Category: fascism

Jews don’t want fairness they want preference!


This is from the ‘I don’t believe he just said that’ department. Abe Foxman of the ADL doesn’t think being fair is in Israel’s best interests because that would mean Israel would have to give back everything it has illegally seized over the last 40 years.

Sen. Mitchell is fair. He’s been meticulously even-handed,but the fact is, American policy in the Middle East hasn’t been ‘even handed’ — it has been supportive of Israel when it felt Israel needed critical U.S. support. So I’m concerned, I’m not sure the situation requires that kind of approach(even handedness) in the Middle East.

Huh? Say what? Fairness is not something needed in the Middle East?  Then what is? Complete and total preference to the Israeli policy of expansionism and the subjugation of Palestinians in the occupied territories, which includes even their acceptance of their own genocide?  The answer is that’s precisely what the Israeli’s want. In their own words

George Mitchell worries them because he was so successful in Northern Ireland, a success that was built on his persistence and his utterly impartiality … and a deal means Israeli concessions which they have never favored.  The stronger the candidate for envoy or mediator — the more of an honest broker he or she would be — the more uncomfortable they are.

This is the problem I have with the idea that a state formed on the basis of religion is exclusively for members of that religion only.  While I am happy the Israeli Supreme Court over turned the Central Elections Committee (CEC) government decision to ban Arab parties from the elections next month, such a ban in a democratic state should have never been instituted or even dreamed of.  However, if religion is the rule of law and not justice, there’s nothing inconsistent with banning, limiting the speech of, restricting the movements of people not of the state’s religion.  Yisrael Beitenu Chairman Avigdor Lieberman, a member of parliament believes the very participation of Arabs in Israeli government is a threat to Israel’s existence!

The court threw away this declaration and in fact gave the Arab parties license to kill the state of Israel as a Jewish democratic state….In the next Knesset, we will pass a citizenship law that will prevent the disloyalty of some of Israel’s Arabs.

Such attitudes beg the question if participation in Israeli government is enough to make one an enemy of the state, what does their conventional wisdom say about Arabs outside the borders of the state?  Naturally,  they are terrorists who deserve the fate of the Gazans.


They’re baaaacccckkkk!!


idfThe timing couldn’t be more accurate.  We’ve pointed out how the Israelis are usually the first to kill after conflict pauses that last more than one week.  In fact the empirical evidence says  over 90% of the time the Israeli government acts provocatively to end truces with its Palestinian neighbors/prisoners but less than one week after announcing a unilateral truce the Israelis are  at it again this time in the West Bank, kidnapping civilians from Jenin and Qaryut as well as shelling Gaza from naval boats off the coast.  Both actions are nothing more than a provocation designed to get the Palestinians to respond in a way that will justify a disproportionate military response on the order of a week ago.

If that doesn’t work, the Israelis are quite content to sit back, tighten the screws on their already strangling blockade and let the Palestinians starve until they try to break the blockade, at which point they’ll return militarily.

“This war and the ceasefire have not brought about a lifting of the siege on Gaza. People might not be dying by gunfire, but they may still starve to death or succumb to easily treatable ailments. This brutal siege has crippled Gaza and most importantly the children”, he ( Dr. Mustafa Barghouthi MP) emphasised, referring on the siege policy that Israel has heavily imposed on the Gaza Strip for 14 months.

Of course the Israelis will say the blockade is to restrict the flow of arms to Hamas, but much needed supplies are being denied to the few remaining civilians  of Gaza and the blockade has become a political tool to ratchet up pressure on Hamas or Gazans in general.  The Israelis are offering the excuse that they want the people of Gaza to disavow their elected officials, but that’s not happening anytime soon.

“Hamas is now our army, the only ones fighting to defend the Palestinian people,” said Gaza resident Ahmed al-Sultan, standing outside the rubble of the north Gaza City home his family has lived in for 40 years. “I saw how they fight, their courage and their sacrifice, and so I’ve changed my opinion about them.”

After it won control in Gaza, Hamas sentenced Mr. Sultan to death. He won a reprieve through a connected relative. Today, he calls the Palestinian Authority leaders he once served, who are based in the West Bank, “donkeys” and says Hamas, his onetime nemesis, are “rightful defenders of the Palestinian people.”

Most nationalist movements are not motivated or moved by outside pressure while their country is occupied.  The US tried it with Iraq after the first Gulf war, with little or no results, despite the thousands of deaths and the utter ruin of the Iraqi economy, and it’s really foolhardy to think Gazans will reject Hamas or vote them out of power.   What the Israelis have done rather successfully is a play on the old divide and conquer philosophy, where they have pit one group of Palestinians against another.  Hamas is a by product of this strategy and the Israelis will perpetuate the lie that  Hamas  doesn’t recognize the state of Israel as a a casus belli for any military action against Palestinians, prolonging the conflict, keeping the region unstable, while appealing for and getting  massive military and economic aid from the US.

President Obama should know all this.  The patterns are really very clear and well discernible.  The Israelis can go on with this game of abuse and genocide as long as they are enabled by the US specifically and western powers generally.  The pressure to change will have to come from the citizens of America and the west on their elected officials who are, for the moment anyway, in the back pocket of the Lobby.

Israel’s existence is not in question


In the minds of the Arab world, Israel exists and will exist and they are no threat to Israel.  The problem is Israel is a threat to its neighbors; inspite of that there has been a muted response from Israel’s enemies.  Juan Cole offers a translation of Ayatollah Sistani’s comments on the Israeli aggression and even I am shocked at how mild mannered it is.

In the Name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate

The beloved Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip have, since noon yesterday, been subjected to a vicious attack and to continual strikes that have resulted so far in hundreds of victims being martyred or wounded.

This assault comes after a suffocating blockade to which this oppressed people has been subjected for several months. It had resulted in the creation of harsh humanitarian conditions as a result of lack of food, medicine, fuel and other necessities of daily life for the citizens.

Mere verbal expressions of condemnation and disapproval of what is being done to our Palestinian brethren in Gaza, and of solidarity with them, mean nothing before the immensity of this horrific tragedy to which they are being subjected.

The Arab and Muslim worlds are called upon, more than at any past time, to take practical steps in order to stop this continual aggression and to break this cruel blockade that has been imposed on that proud people.

We ask God, the Exalted, the All-Powerful to take the hands of all and lead them to that wherein lies goodness and righteousness. Verily, he is the All-Hearing, the Gracious.

Meanwhile, while everyone in corporate American media seems to hedge reporting on the massacre taking place in Gaza, Israeli media seems to have a more realistic handle on the catastrophe raging around their corporate media’s head.

Israel embarked yesterday on yet another unnecessary, ill-fated war. On July 16, 2006, four days after the start of the Second Lebanon War, I wrote: “Every neighborhood has one, a loud-mouthed bully who shouldn’t be provoked into anger… Not that the bully’s not right – someone did harm him. But the reaction, what a reaction!”

Two and a half years later, these words repeat themselves, to our horror, with chilling precision. Within the span of a few hours on a Saturday afternoon,the IDF sowed death and destruction on a scale that the Qassam rockets never approached in all their years, and Operation “Cast Lead” is only in its infancy.

poignantly poised Gordon Levy in Haaretz.  With pretty good moral clarity, Tom Segev writes:

It is admittedly impossible to live with daily missile fire, even if virtually no place in the world today enjoys a situation of zero terror. But Hamas is not a terrorist organization holding Gaza residents hostage: It is a religious nationalist movement, and a majority of Gaza residents believe in its path. One can certainly attack it, and with Knesset elections in the offing, this attack might even produce some kind of cease-fire. But there is another historical truth worth recalling in this context: Since the dawn of the Zionist presence in the Land of Israel, no military operation has ever advanced dialogue with the Palestinians.

 

even though his conclusion is somewhat flawed and undermines what preceeded it.  What’s important is these ideas found their way in mainstream publications in Israel, yet aren’t even remotely mirrored here in the States. I could surmise that’s an indication of the moral strength of certain elements of Israeli media which is greater than their American counterparts. Honestly, I can’t account for the differences in reporting, but the American media is not doing any service to its customers by keeping them in the dark about Israeli trangessions, and our politicians are not working in the best interests of our country when they excuse the faults of a regime hell bent on death and destruction usually ending at our expense.

The tightening grasp on media by the Israeli government


Now that the Gazan offensive is in full swing and the killing and murder are at a fever pitch, look for the Israeli government to bring out their apologists who will be able to convince you and me that things are not what they seem and it’s the Palestinians’ fault.

Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni on Saturday instructed the Foreign Ministry to take emergency measures to adapt Israel’s international public relations to the ongoing escalation in the Gaza Strip.

Livni instructed ministry officials currently on vacation in Israel to return immediately to their posts abroad, and to immediately mount public relations campaigns in their station countries, focusing on local media and public officials.

The Foreign Ministry is also looking to recruit speakers of foreign languages, in particular Arabic, Italian, Spanish, and German, in order to expand Israel’s public relations campaign with the representatives of foreign media outlets currently in Israel.

If you think there will be relief from Israeli spin on the Internet think again.  Israelis have always been afraid of unfettered access to information and so they’ve managed to wrap that loose end up as well.

The Anti-Defamation League announced Sunday its recent expansion into the world of YouTube, the on-line video-sharing site.

The US-based advocacy group has officially partnered with the digital media powerhouse in an effort to combat hate speech and other forms of abuse.

YouTube’s community guidelines define hate speech as “content that promotes hatred against members of a protected group” – a religious or ethnic minority, for example – without discussing the question of intent.

It is not clear what role, if any, the ADL will have in reshaping YouTube policy in this regard. As of now, the ADL appears merely to be supplementing YouTube’s current abuse-protection measures.

The media blitz of the Israeli machine is now in full swing and every excuse will be made for the aggressive and brutal attacks against Gaza’s population, especially when the ground invasion begins.  Grab as many sources of information as you can, while you still can.  It could very well be that an incident like this will be the catalyst for censoring news and keeping people in the dark.



WOT=War on Islam?


There’s no mistake that America had every reason to be angry at what happened on September 11, 2001, but that tragedy was used by some to take out centuries old grudges against people in the Middle East and steer America on a course which has led it to become a violator of international treaties and agreements unparalleled in our nation’s history.  Nowhere is that exemplified more than with Guantanamo Bay where scores of Muslim men were snatched up from all over the world and placed in an isolated military camp where they were tortured for no apparent reason.

An Algerian man who spent nearly seven years in Guantanamo Bay says his U.S. interrogators never questioned him on the main terrorism allegation against him.

Mustafa Ait Idir, who was freed this week and returned to his adopted homeland of Bosnia, was accused of planning to go to Afghanistan to fight against U.S. forces.

“They’ve never asked anything about charges which were brought against us. They’ve never asked about Afghanistan,” he told Reuters in an interview.

Ait wasn’t captured on some battlefield endangering the lives of US servicemen and women, rather he was taken from his country, Bosnia and imprisoned in Gitmo Bay after his own country’s court had determined he was innocent of the charges for which the US government picked him up. It seems however that US authorities were interested in Islamic relief organizations working in Bosnia, which appears to be even the focus of officials even here in America.  (The Holy Land Foundation trial recently concluded in Texas is an example where relief efforts particularly for Palestinians suffering under the worse case of state sponsored terrorism were shut down under flimsily constructed charges.)

The charge for which the US picked up Ait, conspiring to attack the US embassy in Sarajevo,  was dropped by authorities while he was in Gitmo and a US federal judge ordered and government officials acceded to the order that he be released from his unlawful imprisonment, but why was he picked up in the first place?

From this observer’s perspective it appears America has given into its dark side, filled with sadism and masochistic fantacies played out in our artistic and entertainment culture which could be acted out in reality against an enemy we were told only responded to such brutality.  The Bush administration was/is not the least bit interested in fighting its true enemies it merely wanted bodies, the 21st century version of the body count notion that came out of the Vietnam war, to fill up Guantanamo and justify its existence.

At a Pentagon briefing in the spring of 2002, a senior Army intelligence officer expressed doubt about the entire intelligence-gathering process.

“He said that we’re not getting anything, and his thought was that we’re not getting anything because there might not be anything to get,” said Donald J. Guter, a retired rear admiral who was the head of the Navy’s Judge Advocate General’s Corps at the time.

*snip*

In 2002, a CIA analyst interviewed several dozen detainees at Guantanamo and reported to senior National Security Council officials that many of them didn’t belong there, a former White House official said.

Despite the analyst’s findings, the administration made no further review of the Guantanamo detainees. The White House had determined that all of them were enemy combatants, the former official said.

Rather than taking a closer look at whom they were holding, a group of five White House, Justice Department and Pentagon lawyers who called themselves the “War Council” devised a legal framework that enabled the administration to detain suspected “enemy combatants” indefinitely with few legal rights.

The threat of new terrorist attacks, the War Council argued, allowed President Bush to disregard or rewrite American law, international treaties and the Uniform Code of Military Justice to permit unlimited detentions and harsh interrogations.

The group further argued that detainees had no legal right to defend themselves, and that American soldiers — along with the War Council members, their bosses and Bush — should be shielded from prosecution for actions that many experts argue are war crimes.

This attitude that the executive could unilaterally re-write or even ignore existing law is a theme that has been consistently explored during the Bush administration and found expression in a doctrine known as  “unilateral executive”. With this gloves off approach, people in the field were allowed to do whatever they wanted; there were no limits to the power or the abuse they could reap on people under their control and consequentially torture and physical abuse were more normal than not.

(Ait) said he was kept for four months, lightly dressed, in a very cold refrigerated container. For short periods of the day he was taken outside, where it was very hot. Other prisoners were subjected to long periods in total darkness or very bright light, he said.

“There was torture every minute,” Ait Idir said. “It did not matter to them if we were terrorists or not.“

Indeed.

America’s steady decline into fascism


It’s been coming since the dawn of this century and accelerated with the events of 911.  America’s response, defined by its political leaders, promulgated by members of the media, and accepted by a large segment of the population has steered the country towards fascism.  The political definition of fascism fits to a “t” what is happening in 21st century America.  Our increased militarism, which has given rise to a new military state which responds even to natural disasters with a military presence, the nationalism spurred by the ‘either you are with us or against us’ mentality, the tackling of a new and equally imaginary  jihadist Islam, to replace an old one, communism and now the nationalization of the banking system all are signs of the encroachment of fascism into the collective.  The last example has raised more than a few eyebrows, mine included, in a piece written for the Huffington Post.

Now, if you do not yet understand that the Wall Street crisis is a man-made disaster done through intentional deregulation and corruption, I have a bridge in Alaska to sell to you….. This manufactured crisis is now to be remedied, if the fiscal fascists get their way, with the total transfer of Congressional powers (the few that still remain) to the Executive Branch and the total transfer of public funds into corporate (via government as intermediary) hands.

From the very beginning Bush’s administration has always tried to remove any and all opposition to its policies, including Congress’ oversight function, and the unfortunate aspect of that is Congress has allowed it to happen.  The reinterpretation of FISA statutes, the Military Commissions Act and now the bail out of financial institutions have been structured in such a way as to bypass the other two main bodies of government, the legislative and judicial, and leave power solely in the hands of the executive.  The concept of the unitary executive, has been expanded under this Administration far more than previous ones and under Bush he deems fit to categorically dismiss laws passed by Congress and signed by him via signing statements which say in some cases he is not bound by the very law he is signing.

What struck me about this latest offense to come from Bush’s government is the way bailouts of Wall Street are designed to give power solely to the Secretary of the Treasury  in a manner which leaves out the other branches of government in the decision making process.

The Treasury Secretary can buy broadly defined assets, on any terms he wants, he can hire anyone he wants to do it and can appoint private sector companies as financial deputies of the US government. And he can write whatever regulation he thinks are needed.

*snip*

Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.

Such language sounds so much like that employed in the Military Commissions Act, where only the President and or the Secretary of Defense can define someone as an unlawful enemy combatant and outside the reach of one of the most cherished rights of American statehood, habeas corpus and the judicial system.

But even in the waning days of the Bush Administration it appears this descent is in free fall.  The Republican Party feels confident nominating a ticket that includes one who claims it’s perfectly ok to look into the personnel records of state employees, while protesting the invasion of her own privacy and emails.  We’ve already talked about the hypocrisy of Sarah Palin’s position vis-a-vis her own party, but her idea that she can invade others’ privacy so early in the election campaign is chutzpah beyond measure and a sure sign that things will continue as they have been for the last 8 years.

I have an endearing hope in the goodness of the American society to overcome these shortcomings in our political leaders.  This is not to say the choices we are presented with at this time are solutions to where we are heading, but before the Brown shirts fully take over, I hope we can reverse this process which has wreaked havoc on societies similarly placed in the not too distant past.