tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-72725257778270914862024-03-18T21:47:52.624-07:00legalienateNews, Commentary and Satirefrank scotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06210560169236136762noreply@blogger.comBlogger1130125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7272525777827091486.post-88602770693476816002024-03-18T17:02:00.000-07:002024-03-18T17:02:02.838-07:00Private Profits vs. Social Prophets<p>
</p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Private Profits vs. Social
Prophets</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">By Frank Scott</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">“…What we see at work is not
an expression of the sentiments of the American people; rather it reflects the
will of a powerful minority which uses its economic power to control the organs
of political life.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Albert Einstein</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">We entered the massive
marketplace labeled “our democracy” as always long before any election and at
this date hundreds of millions have already been spent both officially and off
the books to insure that ruling power maintains control over American
capitalism no matter who or what may be elected sheriff, mayor, animal control
officer or president of the united states. Given that, the spending and
consciousness brutality have already exceeded past experience and, as befitting
a system verging on complete collapse and involving much more of humanity than
American voters, the time for global as well as national focus on the status of
an American empire making more people rich than ever before while making
multitudes far more poor and continuing mass murders in other subject nations
is not only at hand but at all parts of the international political economic
organism.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">As the fading rulers of
western capitalism act more like a crazed rat on a sinking ship but instead of
leaping into the deeps it promotes the entire world into more warfare, mass
murder, incredible profits for those who feed on bloodshed and a mental
condition that might make homicidal maniacs seem critically thinking human
beings, the natural and especially political environmental reality approaches
the worst fantasy of religious fanatics: eternal damnation in the fires of
hell. This joyful futuristic vision was born of a brilliant past that might
make the present seem docile since none of the modern weapons existed in biblical
times when spears, lances and demented religious leaders operated as ruling
wealth as opposed to the lethally armed with weapons of mass murder political and
media servants of rulers do today.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">The continuing since 1917
American imperial attacks on Russia have reached a disastrous point in the current war
using Ukrainians to kill Russians while they die by the thousands with no hope
of winning and American and foreign munitions makers make billions. Various of
the NATO lapdog leaders sound even more crazed than Americans and urge
broadening of the war to stop the eternal threat of Russia which exists in
their fevered minds said fever having been planted by America since the end of
the second world war.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Meanwhile, the center of
global anti-Semitism, Israel, has exploded as never before with such bloody
horror that many of the innocent and previously comatose have awakened and
expressed anger and hostility about a situation that has prevailed since 1948
when Palestine was engulfed and devoured by the new nation said to have been a
haven for those suffering horror during the second world war. This would be
like Japan getting even for the American atrocities at Hiroshima and Nagasaki
by invading Mexico, throwing the natives out when possible and making all
others second class citizens once they took over, changed the language and
culture to Japanese and proceeded to treat Mexicans worse than Americans ever
had.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">In only one of thousands of contradictions
of logic, language and morality, the European Jews who stole the land continue
calling themselves Semites and screaming anti-Semitism whenever real Semites
commit an act of aggression in retaliation and millions in the western world
have their brains sunk deeper into an ocean of mental sewage. Like everything
else in a radically changing world in which previous western dominance is nearing
an end and hopefully global freedom is nearer than ever, the radical changes
underway that can spell revolution for the human future can be made to seem
more dismal than ever under the consciousness control of purveyors of the
imperial lies now fantastically more powerful than any past relatively tin-pot
dictatorial regime of later made to seem glorious royals and other past
murderers.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">While it seems that the
horrible choice offered voters by capital’s two parties back in 2020 will be
the same in 2024 the only difference is that the divisions among Americans have
grown even worse than before. But as the frustration and anger at both parties
increase alternate choices, usually written off as foreign plots or national
disorders, may finally have space to speak to radical change favoring democracy
in substance rather than the bogus brain disease foisted on innocent people who
are told it is freedom and democracy. Of course, and rape is simply an economic
form of dating and hundreds of thousands of Americans living in the street are
merely getting close to nature. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">While political madness
depicts Putin as a menace to humanity for reacting to an American owned and
operated insurrection in Ukraine and fill voters heads with alleged crimes
committed by Trump which are the everyday reality of political pimps and
hustlers who own and operate “our” democracy, especially congress and the white
house, Palestinians will continue to be murdered by Israelis financed by
American taxpayers proving that our peace loving democracy is just what the
world needs to bring on a nuclear destruction of humanity which is in the
planning stages of our Mass Murder Inc. at the pentagon. This will come to pass
if Americans do not rise up and create real democracy before it is too late.
Among other things that will mean voting against the supposed lesser evil of
the two party combo of economic cancer and political polio to bring about the
end of capitalism and the beginning of a future for the human race that does
not involve growing poverty for hundreds of millions while a relative handful
become billionaires. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">The opening quote is from
someone long admired for something called the theory of relativity, a term not
even vaguely understood by billions of humans, but far more relevant, easily
understandable and important is the fact that he was an anti-capitalist, a
socialist and an anti-war pacifist, easily understandable by those same
billions and hardly known by most. That and many other hidden facts about
people, nations and political economics should become clearer while we adjust
and work to transform a dreadful social reality into a hopeful future by ending
warfare capitalism and bringing about a democratic world such as our
pre-historic beginnings in social and communistic cooperation. And after we
clear up some reality about Einstein, we’d all do well by checking out Marx in
his own words and not those of his simplistic and far too often murderous
detractors. He can help us learn more about what we need to understand about
why our reality is crumbling and what we need to do to rebuild it.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">*</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Einstein on peace pg. 343</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;"> </span></p>
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{page:WordSection1;}</style> <br /></p>frank scotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06210560169236136762noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7272525777827091486.post-58926039889354798202024-03-17T16:53:00.000-07:002024-03-18T21:46:56.453-07:00Satan of Moscow Calls Out U.S. Anti-Russian Laws <p><span style="font-size: large;">"One anti-Soviet, anti-Russian law is being submitted for another . . . They can't seem to do without it! . . . They talk about human rights in Russian prisons and places of detention. That's all well and good, but they have plenty of problems of that kind themselves. [Look at] Abu Ghraib - or Guantanamo, where people are kept jailed for years without being charged. Not only [that], the prisoners walk around shackled, like in the Middle Ages. They have [even] legalized torture. Can you imagine if we had done anything like that? They would have eaten us alive . . . It would have been a global scandal. But in their country, everyone keeps quiet about it. . . . Those so-called secret CIA prisons: who has been punished for that? . . . They are up to the ears in shitty stuff, they're drowning in it, and they still insist on criticizing us.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;"> . . . . I am probably a bad Christian, because as a Christian you are supposed to turn the other cheek. I am not yet morally ready for that. If they slap our face, we have to retaliate. Otherwise they'll go on slapping us forever."</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;"> <span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span>-------Vladimir Putin, 2012</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;"> </span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">Source: Philip Short, <i>Putin</i>, (Henry Holt, 2022) pps. 561-2 <br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;"> </span> <br /></p>Michael Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17631483577908372312noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7272525777827091486.post-90295587299305517952024-03-14T22:36:00.000-07:002024-03-14T22:37:11.639-07:00"The Rise of the New Normal Reich" by C. J. Hopkins<p><span style="font-size: large;">A tirade about "totalitarian" Covid policies, the book has some virtues and many flaws, but a footnote on page ninety-three exposes the author's argument as an exercise in sheer hypocrisy. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;"> </span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">In the midst of complaining about how the corporate
media framed German anti-lockdown protests as a fringe of violent
Covid Deniers running amok, Hopkins says this: "Any reference to any kind of
'Deniers' in Germany naturally evokes Holocaust deniers, i.e., nazis."</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;"> </span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: large;">So all Holocaust revisionists are Nazis? Hardly. More importantly, as Hopkins himself makes abundantly clear,
as soon as an intellectual nigger category is created it matters not who
is assigned to the demonized space. <i>Everyone</i> is forced to
genuflect at the orthodoxy, and independent thought is paralyzed. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;"> </span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">As we know, long before Covid appeared on the scene, this happened in
Germany (where Hopkins resides), a state created by foreign military powers occupying the country
after reducing it to rubble. Heresy trials are legitimate there, about
which Hopkins says nothing, even as he rages against global capitalist "totalitarianism."</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;"> </span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: large;">If he ever did say anything, he'd be jailed and deported. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;"> </span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: large;">No one - not Jimmy Dore, not Max Blumenthal, not Tucker Carlson, not Hopkins, not Matt
Taibbi, not Glenn Greenwald, not a single card-carrying ACLU member, has
any problem with this. They're all completely full of shit. Even Noam
Chomsky, who at least defended Robert Faurisson's free speech rights when he was brought to court on a charge of falsification of history,
considered it a point of pride to remain entirely ignorant of
Faurisson's actual arguments.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;"> </span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: large;">That's where we are. No one who makes his living on speech actually believes in free speech.</span></p>
<p><br /></p>
Michael Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17631483577908372312noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7272525777827091486.post-51363410212869009152024-03-06T20:42:00.000-08:002024-03-06T20:42:12.171-08:00Fighting Wars By The Rules<p><span style="font-size: large;"> <b>Let's All Kill Each Other According To The Rules</b><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: medium;">I don't understand the Geneva Convention and the whole
idea of having rules for fighting a war. Why? Is it really more than
just a way of reassuring ourselves we're all quite civilized, as we pour
our hearts and minds and fortunes into mass killing? It seems to me
like hypocritical bullshit. If the object is to win, wars should be
fought with no holds barred; otherwise, why bother suiting up? As it is
now, a winner is declared, and yet the issue has not been settled by
all possible means.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><br />
Additionally, if the object is to kill the enemy, why treat their
wounded? Treating their wounded requires resources taken from your own
effort to achieve victory. Does this make sense if you're trying to
win? Oh, yeah. Civilized.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><br />
My doubts about having rules for combat likewise extend to street
fighting. I've heard guys whine about someone throwing a "sucker
punch." Are they kidding? A guy wants to reduce your ass to a small
bloody pile, and you're going to warn him before hitting him? Get
fucking lucid! And lose all that dopey shit about fair play. It's out
of place if the object is to win. (Is it?)</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><br />
Also, as far as kicking someone when he's down is concerned, what is
the problem here? Again, the object is to win, yes? Well if he gets
up, you might lose; therefore he must not get up. He needs to be
kicked. You said you wanted to win. Or are you people just fucking
around? I suspect that might be the case. Well, stop fucking around
and make up your mind. You're telling me a man will fuck another man's
wife, drive him out of his business, cut him off and nearly kill him in
traffic, but he shouldn't sneak punch, or kick him when he's down? I
don't get it.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><br />
Another thing I don't understand is the objection to the so-called
dirty play in sports such as football. These are big, tough guys who
are desperate to prove how manly they are; that they're not soft.
That's why they play these games in the first place. Well, why not let
them play "dirty" and let's find out how tough they really are?</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><br />
It's been shown that small, dedicated groups of men can easily find
ways of policing and disciplining those among them who cross the line.
It's called vigilantism, and it's very efficient. Please don't tell a
bunch of six-foot six, three hundred-pounders in helmets and pads they
can't spear and punch and put their thumbs into each other's eyes.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><br />
You'll miss all the fun. And you'll be keeping them from pursuing their calling at its highest level.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><br />
I also don't understand terrorists who call the police to warn them
about a bomb. Do I even need to explain my dismay at this one?</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><br />
You know, folks, if this old world had any imagination, wars would
be fought without codes and conventions, alley fighting would be
standard, and the only rules in sports would govern the uniforms. Then
we'd have some real fun.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><br />
But I fear that doesn't suit you, and so I return to the notion that
produced these thoughts in the first place: You people shouldn't be
fighting at all.<br />
<br /></span>
<span style="font-size: medium;">-----George Carlin, <i>Braindroppings</i>, pps. 179-80 </span></p>Michael Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17631483577908372312noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7272525777827091486.post-39492216519644025912024-02-28T22:57:00.000-08:002024-02-28T22:57:05.092-08:00Fake Peace, Real War, and The Road to "Plausible Genocide"<p> <span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">“<i>We will destroy everything not Jewish</i>.”</span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">-----Theodore Herzl<a href="#_edn1" name="_ednref" style="mso-endnote-id: edn;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;">[i]</span></span></a></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"> "<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">We have no
solution, you shall continue to live like dogs, and whoever wishes may leave,
and we will see where this process leads . . . . You Palestinians, as a nation,
don't want us today, but we'll change your attitude by forcing our presence on
you</i>."</span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">-----Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan<a href="#_edn2" name="_ednref" style="mso-endnote-id: edn;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;">[ii]</span></span></a>
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"><a href="#_ftn1" name="_ftnref" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;">[1]</span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"> </span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">" . . . <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">the
common denominator amongst all the American peace efforts is their abysmal
failure</i>." </span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">------Cheryl A. Rubenberg <a href="#_edn3" name="_ednref" style="mso-endnote-id: edn;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;">[iii]</span></span></a></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"> </p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"><span style="font-size: 18.0pt;">USrael's disgraceful conduct in Gaza goes on, and on
and on. Leveling hospitals, shooting children in the head; gunning down a
surgeon at the operating table, using an emergency call from a little girl
trapped in a car with the corpses of family members to lure two rescue workers
to her, then killing all three; systematically killing Palestinian journalists
reporting on the slaughter; promising to save three premature babies at a
hospital under forced evacuation, then leaving them to slowly die and be
devoured by dogs; singing in chorus of the joy of exterminating Arabs; cheering
the blocking of food aid to starving Gazans; killing entire families, inducing
a Palestinian boy to lay down in the road hoping someone would run over him and
end his misery; this is but a small sampling of the consequences of trapping
over a million Gazans in the southern half of a 125-square-mile concentration
camp without food, shelter, or sanitation, then methodically shooting and
bombing them while thousands of their relatives decompose under expanding
mountains of rubble.</span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"> </p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"><span style="font-size: 18.0pt;">Depravity on this scale will not magically disappear
by establishing a cease fire and holding peace talks, as urgently necessary as
both those preliminaries are. Only relentless popular pressure on the U.S.
government to force it to deny Israel the means to subjugate and murder
Palestinians can even hope to lead to de-nazification of the
Jewish state, without which real peace can never be achieved. Keep in mind that
in the midst of the current wholesale slaughter a large majority of Israelis
think Netanyahu <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">isn't using enough
violence.</i></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"> </p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"><span style="font-size: 18.0pt;">Cease fires we have had before, and peace agreements,
too, but they didn't solve the underlying conflict because addressing the
absence of Palestinian national rights - the heart of the Palestine conflict -
is taboo. </span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"> </p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"><span style="font-size: 18.0pt;">Because of this taboo, massacres of Palestinians are a
feature, not a bug, of Zionist ideology, and have stained Israel's history from
before the state was even formed. </span></p><p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"><span style="font-size: 18.0pt;"> </span></p><p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"><span style="font-size: 18.0pt;">Only the scale of the current Gaza slaughter
sets it apart. </span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"><span style="font-size: 18.0pt;"> </span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"><span style="font-size: 18.0pt;">In June of 1982, for example, Israel invaded Lebanon
on a surge of Pentagon arms shipments, seeking to disperse the Palestine
Liberation Organization (the Hamas of its day) and poison its relations with
the local population while destroying its political and military structures.
Tens of thousands of civilians died as the IDF carved up the country in
alliance with Christian fascist militias. </span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"><span style="font-size: 18.0pt;"> </span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"><span style="font-size: 18.0pt;">While claiming to stand tall for human rights,
Washington kept arms and money flowing in support of Israel's occupation of not
just Palestine, but Syria and Lebanon as well. </span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"> </p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"><span style="font-size: 18.0pt;">Lebanon was savagely pounded, leaving people roaming
the wreckage of Beirut in clouds of flies, terror in their eyes, their clothes
reduced to rags. Mothers howled, orphans sobbed, and the stench of rotting
corpses filled the air. </span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"> </p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"><span style="font-size: 18.0pt;">Cluster bombs leveled whole blocks. White phosphorous
burned people alive. Palestinian refugee camps were blasted to rubble, left
pockmarked with blackened craters that filled with dead bodies and other
debris. An officer in the U.N. peace-keeping force swept aside by the Israeli
attack on Rashidiyeh said, "It was like shooting sparrows with a
cannon." Asked why houses containing women and children were being
bombarded and bulldozed, an Israeli army officer explained that, "they are
all terrorists."</span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"> </p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"><span style="font-size: 18.0pt;">Surrounded by tanks, gunshots, and hysteria, one
hundred thousand people were left without shelter or food, roaming through
piles of wreckage. Blindfolded men, handcuffed with plastic bonds, were marched
away to concentration camps where they were tortured, humiliated, and murdered.
Their families were turned over to Phalangist patrols and Haddad forces
(Israeli allies), who torched homes and beat people indiscriminately. </span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"> </p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"><span style="font-size: 18.0pt;">At the United Nations, the United States gave its
customary blessing to Israeli savagery, vetoing a Security Council resolution
condemning Israel. </span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"> </p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"><span style="font-size: 18.0pt;">Much impressed by Israel's "purity of arms, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The New York Times</i> saluted the
"liberation" of Lebanon.</span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"> </p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"><span style="font-size: 18.0pt;">But it was a macabre "liberation." After
three months of relentless attack, the southern half of the country lay in
ruins. Even President Reagan, as ardent a fan of Israel as any of his
predecessors in the Oval Office, couldn't stomach more killing, and called
Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin to stop the "holocaust."
Offended at the president's use of this word, Begin nevertheless halted the
bombardment immediately.</span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"> </p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"><span style="font-size: 18.0pt;">An agreement between Israel, the U.S. and the PLO was
signed with security guarantees for the Palestinians. Yasir Arafat and his PLO
fighters left for Tunis. On September 16, in defiance of the cease fire, Ariel
Sharon's army circled the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila.
Israeli soldiers set up checkpoints and allowed truckloads of their Phalange
and Haddad allies into the Palestinian camps. The Phalangists came with old
scores to settle and a long list of atrocities against Palestinians already to
their credit. The Haddad forces acted as part of the Israeli Army and operated
under its command. </span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"> </p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"><span style="font-size: 18.0pt;">Perched on rooftops, Israeli soldiers watched through
binoculars during the day and lit up the sky with flares at night, guiding the
soldiers as they moved from shelter to shelter in the camps slaughtering the
defenseless refugees. In mid-massacre, Israeli Chief of Staff Rafael Eitan
congratulated the Phalangist command for having "carried out good
work," offered a bulldozer for scooping up corpses, and authorized the
killers to remain in the camp twelve more hours.<a href="#_edn4" name="_ednref" style="mso-endnote-id: edn;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;">[iv]</span></span></a></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"><span style="font-size: 18.0pt;"> </span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"><span style="font-size: 18.0pt;">On September 18 war correspondent Robert Fisk entered
the camps and described what he found there: </span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"><span style="font-size: 18.0pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">"Down every alleyway there were corpses - women,
young men, babies and grandparents - lying together in lazy and terrible
profusion where they had been killed or machine-gunned to death. . . In
the panic and hatred of battle, tens of thousands had been killed in this
country. But these people, hundreds of them, had been shot down unarmed . </span><span style="font-size: 18.0pt;">. . </span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">these were
women lying in houses with their skirts torn up to their waists and their legs
wide apart, children with their throats cut, rows of young men shot in the back
after being lined up at an execution wall. There were babies - blackened babies
because they had been slaughtered more than 24 hours earlier and their small
bodies were already in a state of decomposition - tossed into rubbish heaps
alongside discarded U.S. Army ration tins, Israeli army medical equipment, and
empty bottles of whiskey. . .. " </span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"> </p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">". . . Down a laneway to our right, no more than
50 yards from the entrance, there lay a pile of corpses. There were more than a
dozen of them, young men whose arms and legs had been wrapped around each other
in the agony of death. All had been shot at point-blank range . . . One
had been castrated . . . The youngest was only 12 or 13 years old." <a href="#_edn5" name="_ednref" style="mso-endnote-id: edn;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;">[v]</span></span></a></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"> </span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"><span style="font-size: 18.0pt;">Such were the results of Israel exercising its
"right to self-defense," just as the wholesale slaughter and
starvation of Gazans forty-two years later is rationalized on the same grounds.</span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"> </p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"><span style="font-size: 18.0pt;">The moral of the story is that no matter how
blindingly obvious its crimes are Israel is never guilty of anything because .
. . the Holocaust.</span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"> </p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"><span style="font-size: 18.0pt;">Forty-seven years ago the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">London Sunday Times </i>reported that Israel routinely tortures
Palestinians, a devastating revelation at the time. The scope of the torture,
said the Times, was so broad that it implicated "all of Israel's security
forces," and was so "systematic that it [could not] be dismissed as a
handful of 'rogue cops' exceeding orders." </span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"><span style="font-size: 18.0pt;"> </span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"><span style="font-size: 18.0pt;">Among the prisoner experiences detailed by the Times'
Insight team were being beaten and kicked, being set upon by dogs, having one's
testicles squeezed, having a ball-point pen refill shoved into one's penis, or
being raped with a stick and left bleeding from the mouth and face and anus.</span></p><p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"><span style="font-size: 18.0pt;"> </span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"><span style="font-size: 18.0pt;">Israel categorically denied the charges, but refused
to rebut, diverting to side issues and attacking Israeli lawyers who stooped so
low as to defend Arabs. Seth Kaplan in the staunchly liberal <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The New Republic</i> rose in defense of
Israeli torture, arguing that how a government treats its people "is not
susceptible to simple absolutism, such as the outright condemnation of torture.
One may have to use extreme measures - call them 'torture' - to deal with a
terrorist movement whose steady tactic is the taking of human life." <a href="#_edn6" name="_ednref" style="mso-endnote-id: edn;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;">[vi]</span></span></a>Of
course, every state in the world practicing administrative torture routinely
claimed it was fighting "terrorists," an infinitely elastic
designation in the hands of national security officials.</span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"> </p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"><span style="font-size: 18.0pt;">So what supposedly made Palestinians
"terrorists"? Mainly, that they resisted Israel's steady tactic of robbing,
swindling, torturing, and murdering all those who had been living in Palestine
long before Zionism even appeared on the scene. But Israel simply couldn't
publicly admit that Palestine was not what it told the world it was - <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">a land without a people for a people without
a land.</i> It had to keep torturing and killing Palestinians to induce them to
vacate the land, but it could never admit this. At the end of 1996, when the
Israeli Supreme Court authorized the torture of Palestinian prisoners, the
justices called it "moderate physical pressure," which sounds more
like massage than torture.<a href="#_edn7" name="_ednref" style="mso-endnote-id: edn;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;">[vii]</span></span></a></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"> </p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"><span style="font-size: 18.0pt;">Two major Middle East peace agreements have been
negotiated entirely under the prejudiced assumption that Palestinians are
terrorists to be neutralized, not an oppressed people entitled to its rights.
In neither Camp David nor Oslo was there any indication that Palestinian
grievances were to be seriously considered, much less honestly dealt with. Had
the obvious issues been faced with courage then, Gazans wouldn't be getting
slaughtered now. But they weren't, an outcome that could have been foreseen
just by looking at the people who produced the agreements. </span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"> </p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"><span style="font-size: 18.0pt;">The Camp David Treaty was negotiated by Egyptian
President Anwar Sadat, Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, and U.S. President
Jimmy Carter. </span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"> </p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"><span style="font-size: 18.0pt;">Sadat was a former Nazi collaborator whose idol was
the Shah of Iran, a U.S. client then moving at break-neck speed to Westernize
the country, in the process laying down a human rights record so appalling that
Amnesty International characterized it as "beyond belief." He was
shortly overthrown by the Iranian Revolution of 1979.</span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"> </p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"><span style="font-size: 18.0pt;">The year before Camp David Sadat had made his
"sacred mission" to Jerusalem to speak to the Knesset, opening the
way for peace. But he complied with Israeli Foreign Minister Moshe Dayan's
instructions to delete references to the PLO, and he never got off his knees
after that. At Camp David he threw himself on the goodwill of the United
States, striving for an agreement <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">so good
for Israel</i> that Begin would invite condemnation should he dare to reject
it. Dismissed as a traitor and a fool throughout the Arab world, he was
assassinated three years later.</span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"> </p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"><span style="font-size: 18.0pt;">Former head of the underground terrorist group Irgun,
Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin was proud of his role in blowing up 95
British and Arabs in the King David Hotel in 1946, as well as the slaughter of
over two-hundred Arab women, children and old men at Deir Yassin in 1948. In
WWII, the Irgun had offered to support the Nazis against the British. One of
Begin's first acts when he became Israeli Prime Minister was to issue a postage
stamp honoring Abraham Stern, whose group made the proposal. <a href="#_edn8" name="_ednref" style="mso-endnote-id: edn;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;">[viii]</span></span></a></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"><span style="font-size: 18.0pt;"> </span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"><span style="font-size: 18.0pt;">The last thing one could reasonably expect out of Prime Minister Begin's cabinet was peace. His military junta included five generals who
maintained cozy relations with apartheid South Africa and the blood-soaked
dictators Augusto Pinochet and Anastasio Somoza.</span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"> </p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"><span style="font-size: 18.0pt;">As for Begin's territorial ambitions, they were
expansive, to say the least. The former Irgun commander had been elected on a
platform calling for the annexation of the West Bank <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">and the East Bank</i> of the Jordan River, a goal that the Likud Party
has never renounced. He regarded the West Bank and Gaza not as occupied but as
liberated - from the indigenous Arabs to whom he felt they didn't rightfully belong,
and he called the land "Judea and Samaria," Biblical names for God's
gift to the Jews. He openly regarded the Palestinians as Israel's coolies,
corralling them into Bantustans even as he promised them full autonomy, which he
defined mystically as self-rule for people, but not for the land on which they
lived. <a href="#_edn9" name="_ednref" style="mso-endnote-id: edn;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;">[ix]</span></span></a></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"><span style="font-size: 18.0pt;"> </span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"><span style="font-size: 18.0pt;">The key figure at Camp David, of course, was U.S.
President Jimmy Carter, a fundamentalist Baptist and supposedly a neutral
mediator between Begin and Sadat. He confessed to having an "affinity for
Israel" based on its custodianship of the Holy Land, and regarded it as
"compatible with the teachings of the Bible, hence ordained by God." <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ordained by God!</i> He had "no
strong feelings about the Arab countries," but condemned the
"terrorist PLO." Begin he described implausibly as a man of integrity
and honor.</span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"> </p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"><span style="font-size: 18.0pt;">Carter instructed Sadat that unless his proposals were
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">patently fair to Israel</i>, which
regarded Arabs as subhuman, Begin would justifiably reject them. When Egypt's opening
proposals requested compensation for Israeli use of land and oil wells in the
occupied Sinai, free immigration to the West Bank, Israeli withdrawal from the
illegally occupied territories (including East Jerusalem), and a Palestinian
state, Carter was despondent at the "extremely harsh"
recommendations. <a href="#_edn10" name="_ednref" style="mso-endnote-id: edn;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;">[x]</span></span></a>Any treatment
of Palestinians other than as anonymous refugees to be absorbed and pacified in
colonial structures was apparently unimaginable extremism. </span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"> </p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"><span style="font-size: 18.0pt;">At the time, the PLO was the sole legitimate representative
of the Palestinian people, and its inclusion in negotiations was the only
possible basis for establishing Palestinian national rights and reaching real
peace. Nevertheless, Carter's national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski
summed up the U.S. stance at Camp David as "bye-bye PLO." The
Palestinians' nationalist aspirations were summarily dismissed, and a solution
for the Occupied Territories was postponed until future "autonomy
talks," to which the PLO would not be invited. This doomed any prospect of
peace.</span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"> </p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"><span style="font-size: 18.0pt;">Unsurprisingly, Camp David's imagined Palestinian
"autonomy" was a substitute for national liberation in the Accords,
and was fundamentally colonial. Israel was allowed to retain economic and
political power over the West Bank and Gaza, and the Israeli Defense Forces
were permitted to indefinitely remain. The Palestinians were essentially
granted municipal authority (to pick up the garbage?) provided it didn't
threaten Israeli "security." Prime Minister Begin openly declared that
he would never allow a Palestinian state on the West Bank.</span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"> </p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"><span style="font-size: 18.0pt;">It's hard to improve upon the summation of Camp David
provided by Fayez Sayegh, founder of the Palestine Research Center:</span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"> </p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">"A fraction of the Palestinian people (under
one-third of the whole) is promised a fraction of its rights (not including the
national right to self-determination and statehood) in a fraction of its
homeland (less than one-fifth of the area of the whole); and this promise is to
be fulfilled several years from now, through a step-by-step process in which
Israel is to exercise a decisive veto power over any agreement. Beyond that,
the vast majority of Palestinians is condemned to permanent loss of its
Palestinian national identity, to permanent exile and statelessness, to
permanent separation from one another and from Palestine - to a life without
national hope or meaning." <a href="#_edn11" name="_ednref" style="mso-endnote-id: edn;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;">[xi]</span></span></a></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"> </span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"><span style="font-size: 18.0pt;">Nevertheless, the United States applauded what it
somehow construed as the birth of peace in the Middle East, while Israel
proceeded to "annex" Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, tattoo the
Occupied Territories with Jewish settlements, carve up southern Lebanon, attack
Iraq, and bomb Palestinian refugee camps. <a href="#_edn12" name="_ednref" style="mso-endnote-id: edn;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;">[xii]</span></span></a>
</span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"><span style="font-size: 18.0pt;"> </span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"><span style="font-size: 18.0pt;">None of this was a surprise. According to Israeli
strategic analyst Avner Yaniv, the effect of Camp David's removing of Egypt
from the Arab military alliance was that "Israel would be free to sustain
military operations against the PLO in Lebanon as well as settlement activity
on the West Bank." <a href="#_edn13" name="_ednref" style="mso-endnote-id: edn;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;">[xiii]</span></span></a></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"><span style="font-size: 18.0pt;"> </span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"><span style="font-size: 18.0pt;">Five years after Israel had reduced southern Lebanon
to rubble Gaza rose in rebellion (the first intifada), and six years after <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">that</i> came the Oslo Accords, with the
White House announcing triumphantly for the second time that lasting Middle
East peace was at hand. But once again there was no peace. In accordance with
long-standing U.S.-Israeli rejectionism the Oslo Accords called for the
incorporation of Palestinian lands in a permanent colonial structure
administered by Israel. </span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"> </p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"><span style="font-size: 18.0pt;">In other words, after more than seventy years of
sacrifice and popular struggle for their national rights, the Palestinians were
triumphantly handed a micro-state with no power. A toothless "Palestinian
Authority" was set up in the West Bank. </span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"> </p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"><span style="font-size: 18.0pt;">Once again, Israel remained in possession of
everything that counted: East Jerusalem, the settlements, the economy, the
land, water, sovereignty, and "security." The Oslo settlement was
based on UN Resolution 242, which only recognized Palestinians as stateless
refugees, not as a people possessed of national rights. </span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"> </p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"><span style="font-size: 18.0pt;">Israel made no commitment to giving up its violence or
compensating the Palestinians for 45 years of conquest and dispossession. Yasir
Arafat renounced all nationalist aspirations and discarded Palestinian rights,
including the right to resist oppression. He accepted responsibility for guaranteeing
Israeli security, turning his people into police for their occupiers.</span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"> </p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"><span style="font-size: 18.0pt;">The Palestinians were granted nothing more than
"limited autonomy," with no guarantee of Palestinian security, no
Palestinian sovereignty, and no autonomous economy. Israeli companies were to
set up sweatshops in the Occupied Territories and Palestinians were to continue
supplying the $6-a-day labor. After years of granting concessions to Israel,
they were asked to wait three to five <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">more</i>
years until "final status" talks could determine what Israel's vague
references to "improvements" actually meant. </span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"> </p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"><span style="font-size: 18.0pt;">For the majority of Palestinians living in the
Diaspora, this represented the final act of robbery, nullifying years of
promises from the UN, Arab governments, and the PLO itself. </span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"> </p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"><span style="font-size: 18.0pt;">At the celebration of the Oslo Accords on the White
House lawn, Arafat, the conquered, thanked everyone for the agreement
suspending most of his people's rights, and delivered an emotionally sterile
speech as though he were reading out of a phone book. He barely mentioned the
Palestinians. </span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"> </p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"><span style="font-size: 18.0pt;">Yitzak Rabin, the conqueror, gave a long speech
detailing Israeli anguish, loss, and suffering involved in the conquest. He
promised that Israel would concede nothing on sovereignty and would keep the
River Jordan, the boundaries with Egypt and Jordan, the sea, the land between
Gaza and Jericho, Jerusalem, the roads, and the settlements. He did not
concede that Israel was, or ever had been, an occupying power. He made no
commitment to dismantling the maze of racist laws and repressive fixtures of
the Occupation. He said nothing about the thousands of Palestinians rotting in
Israeli jails. He expressed not a twinge of remorse for four-and-a-half decades
of ethnic cleansing and lies. <a href="#_edn14" name="_ednref" style="mso-endnote-id: edn;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;">[xiv]</span></span></a></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"> </p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"><span style="font-size: 18.0pt;">So the occupation of Palestine continued for years
more, severely restricting Palestinian movement, increasing Jewish colonization
of Arab land, and intensifying bureaucratic harassment. On September 28, 2000,
Ariel Sharon and a thousand Israeli soldiers touched off the second intifada by
invading the Al Aqsa mosque site in Arab Jerusalem. The next day Prime Minister
Ehud Barak ordered riot police to storm the compound where 20,000 Palestinians
were praying. Rocks were thrown and the police opened fire, killing seven and
wounding 220. Within days President Clinton dispatched the largest shipment of
attack helicopters to Israel in a decade. </span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"> </p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"><span style="font-size: 18.0pt;">Though portrayed by Israel apologists as
extraordinarily generous towards the Palestinians, Prime Minister Ehud Barak
never dismantled a settlement or freed a Palestinian prisoner during his entire
18 months in office. Like his predecessors, he refused to compromise on
settlements, borders, refugee rights, and Jerusalem. According to Robert
Malley, special assistant for Arab-Israeli affairs in the Clinton administration,
it is a myth that Israel had offered to meet "most if not all of the
Palestinians' legitimate aspirations," and equally a myth that the
"Palestinians made no concession of their own." In fact, Palestinians
expressed willingness to accommodate Jewish settlements on the West Bank,
Israeli sovereignty over Jewish neighborhoods in East Jerusalem, and a limit on
repatriation of Palestinian exiles, though <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">all
</i>of them were entitled to return. Malley stated that "no other Arab
party that has negotiated with Israel . . . ever came close to even considering
such compromises." </span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"> </p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"><span style="font-size: 18.0pt;">Meanwhile, Israel offered nothing and demanded
surrender, just as it always had. </span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"> </p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"><span style="font-size: 18.0pt;">According to Israeli military analyst Ze'ev Schiff,
the Palestinians were left with three options: (1) agree to the expanding
Occupation, (2) set up Bantustans, or (3) launch an uprising. </span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"> </p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"><span style="font-size: 18.0pt;">Palestinians chose to fight, and Israel pounded the
nearly defenseless civilian population with helicopter gunships, F-16s, tanks,
missiles, and machine guns. While systematically assassinating Palestinian
leaders, Israel cried "immoral" when its victims turned their bodies
into weapons in horrific suicide bombings at supermarkets, restaurants, pool
halls, and discotheques. Israeli propaganda blamed "hate teaching" by
the PLO, but the real hate teacher was the racist ideology that defined Palestinians
as "beasts walking on two legs" and "cockroaches in a
bottle," among other terms of endearment popular with Israeli leaders.<a href="#_edn15" name="_ednref" style="mso-endnote-id: edn;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;">[xv]</span></span></a>
This swelled the ranks of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade with volunteers who had
lost close relatives to the Israeli military.</span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"> </p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"><span style="font-size: 18.0pt;">Amidst the firestorm of moral indignation occasioned
by the suicide attacks, Israel never considered negotiating in good faith to
resolve the longstanding conflict, and the United States applied no pressure to
make them do so. Following in the footsteps of a long line of predecessors,
President George W. Bush heaped arms and aid on Israel, vetoed UN resolutions
calling for observers in the Occupied Territories, and continued funding the
ever-expanding Jewish settlements. With the entire world recoiling in shocked
outrage at Israel's pulverizing of the West Bank, he declared Ariel Sharon
"a man of peace." <a href="#_edn16" name="_ednref" style="mso-endnote-id: edn;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;">[xvi]</span></span></a></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"><span style="font-size: 18.0pt;"> </span></p>
<span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 18.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Post-Oslo the stealing of land and dynamiting of Palestinian homes
continued with the same justification as before: Jewish land was <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">redeemed</i>, Arab land was <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">unredeemed</i>. By the end of the
twentieth-century, over 80% of Palestine no longer belonged to Palestinian
Arabs. Under Clinton-Barak settlement construction had accelerated dramatically
and Jews received nearly seven times as much water as Arabs in the West Bank
and Gaza. Meanwhile, </span><span style="font-size: 18.0pt;">three hundred miles of Jews-only highways and bypass
roads integrated the settlements into Israel proper while dividing Palestinian
areas into enclaves of misery completely cut-off from the wider world. </span>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"> </p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"><span style="font-size: 18.0pt;">Increasing numbers of Israeli Arabs joined with the
Palestinians in the Occupied Territories to protest Jewish supremacy rooted in
nationality rights granting Jews exclusive use of land, better access to jobs,
special treatment in getting loans, and preferences for college admission,
among other unearned advantages. Military service brought even more benefits,
from which Palestinians were excluded. </span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"> </p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"><span style="font-size: 18.0pt;">Founded as a haven for Jews, Israel had become the
most dangerous place in the world for them to live. The constant war on
Palestinians that made this so was still described as self-defense, and the
crushing of their national culture was still the goal of "peace."
Orwell would have felt like an amateur. <a href="#_edn1" name="_ednref" style="mso-endnote-id: edn;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;">[i]</span></span></a></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"> </p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"><span style="font-size: 18.0pt;">Whatever differences President Biden and Prime Minister
Netanyahu may be having regarding tactics and media sound bites, the commitment
they share is to preserving the festering boil of apartheid Israel, rooted in
the conviction that Jews are a master race of chosen people destined to scrub
the Holy Land of unsightly Arabs and rule over Greater Israel forever.</span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"> </p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"><span style="font-size: 18.0pt;">The stench of death is its constant gift to the world.</span></p>
<div style="mso-element: endnote-list;"><br clear="all" />
<hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" />
<div id="edn" style="mso-element: endnote;"><br /></div>
</div>
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<div style="mso-element: footnote-list;"><br clear="all" />
<hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" />
<div id="ftn" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a href="#_ftnref" name="_ftn1" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;">[1]</span></span></a> </p>
</div>
</div>
<div style="mso-element: endnote-list;"><br clear="all" />
<hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" />
<div id="edn" style="mso-element: endnote;">
<p class="MsoEndnoteText"><a href="#_ednref" name="_edn1" style="mso-endnote-id: edn;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;">[i]</span></span></a> <span style="font-size: 18.0pt;">Joel Kovel, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Overcoming
Zionism</i>, (Pluto, 2007) p. 224</span></p>
<p class="MsoEndnoteText"> </p>
</div>
<div id="edn" style="mso-element: endnote;">
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"><a href="#_ednref" name="_edn2" style="mso-endnote-id: edn;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;">[ii]</span></span></a>
<span style="font-size: 18.0pt;">Noam Chomsky, <i>Hopes and Prospects</i>, (Haymarket,
2010), p. 160</span></p>
<p class="MsoEndnoteText"> </p>
</div>
<div id="edn" style="mso-element: endnote;">
<p class="MsoEndnoteText"><a href="#_ednref" name="_edn3" style="mso-endnote-id: edn;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;">[iii]</span></span></a> <span style="font-size: 18.0pt;">“American Efforts For Peace In The Middle East,
1919-1986, quoted in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Anti-Zionism:
Analytical Reflections</i>, Tekiner, Abed-Rabbo, Mezvinsky, eds. (Amana Books,
1988) p. 195</span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoEndnoteText"> </p>
</div>
<div id="edn" style="mso-element: endnote;">
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"><a href="#_ednref" name="_edn4" style="mso-endnote-id: edn;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;">[iv]</span></span></a>
<span style="font-size: 18.0pt;">Noam Chomsky, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Fateful Triangle</i>, (South End, 1983) pps. 155, 359-71, Rosemary
Sayigh, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Too Many Enemies</i>, (Zed, 1994)
pps. 117-121</span></p>
<p class="MsoEndnoteText"> </p>
</div>
<div id="edn" style="mso-element: endnote;">
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"><a href="#_ednref" name="_edn5" style="mso-endnote-id: edn;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;">[v]</span></span></a>
<span style="font-size: 18.0pt;">21Robert Fisk is quoted from
his book <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Pity The Nation</i> in Susan
Abulhawa, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Mornings In Jerusalem</i>,
(Bloomsbury, 2010) pps. 224-6. Abulhawa is a novelist, but quotes verbatim passages
from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Pity The Nation</i>. </span></p>
<p class="MsoEndnoteText"> </p>
</div>
<div id="edn" style="mso-element: endnote;">
<p class="MsoEndnoteText"><a href="#_ednref" name="_edn6" style="mso-endnote-id: edn;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;">[vi]</span></span></a> <span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;">[vi]</span></span><span style="font-size: 18.0pt;">Noam Chomsky, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Towards
A New Cold War</i>, (Pantheon, 1973-1982) p. 454n., Alfred Lilienthal, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Zionist Connection</i>, (Dodd Mead,
1978) pps. 178-84.</span></p>
<p class="MsoEndnoteText"> </p>
</div>
<div id="edn" style="mso-element: endnote;">
<p class="MsoEndnoteText"><a href="#_ednref" name="_edn7" style="mso-endnote-id: edn;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;">[vii]</span></span></a> <span style="font-size: 18.0pt;">Eduardo Galeano, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Upside
Down - A Primer For The Looking Glass World</i>, (Henry Holt, 1998), p. 88.</span></p>
<p class="MsoEndnoteText"> </p>
</div>
<div id="edn" style="mso-element: endnote;">
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"><a href="#_ednref" name="_edn8" style="mso-endnote-id: edn;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;">[viii]</span></span></a>
<span style="font-size: 18.0pt;">Alfred Lilienthal, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Zionist Connection</i>, (Dodd Mead, 1978) p. 153.</span></p>
<p class="MsoEndnoteText"> </p>
</div>
<div id="edn" style="mso-element: endnote;">
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"><a href="#_ednref" name="_edn9" style="mso-endnote-id: edn;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;">[ix]</span></span></a>
<span style="font-size: 18.0pt;">Edward Said, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Question of Palestine</i>, (Vintage, 1979) pps. 14-15, 44, 57, 138, 195, 204,
206-7; Alfred Lilienthal, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Zionist
Connection</i>, (Dodd Mead, 1978) pps. 144, 191, 279, 351, 398, 683. Noam
Chomsky, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Fateful Triangle</i>, (South
End, 1983), p. 95n.; Jimmy Carter, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Keeping
Faith: Memoirs of a President</i>, (Bantam, 1982) pps. 334, 347)</span></p>
<p class="MsoEndnoteText"> </p>
</div>
<div id="edn" style="mso-element: endnote;">
<p class="MsoEndnoteText"><a href="#_ednref" name="_edn10" style="mso-endnote-id: edn;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;">[x]</span></span></a> <span style="font-size: 18.0pt;">Jimmy Carter, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Keeping
Faith - Memoirs of a President</i> (Bantam, 1982) pps. 274-5, 338-40; Alfred
Lilienthal, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Zionist Connection</i>,
(Dodd Mead, 1978) p. 651.</span></p>
<p class="MsoEndnoteText"> </p>
</div>
<div id="edn" style="mso-element: endnote;">
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"><a href="#_ednref" name="_edn11" style="mso-endnote-id: edn;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;">[xi]</span></span></a>
<span style="font-size: 18.0pt;">Edward Said, The Question of Palestine,
(Vintage, 1979), p. 212</span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"> </span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"> </p>
<p class="MsoEndnoteText"> </p>
</div>
<div id="edn" style="mso-element: endnote;">
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"><a href="#_ednref" name="_edn12" style="mso-endnote-id: edn;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;">[xii]</span></span></a>
<span style="font-size: 18.0pt;">Edward Said, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Politics of Dispossession</i>, (Chatto and Windus, 1994), p. 244; Larry Shoup, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Carter Presidency and Beyond</i>,
(Ramparts, 1980) pps. 120-3) </span></p>
<p class="MsoEndnoteText"> </p>
</div>
<div id="edn" style="mso-element: endnote;">
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"><a href="#_ednref" name="_edn13" style="mso-endnote-id: edn;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;">[xiii]</span></span></a>
<span style="font-size: 18.0pt;">Noam Chomsky, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">World Orders Old and New</i>, (Columbia, 1994) p. 213. </span></p>
<p class="MsoEndnoteText"> </p>
</div>
<div id="edn" style="mso-element: endnote;">
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"><a href="#_ednref" name="_edn14" style="mso-endnote-id: edn;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;">[xiv]</span></span></a>
<span style="font-size: 18.0pt;">Edward Said, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Pen and the Sword</i>, (Common Courage, 1994) p. 110; Edward Said, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Politics of Dispossession</i>, (Chatto
and Windus, 1994) p. xxxiv, xxxv-xxxvii; Christopher Hitchens in Edward Said, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Peace and Its Discontents</i>, (Random
House, 1993) p. 3.</span></p>
<p class="MsoEndnoteText"> </p>
</div>
<div id="edn" style="mso-element: endnote;">
<p class="MsoEndnoteText"><a href="#_ednref" name="_edn15" style="mso-endnote-id: edn;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;">[xv]</span></span></a><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;">[xv]</span></span>
<span style="font-size: 18.0pt;">John Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy</i>,
(Farrar Strauss and Giroux, 2007, p. 89) </span></p>
<p class="MsoEndnoteText"> </p>
</div>
<div id="edn" style="mso-element: endnote;">
<p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"><a href="#_ednref" name="_edn16" style="mso-endnote-id: edn;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;">[xvi]</span></span></a>
<span style="font-size: 18.0pt;">Stephen Shalom, "The Israel-Palestine
Crisis," <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Z Magazine</i>, May 2002;
Edward Said, "The Desertion of Arafat," <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">New Left Review</i>, September-October 2001; Rezeq Faraj, "Israel
and Hamas," <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Covert Action
Information Bulletin</i>, Winter 2001; Rania Masri, "The Al Aqsa Intifada
- The consequence of Israel's 34-year occupation,” Noam Chomsky <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">International Socialist Review</i>,
November-December 2001.</span></p><p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"><span style="font-size: 18.0pt;"> </span></p><p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"><a href="https://www.blogger.com/#_ednref" name="_edn1" style="mso-endnote-id: edn;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;">[xvii]</span></span></a>
<span style="font-size: 18.0pt;">Max Elbaum, interview with Phyllis Bennis,
"For Jews Only: Racism Inside Israel," <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">ColorLines</i>, December 15, 2000. Edward Herman, "Israel's Ethnic
Cleansing," <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Z Magazine</i>, April
2001. Rene Backmann, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A Wall In Palestine</i>,
(Picador, 2010), p. 170.</span></p><p style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"><span style="font-size: 18.0pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoEndnoteText"> </p>
</div>
</div>
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{page:Section1;}</style></p>Michael Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17631483577908372312noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7272525777827091486.post-2667109852330633602024-02-20T12:21:00.000-08:002024-02-20T12:21:43.770-08:00Satan of Moscow Seems Remarkably Like A Human Being<p><span style="font-size: large;">In the wake of Tucker Carlson's interview with Vladimir Putin, it's a good time to review the characterization of the Russian head of state as a genocidal maniac incapable of reason, the usual portrayal of official enemies of the United States . . . </span></p><h3 class="post-title entry-title" itemprop="name">
<span style="font-size: large;"><a href="https://legalienate.blogspot.com/2022/09/imperial-demon-watch-vladimir-putin.html">Imperial Demon Watch: Vladimir Putin </a></span>
</h3>
<div class="post-header">
</div>
<h3 class="post-title entry-title" itemprop="name">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
</h3>
<div class="post-header">
</div>
<div class="post-body entry-content" id="post-body-4872497010603288424" itemprop="description
articleBody">
<p><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
</p>
<div class="post-header">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span><span><i>Russia wants a peaceful
Ukraine, Americans prefer one at war.</i></span></span></span></div><span style="font-size: large;"><span>
</span></span><p><span style="font-size: large;"><span><span>---Israel Shamir, "Putin
Prefers a Bad Peace"<br />
</span></span></span></p><span style="font-size: large;"><span>
</span></span><p><span style="font-size: large;"><span><span>by Michael K. Smith</span></span></span></p><span style="font-size: large;"><span>
</span></span><p><span style="font-size: large;"><span><span>Even before the current round
of nuclear brinksmanship in Ukraine, U.S.-Russian relations
had descended to a lower point than U.S.-Soviet relations
reached during the Cuban Missile Crisis. We've been courting
nuclear annihilation for some time.<br />
</span></span></span></p><span style="font-size: large;"><span>
</span></span><p><span style="font-size: large;"><span><span>Those who would like to exempt
Washington from blame now will have to account for U.S.
hostility towards Russia and the USSR, both of which long
pre-date anything that could remotely be construed as
provocation by Putin. After all, the United States invaded and
occupied the former USSR from 1918-1920, maintained a harshly
belligerent stance all during the Cold War, and unleashed a
plague of financial locusts to loot state enterprises
throughout the former USSR as soon as the Berlin Wall came
down, while enrolling the newly "independent" states into an
anti-Moscow military alliance that extended to the very
borders of Russia. Standards of living plunged, death rates
soared, diplomacy suffocated, and Boris Yeltsin's proposed
U.S.-Russian partnership was immediately forgotten. </span></span></span></p><span style="font-size: large;"><span>
</span></span><p><span style="font-size: large;"><span><span>If a China-Russia alliance had
installed hostile governments in Canada and Mexico at the end
of WWII, after which all of Latin America went full Communist
while narco-terrorists began killing Anglo Texans and banning
English, it's unlikely any blame would fall on
Washington if it attempted to resolve the situation by force,
as it surely would. So we can dismiss pious moral
grandstanding about the "evil" Putin as the boundless
hypocrisy it transparently is.<br />
</span></span></span></p><span style="font-size: large;"><span>
</span></span><p><span style="font-size: large;"><span><span>Furthermore, we should note
that the rhetoric employed in this mad rush to terminal war is
curious and irrational. For example, labeling Putin a "war
criminal" actually legitimizes war, since it implies there is
some ethical or at least inoffensive way to conduct mass
slaughter, which is all that modern warfare is. Transparent
attempts to miss this point by labeling massacre "collateral
damage" should be dismissed with ridicule.<br />
</span></span></span></p><span style="font-size: large;"><span>
</span></span><p><span style="font-size: large;"><span><span>And it can hardly be repeated
too often that the USA is far and away the guiltiest
"criminal" where war is concerned, having by far the greatest
war industry ever seen in human history headquartered on its
soil and forming the heart of its economy (the Defense
Industrial Base), which it has used to fight an endless series
of wars directly or by proxy throughout the world for the past
eighty years. No other contemporary or historical power has
achieved anything close to this commitment to mass killing.<br />
</span></span></span></p><span style="font-size: large;"><span>
</span></span><p><span style="font-size: large;"><span><span>So it is absurd to define the
situation in Ukraine as a uniquely evil instance of military
aggression by Vladimir Putin. In a world of asymmetrical power
with no effective world government, technically sophisticated
powers always have the upper hand in violent conflicts with
their neighbors, which are inevitable. And, of course, they
insist on having friendly neighbors, preferably cooperative,
though submissive will do. </span></span></span></p><span style="font-size: large;"><span>
</span></span><p><span style="font-size: large;"><span><span>Hostile neighbors no one
accepts. How much of the Americas does the United States
permit be part of a hostile military alliance? According to
the Monroe Doctrine, not one square inch. How did Washington
react to Cuba installing Soviet nuclear missiles 90 miles from
Florida in 1962? (Spoiler alert: it nearly blew up the
planet.) What did the media do when Rafael Correa jokingly
proposed an Ecuadorian military base in Miami to balance
Washington's Mena Air Base in Ecuador? It laughed, though the
punchline is far from a joke.<br />
</span></span></span></p><span style="font-size: large;"><span>
</span></span><p><span style="font-size: large;"><span><span><span>A
majority of the world is fed-up with the hypocrisies of
unilateral world order under U.S. control, and is not averse
to accommodating an emerging China-Russia-India based new
world order. </span>Yes, the current war in Ukraine is
causing further expansion of NATO (supposedly a good thing),
but this, in turn, is devouring resources needed to stave off
European economic collapse, while an emerging
Russia-China-India alliance accelerates the collapse of the
U.S. dollar as the world's reserve currency. </span></span></span></p><span style="font-size: large;"><span>
</span></span><p><span style="font-size: large;"><span><span>Meanwhile, in Saudi Arabia, a
U.S. client state, Biden's phone calls in the early stages of
the current war went unanswered while Putin's were cordially
received. Got respect? <br />
</span></span></span></p><span style="font-size: large;"><span>
</span></span><p><span style="font-size: large;"><span><span>Our mind managers warn us of
the horrors of forced neutrality via Finlandization, and urge
instead that we strive for regime change in Moscow. Strange.
Finland is a success story, having achieved balance and
stability via social democratic prosperity. On the other hand,
U.S.-fostered regime change converts countries into
corpse-strewn wastelands on a regular basis. Think
Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Libya. Trying out this strategy
on Russia obviously carries a high risk of nuclear
annihilation. What stupendous prize awaits us if we
successfully navigate this potentially species-terminating
risk? The preservation of "our interests and our values," as
Hillary Clinton so loves to say.</span></span></span></p><span style="font-size: large;"><span>
</span></span><p><span style="font-size: large;"><span><span>In other words, converting
whole cities to radioactive ash is a small price to pay for
preserving our favorite abstractions. Got it.<br />
</span></span></span></p><span style="font-size: large;"><span>
</span></span><p><span style="font-size: large;"><span><span>We hear Putin is a strongman,
an authoritarian, a totalitarian dictator, though we also hear
people are fleeing Russia in droves. Why are they at liberty
to do that in a "dictatorship"? <br />
</span></span></span></p><span style="font-size: large;"><span>
</span></span><p><span style="font-size: large;"><span><span>By the way, was Abraham Lincoln
also a dictator, he who suspended <i>habeas corpus</i>,
jailed journalists, shut down hundreds of newspapers, and
locked up thousands of political enemies? And what about
Woodrow Wilson, who destroyed unions, imprisoned editors,
closed newspapers, and assumed dictatorial control of finance,
the press, farms, and commerce and transportation? </span></span></span></p><span style="font-size: large;"><span>
</span></span><p><span style="font-size: large;"><span><span>Or maybe FDR was a dictator,
who imprisoned over 100,000 U.S. citizens without charge and
burned more civilians alive in a single night than either
atomic bomb killed six months later? </span></span></span></p><span style="font-size: large;"><span>
</span></span><p><span style="font-size: large;"><span><span>What do we actually mean when
we call Putin a dictator? That the media isn't free? But a
major part of Russian, state-owned media has long transmitted
pro-Western, anti-Russian content, paid for by Russian
taxpayers. Try and find taxpayer-funded, Putin-sympathetic
content that reaches mass audiences in the U.S. Good luck.</span></span></span></p><span style="font-size: large;"><span>
</span></span><p><span style="font-size: large;"><span><span>What about free speech? Well,
the Russian people have never had it, and therefore don't care
much about it. Americans have it in theory, but find its
political potency nullified in practice by tsunamis of state
and corporate propaganda. The most popular use of speech in
the contemporary U.S. is not to reveal errors of argument and
evidence, but to denounce others for being "idiots." How free
are we then?<br />
</span></span></span></p><span style="font-size: large;"><span>
</span></span><p><span style="font-size: large;"><span><span>Is Putin a nationalist? In
recent years state-enterprise CEOs in Russia were seen earning
millions of rubles a year while everyone else had to tighten
their belts. The Russian central bank bought U.S. Treasury
Bonds and supported the U.S. dollar at the expense of the
ruble. Where is the nationalism in such policy?<br />
</span></span></span></p><span style="font-size: large;"><span>
</span></span><p><span style="font-size: large;"><span><span>Is Putin anti-democratic? The
annexation of Crimea was overwhelmingly supported by Crimeans
(97% vote). <br />
</span></span></span></p><span style="font-size: large;"><span>
</span></span><p><span style="font-size: large;"><span><span>Didn't Putin back Assad? Yes,
because he was the legitimate head of state in Syria, while
the alternative was rule by Islamic terrorists supported by
the United States and Israel, but no sane person in Syria.
Israel wants the dismemberment of Syria in order to keep the
occupied Golan Heights forever. </span></span></span></p><span style="font-size: large;"><span>
</span></span><p><span style="font-size: large;"><span><span>Much demonology is spouted from
the simple fact that Putin is the former head of the K.G.B.
But Putin is critical of the Bolsheviks and is not himself a
Communist. Nevertheless, he considers the demise of the USSR a
"world tragedy," since overnight twenty-five million Russians
found themselves foreigners living in fourteen new countries.
<br />
</span></span></span></p><span style="font-size: large;"><span>
</span></span><p><span style="font-size: large;"><span><span>Is Putin anti-Israel? Well,
Daesh oil flowed to Israel, and Putin said nothing, valuing
his relations with then Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Israel, of course, supported Al-Nusra, and they were declared
terrorists by the United Nations. But Israel is admirable by
definition, because . . . the Holocaust. Strange, though, that
Putin gets no credit for aiding the Holy State.<br />
</span></span></span></p><span style="font-size: large;"><span>
</span></span><p><span style="font-size: large;"><span><span>We are told that no threat to
the Russian state exists, so therefore no cause for war in
Ukraine exists. But the Russian state and everything else can
be blown off the map in a matter of minutes. The fact that the
world is wired up to explode in a nuclear holocaust has been
an American initiative from the beginning, and its dominant
enemy has been (1) the USSR, and (2) Russia. NATO is by
definition hostile to Russia, and lost even an ostensible
reason for existing in 1991 with the dissolution of the Warsaw
Pact. Why is it still around? Because Russia is still around,
and Washington doesn't like that fact. Its efforts to achieve
regime change in Moscow can and may end human civilization,
which isn't likely to improve matters for Ukrainians. </span></span></span></p><span style="font-size: large;"><span>
</span></span><p><span style="font-size: large;"><span><span>Is Putin an extremist? No.
There is nothing radical in him. He has no plans for social
re-arrangement. He merely seeks to have Russia respected as an
independent, wealthy, and "great" nation, and yes, he wants
Russia to be treated as an equal. But he also wants to fit
into the world, not rebel against it. These modest ambitions
are a threat to US/NATO hegemony and world dominance, which
represent the triumph of Western extremism.<br />
</span></span></span></p><span style="font-size: large;"><span>
</span></span><p><span style="font-size: large;"><span><span>Keeping things in perspective,
Putin is a Russian patriot. He wants to see Russia be a
strong, healthy country where people lead good lives, are
happy, and Russia occupies a prominent position
internationally. He's not a chauvinist or reactionary
nationalist. <br />
</span></span></span></p><span style="font-size: large;"><span>
</span></span><p><span style="font-size: large;"><span><span>The Orange Revolution was
totally unexpected in Russia, which can't really be said to
have a political opposition because there is no one who
embodies and represents the views of a Russian majority.
Having said that, Putin has been something of the "golden boy"
in Russian politics for the past generation. He is good at
addressing issues and speaking in clear terms that average
people understand. The initial "democracy" of the Yeltsin
period has been curtailed, but the middle class has developed
rapidly on Putin's watch. </span></span></span></p><span style="font-size: large;"><span>
</span></span><p><span style="font-size: large;"><span><span>Yeltsin spoke to the U.S.
Congress in 1992, and offered Washington a partnership in
which each nation would treat the other as an equal. For
thirty years now the U.S. has rejected this. In the year of
the U.S./NATO attack on Serbia (1999), Yeltsin protested,
"Russia is not Haiti. You can't treat us like Haiti."*
Washington considers Haiti a "shit-hole" country, as one of
America's more honest presidents memorably put it. <br />
</span></span></span></p><span style="font-size: large;"><span>
</span></span><p><span style="font-size: large;"><span><span>Washington is incapable of
giving Russia its due diplomatic respect. According to the
reigning "Wolfowitz Doctrine," the U.S. should dominate the
world and not allow any rivals for power to emerge. Russia
therefore is and should be treated as a second rate power.
This is a non-negotiable position. </span></span></span></p><span style="font-size: large;"><span>
</span></span><p><span style="font-size: large;"><span><span>Naturally, Putin does not
accept this, and never accepted the U.S. view that Russia lost
the Cold War. Russia saw the end of the Cold War as an
opportunity for them to become part of the international
community. At the core of Russian beliefs is that Russia must
be a Great Power. The Russian people have never doubted that
Russia is a great country. Having their noses rubbed in the
Wolfowitz Doctrine year after year is insulting, degrading,
and an open invitation to mutual suicide.<br />
</span></span></span></p><span style="font-size: large;"><span>
</span></span><p><span style="font-size: large;"><span><span>The USSR's forcing its rule
onto Eastern Europe was a big mistake, though understandable
given two Western invasions in a generation that left much of
the country a smoldering ruin. The U.S. ignoring the
possibility of Russia "coming back" to international
prominence was a big American mistake. Washington continues to
think of Russia as at most a regional power whose wants and
needs can be ignored. But no nuclear-armed country can be
ignored.<br />
</span></span></span></p><span style="font-size: large;"><span>
</span></span><p><span style="font-size: large;"><span><span>At the end of the Cold War the
U.S. promised not to expand NATO - not one inch - to the East,
a promise it quickly violated. </span></span></span></p><span style="font-size: large;"><span>
</span></span><p><span style="font-size: large;"><span><span>Now we wait to learn if our
three-decade refusal to concede Russia minimal diplomatic
respect and cooperation will eventuate in nuclear war. </span><br />
</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: large;"><span><br /></span></span></p></div>
<p><span style="font-size: large;"><span>* </span><span><span><span>Vladimir
Pozner, "The Present State of Russian-American Relations," Monterrey
Summer Symposium, Middlebury Institute of International Studies, July
24, 2020</span></span></span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;"> </span></p>Michael Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17631483577908372312noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7272525777827091486.post-3684358134215093262024-01-22T21:59:00.000-08:002024-01-23T13:08:00.603-08:00Netanyahu Snubs Biden On Two-State Solution<p><span style="font-size: large;"><b>Netanyahu</b>: "From the river to the sea, Israel must reign free."</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;"><b>Biden</b>: "Well, Gazans can have a micro-state with no power, can't they?"</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;"><b>Netanyahu</b>: "Drink my diarrhea, goy."</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;"><b>Biden</b>: (placating) . . . "I'm an optimist. I see the glass as half-empty."</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;"><b>Netanyahu</b>: "I'll fix that. From my ass to your mouth."</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;"><b>Biden</b>: ". . . burp . . . "<br /></span></p>Michael Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17631483577908372312noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7272525777827091486.post-12410092324819883012024-01-17T19:58:00.000-08:002024-01-17T19:58:09.475-08:00Trans-Class Pride Celebration<p>
</p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11.0pt;">Trans-Class Pride Celebration
Planned</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11.0pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11.0pt;">By Frank Scott</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11.0pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11.0pt;">A spokesperson for
Trans-Class-Pride said a massive parade and rally for the hundreds of millions
of working class and poor Americans who feel rich but are disrespectfully not
allowed to be what they feel is planned for a weekend soon. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11.0pt;">“ A day would be much too
short for all our members to be able to participate and we may need a week
rather than a weekend’ said cis-working class member George Melissa Mulatto who
delivers for amazon but feels like the people he delivers to - a member of the
upper middle class.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11.0pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11.0pt;">“We are sick, tired and fed
up with being denied the American dream and forced to live the American
nightmare of the gig economy at best and street poverty at worst” said the
poorly dressed but academically rich even though only having been to college to
make deliveries and clean toilets spokesperson, whose pronouns are homeless/houseless.
</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11.0pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11.0pt;">‘When we march together we
feel stronger and at peace without seeing therapists which we cant afford or
using drugs which we cant afford either.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11.0pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11.0pt;">“I have a good friend who is
a woman with a penis and shim gets to use toilets of shims choosing, play on
men’s sports teams and is respectfully treated as trans female. If shim can
have their feelings acknowledged why cant we? Just because some of us have no
bank accounts is no reason to deny us credit or because we are without wardrobes
deny us money for rent. After all, Americans spend billions on our animals and
even call them members of our families. Cant we give that much respect to the
majority of us Americans who struggle to get by let alone the substantial
minority of us who have no shelter and are forced to live under conditions many
of us would not tolerate for our pets. We may no more be middle class than my
friend with a penis is an actual female but we deserve at least the trans
rights being enjoyed by so many citizens. How about trans class Americans who
are possessed of testicles, vaginas, both or neither but nonetheless are
members of the human race who deserve at the very least what a tiny minority of
us have: equality of transism!”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11.0pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11.0pt;">Congress is considering
legislation to ban any public display of trans-classism unless it can be shown
that all trans classists are not inspired by Chinese or Russian or Socialist or
Communist or Catholic or Jewish or Agnostic or Atheistic propaganda and all have
testacies, vaginas, both or neither and firmly believe in the American
constitution and the right of people to spend trillions of social dollars on
war, hundreds of billions on pets, while poverty, injustice and other
marketable commodities remain available to all Americans without
discrimination.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11.0pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11.0pt;"> </span></p><br /><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11.0pt;"> </span></p>
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{page:WordSection1;}</style></p>frank scotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06210560169236136762noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7272525777827091486.post-13787000443255967242024-01-05T18:16:00.000-08:002024-01-05T18:16:20.099-08:00ANTISOCIAL NOTES ON WHAT PASSES FOR SOCIAL REALITY<p>
</p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">ANTISOCIAL
NOTES ON WHAT PASSES FOR SOCIAL REALITY</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Many
of us are so mentally abused by the lies of ruling power that we believe only
the most far fetched tales of plots seemingly conducted by forces of evil
invisible to all but the anointed who can spot false flags a mile away but are
blind to political economics staring them in the face.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Reduced to an endless mob of consumers buying
bullets, cosmetics, pizza, fashion, beer or pet food, and a parade of proles
carrying plastic bags filled with merchandise, garbage or dog shit, most of us
are innocently swept up in whatever trend of the moment comes via our networks
of believability. And all those networks are directly or indirectly owned by
the same financial powers which have nothing to do with fantastic schemes or
the illuminati but everything to do with what is quite visible, material and
threatens the world we all live in whether compelled to wave fabric painted red
white and blue or coerced to carry mentally false banners denoting a sub-human
status forced upon us as alleged minorities. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14.0pt;"> </span></p>
<table align="left" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="MsoNormalTable" style="mso-cellspacing: 0in; mso-padding-alt: 0in 0in 0in 0in; mso-table-anchor-horizontal: column; mso-table-anchor-vertical: paragraph; mso-table-left: left; mso-table-lspace: 3.0pt; mso-table-rspace: 3.0pt; mso-yfti-tbllook: 1184; width: 103%;">
<tbody><tr style="mso-yfti-firstrow: yes; mso-yfti-irow: 0;">
<td style="padding: 0in 0in 0in 0in; width: 100.0%;" width="100%">
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 14.25pt; mso-element-anchor-horizontal: column; mso-element-anchor-vertical: paragraph; mso-element-frame-hspace: 3.0pt; mso-element-wrap: around; mso-element: frame; mso-height-rule: exactly;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">We are legitimately
upset about the dangerous decline in relations among Americans, not least
over the police controversies but we need to remember the police are not
vigilantes who appoint themselves to uphold law. They are state workers who
have nothing to do with creating low income communities of higher crime than
affluent communities - at least on the streets where people suffer drive by
shootings and more while the affluent don’t even have streets - but police
are sent to regulate reality when social breakdowns occur. If we don't
un-create low incomes, poverty, and all the other injustices which help
create if not necessitate street crime, and the larger crimes of the people
in the suites who rule and run society, things will get much worse. Defund
the police? We need to defund the pentagon, get the hell out of the rest of
the world unless invited by the people to visit in friendship, and stop
swallowing mythology about how everyone is evil and plotting to destroy
America when the evil and plotting originates right here.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 14.25pt; mso-element-anchor-horizontal: column; mso-element-anchor-vertical: paragraph; mso-element-frame-hspace: 3.0pt; mso-element-wrap: around; mso-element: frame; mso-height-rule: exactly;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 14.25pt; mso-element-anchor-horizontal: column; mso-element-anchor-vertical: paragraph; mso-element-frame-hspace: 3.0pt; mso-element-wrap: around; mso-element: frame; mso-height-rule: exactly;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Among the more
destructive aspects of the private profit market religion of capitalism that
keeps us at each others throats rather than acting as a democratic majority
and transforming our political economy into something that’s serves all of us
rather than only some at the expense of others is the information and thought
control that teaches us nonsense about the world and murderous lies about our
relations to foreigners and one another. Thus we are reduced to alleged
minorities- identity groups while being subjected to mind menacing horror
that describes war as some sort of natural way of living. Ruling power
minorities reign supreme by keeping people divided, as in the cases of human
beings suffering the outrageous realities that deny comfortable survival for
all by creating luxury for only some while the majority are forced into
competition and resentment for one another instead of joining forces and
taking on ruling minorities before they destroy all of us.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 14.25pt; mso-element-anchor-horizontal: column; mso-element-anchor-vertical: paragraph; mso-element-frame-hspace: 3.0pt; mso-element-wrap: around; mso-element: frame; mso-height-rule: exactly;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 14.25pt; mso-element-anchor-horizontal: column; mso-element-anchor-vertical: paragraph; mso-element-frame-hspace: 3.0pt; mso-element-wrap: around; mso-element: frame; mso-height-rule: exactly;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">These two areas, the
division of humans into allegedly different races when there is only one
human race, and rationalizing mass murder as some natural act of life because
some identity group or other is an enemy of some other identity group though
the only identity group that should concern us is the small minority that
owns and controls material reality while we are used to seeking a better life
for disabled polish American gay Jews of color while not noticing the
enormous numbers of people without food clothing or shelter who represent the
identity group all of us belong to: the human race.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 14.25pt; mso-element-anchor-horizontal: column; mso-element-anchor-vertical: paragraph; mso-element-frame-hspace: 3.0pt; mso-element-wrap: around; mso-element: frame; mso-height-rule: exactly;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-element-anchor-horizontal: column; mso-element-anchor-vertical: paragraph; mso-element-frame-hspace: 3.0pt; mso-element-wrap: around; mso-element: frame; mso-height-rule: exactly;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14.0pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14.0pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Individuals are racists,
brutes, sadists, killers, rather than social policies and social influences and
cultural training, as in grunts raping and killing, cops killing unarmed
p.o.c…never the result of social always the result of individual evil, whether
at the bottom, middle or top…the leader is a demon-monster-killer, the cop is a
demon monster killer, the soldier is a demon monster killer…at worst, they
commit “war” crimes, which like hate crimes that mean there must be a love
crime, insure that there most be a legal war and by george we have it…angelic
folks in business suits, with law and other degrees, figure out how to commit
mass murder the politically correct way…</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">of course,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>grunts and other monsters carry it out under
the command of a demon, for the losing side, while heroic figures operating
under the sway of an angelic leader are the winners…</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">and big Pharma operates re
the above…you have a problem which must/can/should be solved by drugs..us? no
problems at all…you have a.d.d, depression, hdba, neurosis, xxfuckedup
disorder, etc… but just because millions like you have the same problem, means
it is exclusively individual, demanding a personal solution meaning a drug
administered to thousands, millions, whatever number makes the biggest
profits…if you can afford it and/or have coverage you can go to a shrink –
legal- and get your prescription for the drug that will ease your social
dilemma and buy it – legally- from a legal dope peddler – hmo, Walgreens, rite
aid, blue cross, etc…if you can’t afford it and/or you have no coverage, you
can go an illegal drug dealer – or undocumented pharmacist – and get the stuff
you need to ease your social dilemma…both sides of the legal coin deal with
individual problems having nothing to do with society, but they are dealt with
differently based on economic power, but all of that, too, is individual and
has nothing to do with any social arrangements, especially class membership and
economic status…</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">war state/capital
state/police state cure? democratic state, when the state becomes an “us”, not
an “it”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">when we cannot pay for the
car, the house, whatever, what do the private insurance companies, banks,
financial institutions do? They “repo”, as in repossess…who insures the banks?
What is fdic? The taxpayers insure the banks? We insure one another, as well as
most especially them? When the banks under private control cannot pay, the
people should, need to, must, “repo” the banks!</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Gated communities at one end
with split levels, moats , sun decks and armed guards & gated communities
at the other end with bars, cell blocks, isolation holes and armed guards
…america…</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">An environmental, political,
economic and growing mental breakdown is being attributed to every conceivable
outside force or source but its core which threatens ultimate destruction of
humanity itself. Capitalism didn’t just bring us a pandemic which has killed
millions but has long sustained vicious poverty and warfare which have killed
millions in pursuit of lucrative market profits that benefit fewer each day and
threaten more each stormy overheated undernourished experience being suffered
by the poorest among us first, as always, but all of us, eventually. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;"> </span></p>
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{page:WordSection1;}</style></p>frank scotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06210560169236136762noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7272525777827091486.post-61085894631970391662023-12-06T18:40:00.000-08:002023-12-06T18:47:15.057-08:00Feminist Imperialism Liberates No One<p> <span style="font-size: large;">"The entanglement of the 'liberating women' agenda with America's endless and ever-expanding War on Terror gave birth to 'securo-feminism,' a term described by the scholar Lila Abu-Lughod to indicate the collusion between international women's rights advocates and the global security enterprise referred to as CVE (countering violent extremism). Securo-feminism holds that fighting against terrorism is in itself a kind of feminism. The national shock and grief around the 911 attack located this foreign war in a very different category from any that America had fought before. The threat was not abstract or hypothetical, and it was not happening somewhere far away. It felt tangible, immediate, personal. . . . . </span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">"Americans promoted a 'liberation lie' that positioned them as the saviors of downtrodden Afghan women. From this superior perch, white liberal feminists imagined gender-based violence as something found only in faraway lands. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">"In 2002, a coalition of women's organizations sent an open letter to President George W. Bush, asking him to 'take emergency action to save the lives and secure the future of Afghan women.' Its signatories included Eleanor Smeal, president of the Feminist Majority Foundation in Virginia, together with other notable feminists such as Gloria Steinem, Eve Ensler, Meryl Streep and Susan Sarandon. U.S. women overwhelmingly support the war, they noted, because 'it will liberate Afghan women from abuse and oppression.' The National Organization of Women (NOW) put out statements in support of the war and its allegedly 'feminist' objectives. Everyone in the mainstream American and British establishment including white feminist heroines like eventual Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, signed on wholeheartedly to the cause of fighting the War on Terror via any means that the military, the CIA, or the president thought necessary. The disconnect between the practice of American brutality and preaching of American saviordom managed to escape notice. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">"Securo-feminists were not simply invested in fighting the War on Terror, they were also committed to using American military power to promote American values all over the world. Just as imperial feminism during the British colonial era had convinced themselves of their own benevolence in improving the lives of native women, so too did securo-feminists believe that they were 'saving' Afghanis and Iraqis from themselves.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">"Securo-feminism . . . bound white American feminists to the neoimperial and neoliberal project of nation-building around the world . . . .Caught in its fevers, American feminists did not question loudly enough the wisdom of exporting feminism through bombs and drones. Trickle-down feminism, everyone assumed, would miraculously fast-forward the realization of a gender-equal, free market world created in the self-image of America." </span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">" . . . Notably, there was no mention of investing in Afghan women's political participation, perhaps because if Afghan women had political freedom they would prioritize ending the American occupation over anything else." <br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">-------- Rafia Zakaria, <i>Against White Feminism - Notes on Disruption</i>, pps. 84-7 <br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></p>Michael Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17631483577908372312noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7272525777827091486.post-76290609860318578052023-12-02T20:34:00.000-08:002023-12-04T10:58:22.384-08:00Nutcase Netanyahu Calls For War With Everyone<p> <span style="font-size: large;">"If you take away the Soviet Union and its chief proxy the PLO, international terrorism would collapse."</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">--------Benjamin Netanyahu, 1982 <br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">"If you take out Saddam, Saddam's regime, I guarantee you, that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region."</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">--------Benjamin Netanyahu, 2002 <br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">"Obviously, we'd like to see a regime change, at least I would, in Iran, just as I would like to see (one) in Iraq. The question now is a practical question, it's not a question of whether Iraq's regime should be taken out, but <i>when</i> should it be taken out. It's not a question of whether you'd like to see a regime change in Iran, but how . . . ."</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">--------Benjamin Netanyahu, 2002</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;"> <br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;"><b>Congressman Dennis Kucinich</b>: "Are there other nations that you would recommend the United States launch pre-emptive strikes upon at this point?"</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;"><b>Netanyahu</b>: "The answer is, categorically, yes, is Iraq and Iran. But a third nation, by the way, is Libya, as well. Libya is trying very rapidly to build an atomic bomb capability." (2002)</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">"We must all stand together to stop Iran's march of conquest, subjugation and terror."</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">--------Benjamin Netanyahu, 2015</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">Source:</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">Video clip aired on Jimmy Dore (You Tube) December 2, 2023. See "Netanyahu Says He Wants Wars With Iran, Iraq, Libya and Russia"<br /></span></p>Michael Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17631483577908372312noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7272525777827091486.post-1291365241933028472023-11-30T13:59:00.000-08:002023-11-30T13:59:03.800-08:00Jewish Apartheid State Opposed From the Beginning<p><span style="font-size: large;">A STATEMENT TO THE PEACE CONFERENCE*</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">"As a future form of government for Palestine will undoubtedly be considered by the approaching Peace Conference, we, the undersigned citizens of the United States, unite in this statement, setting forth our objections to the organization of a Jewish State in Palestine as proposed by the Zionist Societies in this country and Europe and to the segregation of the Jews as a nationalistic unit in any country. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">"We feel that in so doing we are voicing the opinion of the majority of American Jews born in this country and of those foreign born who have lived here long enough to thoroughly assimilate American political and social conditions. The American Zionists represent, according to the most recent statistics available, only a small proportion of the Jews living in this country, about 150,000 out of 3,500,000. (American Jewish Yearbook 1918, Philadelphia.) </span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">"At the outset we wish to indicate our entire sympathy with the efforts of Zionists which aim to secure for Jews at present living in lands of oppression a refuge in Palestine or elsewhere, where they may freely develop their capabilities and carry on their activities as free citizens.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">"But we raise our voices in warning and protest against the demand of the Zionists for the reorganization of the Jews as a national unit, to whom, now or in the future, territorial sovereignty in Palestine shall be committed. This demand not only misinterprets the trend of the history of the Jews, who ceased to be a nation 2000 years ago, but involves the limitation and possible annulment of the larger claims of Jews for full citizenship and human rights in all lands in which those rights are not yet secure. For the very reason that the new era upon which the world is entering aims to establish government everywhere on principles of true democracy, we reject the Zionistic project of a 'national home for the Jewish people in Palestine.' <br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">"Zionism arose as a result of the intolerable conditions under which Jews have been forced to live in Russia and Roumania. But it is evident that for the Jewish population of these countries, variously estimated at from six to ten millions, Palestine can become no homeland. Even with the improvement of the neglected condition of this country, its limited area can offer no solution. The Jewish question in Russia and Roumania can be settled only within those countries by the grant of full rights of citizenship to Jews. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">"We are all the more opposed to the Zionists, because they, themselves, distinctly repudiate the solely ameliorative program. They demand and hail with delight the 'Balfour Declaration' to establish 'a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine,' <i>i.e.</i>, a home not merely for Jews living in countries in which they are oppressed, but for Jews universally. No Jew, wherever he may live, can consider himself free from the implications of such a grant. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">"The willingness of Jews interested in the welfare of their brethren to aid in redeeming Palestine from the blight of centuries of Turkish misrule, is no acceptance of the Zionist project to segregate Jews as a political unit and to re-institute a section of such a political unit in Palestine or elsewhere.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">"At the present juncture in the world's affairs when lands that have hitherto been subjected to foreign domination are to be recognized as free and independent states, we rejoice in the avowed proposal of the Peace Congress to put into practical application the fundamental principles of democracy. That principle, which asserts equal rights for all citizens of a state, irrespective of creed or ethnic descent, should be applied in such a manner as to exclude segregation of any kind, be it nationalistic or other. Such segregation must inevitably create differences among the sections of the population of a country. Any such plan of segregation is necessarily reactionary in its tendency, undemocratic in spirit and totally contrary to the practices of free government, especially as these are exemplified by our own country. We therefore strongly urge the abandonment of such a basis for the reorganization of any state."</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">OBJECTIONS TO SEGREGATION OF JEWS AS A POLITICAL UNIT</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">"Against such a political segregation of the Jews in Palestine or elsewhere we object:</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">1. "Because the Jews are dedicated heart and soul to the welfare of the countries in which they dwell under free conditions. All Jews repudiate every suspicion of a double allegiance, but to our minds it is necessarily implied in and cannot by any logic be eliminated from the establishment of a sovereign State for the Jews in Palestine.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">"By the large part taken by them in the great war (WWI), the Jews have once and for all shattered the base aspersions of the Anti-Semites which charged them with being aliens in every land, incapable of true patriotism and prompted only by sinister and self-seeking motives. Moreover, it is safe to assume that the overwhelming bulk of the Jews of America, England, France, Italy, Holland, Switzerland and the other lands of freedom, have no thought whatever of surrendering their citizenship in these lands in order to resort to a 'Jewish homeland in Palestine.' As a rule those who favor such a restoration advocate it not for themselves but for others. Those who act thus, and yet insist on their patriotic attachment to the countries of which they are citizens, are self-deceived in their profession of Zionism and under the spell of an emotional romanticism or of a religious sentiment fostered through centuries of gloom. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">2. "We also object to political segregation of Jews for those who take their Zionistic professions seriously as referring not to 'others' but to themselves. Granted that the establishment of a sovereign Jewish State in Palestine would lead many to emigrate to that land, the political conditions of the millions who would be unable to migrate for generations to come, if ever, would be made far more precarious. Roumania - despite the pledges of the Berlin Treaty - has legally branded her Jews as aliens, though many are descended from families settled in that country longer than the present Roumanian government has existed. The establishment of a Jewish State will manifestly serve the malevolent rulers of that and other lands as a new justification for additional repressive legislation. The multitudes who remain would be subject to worse perils, if possible, even though the few who escape might prosper in Palestine.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">3. "We object to the political segregation also of those who might succeed in establishing themselves in Palestine. The proposition involves dangers, which, it is manifest, have not had the serious consideration of those who are so zealous in its advocacy. These dangers are adverted to in a most kindly spirit of warning by Sir George Adam Smith, who is generally acknowledged to be the greatest authority in the world on everything connected to Palestine, either past or present. In a recent publication, <i>Syria and the Holy Land</i>, he points out that there is absolutely no fixity to the boundaries of Palestine. These have varied greatly in the course of the centuries. The claims to various sections of this undefined territory would unquestionably evoke bitter controversies. 'It is not true,' says Sir George, 'that Palestine is the national home of the Jewish people and of no other people.' 'It is not correct to call its non-Jewish inhabitants "Arabs," or to say that they have left no image of their spirit and made no history except in the Great Mosque.' 'Nor can we evade the fact that Christian communities have been as long in possession of their portion of this land as ever the Jews were.' 'These are legitimate questions,' he says, 'stirred up by the claims of Zionism, but the Zionists have not yet fully faced them.'</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">"To subject the Jews to the possible recurrence of such bitter and sanguinary conflicts which would be inevitable, would be a crime against the triumphs of their whole past history and against the lofty and world-embracing visions of their great prophets and leaders.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">4. "Though these grave difficulties be met, still we protest against the political segregation of the Jews and the re-establishment in Palestine of a distinctively Jewish State as utterly opposed to the principles of democracy which it is the avowed purpose of the World's Peace Conference to establish.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">"Whether the Jews be regarded as a 'race' or as a 'religion,' it is contrary to the democratic principles for which the world war was waged to found a nation on either or both of these bases. America, England, France, Italy, Switzerland and all the most advanced nations of the world are composed of representatives of many races and religions. Their glory lies in the freedom of conscience and worship, in the liberty of thought and custom which binds the followers of many faiths and varied civilizations in the common bonds of political union. A Jewish State involves fundamental limitations as to race and religion, else the term 'Jewish' means nothing. To unite Church and State, in any form, as under the old Jewish hierarchy, would be a leap backward of two thousand years.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">"'The rights of other creeds and races will be respected under Jewish dominance,' is the assurance of Zionism. But the keynotes of democracy are neither condescension nor tolerance, but justice and equality. All this applies with special force to a country like Palestine. That land is filled with associations sacred to the followers of three great religions, and as a result of migration movements of many centuries contains an extraordinary number of different ethnic groups, far out of proportion to the small extent of the country itself. Such a condition points clearly to a reorganization of Palestine on the broadest possible basis.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">5. "We object to the political segregation of the Jews because it is an error to assume that the bond uniting them is of a national character. They are bound by two factors: First, the bond of common religious beliefs and aspirations and, secondly, the bond of common traditions customs, and experiences, largely, alas, of common trials and sufferings. Nothing in their present status suggests that they form in any real sense a separate nationalist unit.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">"The reorganization of Palestine as far as it affects the Jews is but part of a far larger issue, namely, the constructive endeavor, to secure the emancipation of the Jews in all the lands in which they dwell. This movement, inaugurated in the eighteenth century and advancing with steady progress through the western lands, was checked by such reactionary tendencies as caused the expulsion of the Poles from Eastern Prussia and the massacre of Armenians in Turkey. As directed against Jews these tendencies crystallized into a political movement called Anti-Semitism, which had its rise in Germany. Its virulence spread (especially) throughout eastern Europe and led to cruel outbreaks in Roumania and elsewhere, and to the pogroms of Russia with their dire consequences.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">"To guard against such evils in the future, we urge that the great constructive movement, so sadly interrupted, be reinstituted and that efficient measures be taken to insure the protection of the law and the full rights of citizenship to Jews in every land. If the basis of the reorganization of governments is henceforth to be democratic, it cannot be contemplated to exclude any group of people from the enjoyment of full rights.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">"As to the future of Palestine, it is our fervent hope that what was once a 'promised land' for the Jews may become a 'land of promise' for all races and creeds, safeguarded by the League of Nations which, it is expected, will be one of the fruits of the Peace Conference to whose deliberations the world now looks forward so anxiously and so full of hope. We ask that Palestine be constituted as a free and independent state, to be governed under a democratic form of government recognizing no distinctions of creed or race or ethnic descent, and with adequate power to protect the country against oppression of any kind. We do not wish to see Palestine, either now or at any time in the future, organized as a Jewish State."</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">*Handed to President Wilson on behalf of the signers by Congressman Julius Kahn on March 4th, 1919, for transmission to the Peace Conference at Paris. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">1. The statement was prepared conjointly by the Rev. Dr. Henry Berkowitz, of Philadelphia, Mr. Max Senior, of Cincinnati, and Professor Morris Jastrow, Jr., of the University of Pennsylvania.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;"> </span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">Source: <i>Anti-Zionism - Analytical Reflections</i>, Amana Books, 1988, pps. 341-349<br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;"> </span> <br /></p>Michael Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17631483577908372312noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7272525777827091486.post-26530230179737406072023-11-27T15:18:00.000-08:002023-12-06T22:18:56.199-08:00Genocide Isn't About Mass Killing - It's More Identity Politics<p><span style="font-size: large;">Norman Finkelstein is all over the media recently; he even got a solo appearance on Piers
Morgan. While it's wonderful to see him get the attention his brilliant 40-year
investigation of Israel-Palestine deserves, he nearly always does
something irritating as well . . . Yesterday he was interviewed by
Krystal Ball on <i>Breaking Points,</i> and he dismissed with contempt the line
we've been hearing the past six weeks, i.e., "The October 7 attacks
were the greatest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust." Finkelstein
snorted and replied, "What the hell do 1400 deaths have to do with the
Holocaust?" He accused Israel of always "dragging in" the Holocaust as
moral backing for its endless outrages against the Palestinians, but if that
disproportion (1400 to 6 million) is absurd, can't a similar argument be
made that 15,000 Gazans killed, less than one percent of the Gazan
population, cannot constitute genocide, whatever Israel's intentions? </span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">Too much of the legal definition of genocide hangs on
intent, which is not likely of much concern to the victims of - take your
pick - massacre, ethnic cleansing, extermination, genocide, slaughter,
etc. If Israeli attacks in Gaza today constitute a genocide, whereas European colonizers' wiping out of
97%-99% if the indigenous populations of the Americas is NOT genocide,
as few talking heads think it is, then massive killing is really not the
central issue defining "genocide," and we need to start saying so. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">By the way, if Israel were to agree to a permanent cease-fire in return for the sterilization of all Palestinian women of child-bearing age, would that be a peace proposal or more genocide?<br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">In any event, it does not appear that
Israel's intent in the current massacre has anything to do with
genocide, if that word is taken to mean utter annihilation. It's ethnic cleansing, which is not a synonym for genocide,
though it's often treated as though it were. Jewish supremacists want to keep killing
Gazans until international horror forces open the Rafa crossing so the
despised Gazans can be dispersed throughout Egypt and the Gulf States.
"Transfer," it's called in Zionist commentary, and that goal has been a
constant from the beginning. Every time there's a "war," Israel takes
more land and drives more Arabs off it. A land without a people for a people without shame.<br /></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: large;">Finkelstein also dropped into his conversation with Krystal Ball the claim that "10,000
Jews a week were gassed at Auschwitz," which, if true, likewise makes the charge of
genocide in Gaza seem pretty absurd by comparison. In case you're
wondering, here's the current genocide scorecard, according to various experts in the topic:<br /></span></p>
<p><b><span style="font-size: large;">Gaza 2023: under 1% killed, definitely genocide.</span></b></p>
<p><b><span style="font-size: large;">Indians 1500-1900 98% killed, NOT genocide</span></b></p>
<p><b><span style="font-size: large;">European Jews 1933-1945 - 66% killed, the worst genocide ever, don't even try to compare it to anything else.</span></b></p>
<p><span style="font-size: large;">One wishes that there were some sense in this, but alas, it appears there is not. And
Finkelstein always plays into the idea that his being the son of Holocaust survivors is what makes his voice relevant, even as he
stresses that the only thing that matters is the facts and a logical
accounting of them. Consistency, please, could we please just have some
consistency, once in a while, even just as a holiday treat?</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">Remember also that genocide experts claimed a generation ago that Slobodan Milosevic was guilty of it in the war over the break-up of Yugoslavia, though that was a three-way ethnic fight with massacres on all sides. Furthermore, Germany was said to be redeeming its guilt for the Holocaust by bombing Belgrade, just as the Nazis had done!</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">So let's abstain from easy conclusions that "genocide scholars" are an intellectual fire department come to deliver us from evil. More likely, they're capitalism's latest branding exercise to keep us forever at each other's throats.<br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;"> </span></p>Michael Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17631483577908372312noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7272525777827091486.post-63432403072580634752023-11-23T17:29:00.000-08:002023-11-23T17:29:54.984-08:00Bulletin! Zionists Have Known They Were Lying From The Beginning<p> <span style="font-size: large;">"Why should the Arabs make peace? If I was an Arab leader, I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country. Sure, God promised it to us, but what does that matter to them? Our God is not theirs. We come from Israel, it's true, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to them? There has been anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: we came here and stole their country. Why should they accept that?</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">--------First Prime Minister of Israel David Ben Gurion </span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">Source:</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;"><i>Anti-Zionism, Analytical Reflections</i> (Amana Books, 1988), p. 135<br /></span></p>Michael Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17631483577908372312noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7272525777827091486.post-88556545307672070042023-11-18T15:34:00.000-08:002023-11-18T22:02:10.667-08:00What Really Happened on October 7?<p><span style="font-size: large;">"You want to know what happened on October 7 that doesn't appear in the press? Here's what happened, according to Israeli sources. It was a one-time raid, by several thousand Hamas fighters, chosen at a relatively young age, because they've lost their sisters or their brothers or mothers or cousins or fathers in prior Israeli wars against them. So they chose them because they were so motivated that way - for revenge. Number two, they were unemployed, and they felt hopeless, they had no will to live anymore, and in that (Palestinian) culture when you're unemployed you're going to have a hard time getting married and raising a family, so they sent them over there. Hamas and others are probably stunned that they even got so far. And it was a homicide-suicide mission. They knew they were going to die, and so they started shooting anything they saw, whether it was soldiers, a party going on, civilians in their homes, until they were wiped out. Some of them got back with hostages, and, of course, there are seven thousand hostages in Israeli prisons, the Palestinians, because they are abducted in order to extract information from their relatives in Gaza and the West Bank, that's an old practice,, and they control extended families that way, so that's why we - Bruce Fein and I, teach them - Biden - to have a hostage-to-hostage exchange, in order to start a process of reconciliation and resolution of that conflict over there. But on terms of the attack the Israeli government (1) after the attack said they counted 1600 Hamas bodies that they killed in the shoot-out on October 7. And that's more than the estimated Israelis that were killed by these Hamas fighters. So you can see that there's something wrong with the numbers here. And about one hundred of the Israeli fourteen hundred were, by the way, migrant workers. They were Thai migrant workers, Polish migrant workers, and Arab Bedouins working in the orchards - innocently - and they were killed savagely. So this idea that Hamas is an existential threat to Palestine is absurd. It was a one-time raid that caught the military napping, and they're never going to get over the border again no matter what they do. So that's why we've got to stop this attempt to treat this whole war as if it's Israel's war of survival. It's nothing of the sort."</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">-----Ralph Nader, interview with Briahna Joy Gray, Bad Faith podcast, 11/16/23<br /></span></p>Michael Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17631483577908372312noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7272525777827091486.post-61372554184577003902023-11-17T19:27:00.000-08:002023-11-17T19:27:23.599-08:00Humanity’s Most Critical Test: Surviving Global Capitalist Savagery<p><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 21.33333396911621px; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;">Humanity’s Most Critical Test: Surviving Global Capitalist Savagery</span>
</p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 16.0pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 16.0pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 16.0pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 16.0pt;">“The present system of
production is self-destructive; the present course of human civilization is
suicidal”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 16.0pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 16.0pt;">Barry Commoner</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 16.0pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 16.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The increasing threats posed by capitalist economics that bring luxurious
splendor to some only by creating grotesque misery for others have increased to
become immediate rather than long-term problems for all of us and not just some
of us. The present mass murders taking place in Israel and Ukraine are
immediate problems for tens of millions but the profit seeking assault on all
of nature puts all humans in terrible jeopardy. Cataclysmic capital’s reduction
of the planet to domination by a pro-profit anti-community west under control
of the USA since the end of world war two is coming to a close. This is a
situation that can bring a rebirth of humanity, a multipolar world out from
under the deadly weight of imperial rules enforced by a uni-polar minority
claiming a form of master race status while reducing the majority to peonage
for most while a relative handful live in luxury and a large group of its servants
enjoy physical if not mental comfort. But it can lead to an immediate, complete
and total destruction of the human race in a nuclear holocaust provoked by western
leadership that even brain transplants might not help, or a longer range
breakdown of humanity’s support system of origin: nature itself.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 16.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 16.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 16.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 16.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The present crisis brought on by Israel’s long theft and
domination of Palestine to supposedly atone for the dreadful German assault on
European Jews by totally demolishing Palestinian society that had absolutely
nothing to do with past euro-Jewish suffering which has seen – for the first
time – a bloody retaliatory assault on Israeli citizenry such as has been
performed on Palestinians since the birth of a stolen nation. This has led to
the most blatant attack not only on the bodies of the people in the region but
on the consciousness of those who have been kept blessedly ignorant of material
conditions and are now having their minds raped by western propaganda which in
the present labels everything and anything as fascist or communist or racist
for simply demanding equality among all and ending the supremacy of some of the
most morally degenerate leaders in all history.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 16.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 16.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">While U.S. taxpayers are lulled into a belief that a bastardized
form of market democracy in which those with the greatest buying power rule awards
us some form of superiority over other humans, we are paying billions to kill
Russians in alleged defense of the Ukraine and billions more to sustain Israeli
apartheid rule in Palestine. Greater numbers of citizens than ever before,
though still a minority in America, are protesting the bastardization of language,
politics and economics that can call mass murder by anything but its name. Thus
we have “genocide” and “war crime” label-synonyms attached to the reality of
mass murder, long a profit-making endeavor for imperial capitalist America,
which covers its crimes with occasional contributions to the well being of suffering
children after having murdered their parents. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 16.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 16.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Authority and its subjects struggle to attempt balance between
mass murder and mass mind control when both must be overcome to bring about any
hope for the full flowering of humanity and the achievement of peace, social
justice and better lives for all and not just favored-by- themselves minorities
which trust in biblical fable and mass murderous military power to act as
humans supposedly chosen by deities to reign over all of nature.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 16.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 16.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 16.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Race is only one of the lies leading to separation of humans who
originated in primitive communistic tribes of hunter-gatherers who shared and
cooperated in order to survive, which is what we must relearn in order to have
a future. When the hunt was successful all shared in the meat and when not they
shared what was gathered. After millennia we advanced (?) to a system which
transformed earth into real estate while bringing about wonderful material
reality for some but only while destroying lives and other aspects of nature
for many more. Just as slavery was great for many but dreadful for most,
present day capitalism has advanced the life styles of millions but only by
reducing billions to poverty, bigotry, social injustice and worse. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 16.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 16.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The present explosion in Israel with Palestinians dying by margins
of ten to one after they murdered Israelis in number for the first time has
seen a reaction globally and especially in America of opposition carefully
stated as being against all violence but especially reacting to the bigoted
savagery Palestinians have been forced to endure since 1948 when they lost
their homeland and lives due to European savagery which they had nothing to do
with by any stretch of idiocy or bigotry.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 16.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 16.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The present butchering of Palestinians is only the latest outrage
rationalized as necessary to stop lower human forms of allegedly weaker races
from being allowed to act as equals and achieve freedom said to be the sole
possession of those who bless themselves with holiness while cursing the world
with mass murder. The racial basis for most of this brutality is among the
biggest lies perpetuated by supposed superior beings to rationalize all forms
of human degradation made excusable by supposed children of gods in all their
forms.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 16.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The solution to racism is to end the evil stupidity that socially
creates it and face reality. There is only one human race. Rulers, especially
capitalists, create divisions among people in order to create profits and prevent
democracy, but it is long past time to wake up and smell the bullshit. There is
no tall race or short race or yellow race or white race but only ruling powers
that have forced those thoughts into captive minds to keep humanity unaware of
our racial unity. All people are people of color and only a tiny group of us -
albinos - have no mescaline and thus lack any color. Out of more than 8 billion
humans there are some 200 thousand albinos and they are also human, suffering
serious disabilities but still very much humans like all of us. Our sometimes
broad differences are national, linguistic and ethnic but all of us share the need
for food, clothing and shelter, no matter our skin tones, languages, cultures
or reproductive organs. The class divisions that allow some to lavish in
privilege while serving rulers are the serious divisions that must be overcome
but racial differences are about as real as the Easter bunny, Santa Claus and
all the other myths like poisoned vaccines and secret plots by one or another
race that make as much sense as picking your nose to perform a self lobotomy.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 16.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 16.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">If the hundreds of billions spent on mass murder rationalized as
war and only seen as a degenerate social reality when performers do not murder
in the proper form their rulers dictate so they, the rulers, can continue feeling
superior while counting profits, were used for humanity’s sake, peace, social
justice, equality and all the things most humans wish for could be reality. The
present human nightmare as living reality will continue until and unless there
is a mass awakening among a global and not just a national majority that
cooperation for public good is absolutely necessary for there to be any future
for all of us. That means the end of a so-called free market of private profiteers,
which will help bring about a global community of truly free, and equal human
beings, housed instead of being homeless, well fed instead of going hungry, and
at peace in and among ourselves.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 16.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 16.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The continued pursuit of private profit at the market which
demands that humans must produce market forces in order to find food, clothing,
shelter and any and all other things that can create decent lives will mean the
ultimate destruction of humanity and nature, no matter what minority led
majorities may still believe. The ongoing slaughters in Europe and the middle
east are business as usual and their attendant horror mean more profits for the
billionaire minority at most dreadful expense of the eternally-so far- gulled
majority.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 16.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 16.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Democracy means power of all the people to benefit all the people.
Capitalism means continued destruction of humanity and our foundation, nature.
It must end so that we can return to our roots as cooperating humans or we will
end as a race, no matter what national or identity group we have been mentally
tortured to believe in. All of us or none of us. Let’s put that too a global
vote instead of accepting the national choice between political employees of
the ruling minorities and their multi -billion dollar mass murder economy. Then
we can truly speak of “our” democracy, and face a future of hope.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 16.0pt;"> </span></p>
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{page:WordSection1;}</style></p>frank scotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06210560169236136762noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7272525777827091486.post-34262926390740003322023-11-17T11:27:00.000-08:002023-11-20T12:03:24.895-08:00Osama bin Laden Goes Viral - A Look Back At What He Said<p><span style="font-size: small;"> <span style="font-style: italic;">How angry America gets when it attacks people and those people resist!</span><br /><br />-----------Osama bin Laden, December 1998<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">How
can they hope to be blessed with security while they are dishing out
destruction, devastation, and murder on our people in Palestine and
Iraq?</span><br /><br />-----------Osama bin Laden, December 16, 2004</span><span style="font-size: large;"><br /><br />His political awakening dates from the early 1970s, and especially 1973, when a U.S. airlift helped
Israel turn the tide in the so-called Yom Kippur War. Egypt and Syria
had overrun Israeli defenses and its vaunted Bar-Lev line at the
beginning of the war, leading a stunned Tel Aviv to hint that it might
resort to nuclear weapons if the U.S. didn't save the day for the Jewish
state. By the time Washington's intervention helped deal the Arabs another
bitter defeat, sixteen-year-old Osama had already stopped watching cowboy shows and wearing Western clothes (except at school, where it was
required). He "would sit in front of the television and weep over the
news from Palestine."*<br /><br />The immediate cause of the war was
Israeli "development" of the Northeastern Sinai, which involved the
forcible removal of Arab farmers from their lands. U.S. support for
Israeli annexation of large parts of the Occupied Territories and its
refusal to respond to Anwar Sadat's peace overtures, made war
inevitable. For bin Laden, it made sympathetic consideration of Western
culture impossible.<br /><br />It was the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in
1982, which killed 20,000 people, overwhelmingly civilians, that planted
in bin Laden the seed of revenge. In a November 2004 video he recalled
the carnage, the "blood and severed limbs, women and children sprawled
everywhere. Houses destroyed along with their occupants and high rises
demolished over their residents . . ." He longed to strike back. "As I
looked at those destroyed towers in Lebanon, it occurred to me to punish
the oppressor in kind by destroying the towers in America, so that it
would have a taste of its own medicine and would be prevented from
killing our women and children. On that day I became sure that the
oppression and intentional murder of innocent women and children is a
deliberate American policy."<br /><br />A decade before the release of this
video, bin Laden had been stripped of his Saudi citizenship (1994) for
his continued harsh criticism of the Saudi royal family. He wrote a
letter to the Chief Mufti, the foremost juridical authority in the
Kingdom, calling his endorsement of the 1993 Oslo Accords an
"astonishing juridical decree," a betrayal of the word of God and the
community of the faithful. Like millions of other Arabs, bin Laden was
anguished at the contemptuous treatment Palestinian Arabs continually
received at the hands of the West, and saw no reason why it should
continue.<br /><br />Bin Laden's letter argued flat out that the Jews that
came to Palestine were not indigenous to the region: "The current Jewish
enemy is not an enemy settled in his own original country fighting in
its defense until he gains a peace agreement, but an attacking enemy."
The only proper course of action, therefore, was to wage jihad, both for
the sake of God and "so that Palestine may be completely liberated and
returned to Islamic sovereignty." The Oslo Agreement, which nullified
Palestinian national rights, converting the PLO to a municipal
authority, was a patent fraud: ". . . the alleged peace that the rulers
and tyrants are falling over themselves to make with the Jews is nothing
but a massive betrayal, epitomized by their signing of the documents of
capitulation and surrender of the Holy City of Jerusalem and all of
Palestine to the Jews, and their acknowledgement of Jewish sovereignty
over Palestine for ever."<br /><br />In a March, 1997 interview with Robert
Fisk of the <i>London Independent</i>, bin Laden again made clear that Israel
was a primary grievance. Referring to the Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi
Arabia the year before, he said: "The explosion in al-Khobar did not
come as a direct reaction to the American occupation, but as a result of
American behavior against Muslims, its support of Jews in Palestine and
of the massacres of Muslims in Palestine and Lebanon - of Sabra and
Chatila and Qana - and of the Sharm el-Sheikh conference." Sabra and
Chatila was a 1982 massacre of over a thousand Palestinian refugees by
Israel's Phalangist Christian allies in Lebanon; Qana was a U.N. base
attacked by Israel in 1996, in which roughly a hundred Lebanese were
killed; Sharm el-Sheikh was an "anti-terrorism" conference in which Bill
Clinton accused Hamas and Hizbollah of terrorism but said nothing of
Israel's far greater violence. Events like these merged Israel and the
U.S. in bin Laden's mind. ""For us there is no difference between the
American and Israeli governments or between the American and Israeli
soldiers."<br /><br />Four months after the 1998 attacks on the U.S.
Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, which Bin Laden disclaimed
responsibility for, he returned to the theme of the betrayal of
Palestine: "Every time a king meets a president they say they have
'discussed the Palestinian issue,' but over half a century a clear
picture has emerged: they have abandoned the <i>mujahidin</i> in Palestine. . .
they have given a guilty verdict on those lions whose fathers and
brothers have been killed, imprisoned, tortured, and persecuted . . . . I
don't know what people are waiting for after this clearest of
betrayals, and after the shameful way in which the Arab rulers have
acted in the interests of the Jews or America."<br /><br />An interesting
side note on the Nairobi Embassy bombing concerns a young Arab
questioned by F.B.I. investigator Stephen Gaudin. Identifying himself as
Khaled Saleem bin Rasheed from Yemen, he shouted at Gaudin: "You want
to blame this (bombing) on me? It's your fault, your country's fault for
supporting Israel!" Livid at the death toll, he asked Gaudin: "Why did
these people have to die? They had nothing to do with the United States
and Israel and Palestine!"<br /><br />In a statement faxed to Al Jazeera on
September 24, 2001, bin Laden excoriated USrael hypocrisy in waxing
moralistic on the issue of human rights while it was engaged in
wholesale killing in Iraq and Palestine: "Until this point, a million
innocent children have been killed in Iraq . . . As I speak, Israeli
tanks and bulldozers are going in and wreaking havoc and sin in
Palestine - in Jenin, in Ramallah, in Rafah, in Beit Jala . . . . and we
do not hear anyone protesting or even lifting a finger to stop it." He
insisted on reciprocal security or none at all: "I swear by God Almighty
Who raised the heavens without effort that neither America nor anyone
who lives there will enjoy safety until safety becomes a reality for us
living in Palestine and before all the infidel armies leave the land of
Muhammad." The U.S. response came two weeks later, when the White House
announced that it had asked the five major U.S. T.V. networks to censor
footage of al-Qaeda. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice "urged
all the American network chiefs not to screen videos of Bin Laden."<br /><br />In
a October 20, 2001 interview with <i>Al Jazeera</i> reporter Taysir Alluni in
Afghanistan, bin Laden expressed outrage that President Bush and Colin
Powell had promised in their first few months in office that "they would
move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, and that Jerusalem
would be the eternal capital of Israel." Asked about the justification
for killing innocent civilians, Bin Laden condemned Washington's
selective and self-serving morality: "Whenever we kill their civilians,
the whole world yells . . . . and America starts putting pressure on its
allies and puppets. . . . What about the people that have been killed
in our lands for decades? . . . Who said that our blood isn't blood and
that their blood is blood? . . . More than 1,000,000 children died in
Iraq, and they are still dying . . . . Everyday in Palestine, children
are killed . . . . How is it that these people are moved when civilians
die in America, and not when we are being killed everyday?" Near the end
of the interview he returned to the constant killing in Palestine: "By
what right are our families in Palestine denied safety? The helicopters
hunt them while they are in their homes, while they are amongst their
women and children; everyday the bodies and wounded are removed."<br /><br />In
an interview published in London's <i>Al Quds</i> on November 12, 2001, bin
Laden explained that, "The United States and their allies are killing us
in Palestine, Chechnya, Kashmir, and Iraq," so "that's why Muslims have
the right to carry out revenge attacks on the U.S.." He added that the
democratic nature of the U.S. government implicated all Americans in
such crimes. "The American people should remember that they pay taxes to
their government and that they voted for their president. Their
government makes weapons and provides them to Israel, which they use to
kill Palestinian Muslims. Given that the American Congress is a
committee that represents the people, the fact that it agrees with the
actions of the American government proves that America in its entirety
is responsible for the atrocities that it is committing against Muslims.
. . . The onus is on Americans to prevent Muslims from being killed at
the hands of their government."<br /><br />In a statement recorded for
release to <i>Al Jazeera</i> in December 2001, bin Laden reiterated his claim
that the 911 attacks were retaliation for the West's injustices against
Muslims worldwide. Once again, he drew attention to Palestine: "Our
terrorism against America is a praiseworthy terrorism in defense against
the oppressor, in order that America will stop supporting Israel, who
kills our sons."<br /><br />In a letter to the American people on October 6,
2002, bin Laden posed the question, "Why are we fighting and opposing
you?" He answered succinctly: "Because you attacked us and continue to
attack us." He again drew special attention to Palestine. "The creation
and continuation of Israel is one of the greatest crimes, and you are
the leaders of its criminals. . . . The creation of Israel is a crime
which must be erased . . . The British handed over Palestine, with your
help and your support, to the Jews, who have occupied it for more than
50 years, years overflowing with oppression, tyranny, crimes, killing,
expulsion, destruction, and devastation." He rejected out of hand
tortured Zionist justifications for taking control of the land: "It
brings us both laughter and tears to see that you have not yet tired of
repeating your fabricated lies that the Jews have a historical right to
Palestine, as it was promised to them in the Torah." Debate, he noted,
is not tolerated, as "anyone who disputes with them on this alleged fact
is accused of anti-semitism." But the Zionist legend claiming
justification for Israel "is one of the most fallacious,
widely-circulated fabrications in history," since "the people of
Palestine are pure Arabs and original Semites." Therefore, "it is the
Muslims who are the inheritors of Moses (peace be upon him) and the
inheritors of the real Torah that has not been changed," so "if the
followers of Moses have been promised a right to Palestine in the Torah,
then the Muslims are the most worthy nation of this."<br /><br />Living
under elected government, he went on, "the American people have chosen,
consented to, and affirmed their support for Israel's oppression of the
Palestinians, the occupation and usurpation of their land, and its
continuous killing, torture, punishment, and expulsion of the
Palestinians." Better choices exist. "The American people have the
ability and choice to refuse the policies of their government, and even
to change it if they want."<br /><br />On the matter of violence, he
observed that "If (Ariel) Sharon is a man of peace in the eyes of Bush," (which
Bush declared he was), "then we are also men of peace. America does not
understand the language of manners and principles, so we are addressing
it using the language it understands."<br /><br />In a video dated February
14, 2003, bin Laden warned that "The current Zionist-Crusader campaign .
. . is the most dangerous and rabid ever . . . He claimed again that
al-Qaeda's violence was merely retaliation, since "we strike them (the
U.S.) because of their injustice towards us in the Islamic world,
especially in Palestine and Iraq, and their occupation of Saudi Arabia.
He observed that the 60 states identified by President Bush as prime
targets in his "crusade" against terror pretty much defined the Islamic
world. "Is the Islamic world not around 60 states? . . . Did they not
say that they want to change the region's ideology, which vents hatred
against the Americans?"<br /><br />In a statement broadcast by<i> Al-Jazeera</i> a
month after the Madrid train bombings in 2004 bin Laden accused
Washington of "persistently ignor[ing] the real problem, which is the
occupation of Palestine," and decried the double standard that allowed
U.S. leaders to "indulge in lies and deceit about our right to
self-defense," which proved "they have no self-respect." "They show
contempt for peoples' blood and minds through such deceit, but it only
means that your blood will continue to be shed." He was not too blinded
by passion to see the injustice being done to ordinary Americans: ". . .
an important truth becomes clear, which is that we are both suffering
injustice at the hands of your leaders, who send your sons to our
countries, despite their objections, to kill and be killed." He
identified a common enemy benefitting from all the carnage: "It is all
too clear . . . who benefits most from stirring up this war and
bloodshed: the merchants of war, the bloodsuckers who direct world
policy. . . President Bush . . . the big media . . . the United Nations .
. . These and others are groups who are a mortal danger to the entire
world, the most dangerous and difficult of these being the Zionist lobby
. . ."<br /><br />Condemning the transparent fraud of Bush's talk of peace,
he asked: "Why hasn't he spoken about the one who slit open the bellies
of pregnant women in Sabra and Shatila . . . the 'man of peace' [Ariel
Sharon]?" He reiterated that al-Qaeda violence was retaliatory: "We only
killed Russians after they invaded Afghanistan and Chechnya, we only
killed Europeans after they invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, and we only
killed Americans after they supported the Jews in Palestine and invaded
the Arabian peninsula. . . " He offered to make peace with any state
that agreed to leave Muslims alone: "So I present to them this peace
proposal, which is essentially a commitment to cease operations against
any state that pledges not to attack Muslims or intervene in their
affairs . . . It will come into effect on the departure of its last
soldier from our lands."<br /><br />Just days before Bush was re-(s)elected
in November 2004, bin Laden released a video telling the American people
that its security was in its own hands, that it could achieve safety by
reigning in its lawless government. "We have been fighting you because
we are free men who cannot acquiesce in injustice . . . Just as you
violate our security, so we violate yours. Whoever encroaches upon the
security of others and imagines that he will himself remain safe is but a
foolish criminal. When disasters happen, intelligent people look for
the reasons behind them, so they can avoid them in the future."<br /><br />Bin
Laden's determination to rectify the injustice of dismembering
Palestine is apparently not going away. On March 20, 2008 a videotape
reputed to be his was aired on Al Jazeera, in which he urged holy war on
behalf of the Palestinians. "Palestine cannot be retaken by
negotiations and dialogue, but with fire and iron."<br /><br /> Endnotes:</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">*Political awakening . . . . see </span><span style="font-size: large;">Bruce Lawrence, ed., <i>Messages To The World: The Statements of Osama bin Laden</i>,</span><span style="font-size: large;"> </span><span style="font-size: large;">(Verso, 2005)</span><span style="font-size: large;"> p. 31</span><span style="font-size: large;"> Stops wearing Western clothes . . . .Lawrence Wright, <i>The Looming Tower - Al Qaeda
and the Road to 9/11</i>,</span><span style="font-size: large;"> (Knopf, 2006) p. 75<br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;"> </span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">The Sources:<br /><br />"Bin laden accuses pope of 'crusade' in new tape," March 20, 2008 msnbc.com<br /><br />Bruce Lawrence, ed., "Messages To The World: The Statements of Osama bin Laden" (Verso, 2005)<br /><br />Lawrence Wright, "The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11," (Knopf, 2006)<br /><br />Alfred Lilienthal, "The Zionist Connection - What Price Peace?" (Dodd, Mead, 1978)<br /><br />Anonymous, "Imperial Hubris - Why The West Is Losing The War on Terror," (Brassey's, 2004)<br /><br />Robert Fisk, "The Great War For Civilisation - The Conquest of the Middle East," (Knopf, 2005)<br /><br />-----Michael
K. Smith is the author of "Portraits of Empire" from Common Courage Press.
He co-blogs with Frank Scott at www.legalienate.blogspot.com</span><br /></p>Michael Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17631483577908372312noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7272525777827091486.post-87094848765015375592023-11-08T16:31:00.225-08:002023-11-09T14:53:54.357-08:00The "Great Beast" Stirs As Palestine Explodes<p><span style="font-size: small;">"We are witnessing the sick relationship between the United States and Israel."</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">-----Egyptian podcaster Rahma Zain</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">The outpouring of support for Palestine around the world in recent weeks has been a very encouraging sight. Dotted with signs calling for “Freedom For Palestine,” “Ceasefire Now,” and “We Are All Palestinians,” protests burst forth in London, Berlin, Paris, Madrid, Barcelona, Ankara, Istanbul, Tokyo, New York City, Toronto, Washington D.C., Rome, Beirut, Baghdad, Cairo, Seoul, Kuala Lumpur, Karachi, Stockholm, Oslo, and Wellington New Zealand. While they have no direct power to change government behavior, governments cannot afford to ignore the threat they pose to their legitimacy. The “Great Beast,” as Alexander Hamilton called the public, is at last stirring, this time on behalf of a colonized people whose suffering has for far too long been rendered invisible. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">And for once social media has proven itself a positive force, spreading videos of Israel carpet-bombing a concentration camp full of children to all corners of the earth. The steady flow of images from this Truth Superhighway instantly shattered rationalizations of the barbarity, leaving in their wake only a stark and haunting picture of USraelis as remorseless killers. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">Though it’s impossible to reconcile with the American self-image, we can hardly claim to be surprised at this. After all, the latest round of “humanitarian” butchery is merely one in a long line of betrayals of all that is allegedly most sacred to Americans - human rights, self-determination, the rule of law - blah, blah, blah. The latest bloodletting is supposedly justified now more than ever because - <i>wait for it</i> - the enemy is irredeemably evil and irrevocably committed to the rape of women, the decapitation of babies, and the massacre of old people, among other uniquely diabolical horrors. What else can we-as-decent-people do but bury them in blood-spattered rubble?</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">In other words, the closest thing we can actually claim as a “sacred” value is hypocrisy. We preach peace, but are forever at war. We praise diplomacy, but spit out “obey-or-die” ultimatums like machine-gun fire. We recommend self-determination, but enthusiastically guarantee Israeli apartheid with an avalanche of lethal weaponry.<br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">The prompt international protest against this two-faced lunacy has been a welcome demonstration that much of the world will no longer tolerate the gratuitous contempt with which USrael treats Palestinian Arabs.* It is this, not international human rights law, that is forcing governments to confront their complicity in apartheid, and it is only a great deal more of it that stands any chance of bringing about peace. <br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">Obviously, Hamas could not possibly have initiated this conflict a mere one month ago. In fact, it dates back more than a century, to when the British, themselves lacking any legitimate right to the land, promised Palestine to both Zionist Jews and Palestinian Arabs. As we know, the Zionist Jews won out based on strength of evidence - a Bronze Age land deed carved by God on a tablet, helpfully carried down the mountain by Uncle Moses. Even Jimmy Carter, the reputedly neutral broker of the Camp David Accords, found this evidence convincing, saying in his memoirs that Israel was “ordained by God.”</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">With neutrals like that, who needs partisans? Though the appearance of Biblical mythology in historical discussion ought to evoke alarm bells in any mind claiming a speck of rationality, the peculiar justifications offered up for Jewish sovereignty over Palestine have long passed muster in the United States. In a nutshell, this is the story that is quite uncritically accepted: a largely irreligious people re-claimed land after an absence of two thousand years based on Biblical texts few of them believed in. An ethno-theocratic state bent on conquest and expansion was hailed as a model of democratic socialism with unique sensitivity to morality and human rights. Its leaders embarked on an “in-gathering” of Jews from lands they had lived in for centuries while intoning the words Hitler had used in carrying out the Holocaust: “<i>You are not a German, you are a Jew - you are not a Frenchman, you are a Jew - you are not a Belgian, you are a Jew</i>.” </span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">The heart of the matter was a serious and deliberate confusion of nationalism and religion. Organized Jewry, an unequivocal supporter of separation of Church and State outside the Holy Land, condoned their union in Israel, demanding the loyalty of Jews everywhere, whether or not they considered themselves as such. Diasporan Jews supported Israel out of religious duty, though they may or may not have realized what Zionist ideology actually entailed. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">Though twenty percent of Israelis were Arabs from the start, Israeli citizenship** was anchored in <i>Jewish</i> identity, and the state announced its independence in “the name of the Jewish people.” In that context, public debate naturally centered on the question, “What is a Jew?” Since Jews, like most people, had a mixed ancestry, Israeli myth-makers eager to buttress territorial claims with evidence of historical continuity quickly blurred distinctions between Hebrew, Israelite, Judean, Jewish, Judaism, and Zionism, forestalling recognition that these referred to different people at different points in history with different ways of life. Neither the Jews or these various forebears ever constituted a race or even a distinctive pure ethnic grouping, and since Judaism had been of declining significance for most Jews for some time, it was not at all clear what the basis of Jewish statehood actually amounted to - apart from subjugating Palestinian Arabs, which quickly became the national pastime. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">Seventy-five years of dispossession and two fake peace agreements later, and the overwhelming majority of today's Gazan population - "human animals" according to Israel - are indeed living like such in the Gaza concentration camp, after having survived a whole series of violent land grabs inspired by the quest for a Greater Israel, another concept derived from Biblical fantasy. Counterposed to that fanciful notion has been the all-too-real dreadfulness of Gaza, which was the world's most wretched colonial outpost long before Hamas appeared on the scene.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">Refusing to accept their assigned fate, Gazans rose in rebellion in December 1987. Children threw rocks at tanks and soldiers carrying automatic rifles. Old people, too feeble to hurl their defiance, filled sacks with rocks for their grandchildren to throw. Young and old alike went on strike, established liberated zones, directed an underground economy, and shut their shops at noon in honor of imprisoned compatriots.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">Shooting and cursing, Israeli soldiers chased the insolent children through the unpaved, pothole-ridden streets, where open sewers reeked with a stomach-turning odor. With a violent banging they announced their presence, ransacking homes and raiding hospitals in pursuit of child “terrorists.” Whenever they winged their prey or left a corpse lying in the road, they, laughed, whistled, or clapped their hands with glee.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">The Palestinian Arabs, then ninety-eight percent of the West Bank and Gaza, were called <i>the minorities</i>. The two percent who resided in religious settlements - replete with green lawns and swimming pools - were their designated masters.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">Anyone caught using the word “Palestine,” or displaying a map of its territory, was subject to immediate arrest and torture. But for reasons Israel still can’t understand, hooded interrogations didn’t make Gazans sing, while their outlawed Palestine national anthem did.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">This was the language of the occupiers: confiscation, demolition, surveillance, arrest, prison, torture, humiliation, deportation, death. These were the results: hunger, disease, mutilation, death, pride, defiance, insurrection.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">All this was so sixteen years <i>before</i> Hebrew University sociology professor Baruch Kimmerling pronounced Gaza the largest concentration camp in the world, and nineteen years before Hamas was elected, quickly followed by the siege of Gaza. Though few people seem to remember, those fateful elections were certified as eminently fair by Jimmy Carter. And once in power, Hamas quickly put out peace feelers. By 2008 they had negotiated a cease-fire, which Hamas honored for months and Israel ultimately violated. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">Keep all this in mind when you are asked, “Do you support Hamas?” The reasonable answer is “yes,” when they act constructively, as they frequently do. Israel, on the other hand, never misses an opportunity to indulge an infantile spasm of murderous rage that shocks the world and worsens Jewish security. This is what we are seeing yet again in the rubble of Gaza, and it will not end until the ideology of Jewish supremacy is dealt a stinging defeat.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">But what about the hostages, and don't we have to “condemn Hamas?" Hopefully, these are naive, but not consciously diversionary questions. The answer is "no," we do not have to condemn Hamas, at least not until Israel responds constructively to the countless daily acts of non-violent Palestinian resistance, which are by far the most numerous and common response to Israeli apartheid by its victims. Until that happens,“condemning Hamas” will continue to be an exercise in sheer hypocrisy, i.e., justifying apartheid for Israel, but not national liberation for Palestinians. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">As for “the hostages,” the current campaign of saturation bombing stands a good chance of getting them killed before a negotiated exchange can get them released. But even more fundamentally, hand-wringing about Hamas’s hostages overlooks the fact that <i>all Gazans</i> were already hostages on October 7, and had been for decades as a consequence of their colonial subjugation. When is their release date?</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">Furthermore, one does not have to wish Hamas's hostages any harm to point out that it doesn't really make much sense to build one's home on a volcano and then wax indignant at having lava in the living room. As a measure of the moral bankruptcy that prevails in Israel, consider the fact that the music festival <i>dedicated to peace and love</i> that Hamas savagely attacked - was just two kilometers from a concentration camp full of children. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">The truth is that Hamas “terror” has never been the problem, as Israel reflexively dismisses any Palestinian nationalist impulse as terrorism, quite apart from any associated violence. The real problem, therefore, is not terrorism, but the 1948 declaration of Jewish sovereignty over Arab lands, which instantly made every act of Palestinian resistance into "terrorism." Asserting a right to Jewish supremacy in Palestine was a very predictable - and predicted - disaster, even for Jews, who claim to be "redeeming" the land by taking it from indigenous Arabs. Any notion that this robbery is wrong is unthinkable in Israel, which is why prior to October 7 the only discussion of apartheid in the Holy State was about what form it should take: messianic, religious, and theocratic, or secular, Western, and democratic. Palestinians had been completely forgotten. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">And not only in Israel. To our everlasting shame, it took a hideous act of mass killing to put them back on the world’s agenda. One can only hope that the "Great Beast" will keep up the pressure until Holy Apartheid is no more.<br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">*Nevertheless, much of the rhetoric of denunciation aimed at Israel has exceeded rational bounds. Gazans are <i>not </i>being subjected to genocide, for example, as is rather commonly suggested by human rights experts, independent media outlets, and pro-Palestine activists, with no reflection on just how difficult it would be for Israel, itself born as the alleged solution to genocide, to get away with its own genocide. Tedious legal debates aside, mathematics argues against the claim that genocide is occurring. Right now, ten thousand plus Gazans are said to have been killed since October 7. Even if we
assume another ten thousand are buried beneath the rubble, that is still
less than one percent of the population of Gaza (2.3 million), an
appalling total, but nevertheless well short of genocide. Furthermore,
the intent is to make them flee, not kill them to the last man, woman,
and child. This de-population effort, known as "transfer" in Zionist commentary, has been present from the beginning. A June 12, 1895 diary entry by Theodore Herzl, the "Founding Father" of Zionism, predicted that his dream of a Jewish homeland would require the expulsion of the indigenous Arab population.<br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">**Actually, "Israeli" citizenship is codified as either "Jew" or "Arab." Allegedly possessed of equal civil rights, the two groups belong to separate nations.</span><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">Sources:</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">Egyptian podcaster Rahma Zaid quoted in Novara Media You Tube video, "Netanyahu Gears Up For Ground Invasion," October 26, 2023</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">On Hitler's words during the Holocaust, and the blurring of history and mythology see Alfred Lilienthal, <i>The Zionist Connection - What Price Peace?</i> (Dodd, Mead & Co., 1978) p. 5, 10, 106 <br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">On Theodore Herzl and "transfer" of the Palestinians, see Noam Chomsky and Ilan Pappe, <i>Gaza in Crisis - Reflections On Israel's War Against The Palestinians,</i> (Haymarket, 2010), p. 67</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">On the music festival that Hamas attacked, see Ilan Pappe, "Crisis in Zionism, Opportunity For Palestine?" U.C. Berkeley lecture, October 19, 2023 </span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">On Baruch Kimmerling describing Gaza as a concentration camp, see Norman Finkelstein interview with Jeremy Scahill, <i>The Intercept</i>, May 20, 2018</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">On the 2006-8 history of Hamas, see "Norman Finkelstein RESPONDS to Bernie Sanders statement OPPOSING GAZA CEASEFIRE," You Tube video available at www.normanfinkelstein.com<br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">On the Gaza uprising of 1987 see all of the following: </span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">Edward W. Said <i>The Politics of Dispossession - The Struggle For Palestinian Self-Determination 1969-1994</i> (Chatto & Windus, 1994) p. 166, 194</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">Edward Said, <i>The Pen and the Sword</i>, (Common Courage, 1994) p. 114</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">Gloria Emerson, <i>Gaza</i>, (Atlantic Monthly, 1991) pps. 15, 21, 30, 35, 183</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">Michael Palumbo, Imperial Israel, (Bloomsbury, 1990) p. 233</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">William Lutz, <i>Doublespeak</i> (Harper Collins, 1990) pps. 157-8<br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></p><p><br /><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></p>Michael Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17631483577908372312noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7272525777827091486.post-44747411534044143122023-11-06T11:20:00.003-08:002023-11-06T11:20:49.590-08:00"Peace" Activist Bernie Sanders Proves Himself a Craven Coward on Gaza<p> <span style="font-size: large;">"I don't know how you can have a permanent cease-fire with an organization like Hamas, which is dedicated to turmoil and chaos and destroying the state of Israel. And I think what the Arab countries in the region understand (is) that Hamas has got to go."</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">--------Senator Bernie Sanders</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">Source:</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">The Hill, "Rising," November 6, 2023<br /></span></p>Michael Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17631483577908372312noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7272525777827091486.post-17669715674658148682023-11-03T16:59:00.014-07:002023-11-07T10:15:45.691-08:00Letter To a California Senator re Gaza Slaughter<span style="font-size: large;">Senator Alex Padilla</span><br /><span style="font-size: large;">Senate Office Building</span><br /><span style="font-size: large;">Washington, DC<br /></span><div><p><span style="font-size: large;">Dear Senator Padilla,<br /><br />It is a strange sympathy for innocent Palestinians that supports a massive U.S. military presence in the region, giving Israel carte blanche to slaughter Gazans while Prime Minister Netanyahu cites Biblical genocide as justification for piling up civilian corpses. Have you taken leave of your senses, sir?<br /><br />Israel does not, in fact, have a "right to defend itself" on occupied territory, any more than I would have the right to shoot you down after taking over your home. It is unbecoming of a U.S. Senator to use such mindless propaganda.<br /><br />Hamas is not the issue. Israel actually supported Hamas as an alternative to Fatah, which makes its current condemnation of the organization hypocritical. In any event, the U.S. and Israel reject not "terrorism," but any independent nationalist movement among the Palestinian people, which they have opposed for 75 years. When the Palestinians sought their national rights through non-violent means, Israel crushed them, killing thousands. Until you or someone else can demonstrate how Palestinians can peacefully avail themselves of their national rights, all criticism of "terrorism" is irrelevant. Recall that George Washington was a terrorist in British eyes when our own national independence was at stake.<br /><br />And enough already with claims to be trying to "minimize civilian casualties" while we watch thousands of wailing Gazans on TV searching the rubble of bombed hospitals and collapsed apartment buildings for their loved ones. Your support for this barbarity is clear; please have the integrity to declare it without resort to pious euphemisms about humanitarianism. We've all had more than enough of blood-soaked "humanitarianism" from Washington.<br /><br />The $100 million in "humanitarian" aid you favor sending to assist this slaughter, not to mention the $260 <i>billion</i> we have sent the Holy State since its founding, could find far better uses at home, if you cared to look for them. <br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">Covered in the blood of innocent Gazans, today is a day of shame for all Americans.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;"> </span> <br /></p></div>Michael Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17631483577908372312noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7272525777827091486.post-78046898991301005982023-10-31T12:24:00.007-07:002023-11-01T12:28:28.820-07:00Rabbi Meir Kahane's "They Must Go!" Politics Endorsed by "Secular" Israel<p><span style="font-size: large;">"Israel needs to create a humanitarian crisis in Gaza, compelling tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands to seek refuge in Egypt or the Gulf. In order for this to happen, Israel needs to demand four key points with greater determination than ever before:</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">1. "The entire population of Gaza will either move to Egypt or move to the Gulf. From our perspective, every building in Gaza known to have Hamas headquarters underneath, including schools and hospitals, is considered a military target.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">2. "Every vehicle in Gaza is considered a military vehicle transporting combatants. Therefore, there is no vehicular traffic, and it does not matter whether it is transporting water or other critical supplies.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">3. "The UN secretary-general has initiated humanitarian aid to Gaza. The Israeli condition for any aid should be a visit by the Red Cross to Israeli hostages and especially the civilians among them. Until this happens, no aid of any kind will be permitted to enter Gaza. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">4. "Intermediators with both diplomatic and military experience will be required to explain in detail these concepts to the rest of the world. It will not be possible to remove Hamas without exerting pressure and if the Americans do not receive a clear and detailed explanation from Israeli officials and understand that Israel has no choice. It is comparable to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, which led to the launch of an atomic bomb in Japan."</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">------Giora Eiland, former head of Israel's National Security Council</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">Source:</span></p><span style="font-size: large;">Novara Media, "Israel's Explicit Call For Genocide,"</span><span style="font-size: large;"> 10/31/23<br /></span><p><span style="font-size: large;"> </span> <br /></p>Michael Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17631483577908372312noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7272525777827091486.post-19938064220006721382023-10-30T13:45:00.040-07:002023-10-30T22:21:06.180-07:00Netanyahu Says Genocide In Bible Justifies Israel's Mass Slaughter in Gaza<p> <span style="font-size: large;">"You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible."</span></p><p><b><span style="font-size: medium;">1 Samuel 15:3 </span></b></p><p><b><span style="font-size: medium;">'Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.' </span><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></b></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">"And we do remember, and we are fighting, our brave troops and combatants, who are now in Gaza or around Gaza, and in all other regions in Israel, are joining this chain of Jewish heroes, a chain that has started 3000 years ago from Joshua ben Nun until the heroes of 1948, the Six Day War, the '73 October War, and all other wars in this country. Our hero troops, they have one supreme, main goal - to completely defeat the murderous enemy, and to guarantee our existence in this country we've always said, Never Again. Never Again is now."</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;"> ---------Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">Sources: </span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">"Netanyahu Appeals to 'Holy Bible' During War Speech"</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">Breaking Points, October 30, 2023</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">"WW3 Fear As US Troops Deployed," Secular Talk, 10/30/23 <br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></p>Michael Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17631483577908372312noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7272525777827091486.post-88812726365951639802023-10-24T12:50:00.039-07:002023-10-27T10:39:18.624-07:00Gaza Extermination More Important Than Hamas Hostages - - - - Israel<p> <span style="font-size: large;">"We will act in every way and with every actor to release the hostages. In every way. I saw humanitarian pressure as one way to release them. But we must act in any way that can lead to it. <i>But it cannot hinder our actions</i> (emphasis added), including the ground offensive, if we decide to do so, because that is what Hamas wants. What Hamas wants is for us to deal with the hostages and not have our military go in and eliminate their infrastructure. That's not going to happen, but we're doing everything se can to bring them home."</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">-------Israeli Energy Minister Israel Katz</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;"> Given the savageness of Hamas's initial attack, it seems more likely that Hamas actually wants Israel to invade Gaza, where it can inflict severe damage on the Israeli Army in urban warfare - the toughest kind. So Minister Katz, like the Israeli government in general, seems to be doubling down on stupid, i.e., the mass slaughter of civilians, which has proven over and over to harden the fighting resolve and ability of its opponents while strengthening solidarity with Palestine throughout the world. <br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;"> </span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;"> </span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;"> </span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">Source:</span></p><span style="font-size: large;">"Hamas Releases Two Israeli Hostages"</span><br /><span style="font-size: large;">Novara Live 10/24/23</span>Michael Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17631483577908372312noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7272525777827091486.post-56453492657064367112023-10-20T13:35:00.148-07:002023-11-18T15:38:18.015-08:00Israel A Safe Haven For Jews? Think Again.<p><span style="font-size: small;">"You take my water, burn my olive trees, destroy my house, take my job, steal my land, imprison my father, kill my mother, bombard my country, starve us all, humiliate us all, but I am to blame: I shot a rocket back." </span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">-----------------An old man's placard in Gaza </span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">"We are witnessing the sick relationship between the United States and Israel."</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">------Egyptian podcaster Rahma Zain<br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">Hand-wringing about "the hostages" in Israel overlooks the fact that all residents in Gaza were already hostages on October 7, and had been for decades as a consequence of deliberate USraeli policy. This is what it means to live in colonial subjugation.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">As for the recently kidnapped, one does not have to wish them any harm to point out that it doesn't really make much sense to build one's home on a volcano and then wax indignant at having lava in
the living room. As a measure of the moral bankruptcy that prevails in Israel, consider the fact that the music festival that Hamas brutally attacked was dedicated to peace and love - just two kilometers from what Hebrew University sociology professor Baruch Kimmerling called "the largest concentration camp in the world" - in 2003, long before the siege of Gaza made the situation much worse.<br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">Also, in a country as militarized as Israel, is it really appropriate to use the term "civilians" without qualification? Almost all Jews are either current soldiers, former soldiers, or future soldiers.<br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">Furthermore, common references to
"inhumane" conditions in Gaza, and "neglect" as a reason for them are
drastically understated. Such allegedly non-partisan evaluations of Israel's policies of shooting at
ambulances, leveling hospitals, and dropping white phosphorous bombs on
civilian populations, among other horrors of the Holy State, are a total absurdity. It's like calling lynching an inadvertent unkindness.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">It's time to face reality. As Egyptian podcaster Rahma Zain recently stated, the U.S.-Israel "special relationship" is sick. She points out that Washington has essentially raised a spoiled brat that it is unable to say "no" to, who has now grown into a sociopath.<br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">The truth is that declaring Jewish
sovereignty over Arab lands in Palestine was always a disastrous plan, even for Jews, who claim to be "redeeming" the land by taking it from indigenous Arabs. This wholesale robbery is seen as entirely legitimate in Israel's eyes. Prior to October 7, the only discussion related to apartheid in the Holy State was about what form it should take: messianic, religious, and theocratic, or secular, Western, and democratic. Palestinians had been completely forgotten. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">Israel was supposed to be a safe
haven for Jews, but by repeatedly doubling down on racist exclusion of the Palestinians, it has become the most dangerous place in the world for a
Jew to be.<br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">Epic fail.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;"><br data-mce-bogus="1" /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">Sources: </span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">Old man's placard in Gaza . . . Noam Chomsky, "Because We Say So," (City Lights, 2017) p. 77</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">Kimmerling quote from Norman Finkelstein interview with Jeremy Scahill, <i>The Intercept</i>, May 20, 2018</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">Music festival commentary from Ilan Pappe, "Crisis in Zionism, Opportunity For Palestine?" U.C. Berkeley Lecture, October 19, 2023</span><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">Rahma Zain quoted in You Tube video, "Netanyahu Gears Up For Ground Invasion," Novara Media, 10/26/23</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">For more than ample verification of Israel's crimes in Gaza, see Norman Finkelstein's fine
work on the topic, which long pre-dates October 7, 2023. (For example, see "Gaza: An Inquest Into Its Martyrdom.")</span></p><p><br /></p><br />Michael Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17631483577908372312noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7272525777827091486.post-29302846258161213532023-10-12T17:56:00.349-07:002023-10-13T11:21:43.077-07:00The (Failed) Israel Experiment<p><span style="font-size: large;">"I'm going to talk about Israel today. And I'm going to talk about Israel as a failed experiment. Let me just run through a quick, relevant history. In the 1940s we kind of Louisiana Purchased Israel in so far as with the Louisiana Purchase the Americans bought the Native Americans' land from the French and expanded our country that way. Turned out in the 1940s the British gave the Israelis - well, created the Israelis - with the Palestinians' land. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">"So they had this extra colony laying around because up until the 1940s the British still owned quite a bit of the world, including my ancestral Ghana. So the British had land they were giving away because they thought it was theirs. It turns out they were a colonial power and they kind of gave their colonial power land to the Jewish people as a recompense for the atrocities that were suffered from the genocide. And it kind of made sense, that history kind of suggested, that there was no land in which Jewish people would remain safe, so we've got to give them a land because they're people, too. I can understand the arguments . . . the problem was we gave them other people's land. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">"Like, I'm actually, I'm for moving Israel. I'll get to that later. But I'm for moving Israel. I like the Michael Chabon solution, where we just kind of put Israel in Alaska, or we kind of cede them New Mexico. Look, if we're going to defend a state, and if we're going to be casual about guaranteeing these people a state, an ever expanding state, because it's the mixing of property rights and birth citizenship, then we should be able to control the land and control the borders, and secure them that way, rather than just be casual with other people's lands and other people's borders. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">"So I would be open to talks about ceding New Mexico, or ceding some land in the United States or that the United States controls, to Israel, and making a New Israel. We've got to move Israel because the current Israel is in a bad spot. We sold someone else's land, or we gave away things that didn't belong to us. It'd be like me selling the Brooklyn Bridge. And that's always going to be a problem . . . </span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">"So we have some three-quarters of a million people (that) were moved, or have been moved, and now we have two million - about - people in the area that's known as the Gaza Strip, and the problem is those Palestinians are not allowed to really do anything, because it turns out that if you give people - (from whom) you've stolen their land and livelihood - access to doing anything, one of the things they're going to do is figure out how to get their land and livelihood back. And probably take it back - with force. You moved them out with force; they're going to try to take it back with force. So you have blockades, you have sieges, because they're trying to keep two million people from actually building anything, because one of the things that those people will also build is the means to get their land back. And this all happened in 1947 . . .. That's the year my Mom was born. . . This isn't that long ago.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">"And we're talking about a good amount of people. . . . Now it's the case that there are blockades such that . . . it precludes the conditions for the people in Gaza to be self-determining. Because one of the things they will use, and this is I think true, if you give them water, if you give them food on demand, if you give them all of the things that are conditions with like full citizenship, they will use that subjective freedom to create the objective conditions for a fight back. Right? And so, in order to keep them from fighting back, we keep them from doing everything that's consistent with self-determination. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">"If they elect leaders we don't like, we invalidate the elections. And I say "we" because I'm not convinced that Israel and the United States aren't the same power. I actually think that we're a colonial power; we are a colony of Israel, and not the other way around. Don't get it confused. A lot of people get this confused, and think that the U.S. runs Israel, but I think Israel runs the U.S.. Israel runs the U.S. insofar as they can say, 'Shut up, and give us money and guns,' and we'll shut up and give them money and guns. And if we say the same thing, they will just ignore us. Or we will be too scared to say the same thing, because our politicians need a lot of money from Jewish people who are not necessarily the same Zionists who are the problematic actors in Israel, but they're not exactly antagonistic to those Zionists, in the way that I would need them to be antagonistic to those Zionists.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">"I hear a lot of, 'well, you know, there are multifaceted forms of supporting and fighting against some of the more obnoxious and heinous policies of Israel, and you're just kind of painting the Israelis and their sympathizers with a broad brush.' And I'm saying that the anti-Israel-apartheid side of the Jewish people in the United States are not sufficiently "anti". They're lukewarm "anti". Because they're not talking about we need to abolish Israel and move it to Alaska. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">"Though if there were a significant number of Jewish people that said like, 'there's no two-state solution, a two-state solution is untenable' - and it was part of the culture, and part of the even heterodox Jewish culture, saying 'the two-state solution is untenable; we need to abolish Israel and move it to a place where we actually control the borders.' Which I think is actually a responsible solution. We need to move it to New Mexico; we need to move it to Arizona. I actually think that would be responsible. Just get up and move. New Israel. Give them half of Utah. It could be 'the state the Chosen People choose.' Right? Because you've got the Mormons (there) who consider themselves chosen. And the Jewish people consider themselves chosen."</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">"By the way, the distinction between cultural Judaism and Zionism is not a hard and fast distinction. And I didn't really know this until I went to a random synagogue for a Shabbat a few years ago with a buddy. It was just a regular, mainline synagogue, nothing special, and they folded in a prayer for Israel, into the synagogue. And you could say, 'well, it was just peace for Israel,' and actually that prayer was more support for Israel than just peace, but if you want peace without eradicating the conditions of injustice, you're pretty much just praying for an apartheid government. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">"And when I say an apartheid government that's two systems of laws for two different people. Now, it's not a racial apartheid insofar as we're not punishing them because they are browner or Muslim. But we're just saying because they're browner and Muslim, they're going to be more likely to organize against us, so we have to have a different system of laws for them. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">"So it's not the same kind of apartheid as South African apartheid, but it's the same in objective expression. Because I think rightly they (Jewish Israelis) understand that if the Palestinians in Gaza are empowered, and aren't too busy trying to figure out food and water and the hospitals, they will use some of that excess resource, and some of that disposable income and insight, to figure out how to get their land back. And that's something that's untenable for Israel. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">"So they have to keep an apartheid system, in order to keep the Palestinians weak enough . . . You have to keep them weak.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">"Gaza's not about autonomy. It's about being able to neuter a population without going full-genocide. Especially when you're a nation that's founded, whose moral authority is - 'we're the response to a genocide' - you can't go full-genocide on the Palestinians, but you also can't have them doing anything, because one of the things that they will do is try to get their land back. And for people who say, 'It's senseless violence to go shoot up a music festival', well, its not senseless insofar as nobody knows what the conditions, the path forward for a Palestinian autonomy (would be). </span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">"I'm not one to second guess the leaders of Hamas. It's not necessarily what I would do, but I don't have a workable plan. I don't think there is a workable plan, short of the U.S. saying 'We're not going to support <i>that</i> Israel anymore, we're going to give you a different spot, a different Israel. One that we <i>can</i> control. And that's what our support (from now on) looks like. And if you don't want to go to our New Israel, either when it's in Alaska, it's part of Utah, if you don't want to go to that new Israel, you're on your own. That would be my solution. . . .</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">"If we're going to displace people, and support the displacing of people, we should support the displacing of our own people for our cause. And if we're not willing to do that, we shouldn't be displacing others like that so casually. And if Zionists say, 'No, we want Tel Aviv and we want Jerusalem, these are holy cities for us,' - I say the world isn't like Burger King; you don't get to have it your way. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">"You want land that's safe and you want secure borders. The U.S. can provide that, but you're not going to be able to pick the land. This idea that you get born into particular property claims, like specific, naturally given property claims, you get born into that by some sort of birth right or religious right - not property claims in general but particular ones - Jerusalem, not like Orem Utah, the idea that you would get those claims is ridiculous. It's a kind of entitlement that I think we've bred among the Zionists, and we need to stop breeding. I can see the argument that as a person, in order to be a free person in the modern world, you need some sort of property, but I don't see the argument that you also get to pick the property you get."</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">"And so, since I don't have a path forward that is non-violent I'm not going to second guess what Hamas does in the name of violence. Because look, one of the purposes of non-violent civil disobedience is to show the degradation of the oppressors. Non-violent civil disobedience doesn't work when one people just wants you dead. A lot of Zionists would be happy if everyone just miraculously died in Gaza. They just kind of disappeared. They're not particularly useful to the economy in that way, in the same way that, for example, black people were useful to the economy in the American South, or Hindus and Indians were useful to the economy in India. It's not that kind of shutdown when non-violence can work. There's no boycott that will actually help the case. There's no boycott that will force a quality of violence that will show the disproportionate violence and the inhumanity that you're being subject to. And that's the point of non-violent resistance. You're trying to provoke the quality of violence that will show that 'no, the people who are trying to kill us really do think that we're inhuman.' And you can't do that with non-violence in Gaza. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">"But you might be able to do that with violence. So you do a little bit of horrendous violence and then they come back leveling hospitals. They can no longer say, 'well, you're killing children and women.' Well, you're leveling hospitals - indiscriminately. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">"Hamas doesn't have a base of operations that you know of - if you knew you'd send in Mossad and take them out. You don't have it. You're just leveling hospitals to show a vague sense of power. That's a form of terrorism. That's the shelling that's happening right now. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">"I'm not one to say that Hamas was wrong, because I don't know what's right. I know that filling out the paperwork and waving signs isn't going to work. It's not going to get you autonomy; it's not going to get you clean water. You can't <i>do</i> anything. You can't build anything. You have a life, and your children will have a life - a short life in Gaza - because they don't have any of the conditions for a long life, including clean water and a robust self-governing apparatus. It (your life) is going to be over-determined by the needs of a settler power, which is Israel, to make sure that you can't form the quality of organization and industrial capacity that would attack Israel. That's going to be your line . .. . a second class, necessarily subordinated citizen, who can't even, who by design isn't going to be able to coordinate to do anything meaningful.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">"And that is the situation of the Palestinians right now. . . I don't think a two-state solution is viable because Palestinians want their land, and the (Jewish) Israelis feel very entitled to the Palestinians' land. So if the Jewish people need a state to return to then we need to create a different state.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">"So it was a failed experiment and we just need to take the loss and carve out a little bit of West Virginia or whatever - give them some of Nebraska or Oklahoma, and call that New Israel, and that'll be that. And if we're not willing to do that, we need to not pooh-pooh the Palestinians, who are rightly fighting for the conditions of their self-determination."</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">"Like civil self-determination, family self-determination, all of these things are over-determined by the blockade, and the abject control that they're suffering under (Jewish) Israeli rule, and that's the situation right there. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">"Israel won't let the Palestinians do anything, because one of the things that the Palestinians will do is organize to attack Israel. And so I understand the blockade, but I also understand that's not a tenable way to think through like long term, that doesn't actually get rid of the problem. The forever conditions of apartheid aren't going to get rid of the problem. Any time the Palestinians get a little bit of air to breathe, they're going to use that air to try to attack Israel . . . and there's reason for them to do that. And so now Israel has an incentive to make sure that Palestinians don't ever get any sort of disposable anything, the capacity to build and take care of themselves and frustrate the plans of other people. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">"It was a failed experiment in colonialism. We gave people land that wasn't ours to give, and this is the fallout of it. And it's not going to go away. It's not going to go away. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">"A two-state solution is not viable. Because it's the Palestinians' land. It's the Palestinians' land. And if we just had a little bit more humility, we would just be honest and think about land we <i>do</i> control, and just ask the Jews to suck it up. Suck it up. Now you go to Utah instead. We tried Israel there, and there going to be like, 'No, we want Jerusalem,' and I'm going to say, 'Sorry. You don't get to cut the cake and choose which slice you get.' Michael Chabon talks about this in his book, "The Yiddish Policeman's Detective Agency" - it came out I'll say 2007ish, where the New Israel is up in Alaska. "</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">"I think it's a more responsible solution because the problem is the place. The problem is the place. And the fact that it wasn't your land to begin with. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">"And this whole idea that it was a senseless killing, going after the music festival is a senseless killing. I'm like, 'these people never read the end of <i>The Odyssey</i>', where I mean . . . If someone steals your house, throws a party in your house, and you come home, and you mow them down, that's not exactly senseless. They stole your house. At the end of <i>The Odyssey</i>, Odysseus comes in with a bunch of suitors and a party going on, and he like looks around and just mows them all down, because they were in his house, they had no business being there. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">"So this idea, it's not senseless, it's not barbaric, it's actually, it makes sense. And I wish, I wish, I wish I knew how to de-colonize without this kind of violence. I wish I did. I don't. So I'm not going to criticize Hamas leaders who think this is the only way, because it might be the only way. And it's the only reason I'm talking about it. And the more people who actually talk about the situation, I think the better it is for the Palestinian case." <br /></span></p><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span>-----Irami Osei Frimpong</span><br /><span style="font-size: large;">www.thefunkyacademic.com, 9/11/23<br /></span></div>Michael Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17631483577908372312noreply@blogger.com2