This is not a rehash. Take the time to listen. It is worth it.
This part is about his being persecuted at the Haifa University where he was a Professor
(Source: Wikileaks)
I love the rage against Julian Assange. It shows how effective the Wikileaks drop has been. Schumer: “This man has put his own ego above the safety of millions of innocents… He should be extradited, tried for espionage, and given the most severe penalty possible.” And just now on WNYC, Massimo Calibresi of Time was saying that Assange doesn’t really care about gov’t transparency, he’s just a grandiose showman/freak/autodidact from a nomadic background. And we have learned from this that the media shouldn’t just be a firehose, but should make “appropriate” decisions about what to run, says Calibresi. Liberal Jamie Rubin formerly of the State Department was as angry as Schumer on Chris Matthews the other night, and Matthews seems to want Assange arrested. I’m told Richard Cohen was completely dismissive today. Quel surprise.
A few quick thoughts on the cables drop:
- It is a historic huge event. We will be figuring out what it means for years. It is like the Pentagon Papers in that respect, it will transform the terrain. Calibresi says it will result bureaucratically in more secrecy. Gosh, I don’t care; it’s the biggest breaking of secrecy I’ve ever seen.
- People are gaining enormous information about how government works. This is a phenomenological, objective truth. 250,000 cables. Wow. The cables will be studied and studied; and many people will learn from them.
- Despite the characterizations of Assange as a weirdo and anarchist, he’s a leftwinger; and this is a huge power move for the Left. The Left is aided enormously by these cables, left wing discourse. The appropriate decisions that the media made for us gave us the destruction of Iraq. Assange is angry about that, enraged about the killing in the Middle East, that’s my assessment of his statements. And he has taken bold action.
- Could this affect American status in the world? Knock it down. Yes, absolutely. Why are Schumer and Matthews so angry. They know.
- Everyone is telling us that Assange is a weird cat. OK, he’s weird. I don’t care. They went into Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office when that went down. I bet Dan Ellsberg was weird. A lot of people are weird. All the stuff about the sexual assault charges against Assange and his cult/theater/dropout background may be true (and let him be tried); but these matters are actually trivial next to his political motivation and action.
- Did you notice how familiar so many arguments in the cables were? That’s because you heard them before; these State Department guys have been piping them to the NYT and other MSM voices for years. Assange is trying to break that daisy chain. No wonder Rubin is mad and the MSM is upset. This was their game, they got to make the decisions. And notice, they’re madder than when Assange’s Iraq information allegedly endangered soldiers and exposed soldiers’ atrocities. Now it’s journalistic/diplomat conspiring that’s been exposed.
- Will the cable drop damage people, hurt relationships, even end some careers? Yes I’m sure it will. Gotta break some eggs to make an omelet.
- Susan Abulhawa notes that many of the cables seem to serve Israel’s interests, and she wonders about the sources… She’s not alone, other friends of mine wonder; Assange has actually praised Netanyahu in one statement or another. Myself, I don’t buy it. I think the lobby spins everything all the time, and the cables will actually shed a lot of light on how the special relationship works, in the long run. Latest morsel: Jane Harman of California, jumping in on a congressional meeting with Mubarak to press him about cutting off supplies to the people of Gaza. Doesn’t this woman have better things to do with her time?
Israel, at least 40 dead as fire rages across the Carmel Mountains. A mass evacuation has begun.
As I am writing these lines, Israeli Fire fighting crews are battling with the flames. They also express no hope of controlling the fire soon. “We lost all control of the fire,” said the Haifa Fire fighting services spokesman. “There aren’t enough fire fighting resources in Israel in order to put out the fire.”
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hurried to the scene of the fire on Thursday. He requested the help of the U.S, Greece, Italy, Russia, and Cyprus to send additional forces to aid the Israeli firemen. A normal country would probably ask for the help of its neighbours, but the Jewish state doesn’t have neighbours. It made all its neighbours into enemies.
But the story here goes far deeper. The fire in northern Israel is far from being a coincidence. Israel’s rural landscape is saturated with pine trees. These trees are totally new to the region. They were not there until the 1930’s. The pine trees were introduced to the Palestinians landscape in the early 1930s by the Jewish National Fund (JNF) in an attempt to ‘reclaim the land’ . By 1935, JNF had planted 1.7 million trees over a total area of 1,750 acres. Over fifty years, the JNF planted over 260 million trees largely on confiscated Palestinian land. It did it all in a desperate attempt to hide the ruins of the ethnically cleansed Palestinian villages and their history.
Along the years the JNF performed a crude attempt to eliminate Palestinian civilisation and their past but it also tried to make Palestine look like Europe. The Palestinian natural forest was eradicated. Similarly the olive trees were uprooted. The pine trees took their place. On the southern part of mount Carmel the Israelis named an area as ‘Little Switzerland’. I have learned tonight that Little Switzerland is burned.
However, the facts on the ground were pretty devastating for the JNF. The pine tree didn’t adapt to the Israeli climate as much as the Israelis failed to adapt to the Middle East. According to JNF statistics, six out of every 10 saplings planted did not survive. Those few trees that did survive formed nothing but a firetrap. By the end of each Israeli summer each of the Israeli pine forests become a potential deadly zone.
In spite of its nuclear power, its criminal army, the occupation, the Mossad and its lobbies all over the world, Israel seems to be very vulnerable. It is devastatingly alienated from the land it claims to own. Like the pine tree, Israel and the Israeli are foreign to the region.
Michael Moore
November 30th, 2010 10:22 AM
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251,287 secret State Department cables, released into the public domain by Wikileaks! You’d think this amazing treasure trove of inside dope would prompt the media to ask some real questions. But so far, the likes of the New York Times and CNN have shown no interest in delving into obvious subjects like these:
1. Is Hillary Clinton building a secret army of Ban Ki-moon clones?
A July, 2009 cable signed “CLINTON” demands “biometric information” on Ban Ki-moon, the Secretary-General of the United Nations. We know from other cables that these kinds of requests included facial scans and DNA.
I don’t think I’m the only person who’s noticed a certain glint in Hillary’s eye — the kind of glint that says “I’d like to command a gigantic army of clones.” The real question here may be why Hillary decided to clone Ban Ki-moon specifically. Would she want a bunch of copies of any UN Secretary-General? Or, perhaps, is she simply looking to clone a kindly middle-aged Korean man, and he happened to be available?
2. Do the King of Saudi Arabia and Glenn Beck share a speechwriter with Saddam Hussein?
According to the cables, Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah, the world’s 5th worst dictator, has repeatedly urged the U.S. to attack Iran in order “to cut off the head of the snake.” Saddam Hussein used to refer to the Iranian government as “Khomeyniite snakes.” And Glenn Beck has said we need to “pop the head of the snake in Iran.”
Is this snake fixation a strange coincidence? Or have Abdullah and Glenn Beck hired the same guy who used to write Saddam’s stuff? If so, this person needs to stop recycling their material and come up with something fresher.
3. Why are Iranians so unbelievably paranoid?
According to a 2007 cable, the head of the Israeli Mossad said they wanted U.S. help to “Force Regime Change” in Iran, “possibly with the support of student democracy movements, and ethnic groups.”
Now, this is just good neighborly relations. If during the Cold War the Soviet Union had tried to get students, African Americans and Latinos to overthrow the U.S. government, we wouldn’t have complained. In fact, we would have complimented them on their initiative. But our side tries one little coup (well, actually this would be our second in Iran) and the Iranians won’t stop screaming about it! This leads to the next question:
4. Are Iranians a completely different species from Americans?
A cable from 1979 makes a good case that Iranians are so different from us here in the U.S. of A. that they maybe shouldn’t even be classified as people. For instance:
“…the single dominant aspect of the Persian psyche is an overriding egoism…The practical effect of it is an almost total Persian preoccupation with self and leaves little room for understanding points of view other than one’s own.”
You see? As humble Americans, who spend every second of every day trying our best to look at things from other people’s points of view, we’re so completely different we’ll probably never be able to comprehend the Persian Mind.
Then there’s this:
“…the idea that Iranian behavior has consequences on the perception of Iran in the U.S. or that this perception is somehow related to American policies regarding Iran. This same quality also helps explain Persian aversion to accepting responsibility for one’s own actions.”
Again, the difference is like night and day — we Americans all understand completely that our dozens of wars have made a big chunk of the world hate us, we know that’s why they act the way they do toward us, and we blame ourselves for it. I’m sorry if you don’t understand that, Iran, but that’s just the way we roll.
5. When did the U.S. government decide to buy keyboards that WEREN’T ALL UPPER CASE?
For a long time, all U.S. cables were ALL IN UPPER CASE. This made it seem as though our diplomats WERE BOLD AND FILLED WITH SO MUCH CONFIDENCE THAT THEY YELLED ALL DAY LONG. Unfortunately, at some point this changed, and the cables became filled with puny lower-case letters. WE MUST FIND OUT WHO DID THIS, AND INVESTIGATE WHETHER IT WAS A PLOT TO WEAKEN US FROM WITHIN.
IN THE MEANTIME, I ADVISE ALL MY FELLOW AMERICANS TO HIT THE CAPS LOCK, ESPECIALLY WHEN TALKING TO FOREIGNERS. THEY WILL RESPECT THIS AS A SHOW OF STRENGTH.
THAT IS ALL. (Oh, and can we just bomb Iran and get it over with? I’m tired of the tease! We’ve already crapped up Iraq and Afghanistan — what about the country located between them? They need a good ol’ American… shellacking.)
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