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Obama, Emanuel and Israel


By JOHN V. WHITBECK

In the first major appointment of his administration, President-elect Barack Obama has named as his chief of staff Congressman Rahm Emanuel, an Israeli citizen and Israeli army veteran whose father, according to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, was a member of Menachem Begin’s Irgun forces during the Nakba and named his son after “a Lehi combatant who was killed” — i.e., a member of Yitzhak Shamir’s terrorist Stern Gang, responsible for, in addition to other atrocities against Palestinians, the more famous bombing of the King David Hotel and assassination of the UN peace envoy Count Folke Bernadotte.

In rapid response to this news, the editorial in the next day’s Arab News (Jeddah) was entitled “Don’t pin much hope on Obama — Emanuel is his chief of staff and that sends a message”. This editorial referred to the Irgun as a “terror organization” (a judgment call) and concluded: “Far from challenging Israel, the new team may turn out to be as pro-Israel as the one it is replacing.”

That was always likely. Obama repeatedly pledged unconditional allegiance to Israel during his campaign, most memorably in an address to the AIPAC national convention which Israeli peace activist Uri Avnery characterized as “a speech that broke all records for obsequiousness and fawning”, and America’s electing a black president has always been more easily imagined than any American president’s declaring his country’s independence from Israeli domination.

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R. Emanuel: Repudiate this disgusting racist comment

Posted by Helena Cobban
November 7, 2008 11:09 AM EST | Link
Filed in US politics

… that was reportedly made by your father, Benjamin Emanuel, to the Israeli newspaper Ma’ariv in response to your appointment as Obama’s White House Chief of Staff:

    “Obviously he will influence the president to be pro-Israel… Why wouldn’t he be? What is he, an Arab? He’s not going to clean the floors of the White House.“

(HT: B of Moon of Alabama)

In many Jewish-Israeli circles, including apparently the Irgun/Likud circles the elder Emanuel has been associated with for many decades, “Arab work” is associated with doing all the dirty or hard work, very frequently carried out by members of Israel’s substantial ethnically Palestinian (Arab) minority, that allows so many of Jewish Israelis, nowadays, to live lives of relative ease and prosperity.

But Rahm Emanuel is not just a provincial-minded Jewish Israeli. He is also a US citizen. Indeed, he’s about to rise to one of the highest positions in our country.

There is a good question as to whether anyone occupying such a sensitive position in Washington ought to also hold the citizenship of a foreign country– or whether, in the circumstances, Rahm Emanuel should lay down his foreign citizenship.

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Angry Arab : raining on the parade

Of course I feel happy for Obama’s victory but I share some of the pessimism of Angry Arab below

Wednesday, November 05, 2008

Remember me: Obama bashing begins here. It was a noisy night in Washington, DC. Cars were parading the streets and honking their horns all night long. People around were very excited and people walked the streets and yelled and shouted in joy. AlJazeera offices: now that was a different story. The chaos there could not hide the festive atmosphere. People took bets and they had a sheet with staff names. I asked who was betting on McCain: no one, they said but they were betting on when the results would come in with news of Obama victory. People were excited and emotional. As I sat with the three anchors listening to Obama victory speech, I would make critical comments. I could tell that people did not enjoy that and there was a white technician who was very emotional got really mad at me because I was being critical of Obama. I ran into Lawrence Korb (former assistant secretary of defence under Ronald Regan) and I asked him if he had endorsed Obama. He said that he did not do that publicly but that he was advising him on defense and national security policies. He said that there is a move to appoint Richard Halbrooke as Secretary of State. I said: but the man (in addition to annoying the hell out of me) is the biggest self-promoter in the world. I woke up to day and put on Fox News: yesterday, at the GYM I turned to Fox and the people in the GYM were about to kill me. Not Fox, they yelled. I said: are you kidding. They are hilarious and I will derive a lot of pleasure watching them this week and in weeks to come. Fox mentioned the headline of Al-Akhbar newspaper which referred to Obma as “the black Jack Kennedy”. I was not amused and I did not like that headline by Al-Akhbar at all. Why should the White Man always be a term of reference? He is not Jack Kennedy: and even though I don’t support Obama but he is much more capable and effective than Kennedy, and he did not use his daddy’s money to achieve victory, and Obama wrote his own words. The festive coverage of the Arab press is really bothering me and I tried to express that in my appearance on AlJazeera. I will write about that soon in Al-Akhbar. Those who supported Obama: you will be disappointed and you will remember my caution. Remember me when Obama will endorse an Israeli war on a refugee camp and on a Lebanese village, and he will call that justified self-defense. Remember me when Obama will mourn the deaths of Israelis and will celebrate the deaths of Arabs and Muslims. Remember me when he orders his first bombing campaign on some remote area of Pakistan. Remember me when he betrays the poor in favor of Wall Street. Remember me when he will betray the aspirations of black people in favor of the white middle class that is now the headline of the Democratic Party. Remember me when Obama will not fight for his health reform plan, and will he not deliver on many of his promises. Remember me when Obama will stick to his campaign promise of opposing gay marriage. Remember me when when Obama will continue to blame the failure of the American occupation of Iraq on the Iraqi people themselves. On Angry Arab: the Obama bashing has just begun and will continue unabated.

source

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Excellent interviews about the US elections

Found in the comments of this article on information clearing house web site

YES the situation is not good and NO it’s not the same to get McCain or not vote, vs to get Obama.

YES
An incendiary interview with an incandescent Gore Vidal on Channel 4 http://www.channel4.com/news/art…to+kill/ 2238447

“I knew JFK, says Gore Vidal, and believe me Obama’s the better leader.” http://tinyurl.com/67pa2m

NO
Howard Zinn http://tinyurl.com/6njsu3
Noam Chomsky http://tinyurl.com/5bq6sy
The pragmatic activist view – Danny Glover http://tinyurl.com/6jl3nl
Ex Pat | 11.02.08 – 12:53 pm | #

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David&Layla

I attended the projection of David&Leyla last night at the Arab film festival in Brussels

Among the shameful events of my life …

During the Q&A section of the evening

I did not speak up and yet…
I had felt like leaving well before the end and yet…
since I’ll never know the end of Waltz with Bashir (I could not care less about the lebanese nightmares of zionist assassins) I stayed
but then, why did I not open my mouth ?

I know, it was hard to hurt the feelings of the producer who was present; I am trying to make amends by putting this on line.

I felt the film as a vulgar, American vision of things
A love story between a randy and sex problems ridden jewish New Yorker and a beautiful Kurd
He is engaged to a nightmare of a woman who has the blessing of his family.
He falls in love with Leyla, the beautiful and virgin Kurdish and muslim girl about to be shipped out by Immigration.
Both families object and throw all their racist or national clichés at each other
Leyla can marry David only if he converts to islam
David converts to islam and they marry
During the wedding party David leaves the party discreetly and breaks a glass under his foot  in the Jewish tradition.
A few years later, we see them with a son sharing  Pessah with the Jewish side of the family.

The positive side of the film
The film maker remains firm on Palestine
Islam is not presented as a caricature

We share the nostalgia of the exiled Kurds
Eventually, the two families blend harmoniously with each side keeping its values

The wonderful Kurdish wedding party and the Kurdish music

And there is humour of course with poor David having to deal with the consequences of his betrayal and struggling to take his admission exam into Islam.

What was totally uncalled for :
the sex scenes. That was really the vulgar part, specially towards the end, the scence between the parents.
I cannot imagine this film being viewed in Damascus if only on this account. If you want to build a bridge between the two sides you have to take the sensitivities of the other side into account.

Two moroccan newspapers have accused the film of being zionist; I would not go that far.

Had I know, would I have gone to see it ? The answer is no. Does not mean you should not.

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America’s Hollywood-inspired anti-Arab and anti-Muslim prejudices

As Lee Bailey noted in The National (Abu Dhabi, 16 October 2008), “Jack Shaheen, a Lebanese-American academic, has published two books documenting the representation of Muslims and Arabs in American film. One, Reel Bad Arabs, dealt with the period before 11 September, and the second, Guilty, considered films made after the attacks.”

Bailey added, “…Of approximately 1,000 films that depicted Muslims and Arabs before 2001, [Shaheen] estimated that only 65 portrayed them in a positive or even-handed manner…” In other words, Americans have been brainwashed by anti-Arab propaganda for decades. More than 9/10ths of Hollywood’s productions involving Arabs have made them ugly in the minds of viewers.

On 11 October 2008, James Zogby was reported as saying,

“We are disturbed by the degree to which ‘Arab’ has become the metaphorical mud to sling against your opponent. This week, for example, the Republican Jewish Coalition released a document in which they use the term pro-Arab as a pejorative accusation. For his part, Rush Limbaugh has joined in by declaring that Obama is in fact an Arab American. Then, on Friday, after a supporter called Senator Barack Obama ‘an Arab’, Senator John McCain came to the defence of his political opponent by saying, ‘No, ma’am. He’s a decent family man and citizen…’ From this we are left to infer that an Arab man is less than a decent family man.”

Zogby’s right. It was the first thing that came to mind when I saw McCain remove the mike from the woman. However, Zogby missed my next thought: if McCain was the honourable maverick he claims to be, he would have said to the woman: “He doesn’t have an Arab heritage but so what if he had?”

But then McCain was brought up on more than half a century of Hollywood’s vilification of Arabs, so the images of “rag heads”, jihadists, Islamic extremists, terrorists and womanizing sheikhs has been implanted as deep in his mind as in 250 million or more other mentally programmed Americans. Jack Shaheen’s Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People and Guilty: Hollywood’s verdict on Arabs after 9/11 should be required reading in the schools.

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An Israeli Trojan Horse

By CHRISTOPHER KETCHAM

Since the late 1990s, federal agents have reported systemic communications security breaches at the Department of Justice, FBI, DEA, the State Department, and the White House.
Several of the alleged breaches, these agents say, can be traced to two hi-tech communications companies, Verint Inc. (formerly Comverse Infosys), and Amdocs Ltd., that respectively provide major wiretap and phone billing/record-keeping software contracts for the U.S. government.
Together, Verint and Amdocs form part of the backbone of the government’s domestic intelligence surveillance technology.

Both companies are based in Israel – having arisen to prominence from that country’s cornering of the information technology market – and are heavily funded by the Israeli government, with connections to the Israeli military and Israeli intelligence (both companies have a long history of board memberships dominated by current and former Israeli military and intelligence officers).

Verint is considered the world leader in “electronic interception” and hence an ideal private sector candidate for wiretap outsourcing.

Amdocs is the world’s largest billing service for telecommunications, with some $2.8 billion in revenues in 2007, offices worldwide, and clients that include the top 25 phone companies in the United States that together handle 90 percent of all call traffic among U.S. residents. The companies’ operations, sources suggest, have been infiltrated by freelance spies exploiting encrypted trapdoors in Verint/Amdocs technology and gathering data on Americans for transfer to Israeli intelligence and other willing customers (particularly organized crime).

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Christopher Ketcham writes for Vanity Fair, GQ, Harper’s, Salon and many other magazines and websites. You can reach him at cketcham99@mindspring.com.

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USA voting choices

If you want Iran to get bombed,

vote for Mac Cain !!

If you want Pakistan to get bombed ,

vote for Obama !!

If you want New York to be bombed,

vote for the  CIA and/or Oussama !!

If you want Gaza to starve to death,

it  makes no difference !!

(anyone of them shall do it)

If you want Baghdad really liberated

take away those foreign-liberators !!

If you want Jerusalem liberated

take away those foreign-impostors !!

Give us back Palestine and Iraq

and we shall give you Peace

and then

you shall even not need

to bomb  anybody !!

Eng. Moustafa  Roosenbloom

inventor of those Peace-Bombs

patent-pending !!

9Th. of October 2008

Choudran Raja

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This Debate’s Biggest Loser
By Richard Cohen

Tuesday, October 7, 2008; Page A21

Reading William Kristol’s column in yesterday’s New York Times, I discover that Sarah Palin and I have something in common.

Kristol, who was once Dan Quayle’s chief of staff and therefore, shall we say, has a Mister Rogers approach to certain politicians, got Palin on the phone and reported that “she doesn’t have a very high opinion of the mainstream media.” This is where we are in agreement. On account of Palin, neither do I.

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