Memory Hole: Blog Work

(Updated: originally posted July 11, 2007)

This is when I began to repost other blogs.

I am reposting three pieces today. Enjoy!

"It’s What Bush Craves!" by Karen Kwiatkowski

".... To treat the sickness of Dubya and Dick, stop drinking the Kool-aid. Trust me, it’s easy. Ignore those media outlets that transmit his message – and that’s pretty easy too. Media is business (even when corrupted by government linkages), and it will give us what we want to hear.

Stop buying the recycled BS and terror-filled Washington talking points, and they’ll stop selling. Conservative TV and talk radio are already feeling the pain of a nation that disapproves of war and global intervention, wasted treasure and blood.

On Iraq and Afghanistan, try walking away. Quickly, like a puddle of water evaporating in the Mesopotamian sun. Don’t worry that a well-dressed, finely fed and perfectly coiffed neocon in Washington will call you gutless.

If the global policing, base-building, corporate capitalists cry that if we leave now, even more innocent people will die, just remember that "more" is an awful big number. Americans have already killed a million Iraqis and Afghanis, and displaced nearly three million. And this doesn’t count the 500,000 dead Iraqi children our government justified as "worth" a decade of economic sanctions.

Don’t worry that a soldier will ask the impossible question of "If we leave now, why was I maimed, lied to, wasted, and made a murderer?" He’ll ask anyway, and there is only one answer, an old and oft repeated answer, and it hurts. You chose to serve the state, and it sacrificed you for nothing.

The government war on terror, everywhere and all the time – captioned and captive by "Al Qaeda" – is what Bush craves. Like some futuristic Brawndo, it’s killing our country, destroying our economy, and creating morally decrepit automatons where millions of free Americans might stand.

Over 70% of Americans oppose Bush, and his bloody cravings. Just in case we really are approaching idiocracy, that’s plus or minus 200 million. 200 million people who do not support the policy of a dwindling few in Washington, in a republic, ought to mean something. Shouldn’t it?

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"Palestine: Zionist Starvation Plan" by Mary Sparrowdancer

"Over 6000 (six thousand) Palestinian refugees from Gaza, including children, babies, pregnant women, the sick, the elderly, and unarmed civilians have been stranded on the Egyptian side of the Rafah border of Gaza for over one month now.

Stranded in the scorching heat, they are without adequate shelter, food, or money with which to solicit help because the Zionist Israeli military regime decided to close the border passage between Gaza and Egypt. The Zionists had earlier built an enormous wall between Gaza and Egypt, destroying hundreds of Palestinian homes without notice in the process. The wall is a wall that is too high to be scaled, and those now trapped on the other side of it are being denied by Zionists reentry into Gaza. The Palestinians of Gaza cannot go home. (1)

In addition to this sadistic and prolonged torture of the innocent, according to Gush Shalom, (Gush Shalom is a Jewish peace movement- true Judaism is opposed to Zionism) "services of Western Union and DHL in the Gaza Strip were discontinued under Israeli and American pressure, making it impossible for families to send money to their trapped relatives." On July 2, 2007, Gush Shalom sent "a strong protest to Prime Minster Olmert and Defence Minister Barak, and also a letter to representatives of the European Union. (2) (3)

Stranded now in what former Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniya describes as "appalling conditions," the death toll of the tormented has begun. Twenty-eight have died. In what should be causing flags of great concern to be raised, the EU personnel who monitor the border crossing between Gaza and Egypt are being sent home because it appears the border is going to remain closed. Chillingly, one must quickly ask if this is tantamount to removing potential foreign witnesses from a scene where a plan of torture and murder by the deliberate acts of withholding food and water from a civilian population could be underway. (4) (5)

Many of the Palestinian refugees now stranded at the closed border had simply been in Egypt seeking medical treatment, while others had fled the fighting that recently took place in Gaza. The recent fighting was carried out by the Zionists in what they referred to as "routine operations." The "routine operations" took place after Zionist tanks, aircraft, and military bulldozers left Israeli boundaries, crossed over the Gaza borders and then entered the Gaza refugee camps where they killed eleven, wounded dozens more and further demolished Palestinian homes and property. It should be noted that this is not a "war" between two militaries. It is a completely unbalanced slaughter of civilians. The incursions are Zionist-Israeli foreign military strikes taking place within Palestinian lands, and the military attacks have been against what has historically been a largely unarmed, unheard, and unprotected civilian population of Palestinians. The Zionist military has been portrayed via controlled mainstream media as victims, while the largely unarmed civilians have been portrayed as "terrorists" if they even attempt to protect themselves in their own land from the tanks. (6)

Among those wounded in the latest "routine operations" by the Zionist military aggression into Gaza refugee camps, were children and a young documentary news cameraman for the Al-Aqsa TV satellite channel. The cameraman, Imad Ghanem, 21,who was filming footage of rescue efforts, was gunned down by a tank as he filmed, and then several more shots were fired into him as he lay helpless on the ground next to his camera. Only one side of this military occupation in Gaza has tanks. Both of the young man's legs were later amputated. Although Israel claims it does not intentionally fire upon news media members who are gathering footage of Israeli military activities within refugee camps, other reporters also claimed to have been fired upon during this military incursion, as well. (7) (8) (9)

Having completely cut Gaza off from the rest of the world and even from 6000 of her own Gaza citizens, the Zionists have also blocked all import and export routes. Food and other supplies cannot get through to the Palestinian refugees stranded outside of Gaza, nor can supplies get through to the Palestinians being held as prisoners in their own homes in Gaza by the Zionists. The money is no longer flowing. Businesses are closed. Many refugees are homeless as a result of continued Zionist destruction of Palestinian property. But, none of this has been enough for Zionist Israel. Now, just out of the world's sight and behind those tall, ugly, Zionist walls that no one can see over, the Palestinians are being deliberately starved.

I contacted Palestinian journalist, Mohammed Omer who writes for The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs and asked him how bad the food situation was for the Palestinians in Gaza at this time.

"I just talked to a man," Mohammed replied, "he said that he has nothing to feed his kids and his family. He made it clear that things are so bad for him and his five children now due to food shortages, he goes to get bones of cows in the market."

The desperate family apparently boils the bones in water, but other than this they have no food.

"He has no money!" Mohammed said. "It's very bad here!"

According to an article written by Palestinian journalist Khalid Amayreh, "Israel, which is shamelessly telling the world that it has ended its occupation of Gaza, is still in tight control of the Rafah crossing, effectively turning the entire Gaza Strip into the world's largest concentration camp." (10)

As stated in the brief clip of the documentary, The Wall of Hate, (produced during or before 2004), which focused on the enormous walls that Israel has been building within and around Palestinian lands, "If the international community cannot stop Israel's apartheid wall and the destruction of people and their livelihood, then humanity is at stake." (11)

Humanity is now at stake.

Zionist Israel, which is a military/political war-state funded by billions of US tax dollars, has been deliberately taking life, limb and land away from the Palestinians for over sixty years now. It is a war machine that is bringing humanity to a disastrous point of no return. Americans need to act immediately to block any further funding of Zionist fanatical terrorism, and most importantly, we need to demand instead that immediate humanitarian supplies and an immediate money flow be restored to the Palestinian refugees living within all concentration camps of Zionist Israel.

The entire world should demand that the 6000 stranded refugees receive immediate humanitarian supplies as well as entry back into their own homes in Gaza. Their reentry will be into the concentration camp of Gaza, but that is all they have. It is better than standing at the border and dying under the sun of exposure, dehydration and starvation. And then, immediately, we, the world, need to come together as human beings and liberate all of the Palestinians-all of the world-from Zionism. We need to liberate the Palestinians from their state of torture and despair.

We need to liberate the Palestinians from starvation and from the concentration camps, the same as we once liberated the Jews and other minorities from similar torture. The long list of crimes against humanity and war crimes carried out by Zionist Israel must end immediately.

We, the entire world, need to confront the disgraceful and horrifying truth that is now before us. We have inadvertently permitted and supported the ongoing torment of the Palestinian Semites for sixty years by the cruel hands of a barbaric political state that is not a "Semitic" state at all, and which further has no heart, no decency, no Constitution, no "democracy," and no willingness to abide by any laws whatsoever.

It has no business occupying Palestine. (12) (13)

* * * * * * * * *

Mary Sparrowdancer is a writer and the author a bestselling book, The Love Song.

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""Sicko" wins hearts & minds - in Texas!"

"An amazing story about how "Sicko" is winning the hearts and minds of Americans in the strongest of corporate America's strongholds - Dallas, Texas.

Long time readers of this site no doubt know that I live in Texas. As everyone knows there’s no more conservative state in the Union than here. And I don’t just live in Texas; I live in the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex. Dallas isn’t some pocket of hippy-dippy behavior. This isn’t Austin. Dallas is the sort of place where guys in cowboy hats still drive around in giant SUV’s with “W” stickers on the back windshield, global warming and Iraq be damned. It’s probably the only spot left in America where you stand a good chance of getting the crap kicked out of you for badmouthing the president.

So when I went to see Sicko for a second time this afternoon, I wasn’t sure what to expect from the audience. I wasn’t watching it downtown, where the city’s few elitist liberals congregate and drink expensive lattes. I went to a random mall in the mid-cities, where folks were likely to be just folks. As I sat down, right behind me entered an obligatory, cowboy hat wearing redneck in his 50s. He announced his presence by shouting across the theater in a thick Texas drawl to his already seated wife “you owe me fer seein this!”

Sicko started; the stereotypical Texas guy sat down behind me and never stopped talking. He talked through the entire movie… and I listened. The first ten to twenty minutes of the film he spent badmouthing Moore to his wife and snorting in disgust whenever MM went into one of his trademark monologues. But as the movie wore on his protestations became quieter, less enthusiastic. Somewhere along the way, maybe at the half way point, right before my ears, Sicko changed this man’s mind. By the forty-five minute mark, he, along with the rest of the audience were breaking into spontaneous applause. He stopped pooh-poohing the movie and started shouting out “hell yeah!” at the screen. It was as if the whole world had been flipped upside down. This is Texas, where people support the president and voting democratic is something only done by the terrorists. Michael Moore should be public enemy number one.

By the time the movie was over, public enemy number one had become George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and John F. Kennedy all rolled together. When the credits rolled the audience filed out and into the bathrooms. At the urinals, my redneck friend couldn’t stop talking about the film, and I kept listening. He struck up a conversation with a random black man in his 40s standing next to him, and soon everyone was peeing and talking about just how fucked everything is.

I kept my distance, as we all finished and exited at the same time. Outside the restroom doors… the theater was in chaos. The entire Sicko audience had somehow formed an impromptu town hall meeting in front of the ladies room. I’ve never seen anything like it. This is Texas goddammit, not France or some liberal college campus. But here these people were, complete strangers from every walk of life talking excitedly about the movie. It was as if they simply couldn’t go home without doing something drastic about what they’d just seen. My redneck compadre and his new friend found their wives at the center of the group, while I lingered in the background waiting for my spouse to emerge.

The talk gradually centered around a core of 10 or 12 strangers in a cluster while the rest of us stood around them listening intently to this thing that seemed to be happening out of nowhere. The black gentleman engaged by my redneck in the restroom shouted for everyone’s attention. The conversation stopped instantly as all eyes in this group of 30 or 40 people were now on him. “If we just see this and do nothing about it,” he said, “then what’s the point? Something has to change.” There was silence, then the redneck’s wife started calling for email addresses. Suddenly everyone was scribbling down everyone else’s email, promising to get together and do something… though no one seemed to know quite what. It was as if I’d just stepped into the world’s most bizarre protest rally, except instead of hippies the group was comprised of men and women of every age, skin color, income, and walk of life coming together on something that had shaken them deeply, and to the core.

In all my thirty years on this earth, I have never ever seen any movie have this kind of unifying effect on people. It was like I was standing there, at the birth of a new political movement. Even after 9/11, there was never a reaction like this, at least not in Texas. If Sicko truly has this sort of power, then Michael Moore has done something beyond amazing. If it can change people, affect people like this in the conservative hotbed of Texas, then Sicko isn’t just a great movie, seeing it may be one of the most important things you do all year.

If this is the kind of reaction it's getting in Texas, we have to start gathering our friends and families - even our neighbors - and organize field trips to see Sicko!

It's about time Americans got sick and tired of our bloodsucking Deathcare System!"

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Of course, we have all seen where that issue has gone over the last year (as well as the other two items I posted).

And as you can see, I loved "Sicko."

It is on my list of favorite films -- an issue I do not take lightly at all.