How regrettable that Hillary has threatened, on Good Morning America, to "obliterate" Iran if it attacks Israel... How lamentable that the comment draws criticism from around the world, including a British foreign minister, but no one here bats an eye...
This kind of rhetoric does nothing for the people of Israel or Iran. An imbalance in nukes is destabilizing to any region. The '67 War is thought to have been started in good part because France gave Israel nukes and Nasser knew it.
Our leaders ought to be winding down the Middle East, not winding it up. Trita Parsi, the Iranian-American realist, ought to be advising these candidates. Trita have you talked to Obama? His organization says that Arlan Specter has called for talks with Iran; and there Parsi says the following:
"Senator Clinton's statement reflects a mindset of perpetual conflict that has guided our Iran policy for the last seven years," Trita Parsi, NIAC President, said. "This is disastrous for US national interest, since we are in desperate need of a new and fresh Iran policy aimed at resolving the conflict rather than prolonging it."
A mindset of perpetual conflict. I'm reminded of Joel Kovel's comments at Brecht Forum the other night: that Israel has never wanted peace, that its internal dynamics depend on a state of militarized belligerence toward its neighbors. Why oh why are we engaged in this madness? If there's one thing I love about Obama, it's that he is too green, and has too much integrity, political and intellectual, to ever say such things.
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"A mindset of perpetual conflict … a state of militarized belligerence toward its neighbors." Why oh why are we engaged in this madness?"
It's a cultural phenomenon, isn't it? In his classic work on U.S. culture, "Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America," David Hackett Fischer reached back to the U.K. to find the roots of four distinct region-to-region migrations in the early colonial period. He labeled the four as follows:
1. East Anglia to Massachusetts (exodus of the Puritans)
2. South of England to Virginia (distressed cavaliers and indentured servants)
3. North Midlands to the Delaware (the Friends' migration)
4. Borderlands to the Backcountry (the flight from North Britain)
Fischer clearly identifies the fourth category, the Scots-Irish borderers who ended up in Appalachia, as the poorest and most violent of the lot. He traces this characteristic back to centuries of conflict along the English-Scottish border.
What if one attempted to apply Fischer's analysis to Israel? The sephardim, as a minority embedded in Islamic countries, didn't have any recent martial history. Nor is any found among the ashkenazim of eastern Europe. How, then, did Israel create such a militarized culture in the space of two generations? I don't know; I'm asking the question. It ought to be a sociological case study.
Obviously the conditioning doesn't take on everyone, as in Bloomberg's Dec. 2007 article about "Karma Kosher" IDF dropouts becoming hippies in Goa.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=a12JnKt1Pwlc&refer=exclusive
At the moment, militarized Israel and the militarized U.S. rhyme in unpleasant ways. Anyone who values peace should be seeking to unwind that linkage. Stopping the $3 billion a year subsidy of Israel's belligerence is Job #1.
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On yesterday's topic of "Light, Light, Light Coming Into Our Lives" — by God, it's happening! Ask and ye shall receive, my bruthuhs and sistuhs! M.J. Rosenberg exults:
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It's not much but it's something. Georgetown University has decided not to renew Doug Feith's contract.
Word from campus is that both students and faculty had pretty much had it with the arch war criminal walking around campus although I also heard that he is such a goofy, pathetic guy that some students felt sorry for him. One told me, "he's like the nerdiest loser I ever saw. He cannot have done the things he's accused of. He's too obtuse."
I told her to read Arendt's "The Banality of Evil."
In any case, the Jesuits have done themselves proud by, at long last, giving Feith his walking papers. I wonder where we'll turn up next. In a McCain administration or in the dock at the Hague?
http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/2008/04/23/georgetown_university_terminat/
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Feith, of course, is the clown that General Tommy Franks called "the stupidest fucking guy on the planet." No wonder he can't hold down a job.
Feith's firing is not just an isolated incident. Reportedly, "torture attorney-general" Alberto Gonzales can't get a job — respectable law firms won't touch that tainted name. He may have to return to his old career as a landscape contractor.
Another useless, unemployed neocon turd, Tony Blair, nearly got busted yesterday for vagrancy:
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LONDON (AFP) – Former prime minister Tony Blair was left red-faced when he was caught travelling on a train without a ticket and said he had no cash to pay the fare, a report said on Wednesday.
Blair, who has earned around 500,000 pounds on the speaking circuit since leaving office in June, was confronted by a ticket inspector as he travelled to Heathrow airport to catch a flight to the United States on Monday, the Daily Mail newspaper reported.
He said he had no cash for the 24.50 pounds fare because money an aide had given him was no longer in his pocket.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080423/en_afp/britainpoliticsoffbeat
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And when it comes to duplicating Bill Clinton's feat of pulling in a hundred million dollahs in speaking fees, the SVNE (simian-visaged non-entity) who's currently impersonating the president doesn't have a chance in hell — he can't utter a coherent sentence.
Looks like the wages of sin are in a sharp decline these days, along with everyone else's. Makes it all more palatable, don't it?
Hillary was playing "presidential", and applying the neo-mad (mutually assured destruction) basis of deterence.
Iran with a nuclear weapon is a very big concern, a very destabalizing one, which even Jimmy Carter acknowledged in his interview on Israeli TV, which I posted earlier.
Iran has recently threatened to similarly "annihilate" Israel if Israel bombed its nuclear research facilities.
Hillary shouts fire in the crowded theatre for stupid domestic votes, just like our favorite Iranian. Yeah, she's god good leadership judgment. On a footnote to this scary wannabe president, she had access to the full report before she voted for war on Iraq, but she chose only to read BushCo's summary.
Neither the neocons, Bushies, nor Israel want anything but continued war. Note Bush's secret letter to Sharon, and note this
article showing how our nation is headed to doom in a war with Iran:
http://www.esquire.com/features/iranbriefing1107
Speaking of "War Promotion" — the Israel Lobby has been waging a relatively stealth campaign to pass so-called Iran Divestment bills state-by-state around the country. Despite the transparent rhetoric about exerting peaceful pressure on Iran, the campaign is obviously about ratcheting up war fever and launching us into another neocon Middle East war. Measures have passed in California, Florida, New Jersey, and other states; it was defeated in Maine. See the roundup here: www.theisraelproject.org/site/apps/nlnet/content2.aspx?c=hsJPK0PIJpH&b=689705&ct=5052117
In Massachusetts, there has been some opposition from within the legislature, local academics www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2008/04/24/the_divestment_trap/
and the anti-war community. No stealth here.
Sorry, the links are:
http://www.theisraelproject.org/site/apps/nlnet/content2.aspx?c=hsJPK0PIJpH&b=689705&ct=5052117
and
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2008/04/24/the_divestment_trap/
“Regime change” and war against Iran have been part of the Right-wing agenda for years – and lately the hostile rhetoric has heated up. Norman Podhoretz, one of the strongest neocon proponents of the Iraq War, wrote last year: “I hope and pray that Pres. Bush will bomb Iran.” More recently, the Bush White House and its allies have been promoting the “Iran danger” as a new rational for “staying the course” in the Iraq; one of them (Bill Bennett)suggested that there was “less an argument for getting out of Iraq than going into Iran.” Vice-President Cheney advocates that “the administration should use military force to destroy Iran's nuclear facilities…” Haven’t we seen this movie before?
Yeah. That's the whole point" It works. Goebbels would know.
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Senator Chuck the Schmuck pulls the old zionist double-cross on the hapless Arabs:
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SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) – Five U.S. Senators on Thursday called for holding up multimillion dollar arms deals with Saudi Arabia and other OPEC members if the cartel refuses to increase its oil production. "The Saudis have to understand this is a two-way street," said Senator Charles Schumer. "We provide them weapons, our troops provide them protection, and then they rake us over the coals when it comes to oil." The other four senators are Byron Dorgan (D-ND), Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Bob Casey (D-PA), and Mary Landrieu (D-LA). The Bush Administration should use its leverage with the members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries to increase oil supplies, or Congress will act, they said.
http://tinyurl.com/4udqqd
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You'll recall that this was a tied deal — the arms sales to Saudi Arabia, et al, were to provide "balance" after the U.S. committed $30 billion in military aid to Israel.
Now that global oil supplies are short, for a multitude of reasons — the industrialization of Chindia; the destabilization of Iraq; the U.S. embargo on investment in Iran; the possibility that Saudi production is declining, along with Mexico's — "we" jerk the carpet out from under the nefarious Arabs' feet, blaming them for all of these planetary developments.
But guess what — Israel gets to keep its $30 billion of arms aid. KA-CHING-O, baby! Three-card monte hustlers got nothin' on Chuck. In appreciation, maybe Israel will designate a settler road as the "Chuck Schumer Fair Deal Highway." It's the least they could do, idn't it?
Yep, exactly. Add this in for spiritual comfort: One particularly effective way in which Gush Emunim and other religious advocates of settlement have framed their political enemies as both evil and mortally dangerous throughout Israeli history is through references to catastrophic events in Jewish history, particularly the Holocaust. During the mid-seventies, “Rabin’s concessions to Sadat were… compared to Chamberlain’s 1939 concessions to Hitler at Munich. At this point, this is standard political spiel. No appeasement, you stupid white trailer trash Americans.
"Feith, of course, is the clown that General Tommy Franks called "the stupidest ####### guy on the planet." No wonder he can't hold down a job."
his tribe continues to affirmative action him into employment for which he is worthless re usa.
how many people has this dip helped to slaughter? how many lives made into a hell? not just feith. all the other worthless traitors, eg, wolfowitz, wurmser, perle, ledeen, kristol, abrams, k(c)agans(all of them),pipes, emerson, etc. such a worthless, hate filled, hate creating bunch of parasites.
Yeah, you are right. They think they are tribal heros.
schumer is another true parasite upon the american body. the cia should drag him to the boiling cauldrons of uzbekistan.
an open question:
how many jewish politicians have been loyal to america and only america?
wellstone? the stevensons? any others?
Well, just take a gander at Wasserman-Schultz for somebody who sits in our government but actually represents Israel.
Hilary media spokesmen and Likud liason officer, Lanny Davis, on the Larry King show Tuesday night, defended Joe Lieberman's status as a Democrat by saying that Lieberman sides with Democrats 95% of Senate votes. Davis and soul mate Alan Dershowitz in recent years are known for their rabid campaign against former Democratic President Jimmy Carter for his attempts to subject America's relations Palestine to national discussion.
So, what's a Noble Peace Prize winner when you can have a rich Jew acting for what they perceive is good for the world's jews?
It would help if they were carpenters…. but, no. They are subprime mortgage dealers.
Yeah, keep it up. Let's have more of this, so Jews can keep up their wonderful view of the world.
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New York Jewish Week has an interesting article about the Kadish spy case, which indulges in all kinds of speculations. Is the Kadish case related to Jonathan Pollard's? Is there an American coordinator who they are really after? Is it related to the AIPAC classified documents case? NY Jewish Week doesn't have a clue, but they let it all hang out:
http://www.thejewishweek.com/viewArticle/c37_a8529/News/National.html
One point they raise is troubling. The article claims that the statute of limitations on Kadish's spying — committed in the early 1980s — has expired. He has been charged, the article says, for the Orwellian crime of "lying to an FBI agent" — this year. Federal law enforcement officials are free to lie to you without sanction. But if you lie to them, that's a crime.
The "gotcha" aspect of Kadish's prosecution doesn't serve to condone what he did. But let's be frank, this is an old and stale case, against an old, retired, and rather naive man. If the government is after bigger fish, fine, let's proceed. But if the Kadish case is just a smokescreen to let far more outrageous sellouts of U.S. interests — such as the official giveaway of U.S. nuclear secrets to Israel under the auspices of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission [as mentioned in the article] — then we've been HAD AGAIN.
This can of worms is way too complicated for me to unravel, but one hopes that someone is minding the U.S. nuclear store before Bush and his zionoid flunky Dr. Dale Klein at US NuReg give it away to Israel through the back door. Hello, is shoplifting still illegal?
, is shoplifting still illegal?
Posted by: Jim Haygood | April 24, 2008 at 03:26 PM
not when the shoplifting is done for israel. right now there is nothing left to shop lift. any way it, the entity, has the usa wired like the fbi has a mafia parrot wired.
I haven't heard the Rosenbergs mentioned in a very long time. What's with that? I remember reading in a high school history text about the horrible treatment that they receivied, and their fate was often mentioned as proof of anti-Semitism in the United states. Is it just me, or have Julius and Ethel's names been forgotten by the usual guilt peddlers? If so, I wonder why?
Excellent Bloomberg article, Jim Haygood, on Israeli expats in India.
I really enjoyed this assertion:
"Their attitude has already fueled very real anti-Israeli elements within the Indian government and created sufficient motivation for people in Israel and India to harm our bilateral trade agreements."
Never mind if these young people might be right, there's money to be made and they might get in the way!
Always about money, huh? That's why the kids left Israel in the first place!
Michael Blaine
www.rudelystamped.blogspot.com
Interesting. Always the same. We aren't suppose to notice.
Sometimes I feel sorry for the Jewish people.
They were once so far ahead of their time… a nation without territory, that still maintained a unique solidarity across many nations. And whose globe-spanning, cosmopolitan, sophisticated, intellectualism was miles ahead of any other culture, no matter where they physically lived.
Now they seem to be willfully regressing back to becoming just another narrow-minded, Middle Eastern tribe, mule-headedly scrabbling with their neighbors for patches of land.
It's kind of sad.
-minded, tribal ways of two millennia ago.