threat to the survival of all its people, as clearly outlined by representatives of the global majority at the Cochabamba conference . We need to heed their call for action from the human community before it is destroyed by the forces of division and racial superiority whose time may be ending but who may bring the “end time” for everyone else if they are not brought under control by a united global people.

As Israel’s isolation grows its near lunatic leadership is likely to become even more unpredictably dangerous. But Americans who wish for change need to direct their demands at the American government . We must end foolish support for alleged liberals and conservatives who battle viciously over how best to help corporate capital at the expense of the people but always come together in passionate unity to support a foreign country and squander billions of dollars and thousand of lives in foreign wars that endanger the entire population here at home . All of them need to be thrown out of office, impeached for dereliction of duty or tried for treason. In acting against our interests and for a foreign country they generate more hatred for America with each subservient act of obedience to a lobby that buys them off and makes total mockery of our supposed democracy in the process.

How much more can we push people to the edge by acting as enabling therapist to a crazed state whose American political supporters reduce us to nothing remotely resembling a democratic nation?The next attempted terror bomber may not be as incompetent as the last, and there may be more after that if we do not end our suppression of foreigners who strive for their own freedom while we take more freedom away from the American people and threaten them with future suffering beyond anything imagined now. Had that Times Square bomber learned his craft in the USA, where Timothy McVey learned how to kill 168 at Oklahoma City, hundreds might have died in New York.

The lunatic fringe in Israel has become the mainstream and armed with nuclear weapons and a cultural narrative of eternally imminent destruction, it is a threat to everyone and not just those in the area. Control needs to be exercised but it will not happen if Americans demonstrate in front of Israeli embassies or missions. We need demonstrations to be lodged at the offices of the alleged representatives of the American people, with boycotts, divestitures and sanctions against those who use our taxes, our military and our reputation among nations to support everything Israel does at the moral, financial and existential expense of this nation. Those who still think appealing to one of the two wings of the capitalist ruling party will make a difference need to be replaced by those who truly want radical change in this lifetime and not in some dreamland of a fairy tale future.


There is a global struggle between people who stand for equality of all and those who demand the superiority of only some. The western capitalist domination of the world is ending but its decline becomes more dangerous a process as “mother earth” suffers the strains of accumulating private profits at the enormous cost of humanity’s loss. Palestine's striving for justice is a major part of that struggle but it will not end successfully until those in this country who support a foreign state at the expense of America are rooted out and replaced. Only democracy will help bring peace and security to the planet, including Palestine and all its people who wish to live as equals. There is no hope for the cult of superiority and the sooner we realize it is headquartered in our government, the sooner we avoid our own demise.