Tag: Government

Guantanamo Bay-Terrorist Training Ground


Guantanamo Bay will most likely go down as the place which housed the most terrorist we ever faced in our war on terror, the phony war started  by George Bush, and those terrorists were US personnel who engaged in torture and even murder.  The latest news that three suicides and the resulting investigation was so botched as to lead to more questions than answers can only lead one to the conclusion that the “suicides” were indeed murder and lead to other questions of how many other deaths at Gitmo were at the hands of the captors and not the captive.  The facts from the only independent study conducted are three detainees were found swinging at the end of a ligature in their closely guarded cells with rags stuffed in their throats and one “suicide” victim had his internal organs, heart and kidneys and throat removed before his body was interred.
The removal of internal organs closely dovetails into another story we’ve covered in the pages of Miscellany101 as it regards Palestinians in the Occupied Territories who’ve died at the hands of their terrorist captors. That is scary enough, the parallel universe that seems to pervade all that the American and Israeli authorities do to Arab, semitic and Muslim peoples the world over; however, the lengths at which authorities went to blame even the victims for their murder at the hands of those same authorities (for how can a man both hang himself, stuff rags in his own throat and remained undetected for several hours long enough for rigor mortis to develop in a cell that was under 24 hour scrutiny by security guards because said occupant of the cell possessed the super human capability to break loose over power his guards and eventually find his way to the US mainland to wreak further havoc on innocent Americans) is a further nail in the coffin of US legitimacy and credibility.

Rear Adm Harris said he did not believe the men had killed themselves out of despair. “They are smart. They are creative, they are committed,” he said. “They have no regard for life, either ours or their own. I believe this was not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us.”

Or how about this wildly insane comment from a former Bush Administration official who seemed to have the intent correct, i.e. publicity, although assigning it incorrectly to the victims

“It does sound like this is part of a strategy – in that they don’t value their own lives, and they certainly don’t value ours; and they use suicide bombings as a tactic,” Colleen Graffy, the deputy assistant secretary of state for public diplomacy, told BBC’s Newshour yesterday. “Taking their own lives was not necessary, but it certainly is a good PR move.”

What Guantanamo Bay became  and perhaps still is today was a battleground for a disgraced titular warrior and leader of the free world, George Bush and now Barack Obama, to play out fantasies of getting even with a perceived foe at the expense of the Nation’s Constitution and way of life.  He descended into the depths of every type of illegal and immoral activity to satisfy a blood lust to exorcise demons of inferiority and insecurity and in term projected that all onto the national consciousness that have seriously affected our judgement and moral compass until the present.

Fellatio as policy in the Middle East


That’s what Thomas Friedman gave as the reason for our invasion of countries in the Middle East in his much ballyhooed interview with Charlie Rose several years ago.  (The clip above.)  It seems however that Friedman either forgot his bravado laced interview or considers it insignificant when writing his latest Mid East pronouncements, which appear here.   In this latest tripe Friedman passes for an editorial (can you believe he gets P-A-I-D for writing this stuff?!) Friedman talks about the “narrative” and describes it thusly

The Narrative is the cocktail of half-truths, propaganda and outright lies about America that have taken hold in the Arab-Muslim world since 9/11. Propagated by jihadist Web sites, mosque preachers, Arab intellectuals, satellite news stations and books — and tacitly endorsed by some Arab regimes — this narrative posits that America has declared war on Islam, as part of a grand “American-Crusader-Zionist conspiracy” to keep Muslims down.

Friedman forgot to mention himself as one who promotes the “narrative”; even by his own accounts we invaded Muslim countries and killed scores of innocence not for any grand or noble political designs for us, Americans, or for them, the citizens of those countries, but rather we reaped all of that havoc ‘because we could’ and to get them to Suck. On. This. That mentality is what drove the pornographic rage that we’ve only seen snippets of that took place in Abu Ghraib.  (I’m sure all the citizens of Iraq, and some other Muslim countries too, have heard all of the stories our democracy has said we here in America aren’t eligible to hear or know about.)  Friedman mentions Abu Ghraib, but only in passing, in the midst of  extolling all the good things American soldiers did or are doing in Iraq as occupiers mind you of a country that initially was no threat to the vital interests of the US or her allies.  While chiding “jihadists” for ignoring the latter, Friedman did himself and his article a disservice but doing the same with the former.

As usual, Glen Greenwald does a pretty good job of dismantling the Friedman fantasy/hypocrisy.  Among his zingers to Friedman’s piece are lines like these

And note the morality on display here:  Hasan attacks soldiers on a military base of a country that has spent the last decade screaming to the world that “we’re at war!!,” and that’s a deranged and evil act, while Friedman cheers for an unprovoked war that killed hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians and displaced millions more — all justified by sick power fantasies, lame Mafia dialogue and cravings more appropriate for a porno film than a civilized foreign policy — and he’s the arbiter of Western reason and sanity.

That’s only one of several well placed punches to Friedman’s devilishly childish arguments in his latest op-ed.  Steven Walt of the infamous Walt-Mearsheimer duo which brought the world the book, The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy, and brought upon themselves an undeserved ignominy, weighed in on Friedman’s article as well with less than sterling results, in my opinion, because of his emphasis on “numbers” of casualties amassed to make the case for why “they” hate us. The comments section of his article is why his article lacks the strength of moral certainty to oppose Friedman’s op-ed.  Simply put people don’t care about the whys and wherefores these days and using that argument about why Muslims hate us without mentioning that we launched a war of aggression against them based on lies that our government made and upheld in order to invade and total decimate their culture, and that we continue to justify our occupation based on these debunked lies is disingenuous, in this writer’s estimation.   Walt is an academic so perhaps that’s why he relied so heavily on numbers in his “refutation” of Friedman’s article, but in so doing he let Friedman off the hook for his, Friedman’s, obscene insistence for war and his cheerleading for it when he knew ostensibly that he was lying.  If Walt had simply said that, any claim to legitimacy on the part of Friedman, would have been irrevocably lost.

Friedman is an apologist for wars of aggression and he wants the victims of such wars to engage him in semantic pedantry which is why he issues this weak call out  at the end of his article.   It’s a waste of time for him to issue it and even more a waste of time for others to answer it.  What Mr. Friedman needs to be reminded of is the importance of ‘the rule of law’, something he nor any of his supporters really had a handle on for the last 10 years. Friedman is the newspaper world’s hate radio pundits; not much substance and  a lot of hot air.  His bias and hatred for the people he generally writes about borders on the sophomoric, not at all worthy of the New York Times, or if you insist that it is, then both are not news that’s fit to be printed.  May I suggest citizenship journalism instead?

Another massacre, absent a terrorist Muslim


We still don’t know who killed four young police officers as they gathered at a local eating establishment during their shift in Washington state.  We do know they were killed as they sat talking, eating or comparing notes together sometime during their shift early Sunday morning by a lone gunman, and typically as yet, no link to “terrorism” is known.  That’s an interesting part of the American vernacular these days, as if to imply the deaths of these officers is either easier to take or more heinous if it was done by a terrorist versus a non-terrorist.  We have become used to such insertions into language regarding death….it’s coded to tell us whether we should recoil or merely shrug our shoulders and thank God it wasn’t us; for example the use of the term ‘hate crime’ which has racial overtunes, is the trigger for whether we should really reflect on not just the death of an individual but the status of where we are as a society versus the everyday violent deaths of  scores of people as things beyond our control.

So we now precede reports of violent deaths, and especially those against symbols of state power with whether the perpetrator was a terrorist or not.  Usually, as we have come to expect, that designation is supposed to tell us if the criminal is a “Muslim”, because as the common perception goes, every terrorist is a Muslim, and therefore worthy of the entire population’s ire and revulsion.  Unfortunately, this allows us to more easily accept violent death, while at the same time focusing our anger on the perpetrator of the crime and not on the nature of the crime itself.  If it’s a non-terrorist crime we tend to focus less on either the victim or the criminal whereas for “terrorist” related crimes we are obsessed with both in an entirely unhealthy way as a society.  This is the cheapening of human life through the politicization of “terror” and it serves pundits, policy wonks and others well as they shape policy for all of us around the value terror gives to human life, but it doesn’t help us much when we are left with the senseless slaying of people like the four officers above.  I won’t bother to get into the blame game and say that the proliferation of handguns in a violent society is responsible or that Mike Huckabee is responsible for the deaths of these officers because he let the “person of interest” everyone is now looking for out of an Arkansas prison prematurely.  That was the rational that sunk a Michael Dukakis campaign in 1988…the old Willie Horton ads, remember them?  It’s interesting to see how even now Huckabee, who might be looking to run in 2012 is back pedaling on the import of his commutation by saying, ‘should he (the person of interest) be found responsible for this horrible tragedy, it will be the result of a series of failures in the criminal justice system in both Arkansas and Washington state’….a typical political statement if there ever was one.  At some point, the buck has to stop being passed, the race/ethnicity of the perpetrator becomes insignificant and the application of the rule of law becomes paramount absent these “mitigating social circumstances” of which governor released him, the ethnic/religious persuasion, the gender, etc, etc, ad nauseum…..  In fact the American system supposedly took all that into account when it said all people are equal under the law so that regardless who commits the heinous act of murder, the equal application of the rule insures justice.  That’s the way it’s supposed to be right?

 

When is a political massacre not an act of terrorism?


When it’s done by Christian or Jewish individuals or states!  Perhaps it’s because the perpetrator of this latest  massacre which resulted in the deaths of 57 people in a battle line state/ally in the “war on terror” was not the typical suspect we associate with acts of terror and therefore it can’t be qualified as terrorism?  In answer to the oft raised claim that all acts of terrorism are only done by Muslims, in the Phillipines this week, the deaths of 57 people at the hands of one group was not done by Muslims but rather a family linked to the President of the Phillipines, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo.  Consequently it has become, rightfully so, a gruesome act unfathomable, yet devoid of the religious screeching that usually accompanies reporting on crimes done by Muslims.  Even Michelle Malkin your virulent Islamophobe is silent about this heinous crime that was committed in her native Phillipines because she can’t blame the usual suspects.  Pity that.

Patriotism No Longer


Many of us who opposed George Bush’s policies and the lies he used to enact, and enforce them, were called traitors for not supporting our president during a time of war.  Now, those same voices which assaulted our patriotism and trumpeted their own are behind the likes of these billboards and many others gracing American highways.  We’re still in a time of war, if you accept the first declaration of war against terror, misplaced and erroneously called by George Bush, but now it appears its ok to oppose this president, and as some seem to imply, even overthrow him!  Where were these voices when we called for an end to wars of occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan, and to these same people who talk of revolution in America today, why aren’t you supporting a President who is on the verge of possibly sending more troops to fight this pseudo war on terror, or end it?  Why don’t you see your calls for actions against a sitting president as giving aid and comfort to the enemy, and why aren’t your talking radio head icons not making that point on their daily shows?  America…….I’ve got three words for you, Race, Party Politics. 

The first billboard above was taken down and replaced with the one below.

Hat tip to the Brad Blog and Think Progress.

Blowback-The Intended Consequence of American Foreign Policy-The Awlaki Interview


It was one of the themes of Ron Paul’s candidacy for president in 2008; American foreign policy would exact a price for Americans that they should neither have to pay or  or are not responsible for paying.  Blowback, a term coined by the CIA after their coup was responsible for re-installing the Shah of Iran to power in the early 1950s means the possible “unintended consequences” of American government’s  covert action against other countries, most notably those in the Middle East and elsewhere.  Paul used the term to refer to any policy of the US government, covert or otherwise that adversely affected the people to whom it was directed, but might have possibly been considered advantageous to American interests in the short term.  What Paul and his supporters, I counted myself among them, wanted to say was that American interventionist policy held no strategic long term advantage for anyone and the best course of action was for the US to not become obstructionist in its relations with foreign countries, especially those in the Middle East.

In the present much ado has been made about a certain Imam that might have inspired Nidal Hasan, the Ft. Hood shooter of late, to commit his acts of murder and mayhem, saying the Imam, Anwar Al-Awlak used his firebrand rhetoric which he espoused while an Imam in an Arlington, Va masjid shortly after 911 and which left an indelible mark on Hasan until today.  However, that narrative is incomplete and at the same time convenient for the proponents of blowback, because it allows policy and public to aim their ire at the people who respond to acts of aggression against them in much the same way as they are assaulted.  Thanks to the American Muslim blog, I ran across a National Geographic interview with Al-Awlak while he was Imam of Dar al-Hijrah  masjid and the things he said at that time are a far cry from the firebrand rhetoric he is accused of using to incite people to acts of terrorism against America. In answer to the question of the climate in America created by the 911 catastrophe, al Awlak had this to say.

we stated our position clearly, and I even feel that it’s unfortunate that we have to state this position because no religion would condone this, so it should be common knowledge. But we were in a position where we had to say that Islam does not approve of this. There is no way that the people who did this could be Muslim, and if they claim to be Muslim, then they have perverted their religion.We encourage people to participate in blood drives, we encourage them to donate, and then we encourage the community to reach out. Part of the blame is on us that we haven’t been very active in reaching out to our fellow citizens, so that when these things happen we don’t have to go through this unfortunate backlash. We had a neighbor come in, and she said, “I’m coming to show my solidarity with you, to let you know that we are with you in this and that we are sorry for the difficult times you’re going through.” And then she said, “I wish you had came and visited me earlier, to give me an understanding of your religion. Although we were neighbors, we didn’t really hear from you.” This really is a message for us Muslims, that we need to reach out.

He defined “jihad” this way

The linguistic meaning of the word is “struggle.” The jihad of the individual would be to struggle against the evils of oneself. Therefore, it’s a continuous process of improvement. It is striving to become closer to God. That’s jihad for the individual.Jihad for the community is to protect the religion from any inside or outside enemy. So the jihad of the community would mean that if there is any internal corruption, we would struggle to get rid of it. And if there is an invading force from outside, then we would, too, struggle to defend ourselves, and that is where armed combat occurs. So actually, fighting is only a part of the jihad, and it’s considered to be a defensive force in order to protect the religion. If somebody defends their life, their property or their family, this is considered to be a jihad.

 

Could it be this was the ideology that attracted a searching Nidal Hasan to Awlaki at a time when he was looking for direction and purpose?  As we mentioned in an earlier post the place of worship in Virginia where Awlaki was imam was well known to federal authorities and worhshippers there remember Awlaki strongly condemning acts of terrorism on American soil, as the tone of the above interview seems to suggest.  In a heavy dose of foreshadowing, Awlaki while referring to bin Laden had this to say,

My worry is that because of this conflict,(i.e. in the Middle East-pre Iraq war)  the views of Osama bin Laden will become appealing to some of the population of the Muslim world. Never in the past were there any demonstrations raising the picture of Osama Bin Laden—it has just happened now. So Osama bin Laden, who was considered to be an extremist, radical in his views, could end up becoming mainstream. That’s a very frightening thing, so the U.S. needs to be very careful and not have itself perceived as an enemy of Islam.

True to form, America did just the opposite, entering into what George Bush and others in his administration and the  media called the “clash of civilizations”, an inevitable war of the worlds, and blowback ensued, which is just what the fanatics on both sides of the divide, in Washington and in cities across the Middle East wanted.  Throughout the Iraqi war the constant refrain was the occupation of Iraq by American troops  made America less safe today than it was before and the radicalization of people like Awlaki is proof of that.  Even in the words of the milquetoast Washington Post, Awlaki didn’t become radicalized until he returned to Yemen in 2004, the land of his parents, and witnessed  firsthand the destruction of a nominal agrarian society by an aggressive American foreign policy toward  Yemen and other countries in the Middle East. The fact that Yemeni authorities arrested him once and tried to identify him with a group he had previously eschewed and whose tactics he had condemned played no small part in his about face to  today.  Blowback; and the ability of policy wonks to point to him and by extension Hasan as a reason for repressive measures against Arab/Muslim citizens of the United States, as well as increased vigilance, read, military spending and government intrusion into the lives of all citizens is a convenience of blowback that the initiators and proponents cannot  overlook.  Quite simply, many in government want dissension and strife in areas of the world and if need be at home as well, to justify their continued occupation of such areas amidst huge military and government appropriations.  Anything that can be done to justify this trend is acceptable in their rational, and blowback becomes just another tool, at the risk of ordinary citizens, for the interference of government in people’s lives, either as oppressors or liberators or saviors.

 

Profiling the Religious Right-A Necessary Evil?


A lot has been said lately about profiling Muslims, either those in the US military or ordinary citizens, because some fear their presence on American soil presents a threat to the safety and security of Americans and their way of life.  It doesn’t matter to those who make that call, most recently like  Sarah Palin, that those Muslims themselves are prosperous members of the same society, their religious preference and acts which have been associated to them by an obsequious press have stuck to them and made them visible, likely targets by society.  Undeserved targets, it might be added, but the idea that an entire group of people are responsible for the same crimes committed by 19 hijackers or one lone gunman, resonate in a hate filled and drenched society in much the same way that some say  President Barack Obama is not really a citizen of America, is a racist or a secret Muslim.  In fact the genesis for this idea of racial profiling comes from a source that now implies it is ok to get rid of unlikeable  people, such as Obama, by having them murdered.  If you think this is an unfair jump from a Biblical verse to death threats on the President just look at the 400% increase in death threats against this president versus his predecessor  who was seen as a “born again” Christian.  One of the common elements in the vitriol directed towards a sitting President is Christianity and its religious scriptures.  Indeed, some of the slogans voiced in opposition to Obama are steeped in religious references; “The Anti-Christ is living in the White House”, “Oppressive Bloodsucking Arrogant Muslim Alien”, just to name a few.

That said, why aren’t there more calls for profiling Christians, and especially Christian members of the Republican party who have justified every turn of their opposition to Obama in some way or another to their religious principles.  If you think that is too extreme, then is it too much to ask those in the opposition to at least condemn the tactics of their “brothers” to the rhetoric directed towards the President?  With the exception of the about face made by Rupert Murdoch to Glen Beck’s anti-white tirade against Obama, no one from the “opposition” has said such extreme rhetoric is out of place or inconsistent with the  ideals of a Judeau-Christian society.  The silence from the Right has been deafening and only serves to encourage the fundamentalists to even greater heights of hyperbole and violence.  Where are the calls for a more systematic government approach to Christians’ opposition to Obama, and ensuring his safety from their menace?  Where are the calls from members of other faiths to stop the tide of Christian fundamentalism that endangers the life of our elected officials and in turn the political process we hold so dear?  Why is political expediency what keeps people silent in the face of such threats against the Republic, while the very same silent voices encourage the deafening roar of calls to profile others of the society who have not expressed such incitement, but for whom lone individuals have become the standard by which they and their faith are judged?

One bright side of all this is the ACLU has been consistent in their opposition to stemming free speech, even if it borders on threats to the President of the United States.  Quoting biblical verses whose meaning they consider ambiguous is not reason enough, in their mind, to prosecute people who use them in ways others of us consider threatening.  The very people who in years gone by usually threw scorn on the American Civil Liberties Union for their liberal approach to litigation are now being shielded by the organization from calls that they, abusers of free speech, be held accountable for their speech.  I applaud the ACLU for being predictable even though their position vis-a-vis these latest scoundrels on Americas political landscape hardly deserve their succor.  Regrettably, one can only come to one conclusion and that is no group is responsible for the actions of individual members of that group……no matter how relevant the scriptures they may all believe in inspire the acts of those individuals.  The idea of collectivisim…mentioned before here in this blog, have no place in American discourse but people with political agendas that have nothing to do with American ideals of justice will never say that because they want to use government to suppress those they dislike or mistrust.  Such manipulators of government are the true enemies of the State yet the ones whose profiling is the most difficult to achieve.  It is not altogether an impossible task and the sooner we get on with it, the safer the Republic will be for everyone.

Ft. Hood


Major Nidal Malik Hasan allegedly went to his workplace at Ft. Hood, Texas shot and killed 12 people.  It is reported that Hasan is a Muslim…………….so what?  The religion he professes is not a crime, the act of killing 12 people is and that’s what he has to stand trial for.  We here at Miscellany101 do not subscribe to the notion of collectivism even though it is an idea rooted in Christian theology.  In that ethnic-centric philosophy, all humanity will be judged or held accountable for the sins of the original progenitors of the species but we find it more reasonable and rational to believe that every one is responsible for what he or she does and not what is foisted upon them by birth, nationality, species or one’s correligionists.  Israel has used this rationale to justify it’s oppression and slaughter of Palestinians under its control as well as  threaten those living anywhere else in the world, but Miscellany101 finds that racist and xenophobic and smacks of a bygone and dark era of modern Western history.

It’s sad to see members of the Islamic faith think it necessary to go through super human lengths and acts of condemnation that folks like CAIR and others have gone through to distance themselves from the guilt of collectivism that 21st century America and her allies have put the Muslim world through.  Even as this piece is being written, there are reports of a shooting taking place in Orlando, Florida that some are saying has resulted in two deaths yet no one is asking members of the suspect’s religion to make any genuflections before the public in acts of contrition and neither should they, nor is there any speculation about the religious beliefs of the individual, as that too is irrelevant.  Yet, societal conditions that go far beyond proper citizenship and allegiance are made upon members of the Islamic faith with the most incendiary language used when  dealing with the issue of Islam and Muslims in America.  It’s sad to see the press leading the way in this public electronic lynching as witnessed by Charlie Gibson’s  ABC News  lead on Thursday’s broadcast identifying the gunman as “Muslim Hasan” as if “Muslim” were somehow affixed to his name.  Regrettably, this attitude has become the norm when dealing with “crime” here in America; regardless of the anecdotes attributed to Hasan’s motive, what he did was certainly no more than a crime, religion is at best tangential to this tragedy.  Acts of murder and/or retribution are as old as this Republic, and are  practiced by every tribe, group, race, ethnicity, religion known to man.  There are laws in place to deal with illegal behavior, but our society has not yet criminalized “belonging” to a group or holding beliefs that others may find abhorrent.

What then is America’s fascination with Muslims and their criminal behavior as opposed to the criminal behavior of “criminals” of other religions or origins unknown? Obviously 911 has had an enormous impact on the American psyche but the main impetus of this hate driven agenda is the attempt to grab the heart and soul of America by some through the machinations of big government.  The hypocrisy of that movement to use the full force of government to fix special interest grievances is no more apparent than in the birther and anti-health reform movements now sweeping the country which claims an Obama led administration is somehow orchestrating the total involvement of government in their lives just months after one of the most intrusive governments in modern history  that of George Bush, relinquished its fear mongering hold  on a terrified America.  It doesn’t matter to the denizens of hate and fear that Hasan was probably like all the other military vets who loathed a foreign policy that put them in a foreign land as an occupier for an indeterminate period of time….(this year has been the deadliest year for military suicides since the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan) and that Hasan probably wanted to do the infamous suicide by cop, but stopped along the way to kill scores of people.  Nor do those who are angry with big government and especially Obama’s big government see anything wrong with police teams swarming over Ft. Hood, while soldiers trained to fight in urban settings much like what was taking place on their own base were left unarmed and unable to defend themselves.  No one sees the contradiction in a policy that tells US service personnel they must defend freedom abroad but are not capable of defending themselves on their own soil……i.e. every soldier should have been armed with their personal firearms for protection for just  such an emergency as presented itself that fateful Thursday.   What people have been able to do is avoid discussion of those issues of a foreign and national policy which directly impact the lives of EVERY American and turn it into a hate fest reminiscent of McCarthyism like suspicion of 12% of a population that holds the same values as everyone else.  It’s amazing…..we still have not reached a level of sophistication to see beyond the narrow minded ritual of divide and conquer still being carried out to detract public attention from matters of substance and instead get them to embrace issues that are inconsequential to the health and longevity of this Republic.  I dread the thought that we have to go through another 30-60 years of civil rights struggles for Muslim Americans, much like we’ve had to with other ethnic groups now peacefully inhabiting our shores.  I’m sorry we haven’t learned that age old lesson……every man is responsible for his actions alone, just like Major Hasan.

UPDATE

 

RussellMurder on military installations isn’t as uncommon as one would have you believe, but to focus on the ethnicity of this particular murderer when that hasn’t been done at any other time in recent memory, ignoring the trauma government decisions regarding war and the deployment of the US military has caused the American people at a time when there is talk of potentially expanding the war effort into Iran is macabre and sinister….and might we add typcially neoncon-like.  Lest we forget, a few short months ago, five people were killed on a military installation in Iraq by someone who had been seeking help, didn’t find it and decided to take matters into his own hands.  Nothing at all was said about his religious motivation or lack thereof or even what drove him on his murderous rampage other than his inability to cope with what are supposed to be his duties as a soldier and no demands nor inquiries were made by society in general to have revealed to us all the secrets behind John Russell’s descent into murderous mayhem.  Such knowledge while vital to the likes of mental health professionals, is not something that would satisfy our thirst for justice; and notice how silent we have remained in the face of Russell’s onslaught until now.  Yet pundits across the political landscape of America are with a straight face able to demand that conditions for service to our country, and perhaps even citizenship should change because someone with the name “Hasan” has committed the same act as others who wear a military uniform have done before him.  Why main stream media and punditry haven’t been called out for their hypocrisy is an indication of where present day America is in today’s climate of fear and loathing.  It is the sorry state of affairs we find ourselves in today that despite all the information we have available to us, we still choose to go down that path of our ancestors, which leads to fratricide and destruction.  Wake up America your standard of living is in peril not because of any one group of people’s presence in  your midst but rather because of our inability, lack of will, to work together to ignore the voices of gloom and hate.  If we succumb to them we have no one to blame but ourselves for the catastrophe that is sure to follow.

The Republican Party today


I have tried to ignore the likes of talk radios worst personalities who have been trolling for the Republican Party because I believe they do and say what they do in order to make money, and I secretly hope they don’t believe one bit of the garbage they spew everyday.  We all know who “they” are and they have been really dominant on the American landscape since 911.  They are the worse America has to offer humanity but they are ours and we have to deal with them.  When the Republican party chose an African-American as its titular head, I held out hope the party had turned a corner and would distance itself from the clowns on the air whose ranting and raving about race and Obama and ethnicity have polluted political thought and discourse, but unfortunately, Michael Steele has turned out to be just as ignorant about race and incendiary in his comments as the more crude and boorish air talent the GOP has engaged to take their message to the public.  However, the picture below takes the cake and is the ultimate insult in what one can only hope will be the demise of the Party.  The picture appeared on the Facebook page of the Republican National Committee and is blatant in its disregard for American history and as in your face about what Republicans think of race……especially  mixed race relationships and a Supreme Court case which made it illegal to deny couples of different races the right to marry…..as can be ever spoken.  I hope the picture is the dagger in the heart of a Party which has become irrelevant in the nation’s discourse about ANYTHING and EVERYTHING, and maybe suggestions can be made to the appropriate law enforcement agencies to investigate Rethuglicans for treason against the homeland and threats, real or imagined, against a sitting president.

obamafacebookphoto

Muslim Spies in Congress: A Classic Misdirection Play


Chris Gaubatz Chris Gaubatz, pictured on the right next to Representative Andre Carson, along with his father have produced what they think is an explosive book about the Council on American-Islamic Relations, CAIR,  a Muslim civil rights organization’s attempts to infiltrate Congress with spies as interns.  Yes, this is another in a long line of attempts to discredit, denigrate, pollute Islam’s presence in America, and you the reader should ask yourself the question why is so much effort being made to destroy a religion in the land of the free and the home of brave.  The book in question is called Muslim Mafia, and the writer, Chris’ dad, Dave Gaubatz is literally on the fringe when it comes to sanity in today’s America; you can read about his dubious past here.  Among some of his more enlightened pronouncements is the one where he says when talking about the Obama campaign, ‘We are now on the verge of allowing a self admitted ‘crack-head’ to have his finger on every nuclear weapon in America.’ His tendency to make things up out of thin air is continued in the aforementioned book.  What’s disturbing about it, apart from the fact he prostituted his son to lie and deceive the people who work in the offices of CAIR where he stole memos from them, no doubt that the FBI already possessed, to prove his theory of spying, is the fact this book was announced by four members of Congress, one of whom wrote the forward for the book…….a bit of self-promotion never hurt anybody I guess.  This is the same Congress, an institution where one of their own esteemed members has already been outed as a spy!

HarmanJane Harman, democrat from California has been recorded discussing making a deal with some Israeli intelligence officer who was being monitored by the feds through a court approved wiretap.  Harman was to throw the full weight of her office behind getting the Justice Department to drop the charges against two AIPAC officials….the DOJ inevitably did just that,  who were accused for spying for Israel in exchange for being appointed chairman of the House Intelligence Committee with the help of said Israeli officer. It doesn’t help Harman’s supporters to know that Harman had been under investigation since 2006 and that DOJ attorneys had decided she indeed committed a crime in her discussions with the Israelis.  That doesn’t seem to matter to the likes ofReps. Sue Myrick (NC), John Shadegg (AZ), Paul Broun (GA), and Trent Franks (AZ), who claim the Muslim menace is imminent and deadly and by extension trumps anything Harman ever did.  Yet, the CAIR’s  literature used by Gaubatz to expose their dastardly plot reveals them to be no more than a public advocacy group for the rights of Muslim Americans and a lobbying organization with far less effectiveness than AIPAC.

The second part of the misdirection involves diverting attention away from the efforts Muslims have made to report, bring to the attention of authorities or police,  members of their community only to have their efforts denied, like the community in California that reported an obviously errant Muslim who it later turned out was a FBI informant only to have one of their own arrested and the  subject of a government investigation.   Or how about the Muslim community leader,  known as an Imam, who was arrested by federal authorities because while he agreed to help law enforcement round up radical leaning Muslims he refused to do so surreptitiously. Left with examples like this Muslim communities throughout America feel helpless to stop what are many times government inspired plots of violence against American citizens because such disclosure to or cooperation with federal authorities often leads to negative consequences to otherwise law abiding citizens.   Perhaps this high publicity appearance of the four horsemen congressional representatives was meant to get the members of CAIR and other Muslim civil rights groups to come running back to federal officials begging to be accepted by them and agreeing to any terms dictated by law enforcement to counter any negative publicity generated by this “book”.  I hope that doesn’t happen, and it shouldn’t.   The Muslim community has done more than  their share to show good faith in working with law enforcement  to eliminate any threat to the security of American citizens….many of them Muslims.  This spurious book, Muslim Mafia, is the thanks they get for that.

A bitter disappointment


tantawi226bodygettyI saw an interesting thread over at Ginny’s Thoughts and Things about an encounter the head of Egypt’s leading Islamic University had with a high school aged girl.  You can read about it here and here.  What it boils down to in the simplest of terms is he asked a young high school aged girl to remove her face veil in his presence and when she demurred, he used the full weight of his position as the head of a major state supported institution to have it removed against her will.  Whether you agree with the article of clothing the young woman was wearing or not, the issue is, up to the time of that encounter with Sheikh Tantawi, it was not against the law of her land to wear it, but because her appearance offended him he brought the full action of the State against her.  It appears that even in Egypt, despite its claims of Islamic roots, the State supersedes individual freedom that Egyptian culture, religion and LAW give to the citizens of that country, and the sensitivities of a civil servant of the State, albeit a powerful one can determine what is legal and illegal.

After reading this news, I wonder what came first, Tantawi’s indignation towards this young woman or Egyptian men and society’s disrespect of Egyptian women in general?  Sexual harassment is a big problem in Egyptian society, and Tantawi’s heavy handed approach with this young woman, which has caught the attention of the society, probably serves as an example of how Egyptian men view their relationship with women.  I question whether the Sheikh is the leader of this movement to denigrate women’s rights or is he  a follower of a mob trend in society to intimidate and harass women? It is a sorry state of affairs for an esteemed position or rank in scholarly Islam, and no amount of backtracking can undo the damage done to the young woman or to his position.

Give it up for Harry Connick, Jr!


harry-connick-jr--picture-4Appearing on an Australian television show which featured performers in black face, Harry Connick handled himself with dignity and honor as he spoke out against the inherent racism behind such a skit he was asked to judge.  You can see the skit and watch Connick’s response to it below.  He spoke with measured tones and with a seriousness deserving of the abuse, handling himself with dignity.  His remarks were well received by the Australian audience which applauded what he had to say.  His remarks transcended race and are an indication of where we are as a country today.  Anyone watching how he handled himself and what he said should feel proud of the way he was representin’ America.  Connick, from a grateful citizen of the United States….thank you!

Congratulations to Mr. Obama?


noble peace prizeBarack Hussein Obama has become only the fourth US president, after Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson and Jimmy Carter to win the Nobel Peace Prize.  Coming after the disastrous Bush administration’s  doctrines of wars of aggression and preemption any President should  be awarded the prize if he/she simply refused to continue Bush’s policy, which is why my congratulatory message is tinged with a bit skepticism.

With a publicity seeking  commander of US forces in Afghanistan  asking for more US troops to be stationed and fight there and after eight years of an already failed policy anything less than a resounding NO to such demands means Obama is headed towards another Vietnam type conflict marked by steady increases of US personnel with no clear winnable objectives.  I found this list of things Mr/President Obama should consider to be most helpful in deciding whether to send more troops to Afghanistan:

1. The planning of 9-11 was done in hotels and apartments in Germany and Spain, and flight schools in the United States. Even Paul Pillar, former CIA deputy chief for counter-terrorism will tell you that an al Qaeda base in Afghanistan would not significantly increase threats to the United States.

2. If the Taliban had control of Afghanistan, it would likely not allow al Qaeda in. Richard Holbrooke, the U.S. president’s guy in Afghanistan, will tell you the same.

3. The Taliban would not necessarily gain full control of Afghanistan if the United States left. It never had it before, and appears unlikely to be able to take it now. These three points, as Robert Naiman has pointed out, make the leap from US withdrawal to an al Qaeda attack on the United States quite a large one.

4. Occupying and bombing Afghanistan is actually making us less safe. It is enraging people against the United States, building the Taliban and other resistance.

5. The occupation is also damaging the rule of law. Our engagement in this illegal enterprise makes it more difficult to prevent other nations from engaging in wars of aggression.

6. The occupation is not benefitting the Afghan people. It is not protecting their rights or their lives. It is brutally taking their lives with bombs and imprisoning them without charge or trial or the rights of prisoners of war.

7. The Taliban is made up of poor people fighting in order to eat. They need aid, diplomacy, jobs, education, and resources, not bombs and troops and mercenaries. We’re paying tens of thousands of Afghans to fight as mercenaries. We could pay them to rebuild their country and have money to spare.

8. That we are supposedly succeeding against al Qaeda when arguments are needed to reauthorize the PATRIOT Act, but supposedly failing against al Qaeda when it’s time to continue or escalate wars is insulting, not credible.

9. The citizens of the United States oppose the war, and it’s our money and our kids, and our country being placed in danger of blowback.

10. The people of Afghanistan, according to an ABC News poll, want the United States to withdraw. It’s their country, and you cannot impose democracy on them without obeying their majority opinion.

11. If we’ve been through eight years of this and not been able to even devise a rough description of what a “success” would look like, what are the chances that it will be identified and achieved in year nine?

12. It’s called the graveyard of empires for a reason.

13. Our states’ militias, the national guard, is needed at home and cannot constitutionally be sent abroad to fight for empire.

14. US soldiers signed up to defend the United States, not to commit war crimes in distant lands.

15. There is nothing worse than war that could conceivably take its place. Killing people is the worst thing there is.

I wish the Nobel prize committee had waited to see what Obama’s response about Afghanistan would be before they awarded him the peace prize. Perhaps they thought in giving it to him it would be pressure on him to ‘do the right thing’. I can’t say what their motivation was or what will be Obama’s but his first real foreign policy challenge that directly affects the interest of America is imminent. I hope he lives up to the challenge and the honor of the Nobel Peace Prize.

The South Has Risen Again!


I’m not talking about that “South” which steadfastly refuses to acknowledge that America can and is being led by an African-American, I’m talking about the South that acknowledges that racism is the source of Obama’s critic’s discontent, and it’s  Southern white men who are making the case.  They should be the ones who call out the racist critics of Obama, because as we all know, ‘it takes one to know one’, but this pot calling the kettle black (or in this case racist) is not coming from racist whites but rather from white people who have lived with them down in the deep south all their lives and know how they think and behave.

We white people have controlled political life in the disunited colonies and United States for some 400 years on this continent. Conservative whites have been in power 28 of the last 40 years. Even during the eight Clinton years, conservatives in Congress blocked most of his agenda and pulled him to the right. Yet never in that period did I read any headlines suggesting that anyone was calling for the assassinations of presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan, or either of the Bushes. Criticize them, yes.. Call for their impeachment, perhaps. But there were no bounties on their heads. And even when someone did try to kill Ronald Reagan, the perpetrator was non-political mental case who wanted merely to impress Jody Foster.

But elect a liberal who happens to be Black and we’re back in the sixties again. At this point in our history, we should be proud that we’ve proven what conservatives are always saying that in America anything is possible, EVEN electing a black man as president. But instead we now hear that school children from Maine to California are talking about wanting to “assassinate Obama.”

I believe in free speech, but how long until we white people start making racist loudmouths as socially uncomfortable as we do flag burners? How long until we white people will stop insisting that blacks exercise personal responsibility, build strong families, educate themselves enough to edit the Harvard Law Review, and work hard enough to become President of the United States, only to threaten to assassinate them when they do?  How long before we start(ing) “living out the true meaning” of our creeds, both civil and religious, that all men and women are created equal and that “red and yellow, black and white” all are precious in God’s sight?

If you have policy differences with the POTUS, and God knows I surely do, that’s one thing but to resort to the behavior of Obama’s critics to the point of intimidation and threats on his life is another thing altogether illegal, despicable, and based on a belief he’s not worthy of being where he is. Look at the imagery used by his opponents to portray him as unfit for office, pictures that are steeped in the very images passed down through racist ranks about black Americans since their beginnings on this continent.

watermelon_patchobama-witchdoctor-muckAnd one can easily think the genteel looking men sitting next to congressman Joe Wilson below, with smirks on their faces because they have gotten one of their own to so disrespectfully call the president out were probably thinking of him in those terms as they posed during Wilson’s outburst for their constituents on national television.   They will no doubt say theirs is a measured response to Obama’s administration in much the same way as others, like myself, demonstrated our disagreement to the Bush administration, but it surely was not, because I cannot find images which denigrate Bush’s whiteness or call into question his ancestry in much the same way as the pictures above do for Obama; similarly I can’t find a news clip where a member of Congress acted so disparagingly towards the commander-in-chief as Wilson did on the floor of the Congress before a nationally televised crowd.  Yet, in many ways, I wish someone had called Bush out as a liar when he regaled us with stories of how big government was necessary to protect us.  The compatriots of Joe Wilson most likely hate to read New York Times’ columnists refer to Obama as elegant and erudite, because that’s not the notion they have of African-Americans and not the one they want the public to have either.

heckler_wilsonEveryone knows the look and the attitude, that is those who have had it flung at them during their life time.  Even the good natured Bill Cosby who has had some stinging rebukes to direct towards other African Americans admitted “During President Obama’s speech on the status of health care reform, some members of Congress engaged in a public display of disrespect….While one representative hurled the now infamous ‘you lie’ insult at the president, others made their lack of interest known by exhibiting rude behavior such as deliberately yawning and sending text messages.”

And so it goes, the dehumanization of another group of people at the hands of the Republicans who manage to foist this attitude on the people they claim to represent which further damages the social fabric of this once great Republic and turns it increasingly into a banana republic.  It was not enough that we turned on one another out of fear and handed over our liberties to protect the state, as we fought the global war on horror and demonized members of the Islamic faith, now we are asked to distrust the very official(s) we elected less than a year ago and accept the notion that his death might be the only solution to the problems for which he at the moment is not responsible.  In the interim we are abandoning all sense of civility and decorum in our opposition towards one another, and steering a course towards disorder and anarchy.  Are we our own worse enemy or what?


Again, Olbermann nails it!

The War On Terror Underscores Big Government Inefficiency


All the fear mongering and brutal imagery of war and terrorism aren’t enough to overshadow the fact that this war is as much a plague on the national identity of America as terrorism itself and the government has hindered not helped nor made safer the public it claims it wants to safeguard.  The recent statistics bear that out; with regards to detainees at Guantanamo Bay, only 15%………15% have withstood the habeas corpus guidelines and remained imprisoned…the remaining 85% have been set free, many times by George W. Bush appointed judges who followed the rule of law and not the whimsical desires of their mentor, a public figure drunk with power and image.  So why do we settle for such inefficiency from our government?  Why do we continue to insist the state pursue a course of action which yields only a bare minimum of results for the price we as a society have had to pay?

Even now we are still arguing whether the “enhanced interrogation” methods of the CIA yielded any actionable intelligence, trusting the word of a bygone administration that has continued to lie about its role in this phony war.  All those on the right clamoring for a restoration of government, should also ask for a restoration of the Law and ask why is the government in times of economic difficulty spending countless amounts of money for enforcements that can’t stand the test of the law?  Does the economic expenditure of a Guantanamo Bay which has perhaps even less than 15% of real terrorist inmates, worth the money it costs the US taxpayer at anytime, but especially now?  Is this what we demand and expect from government, that they run on only 15% efficiency?  Are the continued renditions of prisoner away from the scrutiny of an American judicial system we claim to love, honor, support and fight for worth the emotional, moral and financial price we pay for as a country? Do we still claim to assert that acts of violence against people we detained are not torture and therefore not illegal, when there are other indisputable acts of sound law enforcement and military training which yield better, more actionable results?    Glenn Greenwald in a very good piece on the propensity of some in government to support torture mentions this rather eloquent quote from Thomas Paine which should be noted here.

An avidity to punish is always dangerous to liberty. It leads men to stretch, to misinterpret, and to misapply even the best of laws. He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.

It doesn’t get much better than that.

Justice Prevailed!


youssefIn an earlier post I wrote how a defendant found not guilty of a charge was set upon by the full force of the State and detained just two days after his first court case for possible deportation from America.  It wasn’t enough that this young student had done all that was asked of him by society in general as well as the judicial system, the government in some strange way decided more was required and that “more” was his immediate removal from America.   Everyone involved in his court case was up in arms and protested his re-imprisonment where he remained in custody for four months.

Finally,

An immigration judge on Friday rejected the federal government’s attempt to deport an Egyptian immigrant who had been acquitted of charges of illegally possessing and transporting explosives.Youssef Megahed was released after being detained as a suspected terrorist for almost five months by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, in a politically explosive case that has pitted national security claims against charges of profiling and discrimination against Muslims.

It’s scary that the government is even thinking about an appeal of this judge’s decision and the mere thought that’s being left only gives some credibility to Megahed’s dad’s remarks that his son’s case is an example of pure discrimination against Muslims, “They didn’t want us to live here. And because he wins the case, they want to destroy him completely.”  The young man and his family have no record of illegal activity during their stay in America and have been law abiding citizens; the stain of his original trial has been removed with a not guilty verdict and the admiration of some of the jurors in his case.  The witch hunt on the part of the government against a young man with no ties to illegal activity, terrorist or otherwise, is ill advised and sophomoric at best.  There are plenty of bad guys available for ambitious prosecutors to catch, try and imprison.  Youssef Megahed isn’t one of them.  He’s had more than his day in court; he has had several and each time was vindicated.  It’s time for the state to move on.

Memory Hole Material- Hitler’s Jewish Army


I am placing this article on the blog only to refer to it the next time I’m told because there were Palestinians who may have agreed, met or collaborated with Nazi Germany and Hitler they therefore deserve every bad thing they get……because I want to remind such people there were also Jewish Germans who served in Hitler’s army who fought, guarded over and perhaps even in some cases killed fellow Jews, and therefore by the logical extension of the first part of this sentence ask do the people from whom they came also deserve what they get?

The idea of collective punishment is a common one when talking about the Middle East and especially treatment meted out to the enemies of the state of Israel and Jews in particular.  Would they extend that argument to themselves?

Cambridge University researcher Bryan Rigg has traced the Jewish ancestry of more than 1,200 of Hitler’s soldiers, including two field marshals and fifteen generals (two full generals, eight lieutenant generals, five major generals), “men commanding up to 100,000 troops.”

In approximately 20 cases, Jewish soldiers in the Nazi army were awarded Germany’s highest military honor, the Knight’s Cross.

One of these Jewish veterans is today an 82 year old resident of northern Germany, an observant Jew who served as a captain and practiced his religion within the Wehrmacht throughout the war.

One of the Jewish field marshals was Erhard Milch, deputy to Luftwaffe Chief Hermann Goering. Rumors of Milch’s Jewish identity circulated widely in Germany in the 1930s.

In one of the famous anecdotes of the time, Goering falsified Milch’s birth record and when met with protests about having a Jew in the Nazi high command, Goering replied, “I decide who is a Jew and who is an Aryan.”

What this shows is the absolute corruptible nature of power.  In the case of Adolph Hitler he no more believed what he was saying about the final solution than he would about the man in the moon, but he went through all of that, and dragged the rest of the world along with him because it was acceptable to the masses of his citizens and people in his military, some of whom were Jews who took advantage of the power they had for personal reasons, in order to amass power, satisfy an ego out of control, and probably along with that collect a whole lot of money in process.  Hitler appealed to the basest of human nature……hatred and fear, even though he knew there was no reason for any of it!  He was giving personal dispensations to people so they would no longer be Jewish so he could retain their services to keep him in power.  If he feared them at all, the last place he would want them would be in the military apparatus that sustained him and his wars of aggression for so long.  He not only kept them he welcomed them into his fraternity of blood lust and murder, and they accepted and served willingly, knowing full well what that service was doing to the rest of humanity, including their own coreligionists.  This is the essence of the intoxication of power; it causes people to forget the rule of law, to bend all conventions of human interaction and contact, to suspend humanity in order to engage in the most ruthless and aggressive behavior asked them of the state they serve.  There are parallels in today’s various wars, and especially the war on terror which has turned into the war on Islam. One of the ways they succeed in enlisting otherwise good decent people to their cause is to demonize everyone that’s not a part of their circle of power; anyone not granted their “exemption” is someone to be considered “against us”, a negative, a negation, an “anti” not worthy of the right to exist, but rather the right to be destroyed, and all for the advancement of state power.  In many ways therefore, this is not about race or ethnicity; Hitler didn’t mind at all enlisting Jews who agreed with his program of the absolute acquisition of Power to work to that end, even while he claimed they were the “problem”, and George W. Bush had no problems lying his way into the ever expanding power of the federal government into wars of aggression where he had allies from the Muslim world who agreed with his demonic plots because they too relish power.

The point of all this is to remind the people who believe in the idea of collectivism that if they want to throw that stone at people who allied themselves with power, they should really look closely at those who worked for the State’s interests.  They might be surprised to find people from their own midst………..and what will they do then?

They Hate us because we are evil


The conventional wisdom for the last several years is that we are dealing with an implacable enemy who is spiritless, evil, murderous and hates us because of what we stand for.  They are the holders of an irrational ideology that causes them to murder and plunder and they do it all because they don’t like that we are the bulwark between them and anarchy or chaos.  The only way to deal with such an opponent, so goes the extended logic, is to kill them wherever they are, to spare no quarter, until we eliminate all of them.  This sounds much like the same rhetoric used in every other campaign of genocide waged by the self-righteous who want to get rid of people who really aren’t foes or threats but against whom the most vicious incendiary language is directed to justify the righteous’ murder and torture.

It has now come to light that we did just that….murder and torture, and it wasn’t because of anything “they” did, but rather something within us that caused nationwide amnesia to the rule of law, sanity, international relations and all the other historical lessons we have taught over the decades but haven’t learned about tyranny and how to fight it.  This lapse of an American  national conscious caused the death of far more Americans than those who died at the hands of the “terrorists” on 911, that according to an interrogator in Iraq.

“The reason why foreign fighters joined al-Qa’ida in Iraq was overwhelmingly because of abuses at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib and not Islamic ideology,” says Major Matthew Alexander, who personally conducted 300 interrogations of prisoners in Iraq. It was the team led by Major Alexander [a named assumed for security reasons] that obtained the information that led to the US military being able to locate Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the head of al-Qa’ida in Iraq. Zarqawi was then killed by bombs dropped by two US aircraft on the farm where he was hiding outside Baghdad on 7 June 2006. Major Alexander said that he learnt where Zarqawi was during a six-hour interrogation of a prisoner with whom he established relations of trust.

Major Alexander’s attitude to torture by the US is a combination of moral outrage and professional contempt. “It plays into the hands of al-Qa’ida in Iraq because it shows us up as hypocrites when we talk about human rights”

The stain of legal contempt and immorality in this phony war on terror can only be removed by the application of the law against those who need to be in the words of President Bush, ‘brought to justice’. No amount of bullying, or phony displays of patriotism to selective passages of the Constitution and/or the writings of the Founding Fathers should hide the fact that we, America, alone are responsible for fixing this problem. A mentally challenged president was able to whip up fervor among the people of America to fight an enemy of his own creation and the country responded resoundingly. Why hasn’t an even more intelligent and gifted president not appealed to the soul of the nation that justice must be served against criminals, even those in our midst?  The existence of this country is at stake.  The further we descend into the abyss of lawlessness, the easier it becomes for us to become victimized by groups and nations of the world who have seized upon our hypocrisy to unite others against us.  Leaders would be able to stall this inevitability and stop it with such a declaration.  Mr. Obama, are you listening?