Commenter Profile

Total number of comments: 13 (since 2010-05-14 12:18:26)

unverified__a41li1d3

Mondoweiss.net supporter

64 year old secular man of Jewish ancestry

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  • Two Israelis try to help Brooklyn's Jews cross the Red Sea
    • housedoc September 17, 2011 at 2:42 pm

      Was this event video recorded? If so, would someone please post the link or let us know where we can get a copy of the recording.
      Thanks,
      Jonathan House

  • Israel planning to steal more land from Palestinians
    • housedoc May 26, 2011 at 10:54 am

      Good piece in Haaretz by Gideon Levy

      Netanyahu's speech to Congress shows America will buy anything
      The man who explicitly said he would do his level best to destroy the Oslo Accords suddenly says he's in favor of peace with the Palestinians.

      link to haaretz.com

  • A question for our pro-Israel visitors . . .
    • housedoc April 22, 2011 at 12:07 pm with 37 replies

      GuiltyFeat,
      I am glad that you have added you opinions to this thread. I would like to comment in a way which does 'isolate' one aspect of what you have written, namely the notion of "speaking to an Israeli" and "Here we argue over almost everything. Everyone is on one side or the other. Likud or Labour. Racist or not racist. War or no war. Religious or secular. Ashkenaz or Sephard. Schnitzel or schwarma. ". It seems that you are speaking of Jewish Israelis. Yet 20% of Israelis are not Jewish in any sense of the word but are Arab and Chistian or Muslim or secular. There are plenty of examples of violence even to point of killing committed by Israelis against Israelis who are Arabs.
      I am sure you are aware of this, but your (seeming) automatic equation of Israeli with Jewish Israeli seems to be a blind spot which might affect your predictions about what "Israelis" might be willing to do to each other.
      What do you think?
      Sincerely,
      Jonathan House, MD

  • Realist site says Israel lobby has cooked the Israeli goose, and American Jews will step away
    • housedoc March 25, 2011 at 11:56 am with 2 replies

      HRK: I am curious. You say who you are not - "I’m not Jewish and I can’t say that studying the Jews has been my issue for decades or anything,..."

      Who are you? and where, geographically, are you emailing from?

  • Israeli Foreign Ministry sent 'spy' to report on Gideon Levy speech in Dublin
    • housedoc March 25, 2011 at 8:30 am

      Particularly good post by David Habakkuk on Col. Pat Lang's blog

      link to turcopolier.typepad.com

      Entitled "A Poisoned Chalice" it begins with these two paragraphs and is well worth a read.
      "The proposals that Israel should be admitted to NATO, discussed by Clifford Kiracofe in a post not long ago, provide yet another illustration of the inability of so many of that country's most committed supporters, both in United States and elsewhere in the West, to grasp the suicidal nature of the course they have encouraged it to follow.

      At a time when the waves of unrest sweeping the Arab world are calling fundamentally into question the ability of the United States to persuade governments in crucial countries – above all Egypt – to act in ways which Israel wants, support for that country in some of the traditionally most loyal allies of the US has been collapsing. Certainly, the Israeli government's presentation of its policies towards the Palestinians – and also Lebanon and Iran – as the unavoidable defensive responses of a beleaguered outpost of Western civilisation, confronted by that civilisation's implacable Arab and Muslim enemies, retains powerful traction, particularly among neoconservatives, in Europe as in the United States."

      David Habakkuk lives in London, and is a former television current affairs producer. After studying economics and history at Cambridge, he lived in Mexico, and then worked on the Liverpool Daily Post newspaper and the Financial Times. Subsequently he produced programmes for London Weekend Television and the BBC, and as an independent television producer. Among his editors at London Weekend was Greg Dyke, later forced to resign as BBC Director-General in the wake of Lord Hutton’s report on the David Kelly affair – one of the series of official reports which seem to betray a bewildering insouciance about the state of British intelligence. Among his researchers was Peter Mandelson, who later taught the Labour Party spindoctoring, twice lost his Cabinet position due to sailing too close to the wind, but has survived to become a European commissioner. He lost faith in the neocons’ intelligence abilities when making programmes on Gorbachev’s ‘new thinking’ – as they continued to insist that it was a
      deception operation, long after it was clear that this was patently not a tenable interpretation of the facts. His father worked, at the beginning of World War II, on codebreaking at Bletchley Park – a fact of which when growing up he was quite unaware.

  • Brutalized
    • housedoc January 8, 2011 at 1:15 pm

      Dear eee,

      Thank you for replying, but you haven't addressed my question. What, for you, would be a "mitigating circumstance"?

      Let me answer your question. A member of the NYC Police (or a state trooper) would be punished for such behavior no matter what the "provocation". In my personal experience, these forces are - especially when in groups - well disciplined and do not respond to provocations.

      You say "it is not clear how strongly the man was hit". This seems odd to me. Does it really seem unclear to the the assault was an attempt to injure? Why was he assaulted at all whether you want to call it a "hit" or a "push" or a "head butt"? What about weapons being fired? Your comment seems disingenuous. Not an attempt to understand.

      Finally, the issue here is not about the individual soldier who is not on trial here, or in NY, or as far as we know, in Israel. (That is clearly an irrelevant comment, and again suggests that you are being disingenuous. The issue under discussion is brutalization - whether this clip can/should be understood as evidence of a pattern of brutalization of the civilian population both those under occupation and arab citizens of Israel.

    • housedoc January 7, 2011 at 9:12 pm with 2 replies

      Dear eee,

      The clip is upsetting enough that I felt I could not reply to your comment at first. I have left work and come home. I would like to ask you for an explanation of your comment.

      It would seem to me that no form of "baiting" would justify the soldiers' actions. What is it you imagine at worst? It seems to me that even the most extreme form of "baiting" would not justify such violence against an unarmed person. If the soldier-victim of the "baiter" were an unarmed civilian, this would be awful but he is armed and on duty and accompanied by a whole group of soldiers.

      Indeed, even if the soldier had been hit by a rock or bullet and not merely words, the actions would be dispicable and against the rules that govern the behavior of soldiers and police officers.

      The clip is most troubling in context, it seems increasingly clear that this sort of violence is a routine aspect of the both the occupation and the treatment of Israel's arab citizens. This context is today exemplified by e.g. the IDF breaking to the home of a 65 year old man in the middle of the night and shooting him to death in his bed (see the NYTimes link to nytimes.com

      I repeat, what can you imagine that could possibly justify what is on the clip?

      Jonathan House, M.D.
      NY, NY

  • Would this work? You get to keep all your letters, and it still sounds like a Jewish state--
  • A 91-year-old shepherd, killed alongside 29 of his 30 sheep in Gaza, was called a militant by IDF
    • housedoc November 21, 2010 at 2:02 pm

      PS

      Professor Boyle serves as counsel to Bosnia and Herzegovina and to the Provisional Government of the Palestinian Authority. He also represents two associations of citizens within Bosnia and has been instrumental in developing the indictment against Slobodan Milosevic for committing genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Over his career, he has represented national and international bodies including the Blackfoot Nation (Canada), the Nation of Hawaii, and the Lakota Nation, as well as numerous individual death penalty and human rights cases. He has advised numerous international bodies in the areas of human rights, war crimes and genocide, nuclear policy, and bio-warfare. From 1991-92, Professor Boyle served as Legal Advisor to the Palestinian Delegation to the Middle East Peace Negotiations. He also has served on the Board of Directors of Amnesty International, as well as a consultant to the American Friends Service Committee, and on the Advisory Board for the Council for Responsible Genetics. He drafted the U.S. domestic implementing legislation for the Biological Weapons Convention, known as the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989, that was approved unanimously by both Houses of the U.S. Congress and signed into law by President George H.W. Bush.[2]

    • housedoc November 21, 2010 at 2:00 pm with 2 replies

      off topic

      This excerpt of an interview with Prof. Francis Boyle, Prof. of Intnl Law at U. of Illinois, is featured on Col. Pat Lang's web site and is worth checking out in terms of AIPAC etc dominance in the University.

      Francis Boyle on Hypocrisy in U.S. Academy

      link to vodpod.com

      Francis Anthony Boyle (born 1950) is a professor of international law at the University of Illinois College of Law.[1] Boyle received a J.D. degree magna cum laude and A.M. and Ph.D. degrees in political science from Harvard University. He also practiced tax and international tax with Bingham, Dana & Gould.

  • Slater: rightwing Jewish support for Israel risks anti-Semitic backlash when U.S. wakes up
    • housedoc August 8, 2010 at 6:39 pm

      This Memo to the President from Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) is signed by
      Ann Wright, Col., US Army Reserve (ret.), (29 years); Foreign Service Officer, Department of State (16 years)
      Ray Close, Directorate of Operations, Near East Division, CIA (26 years)
      Phil Giraldi, Directorate of Operations, CIA (20 years)
      Larry Johnson, Directorate of Intelligence, CIA; Department of State, Department of Defense consultant (24 years)
      W. Patrick Lang, Col., USA, Special Forces (ret.); Senior Executive Service: Defense Intelligence Officer for Middle East/South Asia, Director of HUMINT Collection, Defense Intelligence Agency (30 years)
      Ray McGovern, US Army Intelligence Officer, Directorate of Intelligence, CIA (30 years)
      Coleen Rowley, Special Agent and Minneapolis Division Counsel, FBI (24 years)

      begins:
      We write to alert you to the likelihood that Israel will attack Iran as early as this month. This would likely lead to a wider war.

      Israel’s leaders would calculate that once the battle is joined, it will be politically untenable for you to give anything less than unstinting support to Israel, no matter how the war started, and that U.S. troops and weaponry would flow freely. Wider war could eventually result in destruction of the state of Israel.

      This can be stopped, but only if you move quickly to pre-empt an Israeli attack by publicly condemning such a move before it happens. ...

      [Not the most important part of the memo, but in connection with this thread is the following passage toward the end of the memo:]

      Even if the U.S. were to be sucked into a war provoked by Israel, there is absolutely no guarantee that the war would come out well.

      Were the U.S. to suffer significant casualties, and were Americans to become aware that such losses came about because of exaggerated Israeli claims of a nuclear threat from Iran, Israel could lose much of its high standing in the United States.

      There could even be an upsurge in anti-Semitism, as Americans conclude that officials with dual loyalties in Congress and the executive branch threw our troops into a war provoked, on false pretenses, by Likudniks for their own narrow purposes.

      We do not have a sense that major players in Tel Aviv or in Washington are sufficiently sensitive to these critical factors.

      You are in position to prevent this unfortunate, but likely chain reaction. We allow for the possibility that Israeli military action might not lead to a major regional war, but we consider the chances of that much less than even.

  • Jewish group said to prepare boat to go to Gaza
    • housedoc June 5, 2010 at 11:24 am

      Interesting post on a major financial cooperative blog Project Syndicate by Fania Oz-Salzberger; interesting so much for its analysis/position but interesting as to who posted it and where,

      Fania Oz-Salzberger is Professor at Haifa and Monash Universities and the 2009/10 Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Professor for Distinguished Teaching at Princeton University's Center for Human Values.

      link to project-syndicate.org

  • Hillel to DePaul SJP: The Nakba is a 'festivity to to delegitimize and destroy Israel'
    • unverified__a41li1d3 May 14, 2010 at 7:40 am

      link to news.bbc.co.uk
      .
      relevant story on bbc now
      A 14-year-old Palestinian boy has been shot dead in the West Bank.
      Palestinian witnesses and security sources say the teenager was shot by Jewish settlers after rocks were thrown at their car.
      Israeli police are investigating but did not confirm that the boy, named as Ayssar Yasser from the village of Mizra al-Sharqiah, had been shot by settlers.
      The Israeli army confirmed there was a shooting in the area, near Ramallah, the West Bank's administrative capital.

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