"what 9/11 was really about"
That's why he's drank the kool aid of 'Al-CIA-Duh."
"Torture and 9/11
By John S. Hatch
May 22, 2009 "Information Clearing House" --- It could be argued that of the panoply of evil of which human beings find themselves uniquely capable, nothing is as abominable as the deliberate infliction of mental or physical pain on a helpless captive person.
That a nation grandiosely referring to itself as the world’s lone ‘superpower’ would, on the basis of very thin manufactured evidence stoop to such behavior as using sodomy (even against innocent children), cramming people into coffin-like boxes, chaining them in stress positions, karate-kicking them (even to death), suffocating them, slamming their heads into walls, taking away their clothing, freezing them, using sensory deprivation and drowning, plus a hundred other cruel measures gives the lie to that assertion. An evil power, certainly. Hardly a ‘shining city on a hill’.
And now that we know that orders for torture came right from the very top of the unrepentant Bush Administration even before the twisted entitlement of the Yoo/Bybee memos, and even as it is revealed that torture was employed not to gain information but to bolster the false assertion that Saddam Hussein had ties to Al Quieda and thus justify the indefensible invasion of Iraq, we are treated to ad nauseam appearances by the previously mute and bunkered Dick Cheney defending his cretinous actions and calling for more of the same. It is unbelievable that a nation that calls itself Christian could even countenance a debate on torture, and, after killing perhaps a million innocent Iraqi citizens in an illegal war, call for more of the same in Afghanistan. Or to employ white phosphorous and other war crime weapons in either location. The combination of hypocrisy and self-serving delusion is stunning. These ‘Christians’ are statistically more likely to favor torture than non-believers.
One would think that such aberrant leaders would be held to task by an outraged public and by their political replacements. Instead, the American people are offered more of the same. Quantanamo will not close anytime soon, and contrary to Mr. Obama’s statements, the outrages there have not ceased, but if anything have become worse. He has upheld the Bush policy of denying all human rights to prisoners at Bagram and elsewhere. He has attempted every means to suppress details of American torture, such as the use of scalpels on genitals. Officials would rather keep innocent people imprisoned until they die, untried, rather than to admit to the embarrassment of having illegally imprisoned and tortured them. Bagram continues to be a hell-on-earth. We don’t know how many others even exist. In Iraq children as young as eight remain imprisoned. Children are mercilessly abused as a method to intimidate their parents. And this is to keep scared-rabbit America safe? How?
But Mr. Obama wants to ‘move forward’ even as remote control drones (they’re Obama drones now) kill around 140 innocent Afghanis, including 93 children, one of them 8 weeks old. As usual the military denies, lies, and then admits limited culpability while stressing how very much they value Afghan civilian lives. They even attempt to keep a straight face. Mr. Obama can’t move forward when he’s mired and sinking in innocent cold blood.
If Mr. Obama were to take a deep breath, look back and take a lesson from some of America’s darkest days, here’s what he would find:
The Iraq invasion was conceived long before 9/11 which was simply used as a pretext for achieving ‘full spectrum domination’ of land, sea, air, space, and cyberspace as outlined in The Project for a New American Century, of which Dick Cheney was a founding member, and President Bush a willing dupe. The goal was nothing short of attempted world domination, and Iraq and Afghanistan were pawns on a list which included Syria and Iran. PNAC spoke longingly of a ‘new Pearl Harbor event’ as a catalyst to galvanize fearful American opinion to allow the former to have its way, which is exactly what happened after 9/11 (and don’t forget that mailed weaponized Lawrence Livermore anthrax, that ‘bonus terror’ that hurried the Patriot Act unread through Congress and that was since so conveniently blamed on a dead guy).
An investigation would reveal (indeed we already know) that torture was employed to establish a false link between Saddam and al Quieda in order to make a preconceived invasion more acceptable to the American people. (Lots of troops in Iraq still think that Saddam was responsible for 9/11, and still exact bloody revenge against innocent people.)
Since everything the people were told turned out to be lies, questions would inevitably arise regarding the ‘catalyst’ itself, the new Pearl Harbor event so useful to PNAC and the Bush Administration.
This, I submit is what officials in the Obama Administration fear the most. An investigation of torture would inevitably lead to questions about what 9/11 was really about. We know with certainty that the official version of events is a pack of lies; what if America had to confront the fact that 9/11 really was an inside job? (The recent finding of nano-thermite in WTC dust is just one more compelling argument.) It’s even possible that Cheney has threatened to spill the beans if anyone comes after him for torture for which he has openly and brazenly taken credit. Would a torturer refuse to stoop to blackmail? If that seems farfetched wouldn’t torture itself have seemed so a relatively short time ago? Cheney et al have ‘enhanced interrogated’ at least a hundred people to death. To paraphrase the Bard, ‘Cheney crap by any other name would smell as foul’. Torture is torture, even by their twisted Bybee/Yoo definitions.
Such a finding would so undermine Americans’ core beliefs as to have profoundly unpredictable consequences. It would mean that no American is safe from its own terrorist government. It would mean that government is not only corrupt to its very foundations, but also that it is a force of malevolence toward its citizens. It would mean that there is nothing in which to place one’s political faith. It would mean that the same forces that killed 3000 Americans on that day (and many subsequently) still operate behind the scenes in Washington, and ‘change’ is only cosmetic. It would prove that over the last two terms, democracy was a cruel illusion in America (and some would say since November 22, 1963). It would mean that for the patriotic American citizen, at last there’s nothing left to lose.
That’s what they’re rightly afraid of.
That’s why they want to allow the Bush putsch to get away with murder.
And to look even further into the abyss.
--MORE--w/"
Sunday, May 24, 2009
Thursday, May 21, 2009
Don't Stand Too Close to Evil
Key quote:
"People have to learn on their own. Not only will they not listen, they will become very angry with you for telling them what they do not what to hear about what they refuse to see"
(Blog author's note: I alter this fabulous and perceptive author's titles not out of disrespect, but respect at the unexpected and prescient phrases, themes, and ideas that catch my eye in his brilliant essays)
"The Apocalypse and the Looming Abyss
The Apocalypse continues. The ‘revealing’ goes on. Tangentially, we note indications that those who thought they were pulling the strings are dancing on strings of their own. Things long hidden are crawling out of hibernation and it is the public rather than the emerging sleepers who are rubbing their eyes. A new revolution based on an awaking conscience is making itself felt in the strangest places. As the good within us begins to glow in the embers of what we used to be, ever more toxic evils display themselves. This evil cannot see its downfall made certain in the boundless arrogance of its behavior. The Apocalypse is a time of madness and we are seeing it on all sides.
This article, in all its damning irony, would be funny had we not just seen the last decade in action. Then again… without so much evidence to the contrary one might miss the humor entirely. No conscious, thinking person can doubt that great forces are loose upon the wind and the shape to be taken is as unpredictable as coursing the track of the wind.
Open your eyes.
Wordpress Mirror
--MORE--"
"People have to learn on their own. Not only will they not listen, they will become very angry with you for telling them what they do not what to hear about what they refuse to see"
(Blog author's note: I alter this fabulous and perceptive author's titles not out of disrespect, but respect at the unexpected and prescient phrases, themes, and ideas that catch my eye in his brilliant essays)
"The Apocalypse and the Looming Abyss
The Apocalypse continues. The ‘revealing’ goes on. Tangentially, we note indications that those who thought they were pulling the strings are dancing on strings of their own. Things long hidden are crawling out of hibernation and it is the public rather than the emerging sleepers who are rubbing their eyes. A new revolution based on an awaking conscience is making itself felt in the strangest places. As the good within us begins to glow in the embers of what we used to be, ever more toxic evils display themselves. This evil cannot see its downfall made certain in the boundless arrogance of its behavior. The Apocalypse is a time of madness and we are seeing it on all sides.
This article, in all its damning irony, would be funny had we not just seen the last decade in action. Then again… without so much evidence to the contrary one might miss the humor entirely. No conscious, thinking person can doubt that great forces are loose upon the wind and the shape to be taken is as unpredictable as coursing the track of the wind.
Open your eyes.
Consider what has been said about the innocence of those detained at Gitmo in relation to Obama’s resurrecting the military tribunals. It’s Milo Minderbinder having lunch with Dr. Strangelove as Dr. Pangloss does the voice over. The tape loops with, “the best of all possible worlds” over and over and over again.
It’s Obama campaigning on a platform of hope and change and an end to illegal conflicts and finding daily, casual extermination of Pakistani civilians in a new war; tens of thousands more troops for Afghanistan in a conflict that CANNOT be won, rubber stamp support for Israel in her genocide of the Palestinians… it goes on and on. Not a day passes that Howdy Doody doesn’t institute some new insanity while maintaining all of the former administrations anti-constitutional edicts. Edict would be the operative word as it tries to find its place in a democratic process. You might as well go looking for the democratic process. Good luck with that.
People ask me how I can be hopeful with this latest blow to our faith and credulity, that being Obama as ‘new and improved’ or is it, “The same thing only different”? Maybe it’s “the real thing in the back of your mind”? I’m hopeful and maybe more than that because of all the revelations that are undressing in the public eye. Such disclosure implies still further disclosure. All these pathetic, self important fools who put themselves on stage, insisting on their right to be there as ‘the deciders’ empowered to fix the problems caused by the people they serve… now find themselves in a different spotlight than the one they imagined would be there and the heat of that light is going to increase and increase. Bank on it.
It goes without saying that they will have to manifest some terrible distractions and those are on the way as you read these words. There is one thing they’ve overlooked in their certitude that they can forever control the perspective of the people they deceive and that is the unavoidable reality which has to do with putting all of those genies back in the lamp. The truth is coming out and the truth is strapped. Another consideration is the means taken to maintain control over indefensible, destructive action. Eventually you set fire to the stage you are standing on and that is a part of the timeless certainty that evil destroys itself. The operative wisdom would be, for each and every one of us, don’t stand to close to the evil while it does this.
When you are locked into a bankrupt process and when you give your fealty to things that are the antithesis of what they present themselves to be, you are standing too close. When you continue in your actions toward an abyss, thinking that there are safeguards built into a system that will protect you at the edge, you are a fool. It was the removal of the safeguards for the purpose of reckless profit which made the abyss a reality in the first place. First there is no abyss and then there is.
A wise ruler understands the importance of balance. Laws and all of the other trappings of a culture exist for the purpose of balance. Make your laws too soft or too hard and the abyss looms. The moment balance goes wanting, the abyss appears. The depth of the abyss is the measure of our fear. Depending on the extent of ones fear one could, in some cases, simply step over the abyss. In other cases you cannot even see the other side. The motive force of those betraying and deceiving you is fear. The handmaidens of fear are confusion on one side and base desire on the other.
Any ruler whose reach exceeds his grasp; who takes his eye off of the supply wagons, who thinks that foreign adventurism is a sage enterprise, who embraces debt as a highway out of debt, is driving toward the abyss with whomever imagines they will share in the gold at the rainbows end. In times of madness one is likely to be without a sane leader. Madness is a period of culling brought about by Nature returning the balance. How many former empires destroyed themselves by the same process we are observing now? Take a look. The history is still there for your perusal.
We know these things. We have seen these things before. Now we are treated to speeches by the seemingly sane. Their teleprompter enhanced performances are dressed in wealth and finery. Their power attends them on all sides. They are mad as hatters. The sympathetic inmates gibber among themselves and applaud each following banality as they march to the abyss, accompanied by marching bands and klieg lights on rollers. There is enough light to require sunglasses at midnight but not nearly enough light to see the abyss.
Some walk along with them for a time. Some call out to them and tell them about the abyss. They mock and throw stones. Their eyes are fixed upon “the most fabulous object in the world” and they will not be dissuaded by you and they will kill you if you try too hard. In Buddhism there is something called, ‘unbearable compassion’. This is when you look around you at the suffering that surrounds you and realize that there are so many things you can do nothing about. People have to learn on their own. Not only will they not listen, they will become very angry with you for telling them what they do not what to hear about what they refuse to see.
We are in a time of summing up. Everything is being sorted. These periods occur like clockwork. They are a part of the process of existence. It is historical fact that these periods come and go. It can be assumed that certain times of ‘summing up’ are of a greater magnitude than others. Let those who must persist in the industry of evil continue as they will. My advice is not to stand to close to them while they cull themselves out of the picture. There will be world enough for us left in the aftermath. We may be without a few things but we will not be without each other or that mysterious something which has always guided the best of us to their just rewards.
Those who ruined and plundered at will are not unaware of their state and of the times in which they find themselves. For all their polished ease and control of the engines of war and information, they are troubled right down to the soles of their shoes. They can feel the breath of fire at the napes of their necks; be that metaphorical or otherwise. The part of their minds that has led them to this pass, urges them onward and they will hear only this voice, until the moment they step off the cliff. Another part of them is fearful in ways we cannot imagine… still, they do believe that they will once again find the reins of control over whatever is left in the wake of their passage. We shall see about that.
It is for each of us to choose who we follow and what we believe at this point. If you see a bunch of drunks playing with fireworks, you have to decide if you’ve had enough beers to want to join them or whether there might not be some other way to occupy your time.
Wordpress Mirror
--MORE--"
These People Lie at All Times
(Blog author's note: I alter this fabulous and perceptive author's titles not out of disrespect, but respect at the unexpected and prescient phrases, themes, and ideas that catch my eye in his brilliant essays
Related: The MSM Monitor Looks Into the Mirror
The Great Deception Machine)
"Flaming Dumpsters and your Dying Breath
Related: The MSM Monitor Looks Into the Mirror
The Great Deception Machine)
"Flaming Dumpsters and your Dying Breath
I’m definitely on the wrong planet. Or it could be as Michael Rivero says, “I flat out do not believe those numbers.” I think that means what it would mean to me if I had said it and that is that it’s either a manufactured lie or the questions were worded in such a way that there was no alternative answers outside of a narrow spectrum… but you know how these people work.
Let’s suppose that there’s some truth to it. Look at the comments that follow the article and consider also that the article is closed to comments now. Look at the glaring similarity in style that weaves in and out of the comments. This is a put-up job. How I know it’s a put-up job is that there’s more than one piece of evidence which suggests it and, since I take it for granted that these people lie at all times, I guess we can forget about everything I just said because we don’t even need any of it.
What I want to talk about is the mentality exhibited in the comments that follows the article. The denial and stupidity leaves me breathless. I stand in awe of the understanding that these people can actually feed and clothe themselves. I am living on the planet
What I want to talk about is why things like reality shows are such a big deal now and why so much attention is paid to the lives of celebrities; why instant celebrities with no talent whatsoever are manufactured in vats somewhere in the California desert, why the focus is so often upon the most banal things, why most of the food is like a chemistry experiment that went wrong, why this and why that. What’s the real reason that various perspectives on human life are all presented in the way that they are while the remarkable beauty of our true being is buried beneath the flaming dumpster of this pornographic excuse for a culture?
It’s simple. It’s all about making us look a certain way to each other and presenting the superficial and obscene as the true picture of humanity and… the reason for this is that the people they tell us we are will permit just about anything; understand nothing, be completely consumed with our appearances and command of trivia to the exclusion… to the total exclusion of everything which makes life worth living. The sort of people they make us wish we could be like can be compared to the cows on some South American pampas at night …that are being fed upon by vampire bats. Vampire bats have the ability to bite you without you knowing it is happening; so much the better if you are someone who is incapable of knowing what is happening due to your dependence on the bats telling you… what’s happening.
I can’t define pornography but I know it when I see it. Some judge said something like that. I would agree. This is pornography disguised as culture. It’s a full color fold out of a naked wolverine on a bed of burning garbage in Pethouse magazine. It’s in your face and standing behind you with a hardon at the same time. It’s everywhere.
Because of this phenomenon that expresses itself in most movies; most television shows, most radio programs, most music, most books, most magazines and most newspapers we are led to believe that we have the intellectual depth of a chicken and the life value of a cartoon character. It makes it a lot easier to kill people when the general population is morphed into what they have become as a result of the models constructed for them and fed to them from the time they learned to walk.
It’s easy to see the connections… money is power and it has no conscience. Corporations are about making money and nothing else except… the power to make more money. Because corporations have a great deal of money they can buy politicians. Politicians are natural born whores. When corporations buy the politicians from both sides of the aisle they control the political process and the government and the inevitable result of that is fascism. Fascism is most easily instituted upon a public made indolent from exposure to a watered down and compromised educational system that operates in tandem with an agenda driven media which, perforce, becomes the real education system. As John Fogerty said, “I know it’s true cause I saw it on TV.”
The houseman for the specific form of fascism of the moment is Political Correctness. The intention of political correctness is to destroy the family unit and pervert the natural affection and loyalties that exist within that dynamic. Therefore we are treated to the many permutations of human life as demonstrated through sitcoms and the hi-profile cartoon expressions of the same where absurdity can be expanded in ways that programs using human actors cannot.
The sudden appearance of the Spice Girls in the
I’m throwing a lot of things out here without the depth that such a subject requires even though the subject has no depth at all. I expect the reader to extrapolate in their own minds and see the specific weave of the matrix. Mcluhan said many things similar as have others.
Life has a particular integrity to it that tends toward an evolution of consciousness. When that integrity is compromised, then a future crisis point is created to resolve the departure. Civilization can be considered as the human reaction to discomfort. Ergo… so much of the technology is devoted to comfort and convenience. War in foreign places, rich with the resources to maintain this comfort in selected zones, follows as well.
Once a certain balance has left any culture it is automatically headed for readjustment. There is no court of appeal for this. You are dealing with forces that cannot be persuaded otherwise. When things have to come where they presently are you can most certainly assume that it will not be long before indications of adjustment come into view. We have been seeing these indications for awhile now. Well… some of us have been seeing these indications and others are seeing what they are being shown which brings us back to all of the things discussed in this piece.
I don’t know how many ways I can say the same thing. It’s one thing to hear this from any one of us who are speaking about it. It is something else entirely when Nature herself starts telling you. It is something else again when what seemed far away begins to show up on your doorstep. Still… for all of the signposts which have appeared in the last ten years there is still a very large portion of the population that doesn’t have a clue and which at the same time has an opinion on everything.
Why He Cannot Support Barack Obama
I agree with him 100%.
"First Principles ... or Why I Cannot Support Barack Obama
Let us begin with the fact that George Bush and Dick Cheney were never legitimately elected to the Oval Office: not in 2000, and not in 2004.
In the American system, the authority of our government is based on the consent of the governed. This consent was not earned in either "election".
Therefore, the Bush-Cheney administrations of 2001-2009 were illegitimate, and the policies implemented by these illegitimate administrations are themselves illegitimate. Period.
If somebody steals your credit card and you report the theft, you are not responsible for purchases made on that card after it was stolen. We reported the theft in 2000; we screamed about the theft in 2004; but it did us no good at all.
The most destructive "terrorist attack" that ever took place on American soil occurred during the first Bush-Cheney administration, and it was never legitimately investigated. The story that was told to explain it is not only false; it's impossible.
Therefore the policies implemented as "reactions" to the "terrorist attack of September 11, 2001" would be illegitimate even if they had been enacted by a legitimately elected government. But they weren't.
Furthermore, many of these same policies contravene both national and international law, and for this reason they would be illegal, and indefensible, even if they were enacted by a legitimately elected government in response to a legitimate threat.
But they were not: all these illegal, immoral, and deeply detrimental policies were enacted by an illegitimate government in "response" to a bogus event.
If we had legitimate opposition politics in this country, it would would begin by calling these policies what they are.
And if we had a legitimate successor government, it would begin by repealing every single one of them, holding accountable those responsible for their implementation, and making amends insofar as possible to those who have suffered the most.
In other words, if a legitimate opposition government had taken power in January, American use of torture against "terror suspects" would be history. All the secret prisons would now be closed. There would be no more extraordinary renditions, and no more military tribunals.
Warrantless surveillance would have been stopped. All American troops would have been removed from both Iraq and Afghanistan, including the "defense" and "security" contractors and clandestine special forces. Rather than propping up puppet governments and blackmailing them at the same time, we would now be financing -- but others would be building -- new infrastructure in both countries. We would also be paying reparations on a scale that would make the bank bailouts look like a drop in the ocean.
And the people most responsible for the abomination that America has become would be in prison by now, if they were allowed to remain alive.
But none of this has happened, and none of it is about to happen, soon or ever.
Instead we have a president who has declared that his first priority is the defense of Israel, and a vice president who has declared that during his 36 years in the Senate, no one has been a better friend to Israel than he has.
Why can't we have a president whose first priority is the defense of our own country?
Why can't we have a vice president who is prouder of having befriended his own nation than of having befriended a foreign one?
And why can't we find a single columnist in a single national publication asking questions like these? Because the system is broken.
We know that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction. We know that the story about the Iraqi WMDs was chosen for "bureaucratic reasons" -- in other words not because it was true but because it was the story we were most likely to believe. We didn't believe it, on the whole. But the war went ahead anyway.
Far more people believed the 9/11 story about Muslim hijackers and Osama bin Laden and skyscrapers "collapsing" due to "impact and fire", but some of us knew it was false on the day, and it has turned out that we were absolutely correct.
And yet the transparently false story about 9/11 has been used to "justify" all manner of abuses, from illegal surveillance to homeland "security", to an endless limitless war against the rest of the world. No matter how obviously false that story is, no matter how many people have learned since then that the story is false, all this has gone ahead anyway.
I cannot support any of it. I cannot support any politician who supports any of it, let alone a president who continues the worst of it. And I cannot support any journalist who supports that president, or who tells those murderous lies.
In my opinion, the people who support Obama now are at least as bad as -- if not much worse than -- the people who supported Bush when he was doing the things that Obama is now continuing, and expanding. It pains me to think of how much time and energy I spent trying to help some of them.
Even George Bush and Dick Cheney never managed to blackmail the Pakistani army into attacking its own people. And the Obama misery is just beginning.
--MORE--"
What a poignant and insightful conclusion.
Which means we will need you even more, WP.
"First Principles ... or Why I Cannot Support Barack Obama
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
Let us begin with the fact that George Bush and Dick Cheney were never legitimately elected to the Oval Office: not in 2000, and not in 2004.
In the American system, the authority of our government is based on the consent of the governed. This consent was not earned in either "election".
Therefore, the Bush-Cheney administrations of 2001-2009 were illegitimate, and the policies implemented by these illegitimate administrations are themselves illegitimate. Period.
If somebody steals your credit card and you report the theft, you are not responsible for purchases made on that card after it was stolen. We reported the theft in 2000; we screamed about the theft in 2004; but it did us no good at all.
The most destructive "terrorist attack" that ever took place on American soil occurred during the first Bush-Cheney administration, and it was never legitimately investigated. The story that was told to explain it is not only false; it's impossible.
Therefore the policies implemented as "reactions" to the "terrorist attack of September 11, 2001" would be illegitimate even if they had been enacted by a legitimately elected government. But they weren't.Furthermore, many of these same policies contravene both national and international law, and for this reason they would be illegal, and indefensible, even if they were enacted by a legitimately elected government in response to a legitimate threat.
But they were not: all these illegal, immoral, and deeply detrimental policies were enacted by an illegitimate government in "response" to a bogus event.
If we had legitimate opposition politics in this country, it would would begin by calling these policies what they are.
And if we had a legitimate successor government, it would begin by repealing every single one of them, holding accountable those responsible for their implementation, and making amends insofar as possible to those who have suffered the most.
In other words, if a legitimate opposition government had taken power in January, American use of torture against "terror suspects" would be history. All the secret prisons would now be closed. There would be no more extraordinary renditions, and no more military tribunals.Warrantless surveillance would have been stopped. All American troops would have been removed from both Iraq and Afghanistan, including the "defense" and "security" contractors and clandestine special forces. Rather than propping up puppet governments and blackmailing them at the same time, we would now be financing -- but others would be building -- new infrastructure in both countries. We would also be paying reparations on a scale that would make the bank bailouts look like a drop in the ocean.
And the people most responsible for the abomination that America has become would be in prison by now, if they were allowed to remain alive.
But none of this has happened, and none of it is about to happen, soon or ever.
Instead we have a president who has declared that his first priority is the defense of Israel, and a vice president who has declared that during his 36 years in the Senate, no one has been a better friend to Israel than he has.
Why can't we have a president whose first priority is the defense of our own country?
Why can't we have a vice president who is prouder of having befriended his own nation than of having befriended a foreign one?
And why can't we find a single columnist in a single national publication asking questions like these? Because the system is broken.
We know that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction. We know that the story about the Iraqi WMDs was chosen for "bureaucratic reasons" -- in other words not because it was true but because it was the story we were most likely to believe. We didn't believe it, on the whole. But the war went ahead anyway.Far more people believed the 9/11 story about Muslim hijackers and Osama bin Laden and skyscrapers "collapsing" due to "impact and fire", but some of us knew it was false on the day, and it has turned out that we were absolutely correct.
And yet the transparently false story about 9/11 has been used to "justify" all manner of abuses, from illegal surveillance to homeland "security", to an endless limitless war against the rest of the world. No matter how obviously false that story is, no matter how many people have learned since then that the story is false, all this has gone ahead anyway.
I cannot support any of it. I cannot support any politician who supports any of it, let alone a president who continues the worst of it. And I cannot support any journalist who supports that president, or who tells those murderous lies.
In my opinion, the people who support Obama now are at least as bad as -- if not much worse than -- the people who supported Bush when he was doing the things that Obama is now continuing, and expanding. It pains me to think of how much time and energy I spent trying to help some of them.
Even George Bush and Dick Cheney never managed to blackmail the Pakistani army into attacking its own people. And the Obama misery is just beginning.
--MORE--"
What a poignant and insightful conclusion.
Which means we will need you even more, WP.
Propagandist Looking For Work
"Any Nation Looking for a First Rate Anti-Zionist Propagandists?
If so, I promise that I will never falter, I’ll always keep my eye on the ball. If it comes down to it, I promise that I’ll stick around, fight and die for your nation assuming that you loathe Zionism as much as I do.
Things being the way they are in the United States, it’s more than apparent to me that Zogbots will soon be at my door for one reason or another anyway, and it‘s probably best that I get out of this country before I‘m no longer able.
I have zero loyalty to the present United States government,, I do not consider it legitimate, I believe that it was long ago hijacked by the world Zionist entity, and despite the fact that I once foolishly served in its military, I believe that to serve it today is to serve evil and all that entails.
Promise me a job and I promise you that I’ll renounce my U.S. citizenship and become a loyal member of your nation. Show me a commitment on your part that you’re willing to confront the forces of evil, those that currently control the United States government, and I promise you undying loyalty and a willingness to do what’s necessary to get the truth out to the people of the world. I’ll fight and die in your corner!
Although I have always been a nationalist at heart, I can clearly see that nationalism is a dying notion in the Jewnited States of Amerika. If you’ll allow me to call myself a Palestinian, I’ll fight and die for the Palestinian cause. Allow me to call myself a Venezuelan, I’ll fight and die for Chavez and Venezuela. Allow me to call myself a Bolivian, I’ll fight and die a Bolivian. Allow me into Belorussia and I’ll fight and die as a Belorussian. I perceive an international enemy today, and I’m more than willing to join any cause that recognizes it too, and recognizes that diplomacy with it, is a waste of time.
Utilize me in any manner you wish, I’m a skilled propagandist, when “propaganda” is understood to mean what it truly means, and not how the Jews have defined it since 1945. According too Merriam Webster,, “propaganda” can be defined as:
“ideas, facts, or allegations spread deliberately to further one's cause or to damage an opposing cause ; also : a public action having such an effect..” #[source]
When it comes to speaking about Zionist Jews, one need not resort to lies, the truth is damning enough, the truth reveals these Jews to be liars and to have lied too humanity for more than 100 years.
When I was young I was led to believe that the United States would accept immigrants from other countries that were being persecuted for their political or religious beliefs. Today, May 2009, I'm the one being persecuted for my political beliefs, just lost a job because of them, I don't bring my views into the workplace, but someone found my internet missives and I was fired. If that's not persecution for political beliefs I don't know what is. So, in any case, If your nation is critical of Israel and World Jewry, and in need of someone more than happy to expose them, send me an email, I'm ready to immigrate.
Yours sincerely,
Curt Maynard
--MORE--"
If so, I promise that I will never falter, I’ll always keep my eye on the ball. If it comes down to it, I promise that I’ll stick around, fight and die for your nation assuming that you loathe Zionism as much as I do.
Things being the way they are in the United States, it’s more than apparent to me that Zogbots will soon be at my door for one reason or another anyway, and it‘s probably best that I get out of this country before I‘m no longer able.
I have zero loyalty to the present United States government,, I do not consider it legitimate, I believe that it was long ago hijacked by the world Zionist entity, and despite the fact that I once foolishly served in its military, I believe that to serve it today is to serve evil and all that entails.
Promise me a job and I promise you that I’ll renounce my U.S. citizenship and become a loyal member of your nation. Show me a commitment on your part that you’re willing to confront the forces of evil, those that currently control the United States government, and I promise you undying loyalty and a willingness to do what’s necessary to get the truth out to the people of the world. I’ll fight and die in your corner!
Although I have always been a nationalist at heart, I can clearly see that nationalism is a dying notion in the Jewnited States of Amerika. If you’ll allow me to call myself a Palestinian, I’ll fight and die for the Palestinian cause. Allow me to call myself a Venezuelan, I’ll fight and die for Chavez and Venezuela. Allow me to call myself a Bolivian, I’ll fight and die a Bolivian. Allow me into Belorussia and I’ll fight and die as a Belorussian. I perceive an international enemy today, and I’m more than willing to join any cause that recognizes it too, and recognizes that diplomacy with it, is a waste of time.
Utilize me in any manner you wish, I’m a skilled propagandist, when “propaganda” is understood to mean what it truly means, and not how the Jews have defined it since 1945. According too Merriam Webster,, “propaganda” can be defined as:
“ideas, facts, or allegations spread deliberately to further one's cause or to damage an opposing cause ; also : a public action having such an effect..” #[source]
When it comes to speaking about Zionist Jews, one need not resort to lies, the truth is damning enough, the truth reveals these Jews to be liars and to have lied too humanity for more than 100 years.
When I was young I was led to believe that the United States would accept immigrants from other countries that were being persecuted for their political or religious beliefs. Today, May 2009, I'm the one being persecuted for my political beliefs, just lost a job because of them, I don't bring my views into the workplace, but someone found my internet missives and I was fired. If that's not persecution for political beliefs I don't know what is. So, in any case, If your nation is critical of Israel and World Jewry, and in need of someone more than happy to expose them, send me an email, I'm ready to immigrate.
Yours sincerely,
Curt Maynard
--MORE--"
New York Times Ignores Gaza
And MISREPORTS the rest!!!
Sigh!
Their bastard step-child the Boston Globe isn't much better.
Related: Israel Admits At Least 14 Gazans Die Every Day
"New York Times Falsifies Obama-Netanyahu Meeting
by Prof. David Bromwich
Also see (remember, Times owns Globe):
More MSM Lies About Iran
Israel Writes The New York Times News Pages
The New York Times: Israel's Mouthpiece
The New York Times Tells Another War-Mongering Lie
Look What Came With the Sunday Times
How Israel Got the Nuclear Bomb
Sigh!
Their bastard step-child the Boston Globe isn't much better.
Related: Israel Admits At Least 14 Gazans Die Every Day
"New York Times Falsifies Obama-Netanyahu Meeting
by Prof. David Bromwich
Global Research, May 19, 2009
The New York Times assigned to the story a campaign-trail reporter, Sheryl Gay Stolberg, whose political perceptions are bland and whose knowledge of Israeli-American relations is an antiseptic zero. At the newspaper of record, a thing like that does not happen by accident. They took the most anxiously awaited meeting with a foreign leader of President Obama's term thus far, and buried it on page 12. The coverage of a major event, which the same newspaper had greeted only the day before by running an oversize attack-Iran op-ed by Jeffrey Goldberg, has officially now shrunk to the scale of a smaller op-ed.
What is more disturbing and far more consequential is that the Times made this meeting into a story about Iran. They read into Obama's careful and measured remarks exactly the hostile intention toward Iran and the explicit deadline for results from his negotiations with Iran that Obama had taken great pains to avoid stating. Obama's relevant remark was this:
My expectation would be that if we can begin discussions soon, shortly after the Iranian elections, we should have a fairly good sense by the end of the year as to whether they are moving in the right direction and whether the parties involved are making progress and that there's a good faith effort to resolve differences. That doesn't mean every issue would be resolved by that point, but it does mean that we'll probably be able to gauge and do a reassessment by the end of the year of this approach. "Shortly after," "fairly good sense," "the right direction," "good faith effort," "probably," "by the end of the year." This was a language chosen deliberately to cool the fever of Netanyahu and his far-right War Coalition in Israel. But Stolberg, writing for the Times, converts these hedged and vague suggestions into a revelation that Obama for the first time seemed "willing to set even a general timetable for progress in talks with Iran."
In fact, as any reader of the transcript may judge, President Obama sounded a more urgent note about the progress Israel ought to make in yielding what it long has promised to the Palestinian people. Palestine was the proper name that dominated Obama's side of the news conference. In the Times story, by contrast, the word Iran occurs three times before the first mention of "Palestinians." Iran is mentioned twice more before the words West Bank are uttered once.
Regarding the necessity of a Palestinian state, President Obama was explicit:
We have seen progress stalled on this front, and I suggested to the Prime Minister that he has an historic opportunity to get a serious movement on this issue during his tenure. And when Netanyahu said the Israeli attitude toward Palestine would completely depend on the details of progress toward securing Iran against the acquisition of a single nuclear weapon, Obama replied that his view was almost the reverse. In a leader as averse as Barack Obama to the slightest public hint of personal conflict, this was a critical moment in the exchange; how far, a reporter asked Obama, did he assent to the Netanyahu concept of "linkage" -- the idea that first the U.S. must deal with Iran, and a more obliging Israeli approach to Palestine will surely follow. Obama answered:
I recognize Israel's legitimate concerns about the possibility of Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon when they have a president who has in the past said that Israel should not exist. That would give any leader of any country pause. Having said that, if there is a linkage between Iran and the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, I personally believe it actually runs the other way. To the extent that we can make peace with the Palestinians -- between the Palestinians and the Israelis -- then I actually think it strengthens our hand in the international community in dealing with a potential Iranian threat. This was a reluctantly formulated but direct and inescapable inversion of the Netanyahu doctrine on linkage. Not a trace of it appears in the Times account.
Finally, Gaza was much in President Obama's mind and on his conscience at this meeting; so much so that he broke decorum and stepped out of his way to mention it:
The fact is, is that if the people of Gaza have no hope, if they can't even get clean water at this point, if the border closures are so tight that it is impossible for reconstruction and humanitarian efforts to take place, then that is not going to be a recipe for Israel's long-term security or a constructive peace track to move forward. And yet not a word from Stolberg and the Times about these words of Obama's on Gaza. Nor was any analytic piece offered as a supplement -- the usual procedure in assessing an event of this importance.
To sum up, what happened at the meeting can be judged plainly enough by the news conference that followed. Binyamin Netanyahu tried to make it all about Iran. Obama declined, and spoke again and again about the importance of peace in the entire region, and the crucial role that Israel would have to play by freezing the West Bank settlements and negotiating in good faith to achieve a Palestinian state.
Let us end where we began, with Barack Obama on the good of peaceable relations with Iran, and the New York Times on the importance of thinking such relations are close to impossible.
President Obama: "You know, I don't want to set an artificial deadline."
Now the Times headline: "Obama Tells Netanyahu He Has a Timetable on Iran." And the Times front-page teaser for their A12 story: "Obama's Iran Timetable."
The decision-makers at the New York Times are acting again as if their readers had no other means of checking the facts they report. They are saying the thing that is not, without remembering that the record which refutes them has become easily and quickly available. A great newspaper is dying. And on the subject of Israel, it is doing its best to earn its death-warrant.
David Bromwich is Professor of Literature at Yale
Also see (remember, Times owns Globe):
More MSM Lies About Iran
Israel Writes The New York Times News Pages
The New York Times: Israel's Mouthpiece
The New York Times Tells Another War-Mongering Lie
Look What Came With the Sunday Times
How Israel Got the Nuclear Bomb
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
Palestine: The World's Largest Open Air Prison
"This is the first of 5 short episodes showing the actual situation of Palestine. The purpose of those videos is to arise international awareness about the prison like closure of Palestine. Palestine need the internationals action and help to break the inhuman and illegal siege imposed by Israel.
Please help us divulgating. thank you
Pictures from MachsomWatch, an organization of peace activist Israeli women, that every morning and afternoon, go out to some 30 checkpoints within the West Bank and on the seam-line between Israel and Palestine, to monitor and document IDF and Border Police conduct, and safeguard Palestinian human rights.
The shoot inside the video has been filmed by Daphne Banai and Milat Shamir at the Huwwara checkpoint on 10thSeptember 2007 - Machsom Watch activists observed that a particular checkpoint commander has a habit of beating up Palestinians in the detention cell. After one of the activists insisted on filming the checkpoint commander as he was entering the detention cell, the soldiers turned their violence towards her.
Images by : Dalia Kaveh, Elat Benda, Judith Spitzer, Magdalena Hefetz, Meged Gozani, Merav Amir, Micky Fisher, Mika Ginsburg, Naama Morag, Nava Elyashar, Neta Efroni, Noa Perelson, Noam Dan, Nurit Wagner, Ofra Ben Porat, Raya Zenter, Ruti Tuval, Shula Bar, Tamar Fleishman, Yudit Levine.
Third episode : In West Bank checkpoints manned by Israeli military : why? In a few slides reasons why are shown. Its not true that theres nothing to do about it and peace is not possible there. There are identified reasons that stand in the way of peace.
Pictures from International Solidarity Movement (ISM), NadPLO, Free Gaza Movement, MachsomWatch
The film in the video : Arson in the Fields of Burin Village by Machsom Watch
Filmed by Yehudith Levin.
Edited by Hadass Shuve
--MORE--"
Also watch: Long Live Palestine...Free Palestine
Please help us divulgating. thank you
The shoot inside the video has been filmed by Daphne Banai and Milat Shamir at the Huwwara checkpoint on 10thSeptember 2007 - Machsom Watch activists observed that a particular checkpoint commander has a habit of beating up Palestinians in the detention cell. After one of the activists insisted on filming the checkpoint commander as he was entering the detention cell, the soldiers turned their violence towards her.
Images by : Dalia Kaveh, Elat Benda, Judith Spitzer, Magdalena Hefetz, Meged Gozani, Merav Amir, Micky Fisher, Mika Ginsburg, Naama Morag, Nava Elyashar, Neta Efroni, Noa Perelson, Noam Dan, Nurit Wagner, Ofra Ben Porat, Raya Zenter, Ruti Tuval, Shula Bar, Tamar Fleishman, Yudit Levine.
Third episode : In West Bank checkpoints manned by Israeli military : why? In a few slides reasons why are shown. Its not true that theres nothing to do about it and peace is not possible there. There are identified reasons that stand in the way of peace.
Pictures from International Solidarity Movement (ISM), NadPLO, Free Gaza Movement, MachsomWatch
The film in the video : Arson in the Fields of Burin Village by Machsom Watch
Filmed by Yehudith Levin.
Edited by Hadass Shuve
--MORE--"
Also watch: Long Live Palestine...Free Palestine
Israel’s Guantanamo Bay
"How many secret prisons does Israel have? 
--MORE--"
Jonathan Cook
Jonathan Cook reports on evidence of a secret Israeli prison – described by an Israeli human rights group as an even grosser violation of international law than Guantanamo – where Arab and Muslim prisoners, including Palestinians, are systematically tortured.
The United Nation’s watchdog on torture has criticized Israel for refusing to allow inspections at a secret prison, dubbed by critics as “Israel’s Guantanamo Bay”, and demanded to know if more such clandestine detention camps are operating.
In a report published on Friday [15 May], the Committee Against Torture requested that Israel identify the location of the camp, officially referred to as “Facility 1391”, and allow access to the International Committee of the Red Cross.
Findings from Israeli human rights groups show that the prison has in the past been used to hold Arab and Muslim prisoners, including Palestinians, and that routine torture and physical abuse were carried out by interrogators.
The UN committee’s panel of 10 independent experts also found credible the submissions from Israeli groups that Palestinian detainees are systematically tortured despite the banning of such practices by the Israeli Supreme Court in 1999.
The existence of Facility 1391 came to light in 2002, when Palestinians were detained there for the first time during Israel’s reinvasion of the West Bank.
In a submission to the UN committee, Israel denied that any prisoners are currently being held at the site, although it admits that several Lebanese were detained there during the attack on Lebanon in 2006.
The committee expressed concern about an Israeli Supreme Court ruling in 2005 that found it “reasonable” for the state not to investigate suspicions of torture at the prison. The panel is believed to be concerned that, without inspections, the prison might still be in use or could be revived at short notice.
The Israeli court, the committee wrote, “should ensure that all allegations of torture and ill-treatment by detainees in Facility 1391 be impartially investigated [and] the results made public”.
Hamoked, an Israeli human rights organization, first identified the prison after two Palestinian cousins seized in Nablus in 2002 could not be traced by their families. Israeli officials eventually admitted that the pair were being held at a secret site.
Israel still refuses to identify the precise location of the prison, which is inside Israel and about 100 km north of Jerusalem. A few buildings are visible, but most of the prison is built underground.
“We only learnt about the prison because the army made the mistake of putting Palestinians there when they ran out of room in Israel’s main prisons,” said Dalia Kerstein, the director of Hamoked.
“The real purpose of the camp is to interrogate prisoners from the Arab and Muslim world, who would be difficult to trace because their families are unlikely to contact Israeli organizations for help.”Ms Kerstein said the prison site was an even grosser violation of international law than Guantanamo Bay because it had never been inspected and no one knew what took place there.
According to the testimonies of the Palestinian cousins, Mohammed and Bashar Jadallah, they were held in isolation cells measuring two metres square, with black walls, no windows and a light bulb on 24 hours a day. On the rare occasions they were escorted outside, they had to wear blacked-out goggles.
When Bashar Jadallah, 50, asked where he was, he was told he was “on the moon”.
According to the testimony of Mohammed Jadallah, 23, he was repeatedly beaten, his shackles tightened, he was tied in painful positions to a chair, he was not allowed to go to the toilet and he was prevented from sleeping, with water thrown on him if he nodded off. Interrogators are also reported to have shown him pictures of family members and threatened to harm them.
Although Palestinians passing through the prison were interrogated by the domestic secret police, the Shin Bet, foreign nationals at the prison fall under the responsibility of a special wing of military intelligence known as Unit 504, whose interrogation methods are believed to be much harsher.
Shortly after the prison came to light, a former inmate – Mustafa Dirani, a leader of the Lebanese Shi’ah group Amal – launched a court case in Israel claiming he had been raped by a guard.
Mr Dirani, seized from Lebanon in 1994, was held in Facility 1391 for eight years along with a Hizbollah leader, Sheikh Abdel Karim Obeid. Israel hoped to extract information from the pair in its search for a missing airman, Ron Arad, downed over Lebanon in 1986.
Mr Dirani alleged in court that he had been physically abused by a senior army interrogator known as “Major George”, including an incident when he was sodomized with a baton.
The case was dropped in early 2004 when Mr Dirani was released in a prisoner exchange.
Ms Kerstein said there was no proof that more prisons existed in Israel like Facility 1391, but some of the testimonies collected from former inmates suggested that they had been held at different secret locations.
She said the concern was that Israel might have been one of the countries that received “extraordinary rendition” flights, in which prisoners captured by the United States were smuggled to other countries for torture.
“If a democracy allows one of these prisons, who is to say that there are not more?” she said.
The committee examined other suspicions of torture involving Israel. It expressed particular concern about Israel’s failure to investigate more than 600 complaints made by detainees against the Shin Bet since the panel’s last hearings, in 2001.
It also highlighted the pressure put on Gazans who needed to enter Israel for medical treatment to turn informer.
Ishai Menuchin, executive director of Israel’s Public Committee against Torture, said his group had sent several submissions to the committee showing that torture was systematically used against detainees.
“After the court decision in 1999, interrogators simply learnt to be more creative in their techniques,” he said.
He added that, since Israel’s redefinition of Gaza as an “enemy state”, some Palestinians seized there were being held as “illegal combatants” rather than “security detainees”.
“In those circumstances, they might qualify for incarceration in secret prisons like Facility 1391.”
Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His latest books are “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website iswww.jkcook.net.
¨
A version of this article originally appeared in The National, published in Abu Dhabi.
¤ ¤ ¤ ¤ ¤
Source: http://www.redress.cc/palestine/jcook20090518
The Path to Peace
"GETTING TO KNOW THE UNKNOWN IS ONE PATH TO PEACE
May 17, 2009
One of the most brilliant quotes I ever heard from a movie is “Fear is the path to the darkside. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate, leads to suffering.” The quote is from the most lovable, fictional character ever to come out of the ‘big screen’. His name was Yoda, from the Star Wars series. Though fictional, there are many true life lessons to be taken from it. That particular quote is just one of them.
May 17, 2009
About two months ago my grandchildren returned home after a weekend away (boy, aged 5 1/2, twin girls, aged 4 1/2). Little did they know, but in their absence their silly, old Granpa adopted a small dog. When they came in the dog greeted them at the door…… there were shrieks of panic, total hysteria. They were afraid of the new addition to the family despite his willingness to be their friend.
They left, but an hour later one of the girls returned and extended her hand in friendship to Mookie. Mookie responded by kissing her hand and cuddling up to her in the chair. She then ‘reported’ to her siblings that there was nothing to be afraid of…”just get to know him.” So, Amir returned as well….. after all, how could a macho little boy let his sister ’show him up’? Amir too, gave Mookie his hand, and within minutes they were best of friends. It took the other twin a few days to join in, but she did.
The next day, the children came running in as soon as school was out…. to play with Mookie. He is their best friend at this stage.
On a small level, these kids learned a very valuable lesson…. they got to know the unknown…. and they made peace with it. It was a simple process…. but a necessary one.
Wouldn’t it be nice if this could apply to society in general? Wouldn’t it be nice if despite the government’s attempts to halt the peace process, a just and lasting peace was established in Israel/Palestine…. just because we all took the time to get to know the unknown.
The following is a post that I wrote about three years ago….. more about the ‘unknown’…..
CLASH OF THE CULTURES
You see everything in Jerusalem. It draws tourists from all over the world, every race, every religion, every political persuasion. Our own local population is quite a mixture as well…
We have Muslim women who dress like this woman…
We have Jewish men that dress like these men…
It was once thought that ignorance is bliss… that is certainly not the case today and there is no excuse for much of our ignorance, especially when it pertains to our fellow citizens.
A quote from a beloved Star Wars character, Yoda is…“Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.”
It was expanded by an unknown writer to say…”IGNORANCE leads to FEAR which causes HATE which leads to ANGER, which ends in SUFFERING.”
I prefer the second quote and it is fitting to the following episode I wish to relate here…
There was a woman walking towards the bank in my neighbourhood the other day. She was dressed like the woman in the photo. A man, on his way to the coffee shop passed her, he was dressed like one of the men in the other photo.
She covers her face so it would not be seen by men other than her husband, he, by his garb represents the ultra orthodox section of Judaism, is not supposed to look at other women. But he did, and he panicked. He ran from that woman as if he saw the devil himself. Why, because of ignorance. He had no idea why her face was covered. He was afraid. Most likely his fear will lead to hate and that will lead to suffering.
We cannot continue to live in our little isolated worlds. We have to open our windows and see who else dwells there. That alone will be a start to end this type of behaviour. It might even lead to peace.
Another post from my archives also deals with the question of fear…. it is worth reading if you missed it…
“FEAR IS THE PATH TO THE DARKSIDE” …… FEAR BUILDS WALLS
One of the most brilliant quotes I ever heard from a movie is “Fear is the path to the darkside. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate, leads to suffering.” The quote is from the most lovable, fictional character ever to come out of the ‘big screen’. His name was Yoda, from the Star Wars series. Though fictional, there are many true life lessons to be taken from it. That particular quote is just one of them. Fear is one of the biggest problems facing both the Israeli and Palestinian people…. fear of the unknown. That fear has led to anger…. anger that could have been avoided if the fear factor was not present. Needless to say, that anger led to hate which we see on a daily basis here…. as well as the suffering which results from that hate.
Understanding and tolerance are the best ways to eliminate the fear…. understanding eliminates the unknown, tolerance teaches us to accept that which might be different, therefore eliminating the anger and the suffering. These are not far fetched theories, these are proven facts, facts that I have been living with for nearly 25 years, right here in Jerusalem.
After you read the brilliant essay presented below, you will understand why I choose to live in this particular neighbourhood, despite the fact that it is situated on the ‘other side’ of the Green Line. I choose this area to be my home because of the reasons dealt with in the essay…. reasons that one day will become the norm in all other parts of Israel. A norm which will break down walls, not build them.
The essay was written by Seth Freedman who is a resident of Jerusalem. He is a regular contributor to Comment is Free, a blog site that appears in the Guardian.
FEAR BUILDS WALLS
Could the harmony that has developed from an influx of Arab families in an area of Jerusalem set the tone for the rest of the country?
By Seth Freedman
Many critics of Israel’s security wall assert that its construction has driven another nail into the coffin of possible integration between the local Jews and Arabs. However, thanks to an unexpected phenomenon arising from its erection, certain Jewish parts of Jerusalem are experiencing an influx of Arabs into their areas – and the early indications are that their assimilation is progressing relatively smoothly.
The district of French Hill, which is technically over the Green Line but in reality bears little resemblance to the typical “settlement” stereotype, has seen a steep rise in the number of Arabs seeking to move into its neighbourhood in recent years. Not wanting to be caught on the “wrong” side of the security wall, many Arab families have sought homes on the Israeli side of the barrier, in order to ensure their Israeli IDs aren’t revoked, as well as to avoid hours-long delays at checkpoints as they commute to and from work.
With prices in the Arab villages of East Jerusalem soaring in the wake of a flood of eager buyers, those with fewer funds available have opted to move into Jewish parts of the city, including French Hill and nearby Pisgat Ze’ev. Their arrival hasn’t been to everyone’s liking, with the usual suspects up in arms and demanding that other residents band together to keep the Arabs out and ensure that the neighbourhoods remain strictly Jewish.
One such charming individual was quoted as saying: “As a Jew I am happy to be a racist,” claiming that it was the only way to preserve his children’s future in the face of the Arab invasion. Fortunately, however, his odious attitude is very much a minority one – at least, as far as I could tell from a visit to the area.
On arrival in the town centre, it was plain to see that the more level-headed and sedate residents have no problem with their neighbours and fellow shoppers. Jews and Arabs alike thronged the cafes, jostling for position in the bright sunshine as they downed cappuccinos and mint teas at the outdoor tables. The local bank was doing equally brisk business, and customers in kipot (skullcaps) stood in line behind others in Arabic headscarves with no hint of tension present.
Sitting behind the counter at Cafe Malcha, the Jewish owner spoke proudly of the mixed group of customers who pack his shop every day. “There’s no problem here. Jews and Arabs sit together, everyone’s friendly, and they come from all over, including the centre of Jerusalem and the surrounding [Arab] villages.” He pointed out that it is mainly the secular Jews and Arabs who socialise with one another, “since the religious on both sides are far more cautious.”
Iyal, a 19-year-old Arab who waits tables at the cafe, agreed with his boss that French Hill is largely devoid of any racial tension. “I’ve worked here for years”, he said, “and I never see any racism in the area”. Sitting outside was a group of five Arab workers, chatting loudly to one another in Arabic and clearly at ease in their surroundings – belying the image that some reporters portray of French Hill as being a hotbed of anti-Arab racism.
However, that’s not to say that under the surface there doesn’t linger some degree of antipathy between the area’s ethnic groups. Isawiya’s youth have something of a poor track record when it comes to their treatment of any Jews who enter the village. Many Jews go there to shop, or get their cars repaired, and are often pelted with rocks and stones by the local children, which does nothing to enhance relations between the two sides. At the same time, local Arab residents have made no bones about their desire to keep their neighbourhoods all-Arab, forbidding the sale of homes to Jewish buyers for fear of losing the Arab identity of their districts.
Similarly, one Jewish girl I spoke to had a great deal of venom in her system when it came to the local Arabs. “I can’t trust them enough to live alongside them,” she said flatly, before going on to assert that “they all want to kill us simply because we’re Jews, so why should we let them move into our neighbourhoods and get the chance to?” When pressed, however, she conceded that her work as a local receptionist has brought her into contact with plenty of Arabs, “and the ones I know aren’t like that at all. I suppose I shouldn’t generalise about them, actually.”
Despite it going against her defensive mentality, it is clear that the experience of working alongside Arab colleagues and discovering what they’re like as individuals – rather than collectively tarring them as “the Arabs” – has produced a chink in her armour. While I still wouldn’t want her in charge of the peace process, given her overriding penchant for painting the Arabs as bloodthirsty Jew haters, the fact that she softened her position at all during the course of our conversation indicates that the process of assimilation is bearing positive fruit.
And, in the words of another local I spoke to who said: “I can barely tell who’s Jewish and who’s Arab round here”, the success of French Hill’s multicultural exercise might well set the tone for the rest of the country one day. Of course, things aren’t going to change overnight – Arabs are still treated with a great deal of suspicion by many Israelis, at both street and institutional levels, but that shouldn’t stop the moderates on both sides forging on with their goal of overcoming the prevalent racist attitudes.
There is an aphoristic piece of graffiti sprayed near the checkpoint between Jerusalem and Bethlehem that reads: “Fear builds walls,” which is as true as it is depressing. However, one unlikely byproduct of the security barrier’s construction could, ultimately, end up eradicating at least some of the fear that exists between the two communities, thanks to the Arab migration into Jewish neighbourhoods that it has created. And that, despite the overarching negativity that surrounds the building of the wall in the first place, is well worth clinging on to for those seeking at least a modicum of hope from a seemingly hopeless situation.
--SOURCE--"
Holocaust and Holodomor
"HOLOCAUST AND HOLODOMOR
by Nicholas Lysson
April 2007
One might think the worst holocaust deniers—at least the only ones who command serious attention—are those who insist the Nazi holocaust, as it involved the Jews only, was without parallel.
Guenter Lewy argues for example in The Nazi Persecution of the Gypsies (Oxford University Press, 2000) that while the Gypsies were gassed, shot and otherwise exter-minated in great numbers,
But pre- or anti-Enlightenment Judaism is hardly a less ethnocentric or hostile moral system. As Edward Gibbon correctly notes in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. 1, ch. 15 (1776), “the wise, the humane Maimonides openly teaches [in The Book of Torts, 5:11] that, if an idolator fall into the water, a Jew ought not to save him from instant death.” See also Rabbi Simeon ben Yohai’s remarkable second-century exercise in ejusdem generis: “The best of the heathen merits death; the best of serpents should have its head crushed; and the most pious of women is prone to sorcery” (Yer. Kid. iv. 66c; Massek. Soferim xv. 10; comp. Mek., Beshallah, Wayehi, 1, and Tan., Wayera, 20, all as cited by JewishEncyclopedia. com). For “heathen” some translators simply write “goyim”; for “prone to sorcery” they write “a witch.” Rabbi Simeon is mentioned more than 700 times in the Talmud.
Israel Shahak and Norton Mezvinsky, in Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel (2d ed. 2004), say (p. 1) “that in the usual English translations of talmudic literature some of the most sensitive passages are usually toned down or falsified,” and indeed (pp. 150-51) that “the great majority of books on Judaism and Israel, published in English especially, falsify their subject matter,” in part by omitting or obscuring such teachings. For a fuller discussion of the point, see Shahak, Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years, esp. ch. 2 (1994), available online. As to Jews, Gypsies or anyone else, of course, ethnocentrism or even outright cultural hostility as a rationale for genocide is obscene.
A particularly relevant parallel to the Nazi holocaust is the Ukrainian holodomor of 1932-33, a state-created famine—not a crop failure—that killed an estimated five million people in the Ukraine, one million in the Caucasus, and one million elsewhere after the Soviet state confiscated the harvest at gunpoint. Throughout the famine, the state continued to export grain to pay for industrialization. See Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow (Oxford University Press, 1987). Norman Davies gives the following description in Europe: A History, p. 965 (Oxford University Press, 1996). His first paragraph assembles quotations from Conquest; the bracketed phrase is his own:
“A quarter of the rural population, men, women and children, lay dead or dying” in “a great stretch of territory with some forty million inhabitants,” “like one vast Belsen.” “The rest, in various stages of debilitation,” “had no strength to bury their families or neighbours.” “[As at Belsen] well-fed squads of police or party officials supervised the victims.”
. . . All food stocks were forcibly requisitioned; a military cordon prevented all supplies from entering; and the people were left to die. The aim was to kill Ukrainian nationhood, and with it the “class enemy.” The death toll reached some 7 million. The world has seen many terrible famines. . . . But a famine organized as a genocidal act of state policy must be considered unique.
See also Oksana Procyk, Leonid Heretz and James E. Mace, Famine in the Soviet Ukraine, 1932-33 (Harvard University Press, 1986); Nicolas Werth, “The Great Famine,” in Stephane Courtois, et al., The Black Book of Communism, pp. 159-68 (Harvard University Press, 1999); Edvard Radzinsky, Stalin, pp. 257-59 (1996); Miron Dolot, Execution by Hunger (1985); Simon Sebag Montefiore, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, pp. 84-85 (2003); and the Commission on the Ukrainian Famine, Report to Congress (1988). That report, at pp. 6-7, cites estimates of the number killed that range as high as 8 million in the Ukraine and 9 million overall.
Piers Brendon, The Dark Valley, pp. 248-49 (2000) gives this description, drawn from still further sources, all cited in his notes:
A population of “walking corpses” . . . even ate horse-manure for the whole grains of seed it contained. . . . Cannibalism became so common-place that. . . local authorities issued hundreds of posters announcing that “EATING DEAD CHILDREN IS BARBARISM.”. . .
They staggered into towns and collapsed in the squares. . . . Haunting the railway stations these “swollen human shadows, full of rubbish, alive with lice,” followed passengers with mute appeals. . . . [They] “dragged themselves along, begging for bread or searching for scraps in garbage heaps, frozen and filthy. Each morning wagons rolled along the streets picking up the remains of the dead.” Some were picked up before they died and buried in pits so extensive that they resembled sand dunes and so shallow that bodies were dug up and devoured by wolves.
Boris Pasternak says “what I saw could not be expressed in words. . . . There was such inhuman, unimaginable misery, such a terrible disaster, that it began to seem almost abstract, it would not fit within the bounds of consciousness.” See Brian Moynahan, The Russian Century, p. 130 (1994). Nikita Khrushchev, in Khrushchev Remembers: The Final Testament, p. 120 (1976), says “I can’t give an exact figure because no one was keeping count. All we knew was that people were dying in enormous numbers.”
According to S. J. Taylor, Stalin’s Apologist: Walter Duranty, The New York Times’s Man in Moscow, p. 202 (Oxford University Press 1990), “. . .Soviet authorities
. . . require[d] that the shades of all windows be pulled down on trains traveling through the North Caucasus, the Ukraine and the Volga basin.” At pp. 239-40, Taylor says this famine “remains the greatest man-made disaster ever recorded, exceeding in scale even the Jewish Holocaust of the next decade.”
In September 1933, Duranty—who cultivated his relationship with Stalin, and is remembered today for his public denials that any such thing was happening—privately told fellow journalists Eugene Lyons (United Press) and Anne O’Hare McCormick (herself from the New York Times) that the death toll was 7 million, but that the dead were “only Russians.” (Sic: mostly Ukrainians; and note the word “only.”) See Lyons, Assignment in Utopia, pp. 579-80 (1937). Duranty’s number is described in Lyons’s book only as “the most startling I had. . . heard,” but is revealed in Lyons’s “Memo for Malcolm Muggeridge” (Dec. 9, 1937), quoted by Marco Carynnyk in “The New York Times and the Great Famine, Part III,” available online.
Several days after giving the 7-million number to Lyons and McCormick, Duranty told the assembled staff at the British chancery in Moscow that the toll for the Soviet Union as a whole might be as high as 10 million. See the report of William Strang, the charge d’affaires (Sept. 26, 1933), quoted by Carynnyk in the text accompanying n. 46. The British government referred publicly to the ongoing situation as an “illegal famine.” Id., n. 46.
Duranty’s 10-million number may have come from Stalin himself. It’s reputedly the same number Stalin gave Winston Churchill a decade later; see, e.g., Eric Margolis, “Remembering Ukraine’s Unknown Holocaust,” Toronto Sun, Dec. 13, 1998 (available online).
According to Arthur Koestler, The Ghost in the Machine, pp. 261-62 (1967):
In 1932-3, the years of the great famine which followed the forced collectivisation of the land, I travelled widely in the Soviet Union, writing a book which was never published. I saw entire villages deserted, railway stations blocked by crowds of begging families, and the proverbial
starving infants. . . . [T]hey were quite real, with stick-like arms, puffed up bellies and cadaverous heads. I reacted to the brutal impact of reality on illusion in a manner typical of the true believer. I was surprised and bewildered—but the elastic shock-absorbers of my [Communist] Party training began to operate at once. I had eyes to see, and a mind conditioned to explain away what they saw. This “inner censor” is more reliable and effective than any official censorship. . . .
Some Ukrainian accounts, and that of Muggeridge, who covered the holodomor for the Manchester Guardian, take the trouble to say that this mass starvation was imposed largely by Jews. Lazar M. Kaganovich is often identified as an architect of the policy. A photograph in Montefiore, Red Tsar, above, shows him personally searching a farm for concealed food. In Muggeridge’s novel Winter in Moscow (1934) he appears as Kokoshkin, “a Jew” and “Stalin’s chief lieutenant.”
In 2003 Levko Lukyanenko, the first Ukrainian ambassador to Canada, was said to have made an anti-Semitic embarrassment of himself on this subject. But see Orest Subtelny, Ukraine: A History, p. 363 (2d ed. 1994)(“Jews were . . . disproportionately prominent among the Bolsheviks, notably in their leadership, among their tax- and grain-gathering officials, and especially in the despised and feared. . . secret police [emphasis added]”); Montefiore, Red Tsar, above, p. 305 (as late as 1937, Jews accounted for only 5.7 percent of Soviet party members, but “formed a majority in the government” [emphasis added]); Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century, p. 254 (Princeton University Press, 2004)(the secret police was “one of the most Jewish of all Soviet institutions”); and Arno J. Mayer, Why Did the Heavens Not Darken?, p. 60 (1988)(“As of the late twenties . . . [a] disproportionate number of Jews came to hold high posts in the secret police and to serve as political commissars in the armed services. They. . . were. . . appointed to high-level and conspicuous positions which called for unimpeach-able political loyalty. . . ”). Mayer, a professor emeritus of history at Princeton, is himself Jewish, and had to flee the Nazis as a refugee.
The Israeli writer Boas Evron says the leaders of the Soviet revolution were scarcely less Jewish than the Zionists. See his book Jewish State or Israeli Nation?, p. 107 (English tr., Indiana University Press, 1995): “The backgrounds of the two groups were much the same. . . . Only differences of chance and temperament caused the one [individual] to be a Zionist and the other a revolutionary socialist.”
On February 8, 1920, Winston Churchill published an article, “Zionism Versus Bolshevism: A Struggle for the Soul of the Jewish People,” in the Illustrated Sunday Herald (London), reprinted in Lenni Brenner, ed., 51 Documents: Zionist Collaboration with the Nazis, p. 23 (2002). Among other things, Churchill said (pp. 25-26):
There is no need to exaggerate the part played in the creation of Bolshe-vism. . . by. . . international and for the most part atheistical Jews. . . . [I]t probably outweighs all others. With the notable exception of Lenin [who had a Jewish grandfather and by some accounts a Jewish wife], the major-ity of leading figures are Jews. Moreover, the principal inspiration and driving power comes from the Jewish leaders. . . . And the prominent, if not indeed the principal, part in the system of terrorism. . . has been taken by Jews. . . . The same evil prominence was obtained by Jews in the brief period of terror during which Bela Kun ruled in Hungary. The same phenomenon has been presented in Germany (especially in Bavaria), so far as this madness has been allowed to prey on the temporary prostration of the German people. (Emphasis added.)
Churchill’s views, as expressed here, resemble those of the Times of London’s correspondent in Russia, Robert Wilton. See George Gustav Telberg and Robert Wilton, The Last Days of the Romanovs (1920), esp. pp. 222-30, 391 (“[t]aken according to numbers of population, the Jews represented one in ten; among the komisars that rule Bolshevik Russia they are nine in ten—if anything, the proportion of Jews is still higher”), 392-93 and 400. The French version of the book, Les Derniers Jours des Romanofs, also published in 1920, contains a list of 556 top figures in the Bolshevik regime, classified by ethnicity. The Jewish proportion is a bit over eight in ten, including two-thirds of the leadership of the secret police. The non-Jews are divided among various small categories—Russian, Lett, Armenian, German, Georgian, etc. The list is absent from the slightly later English and American editions, but is available online. See also John F. O’Conor, The Sokolov Investigation (1971)(a translation, with commentary, of sections of Nikolai Sokolov’s Enquête judiciaire sur l'assassinat de la famille impériale Russe), especially for the comments of O’Conor and his sources on Wilton. [1]....
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