Most people, I suspect, think Representative Stark's comments are hyperbole. Little do they know --does Stark himself know? -- that he's stating the simple truth. Or does everyone know? The part that's still not acknowledged in most places is that Bush and Cheney want to make war on the whole world. The Zionists are very happy with Bush because they see him as advancing their pro-Israel and militarist agenda. They don't yet understand yet that Bush is using them just as he uses every retrograde force in order to destroy every aspect of civilization within reach.
-- Ronald
Thursday, October 18, 2007
Rep. Pete Stark: We’re Raising Kids To Get Their Heads Blown Off For The President’s Amusement
I yield myself two minutes. Madam speaker, I, first of all, I’m just amazed that they can’t figure out—the Republicans are worried that they can’t pay for insuring an additional 10 million children. They sure don’t care about finding $200 billion to fight the illegal war in Iraq. Where are you going to get that money? Are you going to tell us lies like you’re telling us today? Is that how you’re going to fund the war? You don’t have money to fund the war on children. But you’re going to spend it to blow up innocent people if he can get enough kids to grow old enough for you to send to Iraq to get their heads blown off for the President’s amusement.
Sunday, October 28, 2007
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
San Franciso Chronicle: Continent-size toxic stew of plastic trash fouling swath of Pacific Ocean
Continent-size toxic stew of plastic trash fouling swath of Pacific Ocean
Justin Berton, Chronicle Staff Writer
Friday, October 19, 2007
At the start of the Academy Award-winning movie "American Beauty," a character videotapes a plastic grocery bag as it drifts into the air, an event he casts as a symbol of life's unpredictable currents, and declares the romantic moment as a "most beautiful thing."
To the eyes of an oceanographer, the image is pure catastrophe.
In reality, the rogue bag would float into a sewer, follow the storm drain to the ocean, then make its way to the so-called Great Pacific Garbage Patch - a heap of debris floating in the Pacific that's twice the size of Texas, according to marine biologists.
The enormous stew of trash - which consists of 80 percent plastics and weighs some 3.5 million tons, say oceanographers - floats where few people ever travel, in a no-man's land between San Francisco and Hawaii.
Marcus Eriksen, director of research and education at the Algalita Marine Research Foundation in Long Beach, said his group has been monitoring the Garbage Patch for 10 years.
"With the winds blowing in and the currents in the gyre going circular, it's the perfect environment for trapping," Eriksen said. "There's nothing we can do about it now, except do no more harm."
The patch has been growing, along with ocean debris worldwide, tenfold every decade since the 1950s, said Chris Parry, public education program manager with the California Coastal Commission in San Francisco.
Ocean current patterns may keep the flotsam stashed in a part of the world few will ever see, but the majority of its content is generated onshore, according to a report from Greenpeace last year titled "Plastic Debris in the World's Oceans."
The report found that 80 percent of the oceans' litter originated on land. While ships drop the occasional load of shoes or hockey gloves into the waters (sometimes on purpose and illegally), the vast majority of sea garbage begins its journey as onshore trash.
That's what makes a potentially toxic swamp like the Garbage Patch entirely preventable, Parry said.
"At this point, cleaning it up isn't an option," Parry said. "It's just going to get bigger as our reliance on plastics continues. ... The long-term solution is to stop producing as much plastic products at home and change our consumption habits."
Parry said using canvas bags to cart groceries instead of using plastic bags is a good first step; buying foods that aren't wrapped in plastics is another.
After the San Francisco Board of Supervisors banned the use of plastic grocery bags earlier this year with the problem of ocean debris in mind, a slew of state bills were written to limit bag production, said Sarah Christie, a legislative director with the California Coastal Commission.
But many of the bills failed after meeting strong opposition from plastics industry lobbyists, she said.
Meanwhile, the stew in the ocean continues to grow.
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is particularly dangerous for birds and marine life, said Warner Chabot, vice president of the Ocean Conservancy, an environmental group.
Sea turtles mistake clear plastic bags for jellyfish. Birds swoop down and swallow indigestible shards of plastic. The petroleum-based plastics take decades to break down, and as long as they float on the ocean's surface, they can appear as feeding grounds.
"These animals die because the plastic eventually fills their stomachs," Chabot said. "It doesn't pass, and they literally starve to death."
The Greenpeace report found that at least 267 marine species had suffered from some kind of ingestion or entanglement with marine debris.
Chabot said if environmentalists wanted to remove the ocean dump site, it would take a massive international effort that would cost billions. [STOP THE CRIMINAL WARS IN IRAQ/AFGHANISTAN, SAVE BILLIONS, AND CLEAN THE OCEAN! ELEMENTAL!!]
But that is unlikely, he added, because no one country is likely to step forward and claim the issue as its own responsibility.
Instead, cleaning up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is left to the landlubbers.
"What we can do is ban plastic fast food packaging," Chabot said, "or require the substitution of biodegradable materials, increase recycling programs and improve enforcement of litter laws.
"Otherwise, this ever-growing floating continent of trash will be with us for the foreseeable future."
How to help
You can help to limit the ever-growing patch of garbage floating in the Pacific Ocean. Here are some ways to help:
Limit your use of plastics when possible. Plastic doesn't easily degrade and can kill sea life.
Use a reusable bag when shopping. Throwaway bags can easily blow into the ocean.
Take your trash with you when you leave the beach.
Make sure your trash bins are securely closed. Keep all trash in closed bags.
Trash is also a problem in parts of San Francisco Bay. For an interactive map showing some of the worst locations, go to www.savesfbay.org/baytrash.
- Justin Berton jberton@sfchronicle.com
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/10/19/SS6JS8RH0.DTL
This article appeared on page W - 8 of the San Francisco Chronicle
Justin Berton, Chronicle Staff Writer
Friday, October 19, 2007
At the start of the Academy Award-winning movie "American Beauty," a character videotapes a plastic grocery bag as it drifts into the air, an event he casts as a symbol of life's unpredictable currents, and declares the romantic moment as a "most beautiful thing."
To the eyes of an oceanographer, the image is pure catastrophe.
In reality, the rogue bag would float into a sewer, follow the storm drain to the ocean, then make its way to the so-called Great Pacific Garbage Patch - a heap of debris floating in the Pacific that's twice the size of Texas, according to marine biologists.
The enormous stew of trash - which consists of 80 percent plastics and weighs some 3.5 million tons, say oceanographers - floats where few people ever travel, in a no-man's land between San Francisco and Hawaii.
Marcus Eriksen, director of research and education at the Algalita Marine Research Foundation in Long Beach, said his group has been monitoring the Garbage Patch for 10 years.
"With the winds blowing in and the currents in the gyre going circular, it's the perfect environment for trapping," Eriksen said. "There's nothing we can do about it now, except do no more harm."
The patch has been growing, along with ocean debris worldwide, tenfold every decade since the 1950s, said Chris Parry, public education program manager with the California Coastal Commission in San Francisco.
Ocean current patterns may keep the flotsam stashed in a part of the world few will ever see, but the majority of its content is generated onshore, according to a report from Greenpeace last year titled "Plastic Debris in the World's Oceans."
The report found that 80 percent of the oceans' litter originated on land. While ships drop the occasional load of shoes or hockey gloves into the waters (sometimes on purpose and illegally), the vast majority of sea garbage begins its journey as onshore trash.
That's what makes a potentially toxic swamp like the Garbage Patch entirely preventable, Parry said.
"At this point, cleaning it up isn't an option," Parry said. "It's just going to get bigger as our reliance on plastics continues. ... The long-term solution is to stop producing as much plastic products at home and change our consumption habits."
Parry said using canvas bags to cart groceries instead of using plastic bags is a good first step; buying foods that aren't wrapped in plastics is another.
After the San Francisco Board of Supervisors banned the use of plastic grocery bags earlier this year with the problem of ocean debris in mind, a slew of state bills were written to limit bag production, said Sarah Christie, a legislative director with the California Coastal Commission.
But many of the bills failed after meeting strong opposition from plastics industry lobbyists, she said.
Meanwhile, the stew in the ocean continues to grow.
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is particularly dangerous for birds and marine life, said Warner Chabot, vice president of the Ocean Conservancy, an environmental group.
Sea turtles mistake clear plastic bags for jellyfish. Birds swoop down and swallow indigestible shards of plastic. The petroleum-based plastics take decades to break down, and as long as they float on the ocean's surface, they can appear as feeding grounds.
"These animals die because the plastic eventually fills their stomachs," Chabot said. "It doesn't pass, and they literally starve to death."
The Greenpeace report found that at least 267 marine species had suffered from some kind of ingestion or entanglement with marine debris.
Chabot said if environmentalists wanted to remove the ocean dump site, it would take a massive international effort that would cost billions. [STOP THE CRIMINAL WARS IN IRAQ/AFGHANISTAN, SAVE BILLIONS, AND CLEAN THE OCEAN! ELEMENTAL!!]
But that is unlikely, he added, because no one country is likely to step forward and claim the issue as its own responsibility.
Instead, cleaning up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is left to the landlubbers.
"What we can do is ban plastic fast food packaging," Chabot said, "or require the substitution of biodegradable materials, increase recycling programs and improve enforcement of litter laws.
"Otherwise, this ever-growing floating continent of trash will be with us for the foreseeable future."
How to help
You can help to limit the ever-growing patch of garbage floating in the Pacific Ocean. Here are some ways to help:
Limit your use of plastics when possible. Plastic doesn't easily degrade and can kill sea life.
Use a reusable bag when shopping. Throwaway bags can easily blow into the ocean.
Take your trash with you when you leave the beach.
Make sure your trash bins are securely closed. Keep all trash in closed bags.
Trash is also a problem in parts of San Francisco Bay. For an interactive map showing some of the worst locations, go to www.savesfbay.org/baytrash.
- Justin Berton jberton@sfchronicle.com
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/10/19/SS6JS8RH0.DTL
This article appeared on page W - 8 of the San Francisco Chronicle
Friday, October 19, 2007
Arnon Soffer, Israeli advisor: Kill, Kill, Kill, Kill
Canadian blogger Xymphora -- indefatigable researcher and web browser -- found this. --RB
Insanity and sanity
Wednesday, October 17, 2007
http://xymphora.blogspot.com/
Xymphora writes:
If you ever start feeling sorry for the Israelis, read this article on Arnon Soffer, a geostrategist from the University of Haifa and head of research for the IDF’s National Defense College:
“Ruthie Blum: In our previous interview, you made many assertions about what could and should be expected to happen following the disengagement from Gaza. You claim now that everything has played out the way you said it would.
Soffer: Yes. I said, ‘The pressure at the border will be awful. It’s going to be a terrible war. So, if we want to remain alive, we will have to kill and kill and kill.’
That statement caused a huge stir at the time, and it’s amazing to see how many dozens of angry, ignorant responses I continue to receive from leftists in Israel and anti-Semites abroad, who took my words out of context. I didn’t recommend that we kill Palestinians. I said we’ll have to kill them.
I was right about mounting demographic pressures. I am also entitled to defend myself and my country. So today, I would update the headline you gave my last interview and call this one: ‘It’s the demography and anti-Semitism, stupid.’”
Note how Soffer instinctively uses the slur to defend himself against a completely justified criticism for advocating mass killing of Palestinians. Note how his other line of defense, also predictable (the Zionists are like robots!), is self-defense. This isn’t some marginal nut: he’s a key advisor to the Israeli government:
“We are living in a 100-year period of terrorism, and we have another 100 years of terrorism ahead of us. We will forever be forced to live by the sword. We are not wanted in the Middle East, which is why we will have to continue to fight.
The purpose of disengagement was not to put an end to terrorism or Kassam fire. Its purpose was to stop being responsible for a million and a half Arabs who continue to multiply in conditions of poverty and madness. I am thrilled that we are out of there. The Kassams do not constitute a strategic threat, and the Palestinians will get the blow they deserve - though we do have to be cautious, because the situation is complex.”
And, shades of ‘no dogs or niggers’:
“Our government has woken up. The only ones making noise are leftists and so-called human rights lawyers who only care about the well-being of cats, dogs and Palestinians, but never about Jews.”
He continues with a completely clear statement on the purpose of the apartheid wall:
“Thanks to this completely crazy security fence [here he points to another map, and runs his finger along the jagged line delineating it], we have succeeded in reducing the suicide bombings to zero. This by itself is a huge accomplishment. But [former prime minister Ariel] Sharon’s real achievement, which the public doesn’t appreciate, is having included Modi’in, Betar Illit and Ma’aleh Adumim in Israel. In other words, 180,000 Jews remain within greater Jerusalem with American support.
Today there are 270,000 settlers in the territories, and their numbers are increasing, through natural growth and due to Bnei Akiva members moving there. Through Sharon’s cleverness, Jerusalem remains in Israel and 210,000 settlers are within the fence. Only 60,000 remain outside. In other words, 86% of the settlers are at home. This is an unbelievable victory.”
Revelations about a conspiracy involving the American State Department:
“So, now you’re asking me - and rightly so - whether we have to evacuate the rest of the territories. Since our last interview, I have changed my mind about the Jordan Valley. I said then that we were probably going to have to relinquish it. I had been persuaded that there was no longer an eastern-front threat, now that Iraq had become friendly, that Syria was rusty and that our strategic peace with Jordan was sound. But then, suddenly, in November 2005, there was a suicide attack in Amman, which showed that there are al-Qaida cells there.
I also said that we would have to hold on to the Philadelphi Corridor in order to prevent an Egyptian-Gazan connection. Now, if we put our hands to our hearts, we have to admit that the IDF failed to secure Philadelphi - a 200-meter wide and 10-kilometer long area, on one side of which is a terrible country like Egypt, and on the other side of which is Iran. According to reliable sources, Iran was already in Gaza 10 months before disengagement. Why am I bringing this up in connection with the Jordan Valley? [President of the Council on Foreign Relations] Richard Haass, who was director of policy planning for the US State Department at the time, told me personally: ‘We’ll allow Israel to establish a ‘Philadelphi Corridor’ in the Jordan Valley, to guarantee the neutralization and demilitarization of Judea and Samaria.’”
Destroy, destroy and destroy:
“It’s because the IDF failed that we made that deal. That’s why today I think we have to retain control of both the Philadelphi Corridor and the Jordan Valley.
And if we return to Philadelphi, it will no longer be a mere 200 meters. It will have to be widened at the expense of the refugee camps in Rafah, which we will have to destroy, destroy and destroy.”
Israeli thinking on Iran (note that the suggestion would also destroy the world economy):
“I want to tell you: Two missiles on the Iranian islands of Karaj and Siri, and Iran’s entire oil revenue drops from $60 billion to zero. Iran is so weak and vulnerable that it’s unbelievable.”
Soffer sounds like a madman, but he represents mainstream Israeli strategic thinking. Ran HaCohen visits the ‘peace plan’ of the Israeli right, which is essentially the complete ethnic cleansing of the Occupied Territories together with the formalization of the apartheid process to cover Arabs in Israel proper (so that they may be ethnically cleansed in due course). As he points out, the craziest ideas of the Israeli right are the ideas of the IDF, and since Israel is a military dictatorship, soon become mainstream Israeli thinking.
Finally, the American Establishment, in a fight to the death with Jew-control in Washington, finally describes a reasonable settlement to the Palestinian problem, following their recent epiphany that such a settlement is necessary for real American interests. Too bad they didn’t come up with this twenty years ago.
Sunday, October 07, 2007
Left I on the News blogger has it right. Virtually all the influential Democrats are supporting -- or can't be seen not to be supporting -- a US attack on Iran. As many are warning, such an attack is likely to have a devastating effect on what is left of the US republic -- and for many many millions, that will be the least of the horrors.
Left I doesn't get into the reason that such a fanatical Zionist as Senator Lieberman can summon extensive political support for such a catastrophic undertaking. But as a advocate for Palestinian human and civil rights, LeftI probably wouldn't disagree that such potentially destructive legislative underwriting of Bush-Cheney warmongering is made possible or demanded by the powerful Zionist lobby which has been demonizing Iran as an existential threat with increasing persistence.
The mechanism of such demonizing is the same as has been pursued by leaders ever since there were human groups or tribes that coveted the resources of other human groups. Politicians soon learned that a quick and easy way to stay in power and to control a restive population was to promote fear and hatred of the Other (see Orwell's 1984).
Since 9/11 we have become even more tightly bound captives of this leadership requirement/desire for war in large part, because of the power and authority of one man, Dick Cheney, in a way that is perhaps unprecedented in US history. The Bush-Cheney leadership understands that in order to facilitate their pathological desire for endless war they can harness the power of Zionist interest in dominating the Middle East through constant tension and threats of war. Thus the devastation of Iraq and the current threats -- perhaps to be carried out early next year -- against Iran.
It’s not clear whether someone as clever as Senator Lieberman is driven more by arrogance or by denial in his refusal to recognize that his desire for an attack on Iran is likely to result in a disaster for both the US and Israel, and more likely in the short term rather than the middle or long term.
Our reality today is that the pathology and the ideology of those who were considered crazies only a few short years ago is present in the White House, the most powerful and darkly effective military machine the world has ever seen. And all this is supported and enabled by those who actively or tacitly support a Jewish state in the former Palestine. It's a little weird that our very civilization should be threatened by such a project and that this should be the moment in our history when the proverbial manure will find its way to reaches heretofore untouched.
In a footnote that might be helpful to those seeking evidence of the power that Zionism today has over the U.S. political system, one can find in a very useful and important newly published book by the redoubtable London based Palestinian activist and writer, Dr. Ghada Karmi, in her chapter on "Why Does the West Support Israel?" a quote from a campaign speech that Senator John Kerry made in 2004: He said:
“We are not secure while Israel, the one true democracy in the [Middle Eastern] region, remains the victim of an unrelenting campaign of terror…American leadership is needed to bolster Israel’s security at home as well as in the region.”
It should -- but doesn’t necessarily -- go without saying that Kerry has it exactly 180 degrees wrong: it is Israel which has been threatening the security of many if not all of its neighbors at one time or another or ever since it was implanted into the neighborhood.
That our leading politicians are forced to parrot the myth of Israeli insecurity as a regular staple in our campaign seasons and at all other relevant moments ought to be evidence enough of where is the tail and who is the dog.
As it happens, Dr Karmi is coming to the States in early November to publicize her new book, Married to Another Man: Israel’s Dilemma in Palestine . Those interested in learning about her appearances should contact me or Manal Ramadan : manalramadan2023@yahoo.com who is arranging her schedule.
Ronald
***
Blogger Left I on the News wrote:
Tuesday, October 02, 2007
The meaning of Lieberman-Kyl
http://lefti.blogspot.com/
There's been a lot written about the Lieberman-Kyl amendment that passed the Senate the other day 76-22, with Hillary Clinton voting for it and Barack Obama shamefully absenting himself from the vote. Most of the attention has been on its designation of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard as a "terrorist organization" and the implications that has for the possibility of a war against Iran (since the Senate has already given its approval for a "war on terror"). Amazingly, some Democrats are even bragging about how sections 3 and 4 were excised from the amendment before its passage:
(3) that it should be the policy of the United States to combat, contain, and roll back the violent activities and destabilizing influence inside Iraq of the Government of the Islamic Republic of Iran, its foreign facilitators such as Lebanese Hezbollah, and its indigenous Iraqi proxies;
(4) to support the prudent and calibrated use of all instruments of United States national power in Iraq, including diplomatic, economic, intelligence, and military instruments, in support of the policy described in paragraph (3) with respect to the Government of the Islamic Republic of Iran and its proxies;
But these deletions, while some kind of improvement, still don't detract from what the amendment accomplished in giving an imprimatur to war against Iran. Consider point 2 for example, which remains:
(2) that it is a vital national interest of the United States to prevent the Government of the Islamic Republic of Iran from turning Shi'a militia extremists in Iraq into a Hezbollah-like force that could serve its interests inside Iraq, including by overwhelming, subverting, or co-opting institutions of the legitimate Government of Iraq;
After all, if this is our "vital national interest," then whatever it takes to defend that "national interest" is surely acceptable.
So, even as amended, there can be no doubt that this amendment was a strong endorsement by the Senate, including half of the Democrats, for war against Iran. But actually, the reason I'm writing here is to call attention to the one section of the amendment which has been pretty much overlooked - section 1:
(1) that the manner in which the United States transitions and structures its military presence in Iraq will have critical long-term consequences for the future of the Persian Gulf and the Middle East, in particular with regard to the capability of the Government of the Islamic Republic of Iran to pose a threat to the security of the region, the prospects for democracy for the people of the region, and the health of the global economy;
What does that mean to you? I tell you what it means to me - that the Senate has just endorsed not just war against Iran, but an indefinite presence in Iraq, now justified as preventing Iran from "posing a threat to the security of the region."
***
Left I doesn't get into the reason that such a fanatical Zionist as Senator Lieberman can summon extensive political support for such a catastrophic undertaking. But as a advocate for Palestinian human and civil rights, LeftI probably wouldn't disagree that such potentially destructive legislative underwriting of Bush-Cheney warmongering is made possible or demanded by the powerful Zionist lobby which has been demonizing Iran as an existential threat with increasing persistence.
The mechanism of such demonizing is the same as has been pursued by leaders ever since there were human groups or tribes that coveted the resources of other human groups. Politicians soon learned that a quick and easy way to stay in power and to control a restive population was to promote fear and hatred of the Other (see Orwell's 1984).
Since 9/11 we have become even more tightly bound captives of this leadership requirement/desire for war in large part, because of the power and authority of one man, Dick Cheney, in a way that is perhaps unprecedented in US history. The Bush-Cheney leadership understands that in order to facilitate their pathological desire for endless war they can harness the power of Zionist interest in dominating the Middle East through constant tension and threats of war. Thus the devastation of Iraq and the current threats -- perhaps to be carried out early next year -- against Iran.
It’s not clear whether someone as clever as Senator Lieberman is driven more by arrogance or by denial in his refusal to recognize that his desire for an attack on Iran is likely to result in a disaster for both the US and Israel, and more likely in the short term rather than the middle or long term.
Our reality today is that the pathology and the ideology of those who were considered crazies only a few short years ago is present in the White House, the most powerful and darkly effective military machine the world has ever seen. And all this is supported and enabled by those who actively or tacitly support a Jewish state in the former Palestine. It's a little weird that our very civilization should be threatened by such a project and that this should be the moment in our history when the proverbial manure will find its way to reaches heretofore untouched.
In a footnote that might be helpful to those seeking evidence of the power that Zionism today has over the U.S. political system, one can find in a very useful and important newly published book by the redoubtable London based Palestinian activist and writer, Dr. Ghada Karmi, in her chapter on "Why Does the West Support Israel?" a quote from a campaign speech that Senator John Kerry made in 2004: He said:
“We are not secure while Israel, the one true democracy in the [Middle Eastern] region, remains the victim of an unrelenting campaign of terror…American leadership is needed to bolster Israel’s security at home as well as in the region.”
It should -- but doesn’t necessarily -- go without saying that Kerry has it exactly 180 degrees wrong: it is Israel which has been threatening the security of many if not all of its neighbors at one time or another or ever since it was implanted into the neighborhood.
That our leading politicians are forced to parrot the myth of Israeli insecurity as a regular staple in our campaign seasons and at all other relevant moments ought to be evidence enough of where is the tail and who is the dog.
As it happens, Dr Karmi is coming to the States in early November to publicize her new book, Married to Another Man: Israel’s Dilemma in Palestine . Those interested in learning about her appearances should contact me or Manal Ramadan : manalramadan2023@yahoo.com who is arranging her schedule.
Ronald
***
Blogger Left I on the News wrote:
Tuesday, October 02, 2007
The meaning of Lieberman-Kyl
http://lefti.blogspot.com/
There's been a lot written about the Lieberman-Kyl amendment that passed the Senate the other day 76-22, with Hillary Clinton voting for it and Barack Obama shamefully absenting himself from the vote. Most of the attention has been on its designation of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard as a "terrorist organization" and the implications that has for the possibility of a war against Iran (since the Senate has already given its approval for a "war on terror"). Amazingly, some Democrats are even bragging about how sections 3 and 4 were excised from the amendment before its passage:
(3) that it should be the policy of the United States to combat, contain, and roll back the violent activities and destabilizing influence inside Iraq of the Government of the Islamic Republic of Iran, its foreign facilitators such as Lebanese Hezbollah, and its indigenous Iraqi proxies;
(4) to support the prudent and calibrated use of all instruments of United States national power in Iraq, including diplomatic, economic, intelligence, and military instruments, in support of the policy described in paragraph (3) with respect to the Government of the Islamic Republic of Iran and its proxies;
But these deletions, while some kind of improvement, still don't detract from what the amendment accomplished in giving an imprimatur to war against Iran. Consider point 2 for example, which remains:
(2) that it is a vital national interest of the United States to prevent the Government of the Islamic Republic of Iran from turning Shi'a militia extremists in Iraq into a Hezbollah-like force that could serve its interests inside Iraq, including by overwhelming, subverting, or co-opting institutions of the legitimate Government of Iraq;
After all, if this is our "vital national interest," then whatever it takes to defend that "national interest" is surely acceptable.
So, even as amended, there can be no doubt that this amendment was a strong endorsement by the Senate, including half of the Democrats, for war against Iran. But actually, the reason I'm writing here is to call attention to the one section of the amendment which has been pretty much overlooked - section 1:
(1) that the manner in which the United States transitions and structures its military presence in Iraq will have critical long-term consequences for the future of the Persian Gulf and the Middle East, in particular with regard to the capability of the Government of the Islamic Republic of Iran to pose a threat to the security of the region, the prospects for democracy for the people of the region, and the health of the global economy;
What does that mean to you? I tell you what it means to me - that the Senate has just endorsed not just war against Iran, but an indefinite presence in Iraq, now justified as preventing Iran from "posing a threat to the security of the region."
***
Sara Roy's review of a book on Hamas Censored
Don't miss the details below of how Sara Roy's review of a book on Hamas was censored. Yet another instance of Zionist censorship, this time of an article by a highly regarded academic who has written definitive books on life in Gaza and on life for the Palestinians under Israeli occupation.
The interesting thing is that in so many less than high profile cases, an Alan Dershowitz is not required to silence any semblance of an anti-Zionist, or anti Israeli policy, or simply objective position. All that is required in these cases is a pro Israeli faculty member or two to notice that this or that review, this or that associate professor is not good for the Jews, not good for Zionism.
The Zionists have the power, they know they have the power and they know they are free to exercise their power with minimal chance of pushback or consequence. So the niceties of fair play, academic freedom, of speech, don't apply. (Would we do the same thing if we had the power?) The same can be said of the "war on terror."Freedom of speech, due process doesn't apply to those who are perceived as terrorists, enemies, real or imagined of the US and/or Israel, as long as they are Muslims.
Ronald
***>
> BOOK REVIEW
>
> Hamas: Politics, Charity and Terrorism in the Service of Jihad by
> Matthew Levitt. Yale University Press, in cooperation with the
> Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 2006. 324 pages, $26.00,
> hardcover.
>
> Sara Roy
> Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Harvard University
> http://mepc.org/journal_vol14/0707_roy.asp
>
> Author's Note:
> This review, published here in its entirety, was originally
> commissioned by The Fletcher Forum of World Affairs, the official
> foreign-policy journal at the Fletcher School at Tufts University.
>
> Between the time I was invited to write the review and the time I was
> told it would be published, over two months had passed during which I
> had had several exchanges, some of them difficult, with the editorial
> staff. However, by the end of the process the editor-in-chief, with
> whom I had been working, was pleased with the review, and so was I. He
> sent me an e-PDF of the review as it would appear in the journal
> (Volume 31:1 Winter 2007). The PDF version of the page proofs revealed
> that the editor had excerpted two relevant sentences (featured in
> sidebars) to highlight observations that I had offered in the review:
>
> 1. "While there can be no doubt that, since its inception, Hamas has
> engaged in violence and armed struggle, and has been the primary force
> behind the horrific suicide bombings inside Israel, Levitt's
> presentation reduces this increasingly complex and sophisticated
> organization to an insular, one-dimensional...entity dedicated solely
> to violence...and Israel's destruction."
> 2. "The ability of Hamas to reinterpret itself over time through
> processes of radicalization, de-radicalization, de-militarization, and
> re-radicalization is a pronounced and common theme in its historical
> evolution."
> During a subsequent exchange the editor-in-chief wrote, "Thank you for
> your hard work as well. It's a good review." I believed that was the
> end of the matter. Just a few days later, I received the following
> e-mail message from the same editor-in-chief:
>
> Dear Ms. Roy:
> ?After careful review and much consideration of the merits of your
> piece, we have decided that we are ultimately unable to publish your
> review for this edition. Your review was evaluated by several of our
> editors and an external editor for objectivity. Unfortunately, they
> disagreed with my decision to publish your review for the following
> reasons: despite their agreement with many of your points, all
> reviewers found the piece one-sided. This one-sidedness dissuaded
> readers from reading the piece to the end; ultimately, this last point
> is the most important. Although I found your arguments valuable, if
> readers consistently feel this way, I am unable to move forward with a
> piece. My apologies for the way in which this process was carried out,
> and for the time that you spent on editing the piece. Thank you once
> again for your submission and your efforts. If you would like to
> discuss this further, please feel free to e-mail me.
>
> In more than 20 years of writing and publishing I have never
> experienced such behavior or encountered what to me, at least, is so
> blatant a case of censorship. I am therefore extremely grateful to
> Anne Joyce and Stephen Magro for agreeing to publish the review in
> Middle East Policy.
>
> ===
>
> At the beginning of the first Palestinian uprising, I was living in
> Gaza and spent much time in the refugee camps interviewing families
> about the political and socioeconomic changes taking place around
> them. Despite the harsh living situation, Palestinians were filled
> with a palpable sense of hope and possibility that has since
> evaporated. Hamas was then struggling to create a popular
> constituency, despite overwhelming support among Palestinians for
> secular nationalism. That was 18 years ago, and neither I nor anyone
> else ever thought that Hamas would one day emerge as a major political
> actor: democratically winning legislative elections, defeating the
> majority Fatah party and heading a Palestinian government.
>
> In his recent book, Matthew Levitt, who is deputy assistant secretary
> for intelligence and analysis at the U.S. Department of the Treasury
> and an expert in financial counterterrorism, argues that Hamas is
> strictly a terrorist organization that is not only a domestic threat
> but a global one, a part of an international jihad network with links
> to al-Qaeda that must be met with force. He further argues ? and this
> is the core of his book ? that despite the existence of differentiated
> political, social and military sectors within Hamas, they are all part
> of the same "apparatus of terror."
>
> Levitt devotes significant attention to attacking the Islamist social
> sector (dawa) and Hamas's charitable institutions. It is the principle
> aim of his book to show how Hamas uses its extensive social-service
> network-mosques, schools, kindergartens, orphanages, hospitals,
> clinics, sports clubs, youth clubs-to further its primary political
> agenda, which he claims is the destruction of Israel. He argues that
> through its social support structure and services, "Hamas leverages
> the appreciation (and indebtedness) it earns through social welfare
> activities to garner support ? both political and logistical ? for its
> terrorist activities." Levitt summarizes his argument as follows: "The
> general deprivation of the Palestinian people in the Israeli-occupied
> territories predisposes them to favor the much-needed social support
> that Hamas provides." He continues, "In addition to purchasing
> goodwill, charities also create a built-in logistical support umbrella
> underneath which terrorist operations are sheltered and operate." He
> explains that the dawa network operationally supports terrorism
> through recruitment, employment and financing and by providing
> institutional legitimacy.
>
> His evidence, at times interesting, particularly with regard to
> Hamas's external sources of financing, is more often than not based on
> assumption, extrapolation and generalization. For example, as evidence
> for how religious organizations raise money for Palestinian terrorism,
> Levitt quotes from a pamphlet produced by a Quranic memorization
> center that was sponsored by the Ramallah-al Bireh charity committee.
> The pamphlet listed 30 ways to enter heaven, including "Jihad for the
> sake of Allah by fighting with one's soul and money."
>
> In another example of how hospitals are used to support terrorism,
> Levitt briefly describes the Dar al-Salam Hospital: "According to
> information cited by the FBI," the hospital is considered a Hamas
> institution because it was founded with "Hamas funds and protection."
> But Levitt fails to provide any real evidence of these funds or how
> and why they are considered "Hamas." The assumption is that these
> ties, even if they are shown to exist, are inherently evil and can be
> nothing else.
>
> In a chapter on how the dawa teaches terror and radicalizes
> Palestinian society, Levitt writes, "Recipients of Hamas financial aid
> or social services are less likely to turn down requests from the
> organization such as allowing their homes to serve as safe houses for
> Hamas fugitives, ferrying fugitives, couriering funds or weapons,
> storing and maintaining explosives, and more." He cites as evidence
> for this sweeping statement one resident of Jabalya refugee camp in
> Gaza who fed Hamas militants daily. The possibility that Palestinians
> receive support from Hamas institutions without preconditions or that
> popular support requires more than the lure of financial incentives
> and free social services does not enter Levitt's argument. Levitt also
> claims, "When angry, frustrated or humiliated Palestinians regularly
> listen to sermons in mosques in which Jews, Israelis and even
> Americans are depicted as enemies of Islam and Palestine, Hamas's
> official policy may not restrain individual enthusiasm." One wonders
> how Mr. Levitt knows these things, given that he appears never to have
> stepped inside a Hamas institution in Gaza or the West Bank or to have
> conducted any fieldwork at all.
>
> While these arguments are oft-repeated in today's media, Levitt does
> little to address research that supports a very different conclusion
> regarding the Hamas dawa. Some of the key findings of this research
> point to institutional features that demonstrate no preference for
> religion or politics over other ideologies, particularly in
> programmatic work; an approach to institutional work that advocates
> incrementalism, moderation, order and stability; a philosophical and
> practical desire for productivity and professionalism that shuns
> radical change and emphasizes community development and civic
> restoration over political violence; and no evidence of any formal
> attempt to impose an Islamic model of political, social, legal or
> religious behavior, or to create an alternative Islamic or Islamist
> conception of society.
>
> While there can be no doubt that, since its inception, Hamas has
> engaged in violence and armed struggle and has been the primary force
> behind the horrific suicide bombings inside Israel, Levitt's
> presentation reduces this increasingly complex and sophisticated
> organization to an insular, one-dimensional and seemingly mindless
> entity dedicated solely to violence, terrorism and Israel's
> destruction. To fully understand the current political stature of
> Hamas, it is necessary to closely examine the dramatic transitions
> that have occurred within the organization itself, among Palestinians
> with respect to their society, and in Palestine's relationship with
> Israel.
>
>> From the point of view of Hamas, Palestine is an Arab and Islamic land
> that fell to colonial control with the demise of the Ottoman Empire.
> The establishment of the State of Israel is viewed as a way to
> perpetuate colonial authority over the Muslim homeland and is
> therefore illegitimate. As victims of colonialism, Hamas argues that
> Palestinians have the right to resist and struggle to regain their
> homeland and freedom, viewing this as a local and nationalist
> struggle. Now, almost two decades after its birth, Hamas has grown in
> size and popularity. While changes have not been made to its frame of
> reference or objectives, its political discourse has become more
> refined and streamlined, particularly with regard to its relations
> with local groups, political factions, other religious communities and
> other nations.
>
> Unfortunately, Matthew Levitt's book does not address the critical
> evolutionary processes ? particularly with regard to its
> organizational structure and political, social and economic role in
> Palestinian society ? that have characterized the Palestinian Islamist
> movement and Hamas's rise to power. The ability of Hamas to
> reinterpret itself over time through processes of radicalization,
> de-radicalization, de-militarization and re-radicalization is a
> pronounced and common theme in its historical evolution. Levitt
> neglects to address the significance behind this commitment to
> reinterpretation. His analysis aims simply to demonize Hamas, and he
> discounts the critical connections between changing patterns of
> protest and structures of society, competing visions of a Palestinian
> social and political order, and contesting Islamic and secular
> definitions of meaning and legitimacy. The synergy among these forces
> has characterized the history and growth of Palestinian Islamism.
>
> Israel's military occupation, which has long been the defining context
> for Palestinian life, is almost absent from Levitt's book. Hamas's
> popularity and growing empowerment derive from its role as a
> resistance organization, fighting against an occupation that is now 40
> years old. Israel's steady expropriation, fragmentation and division
> of Palestinian lands; settlement construction and expansion; closure
> restrictions and destruction of the Palestinian economy are not part
> of Levitt's discussion, nor is the right of the Palestinians to resist
> these measures. In those few instances where the occupation is
> mentioned, it is couched in terms that acknowledge Palestinian
> hardship ? a reality exploited by Hamas ? but justified as a response
> to terrorism. In the absence of any serious examination of Israel's
> occupation, Levitt's portrayal of the rise of Hamas is completely
> detached from the context within which it was produced and shaped.
>
> Despite evidence to the contrary, the organization is also described
> as a movement incapable of transformation, ignoring the improvements
> in Hamas's political discourse regarding political compromise with the
> State of Israel and resolution of the conflict. During the period of
> the Oslo peace process, for example, some dramatic changes occurred
> within Hamas. The organization was moving away from the extreme and a
> position of confrontation towards one that was more centrist and
> moderate. This shift was characterized by a reorientation in policy
> and strategic emphasis from political/military action to social works
> and community development. Accompanying this shift was a redefinition
> of the nature of the Palestinian struggle, which was no longer for
> political or military power per se but for defining new social
> arrangements and appropriate cultural and institutional models that
> would meet social needs without resort to violence. Similarly, the
> Islamist movement was not advancing a policy of isolation but was
> calling for greater accommodation and cooperation with both domestic
> and international actors.
>
> Since Hamas's victory in the January 2006 legislative elections, there
> has been a further evolution in its political thinking ? as evidenced
> in some of its key political documents ? characterized by a strong
> emphasis on state-building and programmatic work, greater refinement
> with regard to its position on a two-state solution and the role of
> resistance, and a progressive de-emphasis on religion. (See Khaled
> Hroub, "A `New Hamas' Through Its New Documents," Journal of Palestine
> Studies, 34 (4) (Summer 2006)). These are absent from Levitt's
> discussion. Levitt also overlooks questions that are vital to any
> analysis of Hamas, especially at present. To name just a few, what
> were Hamas's ideological, philosophical and structural boundaries? How
> and why were they reset and expanded? What is the role of religion as
> opposed to politics in Islamist thought and practice, particularly in
> the public sphere? Are religion and politics truly unified? Can Hamas
> reconcile faith and ideology with a demand for a place in the
> political system?
>
> Levitt's book has many serious flaws and merits a detailed critique
> that extends well beyond the scope of this review. His is not a work
> of analysis or scholarship, to say the least, and despite certain
> points that are interesting and accurate, anyone wishing to gain a
> substantive, reasoned and critical understanding of Hamas would do
> well to look elsewhere.
>
> *********************************************************************
The interesting thing is that in so many less than high profile cases, an Alan Dershowitz is not required to silence any semblance of an anti-Zionist, or anti Israeli policy, or simply objective position. All that is required in these cases is a pro Israeli faculty member or two to notice that this or that review, this or that associate professor is not good for the Jews, not good for Zionism.
The Zionists have the power, they know they have the power and they know they are free to exercise their power with minimal chance of pushback or consequence. So the niceties of fair play, academic freedom, of speech, don't apply. (Would we do the same thing if we had the power?) The same can be said of the "war on terror."Freedom of speech, due process doesn't apply to those who are perceived as terrorists, enemies, real or imagined of the US and/or Israel, as long as they are Muslims.
Ronald
***>
> BOOK REVIEW
>
> Hamas: Politics, Charity and Terrorism in the Service of Jihad by
> Matthew Levitt. Yale University Press, in cooperation with the
> Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 2006. 324 pages, $26.00,
> hardcover.
>
> Sara Roy
> Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Harvard University
> http://mepc.org/journal_vol14/0707_roy.asp
>
> Author's Note:
> This review, published here in its entirety, was originally
> commissioned by The Fletcher Forum of World Affairs, the official
> foreign-policy journal at the Fletcher School at Tufts University.
>
> Between the time I was invited to write the review and the time I was
> told it would be published, over two months had passed during which I
> had had several exchanges, some of them difficult, with the editorial
> staff. However, by the end of the process the editor-in-chief, with
> whom I had been working, was pleased with the review, and so was I. He
> sent me an e-PDF of the review as it would appear in the journal
> (Volume 31:1 Winter 2007). The PDF version of the page proofs revealed
> that the editor had excerpted two relevant sentences (featured in
> sidebars) to highlight observations that I had offered in the review:
>
> 1. "While there can be no doubt that, since its inception, Hamas has
> engaged in violence and armed struggle, and has been the primary force
> behind the horrific suicide bombings inside Israel, Levitt's
> presentation reduces this increasingly complex and sophisticated
> organization to an insular, one-dimensional...entity dedicated solely
> to violence...and Israel's destruction."
> 2. "The ability of Hamas to reinterpret itself over time through
> processes of radicalization, de-radicalization, de-militarization, and
> re-radicalization is a pronounced and common theme in its historical
> evolution."
> During a subsequent exchange the editor-in-chief wrote, "Thank you for
> your hard work as well. It's a good review." I believed that was the
> end of the matter. Just a few days later, I received the following
> e-mail message from the same editor-in-chief:
>
> Dear Ms. Roy:
> ?After careful review and much consideration of the merits of your
> piece, we have decided that we are ultimately unable to publish your
> review for this edition. Your review was evaluated by several of our
> editors and an external editor for objectivity. Unfortunately, they
> disagreed with my decision to publish your review for the following
> reasons: despite their agreement with many of your points, all
> reviewers found the piece one-sided. This one-sidedness dissuaded
> readers from reading the piece to the end; ultimately, this last point
> is the most important. Although I found your arguments valuable, if
> readers consistently feel this way, I am unable to move forward with a
> piece. My apologies for the way in which this process was carried out,
> and for the time that you spent on editing the piece. Thank you once
> again for your submission and your efforts. If you would like to
> discuss this further, please feel free to e-mail me.
>
> In more than 20 years of writing and publishing I have never
> experienced such behavior or encountered what to me, at least, is so
> blatant a case of censorship. I am therefore extremely grateful to
> Anne Joyce and Stephen Magro for agreeing to publish the review in
> Middle East Policy.
>
> ===
>
> At the beginning of the first Palestinian uprising, I was living in
> Gaza and spent much time in the refugee camps interviewing families
> about the political and socioeconomic changes taking place around
> them. Despite the harsh living situation, Palestinians were filled
> with a palpable sense of hope and possibility that has since
> evaporated. Hamas was then struggling to create a popular
> constituency, despite overwhelming support among Palestinians for
> secular nationalism. That was 18 years ago, and neither I nor anyone
> else ever thought that Hamas would one day emerge as a major political
> actor: democratically winning legislative elections, defeating the
> majority Fatah party and heading a Palestinian government.
>
> In his recent book, Matthew Levitt, who is deputy assistant secretary
> for intelligence and analysis at the U.S. Department of the Treasury
> and an expert in financial counterterrorism, argues that Hamas is
> strictly a terrorist organization that is not only a domestic threat
> but a global one, a part of an international jihad network with links
> to al-Qaeda that must be met with force. He further argues ? and this
> is the core of his book ? that despite the existence of differentiated
> political, social and military sectors within Hamas, they are all part
> of the same "apparatus of terror."
>
> Levitt devotes significant attention to attacking the Islamist social
> sector (dawa) and Hamas's charitable institutions. It is the principle
> aim of his book to show how Hamas uses its extensive social-service
> network-mosques, schools, kindergartens, orphanages, hospitals,
> clinics, sports clubs, youth clubs-to further its primary political
> agenda, which he claims is the destruction of Israel. He argues that
> through its social support structure and services, "Hamas leverages
> the appreciation (and indebtedness) it earns through social welfare
> activities to garner support ? both political and logistical ? for its
> terrorist activities." Levitt summarizes his argument as follows: "The
> general deprivation of the Palestinian people in the Israeli-occupied
> territories predisposes them to favor the much-needed social support
> that Hamas provides." He continues, "In addition to purchasing
> goodwill, charities also create a built-in logistical support umbrella
> underneath which terrorist operations are sheltered and operate." He
> explains that the dawa network operationally supports terrorism
> through recruitment, employment and financing and by providing
> institutional legitimacy.
>
> His evidence, at times interesting, particularly with regard to
> Hamas's external sources of financing, is more often than not based on
> assumption, extrapolation and generalization. For example, as evidence
> for how religious organizations raise money for Palestinian terrorism,
> Levitt quotes from a pamphlet produced by a Quranic memorization
> center that was sponsored by the Ramallah-al Bireh charity committee.
> The pamphlet listed 30 ways to enter heaven, including "Jihad for the
> sake of Allah by fighting with one's soul and money."
>
> In another example of how hospitals are used to support terrorism,
> Levitt briefly describes the Dar al-Salam Hospital: "According to
> information cited by the FBI," the hospital is considered a Hamas
> institution because it was founded with "Hamas funds and protection."
> But Levitt fails to provide any real evidence of these funds or how
> and why they are considered "Hamas." The assumption is that these
> ties, even if they are shown to exist, are inherently evil and can be
> nothing else.
>
> In a chapter on how the dawa teaches terror and radicalizes
> Palestinian society, Levitt writes, "Recipients of Hamas financial aid
> or social services are less likely to turn down requests from the
> organization such as allowing their homes to serve as safe houses for
> Hamas fugitives, ferrying fugitives, couriering funds or weapons,
> storing and maintaining explosives, and more." He cites as evidence
> for this sweeping statement one resident of Jabalya refugee camp in
> Gaza who fed Hamas militants daily. The possibility that Palestinians
> receive support from Hamas institutions without preconditions or that
> popular support requires more than the lure of financial incentives
> and free social services does not enter Levitt's argument. Levitt also
> claims, "When angry, frustrated or humiliated Palestinians regularly
> listen to sermons in mosques in which Jews, Israelis and even
> Americans are depicted as enemies of Islam and Palestine, Hamas's
> official policy may not restrain individual enthusiasm." One wonders
> how Mr. Levitt knows these things, given that he appears never to have
> stepped inside a Hamas institution in Gaza or the West Bank or to have
> conducted any fieldwork at all.
>
> While these arguments are oft-repeated in today's media, Levitt does
> little to address research that supports a very different conclusion
> regarding the Hamas dawa. Some of the key findings of this research
> point to institutional features that demonstrate no preference for
> religion or politics over other ideologies, particularly in
> programmatic work; an approach to institutional work that advocates
> incrementalism, moderation, order and stability; a philosophical and
> practical desire for productivity and professionalism that shuns
> radical change and emphasizes community development and civic
> restoration over political violence; and no evidence of any formal
> attempt to impose an Islamic model of political, social, legal or
> religious behavior, or to create an alternative Islamic or Islamist
> conception of society.
>
> While there can be no doubt that, since its inception, Hamas has
> engaged in violence and armed struggle and has been the primary force
> behind the horrific suicide bombings inside Israel, Levitt's
> presentation reduces this increasingly complex and sophisticated
> organization to an insular, one-dimensional and seemingly mindless
> entity dedicated solely to violence, terrorism and Israel's
> destruction. To fully understand the current political stature of
> Hamas, it is necessary to closely examine the dramatic transitions
> that have occurred within the organization itself, among Palestinians
> with respect to their society, and in Palestine's relationship with
> Israel.
>
>> From the point of view of Hamas, Palestine is an Arab and Islamic land
> that fell to colonial control with the demise of the Ottoman Empire.
> The establishment of the State of Israel is viewed as a way to
> perpetuate colonial authority over the Muslim homeland and is
> therefore illegitimate. As victims of colonialism, Hamas argues that
> Palestinians have the right to resist and struggle to regain their
> homeland and freedom, viewing this as a local and nationalist
> struggle. Now, almost two decades after its birth, Hamas has grown in
> size and popularity. While changes have not been made to its frame of
> reference or objectives, its political discourse has become more
> refined and streamlined, particularly with regard to its relations
> with local groups, political factions, other religious communities and
> other nations.
>
> Unfortunately, Matthew Levitt's book does not address the critical
> evolutionary processes ? particularly with regard to its
> organizational structure and political, social and economic role in
> Palestinian society ? that have characterized the Palestinian Islamist
> movement and Hamas's rise to power. The ability of Hamas to
> reinterpret itself over time through processes of radicalization,
> de-radicalization, de-militarization and re-radicalization is a
> pronounced and common theme in its historical evolution. Levitt
> neglects to address the significance behind this commitment to
> reinterpretation. His analysis aims simply to demonize Hamas, and he
> discounts the critical connections between changing patterns of
> protest and structures of society, competing visions of a Palestinian
> social and political order, and contesting Islamic and secular
> definitions of meaning and legitimacy. The synergy among these forces
> has characterized the history and growth of Palestinian Islamism.
>
> Israel's military occupation, which has long been the defining context
> for Palestinian life, is almost absent from Levitt's book. Hamas's
> popularity and growing empowerment derive from its role as a
> resistance organization, fighting against an occupation that is now 40
> years old. Israel's steady expropriation, fragmentation and division
> of Palestinian lands; settlement construction and expansion; closure
> restrictions and destruction of the Palestinian economy are not part
> of Levitt's discussion, nor is the right of the Palestinians to resist
> these measures. In those few instances where the occupation is
> mentioned, it is couched in terms that acknowledge Palestinian
> hardship ? a reality exploited by Hamas ? but justified as a response
> to terrorism. In the absence of any serious examination of Israel's
> occupation, Levitt's portrayal of the rise of Hamas is completely
> detached from the context within which it was produced and shaped.
>
> Despite evidence to the contrary, the organization is also described
> as a movement incapable of transformation, ignoring the improvements
> in Hamas's political discourse regarding political compromise with the
> State of Israel and resolution of the conflict. During the period of
> the Oslo peace process, for example, some dramatic changes occurred
> within Hamas. The organization was moving away from the extreme and a
> position of confrontation towards one that was more centrist and
> moderate. This shift was characterized by a reorientation in policy
> and strategic emphasis from political/military action to social works
> and community development. Accompanying this shift was a redefinition
> of the nature of the Palestinian struggle, which was no longer for
> political or military power per se but for defining new social
> arrangements and appropriate cultural and institutional models that
> would meet social needs without resort to violence. Similarly, the
> Islamist movement was not advancing a policy of isolation but was
> calling for greater accommodation and cooperation with both domestic
> and international actors.
>
> Since Hamas's victory in the January 2006 legislative elections, there
> has been a further evolution in its political thinking ? as evidenced
> in some of its key political documents ? characterized by a strong
> emphasis on state-building and programmatic work, greater refinement
> with regard to its position on a two-state solution and the role of
> resistance, and a progressive de-emphasis on religion. (See Khaled
> Hroub, "A `New Hamas' Through Its New Documents," Journal of Palestine
> Studies, 34 (4) (Summer 2006)). These are absent from Levitt's
> discussion. Levitt also overlooks questions that are vital to any
> analysis of Hamas, especially at present. To name just a few, what
> were Hamas's ideological, philosophical and structural boundaries? How
> and why were they reset and expanded? What is the role of religion as
> opposed to politics in Islamist thought and practice, particularly in
> the public sphere? Are religion and politics truly unified? Can Hamas
> reconcile faith and ideology with a demand for a place in the
> political system?
>
> Levitt's book has many serious flaws and merits a detailed critique
> that extends well beyond the scope of this review. His is not a work
> of analysis or scholarship, to say the least, and despite certain
> points that are interesting and accurate, anyone wishing to gain a
> substantive, reasoned and critical understanding of Hamas would do
> well to look elsewhere.
>
> *********************************************************************
Sunday, September 30, 2007
Carol A. Valentine: (2002, 2004) Israelis create Palestinian Suicide Bombers
Tooth Fairies And Suicide Bombers
or
"Hi, my name is Abdula. I'll be your suicide bomber this evening ..."
by Carol A. Valentine
Curator, Waco Holocaust Electronic Museum
http://www.Public-Action.com
Copyright, May, 2002
May be reproduced for non-commercial purposes.
May 9, 2002 — People, let's use our noggins. The suicide bombers are not what they seem to be.
For many months now, I have been reading stories in the Washington Post and the Washington Times about alleged "suicide bombers". Within a short time after the attack, not only is the suicide bomber identified by name, but we have nice colored photos, almost portrait quality shots, of the dead culprits.
For example, on April 27, 2002, the Washington Post ran an article in the Style section, "Female Suicide Bombers: the New Factor in Mideast's Deadly Equation." Shown at the top of the article are four color photos of the faces of four Palestinian (?) women, face to the camera, posed for the photographer.
How thoughtful of the suicide bombers to have those photos taken. How thoughtful of the suicide bombers to leave the photos behind to be conveniently found by the Zionist-owned press. And what a public service the Zionist-owned press is doing the whole world by publishing these photos.
SUICIDE BOMBER MIRACLES
Typically, stories about suicide bombers tell us that the bomber went to a public place such as a bus stop, market, restaurant, pool hall, etc., and blew himself/herself up along with one, two, or many Israelis.
Funny, they rarely hit military targets. I wonder why?
The general story line is that the bomber had explosives attached to his/her person. The story goes on to describe the carnage in grisly detail — dismembered bodies, etc. But, remarkably, the suicide bomber himself/herself is not blown to smithereens. The bomber's body is left in sufficiently good shape to be identified immediately, and of course the Israeli authorities do just that.
But even more remarkable: The Israelis come up with these nice portraits of the culprits. And what is most remarkable of all? Everything is coordinated, bombers ID'd, photos gathered, stories written — and published all over the world by the Zionist press — within a few hours or days after the event.
SUICIDE BOMBING NOT TOO SMART
Why would a Palestinian bent on vengeance commit suicide? Far better to go to the bus stop, market, restaurant, pool hall, etc., with a shopping bag or backpack full of explosives, casually discard the package in some inconspicuous place, and leave. BOOM! Lots of Israelis die, and the bomber walks away to bomb another location next week. But no, we are asked to believe that the suicide bombers blow THEMSELVES up, too.
"Why would the bombers do that?" we ask. "Because they are fanatics, that's why," is the response.
Well, if you are a Palestinian fanatic you would surely would want to kill as many Israelis as possible. You would want to extend your life as long as possible to do that job. Committing suicide unnecessarily would be a very dumb thing to do.
WHY NO IRA SUICIDE BOMBERS?
In all the years of IRA activity in Northern Ireland and Britain, the IRA never used suicide bombers, did they? Wonder why the "Palestinians" have to?
IT'S THE QUR'AN!
THEY DO IT BECAUSE THEY'RE MUSLIMS!
There's another variation to these inane suicide bomber stories.
"The suicide bombers are not just fanatics, they are MUSLIM fanatics. Allah will reward them for their deeds. They want to go to heaven to be rewarded."
Yet I have NEVER seen one cite from the Qur'an that justifies suicide, under any conditions. Quite the reverse. I have seen cites from the Qur'an which clearly prohibit suicide.
Now doubtless there are passages in the Qur'an saying eternal bliss will be endowed upon those brave souls who lose their lives while fighting God's war. Big deal. We have chaplains in the US military who, give or take, give our soldiers the same kind of message. That's their job.
If the Israelis want us to believe that the suicide bombers are fanatic Muslims, they need to come up with Qur'anic scriptures to prove their point. They don't. They can't. The Israelis are lying. What else is new?
SUICIDE BOMBERS AND SUICIDE BOMBERS
The Palestinian suicide bombers have been compared to the Japanese Kamikazee pilots who purposely flew their bomb-laden planes into American war ships at sea during world War II.
The Japanese knew they were in danger of losing the war, and they wanted to reverse the trend. So they arrived at a strategy which would inflict maximum American damage for minimum Japanese damage. The Kamikazee strategy was very successful. For each Japanese killed, 10 Americans were killed and many ships were sunk or badly damaged. Unfortunately for the Japanese, the Kamikazee strategy was not successful enough. The US had the A-bomb.
The Kamikazee pilots' purpose was not to commit suicide. Their deaths were the necessary by product of a heroic attempt to defeat a military enemy, an enemy who threatened the life of the Emperor, their God. Of course the Kamikazee pilots thought they'd go to Heaven, too, but that seems to be a common denominator for all who fight in the Good War.
THE HAMAS JOKE
And what of the Hamas, claiming responsibility for these suicide bombings? The reports that the Hamas takes responsibility comes from the Israelis, and we know they never lie.
There is almost no chance the Hamas is a real Palestinian operation. It almost certainly is an undercover Israeli mockingbird operation.
Note of Semptember 28, 2004: For an example of false Islmaic terrorist operations, consider a recent case in France. A Jewish community center was set ablaze, and "the attackers daubed swastikas in red ink on two refrigerators and badly spelled anti-Semitic slogans such as, 'Without Jews we would be happy,' and 'The world would be pure if there no more Jews,' according to police and a rabbi at the synagogue." (According to AFP)
True to form, an Islamic terrorist group claimed credit for the fire. "The statement posted on the Internet in the name of the Jamaat Ansaw Al-Jihad al Islamiya (Group of the Holy Islamic War Supporters) said the attack was 'in response to racist acts by Jews in France against Islam and the Muslims' and 'as a simple response to the racist and savage acts by Jews in Muslim countries like Palestine.'" The governments of France and Israel condemned the act. Convincing, isn't it? ISLAMIC GROUP CLAIMS PARIS ARSON August 23, 2004 By: ICEJ News http://www.icej.org/cgi-local/view.cgi?type=headline&artid=2004/08/23/854240257 HOMELESS JEWISH MAN ARRESTED FOR PARIS ARSON ATTACK August 31, 2004 By: ICEJ News http://www.icej.org/cgi-local/view.cgi?type=headline&artid=2004/08/31/53238481 Jewish man arrested in Paris arson Craig S. Smith NYT Tuesday, August 31, 2004 http://www.iht.com/articles/536543.html
One week later, French police learned that the fire and vandalism were the work of a "homeless, mentally unstable" Jewish man who had attended the center.
OK, these things happen. And when nerves are tense, people make mistakes. But who invented the Arabic terrorist group and wrote the web page that claimed responsibility? Probably not the "homeless, mentally unstable" Jewish man.
Before me on my desk are two color photos of — can you believe — students who attend "suicide bomber" schools. The schools are run by either the Hamas, or Hamas "sympathizers."
One dramatic front page color photo appeared in the Washington Times of December 10, 2001 with this caption:
Ready to Die: At an anti-Israeli demonstration commemorating Hamas's 14th anniversary yesterday, suicide bombers with fake dynamite strapped to their chests paraded near the southern Lebanese city of Sidon.
The photo is attributed to Associated Press, and shows at least 10 people, whose faces and bodies are entirely covered by white sheeting, facing the camera.
Another dramatic front page color photo appeared in the Washington Times on March 4, 2002. The caption reads:
"Hamas activists, dressed as 'suicide bombers' with fake explosives strapped to their waists, rallied yesterday in the West Bank."
There are at least 11 white-garbed clowns in this photo, which is again attributed to Associated Press.
* Like these.
* Two
* Three
* Four
* Five
* Six
* Seven
* Eight
* Nine
* Ten
Juxtaposed beneath the photo of the suicide bomber students is a photo of four young Israelis, two of them boys dressed in black with black hats and side curls. The boys wear mournful expressions on their faces. The caption reads: "Blast site: Ultra-Orthodox Jews watched volunteers clean the Jerusalem site Sunday where a suicide bomber killed nine persons."
"Gee, how sweet and nice those young boys look. Fancy having to put up with suicide bombers ..." that's what we are supposed to think.
Israel has declared on many occasions that assassination is its official policy. How many times have we heard of Palestinian leaders summarily shot dead on the spot by Israeli hit men? That being the case, how realistic is it that the Israelis would permit these young "suicide bombers" to train openly, and march down the street openly? How likely do you think it is that Israel would permit REAL suicide bomber schools to exist?
And how do you think that Associated Press found out about the demonstrations and showed up to take photos? Next we'll be told the suicide bomber schools have public relations departments and send out press releases.
How dumb do they think we are, that we'd believe all this? Well, you can speak for yourself. But I ain't THAT dumb.
THE PUBLIC RELATIONS WAR
I believe Israel runs a suicide bomber campaign. The suicide bomber campaign serves at least four purposes.
* Sharon the Madman needs an insane foe. An insane foe makes Sharon and those behind him look good, or at least not so bad.
* In May, 2001, world public opinion was moved to sympathy for the Palestinian cause. We were enchanted at "The Return of the Knight."
http://www.ukar.org/shamir09.shtml
The heroism of this young Palestinian boy swept the world's imagination. Obviously, the Israelis were losing the PR war. Shortly thereafter, a new rash of suicide bombers broke out and continues to this day. The suicide bomber campaign was in part an attempt to reverse a growing Israeli PR disaster.
* By September 11, 2001, Muslim fanatics committing suicide had to be firmly planted in the public mind as a common-place event. That paradigm made the fantastic stories of the "suicide pilots" — those Muslims accused of crashing the United and American passenger jets into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 9-11 — easier to swallow.
* Depicting the Palestinians are irrational fanatics justifies their extermination. Proof?
This from the mouth of Richard Cohen, columnist for the Washington Post. On February 5, 2002, Cohen wrote a column "Why the Turn to Suicide?"
NEW YORK — On my first visit to Israel, the government supplied me with a guide — a former army officer and combat veteran renowned for his hawkish views. We disagreed about almost everything, including the nature of the "enemy." I found his views simplistic and repulsive. Recently, though, I have begun to wonder if he wasn't right ...
Cohen then moves on to talk about suicide bombers.
It [Palestine] is now behaving as the Japanese did toward the end of World War II when, in desperation, they sent pilots crashing into U.S. ships. These kamikaze attacks were both effective and terrifying, but they were also a clear sign that Japan had gone nuts.
The kamikaze attacks were an important element in the dehumanizing of Japan. They encouraged, maybe the right word is "permitted," the use of the atomic bomb. After all, the enemy was not rational. It was barbaric. It would never surrender. It would fight to the last square inch. Better to incinerate them all.
In a similar manner, suicide bombings have transformed the image of Palestinians. Now, in the view of many, they are similar to the people my guide once so excoriated and insulted — so different, so primitive, so cruel and indifferent to human life that they celebrate the suicide of a loved one and the simultaneous murder of innocent people.
There you have it. The PR payoff of the suicide bomber campaign is to convince world public opinion that any barbaric act against the Palestinians is justified. Nuke them, burn them alive, decapitate every last man, woman, and child. Do whatever you wish.
"BUT I SAW THE FAMILY
BEING INTERVIEWED ON TV"
If I were the director of an Israeli dirty trick intelligence organization, I could think of a number of ways to pull off "suicide" bombings.
* Send an agent to a public place, have him inconspicuously drop off his package and leave. BOOM! Meanwhile, simply abduct and murder some unfortunate Palestinian and blame it on him or her.
* Create a false ID for the Israeli agent, have him establish that persona in real time, send him into a public place, have him inconspicuously drop off his package and leave. BOOM! Then disappear the agent.
* With effective Israeli control of hospitals, mental hospitals, and prisons, Israeli intelligence people have a plentiful supply of the walking wounded at their fingertips — Palestinians who are human ruins, shellshocked, brain-damaged and drugged to the gills. How easy it would be to send one of these unknowing unfortunates out on an errand. "Here, strap this money belt around your middle to make sure you don't lose the money." Tell the poor sap to meet someone in a pool hall, and detonate the "money belt." BOOM!
I'll allow you to come up with other possible scenarios. It's not hard to do.
And as for the interviews with the bereaved family members — we don't know the people being interviewed from Adam. They could have come straight from Central Casting. Or they could be genuinely bereaved family members of real victims — people who have been watching too much Tee Vee and believe the "suicide bomber" media campaign.
Expect more "suicide" bombings, but believe them less. Thank you.
[The article was revised on September 28, 2004. Notes added as indicated.]
See also:
Operation 911: NO SUICIDE PILOTS
by Carol A. Valentine, October 6, 2001
There were no "suicide" pilots on those September 11 jets. The jets were controlled by advanced robotics and remote control technology, not hijackers.
Did NORAD Send The "Suicide" Jets? Part 1: Inside Job
by Carol A. Valentine, February 12, 2002
NORAD, charged with keeping American skies safe, didn't show up on September 11, leaving the remote controlled jets to do their work. Coincidentally, NORAD is one of the world's experts on remote controlled aircraft. NORAD had the means, and provided the opportunity, for making 9-11 happen. Discussion of radar anomalies.
Did NORAD Send The "Suicide" Jets? Part 2: The Dumb Blondes
by Carol A. Valentine, February 25, 2002
NORAD claims it sent defensive jets aloft on 9-11, but America's top generals give contradictory accounts before the Senate. They act like dumb blondes — they can scarcely remember which plane hit which target. NORAD blames the FAA for the catastrophe, but the Senate doesn't bother calling the FAA. More radar anomalies.
When Seeing and Hearing Isn't Believing
by William M. Arkin, in a guest appearance, February 1, 1999
But what about the cell phone calls to relatives from passengers on the doomed planes? The Special Operations Command gives us the answer to that question — but it's not the same answer you heard on network news. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/dotmil/arkin020199.htm
Flight Of The Bumble Planes
by Snake Plissken, as told to Carol A. Valentine, March 10, 2002
Snake Plissken tells us how remote controlled planes and radar trickery were used to pull off Operation 9-11. "Magic is the pretended performance of those things which cannot be done." By George, I think he's got it!
Pentagon RESCUE? Parts I through IV: Open, Bloody Questions . . .
by Carol A. Valentine, June 23, 2002
On 9-11, the most important mission was to extinguish the fire and rescue the victims. So why did they spray water on an aviation fuel fire? Instead of lifting the debris off the victims, why did they use a wrecking ball to collapse the ruins on top of them? Your journey begins here . . .
Pentagon RESCUE? Part V: The Seven Minute Fire
by Carol A. Valentine, August 18, 2002
After the publication of "Pentagon RESCUE? Part IV: Open, Bloody Questions," the Ministry of Truth publicized a little-known article claiming foam was used on 9-11, and that the "bulk" of the fire was extinguished in seven minutes! Then what did we all watch on TV, burning for days after?
Taliban Home Video
by Carol A. Valentine, October 15, 2001
If the US and its pals could fake such a video — and they're easy to fake, either with morphing or stand-in impersonators — why wouldn't they? And they did.
9/11 Terror: Muslims Suspend Laws of Physics!
by J. McMichael, October 23, 2001
Using jet fuel to melt steel is an amazing discovery, really. It is also amazing that until now, no one had been able to get it to work, and that proves the terrorists were not stupid people.
Press Uses Actors in War On Islam
by Carol a. Valentine, November 11, 2001
The Washington Times has faked two photos in its coverage of the War On Islam. One actor was used twice: first cast as an enemy of America, then nine days later, as a friend of America.
Tooth Fairies and Suicide Bombers
by Carol A. Valentine, May 9, 2002
Why would vengeful Palestinians blow themselves up? Why not just leave the package, walk away, and strike again next week? Funny how the Israelis identify the bombers immediately, and distribute nice color portrait shots of the culprits immediately. Funny, the IRA didn't use suicide bombers. Other funny things.
Merry Christmas, and OFF WITH YOUR HEAD!
by Carol A. Valentine, May 15, 2002
What does the establishment of a world-wide Jewish theocracy have to do with the events of 9-11? Everything. If the Jews who rule America have their way, freedom of religion will soon be a thing of the past, and rabbinical courts will rule the world.
911 Lawsuit Is A Booby Trap
by Carol A. Valentine, March 3, 2004
Mrs. Ellen Mariani, a 911 widow, has filed a RICO suit against George W. Bush et al. to discover the truth about 911. But her lawyer, Philip J. Berg, has written a complaint that protects the real culprits. It is littered with gross errors and malpractice. Berg is a suicide bus driver taking Ellen Mariani's quest for truth on a one-way trip to oblivion.
See other 9-11 articles by Carol A. Valentine at http://www.public-action.com
All original works copyright 1996-2004 Carol A. Valentine
On loan to Public Action, Inc.
PO Box 15430 Wedgwood Station, Seattle, WA 98115
http://www.public-action.com
SkyWriter@public-action.com
or
"Hi, my name is Abdula. I'll be your suicide bomber this evening ..."
by Carol A. Valentine
Curator, Waco Holocaust Electronic Museum
http://www.Public-Action.com
Copyright, May, 2002
May be reproduced for non-commercial purposes.
May 9, 2002 — People, let's use our noggins. The suicide bombers are not what they seem to be.
For many months now, I have been reading stories in the Washington Post and the Washington Times about alleged "suicide bombers". Within a short time after the attack, not only is the suicide bomber identified by name, but we have nice colored photos, almost portrait quality shots, of the dead culprits.
For example, on April 27, 2002, the Washington Post ran an article in the Style section, "Female Suicide Bombers: the New Factor in Mideast's Deadly Equation." Shown at the top of the article are four color photos of the faces of four Palestinian (?) women, face to the camera, posed for the photographer.
How thoughtful of the suicide bombers to have those photos taken. How thoughtful of the suicide bombers to leave the photos behind to be conveniently found by the Zionist-owned press. And what a public service the Zionist-owned press is doing the whole world by publishing these photos.
SUICIDE BOMBER MIRACLES
Typically, stories about suicide bombers tell us that the bomber went to a public place such as a bus stop, market, restaurant, pool hall, etc., and blew himself/herself up along with one, two, or many Israelis.
Funny, they rarely hit military targets. I wonder why?
The general story line is that the bomber had explosives attached to his/her person. The story goes on to describe the carnage in grisly detail — dismembered bodies, etc. But, remarkably, the suicide bomber himself/herself is not blown to smithereens. The bomber's body is left in sufficiently good shape to be identified immediately, and of course the Israeli authorities do just that.
But even more remarkable: The Israelis come up with these nice portraits of the culprits. And what is most remarkable of all? Everything is coordinated, bombers ID'd, photos gathered, stories written — and published all over the world by the Zionist press — within a few hours or days after the event.
SUICIDE BOMBING NOT TOO SMART
Why would a Palestinian bent on vengeance commit suicide? Far better to go to the bus stop, market, restaurant, pool hall, etc., with a shopping bag or backpack full of explosives, casually discard the package in some inconspicuous place, and leave. BOOM! Lots of Israelis die, and the bomber walks away to bomb another location next week. But no, we are asked to believe that the suicide bombers blow THEMSELVES up, too.
"Why would the bombers do that?" we ask. "Because they are fanatics, that's why," is the response.
Well, if you are a Palestinian fanatic you would surely would want to kill as many Israelis as possible. You would want to extend your life as long as possible to do that job. Committing suicide unnecessarily would be a very dumb thing to do.
WHY NO IRA SUICIDE BOMBERS?
In all the years of IRA activity in Northern Ireland and Britain, the IRA never used suicide bombers, did they? Wonder why the "Palestinians" have to?
IT'S THE QUR'AN!
THEY DO IT BECAUSE THEY'RE MUSLIMS!
There's another variation to these inane suicide bomber stories.
"The suicide bombers are not just fanatics, they are MUSLIM fanatics. Allah will reward them for their deeds. They want to go to heaven to be rewarded."
Yet I have NEVER seen one cite from the Qur'an that justifies suicide, under any conditions. Quite the reverse. I have seen cites from the Qur'an which clearly prohibit suicide.
Now doubtless there are passages in the Qur'an saying eternal bliss will be endowed upon those brave souls who lose their lives while fighting God's war. Big deal. We have chaplains in the US military who, give or take, give our soldiers the same kind of message. That's their job.
If the Israelis want us to believe that the suicide bombers are fanatic Muslims, they need to come up with Qur'anic scriptures to prove their point. They don't. They can't. The Israelis are lying. What else is new?
SUICIDE BOMBERS AND SUICIDE BOMBERS
The Palestinian suicide bombers have been compared to the Japanese Kamikazee pilots who purposely flew their bomb-laden planes into American war ships at sea during world War II.
The Japanese knew they were in danger of losing the war, and they wanted to reverse the trend. So they arrived at a strategy which would inflict maximum American damage for minimum Japanese damage. The Kamikazee strategy was very successful. For each Japanese killed, 10 Americans were killed and many ships were sunk or badly damaged. Unfortunately for the Japanese, the Kamikazee strategy was not successful enough. The US had the A-bomb.
The Kamikazee pilots' purpose was not to commit suicide. Their deaths were the necessary by product of a heroic attempt to defeat a military enemy, an enemy who threatened the life of the Emperor, their God. Of course the Kamikazee pilots thought they'd go to Heaven, too, but that seems to be a common denominator for all who fight in the Good War.
THE HAMAS JOKE
And what of the Hamas, claiming responsibility for these suicide bombings? The reports that the Hamas takes responsibility comes from the Israelis, and we know they never lie.
There is almost no chance the Hamas is a real Palestinian operation. It almost certainly is an undercover Israeli mockingbird operation.
Note of Semptember 28, 2004: For an example of false Islmaic terrorist operations, consider a recent case in France. A Jewish community center was set ablaze, and "the attackers daubed swastikas in red ink on two refrigerators and badly spelled anti-Semitic slogans such as, 'Without Jews we would be happy,' and 'The world would be pure if there no more Jews,' according to police and a rabbi at the synagogue." (According to AFP)
True to form, an Islamic terrorist group claimed credit for the fire. "The statement posted on the Internet in the name of the Jamaat Ansaw Al-Jihad al Islamiya (Group of the Holy Islamic War Supporters) said the attack was 'in response to racist acts by Jews in France against Islam and the Muslims' and 'as a simple response to the racist and savage acts by Jews in Muslim countries like Palestine.'" The governments of France and Israel condemned the act. Convincing, isn't it? ISLAMIC GROUP CLAIMS PARIS ARSON August 23, 2004 By: ICEJ News http://www.icej.org/cgi-local/view.cgi?type=headline&artid=2004/08/23/854240257 HOMELESS JEWISH MAN ARRESTED FOR PARIS ARSON ATTACK August 31, 2004 By: ICEJ News http://www.icej.org/cgi-local/view.cgi?type=headline&artid=2004/08/31/53238481 Jewish man arrested in Paris arson Craig S. Smith NYT Tuesday, August 31, 2004 http://www.iht.com/articles/536543.html
One week later, French police learned that the fire and vandalism were the work of a "homeless, mentally unstable" Jewish man who had attended the center.
OK, these things happen. And when nerves are tense, people make mistakes. But who invented the Arabic terrorist group and wrote the web page that claimed responsibility? Probably not the "homeless, mentally unstable" Jewish man.
Before me on my desk are two color photos of — can you believe — students who attend "suicide bomber" schools. The schools are run by either the Hamas, or Hamas "sympathizers."
One dramatic front page color photo appeared in the Washington Times of December 10, 2001 with this caption:
Ready to Die: At an anti-Israeli demonstration commemorating Hamas's 14th anniversary yesterday, suicide bombers with fake dynamite strapped to their chests paraded near the southern Lebanese city of Sidon.
The photo is attributed to Associated Press, and shows at least 10 people, whose faces and bodies are entirely covered by white sheeting, facing the camera.
Another dramatic front page color photo appeared in the Washington Times on March 4, 2002. The caption reads:
"Hamas activists, dressed as 'suicide bombers' with fake explosives strapped to their waists, rallied yesterday in the West Bank."
There are at least 11 white-garbed clowns in this photo, which is again attributed to Associated Press.
* Like these.
* Two
* Three
* Four
* Five
* Six
* Seven
* Eight
* Nine
* Ten
Juxtaposed beneath the photo of the suicide bomber students is a photo of four young Israelis, two of them boys dressed in black with black hats and side curls. The boys wear mournful expressions on their faces. The caption reads: "Blast site: Ultra-Orthodox Jews watched volunteers clean the Jerusalem site Sunday where a suicide bomber killed nine persons."
"Gee, how sweet and nice those young boys look. Fancy having to put up with suicide bombers ..." that's what we are supposed to think.
Israel has declared on many occasions that assassination is its official policy. How many times have we heard of Palestinian leaders summarily shot dead on the spot by Israeli hit men? That being the case, how realistic is it that the Israelis would permit these young "suicide bombers" to train openly, and march down the street openly? How likely do you think it is that Israel would permit REAL suicide bomber schools to exist?
And how do you think that Associated Press found out about the demonstrations and showed up to take photos? Next we'll be told the suicide bomber schools have public relations departments and send out press releases.
How dumb do they think we are, that we'd believe all this? Well, you can speak for yourself. But I ain't THAT dumb.
THE PUBLIC RELATIONS WAR
I believe Israel runs a suicide bomber campaign. The suicide bomber campaign serves at least four purposes.
* Sharon the Madman needs an insane foe. An insane foe makes Sharon and those behind him look good, or at least not so bad.
* In May, 2001, world public opinion was moved to sympathy for the Palestinian cause. We were enchanted at "The Return of the Knight."
http://www.ukar.org/shamir09.shtml
The heroism of this young Palestinian boy swept the world's imagination. Obviously, the Israelis were losing the PR war. Shortly thereafter, a new rash of suicide bombers broke out and continues to this day. The suicide bomber campaign was in part an attempt to reverse a growing Israeli PR disaster.
* By September 11, 2001, Muslim fanatics committing suicide had to be firmly planted in the public mind as a common-place event. That paradigm made the fantastic stories of the "suicide pilots" — those Muslims accused of crashing the United and American passenger jets into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 9-11 — easier to swallow.
* Depicting the Palestinians are irrational fanatics justifies their extermination. Proof?
This from the mouth of Richard Cohen, columnist for the Washington Post. On February 5, 2002, Cohen wrote a column "Why the Turn to Suicide?"
NEW YORK — On my first visit to Israel, the government supplied me with a guide — a former army officer and combat veteran renowned for his hawkish views. We disagreed about almost everything, including the nature of the "enemy." I found his views simplistic and repulsive. Recently, though, I have begun to wonder if he wasn't right ...
Cohen then moves on to talk about suicide bombers.
It [Palestine] is now behaving as the Japanese did toward the end of World War II when, in desperation, they sent pilots crashing into U.S. ships. These kamikaze attacks were both effective and terrifying, but they were also a clear sign that Japan had gone nuts.
The kamikaze attacks were an important element in the dehumanizing of Japan. They encouraged, maybe the right word is "permitted," the use of the atomic bomb. After all, the enemy was not rational. It was barbaric. It would never surrender. It would fight to the last square inch. Better to incinerate them all.
In a similar manner, suicide bombings have transformed the image of Palestinians. Now, in the view of many, they are similar to the people my guide once so excoriated and insulted — so different, so primitive, so cruel and indifferent to human life that they celebrate the suicide of a loved one and the simultaneous murder of innocent people.
There you have it. The PR payoff of the suicide bomber campaign is to convince world public opinion that any barbaric act against the Palestinians is justified. Nuke them, burn them alive, decapitate every last man, woman, and child. Do whatever you wish.
"BUT I SAW THE FAMILY
BEING INTERVIEWED ON TV"
If I were the director of an Israeli dirty trick intelligence organization, I could think of a number of ways to pull off "suicide" bombings.
* Send an agent to a public place, have him inconspicuously drop off his package and leave. BOOM! Meanwhile, simply abduct and murder some unfortunate Palestinian and blame it on him or her.
* Create a false ID for the Israeli agent, have him establish that persona in real time, send him into a public place, have him inconspicuously drop off his package and leave. BOOM! Then disappear the agent.
* With effective Israeli control of hospitals, mental hospitals, and prisons, Israeli intelligence people have a plentiful supply of the walking wounded at their fingertips — Palestinians who are human ruins, shellshocked, brain-damaged and drugged to the gills. How easy it would be to send one of these unknowing unfortunates out on an errand. "Here, strap this money belt around your middle to make sure you don't lose the money." Tell the poor sap to meet someone in a pool hall, and detonate the "money belt." BOOM!
I'll allow you to come up with other possible scenarios. It's not hard to do.
And as for the interviews with the bereaved family members — we don't know the people being interviewed from Adam. They could have come straight from Central Casting. Or they could be genuinely bereaved family members of real victims — people who have been watching too much Tee Vee and believe the "suicide bomber" media campaign.
Expect more "suicide" bombings, but believe them less. Thank you.
[The article was revised on September 28, 2004. Notes added as indicated.]
See also:
Operation 911: NO SUICIDE PILOTS
by Carol A. Valentine, October 6, 2001
There were no "suicide" pilots on those September 11 jets. The jets were controlled by advanced robotics and remote control technology, not hijackers.
Did NORAD Send The "Suicide" Jets? Part 1: Inside Job
by Carol A. Valentine, February 12, 2002
NORAD, charged with keeping American skies safe, didn't show up on September 11, leaving the remote controlled jets to do their work. Coincidentally, NORAD is one of the world's experts on remote controlled aircraft. NORAD had the means, and provided the opportunity, for making 9-11 happen. Discussion of radar anomalies.
Did NORAD Send The "Suicide" Jets? Part 2: The Dumb Blondes
by Carol A. Valentine, February 25, 2002
NORAD claims it sent defensive jets aloft on 9-11, but America's top generals give contradictory accounts before the Senate. They act like dumb blondes — they can scarcely remember which plane hit which target. NORAD blames the FAA for the catastrophe, but the Senate doesn't bother calling the FAA. More radar anomalies.
When Seeing and Hearing Isn't Believing
by William M. Arkin, in a guest appearance, February 1, 1999
But what about the cell phone calls to relatives from passengers on the doomed planes? The Special Operations Command gives us the answer to that question — but it's not the same answer you heard on network news. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/dotmil/arkin020199.htm
Flight Of The Bumble Planes
by Snake Plissken, as told to Carol A. Valentine, March 10, 2002
Snake Plissken tells us how remote controlled planes and radar trickery were used to pull off Operation 9-11. "Magic is the pretended performance of those things which cannot be done." By George, I think he's got it!
Pentagon RESCUE? Parts I through IV: Open, Bloody Questions . . .
by Carol A. Valentine, June 23, 2002
On 9-11, the most important mission was to extinguish the fire and rescue the victims. So why did they spray water on an aviation fuel fire? Instead of lifting the debris off the victims, why did they use a wrecking ball to collapse the ruins on top of them? Your journey begins here . . .
Pentagon RESCUE? Part V: The Seven Minute Fire
by Carol A. Valentine, August 18, 2002
After the publication of "Pentagon RESCUE? Part IV: Open, Bloody Questions," the Ministry of Truth publicized a little-known article claiming foam was used on 9-11, and that the "bulk" of the fire was extinguished in seven minutes! Then what did we all watch on TV, burning for days after?
Taliban Home Video
by Carol A. Valentine, October 15, 2001
If the US and its pals could fake such a video — and they're easy to fake, either with morphing or stand-in impersonators — why wouldn't they? And they did.
9/11 Terror: Muslims Suspend Laws of Physics!
by J. McMichael, October 23, 2001
Using jet fuel to melt steel is an amazing discovery, really. It is also amazing that until now, no one had been able to get it to work, and that proves the terrorists were not stupid people.
Press Uses Actors in War On Islam
by Carol a. Valentine, November 11, 2001
The Washington Times has faked two photos in its coverage of the War On Islam. One actor was used twice: first cast as an enemy of America, then nine days later, as a friend of America.
Tooth Fairies and Suicide Bombers
by Carol A. Valentine, May 9, 2002
Why would vengeful Palestinians blow themselves up? Why not just leave the package, walk away, and strike again next week? Funny how the Israelis identify the bombers immediately, and distribute nice color portrait shots of the culprits immediately. Funny, the IRA didn't use suicide bombers. Other funny things.
Merry Christmas, and OFF WITH YOUR HEAD!
by Carol A. Valentine, May 15, 2002
What does the establishment of a world-wide Jewish theocracy have to do with the events of 9-11? Everything. If the Jews who rule America have their way, freedom of religion will soon be a thing of the past, and rabbinical courts will rule the world.
911 Lawsuit Is A Booby Trap
by Carol A. Valentine, March 3, 2004
Mrs. Ellen Mariani, a 911 widow, has filed a RICO suit against George W. Bush et al. to discover the truth about 911. But her lawyer, Philip J. Berg, has written a complaint that protects the real culprits. It is littered with gross errors and malpractice. Berg is a suicide bus driver taking Ellen Mariani's quest for truth on a one-way trip to oblivion.
See other 9-11 articles by Carol A. Valentine at http://www.public-action.com
All original works copyright 1996-2004 Carol A. Valentine
On loan to Public Action, Inc.
PO Box 15430 Wedgwood Station, Seattle, WA 98115
http://www.public-action.com
SkyWriter@public-action.com
Aeneas: Suicide Bombings -- A Favorite US Counter-Insurgency Tactic
This is a very important article explaining much of today’s reality. However as indicated by the title, Aeneas doesn’t explore the most critical point of the suicide bombings which is NOT to counter the insurgency, but to create an insurgency and chaos in order to justify an indefinite occupation and the destruction of the country.
Thus it’s no surprise that further down Aeneas gets it wrong when s/he argues
The US and British invasion of Iraq was NOT for the purpose of bringing "freedom and democracy" to the Iraqi people, but rather for the purpose of securing Iraq's oil resources for the US and British governments and expanding their control over the greater Middle East.
Yes, we agree that Bush and Cheney did not invade Iraq for the purpose of bringing freedom and democracy to Iraq. They are doing everything to beat back democracy in the U.S. and everywhere else their power reaches. They certainly would not abide democracy in Iraq.
But as we have been arguing, the purpose of the war was not to secure Iraq’s oil resources or to expand their control over the greater Middle East. Up until 1991 the U.S. “controlled” Middle East oil and Middle East politics sufficiently for their purposes. They only started losing control in 1991 when they had to spend billions of dollars a month and then a day in bombing and finally occupying and destroying a country, including destroying its oil potential.
Interestingly, Israeli military analyst Martin van Creveld gives the game away in a just published article on a possible U.S. strike against Iran. M.vCreveld: Iran Helpless in face of possible US missile attack Creveld correctly writes that President Bush is on the same belligerent wavelength as Prime Minister Olmert: “— the same President Bush who four years ago needed no reason at all to take on Iran’s neighbor to the west and demolish it to the point where it may never rise again.”
There we have it: the elusive answer to the question: Why did the U.S. invade Iraq? The U.S. invaded the country in order to destroy it -- to the point where it may never rise again:
a. for Israel’s purposes
b. for the Bush-Cheney neocon purpose of perpetual war.
Ronald
***
Suicide Bombings - A Favourite US Counter-Insurgency Tactic
Aeneas, Signs of the Times
http://www.uruknet.info/?p=m35541&hd=&size=1&l=e
[photo]
The true face of Iraqi suicide bombers. Two SAS agents dressed in full "Arab Garb" driving a car full of explosives were caught carrying out a false flag terror attack in Basra, Iraq September 20th
August 20, 2007
Since 9-11 reports of "suicide bombings" have increased exponentially in the news. We are led to believe by the experts that it is one of the favorite weapons of the insurgency against the occupation forces, since it is a cheap and simple way to create chaos. Hardly a day goes by without at least one bombing in Iraq or Afghanistan being immediately seized upon by the media as the work of Iraqi insurgents.
It is one thing for an insurgency to commit suicide bombings against the occupation forces, it is another thing entirely to use them to target and kill civilians. We have been brainwashed into believing that the insurgents in Iraq are such brutal, uncivilized, fanatical crazy extremists that they will anything to fight 'freedom' - even kill their own people.
This picture presented to us by the US government and mainstream media is so insane that Joe Quinn, in response to the massive 'suicide' bombings in Mosul that killed 350+ people last week, felt confident to say:
"The person who can present a convincing argument (i.e. logical and backed up with reliable data) that explains why any anti-American Arab or Islamic group, "terrorist" or otherwise, would kill hundreds of thousands of Iraqis as a response to the US occupation of Iraq, will receive a prize of 1 million USD."
Looking at this from a historical perspective, precedence for the type of bombings in Iraq that are attributed to the insurgency or "al-Qaeda" is virtually non existent. During world war II, a number of countries were occupied by the Nazis. Countries such as France, Denmark, Norway and many others all had resistance movements who used various tactics to hamper the Nazi take over. Yet, there are no records whatsoever that the resistance fighters resorted to the mass murder of their fellow country men in an effort to evict the Nazis. Sure there was factional infighting, but nothing on the massive scale that we are seeing in Iraq. And of course, how could there be? It defies all logic.
Fast forward to the Vietnam war and here too we find no evidence that the Vietcong waged a campaign to kill their own fellow citizens as part if the fight against American forces.
Of course, there are those who would suggest that Muslims are a different breed, that they, like so many other ungrateful peoples who attempted to throw-off the chains of empire, are little more than uncivilised savages and we cannot therefore hope to understand their mentality or actions. Such an ill-informed attitude however is in no way backed up by any evidence and must therefore be dismissed for the obvious racism that it is.
When the Iraqis first fought the British Empire in the 1920's, there was no "suicide bombings" by insurgents against Iraqis. On the contrary and according to good strategy, they united despite minor cultural and religious differences to confront the common British enemy.
Likewise in Afghanistan during the 10 year war with the Soviet union there were no instances of suicide bombings targeting Afghan civilians. Here too, the Afghan tribes united despite previous disagreements against the common aggressor.
Does no one find all of this even mildly odd? After 9-11, suddenly this bizarre phenomenon of an insurgency using suicide bombings against their own people rather than the invaders appears, as if to provide supporting evidence for the reality of the crazed "suicide bombing" hijackers that attacked America - or so the official story goes.
Could the answer be as simple as that what is being touted as suicide bombings are in fact the work of US/British/Israeli counterinsurgency teams? In Iraq, are we in fact dealing with the what are better know as "false flag operations"?
This certainly would explain a lot of the confusion over why Iraqi groups would kill their own people in response to a US invasion of their country. After all, the people who are dying by the hundreds every day in Iraq are the people who support the insurgency, and the US, British and Israeli forces in Iraq are fighting that insurgency, so who benefits from the daily mass murder of the supporters of the insurgency?
Past counterinsurgency tactics involved such things as ethnic cleansing ("draining the dam" as this tactic was known) and/or the destruction of crops like with agent orange in the case of Vietnam. But these methods had little success.
In recent years it seems that devious and deviant minds in the employ of the military industrial complex came up with much more insidious modern tactics.
Roger Trinquier, an immensely influential French counter-insurgency expert, suggested in his book Modern Warfare: A French View of Counterinsurgency (1961) (Available online here) three simple principles of Counter Insurgency:
1. separate the guerrilla from the population that supports him;
2. occupy the zones that the guerrillas previously operated from, making them dangerous for him and turning the people against the guerrilla movement;
3. coordinate actions over a wide area and for a long enough time that the guerrilla is denied access to the population centres that could support him.
Remote controlled bombings masquerading as "suicide bombings" that are carried out by the US, British and Israeli occupation forces fit these principles very neatly. By detonating bombs on a daily basis across Iraq and Afghanistan and via the propaganda organs touting them as being the work of Iraqi/Afghani "suicide bombers" belonging to the insurgency, the occupying military hopes to achieve several goals:
cut off the widespread support base that the insurgency have amongst the Iraqis
create tensions between religious lines, especially by ascribing the faked "suicide attacks" to either Shias or Sunnis.
In other words divide and conquer.
The sheer carnage shown on TV back in the West only supports the idea that the Iraqis/Afghans can't take care of their own country without help from the occupation forces or that they are uncivilised savages. This propaganda reinforces the US government's persistent claim that it would be dangerous to pull US troops out of Iraq and for the American military grunts on the streets of Iraq it helps them to rationalise their continued presence. Either they are trying to show a lesser class of human how to become civilised, or they are doing god's work in wiping them out.
There is ample evidence for the inquiring reader to discover that so-called suicide bombings against civilians are not the product of the insurgency. Some will say that it is the product of "al-Qaeda", which is true if you first clarify that "al-Qaeda" is simply a tool of the very same counterinsurgency, namely CIA/MI6/Mossad. Always ask yourself, "who benefits?", and in this case it is pretty obvious who doesn't benefit.
For years Israel has very effectively used 'suicide' bombings as a tool in the perpetration of its slow genocide of the Palestinian people, with the effect that, today, the world's sympathy lies with the perpetrator (Israel). As a result, all peace initiatives have been stalled and the world has provided tacit if not outright approval of Israel's covert genocidal policies.
The knowledge gained by the Israelis has certainly been passed on to the their counterparts in MI6 and the CIA as this SOTT editorial from September 2005 illustrates:
"Today in Basra, Southern Iraq, two members of the British SAS (Special Ops) were caught, 'in flagrante' as it were, dressed in full "Arab garb", driving a car full of explosives and shooting and killing two official Iraqi policemen.
This fact, finally reported by the mainstream press, goes to the very heart and proves accurate much of what we have been saying on the Signs of the Times page for several years.
The following are facts, indisputable by all but the most self-deluded:
Number 1:
The US and British invasion of Iraq was NOT for the purpose of bringing "freedom and democracy" to the Iraqi people, but rather for the purpose of securing Iraq's oil resources for the US and British governments and expanding their control over the greater Middle East.
Number 2:
Both the Bush and Blair governments deliberately fabricated evidence (lied) about the threat the Saddam posed to the west and his links to the mythical 'al-Qaeda' in order to justify their invasion.
Number 3:
Dressed as Arabs, British (and CIA and Israeli) 'special forces' have been carrying out fake "insurgent" attacks, including 'car suicide bombings' against Iraqi policemen and Iraqi civilians (both Sunni and Shia) for the past two years. Evidence would suggest that these tactics are designed to provide continued justification for a US and British military presence in Iraq and to ultimately embroil the country in a civil war that will lead to the breakup of Iraq into more manageable statelets, much to the joy of the Israeli right and their long-held desire for the establishment of biblical 'greater Israel'
Coming not long after the botched London bombings carried out by British MI5 where an eyewitness reported that the floor of one of the trains had been blown inwards (how can a bomb in a backpack or on a "suicide bomber" INSIDE the train ever produce such an effect), more than anything else today's event in Basra highlights the desperation that is driving the policy-makers in the British government.
British intelligence would do well to think twice about carrying out any more 'false flag' operations until they can achieve the 'professionalism' of the Israeli Mossad - they always make it look convincing and rarely suffer the ignominy of being caught in the act and having the faces of their erstwhile "terrorists" plastered across the pages of the mainstream media. "
As in Israel, 'suicide' bombings in Iraq and Afghanistan often occur at a time that most benefits the occupiers. A recent 'suicide' bombing in Afghanistan illustrates this aspect well:
Seventeen civilians, a dozen of them schoolboys, were killed and 30 others wounded when a suicide bomber blew himself up near a NATO convoy in southern Afghanistan, officials said Tuesday.
The timing just couldn't have been better. NATO had been under a lot of international pressure due to their random use of Aerial bombings with very large numbers of civilian casualties. This incident (as in most cases) harmed no troops, most victims were children. The desired effect of the bombing was described in the article:
The UN representative in Afghanistan, Tom Koenigs, was shocked.
"I am especially concerned by the reports I am seeing of a large number of children being among the dead from todays bomb," he said in a statement." Such utter disregard for innocent lives is staggering and those behind this must be held responsible."
You see? The enemy is uncivilised, crazy, half human in contrast to the civilised benevolent white crusaders who sacrifice so much in the fight against evil. The article concludes:
"There have been more than 70 suicide attacks in Afghanistan this year, as compared with about 140 in all of 2006. Most are aimed at the security forces but civilians are usually the primary victims."
It should be pointed out that these so-called suicide bombings seem to be a speciality of Western intelligence agencies and their client regimes. In recent months we have also heard a lot about suspicious suicide bombings targeting civilians in Pakistan, whose intelligence agency, ISI, has close ties to the CIA.
In Chechnya there have been 28 acts of suicide bombings from June 2000 until 2006. The difference is that these attacks were against Russian civilians and not their own people. Perhaps the defining point is that Western (US/British/Israeli) counterinsurgency teams are not involved in these attacks because they do not wish to hand the Russians a victory. Certainly suicide bombings would demonise the Chechnyan rebels and provide propaganda value to the Russians. This is not to say that Russia does not engage in its own counter-insurgency, it is just that faked suicide bombings do not appear to form a core part of their strategy.
As mentioned before, during the 10 years of Russian occupation of Afghanistan, no suicide attacks were carried out by the insurgency against the Afghan population. Why? It certainly didn't benefit the Americans to kill Afghans who were engaged in killing Russians, the key enemy of the Americans at the time. The Americans were heavily involved in recruiting and supplying the insurgency with all kinds of military hardware. Now however, the situation is different. In Afghanistan it serves the American agenda to murder as many Afghani civilians as possible under the cloak of Taliban "suicide bombings" because it provides the justification for the troops to stay there to fight this manufactured "evil". In Iraq, the goal is the same, with the added element of the Neocons' desire to destroy the real Iraqi resistance by dividing and alienating them from the ordinary people that support their fight against a brutal occupier. It seems that the American, Israel and British tactic in Iraq is that if the ordinary Iraqi people will not be intimidated into accepting occupation and rejecting the real insurgency, then they will be murdered. Plain and simple.
Despite Joe Quinn's offer of 1 million dollars then, he can rest assured that it is unlikely that he will have to go and talk to the bank anytime soon.
:: Article nr. 35541 sent on 21-aug-2007 19:38 ECT
www.uruknet.info?p=35541
Link: www.signs-of-the-times.org/articles/show/138504-Suicide+Bombings+-+A+Favourite+U
S+Counter-Insurgency+Tactic
:: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Uruknet .
Saturday, September 29, 2007
Left I on the News: Who's more cruel: Bush or Castro?
Blogger Left I on the News ably puts Bush’s arrogant calumny against Castro in context and cites some of the reality that Bush and his speechwriters have obfuscated or ignored. (LeftI: Castro or Bush Cruel? 9.25.07) Among other things, LeftI reminds us of the 155 people Bush executed while he was governor of Texas and his reported mockery of Carla May Tucker before her execution. Left I’s analysis raises in our minds the question of whether by calling Castro “cruel,” Bush was unconsciously talking about himself, or perhaps deliberately mocking his world wide audience – or both. Bush’s slander gives rise to the following riff.
You want cruel, I’ll give you cruel. Castro’s cruelty is not even worth mentioning if you compare it to what Cheney and I have already accomplished. And what we’ve already done is a lick of spit compared to what we have planned before we leave office. And don’t be so sure that Jan 20, 2009 will be our last day in power.
The interesting thing about Left I’s blog on Bush's cruelty that although it’s a strong denunciation of the president yet LeftI seems still to embrace the notion that Bush is to be viewed as a more or less normal political leader who is intent on the best interests --- not of the American people or the world, to be sure, – but of the elites, his base, as he famously said.
However, an analysis of Bush’s policies (as well as what has already surfaced about the secret programs of his government) suggests that it is well past time to struggle for a measure of accountability by putting into question the notion that some of his most devastating policies from Iraq to Katrina to 9/11 were the result of error and miscalculation. It can't be too early to raise some hard questions as to whether Bush and Cheney deliberately intended the effects of some or all of their most catastrophic policies in order to pursue an agenda of endless war and massive destruction and suffering.
Ronald
***
http://lefti.blogspot.com/
Tuesday, September 25, 2007
Castro: a "cruel dictator"?
Left I blogger writes:
Not to be outdone by Lee Bollinger insulting Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, George Bush went to the U.N. today and insulted Fidel Castro by calling him a "cruel dictator."
I won't bother to argue the "dictator" description. If you know enough about Cuba, you know that there is a large leadership team, and a democratic system by which decisions are taken. Fidel Castro does not "dictate" what happens. However, it is obvious that he is at once a very strong personality and at the same time a brilliant political and social thinker. Clearly he has, and has had, a major influence on the course of events in Cuba, and that's probably putting it mildly. So if someone wants to call him a "dictator," ok, it's not worth arguing about, although you'd have to say it's a funny criticism coming from a man who on more than one occasion has expressed a desire to be a dictator.
No, it's the "cruel" part I have to take exception to. Before getting to Fidel, we pause to remember that the accuser (Bush) was the one who was described by conservative Tucker Carlson (i.e., not one of Bush's enemies) as having "mocked" Carla Faye Tucker as he was about to put her to death. So accusations of "cruel" coming from him, a man who signed the death warrants of 155 people, are a cruel joke.
But Fidel? A man who has devoted his life (and I mean every day of his adult life, not the days in between clearing brush on his ranch and going fishing) to bettering the lives of the people of his country? A man whose leadership has given Cubans the lowest infant mortality in Latin America, the best education in Latin America, a leadership in scientific fields (2% of the population of Latin America but 11% of the scientists) such as biotechnology, "cruel"? A man whose leadership has led his country to send doctors all over the world offering both regular and emergency medical care to poor people in need, to send doctors to help after Hurricane Katrina hit the country whose leadership wishes him dead, and even to train (for free!) medical students of that country so they can return to treat poor people who otherwise might not have adequate health care? This man is "cruel"?
Again, a cruel joke. And worse, of course. Because behind it lies the deadly policy of blockade, attempted assassination and other acts of terrorism, imprisonment of those who dared to try to prevent that terrorism, and more. You want cruel? The U.S. just denied once again (for the eighth time) visas to Olga Salanueva and Adriana Pérez, wives of two of the Cuban Five (an interview with Olga broadcast yesterday on WBAI here). One man serving life in prison in the United States, another 15 years, both completely unjustly, and the U.S. government led by George Bush has denied them the right to see their wives for more than nine years, in contravention of all international law and human decency.
"Cruel"? That's cruel.
You want cruel, I’ll give you cruel. Castro’s cruelty is not even worth mentioning if you compare it to what Cheney and I have already accomplished. And what we’ve already done is a lick of spit compared to what we have planned before we leave office. And don’t be so sure that Jan 20, 2009 will be our last day in power.
The interesting thing about Left I’s blog on Bush's cruelty that although it’s a strong denunciation of the president yet LeftI seems still to embrace the notion that Bush is to be viewed as a more or less normal political leader who is intent on the best interests --- not of the American people or the world, to be sure, – but of the elites, his base, as he famously said.
However, an analysis of Bush’s policies (as well as what has already surfaced about the secret programs of his government) suggests that it is well past time to struggle for a measure of accountability by putting into question the notion that some of his most devastating policies from Iraq to Katrina to 9/11 were the result of error and miscalculation. It can't be too early to raise some hard questions as to whether Bush and Cheney deliberately intended the effects of some or all of their most catastrophic policies in order to pursue an agenda of endless war and massive destruction and suffering.
Ronald
***
http://lefti.blogspot.com/
Tuesday, September 25, 2007
Castro: a "cruel dictator"?
Left I blogger writes:
Not to be outdone by Lee Bollinger insulting Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, George Bush went to the U.N. today and insulted Fidel Castro by calling him a "cruel dictator."
I won't bother to argue the "dictator" description. If you know enough about Cuba, you know that there is a large leadership team, and a democratic system by which decisions are taken. Fidel Castro does not "dictate" what happens. However, it is obvious that he is at once a very strong personality and at the same time a brilliant political and social thinker. Clearly he has, and has had, a major influence on the course of events in Cuba, and that's probably putting it mildly. So if someone wants to call him a "dictator," ok, it's not worth arguing about, although you'd have to say it's a funny criticism coming from a man who on more than one occasion has expressed a desire to be a dictator.
No, it's the "cruel" part I have to take exception to. Before getting to Fidel, we pause to remember that the accuser (Bush) was the one who was described by conservative Tucker Carlson (i.e., not one of Bush's enemies) as having "mocked" Carla Faye Tucker as he was about to put her to death. So accusations of "cruel" coming from him, a man who signed the death warrants of 155 people, are a cruel joke.
But Fidel? A man who has devoted his life (and I mean every day of his adult life, not the days in between clearing brush on his ranch and going fishing) to bettering the lives of the people of his country? A man whose leadership has given Cubans the lowest infant mortality in Latin America, the best education in Latin America, a leadership in scientific fields (2% of the population of Latin America but 11% of the scientists) such as biotechnology, "cruel"? A man whose leadership has led his country to send doctors all over the world offering both regular and emergency medical care to poor people in need, to send doctors to help after Hurricane Katrina hit the country whose leadership wishes him dead, and even to train (for free!) medical students of that country so they can return to treat poor people who otherwise might not have adequate health care? This man is "cruel"?
Again, a cruel joke. And worse, of course. Because behind it lies the deadly policy of blockade, attempted assassination and other acts of terrorism, imprisonment of those who dared to try to prevent that terrorism, and more. You want cruel? The U.S. just denied once again (for the eighth time) visas to Olga Salanueva and Adriana Pérez, wives of two of the Cuban Five (an interview with Olga broadcast yesterday on WBAI here). One man serving life in prison in the United States, another 15 years, both completely unjustly, and the U.S. government led by George Bush has denied them the right to see their wives for more than nine years, in contravention of all international law and human decency.
"Cruel"? That's cruel.
Monday, September 24, 2007
Tony Karon: Jewish Opposition to the Lobby?
Tony Karon perceives growing dissent among American Jews, a source of potential power that might serve as a counterforce to the Israel Lobby. Karon makes for interesting reading and he provides important documentation of current events, but I think he's way too optimistic. The power of the Lobby is today greater than ever -- to the point that it's currently on steroids despite the heroic work of President Carter and Walt/Mearshimer and others.
Here are a few sentences about Hillary's position on Israel from the JTA (9.12.07) which effectively sum up the depth of the obeisance to the Lobby of the Democrat front runners -- and virtually everyone else running for president.
In her new position paper on Israel, Hillary Rodham Clinton comes not only to praise the Jewish state but to bury doubts that she would be any less vigilant in its protection than the Bush administration...
Perhaps, but Clinton faces challenges for Jewish support from two flanks: Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor who is a Republican front-runner, has moved even further to the right of Bush, saying that now is not the time to consider Palestinian statehood. And Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), her chief rival for the Democratic nomination, has made considerable inroads among liberal Jewish donors.Despite the stepped-up challenges from Obama and Giuliani, a recent poll of 200 rabbis from all of the major denominations named her as the presidential candidate most supportive of Israel and Jewish causes.
One might think that it is evident that the power of the Lobby has been lifted to it's current hyper intensity in large part due to the terror events of 9/11 and the false attribution of Muslim fanatics as the cause or even as unwilling patsies on the scene. It's worth emphasizing that the terror of 9/11 is the springboard and the repeated justification for the phony but powerful and disastrous "War on Terror." That's bad enough. Equally dispiriting is that even opponents of Bush's purposeful and endless war against civilization have difficulty looking at the stark evidence of controlled demolition which ought to demonstrate that Osama couldn't have done it.
(For a handy primer on some of the evidence demonstrating that it must have been an inside job see: Summary of David Ray Griffin's 10 major points in support of controlled demolition [ http://www.truthmove.org/content/demolition-wtc-7/ ]This particular link provides, among much else, a handy video of the rather obvious free fall controlled demolition of WTC Building 7.
It's also probably clear to many that the reason that so many on the left choose to believe Bush on this matter and no other is because they are comfortable with the notion of fanatical Muslim terrorists -- which is precisely the core of the strength of the Lobby.
Ronald
***
Tom Dispatch
posted 2007-09-13
Tomgram: Tony Karon on Growing Dissent among American Jews
I often think of the letters that come into the Tomdispatch email box as the university of my later life -- messages from around the world, offering commentary, criticism, encouragement, but mainly teaching me about lives (and versions of life) I would otherwise know little or nothing about. Then again, the Internet has a way of releasing inhibitions and, from time to time, the Tomdispatch email box is also a sobering reminder of the mindless hate in our world -- of every sort, but sometimes of a strikingly anti-Semitic sort, letters that are wildly angry and eager, above all, to shut down or shut up commentary or debate of any sort.
It's ironic, then, that the threat of sparking such "anti-Semitism," as well as charges of being functionally anti-Semitic, have been used for a long time in this country as a kind of club to enforce, within the Jewish community, an exceedingly narrow range of correct opinion on Israel and its behavior in the world. In recent months, such attacks from within the Jewish establishment seem to have escalated whenever any professor or critic steps even slightly out of line, and the recent controversial book, The Israeli Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy by John Mearsheimer and Steven Walt has caused a little storm of consternation. Tony Karon, who runs the always provocative Rootless Cosmopolitan website, suggests that these attacks may not be what they seem, that the need to turn back every deviation from Jewish orthodoxy may actually reflect a loosening of control within the political world of American Jews, and a new opening, a Jewish glasnost. Tom
Is a Jewish Glasnost Coming to America?
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=107&ItemID=13777
[This article first appeared on Tomdispatch.com, a weblog of the Nation Institute, which offers a steady flow of alternate sources, news, and opinion from Tom Engelhardt, long time editor in publishing, co-founder of the American Empire Project and author of The End of Victory Culture (University of Massachusetts Press), which has just been thoroughly updated in a newly issued edition that deals with victory culture's crash-and-burn sequel in Iraq.]
Despite a Backlash, Many Jews Are Questioning Israel
By Tony Karon
First, a confession: It may tell me that I hate myself, but I can't help loving Masada2000, the website maintained by militant right-wing Zionist followers of Rabbi Meir Kahane. The reason I love it is its D.I.R.T. list -- that's "Dense anti-Israel Repugnant Traitors" (also published as the S.H.I.T. list of "Self-Hating and Israel-Threatening" Jews). And that's not because I get a bigger entry than -- staying in the Ks -- Henry Kissinger, Michael Kinsley, Naomi Klein, or Ted Koppel. The Kahanists are a pretty flaky lot, counting everyone from Woody Allen to present Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on their list of Jewish traitors. But the habit of branding Jewish dissidents -- those of us who reject the nationalist notion that as Jews, our fate is tied to that of Israel, or the idea that our people's historic suffering somehow exempts Israel from moral reproach for its abuses against others -- as "self-haters"is not unfamiliar to me.
In 1981, my father went, as a delegate of the B'nai B'rith Jewish service organization, to a meeting of the Cape Town chapter of the Jewish Board of Deputies, the governing body of South Africa's Jewish communal institutions. The topic of the meeting was "Anti-Semitism on Campus." My father was pretty shocked and deeply embarrassed when Exhibit A of this phenomenon turned out to be something I'd published in a student newspaper condemning an Israeli raid on Lebanon.
By then, I was an activist in the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, which was consuming most of my energies. Having been an active left-Zionist in my teenage years, I had, however, retained an interest in the Middle East -- and, of course, we all knew that Israel was the South African white apartheid regime's most important ally, arming its security forces in defiance of a UN arms embargo. Even back then, the connection between the circumstances of black people under apartheid, and those of Palestinians under occupation in the West Bank and Gaza, seemed obvious enough to me and to many other Jews in the South African liberation movement: Both were peoples harshly ruled over by a state that denied them the rights of citizenship.
Still, this was a first. I could recite the kiddush from memory, sing old kibbutznik anthems and curse in Yiddish. I had been called a "bloody Jew" many times, but never an anti-Semite or a self-hating Jew. What quickly became clear to me, though, was the purpose of that "self-hating" smear -- to marginalize Jews who dissent from Zionism, the nationalist ideology of Jewish statehood, in order to warn others off expressing similar views.
What I like about the S.H.I.T. list's approach to the job -- other than the "Dangerous Minds" theme music that plays as you read it -- is the way it embraces literally thousands of names, including many of my favorite Jews. Memo to the sages at Masada2000: If you're trying to paint dissenters as demented traitors, you really have to keep the numbers down. Instead, Masada2000's inadvertent message is: "Think critically about Israel and you'll join Woody Allen and a cast of thousands..."
A New Landscape of Jewish Dissent
The Kahanists are a fringe movement, but their self-defeating list may nonetheless be a metaphor for the coming crisis in more mainstream nationalist efforts to police Jewish identity. The Zionist establishment has had remarkable success over the past half-century in convincing others that Israel and its supporters speak for, and represent, "the Jews." The value to their cause of making Israel indistinguishable from Jews at large is that it becomes a lot easier to shield Israel from reproach. It suggests, in the most emphatic terms, that serious criticism of Israel amounts to criticism of Jews. More than a millennium of violent Christian persecution of Jews, culminating in the Holocaust, has made many in the West rightly sensitive towards any claims of anti-Semitism, a sensitivity many Zionists like to exploit to gain a carte blanche exemption from criticism for a state they claim to be the very personification of Jewishness.
So, despite Israel's ongoing dispossession and oppression of the Palestinians in the occupied territories, then-Harvard president Larry Summers evidently had no trouble saying, in 2002, that harsh criticisms of Israel are "anti-Semitic in their effect if not in their intent."
Robin Shepherd of the usually sensible British think-tank Chatham House has gone even further, arguing that comparing Israel with apartheid South Africa is "objective anti-Semitism." Says Shepherd: "Of course one can criticize Israel, but there is a litmus test, and that is when the critics begin using constant key references to South Africa and the Nazis, using terms such as ‘bantustans.' None of these people, of course, will admit to being racist, but this kind of anti-Semitism is a much more sophisticated form of racism, and the kind of hate-filled rhetoric and imagery are on the same moral level as racism, so gross and distorted that they are defaming an entire people, since Israel is an essentially Jewish project."
I'd agree that the Nazi analogy is specious -- not only wrong but offensive in its intent, although not "racist". But the logic of suggesting it is "racist" to compare Israel to apartheid South Africa is simply bizarre. What if Israel objectively behaves like apartheid South Africa? What then?
Actually, Mr. Shepherd, I'd be more inclined to pin the racist label on anyone who conflates the world's 13 million Jews with a country in which 8.2 million of them -- almost two thirds -- have chosen not to live.
Although you wouldn't know it -- not if you followed Jewish life simply through the activities of such major Jewish communal bodies as the Conference of Presidents of American Jewish Organizations and the Anti-Defamation League -- the extent to which the eight million Jews of the Diaspora identify with Israel is increasingly open to question (much to the horror of the Zionist-oriented Jewish establishment). In a recent study funded by the Andrea and Charles Bronfman Philanthropies (an important donor to Jewish communal organizations), Professors Steven M. Cohen and Ari Y. Kelman revealed that their survey data had yielded some extraordinary findings: In order to measure the depth of attachment of American Jews to Israel, the researchers asked whether respondents would consider the destruction of the State of Israel a "personal tragedy." Less than half of those aged under 35 answered "yes" and only 54% percent of those aged 35-50 agreed (compared with 78% of those over 65). The study found that only 54% of those under 35 felt comfortable with the very idea of a Jewish state.
As groups such as the Jewish Agency in Israel (which aims to promote Jewish immigration) and the American Jewish committee expressed dismay over the findings, Cohen and Kelman had more bad news: They believed they were seeing a long-term trend that was unlikely to be reversed, as each generation of American Jews becomes even more integrated into the American mainstream than its parents and grandparents had been. The study, said Cohen, reflected "very significant shifts that have been occurring in what it means to be a Jew."
Cohen's and Kelman's startling figures alone underscore the absurdity of Shepherd's suggestion that to challenge Israel is to "defame an entire people." They also help frame the context for what I would call an emerging Jewish glasnost in which Jewish critics of Israel are increasingly willing to make themselves known. When I arrived in the United States 13 years ago, I was often surprised to find that people with whom I seemed to share a progressive, cosmopolitan worldview would suddenly morph into raging ultranationalists when the conversation turned to Israel. Back then, it would have seemed unthinkable for historian Tony Judt to advocate a binational state for Israelis and Palestinians or for Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen to write that "Israel itself is a mistake. It is an honest mistake, a well-intentioned mistake, a mistake for which no one is culpable, but the idea of creating a nation of European Jews in an area of Arab Muslims (and some Christians) has produced a century of warfare and terrorism of the sort we are seeing now." Unthinkable, too, was the angry renunciation of Zionism by Avrum Burg, former speaker of Israel's Knesset.
And, in those days, with the internet still in its infancy, the online Jewish dissident landscape that today ranges from groups in the Zionist peace camp like Tikkun, Americans for Peace Now, and the Israel Policy Forum, among others, to anti-Zionist Jews of the left such as Not in My Name and Jewish Voices for Peace, had not yet taken shape. Indeed, there was no Haaretz online English edition in which the reality of Israel was being candidly reported and debated in terms that would still be deemed heretical in much of the U.S. media.
Thirteen years ago, there certainly was no organization around like "Birthright Unplugged," which aims to subvert the "Taglit-Birthright Program," funded by Zionist groups and the government of Israel, that provides free trips to Israel for young Jewish Americans in order to encourage them to identify with the State. (The "Unplugged" version encourages young Jews from the U.S. to take the Birthright tour and its free air travel, and then stay on for a two-week program of visits to the West Bank, to Israeli human rights organizations, and to peace groups. The goal is to see another side of Israel, the side experienced by its victims -- and by Israelis who oppose the occupation of the West Bank.)
Clearly, much has changed, and the ability of the Zionist establishment -- the America Israel Political Action Committee, the American Jewish Committee, the Anti-Defamation League, and others -- to impose nationalist boundaries on Jewish identity is being eroded. It's worth remembering in this context that anti-Zionism was originally a Jewish movement -- the majority of European Jews before World War II rejected the Zionist movement and its calls for a mass migration from Europe to build a Jewish nation-state in Palestine. The most popular Jewish political organization in Europe had been the Yiddishe Arbeiter Bund, a Jewish socialist party that was militantly anti-Zionist. Even among the rabbis of Europe, there was considerable opposition to the idea of Jews taking control of Zion before the arrival of the Messiah (and there still is, of course, from a sizable minority of the ultra-Orthodox).
Of course, the Holocaust changed all that. For hundreds of thousands of survivors, a safe haven in Palestine became a historic necessity.
But the world has changed since then, and as the research cited above suggests, the trends clearly don't favor the Zionists. I was reared on the idea that a Jewish nation-state in the Middle East was the "manifest destiny" of the Jews. I learned in the Zionist movement that Jewish life in the Diaspora was inevitably stunted and ultimately doomed. But history may have decided otherwise. The majority of us have chosen to live elsewhere, thereby voting with our feet. Indeed, according to Israeli government figures, some 750,000 Israeli Jews (15% of Israel's Jewish population) are now living abroad, further undermining the Zionist premise that the Diaspora is an innately hostile and anti-Semitic place.
The Ferocity of Nationalism, The Universality of Justice
Increasingly anxious that most of us have no intention of going to Israel to boost Jewish numbers, the Israel-based Jewish Agency -- apparently oblivious to irony of its own actions -- has complained to Germany over official policies that make life there so attractive to Jewish immigrants from former Soviet territories, thus discouraging them from going to Israel. More immediately threatening to the Zionist establishment, however, is another reality: Many Jews are beginning to make once unthinkable criticisms of Israel's behavior. If you want to bludgeon Jewish critics with the charge of "anti-Semitism" when they challenge Israel's actions, then it's hardly helpful to have other Jews standing up and expressing the same thoughts. It undermines the sense, treasured by Israel's most fervent advocates, that they represent a cast-iron consensus among American Jews in particular.
That much has been clear in the response to the publication of John Mearsheimer and Steven Walt's controversial new book The Israeli Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, which challenges the wisdom and morality of the unashamed and absolute bias in U.S. foreign policy towards Israel. In an exchange on the NPR show Fresh Air, Walt was at pains to stress, as in his book, that the Israel Lobby, as he sees it, is not a Jewish lobby, but rather an association of groupings with a right-wing political agenda often at odds with majority American-Jewish opinion,
Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League, argued exactly the opposite: Walt and Mearsheimer, he claimed, were effectively promoting anti-Semitism, because the Israel lobby is nothing more (or less) than the collective will of the American Jewish community. Which, of course, it isn't. In fact, in the American Jewish community you can increasingly hear open echoes of Mearsheimer and Walt's skepticism over whether the lobby's efforts are good for Israel.
But Foxman's case is undercut by something far broader -- an emerging Jewish glasnost. Of course, like any break with a long-established nationalist consensus, the burgeoning of dissent has provoked a backlash. Norman Finkelstein -- the noted Holocaust scholar and fierce critic of Zionism recently hounded out of De Paul University in a campaign of vilification based precisely on the idea that fierce criticism of Israel is the equivalent of "hate speech" -- could be forgiven for being skeptical of the idea that the grip of the ultranationalists is weakening.
So, too, could Joel Kovel. After all, he found his important book Overcoming Zionism pulled by his American publisher, the University of Michigan Press, also on the "hate speech" charge.
Jimmy Carter -- who was called a "Holocaust denier" (yes, a Holocaust denier!) for using the apartheid analogy in his book on Israel -- and Mearsheimer and Walt might have reason for skepticism as well. But I'd argue that the renewed ferocity of recent attacks on those who have strayed from the nationalist straight and narrow has been a product of panic in the Jewish establishment -- a panic born of the fact that its losing its grip. As in the former Soviet Union with the actual glasnost moment, this is a process, once started, that's only likely to be accelerated by such witch-hunting.
Last year, a very cranky academic by the name of Alvin Rosenfeld, on behalf of the oldest Jewish advocacy group in the U.S., the American Jewish Committee, got a flurry of attention by warning that liberal Jews such as playwright Tony Kushner, Tony Judt and Richard Cohen, all of whom had recently offered fundamental criticisms of Israel, were giving comfort to a "new anti-Semitism."
"They're helping to make [anti-Semitic] views about the Jewish state respectable -- for example, that it's a Nazi-like state, comparable to South African apartheid; that it engages in ethnic cleansing and genocide. These charges are not true and can have the effect of delegitimizing Israel."
In reality, though, whether or not you agree with the views of those critics, they simply can't legitimately be called anti-Semitic. Actually, I doubt any of those he cited have accused Israel of genocide or compared it in any way to the Nazi state. (Former Israeli Knesset Speaker Avram Burg, however, recently did write, in reference to Israeli militarism and hostility to Arabs, "It is sometimes difficult for me to distinguish between the primeval National-Socialism and some national cultural doctrines of the here-and-now."). But the ethnic-cleansing in which the Israelis expelled 750,000 Palestinians in 1948 and the apartheid character of Israel's present occupation of the West Bank are objective realities. Rosenfeld is suggesting that, to take an honest look at either the occupation or the events of 1948, as so many Israeli writers, journalists, and politicians have done, is to "delegitimize" Israel and promote anti-Semitism.
Just last week, Danny Rubinstein, senior correspondent covering Palestinian affairs for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, was slated to speak to the British Zionist Federation – and then, at the last minute, his speech was canceled. The reason? Rubinstein had pointed out that "today Israel is an apartheid state with different status for different communities." (While many liberal Jewish Americans can't bring themselves to accept the apartheid comparison, that's not true of their Israeli counterparts who actually know what's going on in the West Bank. Former education minister Shulamit Aloni, for example, or journalist Amira Hass use the comparison. (The comparison first occurred to me on a visit to Kibbutz Yizreel in 1978, when the elders of my Zionist youth movement, Habonim, who had emigrated from South Africa to Israel, warned that the settlement policy of the then-new Likud government was designed to prevent Israel letting go of the West Bank. The population there, they told us, would never be given the right to vote in Israel, and so the result would be, as they presciently put it, "an apartheid situation.")
Use of the term "apartheid" in reference to the occupation does draw the attention of those who prefer to look away from the fact that Israel is routinely engaged in behavior democratic society has deemed morally odious and unacceptable when it has occurred in other contexts. It is precisely because that fact makes them uncomfortable, I suspect, that they react so emotionally to the A-word. Take black South Africans who suffered under apartheid on a visit to the West Bank -- a mild-mannered moderate Nobel Peace Prize winner such as Bishop Desmond Tutu, for example -- ask them about the validity of the comparison, and you know the answer you're going to get.
Moreover, it's an answer with which a growing number of Jews, who place the universal, ethical and social justice traditions of their faith above those of narrow tribalism, are willing to deal.
In an earlier commentary, perhaps presaging his break with Zionism, Burg noted in 2002:
"Yes, we Israelis have revived the Hebrew language, created a marvelous theater and a strong national currency. Our Jewish minds are as sharp as ever. We are traded on the Nasdaq. But is this why we created a state? The Jewish people did not survive for two millennia in order to pioneer new weaponry, computer security programs or antimissile missiles. We were supposed to be a light unto the nations. In this we have failed. It turns out that the 2,000-year struggle for Jewish survival comes down to a state of settlements, run by an amoral clique of corrupt lawbreakers who are deaf both to their citizens and to their enemies. A state lacking justice cannot survive. More and more Israelis are coming to understand this as they ask their children where they expect to live in 25 years. Children who are honest admit, to their parents' shock, that they do not know."
Although I am not religious, I share Burg's view that universal justice is at the heart of the Jewish tradition. Growing up in apartheid South Africa was an object lesson in Jewish ethics. Yes, there was plenty of anti-Semitism in the colonial white society of my childhood, but the mantle of victimhood belonged to others. And if you responded to the in-no-way-exclusively-so, but very Jewish impulse to seek justice, you found yourself working side by side not only with the remarkable number of Jews who filled leadership roles in the liberation movement, but also with Christians, Muslims, Hindus, and others.
Judaism's universal ethical calling can't really be answered if we live only among ourselves -- and Israel's own experience suggests it's essentially impossible to do so without doing injustice to others. Israel is only 59 years old, a brief moment in the sweep of Jewish history, and I'd argue that Judaism's survival depends instead on its ability to offer a sustaining moral and ethical anchor in a world where the concepts of nation and nationality are in decline (but the ferocity of nationalism may not be). Israel's relevance to Judaism's survival depends first and foremost on its ability, as Burg points out, to deliver justice, not only to its citizens, but to those it has hurt.
Tony Karon is a senior editor at TIME who also maintains his own website, Rootless Cosmopolitan, where he comments on everything from geopolitical conflict to Jewish identity issues. "Rootless Cosmopolitan" was Stalin's euphemistic pejorative for "Jew" during his anti-Semitic purges of the late 1940s, but Karon, who grew up in South Africa and whose family roots lie in Eastern Europe, and before that France, takes the term as a badge of honor. Karon was a teenage activist in the left-Zionist Habonim movement before finding his way into the big tent of the anti-apartheid liberation struggle, an experience that prompted him to re-imagine what it meant to be a Jew in the world.
Copyright 2007 Tony Karon
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Here are a few sentences about Hillary's position on Israel from the JTA (9.12.07) which effectively sum up the depth of the obeisance to the Lobby of the Democrat front runners -- and virtually everyone else running for president.
In her new position paper on Israel, Hillary Rodham Clinton comes not only to praise the Jewish state but to bury doubts that she would be any less vigilant in its protection than the Bush administration...
Perhaps, but Clinton faces challenges for Jewish support from two flanks: Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor who is a Republican front-runner, has moved even further to the right of Bush, saying that now is not the time to consider Palestinian statehood. And Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), her chief rival for the Democratic nomination, has made considerable inroads among liberal Jewish donors.Despite the stepped-up challenges from Obama and Giuliani, a recent poll of 200 rabbis from all of the major denominations named her as the presidential candidate most supportive of Israel and Jewish causes.
One might think that it is evident that the power of the Lobby has been lifted to it's current hyper intensity in large part due to the terror events of 9/11 and the false attribution of Muslim fanatics as the cause or even as unwilling patsies on the scene. It's worth emphasizing that the terror of 9/11 is the springboard and the repeated justification for the phony but powerful and disastrous "War on Terror." That's bad enough. Equally dispiriting is that even opponents of Bush's purposeful and endless war against civilization have difficulty looking at the stark evidence of controlled demolition which ought to demonstrate that Osama couldn't have done it.
(For a handy primer on some of the evidence demonstrating that it must have been an inside job see: Summary of David Ray Griffin's 10 major points in support of controlled demolition [ http://www.truthmove.org/content/demolition-wtc-7/ ]This particular link provides, among much else, a handy video of the rather obvious free fall controlled demolition of WTC Building 7.
It's also probably clear to many that the reason that so many on the left choose to believe Bush on this matter and no other is because they are comfortable with the notion of fanatical Muslim terrorists -- which is precisely the core of the strength of the Lobby.
Ronald
***
Tom Dispatch
posted 2007-09-13
Tomgram: Tony Karon on Growing Dissent among American Jews
I often think of the letters that come into the Tomdispatch email box as the university of my later life -- messages from around the world, offering commentary, criticism, encouragement, but mainly teaching me about lives (and versions of life) I would otherwise know little or nothing about. Then again, the Internet has a way of releasing inhibitions and, from time to time, the Tomdispatch email box is also a sobering reminder of the mindless hate in our world -- of every sort, but sometimes of a strikingly anti-Semitic sort, letters that are wildly angry and eager, above all, to shut down or shut up commentary or debate of any sort.
It's ironic, then, that the threat of sparking such "anti-Semitism," as well as charges of being functionally anti-Semitic, have been used for a long time in this country as a kind of club to enforce, within the Jewish community, an exceedingly narrow range of correct opinion on Israel and its behavior in the world. In recent months, such attacks from within the Jewish establishment seem to have escalated whenever any professor or critic steps even slightly out of line, and the recent controversial book, The Israeli Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy by John Mearsheimer and Steven Walt has caused a little storm of consternation. Tony Karon, who runs the always provocative Rootless Cosmopolitan website, suggests that these attacks may not be what they seem, that the need to turn back every deviation from Jewish orthodoxy may actually reflect a loosening of control within the political world of American Jews, and a new opening, a Jewish glasnost. Tom
Is a Jewish Glasnost Coming to America?
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=107&ItemID=13777
[This article first appeared on Tomdispatch.com, a weblog of the Nation Institute, which offers a steady flow of alternate sources, news, and opinion from Tom Engelhardt, long time editor in publishing, co-founder of the American Empire Project and author of The End of Victory Culture (University of Massachusetts Press), which has just been thoroughly updated in a newly issued edition that deals with victory culture's crash-and-burn sequel in Iraq.]
Despite a Backlash, Many Jews Are Questioning Israel
By Tony Karon
First, a confession: It may tell me that I hate myself, but I can't help loving Masada2000, the website maintained by militant right-wing Zionist followers of Rabbi Meir Kahane. The reason I love it is its D.I.R.T. list -- that's "Dense anti-Israel Repugnant Traitors" (also published as the S.H.I.T. list of "Self-Hating and Israel-Threatening" Jews). And that's not because I get a bigger entry than -- staying in the Ks -- Henry Kissinger, Michael Kinsley, Naomi Klein, or Ted Koppel. The Kahanists are a pretty flaky lot, counting everyone from Woody Allen to present Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on their list of Jewish traitors. But the habit of branding Jewish dissidents -- those of us who reject the nationalist notion that as Jews, our fate is tied to that of Israel, or the idea that our people's historic suffering somehow exempts Israel from moral reproach for its abuses against others -- as "self-haters"is not unfamiliar to me.
In 1981, my father went, as a delegate of the B'nai B'rith Jewish service organization, to a meeting of the Cape Town chapter of the Jewish Board of Deputies, the governing body of South Africa's Jewish communal institutions. The topic of the meeting was "Anti-Semitism on Campus." My father was pretty shocked and deeply embarrassed when Exhibit A of this phenomenon turned out to be something I'd published in a student newspaper condemning an Israeli raid on Lebanon.
By then, I was an activist in the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, which was consuming most of my energies. Having been an active left-Zionist in my teenage years, I had, however, retained an interest in the Middle East -- and, of course, we all knew that Israel was the South African white apartheid regime's most important ally, arming its security forces in defiance of a UN arms embargo. Even back then, the connection between the circumstances of black people under apartheid, and those of Palestinians under occupation in the West Bank and Gaza, seemed obvious enough to me and to many other Jews in the South African liberation movement: Both were peoples harshly ruled over by a state that denied them the rights of citizenship.
Still, this was a first. I could recite the kiddush from memory, sing old kibbutznik anthems and curse in Yiddish. I had been called a "bloody Jew" many times, but never an anti-Semite or a self-hating Jew. What quickly became clear to me, though, was the purpose of that "self-hating" smear -- to marginalize Jews who dissent from Zionism, the nationalist ideology of Jewish statehood, in order to warn others off expressing similar views.
What I like about the S.H.I.T. list's approach to the job -- other than the "Dangerous Minds" theme music that plays as you read it -- is the way it embraces literally thousands of names, including many of my favorite Jews. Memo to the sages at Masada2000: If you're trying to paint dissenters as demented traitors, you really have to keep the numbers down. Instead, Masada2000's inadvertent message is: "Think critically about Israel and you'll join Woody Allen and a cast of thousands..."
A New Landscape of Jewish Dissent
The Kahanists are a fringe movement, but their self-defeating list may nonetheless be a metaphor for the coming crisis in more mainstream nationalist efforts to police Jewish identity. The Zionist establishment has had remarkable success over the past half-century in convincing others that Israel and its supporters speak for, and represent, "the Jews." The value to their cause of making Israel indistinguishable from Jews at large is that it becomes a lot easier to shield Israel from reproach. It suggests, in the most emphatic terms, that serious criticism of Israel amounts to criticism of Jews. More than a millennium of violent Christian persecution of Jews, culminating in the Holocaust, has made many in the West rightly sensitive towards any claims of anti-Semitism, a sensitivity many Zionists like to exploit to gain a carte blanche exemption from criticism for a state they claim to be the very personification of Jewishness.
So, despite Israel's ongoing dispossession and oppression of the Palestinians in the occupied territories, then-Harvard president Larry Summers evidently had no trouble saying, in 2002, that harsh criticisms of Israel are "anti-Semitic in their effect if not in their intent."
Robin Shepherd of the usually sensible British think-tank Chatham House has gone even further, arguing that comparing Israel with apartheid South Africa is "objective anti-Semitism." Says Shepherd: "Of course one can criticize Israel, but there is a litmus test, and that is when the critics begin using constant key references to South Africa and the Nazis, using terms such as ‘bantustans.' None of these people, of course, will admit to being racist, but this kind of anti-Semitism is a much more sophisticated form of racism, and the kind of hate-filled rhetoric and imagery are on the same moral level as racism, so gross and distorted that they are defaming an entire people, since Israel is an essentially Jewish project."
I'd agree that the Nazi analogy is specious -- not only wrong but offensive in its intent, although not "racist". But the logic of suggesting it is "racist" to compare Israel to apartheid South Africa is simply bizarre. What if Israel objectively behaves like apartheid South Africa? What then?
Actually, Mr. Shepherd, I'd be more inclined to pin the racist label on anyone who conflates the world's 13 million Jews with a country in which 8.2 million of them -- almost two thirds -- have chosen not to live.
Although you wouldn't know it -- not if you followed Jewish life simply through the activities of such major Jewish communal bodies as the Conference of Presidents of American Jewish Organizations and the Anti-Defamation League -- the extent to which the eight million Jews of the Diaspora identify with Israel is increasingly open to question (much to the horror of the Zionist-oriented Jewish establishment). In a recent study funded by the Andrea and Charles Bronfman Philanthropies (an important donor to Jewish communal organizations), Professors Steven M. Cohen and Ari Y. Kelman revealed that their survey data had yielded some extraordinary findings: In order to measure the depth of attachment of American Jews to Israel, the researchers asked whether respondents would consider the destruction of the State of Israel a "personal tragedy." Less than half of those aged under 35 answered "yes" and only 54% percent of those aged 35-50 agreed (compared with 78% of those over 65). The study found that only 54% of those under 35 felt comfortable with the very idea of a Jewish state.
As groups such as the Jewish Agency in Israel (which aims to promote Jewish immigration) and the American Jewish committee expressed dismay over the findings, Cohen and Kelman had more bad news: They believed they were seeing a long-term trend that was unlikely to be reversed, as each generation of American Jews becomes even more integrated into the American mainstream than its parents and grandparents had been. The study, said Cohen, reflected "very significant shifts that have been occurring in what it means to be a Jew."
Cohen's and Kelman's startling figures alone underscore the absurdity of Shepherd's suggestion that to challenge Israel is to "defame an entire people." They also help frame the context for what I would call an emerging Jewish glasnost in which Jewish critics of Israel are increasingly willing to make themselves known. When I arrived in the United States 13 years ago, I was often surprised to find that people with whom I seemed to share a progressive, cosmopolitan worldview would suddenly morph into raging ultranationalists when the conversation turned to Israel. Back then, it would have seemed unthinkable for historian Tony Judt to advocate a binational state for Israelis and Palestinians or for Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen to write that "Israel itself is a mistake. It is an honest mistake, a well-intentioned mistake, a mistake for which no one is culpable, but the idea of creating a nation of European Jews in an area of Arab Muslims (and some Christians) has produced a century of warfare and terrorism of the sort we are seeing now." Unthinkable, too, was the angry renunciation of Zionism by Avrum Burg, former speaker of Israel's Knesset.
And, in those days, with the internet still in its infancy, the online Jewish dissident landscape that today ranges from groups in the Zionist peace camp like Tikkun, Americans for Peace Now, and the Israel Policy Forum, among others, to anti-Zionist Jews of the left such as Not in My Name and Jewish Voices for Peace, had not yet taken shape. Indeed, there was no Haaretz online English edition in which the reality of Israel was being candidly reported and debated in terms that would still be deemed heretical in much of the U.S. media.
Thirteen years ago, there certainly was no organization around like "Birthright Unplugged," which aims to subvert the "Taglit-Birthright Program," funded by Zionist groups and the government of Israel, that provides free trips to Israel for young Jewish Americans in order to encourage them to identify with the State. (The "Unplugged" version encourages young Jews from the U.S. to take the Birthright tour and its free air travel, and then stay on for a two-week program of visits to the West Bank, to Israeli human rights organizations, and to peace groups. The goal is to see another side of Israel, the side experienced by its victims -- and by Israelis who oppose the occupation of the West Bank.)
Clearly, much has changed, and the ability of the Zionist establishment -- the America Israel Political Action Committee, the American Jewish Committee, the Anti-Defamation League, and others -- to impose nationalist boundaries on Jewish identity is being eroded. It's worth remembering in this context that anti-Zionism was originally a Jewish movement -- the majority of European Jews before World War II rejected the Zionist movement and its calls for a mass migration from Europe to build a Jewish nation-state in Palestine. The most popular Jewish political organization in Europe had been the Yiddishe Arbeiter Bund, a Jewish socialist party that was militantly anti-Zionist. Even among the rabbis of Europe, there was considerable opposition to the idea of Jews taking control of Zion before the arrival of the Messiah (and there still is, of course, from a sizable minority of the ultra-Orthodox).
Of course, the Holocaust changed all that. For hundreds of thousands of survivors, a safe haven in Palestine became a historic necessity.
But the world has changed since then, and as the research cited above suggests, the trends clearly don't favor the Zionists. I was reared on the idea that a Jewish nation-state in the Middle East was the "manifest destiny" of the Jews. I learned in the Zionist movement that Jewish life in the Diaspora was inevitably stunted and ultimately doomed. But history may have decided otherwise. The majority of us have chosen to live elsewhere, thereby voting with our feet. Indeed, according to Israeli government figures, some 750,000 Israeli Jews (15% of Israel's Jewish population) are now living abroad, further undermining the Zionist premise that the Diaspora is an innately hostile and anti-Semitic place.
The Ferocity of Nationalism, The Universality of Justice
Increasingly anxious that most of us have no intention of going to Israel to boost Jewish numbers, the Israel-based Jewish Agency -- apparently oblivious to irony of its own actions -- has complained to Germany over official policies that make life there so attractive to Jewish immigrants from former Soviet territories, thus discouraging them from going to Israel. More immediately threatening to the Zionist establishment, however, is another reality: Many Jews are beginning to make once unthinkable criticisms of Israel's behavior. If you want to bludgeon Jewish critics with the charge of "anti-Semitism" when they challenge Israel's actions, then it's hardly helpful to have other Jews standing up and expressing the same thoughts. It undermines the sense, treasured by Israel's most fervent advocates, that they represent a cast-iron consensus among American Jews in particular.
That much has been clear in the response to the publication of John Mearsheimer and Steven Walt's controversial new book The Israeli Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, which challenges the wisdom and morality of the unashamed and absolute bias in U.S. foreign policy towards Israel. In an exchange on the NPR show Fresh Air, Walt was at pains to stress, as in his book, that the Israel Lobby, as he sees it, is not a Jewish lobby, but rather an association of groupings with a right-wing political agenda often at odds with majority American-Jewish opinion,
Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League, argued exactly the opposite: Walt and Mearsheimer, he claimed, were effectively promoting anti-Semitism, because the Israel lobby is nothing more (or less) than the collective will of the American Jewish community. Which, of course, it isn't. In fact, in the American Jewish community you can increasingly hear open echoes of Mearsheimer and Walt's skepticism over whether the lobby's efforts are good for Israel.
But Foxman's case is undercut by something far broader -- an emerging Jewish glasnost. Of course, like any break with a long-established nationalist consensus, the burgeoning of dissent has provoked a backlash. Norman Finkelstein -- the noted Holocaust scholar and fierce critic of Zionism recently hounded out of De Paul University in a campaign of vilification based precisely on the idea that fierce criticism of Israel is the equivalent of "hate speech" -- could be forgiven for being skeptical of the idea that the grip of the ultranationalists is weakening.
So, too, could Joel Kovel. After all, he found his important book Overcoming Zionism pulled by his American publisher, the University of Michigan Press, also on the "hate speech" charge.
Jimmy Carter -- who was called a "Holocaust denier" (yes, a Holocaust denier!) for using the apartheid analogy in his book on Israel -- and Mearsheimer and Walt might have reason for skepticism as well. But I'd argue that the renewed ferocity of recent attacks on those who have strayed from the nationalist straight and narrow has been a product of panic in the Jewish establishment -- a panic born of the fact that its losing its grip. As in the former Soviet Union with the actual glasnost moment, this is a process, once started, that's only likely to be accelerated by such witch-hunting.
Last year, a very cranky academic by the name of Alvin Rosenfeld, on behalf of the oldest Jewish advocacy group in the U.S., the American Jewish Committee, got a flurry of attention by warning that liberal Jews such as playwright Tony Kushner, Tony Judt and Richard Cohen, all of whom had recently offered fundamental criticisms of Israel, were giving comfort to a "new anti-Semitism."
"They're helping to make [anti-Semitic] views about the Jewish state respectable -- for example, that it's a Nazi-like state, comparable to South African apartheid; that it engages in ethnic cleansing and genocide. These charges are not true and can have the effect of delegitimizing Israel."
In reality, though, whether or not you agree with the views of those critics, they simply can't legitimately be called anti-Semitic. Actually, I doubt any of those he cited have accused Israel of genocide or compared it in any way to the Nazi state. (Former Israeli Knesset Speaker Avram Burg, however, recently did write, in reference to Israeli militarism and hostility to Arabs, "It is sometimes difficult for me to distinguish between the primeval National-Socialism and some national cultural doctrines of the here-and-now."). But the ethnic-cleansing in which the Israelis expelled 750,000 Palestinians in 1948 and the apartheid character of Israel's present occupation of the West Bank are objective realities. Rosenfeld is suggesting that, to take an honest look at either the occupation or the events of 1948, as so many Israeli writers, journalists, and politicians have done, is to "delegitimize" Israel and promote anti-Semitism.
Just last week, Danny Rubinstein, senior correspondent covering Palestinian affairs for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, was slated to speak to the British Zionist Federation – and then, at the last minute, his speech was canceled. The reason? Rubinstein had pointed out that "today Israel is an apartheid state with different status for different communities." (While many liberal Jewish Americans can't bring themselves to accept the apartheid comparison, that's not true of their Israeli counterparts who actually know what's going on in the West Bank. Former education minister Shulamit Aloni, for example, or journalist Amira Hass use the comparison. (The comparison first occurred to me on a visit to Kibbutz Yizreel in 1978, when the elders of my Zionist youth movement, Habonim, who had emigrated from South Africa to Israel, warned that the settlement policy of the then-new Likud government was designed to prevent Israel letting go of the West Bank. The population there, they told us, would never be given the right to vote in Israel, and so the result would be, as they presciently put it, "an apartheid situation.")
Use of the term "apartheid" in reference to the occupation does draw the attention of those who prefer to look away from the fact that Israel is routinely engaged in behavior democratic society has deemed morally odious and unacceptable when it has occurred in other contexts. It is precisely because that fact makes them uncomfortable, I suspect, that they react so emotionally to the A-word. Take black South Africans who suffered under apartheid on a visit to the West Bank -- a mild-mannered moderate Nobel Peace Prize winner such as Bishop Desmond Tutu, for example -- ask them about the validity of the comparison, and you know the answer you're going to get.
Moreover, it's an answer with which a growing number of Jews, who place the universal, ethical and social justice traditions of their faith above those of narrow tribalism, are willing to deal.
In an earlier commentary, perhaps presaging his break with Zionism, Burg noted in 2002:
"Yes, we Israelis have revived the Hebrew language, created a marvelous theater and a strong national currency. Our Jewish minds are as sharp as ever. We are traded on the Nasdaq. But is this why we created a state? The Jewish people did not survive for two millennia in order to pioneer new weaponry, computer security programs or antimissile missiles. We were supposed to be a light unto the nations. In this we have failed. It turns out that the 2,000-year struggle for Jewish survival comes down to a state of settlements, run by an amoral clique of corrupt lawbreakers who are deaf both to their citizens and to their enemies. A state lacking justice cannot survive. More and more Israelis are coming to understand this as they ask their children where they expect to live in 25 years. Children who are honest admit, to their parents' shock, that they do not know."
Although I am not religious, I share Burg's view that universal justice is at the heart of the Jewish tradition. Growing up in apartheid South Africa was an object lesson in Jewish ethics. Yes, there was plenty of anti-Semitism in the colonial white society of my childhood, but the mantle of victimhood belonged to others. And if you responded to the in-no-way-exclusively-so, but very Jewish impulse to seek justice, you found yourself working side by side not only with the remarkable number of Jews who filled leadership roles in the liberation movement, but also with Christians, Muslims, Hindus, and others.
Judaism's universal ethical calling can't really be answered if we live only among ourselves -- and Israel's own experience suggests it's essentially impossible to do so without doing injustice to others. Israel is only 59 years old, a brief moment in the sweep of Jewish history, and I'd argue that Judaism's survival depends instead on its ability to offer a sustaining moral and ethical anchor in a world where the concepts of nation and nationality are in decline (but the ferocity of nationalism may not be). Israel's relevance to Judaism's survival depends first and foremost on its ability, as Burg points out, to deliver justice, not only to its citizens, but to those it has hurt.
Tony Karon is a senior editor at TIME who also maintains his own website, Rootless Cosmopolitan, where he comments on everything from geopolitical conflict to Jewish identity issues. "Rootless Cosmopolitan" was Stalin's euphemistic pejorative for "Jew" during his anti-Semitic purges of the late 1940s, but Karon, who grew up in South Africa and whose family roots lie in Eastern Europe, and before that France, takes the term as a badge of honor. Karon was a teenage activist in the left-Zionist Habonim movement before finding his way into the big tent of the anti-apartheid liberation struggle, an experience that prompted him to re-imagine what it meant to be a Jew in the world.
Copyright 2007 Tony Karon
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