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click link to see last 100 comments- Samantha Power’s character reference likens Palestinians to Nazis, deserving defeat (4)
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The War of Ideas in the Middle East
Hey Annie what do you think of this?
link to youtube.com
If Obama defeated the Lobby, why did Hagel capitulate afterwards?
As an ex-Christian I feel like I understand this mindset. Lots of Christians make unsubstantiated claims about Christianity being the only religion with a progressive value system. Some have the nerve (or lack of perspective, I suppose) to say no other religion or moral code has anything like the Ten Commandments (which are actually Jewish but hey, don't expect some people to think too deeply). Or that no one treated women like anything but dirt before Jesus came along. Every religious group probably thinks the same way. That's why I appreciate the Baha'i, who acknowledge every religion, at least.
Illinois isn't a swing state - but how can we call this a democracy??
I'm voting for Jill Stein.
And, talk about trivializing the Holocaust!
I was disappointed when "Fahrenheit 9/11" didn't mention Israel at all. I guess this is a start.
You're harsh, BIC. I appreciate how passionate you are, but black folks have had their own struggles to worry about all these years and despite having a black president, racism is still rampant. Have Arabs stood up for African Americans? As a group, not so much, AFAIK, so naturally it was going to take them a while to stand up for us. And with the lies flying around - the skewed coverage of the U.S. media and fake quotes from MLK, for example, as well as the marginalization of Islam (and therefore folks like Malcolm X) it was hard for people to know what to believe. The great thing about the Internet is the knowledge now available to people almost anywhere in the world.
A friend of mine says her 13-year-old twins have spent over a month studying the Holocaust in one of their classes. Back when I was in school they didn't say a whole lot about it ...
Annie and American,
Zionist Jews might well be correct in linking Thanksgiving to their theological ideas: link to miltonbinning.info
"In 1637, over 700 Pequot men, females and kids gathered for their Green Corn Festival. In the predawn morning, they have been surrounded by Dutch and English mercenaries who ordered them to come outside. These who obeyed have been shot or clubbed to death even though ladies and youngsters huddled inside the longhouse and had been burned alive. The next day the governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony declared this travesty 'A Day of Thanksgiving' given that helpless individuals were murdered."
Thanks Walid. And dumvitaestspesest, I'll give you an even shorter version: the Israelites (who were actually Canaanites who wandered away from one place and set up shop in another) didn't go around killing and conquering anyone, and God didn't promise them anything. The books about David and Solomon were written a couple of centuries after their reign and is mostly propaganda for the then-ruler Josiah (David's descendant). They elaborate even more on that in another book, David and Solomon. Using archeological evidence all over the area, including evidence unearthed by Israeli archeologists, they determined that a lot of the battles and stories in the OT either didn't happen or happened, but involving different players, in more nuanced situations. IOW anyone who uses the Bible as proof that Palestine "belongs" to any one religion, or that God favors any one group of people over the others, are the same people who object to actual science being taught in schools instead of myths written by exiled Jews in Babylon thousands of years ago and their views collapse under any scrutiny.
To gain an insight into the God of the Old Testament, I recommend the book The Bible Unearthed by Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman.
That there was never a Palestine implied by the pro-Israeli speaker. There was never a legal entity Palestine, but there clearly is now a Palestinian people.
If anyone is in the Chicagoland area, you might want to attend the WSFPC educational forum this coming Tuesday.
link to faithpeace.org
I don't think it's completely absent, cause we got folks like you and Phil speaking up. Let me tell you what helped me, personally. It's no secret racism is still alive and well in the US. I remember attending a discussion on race relations on MLK day one year (2000 or 2001 I believe). The white people in the room were all like, "I love everybody and think we can get along." The black people in the room were for the most part angry and resentful. I thought to myself, why are they so angry? What would it take to mollify them?
Now before 9/11 I was no stranger to anti-Arab sentiment but afterwards? Oh-ho, I saw it in spades. Hell if I wasn't a light-skinned Christian I would have been on the receiving end of it more than I already was, and I know what I've experienced is not one-tenth what black Americans experience on a daily basis - but it was enough to wake ME up. I realized what had been in front of my face all these years, but I was too self-absorbed or not astute enough to notice it. It caused me to re-evaluate everything in my life, including my faith - which turned out for the better because I was shaken out of my complacent views about the Bible being literal or inerrant, for one thing, or about Christianity being better than Islam for another.
If I may go back to what Teta said: Wake me when US protesters demand that their government apologize to, and make reparations to, the millions of people that the US has displaced, and when US protesters demand that their government STOP killing people and stealing from them, and lying about it being a “democratization” project. Until that happens, OWS has NO moral leg to stand on.
Maybe the problem is ignorance. Well-meaning people who have no idea what's going on in the world. Joining activist circles really helped me a lot. Now I don't think cheap TVs and cell phones are the greatest thing since sliced bread anymore because I know of the hidden costs behind it - the ones Americans don't pay for, the ones that destroy other countries. Of course an individual has to have a teachable spirit in order for us to reach him but it just seems to me that ignorance is the biggest culprit, and like I said, sometimes you need to be shaken out of your ignorance. Maybe we need Jane Elliot-type training to help them, for starters.
Time and again, Israeli Jews who called themselves leftists and who participated in such programs came away with the sense that though Arabs were human beings, as a national group (Whether in the occupied West Bank, Gaza or in Israel) they posed a security and an ideological threat to Israel.
What would it take to really wake them up? You have to be shaken to your core before you see things in a broader spectrum - that's what it took for me, anyway. In almost no way do I see the world the same way I saw it ten years ago.
They kill 1000 Palestinians for every one Israeli, so it's only fair they should exchange 1000 Palestinian prisoners for one Israeli. It's called being consistent. :-)
A pseudonym would only protect your identity from other everyday surfers like us - and even then I think it's pretty easy to find any of our real names. So Phil and Adam are not only brave, they're smart.
That explains a lot - and its terrifying. People who brag about Israel inventing Intel ought to listen to this - but anyone stupid/awful enough to side with Israel would only dismiss it.
Guys, just fyi, the Zionist fundamentalists go all the way to the top. I heard about some peace activists who are being harassed by the FBI for visiting Palestinian territory:
link to ampalestine.org
The FBI is watching each and every one of us right now, believe me. We're all on file. A lady at an activist meeting I went to last night was talking about how her daughter-in-law travels to Mexico for months at a time, but as long as she comes back to the U.S. at least once a year, she gets to keep her green card. Well she was passing through the Canadian border and they hassled her about not staying in the U.S. enough, and how her green card should be revoked - the young man scanned her passport and told her, "I know everything about your life." It pulled up her dead husband's occupation, the address she uses in the U.S. (her stepfather's, and they said they could arrest him for that), her friends in the Chicago area, where she went to school, EVERYTHING. Maybe this is old news to some of you but these two stories freaked me the hell out when I heard about them last night. Which of course is what the government WANTS to do.
Charon, do you have any links regarding the Mossad agent being arrested and anything else regarding Copts and Muslims in Egypt?
I thought Helen Thomas said Israel should get out of Palestine, not the Jews.
Some commentors have written articles for Mondoweiss - I think you Walid would be a valuable contributor, especially as you know better than anyone here what's going on in Bahrain and Syria.
About the March referendum - I was told that so many Egyptians voted for it because they've been trained to vote "yes" on everything. People don't get used to democracy in a month, and democracy doesn't properly work without an informed electorate. I guess I really want to believe the best. What will happen to my family? And why are so many Muslims hostile to Christianity? If they think America represents Christianity that means they never bothered to get to know their own neighbors - but I guess you could say the same about Islamophobia here in the States. Yet there are people here who fight against that too, even if a lot of Muslims still get harassed on a daily basis ... I don't know ... it's disheartening to say the least.
Ah Walid, must you be such a pessimist? For the record I've never placed high hopes on the military - I think another commenter under another entry said, correctly, that Mubarak was only the face of the NDP and the military is the body. They're still attacking protesters and jailing dissidents so I know nothing has changed, as you noted when discussing the fake border opening at Rafah. But getting Mubarak out was still an accomplishment, and Egyptians can do more, though it's going to still be a bloody and uphill battle.
As for the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafists - do they really represent that many Egyptians? I hope many people recall that the Ikhwan were initially against the protests and only joined later when the movement really gained momentum. And I'm reading a lot of accounts of Muslims saying they don't want the Copts to leave Egypt. I think things will improve.
Aw Phil. Don't be so hard on yourself. A lot of us wanted to believe it was true. It just demonstrates that you really care about human rights and wish to see positive developments in Arab countries. These things can make us overly emotional too, especially when we're getting disinformation and biased speculation all around.
When the revolution first started in Egypt, I pooh-poohed the older first generation American Copts who clung to Mubarak and said no good will come of this (mind you these are people who have not lived in Egypt for decades). Then afterwards, with the increased attacks on churches, I felt the same anger and betrayal as you do right now. I've come to realize that 1) Mubarak helped foment these sectarian tensions so it's not like the people who weren't supporting the revolution were "right," 2) the military is still in control of Egypt so things haven't really changed, which means this isn't the Islamophobic nightmare the rightwingers said it would be with the Muslim Brotherhood eradicating Christianity from Egypt, and that these attacks are the result of widespread ignorance and scapegoating to distract people from their real problems and 3) most Egyptians don't approve of this - the ones who don't speak out are guilty of the same apathy Americans exhibit when you try to rally them against the wars or the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.
The fact is there are still a lot of prejudices, a lot of work still needs to be done, and we're not going to see any huge gay pride parades in the streets of Cairo or Damascus anytime soon, but we should stand steadfast in our support for gay Arabs and seek to educate those who would persecute them, while still standing up for their rights too. So take it easy and realize this doesn't reflect badly on you.
Like I said, I think they now realize that they didn't just kill any old infidel, and now there's going to be a backlash - that's why they won't take credit. Of course I don't know this for sure, I'm just speculating, but it's not farfetched to believe they'd do something like this.
All I know of the Salafis is that since the police went AWOL in Egypt they've been going around killing Christians with impunity. I think they just hate anyone who's not Muslim, except this time around they're realizing they killed the wrong person. If it was them I hope, in the very least, that their movement is entirely discredited throughout the Arab world.
The Salafis are murderous thugs as far as I can tell and I wouldn't put it past them to kill this young man. People like that are not allies to the Palestinians or anyone looking for freedom or justice.
Just chiming in to say that I don't think this POV should be so readily discounted. Sometimes I fear that this "tail wags the dog" mentality is a bit too single-focused. The U.S. is the infinitely more powerful country, and Israel could not exist without us. So how can they be controlling us? Israel must be doing what America wants it to do. It may be a bit harder to grasp the notion that free-market capitalism is behind all of our attacks, from Iraq to Afghanistan to Palestine to Venezuela to Haiti to the working class here at home, but it deserves to be explored.
Oops, you did. Sorry. ::blush::
Did anybody see this?
link to cbsnews.com
The ONE thing we wish didn't work and it DOES. Why did Egypt bother to fight for its independence if it was just going to end up being owned by the United States anyway?
Another typical day in an Egyptian institution. I call it "the country where nothing works."
I posted this video on LJ and got one comment.
Not that I'm one to belabor a point - OK I *am* one to belabor a point. I apologize, this might not have been the appropriate place to post my rant, but I needed to vent. Everytime I try to write something about Palestine on LJ I get shot down - my friends don't support me - and then I read Zio-friend's blog and his wanna-be Jewish-converting girlfriend and it really makes me physically sick. During Cast Lead these two people said disgusting things on Facebook and whenever I objected they ganged up on me. I can't link to the offending blog cause this guy is my so-called friend and it's bad netiquette and whatever I do to him he can do back to me, but I don't know, I needed to share with someone. I went ahead and linked to this video and used stronger language than I normally do - just watch - the guy who posted the "disgusting" video will come after me in the comments section. His Indian-loving Palestinian-hating wanna-be gf won't comment because she doesn't read my journal any more but HE'LL say something, just you watch.
Avi, I don't know who slagbom or abam are.
You guys managed to simultaneously hurt my feelings and make me feel better at the same time. But you're right, that blog probably isn't worth my time or hypertension. What bothered me is the person posting was my friend, and commenter number two was a former friend who's a big PEP and her defense of American Indians and simultaneous dismissal of Palestinians really bothered me. She dumped me because I opposed the genocide of Palestinians.
I wondered why Palestinians would stage such a crazy song - it makes sense now.
Hey guys, this response to a "friend's" blog post raised my blood pressure, but I can't respond there because too many Zio-bots will be ganging up against me. These people make Witty, WJ et al look progressive. If anyone wants the target practice, please snark on this and make me feel better:
Original post entitled "Disgusting Palestinian Child Abuse"
link to youtube.com;
Comment #1:
There's American indians haven't signed the treaty.
Lakota, Apache, Nez Perce.
Open season on white folks with them: guys I've gotten on with have told me it was OK to steal from a white person, abuse a white woman sexually, kill one if you could get away with it.
War's been over more than a hundred years.
They don't care.
Response from commenter #2:
Truly amazes me how myopic and disconnected from reality people are when they ignore just how disgusting and wrong it is to teach kids that violence of this sort is not just okay, but ordained by their higher power. This is TOTALLY child abuse, no different from teaching your kids that beating up mommy or selling drugs or shooting people in your hood when you have a beef is okay. If I saw someone doing this while I was on the clock, I'd have to call child protective and wouldn't hesitate in doing it. It's such out of control cult-like behavior in Gaza that the only things I can think of to compare it to are Scientology and Jonestown.
Oh, and a p.s., only because it's been brought up. A close friend of mine is Lakota - he would never rape a woman or do anything of that sort, but he does carry a blade legally and will use it if you threaten him or anyone else -- including white people, including if you're about to rape a woman. Really great to stereotype a whole people based on what a few assholes say. That aside, the war between the US government and the indigenous of this land never ended, not when the FBI comes onto the rez to harass people and BIA promises and rules are violated by our government over and over. But regardless, comparing the situation among the indigenous of the United States to the conflict between Israel and Gaza/West Bank is apples and oranges. Europeans did steal the land from the Lakota, Iroquois, Navajo, etc. Israel never stole ANYTHING from anyone else.
Can't figure out which is more dangerous... teaching children that mass murder is blessed and condoned by their higher power, especially in the name of bigotry, or people being too full of it and lazy to read a fucking history book before shooting their fool mouths off.
You're a brave man, PG.
Yeah - Poland, Germany, Russia, America ...
Amreeka, zift!
BTW, thanks to the readers here who offered their support. It's nice to be able to vent and not be judged for it. :-)
This happened around 2002 or 2003. I don't know what she was thinking, maybe she thought I didn't grow up in the U.S. or something. She said, "You heard about it?" and I said I learned it in school, if nowhere else. She said, "Your school taught about the Holocaust?" and I said, "Yes, and about WWII." At that point I think she may have asked me where I went to school and I told her, the public schools in the area. She did know I'm of Arab descent, because I told her I was really pissed about the racism on the news. It was even worse then than it is now. And the two of us argued a lot about the war in Iraq and when she brought up that they "threatened" Israel (does that sound familiar?) I really went off. And the thing is that's not an isolated incident. How many people have I met at the grocery store, or wherever, and tried to be nice to, and they were so nasty to me and I didn't understand why, and then I'd learn sometime during the course of our interaction that the person is Jewish and went on a damn birthright trip and they assumed I-don't-know-what about me, and were surprised I wasn't Attila the Hun or whatever. I already have to take anti-anxiety meds and as a result of these encounters I'm a little bit afraid to talk to a person if I know he's Jewish, cause I'm afraid of what he'll think of me. Honestly sometimes I'd give anything to be someone else.
When a people are wronged, for some reason, theirs is the last opinion that counts. Being an Arab-American myself, I find I can talk about any injustice and at least have my basic objections acknowledged, to some extent. But even among fellow progressives, if I say anything about Israel, people get all uncomfortable and I always wonder in my head if they think I'm an anti-Semite. Hell, I often feel I have to apologize for being of Arab descent and I have to hurry and reassure listeners that I'm not a Holocaust denier who hates synagogues or any garbage like that. I remember having a casual conversation with someone and she mentioned Corrie Ten Bloom's The Hiding Place, an account of how her family hid Jews from Nazis in Holland and her own ordeal in the concentration camps. I expressed interest in reading the book and this lady I was talking to said, very cautiously, "You know about the Holocaust?" I asked her if she thought I've been living under a cave for 30 years. I didn't put two and two together until later. I've had too many experiences like that. Btw I didn't seek out my Arab-American identity nor do I really embrace it - I don't speak Arabic and I'm much more American than Arab - but because of my facial features, my hair, my name, etc, it follows me everywhere I go. So, just so you know, if you're not hearing much from Arab-Americans, then yes, it's cause we're muzzled by a brainwashed and clueless society.
Of course I have. It's just that I can't understand how one lobby could screw America up so bad. Do they really have more money than anyone else? Of course what potsherd said is right, the government will sell out the American PEOPLE - but will it sell out the American EMPIRE? If Israel was detrimental to the empire - and obviously, as Keith says, the empire will soon go kaput because it's completely unsustainable - wouldn't we throw that weight off our shoulders? In reality the U.S. and Israel behave the same in so many respects - in fact their war on the Palestinians has a lot in common with our wars in Korea, Vietnam, Kosovo, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, not to mention the CIA's undercover ventures south of the border and elsewhere. The U.S. may be annoyed with how blatant Israel's atrocities have become - Netanyahu didn't get the memo that Bush is no longer in the White House and now you have to pretend to be more civilized while you murder and plunder various populations - but I don't believe our government has any MORAL objection to anything Israel does.
I can't say I understand the relationship between the U.S. and Israel, but I do believe that if Israel were doing something we didn't want them to do, we wouldn't let them. Somehow the U.S. benefits from Israel's actions - otherwise there really is no plausible explanation for our government's attitude.
A grim assessment from Ray Hanania