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Brilliant, and I do not care how un-PC it is, this is a brilliant video. Even if you find some of this offensive, you cannot say that its assessment of America is anything short of poetry. America, the nation that had it all… now flushing itself down the toilet. It is a mind-numbing, awe-inspiring fall from grace. If the world’s fate were not so intertwined with the fate of this latest imperial manifestation, it would make for the greatest black comedy ever. It is hard to know whether one should laugh or cry. God bless America, she sure as hell is gonna need it.
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It wasn’t easy, finding Jim Traficant. Without the help of the American Free Press, (AFP), we never would have found him. Traficant of Youngstown Ohio was running for his old Congressional seat. What sort of campaign could he be running? After all, we’d seen the Greta von Susteren Fox News interview (Sept. 9, 2009, just a few days after Traficant was released from prison). Here’s some of what Traficant had said, “I believe that Israel has a powerful strangle hold on the American government. They control…the House and Senate. They have us involved in wars of which we have little or no interest. Our children are coming back in body bags. Our nation is bankrupt over these wars, and if you open your mouth, you get targeted. And if they don’t beat you at the polls, they’ll put you in prison… It’s an objective assessment that no one will have the courage to speak about. They’re controlling much of our foreign policy. They’re influencing much of our domestic policy. Wolfowitz as Under Secretary of Defense manipulated President Bush #2 back into Iraq. They pushed definitely, definitely to try and get Bush, before he left, to move into Iran. We’re conducting expansionist policy of Israel and everybody’s afraid to say it. They control much of the media…”
WAS IT POSSIBLE somewhere in Ohio someone could say such things and not be ostracized, denounced, trounced? Actually, no. There really was no campaign. Few in the political business dared have anything to do with him, donate to him, invite him, quote him. Only a maverick Tea Party organizer offered him an evening campaign event. Otherwise, the popular sheriff and then Congressman was pretty much shunned. And yet he came in a close third on Nov.2, 2010, with over 30,000 votes.
by Lawrence Davidson on December 17, 2011
Part I
On 12 December 2011 hundreds of Israeli settler fanatics besieged a West Bank IDF army base. They destroyed equipment, set fires, and even stoned the base soldiers. This was the second such attack in a month. The cause? Anger over the army’s dismantlement of a small number of isolated, unauthorized settler outposts. The Chief of the Central Command of the Israel “Defense” Forces, Major General Avi Misrahi, is quoted as saying “I have not seen such hatred of Jews towards soldiers during my 30 years of service.” He must not have been looking.
This an exceptional event. The subsequent indignation over the attack expressed by Prime Minister Netanyahu (“red lines have been crossed”) was, as Alex Fishman writing in Yedioth Ahronoth put it, staged hypocrisy. The Prime Minister is certainly aware that for some time there has been on-going skirmishing between the settlers and government security forces. Right wing settlers regularly throw rocks and fire bombs at police and army vehicles and “physical altercations” between settlers and Israeli police and soldiers are “almost routine.” This is so despite the fact that the government, both Prime Minister and Knesset, “either tacitly or openly” support the settlers. Then why the hatred and why the attacks?
At this stage the battle is over strategy. The Israeli government wants to gobble up all of Palestine in an orderly step by step fashion. In part, this is to avoid too much international criticism at any particular stage of the process. On the other hand, the settlers don’t give a damn about international opinion – no more than does al-Qaeda, to which they have an unsavory resemblance. Led “by fundamentalist religious leaders who do not recognize the state of Israel and its laws,” they are driven by religious fanaticism and have no respect for governments or their agents. It is their ideological conviction that all of Palestine (including, by the way, Jordan) must be Jewish as soon as possible. The authorities sometime get in the way of this goal and that has led the settlers to, as Fishman puts it, “terrorize not only the Palestinian population but also the police and the army.”
Prime Minister Netanyahu, belatedly noticing an erosion of government authority, has begun to set rules against settler violence when it is directed toward the IDF and police (but not toward the Palestinians). The New York Times reports that from now on such “radical Israelis” attacking soldiers or policemen will be treated just like “Palestinian militants.” That is they will be “detained for long periods without charge and tried in military courts.”
Alas, this new toughness won’t work. For years Israeli governments have looked the other way as thousands of armed religious fanatics organized themselves and got stronger and more self-assured. Now, as Adam Keller of Gush Shalom tells us, “the Golem has turned on its creator.” These are the people who assassinated Yitzhak Rabin. What makes Netanyahu believe that Israel’s present army, police and courts which, reminiscent of the Weimar Republic, regularly show sympathy and leniency toward these criminals, are going to change their attitude on his orders? When a military reporter asked a brigade commander if he was prepared to act toward settler hostility in the same manner as he would Palestinian hostility, he answered “you would not expect me to open fire on a Jew…I am certain you didn’t mean that.”
The reporter would have gotten a very different answer if she had asked the fanatic settlers about how far they were willing to go. Anshel Pfeffer writing in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz notes that “the only red line that has yet to be crossed is a scenario in which an Israeli citizen [belonging to] the extreme settler right would open fire on IDF soldiers. There are those in Israel’s security forces who fear that day is not so distant.”
Netanyahu’s apparent change of heart comes too late. What we have here is incipient civil war. Any really serious effort to stop these fanatics will result in their turning their weapons on those who represent the government. What you sow is what you reap.
Parts II and III here
Republican frontrunner says Israelis have a right to their modern-day homeland but implies Palestinians do not
Newt Gingrich declares the Palestinians an ‘invented’ people.The US Republican presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich has declared that the Palestinians are an “invented” people who want to destroy Israel.
The Jewish Channel, a cable TV station, posted online its interview with the former US House speaker, who has risen to the top of Republican nomination candidates to challenge Democratic President Barack Obama in the November 2012 election.
Gingrich differed from official US policy that respects the Palestinians as a people deserving of their own state based on negotiations with Israel. “Remember, there was no Palestine as a state. It was part of the Ottoman Empire” until the early 20th century, Gingrich said.
“I think that we’ve had an invented Palestinian people who are in fact Arabs and who were historically part of the Arab community. And they had a chance to go many places, and for a variety of political reasons we have sustained this war against Israel now since the 1940s, and it’s tragic,” he said.
Most historians mark the start of Palestinian Arab nationalist sentiment as 1834, when Arab residents of the Palestinian region revolted against Ottoman rule.
Modern-day Israel, founded amid the 1948 Arab-Israel war, took shape along the lines of a 1947 UN plan for ethnic partition of the then-British ruled territory of Palestine. Arabs rejected the division.
Gingrich and other Republican candidates are seeking to attract Jewish support by vowing to bolster US ties with Israel if elected.
Gingrich said the Hamas militant group, which controls the Gaza Strip, and the the governing Palestinian Authority, which controls the West Bank, represented “an enormous desire to destroy Israel”.
The US government has sought to encourage the Palestinian Authority to negotiate with Israel but regards Hamas as a terrorist group.
The Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas, opposes violence against Israel as a means to secure an independent state, pinning his hopes first on negotiations and more recently on a unilateral bid for statehood via the United Nations.
Gingrich said he would be willing to consider granting clemency to Jonathan Jay Pollard, who has been serving life since 1987 for passing US secrets to Israel. Successive US presidents have refused Israel’s requests to free him.
“If we can get to a point where I’m satisfied that there’s no national security threat, and if he’s in fact served within the range of people who’ve had a similar problem, then I’d be inclined to consider clemency,” Gingrich said.
Gingrich sharply criticised the Obama administration’s approach to Middle East diplomacy, saying it was “so out of touch with reality that it would be like taking your child to the zoo and explaining that a lion was a bunny rabbit”.
[youtube http://youtu.be/7BxMvnWrmh0?]
The above video is of the UN debate over whether Zionism is a form of racism, which took place 36 years ago this past Thursday. One thing that struck me as I watched it was how similar much of the discourse was to today, especially from Israel’s defenders.
Thursday, September 29, 2011 at 7:59AM Gilad Atzmon
Ahead of the publication of my “The Wandering Who” the entire Zionist network is in a total panic. Veterans Today’s senior Editor Gordon Duff commented yesterday that just a ‘few books have been opposed as this one has’. He may as well be right.
It started last Friday, with the Hasbara mouthpiece “Jewish Chronicle” of London attacking Professor Mearsheimer for endorsing a book ‘by an antisemite’.
I don’t know how many times do I have to mention that I am not an antisemite for I really hate everyone equally. For some reason, my detractors refuse to take this simple message on board.
Then, the Islamophobic agent-provocateur “Harry’s place” — who never miss a chance to muddy the water — joined in, intimidating and harassing a London academic just because she tweeted that she likes Atzmon’s book
Gilad’ s New Book: The Wandering Who? will be out in October. It is already available (pre-order) on Amazon.com
bandannie read the book and was mesmerized by the accuracy of his analysis.
Jewish identity is tied up with some of the most difficult and contentious issues of today. The purpose in this book is to open many of these issues up for discussion. Since Israel defines itself openly as the ‘Jewish State’, we should ask what the notions of ’Judaism’, ‘Jewishness’, ‘Jewish culture’ and ‘Jewish ideology’ stand for. Gilad examines the tribal aspects embedded in Jewish secular discourse, both Zionist and anti Zionist; the ‘holocaust religion’; the meaning of ‘history’ and ‘time’ within the Jewish political discourse; the anti-Gentile ideologies entangled within different forms of secular Jewish political discourse and even within the Jewish left. He questions what it is that leads Diaspora Jews to identify themselves with Israel and affiliate with its politics. The devastating state of our world affairs raises an immediate demand for a conceptual shift in our intellectual and philosophical attitude towards politics, identity politics and history.
You can now pre-order the book on Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk
“A formidable improvisational array…a local jazz giant steadily drawing himself up to his full height…”-John Fordham, The Guardian
“Best Musician” living in the world today, Robert Wyatt, The Guardian
“…Atzmon is an astonishing musician.” John Lewis, Metro
Click below for samples of his music :
The Tide Has Changed by Gilad Atzmon
Mondoweiss and see the article’s comments
Steve Walt at Foreign Policy, “Get ready for more stupid Mideast violence.” Some great points, beginning with the idea that when leaders kick the can down the road on a difficult problem, it becomes intractable/terrifying. Think, American slavery, 1830-1861… Or, a Palestinian state, promised in 1947, undelivered for 8 decades, amidst ethnic cleansing… Walt:
If memory serves, one of the lessons of Roger Fisher’s little book International Conflict for Beginners was “settle conflicts early and often.” This isn’t always possible, of course, but his basic insight was that unresolved conflicts are dangerous precisely because they provide opportunities that extremists can exploit, they harden perceptions and images on both sides, and most importantly, they can always get worse. ..
However one sees this situation, a key point to keep in mind is that this sort of thing isn’t going to stop as long as the occupation and the siege of Gaza persists, and as long as one people has a state of their own and the other does not. If the situation were magically reversed and a million-plus Israelis were being kept in the same condition as the Gazans, I’d be astonished if some of them didn’t try to take up arms against whomever was oppressing them. And I’ll bet Commentary magazine would think that such actions would be perfectly okay. That thought-experiment doesn’t justify the murder of innocents, mind you, but it may help us understand where such deplorable actions come from.
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