Spontaneous Arising

Grieving

2011-12-27T14:35:00.004-07:00

The sudden, self-generated departure of a close family member is bound to bring unexpected ramifications to those who stay behind.

It's happening to me.

What It's Coming To

2011-09-20T21:03:00.002-06:00

Unfortunately, it's impossible these days to figure out who's the "lesser of two evils" (h/t to Joe Cannon and Dakinikat):

Gallup polled a whole bunch of Texans and found that the folks out there don't really like their governor.[...]

The poll, released Tuesday, showed Perry with a negative approval in Texas: while 45 percent of the state’s voters approve of Perry’s job performance, 48 percent of Texas voters say they don’t approve.

Meanwhile, a Marist poll has similar, albeit slightly worse, figures for President O:

According to this McClatchy-Marist Poll, the president’s approval rating is at 39% among registered voters nationally, an all-time low for Mr. Obama. For the first time a majority — 52% — disapproves of the job he is doing in office, and 9% are unsure.

This is about the time I usually swear I won't bother to vote. Then, when the ballot shows up in the mail... I always fill in the bubbles, falling for the ol' "the Supreme Court balance is in danger of going fascist" argument.

But, really, we're given less and less of a choice any more; politics has become nothing but an overpriced reality show, designed to keep the rabble distracted from its deepening enslavement.

From "Change" and "Hope" to "Cut Off Your Arm"

2011-04-26T18:55:00.005-06:00

The betrayal is just sickening -- but if it wasn't Obama, it would be the next person, since the President is nothing but a sock-puppet on the hand of Big Money:

The American ruling class wants--or more accurately, needs--to lower the living standards of American workers. Compared to the people sweating their days and nights in China's iPhone factories, American workers are "overpaid." To compete, the ruling class need us to make do with less--much, much less. And, ideally, they'd like us to believe that this is a good thing.

Like the squabbles over the health care legislation, the budget "battle" between Democrats and Republicans only makes sense in this light. Each side puts up a big "fight" to satisfy their respective bases, but the real outcome is never in doubt. In the case of the budget, both sides have agreed to not really consider taxing the rich, and instead to frame the discussion around which social programs must be cut

The Republicans want to take an arm and a leg. The Democrats have a counterproposal. They're "outraged" that both limbs might be sacrificed.

"Cut off your arm, not your arm and your leg." That will be Obama's campaign slogan for 2012. And we're supposed to feel like he's doing us a favor. Worse, we're supposed to endorse it with a vote.

Dominos Falling?

2011-01-18T18:11:00.004-07:00

Has the dam burst?

After Tunisia, ‘Electrified’ Arab World Sets Sights on Brewing Revolt in Egypt

In a sign that an "electrified" Arab world has been inspired by the events in Tunisia to rise up against their governments, opposition leaders in Egypt have called for an open revolt in the country on January 25.

The US branch of the National Association for Change, an umbrella group of activists led by former IAEA chief Mohamed El-Baradei, issued a statement on Tuesday "urging all Egyptians to take to the streets on January 25th to protest the deteriorating conditions caused by the dictatorial Mubarak regime."

The message places El-Baradei -- a prominent figure in the international community since his role in Iraqi weapons inspections in 2002 and 2003 -- in virtually direct conflict with President Hosni Mubarak, who is generally considered an ally of Washington and whose government receives billions in US aid yearly.

The call for a revolt comes as several Egyptians set themselves on fire in protest this week, apparently inspired by the Tunisian uprising last week that started the same way.

A man set himself ablaze on Tuesday in Cairo and another in Alexandria, Egyptian officials said. The incidents follow a similar one in Cairo on Monday in which a man poured fuel on himself and set himself on fire on a busy street in front of the People's Assembly (see video below).

[...]

It may get worse:

A 16-year-old French boy was rushed to hospital Tuesday in a critical condition after setting himself on fire at his school, officials in Marseille said.

The boy doused himself in a flammable liquid in the toilets of his private school in the southern city and then set himself alight, rescue service officials said.

He has second and third degrees burns over 70 percent of his body, they said. Hospital officials said the boy was in a critical condition.

It's may be a sign that the revolt in Tunisia and brewing unrest across the Arab world may also be part of a "youth uprising" that trends analyst Gerald Celente said last week would come to fruition in 2011.

Young people from industrial societies around the world will unite on the Internet to overthrow increasingly ineffective elements of globalism that have driven their economies into depression, Celente said.

"[The Internet is] exposing the corruptness, the ineptitude and the double dealing going on that [governments] don't want the public to know about," he told RT. "The more freedom of information that goes out, they're going to start using cyber war and the war on terror to take that Internet freedom away from America."

"But in 2011, the game's gonna run out," Celente added. "...On one end, it's a wake-up call and on the other hand it's [an effort to] screw the people."

I think we've all considered the Internet to be a game-changer, and that when the shit truly hits the fan (as it seems to have done in many parts of the world), it will fuel an uprising that the global elites will not be able to contain.

Has that time arrived?

Hearts and Minds, Pt. 3,729....

2011-01-18T17:21:00.002-07:00

Seymour Hersh brings disturbing news from the War Against Islam (emphasis mine):

"What I'm really talking about is how eight or nine neoconservative, radicals if you will, overthrew the American government. Took it over," he said of his forthcoming book. "It's not only that the neocons took it over but how easily they did it -- how Congress disappeared, how the press became part of it, how the public acquiesced."

Hersh then brought up the widespread looting that took place in Baghdad after the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003. "In the Cheney shop, the attitude was, ‘What's this? What are they all worried about, the politicians and the press, they're all worried about some looting? ... Don't they get it? We're gonna change mosques into cathedrals. And when we get all the oil, nobody's gonna give a damn.'"

"That's the attitude," he continued. "We're gonna change mosques into cathedrals. That's an attitude that pervades, I'm here to say, a large percentage of the Joint Special Operations Command."

He then alleged that Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who headed JSOC before briefly becoming the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, and his successor, Vice Adm. William McRaven, as well as many within JSOC, "are all members of, or at least supporters of, Knights of Malta."

Hersh may have been referring to the Sovereign Order of Malta, a Roman Catholic organization committed to "defense of the Faith and assistance to the poor and the suffering," according to its website.

"Many of them are members of Opus Dei," Hersh continued. "They do see what they're doing -- and this is not an atypical attitude among some military -- it's a crusade, literally. They see themselves as the protectors of the Christians. They're protecting them from the Muslims [as in] the 13th century. And this is their function."

"They have little insignias, these coins they pass among each other, which are crusader coins," he continued. "They have insignia that reflect the whole notion that this is a culture war. … Right now, there’s a tremendous, tremendous amount of anti-Muslim feeling in the military community.”"

When Junior first attacked Iraq, it was clear that a New Crusade had commenced -- and the Crusade has continued unabated, despite the Presidential change of guard. Hersh, in fact, says as much in the above article:

Hersh, whose exposés of gross abuses by members of the U.S. military in Vietnam and Iraq have earned him worldwide fame and high journalistic honors, said he was writing a book on what he called the "Cheney-Bush years" and saw little difference between that period and the Obama administration.

He said that he was keeping a "checklist" of aggressive U.S. policies that remained in place, including torture and "rendition" of terrorist suspects to allied countries, which he alleged was ongoing.

People are so deluded, and innocent humans pay with their lives.

When will the notion of peace gain enough widespread acceptance to put an end to this insanity?

Rotten to the Core

2011-01-16T08:57:00.002-07:00

This is why we (in the U.S.) are headed toward BIG CHANGE:

Comcast gave money to the vast majority of the 97 members of the US House of Representatives that signed a letter to the Federal Communications Commission urging approval of a merger between cable company Comcast and broadcaster NBC Universal, according to research.

The 5 January letter, linked here [pdf] and circulated by nonprofit group Public Knowledge urged the merger be approved quickly and without conditions that could harm investment. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, 84 of the 97 received money from Comcast, Public Knowledge said. The amounts range from token contributions of about $1,000 up to $25,100.

Eighty-four out of ninety-seven.

Most "civilized" countries make some small effort to hide the impression that their politicians are owned and operated by Big Money corporate interests... but here? Pure bribery as everyday business.

How can this continue?

Happy Thanksgiving!

2010-11-25T10:05:00.001-07:00

Happy Thanksgiving - WKRP Turkey Drop - kewego
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R.I.P. Gregory Isaacs

2010-10-25T20:38:00.006-06:00

Sad news -- I did not know that he was ill. Peace and comfort to his family and friends, and to everyone who paid attention to this man's cry.

Gregory Isaacs — one of the most popular and versatile reggae singers of the late-1970s, and the smooth-voiced dancehall crooner behind the genre's landmark 1982 LP Night Nurse — passed away this morning at his London home following a year-long battle with lung cancer, the BBC reports. Isaacs was 59. "Gregory was well loved by everyone, his fans and his family, and he worked really hard to make sure he delivered the music they loved and enjoyed," Isaacs' wife Linda said. "He will be greatly missed by his family and friends."

Over the course of his prolific career — in which he released an estimated 500 albums within Jamaica, the UK and the U.S. — Isaacs collaborated with reggae, dub and dancehall icons like Lee "Scratch" Perry, King Tubby, Sugar Minott, Freddie McGregor, Dennis Brown and Errol Holt. After spending the 1970s building a reputation as both a top-notch roots reggae singer and a soulful "lovers rock"-style crooner, Isaacs recorded his masterpiece Night Nurse at Bob Marley's Tuff Gong Studios in 1982, the year after Marley's death.

In the olden days I would've fired one up for Mr. Isaacs.

Now, I will meditate and send loving friendship to his traveling soul....

Testimonials

2010-06-11T18:21:00.003-06:00

From a Pulse Media post entitled The Shocking Truth:

The following eyewitness testimonies of the Freedom Flotilla massacre were filmed on 11 June 2010 by Shaun Dey of Reel News for the Palestine Solidarity Campaign.

They say it all in these videos; nothing more for me to say.

Why the Lack of Soul-Searching?

2010-06-09T08:48:00.004-06:00

Jonathan Cook gives indispensable insight into why most Israelis are indignant over global condemnation of the IDF attack on the Freedom Flotilla:

Israelis have not responded in any of the ways we might have expected. There has been little soul-searching about the morality, let alone legality, of soldiers invading ships in international waters and killing civilians. In the main, Israelis have not been interested in asking tough questions of their political and military leaders about why the incident was handled so badly. And only a few commentators appear concerned about the diplomatic fall-out.

Instead, Israelis are engaged in a Kafkaesque conversation in which the military attack on the civilian ships is characterised as a legitimate “act of self-defence”, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called it, and the killing of nine aid activists is transformed into an attempted “lynching of our soldiers” by terrorists.

* * *

One commentator in Israel’s Haaretz newspaper summed up the feelings of Israelis brought to the fore by the flotilla episode as the “helplessness of a poor lonely victim, confronting the rage of a lynch mob and frantically realising that these are his last moments”. This “psychosis”, as he called it, is not surprising: it derives from the sanctified place of the Holocaust in the Israeli education system.

The Holocaust’s lesson for most Israelis is not a universal one that might inspire them to oppose racism, or fanatical dictators or the bullying herd mentality that can all too quickly grip nations, or even state-sponsored genocide.

Instead, Israelis have been taught to see in the Holocaust a different message: that the world is plagued by a unique and ineradicable hatred of Jews, and that the only safety for the Jewish people is to be found in the creation of a super-power Jewish state that answers to no one. Put bluntly, Israel’s motto is: only Jewish power can prevent Jewish victimhood.

* * *

The angry demonstrations sweeping the country against the world’s denunciations; the calls to revoke the citizenship of the Israeli Arab MP on board -- or worse, to execute her -- for treason; and the local media’s endless recycling of the soldiers’ testimonies of being “bullied” by the activists demonstrate the desperate need of Israelis to justify every injustice or atrocity while clinging to the illusion of victimhood.

The lessons imbibed from this episode -- like the lessons Israelis learnt from the Goldstone report last year into the war crimes committed during Israel’s attack on Gaza, or the international criticisms of the massive firepower unleashed on Lebanon before that -- are the same: that the world hates us, and that we are alone.

What will it take for this mass psychosis to resolve?

A Moral Example

2010-06-06T19:18:00.002-06:00

My new hero, Ken O'Keefe, who disarmed two Israeli commandos upon witnessing them murder two of his fellow activists on the good ship Mavi Marmara:

Ken O’Keefe, former US Marine, Gulf War veteran, and now survivor of the Mavi Marmara massacre, has issued a remarkable and searing statement from Istanbul. “While in Israeli custody I, along with everyone else, was subjected to endless abuse and flagrant acts of disrespect. Women and elderly were physically and mentally assaulted. Access to food and water and toilets was denied. Dogs were used against us, we ourselves were treated like dogs. We were exposed to direct sun in stress positions while hand cuffed to the point of losing circulation of blood in our hands. We were lied to incessantly, in fact I am awed at the routineness and comfort in their ability to lie, it is remarkable really. We were abused in just about every way imaginable and I myself was beaten and choked to the point of blacking out… and I was beaten again while in my cell.

In all this what I saw more than anything else were cowards… and yet I also see my brothers. Because no matter how vile and wrong the Israeli agents and government are, they are still my brothers and sisters and for now I only have pity for them. Because they are relinquishing the most precious thing a human being has, their humanity.“

O’Keefe was a human shield in Iraq who formally renounced his US citizenship in protest in 2001; he now has Irish as well as Palestinian citizenship. On the morning of the attack, as he describes it, he was “directly involved in the disarming of two Israeli Commandos. This was a forcible, non-negotiable, separation of weapons from commandos who had already murdered two brothers that I had seen that day.” Subsequently brutalised by the Israeli military, he is defiant: “I challenge any critic of merit, publicly, to debate me on a large stage over our actions that day. I would especially love to debate with any Israeli leader who accuses us of wrongdoing, it would be my tremendous pleasure to face off with you. All I saw in Israel was cowards with guns, so I am ripe to see you in a new context“.

This man has followed his conscience where few of us would dare tread... and has already left an example to emulate. I just don't have enough words to express my admiration.

Just what the world needs at this most precarious moment....

On the Way to Gaza

2010-05-31T11:23:00.005-06:00

Same ol', same ol'... but, perhaps, this particular instance of criminal brazenness will force the world to put its foot down.

Of course, there is hardly anything new here – Israeli forces using disproportionate violence, killing civilians with impunity. But on this occasion, the murderous incident is not in some poor ghetto in the Gaza Strip hidden from the full view of the world. Up to now, Israeli disinformation could afford just enough wriggle room to sow doubts over such events. The cynical phrases of “terror suspects” and “self defence” parroted by the western mainstream media served to give the Israeli government and its backers in Washington a degree of political cover for otherwise heinous conduct.

Will justice be served?

Let's not hold our breath.....

Following On the Previous Post....

2010-04-11T12:09:00.001-06:00

Palestine/Israel history since 1948....

Atrocity

2010-04-11T11:31:00.002-06:00

Arundhati Roy offers an alternative to the lies and distortions we've been fed all our lives.

To Think She Would Be President

2010-03-24T19:26:00.002-06:00

Evil... it looks like this:

Palin tells followers to ‘reload’ and ‘aim for’ Democrats

Since the passage of health care reform last weekend, there has been increasingly violent language coming from opponents of the legislation, along with vandalism directed at Democratic members of Congress.

Former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin has now done her part to raise the rhetorical intensity, telling her Twitter followers, "Commonsense Conservatives & lovers of America: 'Don't Retreat, Instead - RELOAD!'"

Palin then refers supporters to her Facebook page, where she once again employs gun imagery in offering a list of 20 potentially vulnerable pro-reform Democrats in Congress.

As things become increasingly chaotic and desperate for a certain segment (or two) of America, look for the ugliness to go "hyper-real."

This all has the look and feel of an orchestrated mind-op, meant to present a rationalization for yet another push toward a Police State.

We've lived in an overtly-scripted pseudo-reality for 30 years.

The Gist

2009-11-17T07:28:00.002-07:00

I Knew Things Had Grown Too Quiet....

2009-10-31T17:32:00.002-06:00

Here we go again, perhaps:

Last update - 11:46 30/10/2009
Lebanon warns UN: Israel planning to attack us

Lebanon's ambassador to the United Nations has warned that Israel is exhibiting signs of an imminent attack on his country, the Lebanese newspaper Al-Hayyat reported on Friday.

Ambassador Noaf Salaam sent missives to the United Nations secretary general and to the Security Council condemning Israel's recent artillery fire on the village of Houla, the site where a Katyusha rocket was fired at the Upper Galilee last week.

Salaam called the artillery fire a clear violation of Lebanon's sovereignty as well as of UN Resolution 1701, which saw a truce between Israel and Lebanon following the 2006 war.

According to Al-Hayyat, Salaam described in his missive repeated Israeli threats against the Lebanese government and citizens, an expression he believes signals Israeli plans for to attack.

Salaam also said that the Israeli decision to bomb Lebanese territory following every Katyusha attack delayed and prevented Lebanese forces from investigating the rocket attacks.

Lebanese troops found and dismantled four rockets ready for launching near the border with Israel last Wednesday, a day after the Katyusha was launched from the southern village.

The Katyusha fire was the first such incident since last month, and the ninth since the Second Lebanon War.

The attack drew a rapid response from Israeli artillery in a brief flare-up across the border. Neither the rocket nor the artillery caused casualties.

I hope the ambassador is wrong on this -- but, of course, he's in a position to know, having been there before....

Impossible, You Say?

2009-10-28T06:11:00.003-06:00

From the Asia Times:

Helicopter rumors refuse to die

MAZAR-E-SHARIF - Persistent accounts of Western forces in Afghanistan using their helicopters to ferry Taliban fighters, strongly denied by the military, is feeding mistrust of the forces that are supposed to be bringing order to the country.

One such tale came from a soldier from the 209th Shahin Corps of the Afghan National Army, fighting against the growing insurgency in Kunduz province in northern Afghanistan. Over several months, he had taken part in several pitched battles against the armed opposition.

"Just when the police and army managed to surround the Taliban in a village of Qala-e-Zaal district, we saw helicopters land with support teams," he said. "They managed to rescue their friends from our encirclement, and even to inflict defeat on the Afghan National Army."

This story, in one form or another, is being repeated throughout northern Afghanistan. Dozens of people claim to have seen Taliban fighters disembark from foreign helicopters in several provinces. The local talk is of the insurgency being consciously moved north, with international troops ferrying fighters in from the volatile south, to create mayhem in a new location.

Helicopters are almost exclusively the domains of foreign forces in Afghanistan; the international military controls the air space and has a virtual monopoly on aircraft. So when Afghans see choppers, they think foreign military.

"Our fight against the Taliban is nonsense," said the soldier from Shahin Corps. "Our foreigner 'friends' are friendlier to the opposition."

For months or even years, rumors have been circulating in Afghanistan that the Taliban are being financed or even directly supported militarily by the foreign forces.

In part it stems from an inability to believe that major foreign armies cannot defeat a ragtag bunch of insurgents; in addition, Afghanistan has been a center of foreign intrigue for so long that belief in plots comes naturally to many war-weary Afghans.

The international troops hotly deny that they are supporting the insurgents.

"This entire business with the helicopters is just a rumor," said Brigadier General Juergen Setzer, recently appointed commander for the International Security Assistance Force, ISAF, in the north. "It has no basis in reality, according to our investigations."

The general added that ISAF-North had overall control of the air space in the northern region.

But the persistent rumors that foreign helicopters have been sighted assisting the Taliban in northern Afghanistan were given an unexpected boost in mid-October by Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who told the media that his administration was investigating similar reports that "unknown" helicopters were ferrying the insurgents from Helmand province in the south to Baghlan, Kunduz and Samangan provinces in the north.

...

[Emphasis mine.]

A slight leak in the script, apparently.

We'll need to send mind-control specialists to Eastasia on the next available flight....

It's a Living....

2009-07-04T00:17:00.003-06:00

Where I grew up it was fresh deer on the hood.

Yikes!

Only in Maui you can see people catching sharks and bringing them to the nearest supermarket to "make a few bucks " like this! Not that in Maui there are that many sharks or many problems with them tho, some people were fishing when apparently the shark got stuck it the nets. They got the shark at Kanaha beach park and after following them I took the picture while they were about to park at Star Market in Kahului, a few miles away from the beach.

It's a living... apparently....

Public Enemy #1

2009-07-03T23:45:00.003-06:00

Amazing that this is available:

Saddam Hussein Talks to the FBI:

Twenty Interviews and Five Conversations with "High Value Detainee # 1" in 2004

Washington, D.C., July 1, 2009 - FBI special agents carried out 20 formal interviews and at least 5 "casual conversations" with former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein after his capture by U.S. troops in December 2003, according to secret FBI reports released as the result of Freedom of Information Act requests by the National Security Archive and posted today on the Web at www.nsarchive.org.

Saddam denied any connections to the "zealot" Osama bin Laden, cited North Korea as his most likely ally in a crunch, and shared President George W. Bush's hostility towards the "fanatic" Iranian mullahs, according to the FBI records of conversations from February through June 2004 between Saddam and Arabic-speaking agents in his detention cell at Baghdad International Airport.

The former Iraqi leader, when asked about his accomplishments, listed social progress for the people of Iraq, a temporary truce with the Kurds in the early 1970s, the nationalization of Iraq’s oil in 1972, support for the Arab side during the 1973 Middle East war with Israel, and after that, for the remaining 30 years of his rule, simple survival – through a devastating eight year war with Iran that he had launched, and a 12-year sanctions regime imposed on his people after another war that he began. During the interviews he repeatedly contests FBI evidence and the neutrality of his interlocutors – which one of them finds ironic, given the record of peremptory Iraqi justice under Saddam’s governance. He selectively outlines recent Iraqi history and acknowledges some mistakes, including the destruction without U.N. supervision or verification of some of Iraq’s WMD arsenal left over from the 1980s.

During the interviews Saddam refutes some examples of what he views as myths, like his purported use of body doubles. Instead he says that to evade his enemies he never used the telephone and traveled constantly from one dwelling to another (he describes the farm where he was captured in a “spider hole” as the same place where he took refuge after a failed 1959 coup attempt.)

He takes personal responsibility for ordering the launching of SCUD missiles against Israeli targets during the 1991 Persian Gulf War, because he blamed Israel and its influence in the U.S. for “all the problems of the Arabs”, but denies that his purpose was to draw that country into the conflict and to divide Washington from its Arab allies. He provides details on the lead-up to the war, reporting that during a January 1991 meeting former Secretary of State James Baker told Saddam’s foreign minister that if Iraq did not comply with U.S. conditions “we’ll take you back to the pre-industrial stage.”

Saddam’s historical recollections include his ascendancy within the Ba’athist party in 1968 and 1969; his disappointment after the Iran-Iraq war with Arab governments for their lack of gratitude for Iraq’s “saving all of the Arab world” from occupation by Iran; details about the 1991 Persian Gulf war; and the post-war Shi’a uprising in Iraq’s south, which he characterizes as “treachery” instigated by Iran.

Not included in these FBI reports are issues of particular interest to students of Iraq’s complicated relationship with the U.S. – the reported role of the CIA in facilitating the Ba’ath party’s rise to power, the uneasy alliance forged between Iraq and the U.S. during the Iran-Iraq war, and the precise nature of U.S. views regarding Iraq’s chemical weapons policy during that conflict, given its contemporaneous knowledge of their repeated use against Iranians and the Kurds.

This series of interviews also does not address chemical warfare in Kurdish areas of Iraq in 1987-1988, although an FBI progress report says Saddam was questioned on the topic. One interview, #20, is redacted in its entirety on national security grounds, although it is not clear what issues agents could have discussed with Saddam that cannot now be disclosed to the public.

The interviews and conversations were led by George L. Piro, one of an exceedingly small number of FBI agents who spoke Arabic. The agency expected that Saddam would feel rapport with Piro and develop a sense of dependency. During the interviews Piro hears Saddam out but is often openly skeptical of the former leader’s recollections. The agent does, however, assert with confidence that the U.S. side had information that Iraq was maintaining or developing a WMD capability and cites “evidence” of continuing contact between Iran and al-Qaeda, seemingly implying an operational relationship.

Saddam does not provide comfort to his interlocutors on these matters, refuting any notion of collaboration with al-Qaeda, or of a remaining WMD capacity, and in reality the charges, meant to win public support for the invasion of Iraq, were collapsing while the interviews were underway. Investigators from the CIA, operating freely in occupied Iraq, failed to uncover any credible supporting evidence for the U.S. claims, and ultimately President Bush himself acknowledged that “most of the intelligence turned out to be wrong.”

One of the last interviews in the series ends on a valedictory note, after Piro listens to a poem that Saddam had written. The former president of Iraq is “done,” Piro says, “his life is nearing its end,” and other detainees are blaming him for all of Iraq’s many mistakes. Saddam is fatalistic and acknowledges reality. His interviews with Piro ended soon thereafter, and on December 30, 2006, he was hanged, amid the taunts of the political enemies who carried out his execution.

Click the link above to read the documents.

Off to Jail, Do-Gooders

2009-05-29T09:27:00.002-06:00

The beat goes on:

Despite No Links to Violence, Founders of Muslim Charity Sentenced to Lengthy Terms for Donations to Needy Palestinians in Occupied Territories

Five founders of the Holy Land Foundation, once the nation’s
largest Muslim charity, have received prison terms of up to sixty-five years on charges of supporting the Palestinian group Hamas. The five were never accused of supporting violence and were convicted for funding charities that aided needy Palestinians. The government’s case relied on Israeli intelligence as well as disputed documents and electronic surveillance gathered by the FBI over a span of fifteen years.

Apparently the Crusades continue unabated.

Sick and Wrong

2009-05-01T10:31:00.001-06:00

Apparently, this is real -- some sort of public-access programming from an unknown U.S. city... NOT SAFE FOR WORK!!!!

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

Eye Candy

2009-04-05T19:49:00.004-06:00

Home Sweet Home

2009-04-05T12:16:00.002-06:00

Someday... hopefully...!

Total cost of Ward's cabin solar power system : Less than 700 Bucks!

***

It would be impossible to power a home down in town with a system of this size...but this design goes to show that if you are conservative with your power use, realistic with your expectations, and thrifty with your equipment purchases, you can power up a home for under a grand. Just don't try to plug in that damn air conditioner!

Just need some land in a remote place, abundant sunlight, decent soil... and a plan, which this site provides as a good example.

As time moves forward, something like this makes more and more sense to me....

Today's Ward Churchill Moment -- Trial Victory Edition

2009-04-02T18:42:00.002-06:00

My former University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill has just won his lawsuit against the school that fired him:

The University of Colorado unlawfully fired Ward Churchill for expressing his political beliefs, a jury decided this afternoon.

The jury of four women and two men awarded the former ethnic studies professor $1 in damages. The dollar amount was largely a symbolic move because the judge instructed the jury to award that amount if they ruled in Churchill's favor but found no damages.

Chief Denver District Judge Larry Naves will decide at a separate hearing whether Churchill, 61, is reinstated at CU or given a lump sum of money instead.

Shortly after the verdict was announced, Churchill told reporters that getting his job back was more important than any monetary award.

"I didn't ask for money," said Churchill, who was joined by his attorney, David Lane. "What was asked for and what was delivered was justice."

My first thought is that Ward should've ended up owning the damned school.

My second thought is that, miracle of miracles, the jury found in his favor.

My third thought is that the System can still screw him, should the judge not reinstate his CU professorship.

Without a doubt, the most poetic punishment would be for Ward to go back to work for the weasels who can't stomach his challenge to their comfort zone.

I'll be watching to find out whether poetic justice prevails.

Return of the Black Shirts

2009-03-28T12:29:00.005-06:00

On the one hand, this is frightening.

On the other... well, at least they're standing up for everyone to see, instead of hiding behind labels like "neocon."

Silvio Berlusconi realises dream with new rightwing party

• Freedom People includes Mussolini's spiritual heirs
• Coalition brings Italy closer to two-party state

A unified party of the Italian right, bringing together followers of Silvio Berlusconi, the prime minister, and the spiritual heirs of Mussolini's fascist blackshirts will formally be created tomorrow by delegates at a congress convened to inaugurate the movement.

Speaking from a giant platform in an immense exhibition hall, Berlusconi last night declared the gathering open and moved closer to realising his most cherished dream - leading a single power-bloc of the right.

As soon as a 50ft high screen above the platform showed the prime minister was entering the hall, 6,000 delegates sprang to their feet to give him an ovation. A beaming Berlusconi strode to his place while loudspeakers blared out his party's election campaign song, whose title roughly translates as: "Thank goodness for Silvio".

By tomorrow, when the congress ends, the 6,000 delegates will have turned the Freedom People (PdL) - made up of Berlusconi's Forza Italia ("Come on Italy!") party and the post-fascist National Alliance - from an electoral coalition into a ostensibly monolithic movement representing the bulk of Italy's conservatives. Since most of the centre-left is already united in a rival Democratic Party (PD), the latest merger brings Italy significantly closer to a two-party system.

Wasn't Berlusconi bounced for corruption... sort of like the new PM in Israel?

Oh, that's right.

Laws are for the unwashed masses.

I Miss Him More That Ever....

2009-03-21T15:05:00.003-06:00

Bigger than life:

(Dr.) Hunter S. Thompson was born July 18, 1937 in Louisville, Kentucky. After a crime-filled youth, he enlisted in the Air Force as part of his parole. At Eglin AFB, he worked as sports editor for the base paper. Following his discharge, he worked at various writing jobs, most of which proved fruitless. He spent some time in the late fifties and early sixties writing newspaper articles in South America for American papers. He returned to the states and set up his home in Woody Creek, Colorado, on Owl Farm, although he was continually on the road. He gained fame for his first book, Hell's Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga, in which he spent a year living and riding with the motorcycle gang until a disagreement caused them to stomp him and break his nose. In 1970, he ran for sheriff of Pitkin County on the Freak Power ticket and narrowly lost to the incumbent. He is most famous for his brand of supersubjective journalism, called "Gonzo".

Did I ever tell you that I had a girlfriend who was once a waitress at the Woody Creek Tavern?

She told me that Hunter had his own booth. If anyone was sitting there when he walked in, they had to move to another table immediately. Hunter would dump bag after bag of fan mail onto the table, spending hours going through it all, writing the occasional response onto a stack of blank postcards. He was, apparently, nice to my girlfriend.

Touched by greatness, I guess....

Guerilla Marketing

2009-03-21T14:11:00.002-06:00

Are You a Mad One?

2009-03-21T14:09:00.002-06:00

Obama's New Adviser

2009-03-08T11:14:00.003-06:00

I'm thinking the Prez could do worse:

March 6 (Bloomberg) -- Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez comments on U.S. President Barack Obama and the state of the U.S. economy. He made the remarks today on Venezuelan state television.

“It’s regrettable the crisis that the U.S. is living through. Millions of workers are being left in the street, thousands of companies are closing, in the U.S. there isn’t a single new infrastructure project. Go look for a highway there, the country has gone bust.”

“Now President Obama arrived with some announcements, hopefully, but the capitalist model and its perverse values have failed.”

“I recommend to Obama -- they’re criticizing him because they say he’s moving towards socialism -- come Obama, ally with us on the path to socialism, it’s the only road.”

“Imagine a socialist revolution in the U.S. Nothing is impossible.”

Sweet!

"Nothing is impossible."

Isn't that the spirit that Barack attempted to invoke along the campaign trail?

Time to walk the talk....

God Forbid

2009-03-06T13:05:00.002-07:00

The power of the insurance lobby rears its ugly, puss-infested face:

The state is trying to shut down a New York City doctor's ambitious plan to treat uninsured patients for around $1,000 a year.

Dr. John Muney offers his patients everything from mammograms to mole removal at his AMG Medical Group clinics, which operate in all five boroughs.

"I'm trying to help uninsured people here," he said.

His patients agree to pay $79 a month for a year in return for unlimited office visits with a $10 co-pay.

But his plan landed him in the crosshairs of the state Insurance Department, which ordered him to drop his fixed-rate plan - which it claims is equivalent to an insurance policy.

Muney insists it is not insurance because it doesn't cover anything that he can't do in his offices, like complicated surgery. He points out his offices do not operate 24/7 so they can't function like emergency rooms.

"I'm not doing an insurance business," he said. "I'm just providing my services at my place during certain hours."

This doctor should be canonized as a Saint.

Instead... well, what can we say?

Corporations rule the world, apparently.

Life as a Pin Cushion

2009-02-28T13:23:00.002-07:00

Per Wikipedia:

Elaine Davidson is the "Most Pierced Woman" according to the Guinness World Records.

When examined by a Guinness World Record official in May 2000, Davidson had 462 piercings, with 192 in her face alone. By August 2001 when she was re-examined she was found to have 720 piercings. Performing at the Edinburgh Festival in 2005, the Guardian reported that she now had 3,950 body piercings. She has more piercings in her genitalia than in any other part of the body - 500 in all, externally and internally. The total weight of her jewelry is estimated to be about 3 kilograms. As of May 2008, Davidson's piercings total 5,920. As of Feb. 2009 her piercings total 6,005.

She was born in Brazil and is a nurse. She claims she does not drink or use drugs. She now resides in Edinburgh, Scotland.

And, from her MySpace page:

A lady of many talents, Elaine also walks on beds of nails, fire and bits of glass, and holds a black belt in Judo which she earned in Japan. 'I love the fire because it's beautiful, hot, dangerous and exciting to watch, it's so powerful it can kill you.'

Elaine Davidson does not drink, take drugs or smoke cigarettes and she wants people to know this. In some ways this is because she sees her position in the Guinness Book of Records as a responsibility as much as a dedication. 'It becomes part of our lives and part of ourselves, its like God to us, we love the Guinness book of records so much...' However, Elaine does have a soft spot for coca cola.

Sexy, happy, proud and smiling because of a life based on the stars, the moon, rainbows, water, wind and all the beautiful, natural things on earth.

'When you are alone and the trials of life become complicated,' says Elaine, 'concentrating on the beautiful things around you like the flowers and trees can help you survive and forget the tough times.'

'The power of my mind, the crystal ball, tarot cards, hands that heal, the nature of life itself, all the stars and the moon give me the strength to carry on laughing, smiling and expressing myself.'

Who are we to judge?

I'll just bet that hanging out with Elaine Davidson beats any amount of television watching, any day of the week.

I'll bet that hanging out with Elaine is almost as good as basing our lives "on the stars, the moon, rainbows, water, wind and all the beautiful, natural things on earth."

I'd also bet she could kick my ass with her Judo black belt, so I will refrain from any snarkiness that may lurk at the tip of my tongue.

Elaine Davidson, my new hero.....

Karma Accrues

2009-02-22T17:17:00.004-07:00

Criminal wars against a virtually-defenseless, densely-packed civilian population have consequences:

Long road to rehabilitation for Gaza's amputees
Rami Almeghari, Live from Palestine, 20 February 2009

Amidst the thousands of people injured during Israel's three-week bombardment of the Gaza Strip are many whose lives will be permanently affected because they lost limbs.

Suheir Zemo, a 47-year-old mother of seven, lost her right leg after an Israeli missile crashed into her home in the Tal al-Hawa neighborhood of Gaza City in mid-January, at the height of the Israeli attack.

"I was in my bedroom when a rocket landed in the room. Suddenly my leg started bleeding severely. Then my husband risked his life and took me to hospital as ambulances were not allowed into the area, said Suheir sitting in a wheelchair at the al-Shifa hospital in Gaza.

At al-Wafa rehabilitation hospital in eastern Gaza City, a number of amputees recently began the rehabilitation process. Al-Wafa is the only private rehabilitation center in the Gaza Strip, but even it was not spared damage in the Israeli attack.

In one of the hospital's rooms lie two young men in their early twenties; the first had his right leg amputated, while the second had his lower limbs severely injured, preventing their use completely.

"It was almost 1:15 pm, when an Israeli tank shell hit our home in the Shaaf area of Gaza city. Only my father, my friend and myself were inside the home when it was struck," said Maher al-Habashi.

With signs of agony on his face, Maher added, "we ran out of the home and suddenly two rockets fired by a drone hit the three of us. My father and my friend died, while I felt paralyzed, realizing I was hurt."

The young man who lost his right leg, Yehya Abu Saif, 20, described how was he injured on 3 January, when Israeli warplanes targeted a mosque in the Jabaliya refugee camp in northern Gaza.

"We has just finished the evening prayer and as we got out of the mosque a rocket landed among the worshipers including myself. Later on I realized I was injured and as you see I had my leg amputated."

"Why do they attack mosques, why?" Yehya asked, "is this their alleged democracy?"

As the only facility of its kind in Gaza, al-Wafa is set to receive more people who have lost limbs to begin a rehabilitation process that can take weeks, months and even years. Patients receive physical, functional, psychological and clinical support, and may receive cosmetic or other surgery to prepare them to use prosthetics.

The number and severity of injuries as a result of the Israeli attack were unprecedented and unfamiliar to Gaza's doctors.

Dr. Fawzi al-Nabulsiya, chief of intensive care at Gaza's al-Shifa hospital said: "Many of these cases we haven't observed before. The weaponry used is very effective, leading to amputation of limbs, especially the lower ones, spinal cord and cases of deep coma. The ICU here received 283 cases, equaling the total of cases we often receive in a period of six or seven months."

Such an emergency situation, created by the Israeli war on Gaza, has pushed the Hamas-run health ministry to transfer hundreds of patients to hospitals outside of Gaza, mainly in Arab or Islamic countries.

However demand is still high, especially for treatment and rehabilitation of people with disabilities. Hammam Nasman, spokesman of the health ministry in Gaza drew an image to the health service in Gaza under these circumstances.

"The ministry of health does not have institutions that carry out rehabilitation, therefore, the ministry buys the service from other institutions. Actually, many Arab or Islamic countries extended a hand of assistance, for example, a Turkish institution called IHH has opened a branch in Gaza City, it is preparing to provide prosthetics."

Medical sources in Gaza estimate that the number of injuries due to the recent attacks on the coastal Strip has risen to 6,000, and the death toll more than 1,350, half of them women and children.

Rami Almeghari is contributor to The Electronic Intifada, IMEMC.org and Free Speech Radio News and is a part-time lecturer on media and political translation at the Islamic University of Gaza. Rami is also a former senior English translator at and editor-in-chief of the international press center of the Gaza-based Palestinian Information Service. He can be contacted at rami_almeghari A T hotmail D O T com.

You know, the bombing of Gaza finally ended just before Obama's Inauguration, about a month ago.

The sustained assault, with its 6,000 wounded and 1,350 dead, has subsequently dropped off the map of Western consciousness.

Hopefully, stories like this will continue to pepper the Internet, so that we don't forget what our tax dollars are supporting in the Apartheid State of Israel.

A Poem for Valentine's Night

2009-02-14T14:41:00.002-07:00

From the Prophetic Muse, Pablo Neruda:

The Light Wraps You

The light wraps you in its mortal flame.
Abstracted pale mourner, standing that way
against the old propellers of the twilight
that revolves around you.

Speechless, my friend,
alone in the loneliness of this hour of the dead
and filled with the lives of fire,
pure heir of the ruined day.

A bough of fruit falls from the sun on your dark garment.
The great roots of night
grow suddenly from your soul,
And the things that hide in you come out again
so that a blue and pallid people,
your newly born, takes nourishment.

Oh magnificent and fecund and magnetic slave
of the circle that moves in turn through black and gold:
rise, lead and possess a creation
so rich in life that its flowers perish
and it is full of sadness.

No matter how you feel about this particular holiday, there's enough beauty and truth in the Prophetic Muse to flip a switch in everyone.

I hope it's been a profitable and memorable Valentine's Day for all of you, my friend.

[From Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, page 5, translated from Spanish by W. S. Merwin... which makes me weep every Valentine's Day when I attempt to read a few poems out load.]

Another World

2009-02-07T18:31:00.003-07:00

Trey Ratcliff of Stuck In Customs gives nothing but stunning photography.

Here we see Hong Kong like we've never seen it before.

Do visit Trey's site.

If 6 Were 9

2009-02-07T10:40:00.006-07:00

Sometimes upside-down is rightside-up:

'My preacher mother dated Jimi Hendrix before finding God,' claims Katy Perry

Katy Perry's religious parents may have been outraged by her hit track I Kissed A Girl, but it seems they weren't always quite so conservative.

The 24-year-old singer claimed the couple, now both evangelical Christian preachers, once mixed within the 1960s psychedelic scene.

'My mum went on a date with Jimi Hendrix. My dad was a part of Strawberry Fields Forever and hung out with Timothy Leary,' she said in an interview on Katie Couric's All Access Grammy Special.

Leary was considered a counter-culture icon who advocated psychedelic drug research and promoted the spiritual benefits of LSD.

'My parents have stories. They probably have better stories than I do.'

'And they found God. They needed to find God. Not that they needed to find God, but God found them, really.'

Katy said that her early years closely mirrored Jesus Camp, a documentary about young children and evangelical Christianity.

'I watched it and I went, 'Oh my gosh! I didn't know they had behind-the-scenes footage of my childhood!'

Her parents Keith and Mary Hudson - Katy performs under her mother's maiden name - have previously said they are deeply ashamed of the star for ‘promoting a sin’.

Looks to me like her parents went from one religious fanaticism to another.

But, then, that's life in a nutshell, right?

Plans

2009-02-05T22:59:00.002-07:00

I think I just decided to upgrade my Blogger template here at Spontaneous Arising. This should occupy me for much of the weekend, which is not such a bad thing. Some changes are definitely in order, if only to spark a little more frequent posting from the Proprietor.

Today's Ethnic Cleansing Moment

2009-01-26T07:02:00.003-07:00

Fast Thunder, Oglala Sioux, ca. 60 years old, male [American] Indian, bust portrait, facing right. Copyright 13 July 1900 by Heyn Photo, Omaha, Nebraska. No. 517....

"Realizing this would be futile"....

From Jeffrey Ostler, The Plains Sioux and U.S. Colonialism: Bradley and Clark seriously distorted Lakota sentiments [about Crazy Horse's death in 1877]. Consider, for example, Fast Thunder, one of the leaders of the Lakota scouts. By the government's system of classification, Fast Thunder was a "friendly" Indian. Yet according to his grandson, Mathew King, Fast Thunder was angry enough after Crazy Horse's death to seriously consider leading the scouts to war against the United States. Realizing this would be futile, however, "he left the fort and camped sompelace in the hills ... to cool down." There, he and his followers "smoked the peace pipe." Far from indicating that the Lakotas considered Crazy Horse's death a "blessing," the absence of further violence testified to Lakotas' pragmatism and self-control. (p. 105)

Everything goes better with the peace pipe, yes?

God Forbid That This Be True

2009-01-18T18:38:00.004-07:00

Gabriel at Jews Sans Frontieres asks that this story be broadcast far and wide.

Time will tell as to whether or not this odious thing takes place:

Israel and Egypt planning a round of ethnic cleansing

Under cover of announcing humanitarian relief for injured Palestinians, it is now emerging that Israel is planning the transfer of tens of thousands of Palestinians from Gaza into Egypt.

Evidence of the Israeli transfer plan has been sent to London based Islington Friends of Yibna** [IFY]. Earlier today, Sat 17 Jan 09, IFY received a photo of tents [see above] outside the main hospital in Egyptian Rafah, near the border with Gaza.

The white tents with no markings are being erected by the Egyptian Army, starting last night, Fri 16 Jan 09. The photo was taken this morning [Sat 17 January 09]. The soldiers stated that 5,000 tents were planned for refugees from Gaza.

Further information is available from our contacts in the Egyptian side of Rafah [Rafah was divided by Israel after it occupied Gaza and Sinai in 1967; Israel divided Rafah when Sinai was returned to Egypt].

From our contacts in Yibna Refugee Camp in Gaza we have learnt that, in the north east of Rafah, near the Egyptian border, Israeli tanks have surrounded and sealed off the Al Sarayh neighbourhood, for more than the last 48 hours. There are many injured people trapped there, the Israelis are not allowing access for the Red Cross and many people are dying of their wounds, isolated and with no medical treatment.

We have grave concerns that Israel will target the Al Sarayh neighbourhood to be the first to be transferred and that this might be within the next 24h.

While Al Sarayh is completely isolated, with no access even to the Red Cross, Israel can prepare and carry out its plans without any witnesses from the aid agencies to alert the international community. While preventing Al Sarayh from accessing any medical treatment, Israel would portray a transfer as an Israeli humanitarian gesture to allow them access to medical treatment in Egypt. Given that Israel has been bombing Al Sarayh non-stop Israel would portray a transfer as a humanitarian gesture to allow them to escape the killing fields of the constant Israeli bombardment [thus claiming they will be safer in Egypt and giving them the “choice”].

Israel is NOT on a mercy mission. While presenting this transfer as a humanitarian gesture, allowing injured Palestinians and their families out across the Rafah border crossing for hospital treatment, the Israeli plan to ethnic cleanse Gaza and transfer Palestinians to Egypt is not new. This is an advanced stage in the Israeli plan to ethnic cleanse the 1.5 million Palestinians out of Gaza [e.g. see the video interview in English of the Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi Yona Metzger, a year ago, on 18 Jan 08, calling for the Palestinians in Gaza to be transferred to the Sinai desert as a humanitarian gesture]. Those forced now to leave, under the pretext of a humanitarian gesture, will never again be allowed back [just like they have never been allowed back to the homes from which they were ethnic cleansed in 1948]. The Palestinian refugees, ethnic cleansed from Gaza, would continue to be hunted down by Israel, even if they would be later transferred further into the Sinai desert.

It appears that the ceasefire agreement with Egypt [part of the Israeli “unilateral” ceasefire due to start on 17 Jan, 2400 GMT] paved the way to the erection of the tents by Egyptian forces and that Egypt agreed to allow Israel to ethnic cleansed dozens of thousands of Palestinians from Gaza into Egypt, under the pretext of a humanitarian gesture.

Earlier this afternoon, PM Gordon Brown announced that injured children would be taken out of Gaza for medical treatment and food aid would be stepped up. IFY spoke with medics in the Egyptian Rafah, and they said that today the Egyptian soldiers rejected ALL the food they provided for Gaza, while on other days they allowed some food in [though in no way proportionate to the needs of 1.5 millions]. As for the medical treatment, that could be the cover story for the ethnic cleansing of dozens of thousands, especially as the tents are near the hospital.

By last week, more than 40,000 people in Rafah have already been forced out of their homes by the day and night Israeli bombardment, making transfer easier as there is now no need to get them out of their houses, many of which are now bombed ruins. There’s nothing left for the Palestinians in Gaza [even the cemetery in Rafah was bombed] and they have been terrorised for so long, that it is hard to estimate how much more violence Israel would need to exercise to force them to leave Gaza It is not anticipated that Israel would immediately ethnic 1.5million Palestinians in Gaza, but that it would pursue its completion when it feels there are international circumstances that would allow it.

For further information and updates please contact Yael Kahn on +44 (0)7880 731 865 or Rob Langlands on +44 (0)7977 490415

Islington_Yibna@yahoo.co.uk

We keep seeing comparisons between Israel's treatment of Palestinians and Nazi Germany's treatment of European Jews.

Such comparisons immediately draw cries of anti-Semitism.

People do not like to be labeled "anti-Semite," so they are silenced from criticizing Israel's treatment of Palestinians... so Israeli atrocities not only continue, but they become more brazen, more blood-soaked, more inhuman.

Silence is no longer an option, and it seems as though a large fraction of humanity is "getting it."

Truce, Israeli-Style

2009-01-18T14:33:00.003-07:00

Well, that didn't last long:

Bodies unearthed from rubble as Israel violates ceasefire
Press release, Al Mezan, 18 January 2009

Israel has announced to unilaterally cease fire in the Gaza Strip while leaving its troops in positions they had seized during the so-called Operation Cast Lead. Al Mezan Center's staff visited some of the areas the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) left last night and this morning. It found out that a disaster had struck these areas, which had not been accessible for weeks. The findings provide evidence about the likelihood that the IOF had perpetrated war crimes in these areas. In particular, dozens of civilians' corpses have been found in a bad condition under the rubble of destroyed houses. Moreover, the scene of destruction of neighborhoods suggests that wide-scaled home demolitions were systematically conducted by the IOF.

Al Mezan Center's field workers reported that entire urban blocks have disappeared in the areas of Ezbet Abed-Rabu, al-Salatin, al-Atatra, al-Israa in North Gaza District, and al-Kashif and al-Rayis Hills and the eastern suburbs of Gaza City. As of 2pm, medical teams had found 62 corpses of people under the rubble of houses, or rubble moved by Israeli bulldozers. Among them were eight children and 10 women. It is not known yet whether those were buried under the rubble alive or dead.

According to Al Mezan Center's monitoring, the IOF has breached the unilaterally declared ceasefire. Shooting and shelling from artillery batteries, tanks and naval vessels have occurred in various areas throughout the day. Israeli aircraft also launched raids on open areas. At 10:30am, Israeli troops opened fire at civilians who were trying to reach their homes in Khuzaa village, east of Khan Younis. A man, 22-year-old Mahir Abu Irjila, was killed as a result. The victim and his family had evacuated their house and stayed in a UN shelter.

With these casualties, the number of Palestinians killed by the IOF in the Gaza Strip since the start of Operation Cast Lead on 27 December 2009 has risen to 1,253, including at least 280 children and 95 women. Another 4,009 people were injured, including 860 children and 488 women.

It's as though the world is squeezing its eyes as tightly shut as possible, pretending that Israel did, indeed, have some justifiable reason for unilaterally destroying Gaza and its citizens in plain daylight.

My disgust is total.

Zionists in America, A to Z

2009-01-16T12:16:00.004-07:00

I hope it's okay with Malooga and Bernhard at MofA, but I'm posting this entire piece. It's very, very long, and you'll probably need to spend some hours both reading it and following its links... but this is the essential information we all need to master in confronting the racist and malignant movement known as Zionism.

Thank you, Malooga, for putting forth the time and energy to create this post, which reflects your years of dedicated experience on behalf of an underdog people.

Everything you wanted to know about how Zionists control US policy
by Malooga
I was recently asked to answer the following question: In the original post there is mention of Israel controlling US policy. How exactly does that work?
The short answer is this: A highly influential and extremely well bankrolled collection of groups directs energy simultaneously in a number of directions: Political, media, academic, inter-faith, and other areas, in order to create consent for Israel's policies and to sway politicians to support those policies. The rest of this article examines this process in greater detail, primarily through the words of academics who have studied it for years.
To my mind, Israel's actions, and the extent to which they are enabled by the power of the Zionist lobby is -- or at least should be -- the central moral question confronting Jewish people worldwide, and especially in the US.
To the extent that it isn't, is the clearest indication of the moral degeneration, and ironically, the existential purposelessness which Zionism -- as an answer -- has provided to the Jewish people.
There are no two words which I find more distasteful than "Never Again" -- whether it comes from a Zionist, or my girlfriend. In the case of a Zionist, it is because of the sheer hypocrisy it entails; in the case of my girlfriend, because of its adamantine certainty. (OK, just injecting a little humor into a humorless topic.)
Israel's actions should be of equal concern to any human concerned with Justice and minimizing human suffering, especially Americans and Europeans whose governments support these unjust and genocidal polices, which potentially threaten to escalate and consume the entire world
Because of this, I have followed this topic very closely over the years (I produced and syndicated the first radio program dedicated to covering Palestine from the Palestinian perspective.) – so, rather than deluge people with sources, I will stick with four primary ones: Edward L. Bernays, to help us understand how power is wielded, the seminal paper on the Israel Lobby by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, and similar studies and observations by academic James Petras, and activist Jeffrey Blankfort.
First off, everyone knows that Chomsky is, in many ways, my intellectual godfather. But Chomsky is completely wrong on this issue, just as he is on 9-11. Many lite-Zionists seek to deflect attention away from Israel and Jews, and towards some abstract faceless conception of US State power.
I have written a lot about understanding power lately, but more as subsidiary to other issues, like understanding Obama. In reality, the topic deserves its own extended post and comments thread to fully flesh out my concepts. However, in the interests of time and space, let me be as brief as possible.
I do believe in the primacy of structural analysis in understanding the actions of Power. But Chomsky concentrates too much on executive power, at the expense of other types of power: Congressional, Judicial, and, especially, organizational.
It was Edward L. Bernays, nephew of Sigmund Freud, in his groundbreaking 1928 book, “Propaganda” who first develops the theory by which opinions are formed among people and power is wielded. It is as incumbent for anyone who struggles for any cause whatsoever to read this book, as it is incumbent upon one who seeks to understand Christianity to read the Bible. Here are some brief excerpts:
It is the purpose of this book to explain the structure of the mechanism which controls the public mind, and to tell how it is manipulated by the special pleader who seeks to create public acceptance for a particular idea or commodity.
THE conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.
We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society...
It is not usually realized how necessary these invisible governors are to the orderly functioning of our group life. In theory, every citizen may vote for whom he pleases. Our Constitution does not envisage political parties as part of the mechanism of government, and its framers seem not to have pictured to themselves the existence in our national politics of anything like the modern political machine. But the American voters soon found that without organization and direction their individual votes, cast, perhaps, for dozens or hundreds of candidates, would produce nothing but confusion. Invisible government, in the shape of rudimentary political parties, arose almost overnight. Ever since then we have agreed, for the sake of simplicity and practicality, that party machines should narrow down the field of choice to two candidates, or at most three or four.
In theory, every citizen makes up his mind on public questions and matters of private conduct. In practice, if all men had to study for themselves the abstruse economic, political, and ethical data involved in every question, they would find it impossible to come to a conclusion about anything. We have voluntarily agreed to let an invisible government sift the data and high-spot the outstanding issues so that our field of choice shall be narrowed to practical proportions. From our leaders and the media they use to reach the public, we accept the evidence and the demarcation of issues bearing upon public questions; from some ethical teacher, be it a minister, a favorite essayist, or merely prevailing opinion, we accept a standardized code of social conduct to which we conform most of the time...
As civilization has become more complex, and as the need for invisible government has been increasingly demonstrated, the technical means have been invented and developed by which opinion may be regimented...
When the Constitution was adopted, the unit of organization was the village community, which produced the greater part of its own necessary commodities and generated its group ideas and opinions by personal contact and discussion directly among its citizens. But to-day, because ideas can be instantaneously transmitted to any distance and to any number of people, this geographical integration has been supplemented by many other kinds of grouping, so that persons having the same ideas and interests may be associated and regimented for common action even though they live thousands of miles apart.
It is extremely difficult to realize how many and diverse are these cleavages in our society. They may be social, political, economic, racial, religious or eth- ical, with hundreds of subdivisions of each. In the World Almanac, for example, the following groups are listed under the A's:...
Present-day politics places emphasis on personality. An entire party, a platform, an international policy is sold to the public, or is not sold, on the basis of the intangible element of personality. A charming candidate is the alchemist's secret that can transmute a prosaic platform into the gold of votes.
The public is not made up merely of Democrats and Republicans. People to-day are largely uninterested in politics and their interest in the issues of the campaign must be secured by coordinating it with their personal interests. The public is made up of interlocking groups —economic, social, religious, educational, cultural, racial, collegiate, local, sports, and hundreds of others.
When President Coolidge invited actors for breakfast, he did so because he realized not only that actors were a group, but that audiences, the large group of people who like amusements, who like people who amuse them, and who like people who can be amused, ought to be aligned with him...
The political campaign having defined its broad objects and its basic plans, having defined the group appeal which it must use, must carefully allocate to each of the media at hand the work which it can do with maximum efficiency.
The media through which a political campaign may be brought home to the public are numerous and fairly well defined. Events and activities must be created in order to put ideas into circulation, in these channels, which are as varied as the means of human communication. Every object which presents pictures or words that the public can see, everything that presents intelligible sounds, can be utilized in one way or another.
At present, the political campaigner uses for the greatest part the radio, the press, the banquet hall, the mass meeting, the lecture platform, and the stump generally as a means for furthering his ideas. But this is only a small part of what may be done. Actually there are infinitely more varied events that can be created to dramatize the campaign, and to make people talk of it. Exhibitions, contests, institutes of politics, the cooperation of educational institutions, the dramatic cooperation of groups which hitherto have not been drawn into active politics, and many others may be made the vehicle for the presentation of ideas to the public.
But whatever is done must be synchronized accurately with all other forms of appeal to the public. News reaches the public through the printed word— books, magazines, letters, posters, circulars and banners, newspapers; through pictures—photographs and motion pictures; through the ear—lectures, speeches, band music, radio, campaign songs. All these must be employed by the political party if it is to succeed. One method of appeal is merely one method of appeal and in this age wherein a thousand movements and ideas are competing for public attention, one dare not put all one's eggs into one basket.
In March of 2006, the intellectual world was set aflame by the London Review of Books publishing an edited, but still quite substantial version of the paper by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, “The Israel Lobby.” Here are some excerpts:
So if neither strategic nor moral arguments can account for America’s support for Israel, how are we to explain it?
The explanation is the unmatched power of the Israel Lobby. We use ‘the Lobby’ as shorthand for the loose coalition of individuals and organisations who actively work to steer US foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction. This is not meant to suggest that ‘the Lobby’ is a unified movement with a central leadership, or that individuals within it do not disagree on certain issues. Not all Jewish Americans are part of the Lobby, because Israel is not a salient issue for many of them. In a 2004 survey, for example, roughly 36 per cent of American Jews said they were either ‘not very’ or ‘not at all’ emotionally attached to Israel.
Jewish Americans also differ on specific Israeli policies. Many of the key organisations in the Lobby, such as the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organisations, are run by hardliners who generally support the Likud Party’s expansionist policies, including its hostility to the Oslo peace process. The bulk of US Jewry, meanwhile, is more inclined to make concessions to the Palestinians, and a few groups – such as Jewish Voice for Peace – strongly advocate such steps. Despite these differences, moderates and hardliners both favour giving steadfast support to Israel.
They then go on to methodically detail just who those groups are and how they wield power.
Not surprisingly, American Jewish leaders often consult Israeli officials, to make sure that their actions advance Israeli goals. As one activist from a major Jewish organisation wrote, ‘it is routine for us to say: “This is our policy on a certain issue, but we must check what the Israelis think.” We as a community do it all the time.’ There is a strong prejudice against criticising Israeli policy, and putting pressure on Israel is considered out of order. Edgar Bronfman Sr, the president of the World Jewish Congress, was accused of ‘perfidy’ when he wrote a letter to President Bush in mid-2003 urging him to persuade Israel to curb construction of its controversial ‘security fence’. His critics said that ‘it would be obscene at any time for the president of the World Jewish Congress to lobby the president of the United States to resist policies being promoted by the government of Israel.’
Similarly, when the president of the Israel Policy Forum, Seymour Reich, advised Condoleezza Rice in November 2005 to ask Israel to reopen a critical border crossing in the Gaza Strip, his action was denounced as ‘irresponsible’: ‘There is,’ his critics said, ‘absolutely no room in the Jewish mainstream for actively canvassing against the security-related policies . . . of Israel.’ Recoiling from these attacks, Reich announced that ‘the word “pressure” is not in my vocabulary when it comes to Israel.’
Jewish Americans have set up an impressive array of organisations to influence American foreign policy, of which AIPAC is the most powerful and best known. In 1997, Fortune magazine asked members of Congress and their staffs to list the most powerful lobbies in Washington. AIPAC was ranked second behind the American Association of Retired People, but ahead of the AFL-CIO and the National Rifle Association. A National Journal study in March 2005 reached a similar conclusion, placing AIPAC in second place (tied with AARP) in the Washington ‘muscle rankings’.
The Lobby also includes prominent Christian evangelicals like Gary Bauer, Jerry Falwell, Ralph Reed and Pat Robertson, as well as Dick Armey and Tom DeLay, former majority leaders in the House of Representatives, all of whom believe Israel’s rebirth is the fulfilment of biblical prophecy and support its expansionist agenda; to do otherwise, they believe, would be contrary to God’s will. Neo-conservative gentiles such as John Bolton; Robert Bartley, the former Wall Street Journal editor; William Bennett, the former secretary of education; Jeane Kirkpatrick, the former UN ambassador; and the influential columnist George Will are also steadfast supporters.
The US form of government offers activists many ways of influencing the policy process. Interest groups can lobby elected representatives and members of the executive branch, make campaign contributions, vote in elections, try to mould public opinion etc. They enjoy a disproportionate amount of influence when they are committed to an issue to which the bulk of the population is indifferent. Policymakers will tend to accommodate those who care about the issue, even if their numbers are small, confident that the rest of the population will not penalise them for doing so....
The Lobby pursues two broad strategies. First, it wields its significant influence in Washington, pressuring both Congress and the executive branch. Whatever an individual lawmaker or policymaker’s own views may be, the Lobby tries to make supporting Israel the ‘smart’ choice. Second, it strives to ensure that public discourse portrays Israel in a positive light, by repeating myths about its founding and by promoting its point of view in policy debates. The goal is to prevent critical comments from getting a fair hearing in the political arena. Controlling the debate is essential to guaranteeing US support, because a candid discussion of US-Israeli relations might lead Americans to favour a different policy.
A key pillar of the Lobby’s effectiveness is its influence in Congress, where Israel is virtually immune from criticism. This in itself is remarkable, because Congress rarely shies away from contentious issues. Where Israel is concerned, however, potential critics fall silent. One reason is that some key members are Christian Zionists like Dick Armey, who said in September 2002: ‘My No. 1 priority in foreign policy is to protect Israel.’ One might think that the No. 1 priority for any congressman would be to protect America. There are also Jewish senators and congressmen who work to ensure that US foreign policy supports Israel’s interests.
Another source of the Lobby’s power is its use of pro-Israel congressional staffers. As Morris Amitay, a former head of AIPAC, once admitted, ‘there are a lot of guys at the working level up here’ – on Capitol Hill – ‘who happen to be Jewish, who are willing . . . to look at certain issues in terms of their Jewishness . . . These are all guys who are in a position to make the decision in these areas for those senators . . . You can get an awful lot done just at the staff level.’
AIPAC itself, however, forms the core of the Lobby’s influence in Congress. Its success is due to its ability to reward legislators and congressional candidates who support its agenda, and to punish those who challenge it. Money is critical to US elections (as the scandal over the lobbyist Jack Abramoff’s shady dealings reminds us), and AIPAC makes sure that its friends get strong financial support from the many pro-Israel political action committees. Anyone who is seen as hostile to Israel can be sure that AIPAC will direct campaign contributions to his or her political opponents. AIPAC also organises letter-writing campaigns and encourages newspaper editors to endorse pro-Israel candidates.
There is no doubt about the efficacy of these tactics. Here is one example: in the 1984 elections, AIPAC helped defeat Senator Charles Percy from Illinois, who, according to a prominent Lobby figure, had ‘displayed insensitivity and even hostility to our concerns’. Thomas Dine, the head of AIPAC at the time, explained what happened: ‘All the Jews in America, from coast to coast, gathered to oust Percy. And the American politicians – those who hold public positions now, and those who aspire – got the message.’
AIPAC’s influence on Capitol Hill goes even further. According to Douglas Bloomfield, a former AIPAC staff member, ‘it is common for members of Congress and their staffs to turn to AIPAC first when they need information, before calling the Library of Congress, the Congressional Research Service, committee staff or administration experts.’ More important, he notes that AIPAC is ‘often called on to draft speeches, work on legislation, advise on tactics, perform research, collect co-sponsors and marshal votes’.
The bottom line is that AIPAC, a de facto agent for a foreign government, has a stranglehold on Congress, with the result that US policy towards Israel is not debated there, even though that policy has important consequences for the entire world. In other words, one of the three main branches of the government is firmly committed to supporting Israel. As one former Democratic senator, Ernest Hollings, noted on leaving office, ‘you can’t have an Israeli policy other than what AIPAC gives you around here.’ Or as Ariel Sharon once told an American audience, ‘when people ask me how they can help Israel, I tell them: “Help AIPAC.”’
Thanks in part to the influence Jewish voters have on presidential elections, the Lobby also has significant leverage over the executive branch. Although they make up fewer than 3 per cent of the population, they make large campaign donations to candidates from both parties. The Washington Post once estimated that Democratic presidential candidates ‘depend on Jewish supporters to supply as much as 60 per cent of the money’. And because Jewish voters have high turn-out rates and are concentrated in key states like California, Florida, Illinois, New York and Pennsylvania, presidential candidates go to great lengths not to antagonise them.
Key organisations in the Lobby make it their business to ensure that critics of Israel do not get important foreign policy jobs. Jimmy Carter wanted to make George Ball his first secretary of state, but knew that Ball was seen as critical of Israel and that the Lobby would oppose the appointment. In this way any aspiring policymaker is encouraged to become an overt supporter of Israel, which is why public critics of Israeli policy have become an endangered species in the foreign policy establishment.
When Howard Dean called for the United States to take a more ‘even-handed role’ in the Arab-Israeli conflict, Senator Joseph Lieberman accused him of selling Israel down the river and said his statement was ‘irresponsible’. Virtually all the top Democrats in the House signed a letter criticising Dean’s remarks, and the Chicago Jewish Star reported that ‘anonymous attackers . . . are clogging the email inboxes of Jewish leaders around the country, warning – without much evidence – that Dean would somehow be bad for Israel.’
This worry was absurd; Dean is in fact quite hawkish on Israel: his campaign co-chair was a former AIPAC president, and Dean said his own views on the Middle East more closely reflected those of AIPAC than those of the more moderate Americans for Peace Now. He had merely suggested that to ‘bring the sides together’, Washington should act as an honest broker. This is hardly a radical idea, but the Lobby doesn’t tolerate even-handedness.
During the Clinton administration, Middle Eastern policy was largely shaped by officials with close ties to Israel or to prominent pro-Israel organisations; among them, Martin Indyk, the former deputy director of research at AIPAC and co-founder of the pro-Israel Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP); Dennis Ross, who joined WINEP after leaving government in 2001; and Aaron Miller, who has lived in Israel and often visits the country. These men were among Clinton’s closest advisers at the Camp David summit in July 2000. Although all three supported the Oslo peace process and favoured the creation of a Palestinian state, they did so only within the limits of what would be acceptable to Israel. The American delegation took its cues from Ehud Barak, co-ordinated its negotiating positions with Israel in advance, and did not offer independent proposals. Not surprisingly, Palestinian negotiators complained that they were ‘negotiating with two Israeli teams – one displaying an Israeli flag, and one an American flag’.
The situation is even more pronounced in the Bush administration, whose ranks have included such fervent advocates of the Israeli cause as Elliot Abrams, John Bolton, Douglas Feith, I. Lewis (‘Scooter’) Libby, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and David Wurmser. As we shall see, these officials have consistently pushed for policies favoured by Israel and backed by organisations in the Lobby.
The Lobby doesn’t want an open debate, of course, because that might lead Americans to question the level of support they provide. Accordingly, pro-Israel organisations work hard to influence the institutions that do most to shape popular opinion.
The Lobby’s perspective prevails in the mainstream media: the debate among Middle East pundits, the journalist Eric Alterman writes, is ‘dominated by people who cannot imagine criticising Israel’. He lists 61 ‘columnists and commentators who can be counted on to support Israel reflexively and without qualification’. Conversely, he found just five pundits who consistently criticise Israeli actions or endorse Arab positions. Newspapers occasionally publish guest op-eds challenging Israeli policy, but the balance of opinion clearly favours the other side. It is hard to imagine any mainstream media outlet in the United States publishing a piece like this one.
‘Shamir, Sharon, Bibi – whatever those guys want is pretty much fine by me,’ Robert Bartley once remarked. Not surprisingly, his newspaper, the Wall Street Journal, along with other prominent papers like the Chicago Sun-Times and the Washington Times, regularly runs editorials that strongly support Israel. Magazines like Commentary, the New Republic and the Weekly Standard defend Israel at every turn.
Editorial bias is also found in papers like the New York Times, which occasionally criticises Israeli policies and sometimes concedes that the Palestinians have legitimate grievances, but is not even-handed. In his memoirs the paper’s former executive editor Max Frankel acknowledges the impact his own attitude had on his editorial decisions: ‘I was much more deeply devoted to Israel than I dared to assert . . . Fortified by my knowledge of Israel and my friendships there, I myself wrote most of our Middle East commentaries. As more Arab than Jewish readers recognised, I wrote them from a pro-Israel perspective.’
News reports are more even-handed, in part because reporters strive to be objective, but also because it is difficult to cover events in the Occupied Territories without acknowledging Israel’s actions on the ground. To discourage unfavourable reporting, the Lobby organises letter-writing campaigns, demonstrations and boycotts of news outlets whose content it considers anti-Israel. One CNN executive has said that he sometimes gets 6000 email messages in a single day complaining about a story. In May 2003, the pro-Israel Committee for Accurate Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) organised demonstrations outside National Public Radio stations in 33 cities; it also tried to persuade contributors to withhold support from NPR until its Middle East coverage becomes more sympathetic to Israel. Boston’s NPR station, WBUR, reportedly lost more than $1 million in contributions as a result of these efforts. Further pressure on NPR has come from Israel’s friends in Congress, who have asked for an internal audit of its Middle East coverage as well as more oversight.
The Israeli side also dominates the think tanks which play an important role in shaping public debate as well as actual policy. The Lobby created its own think tank in 1985, when Martin Indyk helped to found WINEP. Although WINEP plays down its links to Israel, claiming instead to provide a ‘balanced and realistic’ perspective on Middle East issues, it is funded and run by individuals deeply committed to advancing Israel’s agenda.
The Lobby’s influence extends well beyond WINEP, however. Over the past 25 years, pro-Israel forces have established a commanding presence at the American Enterprise Institute, the Brookings Institution, the Center for Security Policy, the Foreign Policy Research Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Hudson Institute, the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA). These think tanks employ few, if any, critics of US support for Israel.
Take the Brookings Institution. For many years, its senior expert on the Middle East was William Quandt, a former NSC official with a well-deserved reputation for even-handedness. Today, Brookings’s coverage is conducted through the Saban Center for Middle East Studies, which is financed by Haim Saban, an Israeli-American businessman and ardent Zionist. The centre’s director is the ubiquitous Martin Indyk. What was once a non-partisan policy institute is now part of the pro-Israel chorus.
Where the Lobby has had the most difficulty is in stifling debate on university campuses. In the 1990s, when the Oslo peace process was underway, there was only mild criticism of Israel, but it grew stronger with Oslo’s collapse and Sharon’s access to power, becoming quite vociferous when the IDF reoccupied the West Bank in spring 2002 and employed massive force to subdue the second intifada.
The Lobby moved immediately to ‘take back the campuses’. New groups sprang up, like the Caravan for Democracy, which brought Israeli speakers to US colleges. Established groups like the Jewish Council for Public Affairs and Hillel joined in, and a new group, the Israel on Campus Coalition, was formed to co-ordinate the many bodies that now sought to put Israel’s case. Finally, AIPAC more than tripled its spending on programmes to monitor university activities and to train young advocates, in order to ‘vastly expand the number of students involved on campus . . . in the national pro-Israel effort’.
The Lobby also monitors what professors write and teach. In September 2002, Martin Kramer and Daniel Pipes, two passionately pro-Israel neo-conservatives, established a website (Campus Watch) that posted dossiers on suspect academics and encouraged students to report remarks or behaviour that might be considered hostile to Israel. This transparent attempt to blacklist and intimidate scholars provoked a harsh reaction and Pipes and Kramer later removed the dossiers, but the website still invites students to report ‘anti-Israel’ activity.
Groups within the Lobby put pressure on particular academics and universities. Columbia has been a frequent target, no doubt because of the presence of the late Edward Said on its faculty. ‘One can be sure that any public statement in support of the Palestinian people by the pre-eminent literary critic Edward Said will elicit hundreds of emails, letters and journalistic accounts that call on us to denounce Said and to either sanction or fire him,’ Jonathan Cole, its former provost, reported. When Columbia recruited the historian Rashid Khalidi from Chicago, the same thing happened. It was a problem Princeton also faced a few years later when it considered wooing Khalidi away from Columbia.
A classic illustration of the effort to police academia occurred towards the end of 2004, when the David Project produced a film alleging that faculty members of Columbia’s Middle East Studies programme were anti-semitic and were intimidating Jewish students who stood up for Israel. Columbia was hauled over the coals, but a faculty committee which was assigned to investigate the charges found no evidence of anti-semitism and the only incident possibly worth noting was that one professor had ‘responded heatedly’ to a student’s question. The committee also discovered that the academics in question had themselves been the target of an overt campaign of intimidation.
Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of all this is the efforts Jewish groups have made to push Congress into establishing mechanisms to monitor what professors say. If they manage to get this passed, universities judged to have an anti-Israel bias would be denied federal funding. Their efforts have not yet succeeded, but they are an indication of the importance placed on controlling debate.
A number of Jewish philanthropists have recently established Israel Studies programmes (in addition to the roughly 130 Jewish Studies programmes already in existence) so as to increase the number of Israel-friendly scholars on campus. In May 2003, NYU announced the establishment of the Taub Center for Israel Studies; similar programmes have been set up at Berkeley, Brandeis and Emory. Academic administrators emphasise their pedagogical value, but the truth is that they are intended in large part to promote Israel’s image. Fred Laffer, the head of the Taub Foundation, makes it clear that his foundation funded the NYU centre to help counter the ‘Arabic [sic] point of view’ that he thinks is prevalent in NYU’s Middle East programmes.
No discussion of the Lobby would be complete without an examination of one of its most powerful weapons: the charge of anti-semitism. Anyone who criticises Israel’s actions or argues that pro-Israel groups have significant influence over US Middle Eastern policy – an influence AIPAC celebrates – stands a good chance of being labelled an anti-semite. Indeed, anyone who merely claims that there is an Israel Lobby runs the risk of being charged with anti-semitism, even though the Israeli media refer to America’s ‘Jewish Lobby’. In other words, the Lobby first boasts of its influence and then attacks anyone who calls attention to it. It’s a very effective tactic: anti-semitism is something no one wants to be accused of.
Europeans have been more willing than Americans to criticise Israeli policy, which some people attribute to a resurgence of anti-semitism in Europe. We are ‘getting to a point’, the US ambassador to the EU said in early 2004, ‘where it is as bad as it was in the 1930s’. Measuring anti-semitism is a complicated matter, but the weight of evidence points in the opposite direction. In the spring of 2004, when accusations of European anti-semitism filled the air in America, separate surveys of European public opinion conducted by the US-based Anti-Defamation League and the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that it was in fact declining...
The story begins in late September 2001, when Bush began urging Sharon to show restraint in the Occupied Territories. He also pressed him to allow Israel’s foreign minister, Shimon Peres, to meet with Yasser Arafat, even though he (Bush) was highly critical of Arafat’s leadership. Bush even said publicly that he supported the creation of a Palestinian state. Alarmed, Sharon accused him of trying ‘to appease the Arabs at our expense’, warning that Israel ‘will not be Czechoslovakia’.
Bush was reportedly furious at being compared to Chamberlain, and the White House press secretary called Sharon’s remarks ‘unacceptable’. Sharon offered a pro forma apology, but quickly joined forces with the Lobby to persuade the administration and the American people that the United States and Israel faced a common threat from terrorism. Israeli officials and Lobby representatives insisted that there was no real difference between Arafat and Osama bin Laden: the United States and Israel, they said, should isolate the Palestinians’ elected leader and have nothing to do with him.
The Lobby also went to work in Congress. On 16 November, 89 senators sent Bush a letter praising him for refusing to meet with Arafat, but also demanding that the US not restrain Israel from retaliating against the Palestinians; the administration, they wrote, must state publicly that it stood behind Israel. According to the New York Times, the letter ‘stemmed’ from a meeting two weeks before between ‘leaders of the American Jewish community and key senators’, adding that AIPAC was ‘particularly active in providing advice on the letter’.
By late November, relations between Tel Aviv and Washington had improved considerably. This was thanks in part to the Lobby’s efforts, but also to America’s initial victory in Afghanistan, which reduced the perceived need for Arab support in dealing with al-Qaida. Sharon visited the White House in early December and had a friendly meeting with Bush.
In April 2002 trouble erupted again, after the IDF launched Operation Defensive Shield and resumed control of virtually all the major Palestinian areas on the West Bank. Bush knew that Israel’s actions would damage America’s image in the Islamic world and undermine the war on terrorism, so he demanded that Sharon ‘halt the incursions and begin withdrawal’. He underscored this message two days later, saying he wanted Israel to ‘withdraw without delay’. On 7 April, Condoleezza Rice, then Bush’s national security adviser, told reporters: ‘“Without delay” means without delay. It means now.’ That same day Colin Powell set out for the Middle East to persuade all sides to stop fighting and start negotiating.
Israel and the Lobby swung into action. Pro-Israel officials in the vice-president’s office and the Pentagon, as well as neo-conservative pundits like Robert Kagan and William Kristol, put the heat on Powell. They even accused him of having ‘virtually obliterated the distinction between terrorists and those fighting terrorists’. Bush himself was being pressed by Jewish leaders and Christian evangelicals. Tom DeLay and Dick Armey were especially outspoken about the need to support Israel, and DeLay and the Senate minority leader, Trent Lott, visited the White House and warned Bush to back off.
The first sign that Bush was caving in came on 11 April – a week after he told Sharon to withdraw his forces – when the White House press secretary said that the president believed Sharon was ‘a man of peace’. Bush repeated this statement publicly on Powell’s return from his abortive mission, and told reporters that Sharon had responded satisfactorily to his call for a full and immediate withdrawal. Sharon had done no such thing, but Bush was no longer willing to make an issue of it.
Meanwhile, Congress was also moving to back Sharon. On 2 May, it overrode the administration’s objections and passed two resolutions reaffirming support for Israel. (The Senate vote was 94 to 2; the House of Representatives version passed 352 to 21.) Both resolutions held that the United States ‘stands in solidarity with Israel’ and that the two countries were, to quote the House resolution, ‘now engaged in a common struggle against terrorism’. The House version also condemned ‘the ongoing support and co-ordination of terror by Yasser Arafat’, who was portrayed as a central part of the terrorism problem. Both resolutions were drawn up with the help of the Lobby. A few days later, a bipartisan congressional delegation on a fact-finding mission to Israel stated that Sharon should resist US pressure to negotiate with Arafat. On 9 May, a House appropriations subcommittee met to consider giving Israel an extra $200 million to fight terrorism. Powell opposed the package, but the Lobby backed it and Powell lost.
In short, Sharon and the Lobby took on the president of the United States and triumphed. Hemi Shalev, a journalist on the Israeli newspaper Ma’ariv, reported that Sharon’s aides ‘could not hide their satisfaction in view of Powell’s failure. Sharon saw the whites of President Bush’s eyes, they bragged, and the president blinked first.’ But it was Israel’s champions in the United States, not Sharon or Israel, that played the key role in defeating Bush.
But Mearsheimer and Walt's work, as powerful as it is, was criticized by some for “pulling their punches,” by describing the Lobby as just another lobby, if a more powerful than most. Additionally, their research was based upon the prior work of more radical intellectuals who have been largely excised from corporate coverage because of their critical views of the lobby -- among them Jeffery Blankfort and James Petras.
In addition to describing the structure and workings of the lobby in detail, they critically examine boycotts and divestment strategies, concluding that they are the only workable first option towards disempowering the lobby, and halting Israel's genocidal policies.
Petras has written two books on what he calls the “Zionist Power Configuration,” and produces an annual scorecard of its status and accomplishments. Here is some of what he had to say for 2008:
The strategy of the Jewish state is the complete Zionization of Palestine, the takeover of land, water, offshore gas (estimated to be worth $4 billion dollars) and other economic resources and the total dispossession of the Palestinian people... Recently Israel, through the ZPC in the US, has engaged in a comprehensive, intense and highly charged political, diplomatic, economic and military campaign to isolate and ultimately destroy the Islamic Republic of Iran as a political counterweight to its ambitions in the Middle East (“Israel: Iran building Nuclear Arms”, Aljazeera February 12, 2008). The principal propaganda tool of the ZPC and its Israeli patrons is to claim Iran represents a ‘military threat’ to Israel, Iraq, the Gulf oil producers and the US. This outlandish charge is repeatedly made by ZPC ideologues. According to the 2008 edition of the International Institute of Strategic Studies Military Balance, Iran’s total defense spending for 2006 was nearly 55% less than Israel despite having ten times the population of the Jewish state and facing hundreds of US- supported terrorist incursions across its borders. Per capita, Israeli military expenditures were 17 times more than Iran ($1,737 per Israeli – not counting US direct military assistance – versus $110 for each Iranian citizen). It is widely acknowledged that Israel has over 200 nuclear weapons capable of striking Iranian population centers while Iran has none. Israel receives over $3 billion US dollars a year in direct US military aid, including the most advanced offensive military technology – while Iran receives no foreign military aid and has little defensive technology. According to US Budgetary Hearings, from 2009 to 2018 Israel will receive a $30 billion dollar package of direct foreign military financing from the US, while Iran will receive nothing from any foreign state...
The second task of the ZPC in pursuit of Israel’s agenda is to ensure no major political candidate debates or questions Israeli genocidal policies toward the Palestinians and its military ambitions in the Middle East. In the US Presidential election of 2008, the ZPC’s role is to ensure that all major candidates endorse, support and promote the Israeli political agenda, despite its genocidal policies (see Gideon Levy, “The Lights have been turned off”, Haaretz February 4, 2008) and repudiation of international law. The ZPC has imposed on all Presidential candidates Israel’s bellicose posture toward Iran, and its explicit policy of liquidating Hamas political leaders. According to Israeli Minister of Housing and construction, Zeev Boim, “all members of Hamas political leadership are involved in terrorist acts against Israel…so they must be liquidated.” (Israeli Army Radio- Galei Tzahal, February 9, 2008 cited in Haaretz).
The third task of the ZPC is to use their strategic positions in the White House, Treasury, Pentagon and State Department to undermine Iran’s economy, politically isolate it and provoke internal and external confrontations...
The ZPC is made up of all the major Jewish organizations, pro-Israel plutocrats, media barons and government officials who are Israel Firsters. In the face of the unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe imposed by Israel’s food and energy blockade of Gaza, and its thorough repudiation of the terms of the Annapolis peace negotiation the Zionist power configuration had its work cut out for it in selling the Israeli genocidal agenda as a defensive, justifiable policy of a peace-loving democracy. The second task of the ZPC was to overcome the 2007 US National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran which refuted Israeli and White House propaganda painting Iran as a nuclear threat. The Israeli state propaganda machine went on an all out assault of the NIE, claiming to have superior knowledge of hidden Iranian research programs – without providing a shred of reliable evidence. Once the Israeli state defined its position to the NIE, the entire leadership of the Conference of the Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations (CPMAJO), all the major Zionist- controlled propaganda centers (‘think tanks’) and an army of Israel-First academics (self-styled ‘intelligence experts’) and ideologues deluged the print and electronic mass media with attacks on the NIE report, echoing and citing the rhetoric and claims of the Israeli state. The White House and Congress (with few exceptions) followed the line of the ZPC, downplaying and distorting the NIE, escalating their bellicose rhetoric and pressure for sanctions on Iran in the UN Security Council and among the EU and NATO countries. The success of the ZPC in sustaining US confrontational policies against Iran, and forcefully selling the Israeli policy to the US political elite even against the findings and report of all the US intelligence agencies is a measure of the decisive power of the ZPC over US Middle East policy. Never in the entire history of the US has a small and economically insignificant foreign power wielded so much influence over Washington in a strategic region through its overseas representatives over and against the advice of America’s entire intelligence establishment.
The key to Zionist power is its ability to leverage and multiply its influence through non-Zionist congressional, media, pension fund managers, state and municipal officials and a host of trade union, academic and other notables and civic organizations. Strategically placed Zionists focused on the single issue of Israel, bring to bear the economic and organizational resources of their 1 million affiliates, supporters and media publicists on targeting policy makers in all relevant fields. The targeted individuals and organizations representing many millions of American Gentiles and non-Zionist Jews usually capitulate to the pressure or payoffs or are persuaded to follow the lead of the aggressive focused Zionist zealots. The propaganda value of having non-Zionists with a mass organizational base carrying out Israeli policies is immense. Leveraging the ‘others’ allows the pro-Israel liberal ideologues to obfuscate, downplay and dilute the real power of Israel and the ZPC in the making of US Middle East policy. As a consequence, we find what I call ‘mish-mash’ analyses which argue that “The Zionist pro-Israel lobby (sic) is only one of many groups and interests influencing US Middle East policy”. In other words, Zionist leveraged politicians are given a degree of autonomy and attributed a set of interests, which effectively hides Zionist initiatives, pressures and tactical leverage.
In 2008 Zionist direct and leveraged power is manifested in several decisively important areas of US politics, especially in foreign policy.
The ZPC and the Presidential Elections
All of the major presidential candidates have slavishly followed the most extreme pro-Israel positions promoted by the Presidents of the Major American Jewish Organizations. John McCain, the Republican front-runner declares his unconditional support for Israel’s territorial expansion, settlements and genocidal policy toward Gaza. According to the Jewish weekly, The Forward (February 13, 2008), “On Israel,…McCain has been uncharacteristically conventional. He offers unqualified support, expressed in years of public statements…” The same article emphasizes how in 2006 McCain capitulated to Zionist pressure in a matter of days by recanting his position on Israel returning to its 1967 borders: “I’ve never held the position that Israeli should return to the 1967 lines and that is not my position today.” On February 7, 2008 McCain defined US-Iranian policy on strictly Zionist terms: “Those (Democratic) senators won’t recognize and seriously address the threat posed by an Iran with nuclear ambitions to our ally Israel in the region.” (McCain’s speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference, February 7, 2008, quoted in Haaretz February 10, 2008). In 2007, McCain happily echoed Israeli demands to bomb Iran with the vulgar and sinister new refrain to an old Beach Boys rock song… “Bomb, Bomb, Bomb…Bomb-bomb Iran”.
Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have supported every major position and demand of the ZPC: Both have pledged unconditional support for Israel; they have backed Israel’s genocidal policies against Gaza, the expansion of settlements and the total takeover of Jerusalem. Hillary Clinton urges recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital – contrary to the United Nations, the European Union and even the Bush Administration’s position. Zionist ideologues are among the top foreign policy and Middle East advisers of all three top contenders for their party’s presidential nomination. The public record reads Zionist decisive influence over the next US President’s Middle East policy. The only possible deviation is Obama’s statement that he is willing to negotiate with the Iranian government – a policy that the Bush regime, in part, already practices at a lesser official level via meetings in Iraq. For his minor discrepancy from the Zionist war rhetoric toward Iran, Obama was chastised by Malcolm Hoenlein, head of the CPMAJO (Haaretz January 18, 2008). To compensate for talking too much about ‘change’ which worries the paranoid Jewish leaders, like Hoenlein, Obama went out of his way to blame the civilians living in Gaza for the Israeli campaign to starve them into surrender and called on them to revolt against their democratically-elected Hamas government. The ZPC is the only major national political-social apparatus, which engages in a comprehensive, persistent and intensive campaign to direct US foreign policy into a full-scale (diplomatic, military and economic) confrontation with Iran.
Silencing Potential Critics of the ZPC
Almost every major centrist, leftist or progressive journal, weekly magazine, radio and web site has refused to discuss the singular influence of the ZPC over the Presidential candidates’ Middle East policy - a further indication of the reach and influence of the ZPC. The best indication that the ZPC is not ‘just another lobby’ as Mearsheimer and Walt claim, or a simply another bellicose neo-conservative current of opinion, is found in their slavish adherence to the Israeli state’s policies, even when they blatantly defy and repudiate the rightwing policies of President Bush. At Annapolis (November 2007) President Bush called on Israel to cease building new settlements in order to further peace negotiations. Exactly three months later Israel announced plans to build over 1,000 (1,250) new Jews-only homes in Palestinian East Jerusalem (BBC News, February 12, 2008). The Daily Alert propaganda sheet of the CPMAJO immediately endorsed the Israeli position and set in motion its major lobbyists, op-ed ideologues and media ‘experts’ to justify Israel’s crass repudiation of its agreement with President Bush.
Rather than confront this flagrant, highly public, unilateral and shameful Israeli repudiation of its agreement with the White House, President Bush , Secretary of State Condeleeza Rice and Defense Secretary Gates all played ‘Mickey the Dunce’. White House press secretary, Dana Perino, claimed she had not seen the report about Israel’s plans to build new apartments in East Jerusalem – though it was ‘news’ in all the mass electronic and print media. In fear of the ZPC, Perino responded as if the entire affair was simply a problem for the Palestinians: “But obviously, there is no doubt that an announcement of that sort (building 1,125 new Jews-only segregated apartments) would make the Palestinians concerned” (Santa Barbara News-Press February 12, 2008).
Zionist Power: Treasury Department
Within the government, the principal architect and key operative of the US worldwide campaign to strangle the Iranian economy is a top Treasury Department official, Stuart Levey, a zealous Zionist and key agent of the ZPC in the executive branch. Levey has successfully browbeat the reticent, persuaded the gullible and teamed up with co-thinkers who control state, municipal and private pension funds to withdraw investments from any enterprise which deals with Iran. Levey is a major architect of the Treasury’s economic sanctions policy, which Washington has promoted in the United Nations Security Council. Levey’s policies have succeeded in blocking Iranian private bank transactions. They have received the support of the White House and the National Security Council despite the NIE report, which found that Iran was not engaged in a nuclear weapons program. Mohamed El Baradei and the International Atomic Energy Agency have confirmed the position of the NIE (Associated Press, February 23, 2008). Unlike Levey, the NIE and the IAEA are agencies, which are not influenced by the Zionist power configuration.
Nevertheless, the Israeli demands (pushed by the ZPC) for further sanctions based on unfounded claims of continued nuclear arms programs trumps the NIE and IAEA intelligence findings. The White House, France, England and Germany demand new and harsher sanctions against Iran. Never in the history of Israeli influence over US Middle East policy has the pro-Israel power configuration so much influence as it has today: The US government (President to Congress to Presidential hopefuls) repudiate its own intelligence agencies in favor of the ‘intelligence’ claims of a foreign power. Never has the US Treasury Department been so influenced by Israel Firsters, like Stuart Levey, Daniel Glaser and their colleagues in putting the interests of Israel above and beyond the interests of the major US and European oil companies.
At every AIPAC meeting since 2004, in every publication of the Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations over the past 5 years, in each and every state and citywide conference of Jewish community councils, every effort has been made to promote US military action or economic sanctions against Iran. In fact, the ZPC escalated its campaign against Iran after the NIE was published and intensified their campaign in favor of Israel’s fabricated ‘intelligence claims’ (Daily Alert, November 2007 – February 2008). The dual power position of Israel Firsters in key policy positions and civil society defines their influence over US Middle East policy.
The International Dimension
The US ZPC has been immensely aided in securing its bellicose anti-Iranian agenda by the appointments of prominent Zionists to key foreign policy positions in England and France. David Milliband, the British Foreign Minister, has close family ties with Jewish settlers from Britain colonizing the occupied West Bank. During a visit to Israel, he spent several days with Israeli officials and an evening with his relatives, while totally ignoring the issue of the 1.4 million Palestinians in Gaza suffering from Israel’s genocidal blockade. Milliband has been a fierce defender of keeping the ‘military option on the table’, heightening economic sanctions against Iran and is an unconditional supporter of Israel’s brutal policy preventing the shipment of food and fuel from reaching the suffering people of the Gaza strip.
Bernard Kouchner, the French Foreign Minister is a lifelong zealous Zionist who, upon taking office, pronounced himself in favor of a military attack on Iran ‘if negotiations fail’. As the new Foreign Minister, Kouchner went to US occupied Iraq and praised the occupation and puppet ‘government’ despite the over 1 million civilian deaths and 4 million destitute refugees which has resulted from the invasion and occupation. Kouchner (appointed by French President Sarkozy – under pressure from the Zionists), like president Bush gave strong backing to any Israeli ‘military pre-emptive action’ (offensive military assault), though a strong negative reaction from the French public forced him to tone down his overt support of Israeli military actions.
With such powerful political allies and co-thinkers in the American, French and British governments and the controlling role of the ZPC over US policymakers in the United Nations, it comes as no surprise that Israel received no reprimand for its daily murders and abductions of civilians and Palestinian officials in Gaza and the West Bank. Zion power prevents the UN from even applying its own basic international principles to prosecute crimes against humanity, including torture and collective punishment. Since its founding in the late 19th century and its spread to the US, especially after WWII, organized Zionism has never been so influential in so many spheres of government and had so much control over US Middle East policy as it possesses today. Most major pro-Israel Jewish leaders in moments of candor have publicly acknowledged that they are at the pinnacle of influence, to the effect that ‘we have never had an administration as favorable to Israel as under President Bush.’ Certainly this is an understatement that speaks to an underlying truth : Never has the US engaged in a very costly Middle Eastern war to benefit a foreign power; never has the US deliberately prevented big oil companies from signing billion dollar oil contracts by imposing economic sanctions on Iran in order to weaken a regional opponent of Israel.
The Show Must Go On
Not only does the ZPC directly influence US policy against Palestine, Iraq and Iran, but it has extended its campaign against ‘third parties’, countries like China which have economic relations with Sudan (a Muslim nation with an independent foreign policy which supports Palestinian rights). To an overwhelming degree, the propaganda campaign behind the so-called “Darfur genocide campaign’ is the Israeli state and its political apparatus in the US, namely the ZPC. Most of the media celebrities, led by prominent Hollywood Zionist director Steven Spielberg, have engaged in an exercise of selective moral indignation – supporting Israel, while ignoring its starvation blockade of Gaza, supporting the US occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq while attacking China for its ‘immoral’ oil contracts with the Sudan. The CPMAJO has focused on the Darfur ‘genocide’ because by doing so it favors the brutal separatists in southern Sudan, armed and advised by Israel, as a means of depriving pro-Palestinian Sudan of a large oil rich region in the south of the country. The Darfur campaign deliberately and systematically excludes any mention of the Israeli Supreme Court’s approval of Israel’s food and fuel blockade and deliberate prevention of the movement of medical personnel in Gaza and the West Bank, its approval of Israel’s practice of torture (‘forceful interrogations’), armed assaults on the vital infrastructure and civilian population centers of Gaza.
Hollywood’s Darfur sideshow is a sham propaganda effort at selective humanitarian concern, which does not deviate a millimeter from the official line promoted by the Israeli state and publicized in the US by the Daily Alert, the principle bulletin of the ZPC....
From January to the middle of February 2008, Israeli had killed, wounded and arrested nearly a thousand Palestinians, mostly but not exclusively from Gaza. Over half of those killed, arrested and wounded were unarmed civilians, the rest include Hamas and PLO security officials, militia members and anti-colonial resistance fighters. Of the 700 primitive rockets and shells launched from Gaza, not a single Israeli Jew was killed and fewer than a dozen suffered serious bodily harm. Only a contract farm laborer from Ecuador died on the Israeli side from the rockets.
In a speech to Jewish-American leaders in mid-February, Prime Minister Olmert spelled out the gist of Israel’s totalitarian strategy. According to the BBC News (February 18, 2008) “Mr Olmert said, ‘Israel had a free hand to respond and attack anyone who has any kind of responsibility. This applied to everyone, first and foremost Hamas,” (my emphasis). The entire leadership of the major Jewish organizations, whole-heartedly approved the use of unrestrained and unlimited violence (a ‘free hand’) against the entire Palestinian population (‘any kind of responsibility’), which would include individuals who transport, feed, educate, shelter, vote for or interact with Hamas, their family members, friends, neighbors – 99% of the residents of Gaza. Giving priority to targeting ‘first and foremost Hamas’ includes several hundred thousand voters who elected Hamas in free and democratic elections.
The ZPC has succeeded in securing the near unanimous US Congressional support for Israel’s mass arrests and daily assaults on Gaza, even when a few mass media outlets published photos of Israeli colonial soldiers parading eighty arbitrarily arrested Palestinian civilians bound and blindfolded to notorious Israeli interrogation centers (BBC News February 18, 2008) for unlimited detention with no legal guarantees against physical and psychological torture.
The ZPC has swamped the US mass media with praise of Israel’s cross border assassinations, such as the international political murder of Hizbullah leader, Imad Mughniyeh in Damascus, Syria (Daily Alert February 15, 2008). Reproducing articles from the Israeli press (Jerusalem Post, Haaretz) and Zionist think tanks and weeklys (Washington Institute for Near East Policy, New York Jewish Week, YNET News, CAMERA, New York Sun, and Middle East Strategy at Harvard) the Daily Alert has provided legitimacy to international assassinations by official state-directed death squads thereby extending the violence and counter-violence throughout the world. This is a fact recognized by the US FBI and Israeli officials. Heads of the Israeli international secret police, the MOSSAD, openly acknowledge the role of Israeli assassinations in provoking terrorist reprisals by putting a world-wide alert to Jews to avoid Islamic and Arab countries as well as locations where “there is a high concentration of Israelis” (Prime Minister’s Office, reprinted in the Daily Alert February 15, 2008). The Israeli practice of staging international assassinations of opposition leaders in major cities will not only invite retaliation against Israelis and Jews but also endanger sites in the US and EU, for tolerating these acts of state-sponsored terror. In other words, Israeli terror invites terrorist counter attacks like September 11, 2001. Israel, by provoking a new round in the Palestinian ‘war through global terror’ and the US and EU by embracing an Israeli car bomb assassination in Damascus endanger Western lives everywhere. The Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, their publicists and op-ed ideologues in the mass media are opening the entire Western world to terrorist attacks. By supporting Israeli terror and increasing the chance of Muslim reprisals, the ZPC strengthens the repressive structure of a growing police state in the US. (The ‘professional’ killing by Israeli operatives of a major figure in Damascus, Syria raises the question of the role of Israeli operatives in the as-yet unsolved series of car bomb assassinations in Lebanon – given Israel’s desire to maintain a state of internal tension in that country.) The brilliant and precocious Ivy League academic apologists of each and every act of official Israeli state-sponsored international terror apparently dissociate these acts of assassination from likely reprisals in our country and the consequent further destruction of our remaining precarious democratic freedoms. Could it be that Zionist American intellectuals welcome more US police state agencies and laws in order to prosecute a rising number of Americans who are critical of Zionist influence over the American political process? They might do well to recall that police state structures and laws could be used against them in the future.
Here's a selection from Petras' latest article The Politics of An Israeli Extermination Campaign: Backers, Apologists and Arms Suppliers:
From the moment that the Israeli Government decided it would destroy the newly elected Hamas government and punish the democratic electorate of Gaza with starvation and murder, the entire Zionist Power Configuration (ZPC) in the US, including the PMAJO, pulled all stops in implementing the Israeli policy. The PMAJO encompasses the fifty-two Jewish organizations with the largest membership, with the greatest financial clout and the most influential backers. The most prominent lobbyist within the PMAJO is AIPAC, which has over 100,000 members and 150 full-time operatives in Washington actively pressuring the US Congress, the White House and all administrative agencies whose policies may relate to the interests of the State of Israel. However Israeli political extends far beyond its non-governmental agencies. Over two score legislators in the Congress and over a dozen senators are committed Zionists who automatically back Israel’s policies and push for US funding and armaments for its military machine. Top officials in key administrative positions, in Treasury, Commerce and the National Security Council, senior functionaries in the Pentagon and top advisers on Middle East affairs are also life-long, fanatically committed Zionists, who consistently and unreservedly back the policies of the State of Israel.
Equally important, the majority of the largest film, print and electronic media are owned or deeply influenced by Jewish-Zionist media moguls who are committed to slanting the ‘news’ in favor of Israel. The composition and influence of the ZPC is central to understanding three main characteristics of Israel’s power: (1) Israel can commit what leading United Nations and international human rights experts have defined as ‘crimes against humanity’ with total impunity; (2) Israel can secure an unlimited supply of the most technologically advanced and destructive weapons and use them without limit on a civilian population in violation of even US Congressional restrictions and (3) scores of almost unanimous United Nations condemnations of the construction of genocidal apartheid barriers against a native population, starvation embargoes and the current extermination campaign in Gaza are always vetoed by the US representative...
The ZPC played a major role in all stages of Israel’s extermination campaign against Gaza including a sustained propaganda effort. The ZPC orchestrated a massive successful campaign through the extensive network of American mass media, which it controls and influences. It fabricated an image of the Hamas administration in Gaza as a terrorist organization, which allegedly seized power through violence – totally denying its rise to power through internationally supervised, democratic elections and its defense of its electoral mandate against a US-Israeli backed PLO military takeover. The entire Zionist Jewish leadership backed Israel’s land grabs, its ghetto wall around Palestinians, the hundreds of road blocks, the Jewish settlers violently taking over Palestinian homes in the West Bank and East Jerusalem and the criminal, genocidal Israeli economic embargo on Gaza designed to systematically starve the Palestinians into submission. Throughout the two years of this Israeli extermination campaign, American Zionists played a major role in leading the servile US government at home and abroad in backing each totalitarian measure: The vast majority of local synagogues became bully-pulpits defending the starvation and degradation of 1.5 million Palestinian refugees in Gaza caged on all sides by deadly force...
The Zionist-controlled US print media, in particular the New York Times and the Washington Post, systematically fabricated an account that fit perfectly with Israel’s official line defending its massive assault on Gaza: Omitting any historical account ….
The Conference of President of the Major American Jewish Organizations, and the vast majority of Jewish communal groups and congregations, gave enthusiastic and unanimous support to Israel’s total war...
A close reading of the most important propaganda organ of the PMAJO, The Daily Alert (TDA), during the first 5 days of Israel’s assault, reveals the propaganda tack taken by the leadership of the pro-Israel power configuration. TDA systematically worked to achieve the following:
1.Exaggerate the threats to Israel by the Palestinian missiles from Gaza, citing 4 Israeli deaths, while omitting any mention of the 2,500 Palestinian dead and wounded and the total destruction of their economy and living conditions (without safe water, electricity, food, cooking fuel, medicine and heat in the winter).
2.Promote Israel’s military assault as ‘defensive’, directed at eliminating Hamas rocket attacks while omitting mention of Israel’s clearly stated purpose of destroying all civil organizations, social welfare agencies, educational facilities, medical clinics and public security institutions connected in any way with the elected Hamas government and any auxiliary agencies.
3.Cite select statement from Israel’s allies and clients (Washington, the US media, Germany and the UK) blaming Hamas for the conflict without mentioning the vast majority of countries in the United Nations General Assembly condemning Israel’s brutality.
4.Reproduce Israeli slanders against any and all international human rights leaders and organizations that condemn the Jewish state’s policy of genocide against the native Palestinians. In this regard, TDA is the foremost ‘genocide denier’ in the United States and, perhaps outside of Israel, in the world.
5.Repeatedly cite Israeli political and military leaders’ claims of acting ‘with restraint’, ‘safeguarding civilians’, and ‘targeting military objectives’, even in the face of reports and images of mass civilian destruction and loss of life documented in the vast majority of (non-US) Western media.
6.Defend every Israeli bombing mission, every day, every hour, of every building, every home, and every economic, religious and educational institution in Gaza as ‘defensive’ or a ‘reprisal’, all the while quoting some of the most notorious, unconditional, perennial apologists of Israeli violence as if they were unbiased intellectuals, including Benny ‘Nuke Tehran’ Morris, Marty Peretz and Amos Oz.
7.The Daily Alert quotes US writers, journalists and editors who praise and defend Israel’s ‘total war’ without identifying their long-standing affiliation and identification with Zionist organizations, giving the false image of a wide spectrum of opinion behind the assault. Never has even the most moderate Jewish or Gentile critic of Israel’s massive extermination campaign appeared in any issues of The Daily Alert.
The principle American Jewish organizations have bombarded the US Congress, influencing, intimidating and purchasing the craven so-called ‘representatives’ of the American people, the media and public notables with lies in defense of Israel’s total war to exterminate a people.
Jeffery Blankfort has been bravely criticizing Israel and standing up for the Palestinians his entire adult life. (In order to understand the differences between his position and Chomsky's, see this article: The Chomsky/Blankfort Polemic.) Here is a little of what he says:
S.C. – Do you think that other countries have their equivalent of AIPAC?
Jeffrey Blankfort : AIPAC is very unusual because while it is a registered lobby for Israel, it does not have to register as a foreign lobby. And that gives it a unique situation in the country. In every hearing in the Congress that involves Middle East issues, you have staff members of AIPAC sitting in these committee hearings. No other lobbies, foreign lobbies, have this privilege. And they also write the legislation that Congress passes regarding the Middle East. For example, the recent Syrian Accountability and Lebanese Sovereignty Restoration Act, which was passed a couple of years ago and which lead to what we see in Lebanon and Syria today was written by AIPAC which later bragged about it. It is not a secret. The only people that pretend they don't know it is the Left. It's on AIPAC's website, it is in their publications. AIPAC also provides interns - young, bright Jewish college students to work in the offices of members of Congress. They go to a member of Congress and say: "We have this young person who is interested in working on Capitol Hill, they will come one year and they will work in your office." No member of Congress is about to refuse a volunteer.
Also AIPAC has a special foundation that provides free trips for members of Congress to Israel. Last year over a hundred members of Congress went to Israel, on a free trip, paid for by this foundation. Now there is a big debate about such trips in Congress paid for by various lobbies, but I do not believe that anything is going to happen there that would negatively affect AIPAC. Congress will make an exception when it comes to Israel. What is interesting is we have a country to the South of us called Mexico. Mexico is far more important to the United States, to our economy, and also there are many more people of Mexican-American extraction than Jews.
There are thousands of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans who work here and are responsible for growing and picking the farm produce in the United States. And yet we don’t have Congressional delegations going to Mexico, we don’t have Congress talking about the importance of Mexico. If they go to Mexico, they go for a vacation, and yet here the focus is on Israel simply because of two things: money and intimidation. The Democratic Party has for years relied on wealthy Jewish donors for the majority of its contributions. AIPAC itself does not give money. AIPAC coordinates where the money should go, so if you are a wealthy Jewish donor and you want to do something to help Israel’s cause, AIPAC will let you know where to give it. Also, around the country, there are now about three dozen political action committees or PACs that exist only to give money to candidates who support Israel. None of them are identified by a name that has anything to do with Israel; so here in California we have something called the Northern Californians for Good Government”. You have in St.Louis, Missouri, the St. Louisans for Good Government. The biggest one is called the National PAC, NPAC. Then you have the Hudson Valley Political Action committee, Desert Caucus, et cetera.
If you look at the name of these committees, you have no idea what they are for, whereas the other lobbies identify themselves by their special interest. Why not Jewish supporters of Israel? But even more important for Democrats, and for some Republicans, is the money contributed by individual Jews. For example, in 2002, an Egyptian-born Israeli, named Haim Saban, who came to the United States and made billions of dollars with a Saturday morning children's program, gave $12.3 million dollars to the Democratic party, which was only about a million and a half dollars less than the arm manufacturers political action committees gave to the both political parties.
Now, this is just one man. And also Haim Saban, who founded the Saban Institute at the Brookings Institute which deals with Israeli issues,is also a big supporter AIPAC, and he funds events in Washington where AIPAC trains college students for pro-Israel advocacy. University campuses are a main battleground for the Jewish forces lobbying for Israel they have come together as the Israel Campus Coalition, 28 organizations, including AIPAC with Israel at the top of their agenda.
Today, a main lobby focus is to get to the colleges campuses to stop divestment programs directed towards Israel. They also are trying to influence the next generation of community leaders who are in the universities at the moment to act in Israel's behalf.
Someone here at MOA earlier (can't remember who, but thanks) linked to this extraordinary wide-ranging interview with Jeffrey Blankfort from San Francisco Independent Media Center. I highly recommend that the time be taken to read the entire article. He spends a lot of time analyzing how the left is corrupted or mislead into non-productive paths and what are effectively, reactionary positions. Here is an excerpt about the lobby:
It isn't just the money, however. Money is very important, but it's the way they approach politicians. AIPAC, for example, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, is the only foreign lobby that isn't required to register as a foreign agent. They hold regional meetings around the country, at which they invite supervisors, mayors, city council people, public officials from the area, to come to these luncheons and dinners, where the speaker will be a US Senator or some very important government official, who will come into town, unknown to the media, with no notice to the media. He or she will make no other speeches, give no press conferences, and will leave. It will be reported in the local Jewish paper, but it will not be reported in the state where the person lives, except perhaps in the Jewish press there. And there's no interest in the media in following up why, for example, Senator Christopher Dodd, when he comes to San Francisco, or Mario Cuomo when he speaks out in Danville, why does he not have a press conference and talk to the media here.
In any case, they go to this meeting, and they, these Congress people . . I'm speaking from knowledge here because I joined AIPAC and I went to one of these luncheons and I saw what was going on there. And I said, my god, this is brilliant!! They have all the leading political figures from Northern California at the meeting, from whose ranks will come the next member of Congress, no doubt.
What happens after AIPAC leaves, then the Jewish Federation, or some local Jewish organization, maybe it's the Koret Foundation, will then send local supervisors, city council members, mayors, and so on, on all expense paid trips to Israel. They meet the Prime Minister, whoever it is, the Defense Minister, and so on, of both political parties, they take a trip to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Museum, to Massada, where Jews supposedly committed suicide in Roman times, to the West Bank, where they may meet a House Arab, and they come back here knowing that they have good friends, important friends, in the Jewish community.
These people who go into politics, all of them are ambitious. So they know that if they want to run for office, it's not just a matter of money. It's a matter of personal acquaintances. And there are certain instances where I believe people are promoted to run for office by the Lobby, and so in a sense they become the Lobby's employee from the get-go. Take Sen. Daniel Inouye, the one armed bandit from Hawaii. His first job was selling State of Israel Bonds. He doesn't list that in his official biography, but the Jewish press has written about that. And he has been one of the foremost supporters of Israel. Tom Daschle from North Dakota is another. They seem to have been promoted into running for office.
You also have something else called blackmail, which the Left never considers as a reason for somebody doing something. But the Anti-Defamation League is a major spying organization, the largest private spying organization in the country. They spied on me. In the Bay Area, in Northern California, they spied on twelve thousand individuals, about 600 hundred organizations. Every organization, progressive, ecological, NAACP, the Asian Law Caucus, Filipino groups, Irish Northern Aid, all of them, and Jewish groups as well, progressive Jewish groups. Why do they do this? Information is important. They don't get information just gratuitously and pay people to do that.
I was spied on, but nothing compared to a politician. So, for example, Congressman, Tom Harkin, of Iowa, who was on the Board of Directors of the Palestine Human Rights Campaign, was visited one day by a member of the Anti-Defamation League and AIPAC, and sent his employees home, and the next day, Harkin, soon to run for senator, is all for Israel, totally for Israel. What did they do? Did they offer him money? I doubt it. They probably found something out about Congressman Harkin. They'd given Congressman Harkin reasons why he should be pro Israel and how they would make him a US Senator, perhaps, and afterward they gave him a lot of money through campaign contributions.
I know of another case of a progressive congressman who never would criticize Israel and who had something serious to hide, and if I knew that, so would the Israel Lobby. They have people working on this 24/7. There are many people who think that in Britain, Tony Blair is being blackmailed to support the United States. There is no good reason for the British to support the United States. Materially, they gain nothing. Their corporations have made nothing from the war. And given the British public school education, photographs could have been taken . . . there's a very good likelihood that Blair might be being blackmailed. People try to find all kind of reasons for people's actions and there may be no other political reasons than self survival.
These are all aspects, so AIPAC has this job, this role, of directing funds to various politicians who support them. Also, even if they don't give money, the threat of them giving money to an opponent is there. So in August, 1989, a pro Israel congressperson told Morton Kondracke of the New Republic that it's not out of affection for Israel that Israel gets three billion a year and that there's no debate on the floor of Congress. It's the fear that if you do so, you will wake up the next morning to find that your opponent has a half a million dollar war chest to use against you. That was '89. Today, the war chest would be larger. So there are these threats.
Also something that isn't generally known is the use of political consultants. There's an organization that's called Committee for an Effective Congress or something like that which is part of the lobby.
It was started by Eleanor Roosevelt and is is one of a number of consultant groups. What these consultant groups do is go to a young Congress person. They'll loan them money. They'll also provide them with a databank of their district, critical information on each voter. This is a very expensive proposition if you want to do it on your own. These groups tend to be Zionists. So you're running for office and they come to you, and they want to take care of you, and suddenly you're in their embrace.
Cynthia McKinney resisted AIPAC from the very beginning. One of the things they did with her, and with Earl Hilliard, who also criticized Israel, was to redraw their districts. When the Democratic Party, or the Republicans who have their own consulting groups, the members of Congress go to these groups because they have all the data. There was a congressman named Gus Savage in Illinois. Savage had a problem. He was a critic of Israel. He supported the Palestinians. And he gave a talk in which he listed and gave all the names of all the Jews outside the Chicago area who were giving money to his opponent's campaign. That, of course, was "anti-Semitic." And the Washington Jewish Week ran a headline entitled "Savaged Savage." Talk about racist, huh? And he was defeated. What they did was they redrew his district. And they did the same with Earl Hilliard and Cynthia McKinney to get certain voters who supported them out of their district. And, of course, they got no support from the Democratic party.
It's interesting because the Democratic Party, as I said, is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Israel Lobby. And anyone who thinks that things can change by supporting an individual Democrat, other than McKinney, maybe, is crazy.
The head of the Democratic Party Senate campaign, the one who determines where the money is going to go, is Charles Schumer, an open, leading, Jewish Zionist from New York. For the House, it's Rahm Emmanuel, who, when he was working for Bill Clinton as a high level staff member, took time off during the first Intifada to do volunteer work in Israel for the Israeli Defense Force. His family is Israeli. He says he's not. In any case, here you have two Jewish Zionists, one running the Democrats' House campaigns and one running the Senate campaigns, determining who is going to get the money in the 2006 election. It's flagrant. And yet you can't discuss this on the Left, because they'll say that sounds like anti-Semitism, or say that, "it's not important that they're Jewish," like it's not important that the Pope's Catholic. This is what we're dealing with.
And out here in San Francisco, we have Nancy Pelosi, the House Minority Whip, and Tom Lantos, one of the most important persons on the House International Relations Committee. He's the ranking Democrat, and also serves Israel as a diplomatic representative in countries where Israel has no diplomatic relations, according to the Jerusalem Post. We see major political events against the Iraq war, even for Palestine here, and yet do we hear criticism of Pelosi or Lantos?
Just before 9/11, Steve Zeltzer and I, the Labor Committee on the Middle East no longer existing, decided we would picket of Tom Lantos, who was being given the Jewish National Fund's Man of the Year award at the Fairmont Hotel, the Jewish National Fund being the organization that took over the Palestinian land and the villages in 1948. They plant trees on Palestinian land where the trees have been uprooted. They tear out Palestinian trees in order to plant Jewish trees.
So we decided to have a picket. It was right after the Durban conference on racism. At a meeting at the Arab Cultural Center, I asked one of the leaders of ANSWER, "Will you endorse this picket of Tom Lantos?"
And she looked at a fellow ANSWER official there, and, kind of hesitant, asked "What do you think?"
And he said, "I think we have to."
So we had the picket, and about 65 people turned up. One person turned up from ANSWER, and it was that person. He turned up at the end of the picket. You'll never hear criticism of local the Democratic Party from ANSWER and ANSWER has to answer for that.
There was a big turnout for Nancy Pelosi speaking at the Marina Middle School some months back. Global Exchange was there, as was the ISO, but not ANSWER. Nancy Pelosi is one of the most important politicians in the United States, and she's supportive of the war. She also has acknowledged that she knew about the government wiretapping. She knew about the phone lists being turned over. She's admitted that. Are we going to see a picket or protest against Nancy Pelsosi?
Even when Global Exchange had a picket of her at the Fairmont Hotel against the war in Iraq, I had to get a hold of a microphone to remind people that she's been supporting Israel against Palestine, and pledging her loyalty to Israel every year, and I passed out copies of a speech she had made at an AIPAC convention, in which she pledged her loyalty and America's loyalty to Israel a half a dozen times.
There should be some kind of law about that, when a Congress person pledges her allegiance to a foreign country, but when it comes to Israel there's what I call the "Israeli exception." But here we are, in what used to be a progressive community, and Tom Lantos gets no criticism whatsoever. The Labor Council supports him because he's good on labor issues, and he's good on some other human rights issues. He's also very good on pets and animal rights. He just put out some legislation on animal rights. But he is one of the main proponents of the war in Iraq and the war against the Palestinians.
He was heavily and directly involved in the phony incubator story back in 1991, in which his Congressional Human Rights Caucus, which is actually not a part of Congress . . . it's not an official part of Congress, it's housed in the headquarters of the Hill and Knowlton PR firm in Washington, brought in a Kuwaiti nurse who had witnessed Iraqi soldier coming in and taking Kuwaiti babies out of incubators, throwing them on the floor and taking the incubators back to Iraq, where they didn't have any incubators, obviously, and it turned out the story was a total fabrication. The so-called nurse was the Kuwait ambassador's daughter and hadn't even been in Kuwait. John MacArthur wrote about it in Harper's and the New York Times. Bob Scheer wrote about it in the LA Times. There was no follow up on this, no demand from the Left to follow up on this.
If people in Lantos' own district and Pelosi's own district don't take these people on, how can we expect anybody around the country to do it? The Left is a total failure in San Francisco, an utter failure. It's a betrayal of the Iraqis. Forget the slogans. Forget "No Blood for Oil!" Forget "End the Occupation!" They have betrayed the Palestinians and the Iraqis because they haven't dealt with the political figures in this community who are responsible for the present situation.
Politics is local. And it may appear to give you some good credits or props to picket George Bush, but we have to deal with the issues here.
The failure to put any kind of pressure on Pelosi, over the years, even for her support of fast track on NAFTA is extraordinary.
She's good on the Gay issues, on AIDS, of course. In San Francisco she would be. This does not take courage. This is smart politics. She was good on opposing aid to the Contras, but I asked her, when she was running for office the first time, if she would support aid to the Contras if aid to Israel was tied to it, and she said she would. She'd support the appropriation. I made a flyer out of it.
In conclusion, a small, wealthy, highly organized, and unprecedentedly powerful group of people are leading the world – largely against their will – down a very destructive and risky path. Only by understanding the ways and means by which this is being accomplished can we hope to staunch their power and stop their plans.

It's like swallowing the red pill.

If another 100 monkeys take the red pill, things may change for the better.

Maybe it's already happening.

I choose to believe this to be the case.

The Depths of Evil

2009-01-15T11:32:00.000-07:00

Just... wow.

Latest Run-Down on Gaza

2009-01-14T09:27:00.003-07:00

Via Lenin's Tomb:

As of 5pm yesterday, Israel's army had succeeded in killing at least 971 Palestinians and injuring at least 4,418 of them (see OCHA report [pdf]). Obviously, this is a crude body count rather than an estimate, and therefore leaves out the unknown number of corpses stuck under the rubble and left in areas where fighting is ongoing, or where the Israelis have sealed off and prevented medical staff from entering. 40% of the dead, and 50% of the wounded, were women and children. Among the dead are civilians gunned down while fleeing their homes under orders from the IDF, and clutching little white flags. Among the wounded are those suffering burns from white phosphorus, which has reportedly been fired into refugee camps. That's right - they decided to douse civilians hiding from the fighting with a substance that is known to melt the flesh to the bone. Just to show them.

Such recreational malevolence continues to undermine Israel's elaborate propaganda campaign, (as does its own inability to stick to its story). The UN has repeatedly accused Israel of committing war crimes, and there may now be a referral to the International Court of Justice which, although it is a toothless advisory body, can give Israel a PR bloody nose. Even David Miliband, the Blairite foreign secretary who demands a ceasefire 'on all sides', is supporting demands for a war crimes investigation. Of course, what he ought to be doing is expelling the Israeli ambassador and cancelling all arms shipments to Israel - but that would imply that he was somehow serious about all that 'war crimes' stuff. Mainstream parliamentarians such as Gerald Kaufman are denouncing Israel in the most forceful terms: "Olmert, (Tzipi] Livni and (Ehud] Barak are mass murderers, war criminals and bring shame on the Jewish people whose Star of David they use as a badge in Gaza.". The US media is increasingly, if reluctantly, offering critical viewpoints. Time magazine worries that Israel may be losing the media war. Ha'aretz reports that there is an increasing view outside of Israel that its image in the world has been "destroyed".

However that may be, most of the Western media and almost the entirety of the US political class supports the war. Most of the Israeli public do too, and even the peace camp is invoking comparisons with Fallujah to mitigate(!) Israel's crimes in Gaza. And there is no substitute for success - perhaps Israel's rulers calculate that if they can pull off something that could be called a victory, much of the criticism and complaining will stop. Now, as the swelling army marches into Gaza City behind a fleet of tanks, the Israeli government has let it be known that you ain't seen nothing yet. Phase III of Operation Cast Lead is in the pipeline.

'Hubris' is an over-worked phrase, but if there ever was an example of a state enraptured by its own sense of omnipotence, Israel is it. What else could possibly explain Olmert bragging that he orders his paymasters about? Such mafiosi-style swaggering is stupid and pathetic. You really get the impression that in being so limitlessly cruel, in humiliating the Palestinians with such gleeful vigour, the Israeli elite is starting to buy its own bullshit. There is no doubt that Israel can terrorise the largely defenseless Palestinian people and destroy Gaza's infrastructure, but it is increasingly in doubt that they can obtain a political victory. Such a victory would entail crushing Hamas politically and forcing them to accept the reassertion of Fatah's rule in the Gaza strip. This is what the US is planning for.

But Israeli intelligence says that Hamas' military capacity remains unbroken, while news reports indicate that the factions in Gaza have been driven together by Israel's attack. Even Fatah's Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade is back in action, claiming to have killed and wounded 20 Israeli soldiers in a suicide attack. Not only is Hamas more popular in Gaza, it is also gaining support in the West Bank, despite the best effort of Abbas' thugs to suppress its public expression. According to some analysis, Israel's leadership has been divided on what to do next. While there are no plans to rebuild Gush Katif, Olmert and most of the military establishment (who express fear of another Lebanon-style ceasefire) have advocated the prosecution of a more intense ground attack. Livni and Barak would apparently withdraw and leave open the option to attack Gaza at any time in the future, without warning. But, since the reservists have been sent in there and are entering Gaza City, one has to suppose that the Phase III escalation is going ahead. The rate of atrocity is about to increase.

I hope Lenin doesn't mind me printing the whole thing, but it's that necessary for people far and wide to come into information that would otherwise require massive Internet clicking. Lenin has gone the extra mile for us.

As for the content of Lenin's post... it speaks for itself. Anyone who continues to support Israel's actions -- not just now in Gaza, but since 1948 at least -- is living in delusion.

Thus, the state of our world.

A Lakotah View of Gaza

2009-01-10T11:25:00.004-07:00

Manifest Destiny....

...Hmmm... it's almost as though the Lakotah are able to see right through the official smokescreen. What could possibly have brought this about?

Sometimes it takes one genocided people to recognize when it's happening to another.

The Lies:

Lie #1

Israel is only targeting legitimate military sites and is seeking to protect innocent lives. Israel never targets civilians.

The Gaza Strip is one of the most densely populated pieces of property in the world. The presence of militants within a civilian population does not, under international law, deprive that population of their protected status, and hence any assault upon that population under the guise of targeting militants is, in fact, a war crime.

Moreover, the people Israel claims are legitimate targets are members of Hamas, which Israel says is a terrorist organization. Hamas has been responsible for firing rockets into Israel. These rockets are extremely inaccurate and thus, even if Hamas intended to hit military targets within Israel, are indiscriminate by nature. When rockets from Gaza kill Israeli civilians, it is a war crime.

Hamas has a military wing. However, it is not entirely a military organization, but a political one. Members of Hamas are the democratically elected representatives of the Palestinian people. Dozens of these elected leaders have been kidnapped and held in Israeli prisons without charge. Others have been targeted for assassination, such as Nizar Rayan, a top Hamas official. To kill Rayan, Israel targeted a residential apartment building. The strike not only killed Rayan but two of his wives and four of his children, along with six others. There is no justification for such an attack under international law. This was a war crime.

Other of Israel’s bombardment with protected status under international law have included a mosque, a prison, police stations, and a university, in addition to residential buildings.

Moreover, Israel has long held Gaza under siege, allowing only the most minimal amounts of humanitarian supplies to enter. Israel is bombing and killing Palestinian civilians. Countless more have been wounded, and cannot receive medical attention. Hospitals running on generators have little or no fuel. Doctors have no proper equipment or medical supplies to treat the injured. These people, too, are the victims of Israeli policies targeted not at Hamas or legitimate military targets, but directly designed to punish the civilian population.

Lie #2

Hamas violated the cease-fire. The Israeli bombardment is a response to Palestinian rocket fire and is designed to end such rocket attacks.

Israel never observed the cease-fire to begin with. From the beginning, it announced a “special security zone” within the Gaza Strip and announced that Palestinians who enter this zone will be fired upon. In other words, Israel announced its intention that Israeli soldiers would shoot at farmers and other individuals attempting to reach their own land in direct violation of not only the cease-fire but international law.

Despite shooting incidents, including ones resulting in Palestinians getting injured, Hamas still held to the cease-fire from the time it went into effect on June 19 until Israel effectively ended the truce on November 4 by launching an airstrike into Gaza that killed five and injured several others.

Israel’s violation of the cease-fire predictably resulted in retaliation from militants in Gaza who fired rockets into Israel in response. The increased barrage of rocket fire at the end of December is being used as justification for the continued Israeli bombardment, but is a direct response by militants to the Israeli attacks.

Israel’s actions, including its violation of the cease-fire, predictably resulted in an escalation of rocket attacks against its own population.

Lie #3

Hamas is using human shields, a war crime.

There has been no evidence that Hamas has used human shields. The fact is, as previously noted, Gaza is a small piece of property that is densely populated. Israel engages in indiscriminate warfare such as the assassination of Nizar Rayan, in which members of his family were also murdered. It is victims like his dead children that Israel defines as “human shields” in its propaganda. There is no legitimacy for this interpretation under international law. In circumstances such as these, Hamas is not using human shields, Israel is committing war crimes in violation of the Geneva Conventions and other applicable international law.

Lie #4

Arab nations have not condemned Israel’s actions because they understand Israel’s justification for its assault.

The populations of those Arab countries are outraged at Israel’s actions and at their own governments for not condemning Israel’s assault and acting to end the violence. Simply stated, the Arab governments do not represent their respective Arab populations. The populations of the Arab nations have staged mass protests in opposition to not only Israel’s actions but also the inaction of their own governments and what they view as either complacency or complicity in Israel’s crimes.

Moreover, the refusal of Arab nations to take action to come to the aid of the Palestinians is not because they agree with Israel’s actions, but because they are submissive to the will of the US, which fully supports Israel. Egypt, for instance, which refused to open the border to allow Palestinians wounded in the attacks to get medical treatment in Egyptian hospitals, is heavily dependent upon US aid, and is being widely criticized within the population of the Arab countries for what is viewed as an absolute betrayal of the Gaza Palestinians.

Even Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has been regarded as a traitor to his own people for blaming Hamas for the suffering of the people of Gaza. Palestinians are also well aware of Abbas’ past perceived betrayals in conniving with Israel and the US to sideline the democratically elected Hamas government, culminating in a counter-coup by Hamas in which it expelled Fatah (the military wing of Abbas’ Palestine Authority) from the Gaza Strip. While his apparent goal was to weaken Hamas and strengthen his own position, the Palestinians and other Arabs in the Middle East are so outraged at Abbas that it is unlikely he will be able to govern effectively.

Lie #5

Israel is not responsible for civilian deaths because it warned the Palestinians of Gaza to flee areas that might be targeted.

Israel claims it sent radio and telephone text messages to residents of Gaza warning them to flee from the coming bombardment. But the people of Gaza have nowhere to flee to. They are trapped within the Gaza Strip. It is by Israeli design that they cannot escape across the border. It is by Israeli design that they have no food, water, or fuel by which to survive. It is by Israeli design that hospitals in Gaza have no electricity and few medical supplies with which to treat the injured and save lives. And Israel has bombed vast areas of Gaza, targeting civilian infrastructure and other sites with protected status under international law. No place is safe within the Gaza Strip.

There's more at the link.

About Those "Hamas Rockets"

2009-01-06T11:58:00.003-07:00

Let's dispense with the Israeli talking point that goes on and on about "Hamas rockets raining down on defenseless Israeli citizens" (the prelude paragraphs are very much worth reading, so please click the above link for the whole article):

In Israel's recent rush to invade Gaza, we witness the same predisposition to violence, the same aching aggravation with Palestinian peace offensives, and the same willingness to conflate all resistance, all frustrations, into a single enemy: "They are all Hamas!" And we see that Hamas, like the PLO, refused to oblige Israel with a single provocative act. For more than four months after 19 June 2008, Hamas refrained from any military actions that might endanger the negotiated truce or "calm" with Israel.

The evidence for this is ready to hand. For example, the Wikipedia entry on the events of the summer, "List of rocket and mortar attacks in Israel in 2008" (revised 4 January 2008), based almost exclusively on Israeli newspapers and government sources, confirms that there were no rocket or mortar attacks claimed by or plausibly attributed to Hamas during the calm. This can also be verified by surveying archives of news reports from the period.

The few that were launched, none of them causing any casualties, were claimed by the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, by Islamic Jihad, by "the Badr Forces," or by nobody. Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh called repeatedly for a cessation of rocket fire, and denounced those factions who broke the truce. A Hamas spokesman criticized Fatah for allowing the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, which is affiliated with Fatah, to fire rockets. Meanwhile, Israeli occupation forces' murders and settler pogroms continued unabated on the West Bank. They included an attempt by a settler to fire a homemade rocket toward the Palestinian village of Burin, which nearly killed another settler. During the lull, then, Israeli settlers fired more rockets (i.e., one) than did Hamas.

...

Clearly, the Israelis violated the truce in order to increase the number of Qassam attacks, not to end them. Qassams provide Israel with its best shot at its favorite media role of plucky little David fighting the Palestinian Goliath. And by nimble revision of its webpage, the Israeli MFA is able to turn cause into effect -- turning the retaliatory Hamas Qassams of 6 November into the cause of Israel canceling the truce on 4 November, and smashing it flat on 19 December.

Please remember this the next time some TV foaming-mouth spouts off about those damned Hamas militants who don't have the decency to take their oppression like good little colonial chattle.

Today's Old Testament Prophetic Moment

2009-01-06T10:56:00.009-07:00

A blast from the past, through which Jeremiah passes on Yahweh's judgment that the Israelites had blown it yet again (Jeremiah 6:13-15, NASB):

13 "For from the least of them even to the greatest of them,
Everyone is greedy for gain,
And from the prophet even to the priest
Everyone deals falsely.

14 "They have healed the brokenness of My people superficially,
Saying, 'Peace, peace,'
But there is no peace.

15 "Were they ashamed because of the abomination they have done?
They were not even ashamed at all;
They did not even know how to blush.
Therefore they shall fall among those who fall;
At the time that I punish them,
They shall be cast down," says the LORD.

As Bible fundamentalists frequently say, the Scriptures interpret themselves.

For the rest of us, Ilan Pappe (known in U.S. Zionist circles as a "self-hating Jew" of the first order) writes from first-person experience on how the above ties in with today's headlines (emphasis mine:

My visit back home to the Galilee coincided with the genocidal Israeli attack on Gaza. The state, through its media and with the help of its academia, broadcasted one unanimous voice — even louder than the one heard during the criminal attack against Lebanon in the summer of 2006. Israel is engulfed once more with righteous fury that translates into destructive policies in the Gaza Strip. This appalling self-justification for the inhumanity and impunity is not just annoying, it is a subject worth dwelling on, if one wants to understand the international immunity for the massacre that rages on in Gaza.

It is based first and foremost on sheer lies transmitted with a newspeak reminiscent of darker days in 1930s Europe. Every half an hour a news bulletin on the radio and television describes the victims of Gaza as terrorists and Israel’s massive killings of them as an act of self-defense. Israel presents itself to its own people as the righteous victim that defends itself against a great evil. The academic world is recruited to explain how demonic and monstrous is the Palestinian struggle, if it is led by Hamas. These are the same scholars who demonized the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in an earlier era and delegitimized his Fatah movement during the second Palestinian intifada.

But the lies and distorted representations are not the worst part of it. It is the direct attack on the last vestiges of humanity and dignity of the Palestinian people that is most enraging. The Palestinians in Israel have shown their solidarity with the people of Gaza and are now branded as a fifth column in the Jewish state; their right to remain in their homeland cast as doubtful given their lack of support for the Israeli aggression. Those among them who agree — wrongly, in my opinion — to appear in the local media are interrogated, and not interviewed, as if they were inmates in the Shin Bet’s prison. Their appearance is prefaced and followed by humiliating racist remarks and they are met with accusations of being a fifth column, an irrational and fanatical people. And yet this is not the basest practice. There are a few Palestinian children from the occupied territories treated for cancer in Israeli hospitals. God knows what price their families have paid for them to be admitted there. The Israel Radio daily goes to the hospital to demand the poor parents tell the Israeli audience how right Israel is in its attack and how evil is Hamas in its defense.

There are no boundaries to the hypocrisy that a righteous fury produces. The discourse of the generals and the politicians is moving erratically between self-compliments of the humanity the army displays in its “surgical” operations on the one hand, and the need to destroy Gaza for once and for all, in a humane way of course, on the other.

...

The self-righteousness is a powerful act of self-denial and justification. It explains why the Israeli Jewish society would not be moved by words of wisdom, logical persuasion or diplomatic dialogue. And if one does not want to endorse violence as the means of opposing it, there is only one way forward: challenging head-on this righteousness as an evil ideology meant to cover human atrocities. Another name for this ideology is Zionism and an international rebuke for Zionism, not just for particular Israeli policies, is the only way of countering this self-righteousness. We have to try and explain not only to the world, but also to the Israelis themselves, that Zionism is an ideology that endorses ethnic cleansing, occupation and now massive massacres. What is needed now is not just a condemnation of the present massacre but also delegitimization of the ideology that produced that policy and justifies it morally and politically. Let us hope that significant voices in the world will tell the Jewish state that this ideology and the overall conduct of the state are intolerable and unacceptable and as long as they persist, Israel will be boycotted and subject to sanctions.

Refraining today's scriptural quote:

They were not even ashamed at all;
They did not even know how to blush.

Indeed.

He Says It Better

2009-01-04T16:05:00.002-07:00

Juan Cole:

I was on the radio recently with John Bolton, former US ambassador to the UN, and he expressed the hope that Egypt would take back Gaza and Jordan [and] what is left of the West Bank. You may as well dream of pink unicorns on Venus. It isn't going to happen. The Palestinians are Israel's problem. War on them, circumscribe them, colonize them all you like. They aren't going anywhere, and you can't keep them stateless and virtually enslaved forever, occasionally exterminating some of them as though they were vermin when they make too much trouble. That, sooner or later, will lead to boycotts by rising economic powers and by Europe that could be extremely damaging to Israel's long-term prospects as a state.

Please read Cole's entire post, which discusses Israel's recent "micro war" strategy and how it is destroying hopes of a two-state solution.

There is hope in his words, despite the suffering between here and there.

Not Safe for Children Oops! (Updated Times Three)

2009-01-04T10:22:00.014-07:00

Having given it a bit of thought, I've decided to go ahead and post this video from Sabbah's Blog.

[Warning: Very graphic images of the realities of being Israel's "neighbor."]

I would further desire that Harry Reid (who spouted off this morning about how Israel's "actions are understandable" in what it's doing to the 1.5 million people of Gaza) would be made to pick his way through the human wreckage depicted in this video.

The U.S. political leadership makes me physically ill.

Not nearly so ill, of course, as the embattled humans being collectively punished by an outlaw state before our very eyes.

UPDATE: I just watched the video a second time, and all I can think is, "This is Hell." The men roaming around with machine guns, the sirens, the blood, the women and children burned to charcoal gray, grown men dying before our eyes, the wailing lamentations... this is a glimpse into the Pit. Life on Earth leads to this very scene at the extremes of separation from our natural Unity.

UPDATE II: Per the excellent Siun at Firedoglake, this video, while horrific and pertinent to the ongoing violence in the Palestinian territories, appears not to offer fresh footage from the current Israeli offensive on Gaza.

Go read her report.

I regret that someone would try to slip something like this by. In the interest of accuracy, I'll try to verify the authenticity of future videos before posting.

UPDATE III: Sabbah, from whom I borrowed the video, has more on the misleading nature of this story.

The Dahiya Doctrine Applied

2009-01-02T11:17:00.004-07:00

Via Lenin's Tomb, we learn from frequent DKos diarist Heathlander about an Israeli "overwhelming force" doctrine that emerged from the Lebanon bombings of 2006, only to be perfected in Gaza as I write:

“What happened in the Dahiya quarter of Beirut in 2006 will happen in every village from which Israel is fired on …

“We will apply disproportionate force on it [the village] and cause great damage and destruction there. From our standpoint, these are not civilian villages, they are military bases…

“This is not a recommendation. This is a plan. And it has been approved”.

That was IDF Northern Command chief Gabi Eisenkot, openly threatening to kill Lebanese civilians and destroy entire villages yesterday in Israel’s leading daily paper. Eisenkot calls this the “Dahiya doctrine“, after the poor, densely populated Shi’a suburb of Beirut that Israel flattened in 2006, killing or displacing almost the entire population. Human Rights Watch condemned the “massive destruction” that was inflicted on Dahiya as “both indiscriminate and disproportionate”, describing how “Israeli forces attacked not only Hezbollah military targets but also the offices of Hezbollah’s charitable organizations, the offices of its parliamentarians, its research center, and multi-story residential apartment buildings in areas considered supportive of Hezbollah.”

Lenin goes on to say:

Before Israel began its latest operation, it engaged in what can only be described as a terrorist cold-calling campaign, in which Palestinian families were warned that their houses may be bombed if the Israeli military suspected it was hiding weapons or Hamas members. The attempt to preemptively terrorise non-combatants worked in some cases, sending families fleeing. This is perhaps not as crude as the air-dropped leaflets and radio messages used by Israeli forces in southern Lebanon, during which civilians were simply ordered to leave on pain of fiery death, but if Israel intends a ground assault, this is surely to be the next step. Then they will say, as the US did in Fallujah, 'we ordered them to leave, so only bad guys can remain', as if the war crime of ethnic cleansing justified the war crime of mass bombing.

In this upside-down world of ours, this sort of thing happens right in front of our faces -- amply documented, reported far and wide, blogged and discussed by thinking and caring individuals with Internet access -- and yet the criminals (the Israeli government, the U.S. government and pro-Israeli "interests" in all sectors of community life) continue to run amok, insulated and protected by some mysterious organ of Grace... seemingly following a long-written script that seeks to destroy the "enemy" (Communism yesterday, Arab Muslims today... who knows, tomorrow?) to the vast enrichment of a select few, even as the world economy melts down in ways we're only beginning to fathom.

Me?

I post this stuff in angry outbursts correlating with Israel's periodic explosions of mass-murder and carnage.

I know that I am pissing into the ocean.

At the same time, I sense that more and more are waking up to the monstrous truth of Israel's 60-year history of illegal and immoral mistreatment of the Palestinians -- which is a microcosm of the West's illegal and immoral mistreatment of the entire Middle East going back to the breakup of the Ottoman Empire... which is a repeat of Manifest Destiny as it cleansed America of its "Indian Problem."

It's a familiar story. Hitler loved it so much, he put on his very own production of it.

"Indian removal"--what today would be called ethnic cleansing--was unofficial federal policy during the Monroe presidency. Upon his election, General Andrew Jackson, having earned fame as an Indian fighter, made it official. Jackson’s policies became the model for Hitler’s "final solution."

...

During the Nuremberg trials, Hitler’s No. 2 man, Hermann Goering, insisted Nazi policy had been identical to U.S policy toward Native Americans. But the holocaust in the Americas outdid the Nazis’ Final Solution many times over: "The destruction of the Indians in the Americas was far and away the most massive act of genocide in the history of the world," writes historian David E. Stannard. Stannard estimates about 12 million Native Americans died as a result of ethnic cleansing in the U.S. and Canada; 68 to 90 million died in the entire western hemisphere.

If more and more of us are waking up to what's been going on, I give thanks to the Mysterious Organ of Grace. Perhaps there is hope, after all.

Philosophical Underpinnings

2009-01-01T23:26:00.004-07:00

Dennis Perrin (via Chris Floyd) gives us the short take on what lies behind Israel's most recent (and continuing) "engagement" with the Palestinian people (emphasis mine):

It's interesting to note how all the excuses for slaughtering Palestinians when the PLO was Hitler are now being used to tar Hamas. They reject compromise, are bottomless Jew haters, are addicted to death, want to drive Israel into the sea, etc. Naturally, being human beings, there are Palestinians who match these descriptions (just as there are Israelis who view Palestinians as dogs, pigs, insects, and cancers). But accurate labeling isn't the goal here; finding excuses to justify attacks that were pre-planned is the overall point. Again, this goes back to the PLO period, when Fatah offers of two-state negotiation, beginning in 1976, were not only rejected by Israel, but were often answered with air strikes. When the PLO kept offering to talk, Israel found ways to undermine Palestinian moderation, from helping anti-PLO Muslims gain political/military traction (which led to Hamas), to outright attempts at physical annihilation, like the 1982 invasion of Lebanon. Now that Fatah has been reduced to Israeli-client status, the same bloody playbook is being used against Hamas, and will be used against whoever succeeds them.

This has been a Zionist goal from well before the formation of Israel in 1948. As Ze'ev Jabotinsky put it in his seminal "The Iron Wall" from 1923, "Culturally [the Palestinians] are 500 years behind us, spiritually they do not have our endurance or our strength of will . . . They look upon Palestine with the same instinctive love and true fervor that any Aztec looked upon his Mexico or any Sioux looked upon his prairie." Thus, "we conclude that we cannot promise anything to the Arabs of the Land of Israel or the Arab countries. Their voluntary agreement is out of the question." Jabotinsky was an inspiration to and godfather of modern Israeli rejectionism, primarily for those on the Israeli right, but not excluding more "moderate" Zionist currents. The bottom line is that Palestinians have never been part of the equation. They've been in the way, and their ongoing existence and resistance provide Israeli hardliners the fuel needed to openly kill and marginalize them. What is happening now in Gaza is merely the latest chapter of this barbarous narrative. Judging from official Israeli statements, this narrative is hardly near its end.

Oh, wait... are we allowed to draw attention to this inconvenient bit of history?

What It's Like

2009-01-01T19:56:00.004-07:00

In case the ongoing obliteration of Gaza has slipped to the back of your mind, please take a moment to read this first-hand report from a Palestinian woman in North Carolina whose family is trapped in their Gaza Strip home:

My father just called. I have learned to expect that the 9pm call is not a jovial one: it is usually to alert me of some awful thing transpiring around them. It helps, in whatever way, to broadcast this event that has yet to be broadcast to the world, to whomever you can. In this case, that person is me.

I see the number on my caller ID; my heart races. I answer my cell phone.

"We ...are under..heavy bombardment. Heavy bombardment" says my father in terrified, articulated syllables.

"They are bombing the Legislative Council building next to our house. They are bombing just down our street."

"Baba...are you safe, are you both safe??" I ask, not knowing what else to say.

"I have to go now..I have to go...i just wanted to tell you that..but I have to go..." he stammers. And the line goes dead.

We have figured out a system. When the electricity is back on in Gaza- which has happened for one hour during the past 48, my parents get on Skype immediately. If I am not around, they give me a quick call from their landline to let me know they are back on; they have 2-3 hours of back-up generator time after this. They stocked up on fuel during the past few weeks.

Then, it is dark again.

When the bombs are dropped around them, they send me a quick note to inform me of what happened before running to safety. I am still not sure where "safety" is; and neither, I think, do they. It is perhaps more a mental state and place than a physical one. In any other situations, people flee to where they perceive are safer locations. In Gaza, there is no "safe". And there is no where to flee to, with the borders closed, the sky and sea under siege.

I cannot imagine connecting with my own father in this fashion, as he risks his life to speak with me across the Internet, trembling to scramble back to the basement (or under a table or chair or couch)... knowing that no place is "safe" in any case.

And here's a report from the Rafah Kid, who lives in Rafah on the Gaza Strip:

Last night was a hectic scramble to get to our Jabalia house soon after dark; the further into the night, the greater the danger. On Sunday night, other commitments had delayed us, and then over the phone the family said any car on the road late would for sure be hit and they couldn't bear any more loss, even new friends like us.

So we arrived at about 6 yesterday evening, and F told us they hadn't spent more than brief moments up from the basement that day, since heavy bombing had begun at 5am.

The night was manageable; an Apache helicopter seemed perched above the house for a lot of it, but that meant it was firing rockets away from us. Nearer to morning we had some hours of it being the other way round and the explosions being pretty loud. During the night, the Islamic University was bombed for a second time, and the port continued to receive attacks - as did pretty much all Gaza.

So matter-of-fact, so straight-forward, like it's just another day in the neighborhood... which, of course, is not so far from the truth for the Palestinian people in general.

Finally, a communique from the In Gaza blog:

Last night, staying at Al Quds hospital, I was afforded a very up-close experience of shelling from all sides. The hospital lies between the already-bombed Ministerial Council building complex and the to-be-bombed last night Ministry of Education and Ministry of Justice buildings. Having heard the account of Dr. Haidar Eid who had a sleepless night when the Council buildings were first bombed, I wasn’t surprised when the bombings recurred on other buildings.

At 12:50 am, I’d been speaking with two doctors in their hospital office when a loud explosion hit what I now assume was either the Ministry of Justice or Education. They, Palestinians from Gaza who’ve endured many an invasion, dropped to the floor at the noise and impact. Haidar confirmed: “they hit the Ministry of Justice, as expected.”

Two hours later, at 3:05 another explosion rocks Sharon and I from tentative sleep. I’m thankful the windows are already shattered, because surely they would’ve blown in on this impact. Nonetheless, I’ve instinctively curled into a ball, covering face.

Haidar confirms this blast: “M o J again. One of my windows fell outside.”

Twelve minutes later, the next huge explosion. Ministry of Education, Haidar confirms (he has the radio on and translates for me). “My friend lives opposite it,” he adds. “His children are terrified. His house door is down.”

At 3:37 the drones intensify their volume and presence. At 3:52, another shuddering blast. At 3:43, two very loud, strongest yet, blasts knock the wind out of me as I lie in bed. Shockwaves shake and rattle me, the walls. Ministry of Ed again, Haidar clarifies. Now Legislative Council Building. There’s no point in moving, I couldn’t find a place to feel safe (in a hospital yet).

The angry buzz of drones is joined by helicopters. It’s nearly 4 am and they’re presumably surveying their work. I lie wondering what’s next.

These are human beings who could be me or you, but who happen to have for a neighbor a religiously-exclusive "democracy" that has spent 60 years squeezing the life out of the Palestinian people.

Is the world finally waking up to this ongoing atrocity?

I do pray for peace, for relief and for the world to stand up for a people who are like fish in a barrel under Israeli fighter jets.

Thanks to Gabriel at Jews Sans Frontieres for the blog links above.

As we can plainly see, many Palestinians are perfectly capable of speaking for themselves... if only we take a moment to listen.

Gaza Humanitarian Aid Ship Attacked (UPDATED)

2008-12-30T08:03:00.003-07:00

It was carrying Cynthia McKinney:

An international humanitarian aid boat filled with medical supplies and surgeons has been attacked by the Israeli navy. According to the Free Gaza movement, the boat called The Dignity has been rammed by an Israeli gunship, and live rounds were fired around the boat, as of 6:45 am Tuesday morning.

The group's media spokesperson said that she had been in contact with the passengers on the boat, which include a former US Congressmember and a Cyprian Member of Parliament, but just before cell phone contact was cut off, heavy gunfire was heard in the background. No one had been injured at the time, but since contact was cut off with the boat, it's unknown whether anyone has been injured.

In a press release, the Free Gaza movement stated, “Contrary to international maritime law, the Israelis are actively preventing the Dignity from approaching Gaza or finding safe haven in either Egypt or Lebanon. Instead, the Israeli navy is demanding that the Dignity return to Cyprus - despite the fact that the ship does not carry enough fuel to do so.”

The Free Gaza movement issued an emergency action alert for their supporters to call the Israeli government to tell them to stop attacking the humanitarian aid mission.

There are 15 civilian passengers aboard the boat, representing 11 different countries. The list of passengers released by the Free Gaza movement is as follows:

(UK) Denis Healey, Captain. Captain of the Dignity, Denis has been involved with boats for 45 years, beginning with small fishing boats in Portsmouth. He learned to sail while atschool and has been part of the sea ever since. He's a certified yachtmaster and has also worked on heavy marine equipment from yachts to large dredgers. This is his fourth trip to Gaza.

(Greece) Nikolas Bolos, First Mate. Nikolas is a chemical engineer and human rights activist. He has served as a crewmember on several Free Gaza voyages, including the first one in August.

(Jordan) Othman Abu Falah. Othman is a senior producer with Al-Jazeera Television. He will remain in Gaza to report on the ongoing military onslaught.

(Australia) Renee Bowyer. Renee is a schoolteacher and human rights activist. She will remain in Gaza to do human rights monitoring and reporting.

(Ireland) Caoimhe ButterlyCaoimhe is a reknowned human rights activist and Gaza Coordinator for the Free Gaza Movement. She will be remaining in Gaza to do human rights monitoring, assist with relief efforts, and work on project development with Free Gaza.

(Cyprus) Ekaterini Christodulou. Ekaterini is a well-known and respected freelance journalist in Cyprus. She is traveling to Gaza to report on the conflict.

(Sudan) Sami El-Haj. Sami is a former detainee at Guantanamo Bay, and head of the human rights section at Al-Jazeera Television. He will remain in Gaza to report on the ongoing military onslaught.

(UK) Dr. David Halpin. Dr. Halpin is an experienced orthopaedic surgeon, medical professor, and ship's captain. He has organized humanitarian relief efforts in Gaza on several occasions with the Dove and Dolphin. He is traveling to Gaza to volunteer in hospitals and clinics.

(Germany) Dr. Mohamed Issa. Dr. Issa is a pediatric surgeon from Germany. He is traveling to Gaza to volunteer in hospitals and clinics.

(UK/Tunisia) Fathi Jaouadi. Fathi is a television producer and human rights activist. He will remain in Gaza to do human rights monitoring and reporting.

(USA) Cynthia McKinney. Cynthia is a former U.S. Congresswoman from Georgia, and the 2008 Green Party presidential candidate. She is traveling to Gaza to assess the ongoing conflict.

(Cyprus) Martha Paisi. Martha is a senior research fellow and experienced human rights activist. She is traveling to Gaza to do human rights work and to assist with humanitarian relief efforts.

(UK) Karl Penhaul. Karl Penhaul is a video correspondent for CNN, based out of Bogotá, Colombia. Appointed to this position in February 2004, he covers breaking news around the world utilizing CNN's new laptop-based 'Digital Newsgathering' system. He is traveling to Gaza to report on the ongoing conflict.

(Iraq) Thaer Shaker. Thaer is a cameraman with Al-Jazeera television. He will remain in Gaza to report on the ongoing military onslaught.

(Cyprus) Dr. Elena Theoharous, MP. Dr. Theoharous is a surgeon and a Member of the Cypriot Parliament. She is traveling to Gaza to assess the ongoing conflict, assist with humanitarian relief efforts, and volunteer in hospitals.

Let's hope everyone is okay, and that they are allowed to complete their mission. I'll try to follow up on this story as new facts come to light.

UPDATE: Looks like the Dignity was able to limp into a Lebanese seaport, with no reports of injury.

From the Free Gaza website comes this press release:

(Lebanon, Tuesday 30 December) - Today the Free Gaza ship "Dignity" carefully made its way to safe harbor in Tyre, Lebanon's southern-most port city, after receiving serious structural damage when Israeli warships rammed its bow and the port side. Waiting to greet the passengers and crew were thousands of Lebanese who came out to show their solidarity with this attempt to deliver volunteer doctors and desperately needed medical supplies to war-ravaged Gaza. The Lebanese government has pledged to provide a forensic analysis of what happened in the dark morning, when Israel rammed the civilian ship in international waters, and put the people on board in danger of losing their lives.

The Dignity, on a mission of mercy to besieged Gaza, was attacked by the Israeli Navy at approximately 6am (UST) in international waters, roughly 90 miles off the coast of Gaza. Several Israeli warships surrounded the small, human rights boat, firing live ammunition around it, then intentionally ramming it three times. According to ship's captain Denis Healy, the Israeli attack came, ""without any warning, or any provocation."

Caoimhe Butterly, an organizer with the Free Gaza Movement, stated that, "The gunboats gave us no warning. They came up out of the darkness firing flares and flashing huge flood lights into our faces. We were so shocked that at first we didn't react. We knew we were well within international waters and supposedly safe from attack. They rammed us three times, hitting the side of the boat hard. We began taking on water and, for a few minutes, we all feared for our lives. After they rammed us, they started screaming at us as we were frantically getting the life boats ready and putting on our life jackets. They kept yelling that if we didn't turn back they would shoot us."

Cynthia McKinney, former U.S. congresswoman and Green Party presidential candidate, was traveling to Gaza aboard the Dignity in order to assess the impact of Israel's military onslaught against the civilian population of the Gaza Strip. According to McKinney, "Israeli patrol boats...tracked us for about 30 minutes...and then all of a sudden they rammed us approximately three times, twice in the front and once in the side...the Israelis indicated that [they felt] we were involved in terrorist activities."

The Dignity departed from Larnaca Port in Cyprus at 7pm (UST) on Monday 29 December with a cargo of over 3 tons of desperately needed medical supplies donated to Gaza by the people of Cyprus. Three surgeons were also aboard, traveling to Gaza to volunteer in overwhelmed hospitals and clinics. The ship was searched by Cypriot Port authorities prior to departure, and its passenger list was made public.

Israel's deplorable attack on the unarmed Dignity is a violation of both international maritime law and the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, which states that "the high seas should be reserved for peaceful purposes."

Delivering doctors and urgently needed medical supplies to civilians is a just such a "peaceful purpose." Deliberately ramming a mercy ship and endangering its passengers is an act of terrorism.

CALL the Israeli Government and demand that it immediately STOP attacking the civilian population of Gaza and STOP using violence to prevent human rights and humanitarian assistance to the Palestinian people.

While We Watch Football and Eat Leftovers....

2008-12-28T16:22:00.004-07:00

....Palestinians trapped and starving in the Israeli Bantustan enclave called Gaza are being blown to pieces in their homes.

And this disgusting act of mass murder has been long in the planning:

Israel's ongoing onslaught on the sealed off Gaza Strip, marketed to the world as a response to Palestinian rocket-firing, has been planned six months ago and is Israel's version of America's "shock and awe" campaign against Iraq, Haaretz reported on Sunday, December 28.

"Long-term preparation, careful gathering of information, secret discussions, operational deception and the misleading of the public - all these stood behind the Israel Defense Forces "Cast Lead" operation against Hamas targets in the Gaza Strip," the Israeli daily wrote.

Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak ordered the army to plan for the offensive more than six months ago, even as Israel was negotiating an Egyptian-brokered truce deal with Hamas and other factions.

He ordered a comprehensive intelligence-gathering about permanent bases, weapon silos, training camps and homes of senior officials in Hamas and other factions, sources told Haaretz.

Israeli warplanes targeted a fuel truck traveling outside Rafah near the Egyptian border early Sunday, killing and wounding several people.

Aircraft had staged several air strikes throughout the night, including against a mosque near Shifa Hospital in Gaza City and Al Aqsa TV station, the Israeli army confirmed.

Two bodies were retrieved from the mosque rubble.

Israeli public radio said some 20 air strikes had been staged overnight.

Israeli warplanes hammered targets in the Gaza Strip, the world's most densely populated areas, on Saturday, killing at least 290 people in the bloodiest day of the decades-long Middle East conflict.

Israel warned Sunday that it could send ground troops into the overcrowded enclave.

"We are ready for anything. If it's necessary to deploy ground forces to defend our citizens, we will do so," a Barak spokesman said.

Hundreds of infantry and armored corps troops headed for the border in preparation for a possible ground invasion, military officials said.

Major General Yoav Galant, the commander of the Israeli Southern Command, said the aim of the Operation Cast Lead is to "send Gaza decades into the past" and inflict "the maximum number of enemy casualties."

He added that Israel wants to significantly damage Hamas' leadership and tactical capabilities.

"Under no circumstance can we accept a norm that leaves missions unmet."

Haaretz said the onslaught as Israel's harshest on the Gaza Strip since the 1967 War.

"This was a massive attack much along the lines of what the Americans termed 'shock and awe' during their invasion of Iraq in March 2003."

It quoted sources as saying that 40 targets were destroyed in a span of three to five minutes in simultaneous, heavy bombardment.

"Like the US assault on Iraq and the Israeli response to the abduction of IDF reservists Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser at the outset of the Second Lebanon War, little to no weight was apparently devoted to the question of harming innocent civilians," said Haaretz.

Why?

Perhaps it goes something like this:

Israel used a ceasefire to starve Gazans and turn them and others against Hamas, making Israel’s goal of eliminating Hamas less objectionable to the international community and congruent to those of Abbas' PA, and the governments of Jordan and Egypt.

Long term planning for the operation included a visit to Egypt by Israeli Foreign Minster to inform Mubarak of the operation. Not that his approval was needed, but his submissiveness was desired. Besides, the Israelis prefer if he doesn't utter rhetorical phrases about human rights and shit like that when taken by surprise.

During the attack, Abbas visited Mubarak looking for a shoulder to cry on (yes, even though the attacks have his blessing he still has a faint heart and could not take all the bloodshed alone). He came out of the meeting repeating Israel’s line, handed to him via Mubarak: “Hamas could have prevented this attack,” a murder in which it was the victim.

The murderous air attacks are only the shock-and-awe phase. Israel will follow up with a massive ground invasion, root out everything and everybody belonging to Hamas, and bring back their security subcontractors in the PA.

Mohammed Dahlan, Abbas’ former security chief in Gaza, will be soon installed back in Gaza. Abbas will enter it as a liberator and Fayyad will visit with a fistful of dollars for some miniscule project such as a school or a street. And Gazans, well, they will have to accept that they are better off because, for one thing, they would have food now.

With the difference being that Israel decided to do the military action itself this time, we are back to 1995, when Fatah men, lead by Dahaln, clashed with Hamas in Gaza killing hundreds from both sides. Except that the struggle for Palestinian freedom and equality has never been more irreparable.

It is also a test for Obama. Gauging his response to the action from outside the Whitehouse will set the tone for what Israel gets out of him. With his chief of staff being a former IDF volunteer, it’s hard to see how he will see things any different than the IDF perspective. And the American stance of asking the rape victim to quit scratching the rapist will continue to the Washington Modus Operandi.

I am sick of the rationalizations for this sort of collective punishment, which is an obvious and blatant excuse for ethnic cleansing.

And, as always, I am embarrassed and ashamed that the so-called "progressive blogosphere" (with which I've long identified myself) continues to show passive interest (if any) while deferring to pro-Israeli apologists who threaten critics with the vile slur "antisemite."

Enough!

Enjoying the Season

2008-12-24T12:08:00.003-07:00

Looks like a White Christmas around most of the country, though my hometown of Boulder escaped the big storm they were calling for yesterday. I'm a little bummed about that, but not too much -- we have to drive an hour to the family get-together, and snowy Interstates are not always the best Holiday tradition.

At any rate, I wish you all Peace, Joy and Happiness as the year winds down into yet another. Perhaps more so than at any other time in my life, I have no idea what to expect.

Mooji Alert

2008-12-05T17:52:00.002-07:00

Over here at my spiritual blog....

Please Pass the Mustard

2008-12-04T17:08:00.002-07:00

Yes!

I Give Thanks for George Carlin (May He Rest in Peace)

2008-11-27T21:30:00.004-07:00

I hope everyone enjoyed a blessed Thursday off from work, surrounded by friends and loved ones, stuffing your bellies with the best food you ever ate.

Keep it going for another month, at least.

A Meaningful Death

2008-11-25T19:03:00.001-07:00

This is what courage look like....

Something to Shoot For

2008-11-10T20:06:00.004-07:00

Jack Passion of the U.S., Champion of the Natural Beard category of the World Beard & Moustache Championships.

Me? I can't get it to grow past a certain point. I think it takes a lot more work than I'm willing to put in.

The third place finisher (Richard Newman of the U.K.) seems more in line with my approach:

Sigh....

2008-11-10T19:08:00.001-07:00

This reminds me that life is very, very much worth living... to the hilt....

Even If It's Not Real....

2008-11-10T17:48:00.002-07:00

...It's pretty darned cool....

A Whole Lot o' Work Ahead....

2008-11-09T12:46:00.003-07:00

On what they base these ratings I have no idea, but the basic message is clear: the United States of America has slipped into an abyss of mediocrity.

Shaolin Monks They Are Not

2008-11-09T12:02:00.003-07:00

An injured Greek Orthodox monk is seen after a brawl between Armenian and Greek Orthodox monks next to the traditionally believed to be the tomb of Jesus Christ at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in the Old City of Jerusalem, Sunday, Nov. 9, 2008. A brawl erupted between rival monks at one of Christianity's holiest sites, and Israeli police detained two clergymen for questioning. (AP Photo/Bernat Armangue)

Yikes!

Monks brawl at Christian holy site in Jerusalem

JERUSALEM – Israeli police rushed into one of Christianity's holiest churches Sunday and arrested two clergyman after an argument between monks erupted into a brawl next to the site of Jesus' tomb.

The clash between Armenian and Greek Orthodox monks broke out in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, revered as the site of Jesus' crucifixion, burial and resurrection.

The brawling began during a procession of Armenian clergymen commemorating the 4th-century discovery of the cross believed to have been used to crucify Jesus.

The Greeks objected to the march without one of their monks present, fearing that otherwise, the procession would subvert their own claim to the Edicule — the ancient structure built on what is believed to be the tomb of Jesus — and give the Armenians a claim to the site.

The Armenians refused, and when they tried to march the Greek Orthodox monks blocked their way, sparking the brawl.

Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said police were forced to intervene after fighting was reported. They arrested two monks, one from each side, he said.

A bearded Armenian monk in a red-and-pink robe and a black-clad Greek Orthodox monk with a bloody gash on his forehead were both taken away in handcuffs after scuffling with dozens of riot police.

Six Christian sects divide control of the ancient church. They regularly fight over turf and influence, and Israeli police are occasionally forced to intervene.

The obvious question is, is this what Jesus had in mind when he sent His Apostles out to establish The Way?

I know, I know....

Why You Should Never Wash the Car

2008-11-08T10:48:00.005-07:00

"Uh, look little dog, there'll be no more car-stealing from you, okay?"

According to the AP, this is a true story:

Car impounded after dog drives away from car wash

PRYOR, Okla. – A dog waiting in a car while at a car wash slipped the vehicle into gear and drove in a loop before the car came to a stop. Pryor police officer Brent Crittenden said the dog's owner was washing the vehicle when the 70-pound pit bull jumped on the dash and somehow shifted the car into reverse.

The car backed out of the car wash bay, continued onto a highway and then looped around before coming to a stop at an automated car wash lane.

Crittenden said the vehicle was impounded because its owner was unable to provide proof of insurance.

Because the dog was registered with the city, Crittenden said the owner was allowed to walk the pooch home.

A 70-pound pit bull?

How do you discipline a 70-pound pit bull?

Go With the Dark Flow

2008-11-07T14:23:00.002-07:00

Huh?

Oh, right -- belongs at my other blog....

Change We Need

2008-11-06T15:26:00.001-07:00

From cartoonist Jack Ohman of The Oregonian:

Seems Like One of Us

2008-11-06T14:28:00.009-07:00

100,000 in St. Louis, expressing a hope and prayer that Obama may or may not fulfill. He ignited millions of us; he'd better not disappoint.

Unlike so many politicians, his shtick does not seem like an act....

Something tells me that the sky truly is the limit. Which is to say, I think we'll be surprised at how far this nation will travel in a very short period of time. We have Junior to thank for setting the bar so low and giving us so much to work on....

I know, I know: There's no point in getting my hopes up too high. This is America, after all -- land of the CIA/FBI/ATF/NSA, land of shadow wars, land of institutional racism, land of corporatist media, land of the Federal Reserve. Obama represents some combination of wealthy interests and is bound to enact policies that hurt more than they help.

What I'm getting however, is that he has awakened a civic spirit that has been missing since I left home and entered the workforce in 1982. He's challenged grassroots organizers to use his election campaign as a blueprint for local and regional change.

I think this counts for something, and I'm very much inclined to give him the benefit of a doubt that extends through a considerable honeymoon period.

Whether or not he's the real deal, we already know that he's sparked something special in a large segment of society. No matter what he does from here on out, he deserves out deepest thanksgiving for that.

UPDATE: Almost forgot to give my impression of Obama's selection for White House Chief of Staff.

As I am a proponent of Palestinian human rights, this could not have been a more devastating pick. Rahm Emanuel is the son of an Irgun terrorist. Read the Wikipedia entry for this guy, then Google around a little. A piece of work. I know he's considered a bulldog where Obama is more of a Labrador Retriever (sleek and yet cuddly), and that in a political sense it may create a nice good-cop vs. bad-cop setup... but I'm really afraid that having Rahm Emanuel in Obama's ear on a daily basis spells doom for Palestinians.

Xymphora thinks differently, which is an encouragement. He asserts that Obama is the Old American Establishment front man, and that the Old American Establishment is sick and tired of neolib/neocon MidEast policies. Xymph further maintains that the Old American Establishment is keen to end U.S. military aggression in Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan, bring American troops home, and go about the business of designing the next colonial enterprise, whatever that turns out to be.

Who knows?

Again, I'm ready to wait-out the honeymoon period before casting judgment.

UPDATE II: As always, Al Giordano brings sanity to the discussion. His theory: by extracting Rhambo from the House of Representatives and putting him under Obama's thumb, he will be more easily controlled.

I bet Xymph comes out with a similar analysis.

The good news: both bloggers are smarter than me....

Feeling Gratified....

2008-11-04T21:34:00.003-07:00

Sunrise in America....

Exhausted and operating under no illusions... but to know that this victory belongs to the people, that it is much, much bigger than Obama... makes me thankful to be alive on Earth tonight.

As I've been saying all day, our work is just beginning.

I don't feel much different than in 2000 and 2004, except that they weren't able to yank the rug out from under our feet this time (see Florida and Ohio). Now I'm just interested to see whether or not the "ground game" unveiled by the Obama campaign will be able to sustain itself in order to create meaningful change during the coming days, weeks and years.

I choose to believe that it will.

MSNBC Live Streaming Election Results

2008-11-04T16:15:00.002-07:00

In case you don't have cable....

Online Election Sites

2008-11-04T13:43:00.003-07:00

A previous Presidential hopeful joins his family and inner circle in watching election returns... a couple years before I was born....

I just discovered a good resource for following the numbers tonight, if you're like me and are unable to turn away from the Spectacle.

Assuming things go as advertised, I'll raise a cold one to all my blogging friends sometime after seven o'clock Eastern time....

Do We Even Deserve a Free Country?

2008-11-02T20:29:00.003-07:00

Or are we so stunted that we crave, deep down inside, an authoritarian dictatorship in the Republican mold?

Former Nixon cabinet member John Dean pretty much speaks for me with regard to these questions (emphasis mine):

Frankly, the fact that the pre-election polls are close - after eight years of authoritarian leadership from Bush and Cheney, and given its disastrous results - shows that many Americans either do not realize where a McCain/Palin presidency might take us, or they are happy to go there. Frankly, it scares the hell out of me, for there is only one way to deal with these conservative zealots: Keep them out of power.

This election should be a slam dunk for Barack Obama, who has run a masterful campaign. It was no small undertaking winning the nomination from Hillary Clinton, and in doing so, he has shown without any doubt (in my mind anyway) that he is not only qualified to be president, but that he might be a once-in-a-lifetime leader who can forever change the nation and the world for the better.

If Obama is rejected on November 4th for another authoritarian conservative like McCain, I must ask if Americans are sufficiently intelligent to competently govern themselves. I can understand authoritarian conservatives voting for McCain, for they know no better. It is well-understood that most everyone votes with his or her heart, not his or her head. Polls show that 81 percent of Americans "feel" (in their hearts and their heads) that our country is going the wrong way. How could anyone with such thoughts and feelings vote for more authoritarian conservatism, which has done so much to take the nation in the wrong direction?

We will all find out on (or about) November 5th.

Thus, an election that has large swaths of us sensing that this is our final opportunity to pull back from the brink of annihilation.

AntiSniveler Alert

2008-11-01T16:53:00.003-06:00

For those interested, I just did a little write-up (over at my spiritual blog) on the recent contemplative writer's retreat I helped facilitate this past weekend.

My question for the post is, "Why Meditate?"

Man's Inhumanity to Man

2008-11-01T12:21:00.003-06:00

I just stumbled onto some disturbing images like the one from 1980 above, which shows "A kid in Uganda about to die of hunger, and a missionary."

More impactful moments found here.

Pictures, as they say, are more powerful than words.

When I sometimes muse that life on Earth is the true Hell, this insight arises from the Eastern concept of samsara, or the Wheel of Rebirth. This concept holds that we continually take bodies as beings on Earth, doomed to experience a seemingly infinite number of ups and downs that essentially add up to perpetual suffering... until, at some point, we "get it" that this is all just happening within the One Mind, and that we are all connected through a Matrix of Love. In this moment of recognition, we are able to awaken from our collective nightmare and emerge with our true nature.

When I see photos like these, I want more than ever for everyone to awaken from the dream. This shit has got to stop.

American Socialists

2008-11-01T08:32:00.002-06:00

See which states get more than they give... and remind yourself of the deep hypocrisy that marks this country's political discourse.

Screw Politics

2008-10-30T08:01:00.002-06:00

I'm going with the street musicians:

and, in Osaka:

The Other Clinton

2008-10-28T20:20:00.005-06:00

George, that is....

I once bought this man a six-pack of Ginger Ale, and he begrudgingly signed a bootleg Funkadelic CD that I happened to have just purchased.

Touched by greatness....

Perhaps There Is Hope....

2008-10-28T20:11:00.002-06:00

On the heals of Florida Governor Crist's announcement from earlier today, we learn this from Ohio:

Judge rules Ohio homeless voters may list park benches as addresses

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) - A federal judge in Ohio has ruled that counties must allow homeless voters to list park benches and other locations that aren't buildings as their addresses.

U.S. District Judge Edmund Sargus also ruled that provisional ballots can't be invalidated because of poll worker errors.

Monday's ruling resolved the final two pieces of a settlement between the Northeast Ohio Coalition for the Homeless and Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner.

The coalition agreed to drop a constitutional challenge to Ohio's voter identification law until after the Nov. 4 election. In return, Brunner and the coalition agreed on procedures to verify provisional ballots across all Ohio counties.

The coalition was concerned that unequal treatment of provisional ballots would disenfranchise some voters.

What a sick and disgusting headline... and yet, wonderful....

They Probably Consider Themselves to be Good Christians

2008-10-17T12:00:00.005-06:00

[Please see UPDATE below.]

Where is Bobby Kennedy's Justice Department when you need it?

Surprise, shock and some fear in a local neighborhood, after an anti-Obama display is hung from a tree. The display is at a home at Symmes and Hicks Road in Fairfield.

And the person who put it there says the message isn't political, it's racist. Shawn Ley spoke with the man who isn't shy about his views.

There it is, right above the "McCain-Palin" sign: a make-shift ghost, hanging from a noose. A Barack Obama sign attached upside down. Obama's middle name: "Hussein" spray painted and misspelled above.

This little First Amendment display may be found in the Cincinnati suburb of Fairfield, OH.

Remind me never to go there.

UPDATE: What the hell is WRONG with people?

From the accompanying Raw Story piece:

LOS ANGELES (AFP) – A Halloween display showing a figure resembling Republican vice presidential pick Sarah Palin hanging by a noose has caused uproar in the Californian city of West Hollywood, leading to condemnation Monday from the local mayor.

Chad Michael Morrisette has the effigy, wearing Palin's trademark red jacket, glasses, high heels and a wig, hanging from the roof of his house in the city to the west of Los Angeles.

"It should be seen as art and it should be seen within the month of October. It is Halloween. It's time to be scary. It's time to be spooky," he told local television channel KCAL9.

Mayor Jeffrey Prang issued a statement condemning the display, in which a disfigured model of presidential candidate John McCain can also be seen surrounded by flames.

"While these residents have the legal right to the display of Senator McCain and Governor Palin, I strong oppose political speech that references violence -- real or perceived," he said.

"I urge these residents to take down their display and find more constructive ways to express their opinion," he continued.

West Hollywood is one of the main gay areas of the United States. About 500,000 people are expected there Friday for one of the biggest Halloween carnivals in the country.

Halloween is rooted in pagan Celtic and Christian feasts and sees Americans decorate their homes with ghoulish displays of ghosts, witches and other monsters.

People need to get a grip.

Wake up, already!

If you're angry, join the effort to vote them out. Or leave the country. Or do whatever you do to transform your life at the local level, without resorting to a mentality of victimization.

They have power over you when you let them have that power.

Don't become precisely that which you despise.

Golden Rule 101, for goodness' sake....

Greed

2008-10-16T22:37:00.004-06:00

It has turned the world economy into a gigantic casino... and we've just rolled snake eyes.

Wonderful Der Spiegel interview with Nobel Laureate Muhammad Yunus.

Somehow, I doubt he'll be invited into the next U.S. President's cabinet....

Boy, Ain't That the Truth....

2008-10-15T18:24:00.002-06:00

Mudslinging: As American as Apple Pie

2008-10-14T19:07:00.002-06:00

Punch me in the arm for linking to the WaPo, but this is actually an interesting overview of our country's long history of campaign sleaze.

Thomas Jefferson was attacked by ministers who accused him of being an "infidel" and an "unbeliever." A Federalist cartoon depicted him as a drunken anarchist, and the president of Yale warned that if Jefferson came to power, "we may see our wives and daughters the victims of legal prostitution." A Connecticut newspaper warned that his election would mean "murder, robbery, rape, adultery and incest will openly be taught and practiced" -- though the paper, which is now the Hartford Courant, did apologize some years later.

[...]

The years "1800 and 1828 and the one against Lincoln, I think -- those were worse than anything we've had," says historian Paul F. Boller, who has written about the history of dirty politics and who, at 91, takes the long view of things.

Back in the day, political rhetoric was, as David Mark puts it in "Dirty Politics," "shriller, hyperbolic, and downright mean." It was racist -- more than one candidate was rumored as being half-this or part-that -- as well as hostile to certain religions and deeply personal. It was also occasionally bizarre. Historians differ on whether Jefferson was ridiculed for being raised on a diet of "hoe-cake" and "fricasseed bullfrog." During Martin Van Buren's presidency, a Pennsylvania congressman accused him of being so decadent that he landscaped the White House grounds into hills resembling "an Amazon's bosom."

Oh, "John Quincy Adams was accused of pimping for the czar," Troy says. Really. The czar of Russia. The press backing Jackson labeled Adams "The Pimp."

[...]

In 1835, Davy Crockett -- who briefly considered a run for the presidency -- released a ghost-written campaign tract with one of those really long titles they used to use back then: "The life of Martin Van Buren, heir-apparent to the 'government,' and the appointed successor of General Andrew Jackson, Containing every authentic particular by which his extraordinary character has been formed, With a concise history . . . " You get the idea.

Inside, Crockett made note of Van Buren's baldness, described his face as "a good deal shrivelled," compared Van Buren to "dung" and described his personality as "secret, sly, selfish, cold, calculating." Then he got nasty. Van Buren, he wrote, was "a dandy. When he enters the senate chamber in the morning, he struts and swaggers like a crow in the gutter. He is laced up in corsets, such as women in a town wear, and, if possible, tighter than the best of them."

And so on and so forth, proving once more that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Not that we should be proud of it in this case.

State of the World Got You Down?

2008-10-14T07:28:00.000-06:00

Relax....

No Words Required

2008-10-13T21:32:00.002-06:00

Bush is Bad, Yes... But He's Not Alone

2008-10-13T08:05:00.002-06:00

A Dissenting opinion mirrors my own:

The Legacy of the Clinton Bubble

THE CONVENTIONAL wisdom has held that economic policy was a great success under Bill Clinton in the 1990s and a failure ever since. Hillary Clinton has made the comparison often, promising to end “the seven year detour” and “attack poverty by making the economy work again.” In January, in response to the president’s State of the Union Address, Barack Obama stated that it was “George Bush’s Washington that let the banks and financial institutions run amok and take our economy down this dangerous road.”

Perhaps this reading of history makes for good politics in an election year, and it is certainly better for the Clintons than for anyone else. The only problem is that the story line is flawed. One could even say that it’s a bit of a fairy tale.

For six of eight years, Bill Clinton governed with Republican majorities in Congress. Not surprisingly, there was much continuity between the Clinton and Bush administrations. Both embraced the so-called Washington Consensus, a policy agenda of fiscal austerity, central-bank autonomy, deregulated markets, liberalized capital flows, free trade, and privatization.

On each of these crucial issues, the most significant differences between Clinton and Bush were differences in timing and degree, not in direction. Both administrations were willfully asleep at the wheel. Clinton was fortunate to preside over the early stages of a bubble economy. Bush has had the misfortune of presiding as a lame duck through the final stages of the same bubble and, thanks to the deregulation of the Clinton years, without a regulatory structure capable of containing today’s speculative fevers.

[...]

This is just a quick snip from a long, detailed examination of our casino-market culture. It deserves all our attention, should we have the spare time to read it through.

Basically, we've all swilled the Kool Aid and we're all paying the price for our gullibility.

Such is life, I guess.

A Miracle

2008-10-13T07:23:00.005-06:00

Maximum Leader Fidel is incredulous:

"Millions of whites cannot reconcile in their minds with the idea that a black man with his wife and children would move into the White House, which is called just like that – White," he wrote.

He added that it was a "pure miracle" the Illinois senator, who became the first black politician to win the Democratic Party's presidential nomination, had not been assassinated.

The ailing Cuban communist leader, who handed power to his brother Raul earlier this year, described Mr Obama as a politician who "has the habit of looking at his opponent with serenity and laughing at his rhetorical attacks."

Compared with the rest of Earth, the United States may as well be the planet Pluto, so backwards and ignorant it has become during the past 30 years.

Will this be the year that it joins to rest of the human race?

Just in Time for the Elections

2008-10-12T17:09:00.002-06:00

Are we this stupid?

Warning signs of an Israeli strike on Iran

Some key decision makers in Israel fear that unless they attack Iranian nuclear enrichment facilities in the next few months, while George W Bush is still president, there will not be another period when they can rely on the United States as being anywhere near as supportive in the aftermath of a unilateral attack.

In the past 40 years there have been few occasions when I have been more concerned about a specific conflict escalating to involve, economically, the whole world. We are watching a disinformation exercise involving a number of intelligence services. Reality is becoming ever harder to disentangle.

Last month a story in The Guardian claimed that on May 14 Ehud Olmert, the Israeli prime minister, in a meeting with Bush, had asked for a green light to attack Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities. We were told that Bush refused. He believed Iran would see the United States as being behind any such assault and Americans would come under renewed attack in Iraq and Afghanistan. Shipping in the Gulf would be vulnerable. We were told that the source of the story was a European head of government and “his” officials – as if to exclude Angela Merkel and Germany. It is, however, improbable that Israel abandoned its option to take unilateral action.

Three weeks later the Israeli military conducted an exercise over the Mediterranean to demonstrate to the United States as well as Iran that it could attack. More recently there have been a number of stories raising concern about what is happening in Iran. One said Iran’s first nuclear electricity generating plant would go critical in December and thereafter any air attack would become impossible since it would trigger a nuclear explosion. Then we were told that a US radar system had been deployed in Israel with US personnel to strengthen Israel’s defence against Iranian airstrikes. There was also an interview with Olmert where he dismissed as “megalomania” any thought that Israel should attack Iran. He appeared to be trying to disrupt the Israeli coalition negotiations.

Finally, on Friday, The New York Times revealed that in February an IAEA inspector had talked of experiments in Iran that were “not consistent with any application other than the development of a nuclear weapon”. Iran denied the claim.

Before the Israeli negotiations got under way, Ehud Barak, the Labour leader, spoke first to Benjamin Netanyahu, leader of the Likud opposition party, rather than to Tzipi Livni, the newly elected leader of Kadima. This indicated that Barak was interested in an all-party coalition, presumably believing that a Palestinian settlement is not yet achievable and that Israel needs maximum unity to deal with a world transfixed by the economic crisis and resigned to Iran becoming a nuclear weapon state.

If Israel were to attack Iran, one Iranian response would be to block the Strait of Hormuz. On September 16 Iran said its Revolutionary Guards would defend the Gulf waters. In the narrow strait just one oil tanker sunk would halt shipping for months. Insurance cover would be refused and owners would fear the risks of sailing even if the US navy cleared mines.

The Revolutionary Guards are committed to a war against Israel and prepared, in the process, to take on the rest of the world. They have good equipment and operate from the land, sea and air. They will be suicide soldiers, seamen and airmen. If Iran is attacked, Russia and China will supply it with arms.

Maybe I'm wrong, but it sure feels like certain entities are engineering an Apocalypse of their own designing.

But, then, I am paranoid and should be ignored at all costs.

In Case You're About To Miss It

2008-10-12T11:38:00.004-06:00

Top 25 Censored Stories for 2009

The entire list is shocking, but numbers 5 and 8 really jump out at me.

We live behind a blindfold.

For the Curious....

2008-10-10T15:42:00.002-06:00

...I've got a new post up over at my spiritual blog, which sort of goes into what I've been doing while not blogging... if you're interested.

Please, if the spiritual thing disturbs or provokes you, don't go over there!

Thanks,
Your Proprietor

Us vs. Them

2008-10-10T13:13:00.002-06:00

Living in Pretend Land will catch up with us one day....

Seems LikeEveryone Was In On the 9/11 Conspiracy....

2008-09-30T06:36:00.002-06:00

...Except me, of course....

The Financial Tsunami Explained

2008-09-23T18:19:00.002-06:00

Don't go here if your stomach is already cramped.

Otherwise, read it and weep.

Life is changing before our very eyes.

Peddling Hate, Consequences Be Damned

2008-09-14T09:54:00.003-06:00

Thanks to the good folks at PBS, we can watch Bill Moyers any time we want.

From this past Friday's show:

What happens when America's airwaves fill with hate? BILL MOYERS JOURNAL takes a tough look at the hostile industry of "Shock Jock" media with a hard-hitting examination of its effects on our nation's political discourse.

Well worth the moments out of your life to watch the whole thing.

Pets Are a Big Responsibility

2008-09-09T07:07:00.002-06:00

Understandable:

Jessica the Hippo has made herself a member of this South African family. She is retricted to only going in the kitchen now since she broke a couch and a bed.

I think I'll go with a pot belly pig:

Not Like Your Grandfather's Wheelbarrow Race

2008-09-09T06:54:00.005-06:00

Why, back in my day, we didn't have no fancy wheelbarrow moves....

Is this, like everything else in the new generation's world, a result of mistaking video games for reality?

Snoozing Through "The Speech"

2008-09-03T20:52:00.003-06:00

"Cut it out, Todd...!"

Sounds just like Lisa Loopner, doesn't she?

[H/t to cmnh.]

What Jeralyn Said

2008-09-03T07:51:00.004-06:00

Sarah and Cindy... may as well live on different planets....

While her commenting community is 85% insufferable, Jeralyn at TalkLeft is a good egg whose self-reflective capacity is refreshing.

Recently she instituted a ban on Palin-bashing at her site... but today lifted that ban due to Palin hypocrisy of the highest order:

Gov. Palin, who asked for privacy concerning the matter of her teenage daughter's pregnancy, is flying Levi Johnston, the father-to-be (now her daughter's fiance) to Minneapolis to be on stage with the family during her speech tonight.

If Palin wanted privacy, why showcase the couple to the world? As the parent of a son who is now a young man, I find it reprehensible that she would parade him on national television, just to show he really will be a member of the family.

[...]

So Sarah Palin, in her bid to show America, that her daughter, who got pregnant as an unmarried teen is really no different than any other young married couple who get pregnant, is putting the best interests of her child and her fiance second to her need to show family love and harmony at a political event watched by millions around the world.

In my world, that comes close to a shaming punishment for the kids, one which I would argue to a judge in a criminal case is inappropriate for juveniles and can have long-lasting detrimental psychological effects.

[...]

Whatever modicum of restraint I felt Palin was entitled to is now gone. Since she has made the deciison to put her unwed daughter and fiance on stage in front of the world, she's forfeited any right to privacy I or anyone else previously granted her.

Jeralyn's commenting community is, typically, 85% outraged. If I was Jeralyn, I'd ban them all and start over again -- but, then, my commenting community consists of three people, and so far as I know, they are 100% good eggs.

As Always, Richard's Got My Back

2008-09-01T15:53:00.003-06:00

One of the Blogroot's greatest voices, Richard Blair, early on honored this blog with a place on the All Spin Zone's "Progressive Uber Alles" blogroll.

After posting twice on the GOP VP nominee's pregnancy issues (here and here), I wondered how some of my old blogging friends were responding to the rumors, if indeed they were giving them the time of day.

Richard, as usual, does not shy away from a prickly story:

There are so many other issues with which to skewer Sarah Palin (and I’ll be commenting on some of those issues later today). But as I noted, her teenage daughter’s pregnancy out of wedlock is supremely relevant to discussions that are sure to take place in the next several months. It’s as relevant, and maybe more so, as the fact that rabidly anti-gay Dick Cheney has a gay daughter, but that was out of bounds for some reason (because the GOP said so, I guess) in the last presidential election, where the issue of gay marriage was such a huge, divisive topic.

And if you believe for one moment that the McCain campaign knew about this ahead of time before they offered Sarah Palin the Veep slot on the ticket, I have a bridge to nowhere for sale. Cheap. If McCain did know about it, then that says even more about his judgment (which is already under question) in choosing Palin as his running mate.

For me, it's all about the hypocrisy, baby. If we don't shout it out from the rooftops, "they" will get away with demonizing the rest of us, as always.

No kid gloves. No way.

More GOP Hypocrisy

2008-09-01T14:03:00.002-06:00

Repression gets you nowhere:

Alabama's Anti-Gay Attorney General Caught in Bed with Male Aide

MONTGOMERY, Ala. - Okay; who said the following?

"The existence of the Gay-Lesbian Alliance on this campus is an affront to the state of Alabama, its citizenry, this university and its students."

"Currently, AIDS is the most behavior-oriented disease known to mankind. If this nation's current purveyors of perversion would refrain from committing sodomy, they would unquestioningly be spared the ravages of the disease."

"It is indeed sad that America has fallen to the point where she will condone any type of deviant, immoral activity in which a group desires to participate."

"I often hear the argument that homosexuals who live together create a loving, caring family environment, perhaps an environment which is even superior to that which can be provided by a heterosexual couple. In this day of rampant decadence, many homosexuals would mislead society into believing that three men, an armadillo and a house plant create a functional family."

If you guessed "Troy King, Attorney General of Alabama," give yourself a cigar!

That would be the same Troy King who, within the last couple of weeks - no exact date available - was caught by his wife Paige in bed with a male aide - in fact, a former "Homecoming King" from King's undergraduate days at Troy University - and subsequently thrown out of the couple's house.

The gifts just keep on falling from the sky....

Palin Responds to "Rumor"

2008-09-01T10:45:00.008-06:00

VP nominee Sarah Palin feels the need to respond to "liberal blog" reports that her daughter gave birth to a Down's Syndrome baby at age 16.

Interestingly, the "defense" Palin offers is that her now-17-year-old daughter is pregnant.

Hmm.

To rebut rumors, Palin says daughter, 17, pregnant

The 17-year-old daughter of Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin is pregnant, Palin said on Monday in an announcement intended to knock down rumors by liberal bloggers that Palin faked her own pregnancy to cover up for her child.

Bristol Palin, one of Alaska Gov. Palin's five children with her husband, Todd, is about five months pregnant and is going to keep the child and marry the father, the Palins said in a statement released by the campaign of Republican presidential candidate John McCain.

Bristol Palin made the decision on her own to keep the baby, McCain aides said.

Does this squelch the flames of controversy?

I'll leave it to others to do the chronological math, but at the moment, I'm wondering what would keep young Bristol from becoming pregnant a second time.

Stay tuned.....

UPDATE: While the DKos diary referenced in my previous post has mysteriously disappeared, there's a new one up that encourages us to keep moving on this story. I'll copy it it in its entirety, in case it goes away like the first one:

This is a complete cover up from the McCain campaign because the blogosphere is actually making headway in exposing Ms. Palin’s fake pregnancy. I made this deduction by how fast they’re willing to tell us about what we didn’t really ask them about.

Bristol is not currently pregnant; this press release is a head fake.
Bristol’s tummy is still big from the birth of Trig
Gov. Palin is using the ultimate cover up to cover her fake pregnancy.

Bristol is the real mother of Trig. And Trig is the grandson of Sarah.

This admission is all the proof we need; this admission of pregnancy is the red-flag.

Again congratulation folks for an outstanding "grassroots oppo job."

UPDATE II: Looks like the original diary is back up. Good.

UPDATE III: Here's a photo of Sarah Palin seven months pregnant with her son, Track Palin, in 1989:

...As opposed to this photo of Sarah Palin when she was supposed to be seven months pregnant with her daughter's Downs Syndrome baby:

Bloggers with more class than me are screaming that we should not touch this story. This is an example of typical Democrat-ic milquetoast behavior, fearing the consequences of moving beyond political correctness.

Personally, I'm sick and tired of purists on both sides of the political divide. They deserve everything they're getting, including this made-in-the-USA tabloid fiasco.

Thankfully, due to my lack of posting these last few months, hardly anyone finds this blog anymore.

Gustav Watching

2008-08-31T20:39:00.002-06:00

Dr. Jeff Masters at Weather Underground offers the most detailed-yet-understandable meteorological information out there. I can't recommend it highly enough.