Tag: Palestinians

CHARACTER


mckinney2-sizedWebster, in one of its definitions of “character”, says it is moral excellence and firmness, and in the case of Cynthia McKinney the definition is appropriate. McKinney is now in an Israeli prison because she along with other humanitarians decided to defy the self-imposed Israeli blockade of Gaza, a blockade that everyone except Israel, says must be removed. I’m inclined to think it must be in the water of the state of Georgia that gives its residents, or some of them, the moral courage, backbone,  to face and speak out against injustice, especially when it comes in the form of political Zionism.

There was Martin Luther King who spoke against racism, interestingly enough which “Zionism” has been equated with and there’s Jimmy Carter who has  been a vocal opponent of the oppression of Palestinians and the proponent of an equitable solution for all parties in Israel and the Occupied Territories. Now along comes McKinney, drinking the same water of the Georgia hills and calling out from the jails of Israel to let freedom ring. The “movement” is catching, isn’t it?

On another level, McKinney has taken up a cause that for now is not a very politically correct one and which puts her in the cross hairs of the status quo.  That parallels the path travelled by King in his fight against Jim Crow.  At the time, King’s movement wasn’t a very popular movement and while it ended up getting him killed, there were people who said he was fanatical, impatient, a communist, and everything else bad that could be said about a person to marginalize him in the eyes of the American public and the world.  It didn’t work and now there’s a holiday named after him….but it came with great personal sacrifice for Dr. King and his family.  I am reminded of Muhammad Ali who took a stand against the Vietnam war….a stand which took him all the way to the US Supreme Court.  Along the way he was vilified, despised, stripped of his livelihood for a time.  Not Ali, and though he took a position which made him a lone figure in many ways, he too prevailed, politically and personally.  Now he’s the darling of media…he lit the Olympic flame in Los Angeles during the Olympic games and is applauded everywhere he goes, but that didn’t come without courage and character.
Oceans and time zones removed from the shores of America was one Nelson Mandela who languised in a South African prison for almost three decades for opposing the racist and brutal political movement apartheid….. a system of government which by the way Israel supported politically and militarily.  Most of that time he stayed there, as did civil rights  predecessors of Mandela while being demonized by the establishment and denied any sense of humanity or dignity, yet he persevered and later bacame the president and leader of a New South Africa in spite of his oppressors and because of them.  Liberty cannot be denied a people who want it or those who want it for them, even when it’s opposed by the strongest of nations.  Israel should have learned that lesson since they too were the oppressed, but it will have to be repeated for them but with  roles reversed and this time at the expense of their political zionism.

Mckinney has joined the list of people who have chosen to give up a comfortable life to oppose slavery.  She picked up the gauntlet thrown down by Obama who said, along with an international community of nations, that the blockade of Gaza must be lifted.

Now we must extend a hand of opportunity to those who seek peace. As part of a lasting cease-fire, Gaza’s border crossings should be open to allow the flow of aid and commerce, with an appropriate monitoring regime, with the international and Palestinian Authority participating.

Relief efforts must be able to reach innocent Palestinians who depend on them. The United States will fully support an international donor’s conference to seek short-term humanitarian assistance and long-term reconstruction for the Palestinian economy. This assistance will be provided to and guided by the Palestinian Authority.

Let’s be clear that the blockade of Gaza is not about the security of Israel, the strongest military government in the Middle East and some would say one of the strongest in the world, but rather it, the blockade, is about destroying the will of the Palestinian people, denying them sovereignty and continuing a military presence in the occupied territories.  For Israelis, all Palestinians are terrorists.  Witness the recent round up by the Israelis of non Hamas supporters in the West Bank. Meanwhile civilians living in Gaza continue to suffer as a result of the seige with only a minimal amount of the supplies needed by the people living there actually arriving.  It is a humanitarian crisis of epic proportions and one that McKinney responded.  She now sits in an Israeli jail as a result of her activism, like activists who’ve gone before her, having broken no law, yet speaking for those whose voices aren’t or can’t be heard.   Her detractors, like Obama’s have resorted to the race card; the blogosphere is full of unflattering pictures of McKinney and what they mean, which further underscores the correctness of her position, for McKinney’s position is the only position on which to fall during this crisis in Gaza.  It is the same position required of humanity in all other similar scenarios, despite the attempts of revisionists to the contrary.  Political zionism doesn’t take too kindly to exposing the sufferings of any people except their own.

What is perverse is the Israeli lack of regard for law.  The confiscation of aide and the imprisonment of relief workers comes on the heels of a human rights report that says Israeli committed war crimes in its assault on Gaza late last year and early this,  and on the heels of another announcement that America will renew Israeli loan guarantees.  The message is quite clear, Israel can endlessly break the law and suffer no negative consequences.  Kudos, therefore to a small movement of which McKinney is a part that is going against the oppressive jugernaut of political zionism and siding with its brothers and sisters of humanity in being a part of a solution.  I think it’s the Georgia water that does it.

Peace is not an option for the occupiers of the West Bank


MIDEAST-ISRAEL-PALESTINIAN-WEST BANK-SHOOTING-VIDEOFollowing up on the story posted below about the Global Peace index and how low Israel ranks comes this story that underscores that ranking and demonstrates how a country is sometimes its own worse enemy.

Two Israeli officers have testified that troops in the West Bank beat, bound and blindfolded Palestinian civilians as young as 14.

Both the soldiers, from the Harub battalion, highlighted the tight tying of the plastic hand restraints placed on detainees. “There are people who think you need to tighten the restraints all the way, until no drop of blood will pass from here to there,” one soldier said. “It doesn’t take much time until the hands turn blue. There were a lot of people that you know weren’t feeling anything.”

“The soldiers who took [detainees] to the toilet just exploded [over] them with beatings; cursed them with no reason. When they took one Arab to the toilet so that he could urinate, one of them gave him a slap that brought him to the ground. He had been handcuffed from behind with a nylon restraint and blindfolded. He wasn’t insolent, he didn’t do anything to get on anyone’s nerves … [it was] just because he’s an Arab. He was something like 15 years old.” The soldier said he saw a lot of soldiers “just knee [Palestinians] because it’s boring, because you stand there 10 hours, you’re not doing anything, so they beat people up.

There were a lot of reservists that participated, and they totally had a celebration on the Palestinians: curses, humiliation, pulling hair and ears, kicks, slaps. These things were the norm.”

This is systematic violence against people for the most part are under the authority of the Israeli government and it is this type of government sanctioned violence that keeps Israel in much the same company as Sudan, Somali, and Iraq, and it is all done with the knowledge and blessings of the US government.

The Global Peace Index


israeli_flagThe Global Peace Index offers some interesting insight into what is considered a peaceful country and what isn’t.  The top ten peaceful countries are in order, New Zealand, Denmark, Norway, Iceland, Austria, Sweden, Japan, Canada, Finland, Slovenia.  Denmark and Norway have been the scene of some pretty violent opposition to Muslim immigration to their countries, but evidently the citizens have managed to coexist peacefully with one another.  The Netherlands another country that has seen stiff opposition to immigrants is the 22nd most peaceful country and France is ranked number 30.  America is ranked 83 which surprised me considering we invaded three countries and are the only country at war with other countries, or forces in other countries.  The ten most violent countries in the world are Zimbabwe, Russia, Pakistan, Chad, The Republic of the Congo, Sudan, Israel, Somalia, Afghanistan and finally Iraq, the most violent country of the 144 countries considered.  With the exception of Iraq, Somalia and Afghanistan, all of the other worst offenders are fighting their own populations and not foreigners invading their territory. (Guess who that invader is in two of the cases.)  Only one of the 10 worst countries is an ally of America, while the others have cold to almost no relations with the United States and face some sort of condemnation from America as a result of their human rights violations against their own.   Israel meanwhile continues to enjoy copious amounts of US aid,  materiel and support for its apartheid like policies towards its Arab citizens and neighbors.  Noteworthy too is the fact that Israel has been in the bottom 5 consistently for the last three years. It is definitely time for CHANGE.

Another in your face moment, brought to you by the Likudiniks


The Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin  Netanyahu visited the US this week amid all sorts of speculation surrounding the US/Israeli “special relationship”.  One thing is certain, despite all the talk of “change” coming to Washington, Israel still runs the show when it comes to US foreign policy, and especially policy regarding the Middle East.  Casting all doubts whether the current Israeli government is for a two state solution, which Obama has said he favors, Netanyahu’s visit came on the eve of the announcement Israel was going to expand settlements in the West Bank which goes to show you a US president can say whatever he wants but it has no basis in reality as far as Israel is concerned.  Take that, Obama!!

Interesting insight into the Israeli national mentality


No matter what they say about nuclear weapons possessed by Iran or hostile Arab neighbors who want to drive the Jews into the sea, it’s the least of Israeli worries, just as  Saddam Hussein’s WMDs were no threat to Israel or anyone else for that matter, because they simply didn’t exist. What is interesting is reading what Israel thinks are their problems and why and the list is far more revealing than any I’ve seen to date.  Here they are in the order mentioned in this article Seven Existential Threats.

1.The Loss of Jerusalem; partly due to the absence of Zionists living in the city.

2.The Arab Demographic Threat; Israel must be 70% Zionist in order to be legitimate and Arabs are having too many children

3. Delegitimization; Israel’s sins are receiving world wide attention which is bad for it’s reputation.

4.Terrorism; we’ve heard it all before.

5. A Nuclear-Armed Iran; we’ve heard this all before too.

6.The Hemorrhaging of Sovereignty; Israel doesn’t exert its control over people under its authority.

7.Corruption;The breakdown of public morality especially among it’s leaders.

The blog, War In Context,  does a decent job dismantling some of the above notions but looking at Oren’s list, the originator of the 7 deadly threats to Israel, it appears his biggest complaint and remedy for it is the absence of Zionism and the need for more Zionism.  Not much mention of Judaism as a religion, but rather Zionism as a political movement.  One other line in his piece that brought about a chuckle was this assertion:

Israel, the Jewish State, is predicated on a decisive and stable Jewish majority of at least 70 percent. Any lower than that and Israel will have to decide between being a Jewish state and a democratic state. If it chooses democracy, then Israel as a Jewish state will cease to exist. If it remains officially Jewish, then the state will face an unprecedented level of international isolation, including sanctions, that might prove fatal.

Is he saying democracy is a threat to and not consistent with Israeli interests?  Ohh, America, are you listening?

Israel Warns EU to tone down


Warnings usually accompany threats, as in ‘if you don’t stop doing this I’m going to do something in response’, so what is Israel’s warning of consequence?

Israel warned the European Union on Thursday to tone down its criticism of the new Israeli government or risk forfeiting the bloc’s role as broker in Mideast peace efforts.

So my question is what is it Israel can threaten the European Union with? Israeli military threats against Europe have been made before and with rabid Israeli politicians now in power, the implication of Israel’s warning is probably not lost on Europeans.  Also, Israel has never accepted the EU’s role as a peace broker, the latest Gaza offensive, is proof of that when the Israelis bombed, strafed and blocked aid supplies to Palestinians in Gaza which came from Europe.  What is really at stake here is Israeli access to European markets.  The Israelis want to ply their trade of espionage, industrial, political and military and they can’t do that now as easily as they can in the US.  Evidently old habits die hard in the relations between Europeans and Jews.

A foul pay off


The bit of news that the Palestinian doctor, Ezzeldeen Abu al-Aish, who was treating Palestinians and Israelis during the Gaza war has had his name submitted for the Nobel Peace prize is both foul and obscene.  It is nothing more than a payoff some people somewhere  suggest he receive for the public anguish and humiliation he has had to face at the hands of an indifferent, and scornful Israeli government.  I’m sure you all remember the story of this doctor who was informed on Israeli tv live that his daughters had been killed by the IDF.  He wasn’t received very well by Israelis who took offense at his suggestion there be peace between Israelis and Palestinians either, so how is it his name was arrived at as a candidate for this prize; why would he even accept it?  Nothing he does will bring back his daughters; however, there is something that can prevent his tragedy from being repeated and it’s not anything of his own doing. Israel recognize the territorial sovereignty of its Palestinian neighbors and remove their armed forces from the occupied territories.   Ezzeldeen Abu al-Aish has done enough.  Well he could do one thing more and that is come to Washington and convince the current administration to have the chutzpah to just say no to Israeli demands for illegal settlements with US dollars.  Or better yet, ask the US government to repudiate the current Israeli leadership that harbors a terrorist as its foreign minister; or perhaps just call for an economic boycott of Israel until it ends its occupation of Palestinian territory.  Anything less than that makes the Nobel Peace Prize a cheap trophy to hang up on the mantle Dr.  Abu al-Aish has in his tent in some refugee camp.

Israel attacks Sudan and blames Hamas?

Israel makes it clear they think they can go anywhere and attack anyone they think has a terrorist infrastructure. Of course only Israel can single-handedly define what constitutes a “terrorist infrastructure” whether in a contiguous neighbor or one far removed, like Sudan, Cyprus, or even western Europe and or North America.


sudan_gazaIsrael  launched an attack on Sudanese territory to supposedly interdict an arms convoy supplied by Iran headed to Gaza….and if you believe that I have a bridge to sell you in Brooklyn.  No doubt an attack took place, or that’s according to US authorities and it was launched by Israel, but the reasons for the attack hardly have anything to do with weapons.  Hamas makes a good point when they say

“Should it turn out that there were raids and a high number of people killed, this would mean Israel is seeking to use the opportunity to blame Hamas and hit Sudan,” he said.

The fact that the Gaza Strip is not a neighbour of Sudan, with Egypt in between, “shows these are false claims,” he added.

Israel has pounded Gaza and Egypt in attempts to destroy the tunnel system they say exists to smuggle things into Gaza; however, now they think it’s justified to bomb a regional neighbor that has never hosted, fomented, incited or carried out any attacks against Israel.  Sudan is a political foe of Israel; it is a predominantly Muslim country which has repudiated Israel’s expansionist policies in the West Bank and Gaza.  I would hope that the predominantly Christian country of America would repudiate Israeli policy in Palestine… UN resolutions demand at least that.  Should the US expect an attack of the magnitude of the Sudanese intrusion?  Have we already had such an attack?  Israel makes it clear they think they can go anywhere and attack anyone they think has a terrorist infrastructure.  Of course only Israel can single-handedly define what constitutes a “terrorist infrastructure” whether in a contiguous neighbor or one far removed, like Sudan, Cyprus, or even western Europe and or North America.  What’s even more unfortunate about all this is the US would rather be impotent in its response to Israeli aggression than to take a stand against it.  In doing so, America has signed on to Israeli aggression against all its “foes” and the possibility of a world war the likes of the previous two.  It seems humanity gets this once a century itch to literally fight itself to the death, when it’s not necessary nor prudent; but it’s become our destiny and America has become the prime enabler in movement towards that end.  Instability of the region that allows for Israeli hegemony has always been the goal of Israeli policy, that and the usurpation of its neighbors natural resources.  In order to accomplish this they cannot have opposition; acquiescence is essential and the slightest objection vocal or otherwise is considered an existential threat to those  goals.  That said, one should only expect more death and destruction.

No comment


“This is an action that sowed massive destruction among civilians. It is not certain that it was possible do have done it differently, but ultimately we have emerged from this operation and are not facing real paralysis from the Qassams. It is very possible that we will repeat such an operation on a larger scale in the years to come, because the problem in the Gaza Strip is not simple and it is not at all certain that it has been solved. What we want this evening is to hear from the fighters.”

Aviv: “I am squad commander of a company that is still in training, from the Givati Brigade. We went into a neighborhood in the southern part of Gaza City. Altogether, this is a special experience. In the course of the training, you wait for the day you will go into Gaza, and in the end it isn’t really like they say it is. It’s more like, you come, you take over a house, you kick the tenants out and you move in. We stayed in a house for something like a week.

“Toward the end of the operation there was a plan to go into a very densely populated area inside Gaza City itself. In the briefings they started to talk to us about orders for opening fire inside the city, because as you know they used a huge amount of firepower and killed a huge number of people along the way, so that we wouldn’t get hurt and they wouldn’t fire on us.

“At first the specified action was to go into a house. We were supposed to go in with an armored personnel carrier called an Achzarit [literally, Cruel] to burst through the lower door, to start shooting inside and then … I call this murder … in effect, we were supposed to go up floor by floor, and any person we identified – we were supposed to shoot. I initially asked myself: Where is the logic in this?

“From above they said it was permissible, because anyone who remained in the sector and inside Gaza City was in effect condemned, a terrorist, because they hadn’t fled. I didn’t really understand: On the one hand they don’t really have anywhere to flee to, but on the other hand they’re telling us they hadn’t fled so it’s their fault … This also scared me a bit. I tried to exert some influence, insofar as is possible from within my subordinate position, to change this. In the end the specification involved going into a house, operating megaphones and telling [the tenants]: ‘Come on, everyone get out, you have five minutes, leave the house, anyone who doesn’t get out gets killed.’

“I went to our soldiers and said, ‘The order has changed. We go into the house, they have five minutes to escape, we check each person who goes out individually to see that he has no weapons, and then we start going into the house floor by floor to clean it out … This means going into the house, opening fire at everything that moves , throwing a grenade, all those things. And then there was a very annoying moment. One of my soldiers came to me and asked, ‘Why?’ I said, ‘What isn’t clear? We don’t want to kill innocent civilians.’ He goes, ‘Yeah? Anyone who’s in there is a terrorist, that’s a known fact.’ I said, ‘Do you think the people there will really run away? No one will run away.’ He says, ‘That’s clear,’ and then his buddies join in: ‘We need to murder any person who’s in there. Yeah, any person who’s in Gaza is a terrorist,’ and all the other things that they stuff our heads with, in the media.

“And then I try to explain to the guy that not everyone who is in there is a terrorist, and that after he kills, say, three children and four mothers, we’ll go upstairs and kill another 20 or so people. And in the end it turns out that [there are] eight floors times five apartments on a floor – something like a minimum of 40 or 50 families that you murder. I tried to explain why we had to let them leave, and only then go into the houses. It didn’t really help. This is really frustrating, to see that they understand that inside Gaza you are allowed to do anything you want, to break down doors of houses for no reason other than it’s cool.

“You do not get the impression from the officers that there is any logic to it, but they won’t say anything. To write ‘death to the Arabs’ on the walls, to take family pictures and spit on them, just because you can. I think this is the main thing in understanding how much the IDF has fallen in the realm of ethics, really. It’s what I’ll remember the most.”

“One of our officers, a company commander, saw someone coming on some road, a woman, an old woman. She was walking along pretty far away, but close enough so you could take out someone you saw there. If she were suspicious, not suspicious – I don’t know. In the end, he sent people up to the roof, to take her out with their weapons. From the description of this story, I simply felt it was murder in cold blood.”

Zamir: “I don’t understand. Why did he shoot her?”

Aviv: “That’s what is so nice, supposedly, about Gaza: You see a person on a road, walking along a path. He doesn’t have to be with a weapon, you don’t have to identify him with anything and you can just shoot him. With us it was an old woman, on whom I didn’t see any weapon. The order was to take the person out, that woman, the moment you see her.”

Zvi: “Aviv’s descriptions are accurate, but it’s possible to understand where this is coming from. And that woman, you don’t know whether she’s … She wasn’t supposed to be there, because there were announcements and there were bombings. Logic says she shouldn’t be there. The way you describe it, as murder in cold blood, that isn’t right. It’s known that they have lookouts and that sort of thing.”

Gilad: “Even before we went in, the battalion commander made it clear to everyone that a very important lesson from the Second Lebanon War was the way the IDF goes in – with a lot of fire. The intention was to protect soldiers’ lives by means of firepower. In the operation the IDF’s losses really were light and the price was that a lot of Palestinians got killed.”

Ram: “I serve in an operations company in the Givati Brigade. After we’d gone into the first houses, there was a house with a family inside. Entry was relatively calm. We didn’t open fire, we just yelled at everyone to come down. We put them in a room and then left the house and entered it from a different lot. A few days after we went in, there was an order to release the family. They had set up positions upstairs. There was a sharpshooters’ position on the roof. The platoon commander let the family go and told them to go to the right. One mother and her two children didn’t understand and went to the left, but they forgot to tell the sharpshooter on the roof they had let them go, and it was was okay and he should hold his fire and he … he did what he was supposed to, like he was following his orders.”

Question from the audience: “At what range was this?”

Ram: “Between 100 and 200 meters, something like that. They had also came out of the house that he was on the roof of, they had advanced a bit and suddenly he saw then, people moving around in an area where they were forbidden to move around. I don’t think he felt too bad about it, because after all, as far as he was concerned, he did his job according to the orders he was given. And the atmosphere in general, from what I understood from most of my men who I talked to … I don’t know how to describe it …. The lives of Palestinians, let’s say, is something very, very less important than the lives of our soldiers. So as far as they are concerned they can justify it that way.”

Yuval Friedman (chief instructor at the Rabin program): “Wasn’t there a standing order to request permission to open fire?”

Ram: “No. It exists, beyond a certain line. The idea is that you are afraid that they are going to escape from you. If a terrorist is approaching and he is too close, he could blow up the house or something like that.”

Zamir: “After a killing like that, by mistake, do they do some sort of investigation in the IDF? Do they look into how they could have corrected it?”

Ram: “They haven’t come from the Military Police’s investigative unit yet. There hasn’t been any … For all incidents, there are individual investigations and general examinations, of all of the conduct of the war. But they haven’t focused on this specifically.”

Moshe: “The attitude is very simple: It isn’t pleasant to say so, but no one cares at all. We aren’t investigating this. This is what happens during fighting and this is what happens during routine security.”

Ram: “What I do remember in particular at the beginning is the feeling of almost a religious mission. My sergeant is a student at a hesder yeshiva [a program that combines religious study and military service]. Before we went in, he assembled the whole platoon and led the prayer for those going into battle. A brigade rabbi was there, who afterward came into Gaza and went around patting us on the shoulder and encouraging us, and praying with people. And also when we were inside they sent in those booklets, full of Psalms, a ton of Psalms. I think that at least in the house I was in for a week, we could have filled a room with the Psalms they sent us, and other booklets like that.

“There was a huge gap between what the Education Corps sent out and what the IDF rabbinate sent out. The Education Corps published a pamphlet for commanders – something about the history of Israel’s fighting in Gaza from 1948 to the present. The rabbinate brought in a lot of booklets and articles, and … their message was very clear: We are the Jewish people, we came to this land by a miracle, God brought us back to this land and now we need to fight to expel the gentiles who are interfering with our conquest of this holy land. This was the main message, and the whole sense many soldiers had in this operation was of a religious war. From my position as a commander and ‘explainer,’ I attempted to talk about the politics – the streams in Palestinian society, about how not everyone who is in Gaza is Hamas, and not every inhabitant wants to vanquish us. I wanted to explain to the soldiers that this war is not a war for the sanctification of the holy name, but rather one to stop the Qassams.”

Hat tip.

Zionism is the problem

Opposing Zionism is neither anti-Semitic nor particularly radical. It requires only that we take our own values seriously and no longer, as the book of Amos has it, “turn justice into wormwood and hurl righteousness to the ground.”


The political movement which asserts the supremacy of Israeli Jews over all others will lead the world into another world war, so it is that the editorial below which appeared in the Los Angeles Times is a particularly good one beckoning the world to take heed of this problem and solve it.  Several bloggers have mentioned the editorial below but it wasn’t until I read it in its entirety that I felt it was worth mentioning here at Miscellany101.  It is rather long, so I’ll excerpt it but strongly encourage everyone who reads this post to go to the link and read it.

Israeli policies have rendered the once apparently inevitable two-state solution less and less feasible. Years of Israeli settlement construction in the West Bank and East Jerusalem have methodically diminished the viability of a Palestinian state. Israel’s new prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has even refused to endorse the idea of an independent Palestinian state, which suggests an immediate future of more of the same: more settlements, more punitive assaults.

All of this has led to a revival of the Brit Shalom idea of a single, secular binational state in which Jews and Arabs have equal political rights. The obstacles are, of course, enormous. They include not just a powerful Israeli attachment to the idea of an exclusively Jewish state, but its Palestinian analogue: Hamas’ ideal of Islamic rule. Both sides would have to find assurance that their security was guaranteed. What precise shape such a state would take — a strict, vote-by-vote democracy or a more complex federalist system — would involve years of painful negotiation, wiser leaders than now exist and an uncompromising commitment from the rest of the world, particularly from the United States.

Meanwhile, the characterization of anti-Zionism as an “epidemic” more dangerous than anti-Semitism reveals only the unsustainability of the position into which Israel’s apologists have been forced. Faced with international condemnation, they seek to limit the discourse, to erect walls that delineate what can and can’t be said.

It’s not working. Opposing Zionism is neither anti-Semitic nor particularly radical. It requires only that we take our own values seriously and no longer, as the book of Amos has it, “turn justice into wormwood and hurl righteousness to the ground.”

Establishing a secular, pluralist, democratic government in Israel and Palestine would of course mean the abandonment of the Zionist dream. It might also mean the only salvation for the Jewish ideals of justice that date back to Jeremiah.

In Israel American life is cheap


tristanThe Israelis are in such a hurry to kill people who are not Israeli that they even break their own laws to do so.  The latest victim is Tristan Anderson, an American from California who joined in solidarity with Palestinians in the village of Ni’lin and was  shot in the head, for his trouble,  with a nasty piece of  munition  at quite some distance.  I don’t know what made Mr. Anderson think that Israelis live by the same laws as America, where peaceful assembly is NOT met with fatal fire from the authorities.  A brief history of the village where he was would have convinced him that Ni’lin is a target practice area for the IDF; upwards of 20 people have already been shot there.  Of course we’re hearing the same lame excuses for his near death, if he isn’t dead already of his  injuries, from Israeli apologists: ‘he shouldn’t have been there’, ‘he got what he deserved’, ‘that’s what you get for taking up the Palestinian cause’, etc.,  and I would sort of agree with the first one above.  He shouldn’t have been there, and neither should the billions of dollars of aid we have given to our rather petulant ally who thanks us by shooting in cold blood American citizens who want to see for themselves how their tax  money is being spent.  Americans should steer as clear from Israel as humanly possible, and convince their lawmakers, under threat of expulsion from the seat of government,  to do the same with our federal largess.  Anything else dishonors the memory of those brave souls who were sacrificed at the altar of Israeli appeasement by cowardly American congressmen and women.

Out with the old!

. What is painfully obvious is that the Lobby has gone far beyond asserting Israel’s right to exist, which like every other sovereign country it has, instead it now declares it has the right to decide for other countries what is in their (Israel’s) interests exclusively.


I’m NOT a big fan of the UK these days, what with their obsequious adoption of US foreign policy measures, which included their  security forces’ gunning down  innocent residents merely on suspicion, their rendering of suspects and their abandonment of their residents to US rendition.  Neither do I think that this latest news is really their turning over a new leaf although that’s exactly what it should signify.

Britain says it is re-establishing contacts with the political wing of the Lebanese movement Hezbollah. The move follows “positive political developments” in Lebanon, officials from the UK Foreign Office said. It comes about 10 months after Hezbollah signed a unity accord in Lebanon and joined the government.

Of course it took no time for the Lobby via the American government to respond negatively to the news, and at this stage in America’s political development that’s entirely expected.  The American government has become a political arm of the Israeli war machine, spouting all the necessary rhetoric to keep the government of Israel at the top, for now, of the Middle East’s hierarchy.  The Obama administration even uses the same tactics as the Lobby, lies and deceit, claiming that it wasn’t given a proper advanced warning of this political development, as if such a warning was essential to the interests of either America, the UK, Lebanon or Hezbollah.  Rather, it appears as a veiled threat that for the moment at least Britain has no right to decide for itself what is in its best interests with other countries.  What is painfully obvious is that the Lobby has gone far beyond asserting Israel’s right to exist, which like every other sovereign country it has, instead it now declares it has the right to decide for other countries what is in their (Israel’s) interests exclusively.  This all or nothing, zero sum game signified by the one way flow of information, material, good will all in Israel’s direction is necessary for the establishment of the Israeli empire.  It ignores the admission of its foes that the right to exist belongs to all communities and peace should come from both sides, because Empire is established only on the corpses of opponents, not through peace treaties.  So it should come as no surprise that news Hamas wants peace with Israel and wants to stop attacks from its soil against Israel  doesn’t get mentioned in political discussions taking place around the world because such news means Israel must cease its aggressive policy against Palestinians, something it is not willing, nor able given the current political climate in Israel, to do.  Syria’s announcement that it can live peacefully alongside its Israeli neighbor was met with Israeli invasion of Syrian airspace on a suspect nuclear weapons site, still shrouded in doubt and mystery.

None of these movements, political or military pose even the slightest existential threat to Israel, yet they are all met with the same heavy handedness that only a leadership steeped in the oppression of its past adversaries can bring to bear on a defenseless population.  Part of that defenseless population includes those living in America who see oppression and brutality emanating from the Israeli side and call it just that.  Charles Freeman is one of the latest casualties of the Israeli blitzkreig. If America’s political leadership is able to muster the backbone necessary to fight the Lobby war, and free itself of its indulgence to that Lobby, only then will there be peace in the Middle East and the survival of all parties there will be a possibility.  Until then, we are destined for more conflict, death, destruction and political casualties of decent, honest civil servants and civilians at the hands of the Lobby and its military wing the Israeli government.

Hillary Clinton: The McDaddy


hillaryI’m speechless and at the same time want to shout out at the top of my lungs, FINALLY!  For now, I’ve got to give Hillary Clinton her props for having more balls than most men in Washington.  I guess this is a fine time to recognize her for that since we’re celebrating International Women’s day.

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton criticised Israel’s plans to demolish more than 80 Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem as “unhelpful” and a violation of its international obligations.

In the first public rebuke of a specific Israeli policy since the new US administration took office, Mrs Clinton indicated the plan contravened the provisions in the five-year-old internationally agreed “road-map” that calls for a halt to all settlement activity.

Let’s hope her boss doesn’t hang her out to dry like the last Secretary of State was with George Bush.

Paper is a WMD according to Israel


We’ve blogged about how israel considers clothes a WMD and has blocked them from entering Gaza but now comes word the Israelis are blocking paper that will be used to print textbooks from entering Gaza as well.   Now before you go off and think the textbooks will be about pigs and monkeys, a term I was called by an Israeli for insisting what’s happening in Gaza is “genocide”, you should know the textbooks that will be printed are human rights courses which are modeled on those developed by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, with input from the human rights community in Gaza. They will be taught by specialist human rights teachers in every school, and human rights organizations in Gaza will evaluate the teachers’ performance. This should come as no surprise since the Israelis the biggest violators of human rights in the Middle East want to continue the myth that they are the victims.

Stunning words from the mainstream


Paul Craig Roberts is a maverick of sorts, ever since he left the Reagan administration and began writing editorials about current events.  He still reflects fondly on Reagan, the conservative most modern day conservatives like to pattern themselves after, but speaks disdainfully of GW Bush and the people who surrounded him, calling them ‘brownshirts with the same level of intelligence and morals as Hitler’s enthusiastic supporters.’ Amen to that.  However, he has written a damning editorial on the war on terror, written by the way, at about the same time as Dick Cheney’s rather high treasonous remarks, which speaks volumes on how that war has been carried out and whether it’s real.  I’d like to produce exercepts of it below. He does a far better job of saying it than I ever could.

According to US government propaganda, terrorist cells are spread throughout America, making it necessary for the government to spy on all Americans and violate most other constitutional protections. Among President Bush’s last words as he left office was the warning that America would soon be struck again by Muslim terrorists.

If America were infected with terrorists, we would not need the government to tell us. We would know it from events. As there are no events, the US government substitutes warnings in order to keep alive the fear that causes the public to accept pointless wars, the infringement of civil liberty, national ID cards, and inconveniences and harassments when they fly.

The “war on terror” is a hoax that fronts for American control of oil pipelines, the profits of the military-security complex, the assault on civil liberty by fomenters of a police state, and Israel’s territorial expansion.

There were no al Qaeda in Iraq until the Americans brought them there by invading and overthrowing Saddam Hussein, who kept al Qaeda out of Iraq. The Taliban is not a terrorist organization, but a movement attempting to unify Afghanistan under Muslim law. The only Americans threatened by the Taliban are the Americans Bush sent to Afghanistan to kill Taliban and to impose a puppet state on the Afghan people.

Hamas is the democratically elected government of Palestine, or what little remains of Palestine after Israel’s illegal annexations. Hamas is a terrorist organization in the same sense that the Israeli government and the US government are terrorist organizations. In an effort to bring Hamas under Israeli hegemony, Israel employs terror bombing and assassinations against Palestinians. Hamas replies to the Israeli terror with homemade and ineffectual rockets.

Hezbollah represents the Shi’ites of southern Lebanon, another area in the Middle East that Israel seeks for its territorial expansion.

The US brands Hamas and Hezbollah “terrorist organizations” for no other reason than the US is on Israel’s side of the conflict. There is no objective basis for the US Department of State’s “finding” that Hamas and Hezbollah are terrorist organizations. It is merely a propagandistic declaration.

The retired American generals who serve as war propagandists for Fox “News” are forever claiming that Iran arms the Iraqi and Afghan insurgents and Hamas. But where are the arms? To deal with American tanks, insurgents have to construct homemade explosive devices out of artillery shells. After six years of conflict the insurgents still have no weapon against the American helicopter gunships. Contrast this “arming” with the weaponry the US supplied to the Afghans three decades ago when they were fighting to drive out the Soviets.

The films of Israel’s murderous assault on Gaza show large numbers of Gazans fleeing from Israeli bombs or digging out the dead and maimed, and none of these people are armed. A person would think that by now every Palestinian would be armed, every man, woman, and child. Yet, all the films of the Israeli attack show an unarmed population. Hamas has to construct homemade rockets that are little more than a sign of defiance. If Hamas were armed by Iran, Israel’s assault on Gaza would have cost Israel its helicopter gunships, its tanks, and hundreds of lives of its soldiers.

The great mystery is: why after 60 years of oppression are the Palestinians still an unarmed people? Clearly, the Muslim countries are complicit with Israel and the US in keeping the Palestinians unarmed.

The unsupported assertion that Iran supplies sophisticated arms to the Palestinians is like the unsupported assertion that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. These assertions are propagandistic justifications for killing Arab civilians and destroying civilian infrastructure in order to secure US and Israeli hegemony in the Middle East.


American academics stand up to be counted


Joining a growing list of people who are protesting the Israeli genocide in Gaza, American members of academe have come out to call for a cultural boycott of Israel, with five goals it wants to achieve.

“Refraining from participation in any form of academic and cultural cooperation, collaboration or joint projects with Israeli institutions that do not vocally oppose Israeli state policies against Palestine,” “promoting divestment and disinvestment from Israel by international academic institutions,” and “supporting Palestinian academic and cultural institutions directly without requiring them to partner with Israeli counterparts as an explicit or implicit condition for such support.”

The group’s press release continues,

“We believe that non-violent external pressure on Israel, in the form of an academic, cultural and economic boycott of Israel, can help bring an end to the ongoing massacres of civilians and an end [to] the occupation of Gaza and Palestine” — with “Palestine” referring to the West Bank land occupied by Israel since the 1967 war

explained David Lloyd, a professor of English at the University of Southern California.  I am glad to see Americans joining in the initiative and I note that they very clearly say they are interested ina  non-violent form of protestation, not something that is designed literally to exterminate the Jewish state.  What this boycott is asking for is a modification of Israeli behavior that will ensure its existence as well as that of its neighbors, the Palestinians.  It is NOT a zero sum game but you can expect the Israelis will portray it that way.

America’s Iran jones


What is it with US policy makers that they have to go off and antagonize Iran at every chance they get, even when it’s not necessary?  Two threads have appeared in news stories today centered around Iran with this trend as if to anticipate and undermine what Obama is going to say in a letter he’s putting together to send to that country’s leaders.

Before getting onto those two themes, let me say I’ve always been distressed at how government has this seamy undercurrent that works to under cut what official Washington is doing, and both the official and unofficial seem to like the give and take in this relationship of setting, revising, ignoring, cancelling policy.  It would seem to me once you get  your marching orders from the CiC you take them and run with them, not go off and rub his nose in them with your own pronouncements, but that’s what it seems Robert Gates, Defense Secretary has done.

When U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates accused Iran of “subversive activity” in Latin America Tuesday, it raised the question whether he is trying to discourage President Barack Obama from abandoning the hard-line policy of coercive diplomacy toward Iran he has favored for nearly three decades.

In his Senate armed services committee testimony Tuesday, Gates said Iran was “opening a lot of offices and a lot of fronts behind which they interfere in what is going on.” Gates offered no further explanation for what sounded like a Cold War-era propaganda charge against the Soviet Union.

Gates has made no secret of his skepticism about any softening of U.S. policy toward Iran. In response to a question at the National Defense University last September on how he would advise the next president to improve relations with Iran, Gates implicitly rejected what he called “outreach” to Iran as useless.

Gates’ 1992 sabotage of the Bush plan for reciprocating Iran goodwill relied in part on making public charges against Iran that created a more unfavorable political climate in Washington for such a policy.

It will be interesting to see what Obama’s reaction to all this political posturing Gates is making so early in the Administration’s efforts towards rapprochement with Iran. We will  be able to take measure of Obama depending on his response; if he lets Gates continue with his “subversive” activity he can be viewed as a weak President undeserving of a second term, the nation’s trust, or respect of his “underlings”.  If he kicks Gates out so soon after asking him to stay on as Defense Secretary he’ll find himself facing criticism for not being a stable administrator or able to hold his people in check, preferring to give in to his impetuous side and getting rid of them whimsically.  The perfect damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

The second salvo against Obama comes from of all places the Likud party’s boisterous and wrong Benjamin Netanyahu who says the Iranian nuclear weapons are more a problem than the global economy.  Netanyahu is great for hyperbole, probably something he picked up as a result of his public school education in Cheltenham, Pa. back in the day.  This we expect from Bibi who likes to somehow challenge the masculinity of America’s leaders by questioning their ability to take on his enemies for his benefit.  Using his typical adroit slight of foot maneuvers he turns everything that has to deal with anything into Iranian nukes.

Asked about achieving peace in Gaza, Netanyahu swiftly turned his answer to Iran, which he said is in a “100-yard dash” to get nuclear weapons.

*snip*

“We have had two wars with two Iranian proxies in two years and Persia has now two bases on the eastern Mediterranean,” said Netanyahu, referring to this month’s brutal fighting in Gaza against Hamas and Israel’s 2006 war with Hezbollah in Lebanon.

“I think we are going to have to deal with neutralizing the power of the mother regime,” he said. “The Hamas stronghold would be about as important, if Iranian power was neutralized, as Cuba was when the Soviet Union became irrelevant.”

What Netanyahu doesn’t tell you about his metaphor  is while the Soviet Union became irrelevant because American ideas triumphed a military dictatorship without the US having to fire a single shot at the Soviet Union, Iran’s leadership and in fact all of that country has to be laid to waste militarily, according to the Netanyahu school of thought in order for his enemies, Hamas and Hezbollah, to become irrelevant. Typical.  In any event, this kind of bluster is to be expected from this quarter, and Obama would do well to ignore it and press on with his agenda, not that of an intractable and petulant “ally”.  Unfortunately, he can’t so easily dismiss Netanyahu, and if Gates continues with his own agenda as well, it might be even more difficult.  Bush may be gone, but the neocons are still lurking and haven’t given up hope of re-establishing themselves in policy making  positions or of somehow influencing policy.