Memo to Obama: Sarkozy is upstaging US leaders as a moral actor

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1. anonn says:

   January 7, 2009 at 11:12 am

   US & Israel myopia: Israel Rules Rule
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2. Jim Haygood says:

   January 7, 2009 at 11:16 am

   Many have doubts about Sarkozy's neocon tendencies, and still do. But he unquestionably has shown leadership in the Gaza crisis.

   By contrast, the mighty but pitiful Anglo-American alliance has its head so far up Israel's ass that it can't see its way out of a paper bag. Tony Blair will have to cut short his feckless tete-a-tetes with the Israeli alliance to accept an award from George Bush next Tuesday.

   In other non-news …

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3. S Kneedler says:

   January 7, 2009 at 11:28 am

   Saree Makdisi eloquently discusses the unimaginable heartlessness of Zionism in today's Counterpunch. Many other heart-rending articles appear there and at antiwar.com today.

   These are terrible timess, and, yes, Phil's right: we're all being tested.

   'Israel’s disregard for Palestinian life in Gaza today is, in short, a direct extension of its disregard for Palestinian life since 1948, and what is happening in Gaza today is the continuation of what happened six decades ago. Eighty percent of the people crammed into Gaza’s hovels and shanties are refugees or the descendants of refugees that armed Zionist gangs, which eventually coalesced into the infant Israeli army, terrorized from their homes elsewhere in southwestern Palestine in 1948. They have been herded, penned, and slaughtered by a remorseless power that clearly regards them as subhuman. If you think I’m stretching the point, I’m not. Listen to the words of Professor Arnon Sofer, the government consultant who did so much to help plan the isolation and imprisonment of Gaza, in a interview with the Jerusalem Post in 2004:

   “When 2.5 million people live in a closed-off Gaza, it’s going to be a human catastrophe,” Sofer predicted. “Those people will become EVEN BIGGER ANIMALS THAN THEY ARE TODAY, with the aid of an insane fundamentalist Islam.

   The pressure on the border is going to be awful. It’s going to be a terrible war. So, if we want to remain alive, we will have to KILL AND KILL AND KILL. All day, every day.”

   Sofer admitted only one worry with all the killing, which will, he says, be the necessary outcome of a policy that he himself helped to invent. “The only thing that concerns me,” he says, “is how to ensure that the boys and men who are going to have to do the killing will be able to return home to their families and be NORMAL human beings.”

   [SK'S CAPS]

   Meticulously and clinically thought through even before the first rocket from Gaza claimed a life inside Israel, the slaughter in Gaza today has nothing to do with rockets or with Hamas. As Sofer himself explains, it is the purest and most distilled expression of Zionist ideology. “Unilateral separation doesn’t guarantee ‘peace,’” Sofer says in that same interview; “it guarantees a Zionist-Jewish state with an overwhelming majority of Jews.”

   And that—taken right from the horse’s mouth—is what the slaughter of innocents in Gaza is fundamentally about: the people being killed today are the ones for whom there is no room in the Zionist vision of the state. They are regarded as an excess population. Not even Malthus thought that a redundant population should just be lined up and shot, or bombed into the ground. But, clearly, times have changed since 1798.

   This inhuman madness will end only with the end of the violent ideology that spawned it—when those who are committed to the project of creating and maintaining a religiously and ethnically exclusivist state in what has always been a culturally and religiously heterogeneous land finally relent and accept the inevitable: that they have failed.

   Saree Makdisi is a professor of English and comparative literature at UCLA and the author of Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation.

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4. S Kneedler says:

   January 7, 2009 at 11:35 am

   Here's another great expose on anti-Palestinian and Pro-Israeli press bias:

   The Trauma Vortex: Israel's Monopoly on Psychological Suffering

   http://www.counterpunch.org/fernandez01072009.html

   And, yes, Anonn, Kamiya's article in Salon today is superb; Anti-war.com calls it "Blinded to Israel's Faults."

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5. S Kneedler says:

   January 7, 2009 at 11:54 am

   Robert Scheer, Why Do So Few Speak Up for Gaza?
   1. decries the Western media's acceptance of being barred from Gaza

   2. criticizes the US indifference to Palestinian suffering

   3.debunks the ridiculously exaggerated existential crises Israel says it always faces

   4. exposes the hypocrisy of refusing to negotiate with Hamas, when so many current Israeli politicians Have been terrorists.

   5. wonders when we'll again have leaders like Einstein, who refuse to deal with fascists.

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6. S Kneedler says:

   January 7, 2009 at 1:27 pm

   Phillipe Sands is now on Terry Gross's NPR Fresh Air discussing the possibility that US leaders face the possibility of war crimes investigations:
   the usual Zionists and then the sadists:

   Addington, Feith, Wolfowitz, Yoo–less likelihood for Cheney, Sands says.

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7. Father Ted says:

   January 7, 2009 at 3:33 pm

   “Unilateral separation doesn’t guarantee ‘peace,’” Sofer says in that same interview; “it guarantees a Zionist-Jewish state with an overwhelming majority of Jews.”

   The Arab peace initiative, which gives Israel an effective veto over the right of return, also guarantees a Zionist-Jewish state with an overwhelming majority of Jews. It also offers regional normalization.

   I know it would mean settling for the 1967 borders instead of Eretz Israel, but wouldn't that be a better strategy for preserving a Jewish super-majority than just ghettoizing and killing more and more Arabs and Muslims? Sooner rather than later, whether Israel wills it or not, Iran and its leading Arab regional rivals will be sporting nukes. And then having no policy except ever-escalating violence won't look smart at all.

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