Typically, the British press has 2 ugly stories from the colonized West Bank --sorry, Judea and Samaria--that haven't shown up here.
BBC has a piece showing 4 Israeli settlers descending with baseball bats on Palestinian shepherds because the locals are grazing their animals too close to the colonists' land. Charming. B'tselem, the great human rights org, is responsible; gave 100 cameras to Palestinians.
This piece in the Economist tells of the incredible pressure on water resources in the Middle East, and notes another byproduct of colonization:
More alarmingly, because rubbish dumping in Israel is better controlled than it used to be, contractors now dump more waste illegally in the poorly supervised West Bank, which adds to the contamination of the aquifer.
Ahh that reminds me…
Sure…American Jews Love Israel…But Does Israel Love American Jews?
link to homo-sapien-underground.blogspot.com
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The first link to BBC is broken, because the 'http://' bit is repeated twice. Try this one:
link to news.bbc.co.uk
YouTube gonna kill zionism, just as surely as television and photojournalism killed apartheid and Jimbo Crow.
IT'S OVAHHHHH …
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"Do We Give Them Baseball Bats Too?"
Baseball bats, hell … we give them jet fighters, missiles and avionics.
Check out this slick piece of agitprop, courtesy of 60 Minutes and Yahoo News, lionizing the Israeli Air Force as 'Top Guns':
link to 60minutes.yahoo.com
This is pure memeering, positioning, image marketing. Usually such garbage is released in the run-up to an attack, to engineer public support for the fireworks show. Cinema screens were full of such images in Summer 2001, including a Pearl Harbor movie which sort of pre-announced 9/11.
All MSM hands on deck … see ya in Tehran!
Phil, besides the billions of dollars, the most important thing america gives to zionism is a silent and complicit press like they said at that aipac meeting where they admitted to having a special agreement with the press.
zionism is able to bilk americas jews of their hard earned money because the press here remains silent and under control.
if the majority of jews in america knew, they would not be so willing to part with their hard earned dollars in support of the experiment in the middle east.
No time to look into this. I doubt that Finkelstein wrote precisely what this kid *writes*. Should I assume that there was no correction by whomever reading the paper? A questionmark? Add citation here? But I have no time to look into this closer.
My default assumption is that he puts something into Finkelstein's mouth, as we Germans say, something that is quite in line with the anti-Finkelstein witch hunt.
link to nazibegone.blogspot.com
" Uri Avneri, an Israeli critic, says regarding Jewish Nationalism today that “For generations the Jews were persecuted in many countries and developed the consciousness of victims. It could almost have been said that most of the Jewish culture created during the last two or three centuries revolves around this axis” (Lozowick 42). According to this, Jewish identity is based lately on the idea of victim hood and many others, including Norman Finkelstein say this, *that we have played this up in order for the creation of the state of Israel to take place.* Finkelstein, in particular plays up how Israel has played it up. He says in his book The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering, he says “Given its proven utility, organized American Jewry exploited the Nazi Holocaust” and that the Holocaust “proved to be the perfect weapon for deflecting criticism of Israel” (30). According to both of these men, with Uri being an Israeli and Finkelstein being a Jewish individual (whose mother is a Holocaust survivor) says that Jewish people exploit their victim hood so that was we cannot take any blame from anyone for anything actions Israel takes."
notice the shift from "Israel played up" to "American Jewry exploited". In Nazi lore this no doubt may be identical, but is it?
And does Norman Finkelstein blame the whole "American Jewry". I somehow doubt.
In contrast, I think it is responsible and desirable for the US to continue to support Israel militarily, certainly until the Arab world takes the responsible step of recognizing Israel.
Currently, the Arab world is still in a state of war (deferred) with Israel. Thankfully the former largest aggressors towards Israel either have treatied (Jordan, Egypt) or are powerless to aggress currently (Iraq, Syria).
Only Iran remains, funding, arming, training, proxy militias on Israel's borders.
It is a false assertion to state that the flow of oil is stopped by anything that Israel does in the region. Saudi Arabia, UAE, Kuwait each determine their production independantly of Iran, and independantly of reaction to any of Israel's actions.
Only those for whom ideology trumps practicality are in any aggressive relationship with Israel, or agitating for overthrow of oil states.
That is not to state that the monarchies and theocracies are laudable, just states. Just that Israel is NOT a cause of their instability.
In contrast, the US has comprehensive and very varied economic and social relations with Israel that are not limited to a single dependant industry.
"Do we give them a baseball bat too?"
Contemptuous outrage only? Why?
You will be very disappointed with Obama, Phil.
what i have found out is that mostly people do not want to know about the connection between the neocons and israel or our iraq adventure and israel. my experience has been that in having political conversations, it stops when i mention this connection and the topic is changed. i am not talking of jews, but of ordinary gentiles, often quite educated and interested in politics. my take on this is that we have been so trained by political correctness that any hint of jews/israelis having a nefarious agenda is automatically deleted from the mind. this is automatic and complete. i honestly don't know what it will take to change this. naturally this rule doesn't apply when one speaks of say, the chinese. also i notice, one cannot have a rational conversation about immigration. if you have misgivings about the numbers of immigrants you are a racist,automatically.
what i have found out is that mostly people do not want to know about the connection between the neocons and israel or our iraq adventure and israel. my experience has been that in having political conversations, it stops when i mention this connection and the topic is changed. i am not talking of jews, but of ordinary gentiles, often quite educated and interested in politics. my take on this is that we have been so trained by political correctness that any hint of jews/israelis having a nefarious agenda is automatically deleted from the mind. this is automatic and complete. i honestly don't know what it will take to change this. naturally this rule doesn't apply when one speaks of say, the chinese. also i notice, one cannot have a rational conversation about immigration. if you have misgivings about the numbers of immigrants you are a racist,automatically.
UNCLE JABO'S POOP SOUP *****
Cut costs and preserve your racist hegemony in one simple dish!
Serves about 1.5 million
250,000,000 gallons fresh water
1 heaping dollop of militarism (Uncle Sam's brand)
1 ripe racist ideology
8,000 impossible conditions
pinch of corporate capitalist sensibility
pollution to taste
Procedure:
Begin by removing the property and sovereignty rights attached to fresh water. Set these aside under several layers of militarism, adding impossible conditions and ripe racism and beating vigorously, until almost no impurities remain.
Whenever fresh pollution is available, it can be carefully inserted into fresh water. Adding a final pinch of corporate capitalist sensibility makes the stew a little easier on the stomach.
Serve poop soup the way old Uncle Jabo would: cold, with plenty of martyr sauce, or your favorite wars d'oeuvres.
And would that the righteous zionist leadership were to offer Uncle Jabo's concoction at no charge for the hungry in its soup cantons, to make life a little easier on the poor former occupants of the Biblically all.
But the poop soup business ain't what it used to be.
That's why according to the Palestine-Israel Journal of Politics, Economics, and Culture, "Israelis pay $0.40 per cm for domestic water and only $0.16 per cm for agricultural water; whereas, Palestinians pay a standard rate of $1.20 for [poop soup]" (as of 1998).
link to pij.org
Lovely business, zionism.
All cleared up by recognition and establishment of diplomatic relations with Israel.
Yup. Just sign on the dotted line, and all will be fine.
It's rational and national. LOL!
What heals is the question?
You can LOL all you want, but change is not constructed by either form of ridicule.
Okay, you want a serious reply? Diplomatic relations represent the endpoint of a reconciliation process, not the start of it.
Israel's demand for recognition — particularly with the loaded formula "as a Jewish state," which would vitiate Palestinian claims such as right of return — is intended as an obstacle to a peace settlement, not as a serious offer.
And I'm certain you know that.
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Right Jim. thats what i've been saying, elsewhere. it's over. the whole damn thing is over. i now believe i understand. but no one will listen. i guess it seems grandious to say you understand. suspect ive been doing what martillo used to do. in the euphorea of understanding i expect that all i have to to is put it out there and then they will understand. so i coach it in a form that is poetic and amusing to me. which goes over like a lead balloon.
how dare he claim he understands! and look at the crazy way he writes. what a lunatic! dont read it or i might go crazy too. look at him cackling like a hyena! this is serious. all that religious bullshit. give me a break. What a moron! a shame and a disgrace. he makes a fool of himself because he craves attention.
well let me try it here as well just for the hell of it. sorry.
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It seems we are in the final stages of the Kali Yuga, when everything comes apart. We are entering the regime of exponential decay, when 'the cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples … shall dissolve … and melt into thin air'. For 'We are such stuff as dreams are made on', and the old dream is just about done, and a new one is getting ready.
Clearly the era of market capitalism is done for, since it depends on economic growth, and we have finally reached the limits of growth. But even beyond that, the reductive materialist view of the person as a productive unit has reached its absurd limit, plunging us into an ontological crisis. The culmination of our rationalist philosopy has cut us off from the roots of our animal nature, and we are beyond any basis for our values, directionless, radically inauthentic.
So what seems to need to happen in our culture, and what is in fact happening, is a process of return to Eden, to the pre-civilized state, before the Fall. Before social power structures were organized as multiply layered hierarchies. Before religion was reorganized in the image of the bureaucratic State, and its primary function became to support the State. Before the imposition of the superego as the tree of knowledge of good and evil, before morality was conceived of as a legal code. What we need is not the creation of the New Human, but the retrieval of the old one.
If I had to give this movement a name I would call it neoshamanism.
I tend to think it is inevitable. But the challenge is how to usher it in with a minimum of uncontrolled population collapse.
Our government is so utterly dysfuctional that I am very skeptical that it can do much more than refrain from harm. Maybe the proper fuction of politics as we know it is to dissolve itself. Or maybe not. The government can contribute by refraining from harm. Imagine that.
"It is a false assertion to state that the flow of oil is stopped by anything that Israel does in the region."
Ironic. It's a false assertion to state that the flow of blood on American soil is stopped by anything that Israel does in the region, as well.
I always enjoyed lunch at Windows on the World.
The intention to recognize is the staring point.
Why has Saudi Arabia not recognized Israel? It has no conflict of its own with Israel, UAE, Kuwait, Iraq?
The Walt/Mearsheimer thesis is that military support of Israel conflicts with the interests of the US.
I differ.
The only manner that it could conflict is in the urge to pander to extremists. There is NO VALID basis to consider that oil is less available to the US because of Israel, or any significant relationship with Saudi Arabia, UAE, Iraq, Kuwait, etc.
It IS in the US interest to keep the relations that Israel has with US individuals, companies, states continuing confidently.
Phil's loose tongue "Do we give them baseball bats too?" is only ridicule.
A cheap approach, that solves nothing except generate animosity.
Watch for the news of "Palestinians stage a fake propaganda event and sell it to the stupid BBC".
I called it here first.
Right, Witty. Phil's the one generating animosity here, not 100 years of zionist colonialism.
I hear Barack's "undivided Jerusalem" went down really well with the natives.
Too bad Phil here can't stop stoking the animosity.
Say have you ever asked around in your shul why Palestinians gotta pay up to 10x the Israeli price for water that's mostly residing in aquifers underneath their supposed future state? Not that that sorta thing generates animosity…
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well undivided jerusalem capital of jewish state is bad enough but not enough to make me bust a gut the way i did. i read that he said there is no way whatsoever that iran will build a bomb on my watch and we will do WHATEVER NECESSARY to ensure it does not happen. could this have been disinformation? the whole thread at truthdig was absolutely SEETHING. could this have been in fact a liedig party? but you would think someone wd call them on it.
The question was of Walt/Mearsheimer's thesis.
Is it accurate, or is it full of it, or something in between?
If it is in the US interest to have close relations with Israel, and to support Israel militarily, then the Walt/Mearsheimer thesis is less than a force of nature, barely credible.
I don't believe that it is right to encourage settlers to wield baseball bats in any way, but Phil's headline "Did we give them the baseball bats too?" is a little hot.
To equate the presence and relevance of the state of Israel with the idiocy of some of the settlers, is to use a straw dog.
So who is policing the settlers?
The state of Israel is policing the Palestinians on behalf of the settlers.
The settlers are an outpost of Israeli colonialism. Hand and glove.
And Richard, this whining about recognition of the state of Israel?
what are its borders? which Israel?
The UN's 1947? (time to hand back all of Jerusaliem). 1949? 1967? the settlements? the land over which the Israeli military apparatus presides?
All this prattle about recognition of Israel is part of the endemic dishonesty associated with the Zionist cause.
Recognition of Israel by its victims if course a recognition by those victims that they will be subject in perpetuity to victimisation.
Really Richard, where did you learn your moral code?
" my take on this is that we have been so trained by political correctness that any hint of jews/israelis having a nefarious agenda is automatically deleted from the mind. this is automatic and complete. i honestly don't know what it will take to change this. naturally this rule doesn't apply when one speaks of say, the chinese. also i notice, one cannot have a rational conversation about immigration. if you have misgivings about the numbers of immigrants you are a racist,automatically."
I agree about opinions on Israel and immigration. I wonder why zionism and immigration/multiculturalism are two subjects that are off limits in the U.S., no matter how much damage is caused, or how many laws are broken in their support? Could the same people support each situation? If so, who and why?
Israel is attempting to control all natural water supplies for itself and provide desalination plants for the Palestinians which of course they could bomb or withhold parts or in some other way make other human beings suffer for their strategic aims.