Total number of comments: 656 (since 2009-07-31 16:25:09)
LanceThruster
I grew up with the conventional wisdom believing that the Israelis were the "white hats" and that the Palestinians/Arabs/Muslims were the "black hats." After 9/11, I wanted to know more about the conflict in the ME. I came to the realization that the narrative was totally one-sided. I largely credit many outstanding Jewish voices (my close friend Bernie the Attorney for one) for opening my eyes. I see on a daily basis the efforts by Zionists and their stooges to dismiss truth-tellers in the most reprehensible manner, up to and including threats of violence. Truth needs no army of thugs to establish it; only lies need enforcers.
Website: http://lancethruster.blogspot.com
For a group (the religious component of Israel's land grab gang) so concerned with the proper treatment of remains that they have a special group (ZAKA) to ensure respectful handling of the victim's tissue, this same concern never seems to extend to anyone else, at least not with an equal level of attention.
Ms. Vardi - Just wanted to say I was very moved by your actions to put yourself in harm's way for the sake of defending a young boy who was about to be shown the errors of his ways in defying the prevailing narrative.
Thank you for your courage and tenacity, and sharing your first hand account here. Please return often.
I'll use this piece to request a story on Joe Lieberman's recent fact-finding junkets to the Middle East ( a one-man codel). If there's someone who's demonstrated an extreme aversion to facts regarding the "frictions" of the region on an ongoing basis, it's Joe -freaking- Lieberman.
Pitts may be only clueless, but joltin' Joe is willfully ignorant to a degree that establishes that even he knows what bollocks he spouts.
How can we miss you, Joe, if you won't go away?
.
"Tamed" as in killing and running off the wild Ayrabs?
And the welcoming of immigrants (as long as they're Jews) in excess of a million doesn't seem quite so magnanimous when considering that actual native former inhabitants of the region are also welcomed not to return (as long as they're not Jews - even if they have their mothers and/or grandmothers convert )
Speaking of...aren't converts to Judaism deprived of Platinum class Jew status? Too bad, otherwise all the Palestinians could "convert" to exercise their newly acquired right of return. Israel most certainly would never allow that because the newly Juderized would skew the curve on character so much as to render Zionist narrative fabrication mechanism problematic (that is, in fact, unless Zionism is so toxic that the Ziocane spike makes them totally numb to the reality they just arrived from).
As a non-religionist, and indiferrent tribalist ("Yay, America!" when we get things right), I am always amazed and concerned when the fear of not being in lockstep with one's particular group affiliation in even minor ways so fully overrides what I would like to think is the standard application of morality and ethics for most human beings.
Though it's true the wheels of justice turn slowly, I'd like to up the ante on what constitutes "bravery."
link to en.wikipedia.org
Please do, indeed. We need it on a college tour, and as many grade schools as we can get it into and in every Holocaust memorial and museum. Create a mini one like the traveling Vietnam Memorial Wall. Let the Nakba be as common knowledge to Americans and the world as their most cherished days of observance.
The time is definitely now.
Is the phrase "Zionist bully" redundant?
I've seen so much low rent behavior on the interwebs in this regard that none of the real world transgressions surprise me.
As my recall is fairly sketchy you could be correct and that I am mischaracterizing his statements. I just remember seeing him at different times on different programs where the impression I got from him one time was turned around on a later viewing.
Great material, Dickerson.
THX.
Thanks for the concrete examples. That's exactly the type of thing I remember as being somewhat confusing.
Thank you for those thoughtful observations. On reflection, that assessment seems quite plausible.
Scheuer has often been an enigma to me as I've heard him say many things that qualify him as a truth-teller, and others that I felt fall into the category of "Islamo-fascism" demonization.
I regard him like anyone, I guess. I appreciate when they're being truthful and candid, and question their agenda when their position conflicts with the facts as _I_ understand them (granted I'm not expert in anything).
I often don't get to make time for "good" shows (or at least ones that I like).
I at least figure if it has any merits whatsoever, it will be available to me at some point - and even if it doesn't.
I disliked "Haganah" Jane so much I scraped together the few bucks I didn't have to donate to her progressive Democratic opponent, Marcy Winograd (not even my district). Jane drinks deep from the fetid trough.
I am fascinated by this tale and the comments which all deal one way or another with bloodlines, whether being tethered by them, or casting them off to whatever degree of desire or success.
I'm glad that some anachronisms are dying off. The old ways sometime remind me of the marriage restrictions of the British Royal Family.
Harrumpf!
So the difference between being shipped off to the Warsaw Ghetto being viewed as an abomination and a travesty of justice verses a legally executed act of the state is lead time?
IDF relocation slogan -- "Don't go away mad...just go away."
"Catch-22 means people have the right to do to you anything which you cannot prevent them from doing to you." ~ Joesph Heller
It looks very much like the high desert region I moved to a year ago. I know what a hard-scrabble existence it is (and I have access to all the modern comforts). I can't imagine the feeling of dispair to have one's livelihood shattered in such a cruel and callous manner.
Truly sickening.
International law allows for violent force to be used to repel invaders.
The Palestinians have been quite reserved on the whole, and certainly do not deliver death and destruction on the scale of Israel against Palestinian non-combatants.
Frederick - It still represents losing ground as when the narrative was unchallenged, it would have easily been closer to a hundred to one.
The wheels of justice turn so very slowly, but they gain a momentum that ultimately is unstoppable.
Good to find the source that Teddy Roosevelt paraphrased --
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are. ~ Theodore Roosevelt
I like Wesley's total sense of inclusiveness, urgency, and persistence.
I agree with his dig at the closing. Well deserved by the press whores..I mean corps.
And I suppose JK could have used tweets and Elmer Fudd, but it would not have been as topical as BW.
I think Bill Maher had it right when he spoke of fake outrage (though he is pretty much fully in league with Z-team apologetists - he gushed over Bibi and went pretty easy on Michael Oren if I remember correctly).
The IDF "enforcers" reminds me of the goons from "Battelfield Earth."
How many of the Israelis are imprisoned for violent crimes they committed in support of their politics (i.e. lebensraum)?
I love the colorful phrasing.
Citizen...X2
In the great San Francisco earthquake, it was noted the churches toppled, but the bar rooms and cathouses still stood.
OK, I misread the wired piece in that I thought a Sabbath stove setting was to override the auto shut-off. This gets interesting. Would a so-called "dead man's switch" work (keeping the covenant) in that your actions only provide a continuation (or not) of whatever action you sought to "control."
Like I said, as a secularist, it seems pretty Rube Goldberg, the way the fishing line to create an Eruv does. (though the line deal, seems simple enough yet effectively allows the skirting of the rules - or is it allows "keeping" them?).
Citizen, one thing that occurred to me was if it was OK to leave the stove on continuously, would it be OK to set a timer to have the stove come on at a prearranged time during the Sabbath as long as you did the work to set it outside the Sabbath.
A person has not violated the rules. Can an appliance displease Jehovah by its programmed actions?
I have everything I can on timers and motion sensors. Forgive, oh lord, I know not what I doo'd.
TYVM, Citizen. I enjoyed that.
I remember seeing a play by an adjunct professor about her family history. She had a Jewish grandfather who no one would talk about because he abandoned the family after they came over to Ellis Island.
It ended where she was allowed to forgive him because she researched that he had done some act that constituted "contrition" and so she interpreted that as he had asked for forgiveness (she wouldn't have been allowed to per her belief if he had not). She was quite proud of her quest (the historical search *was* interesting), but I felt it showed how her strict adherence to the ritualistic limited her somewhat as a human being. She could choose to forgive based on her own will, not by playing convoluted games to see if she could find doctrinal justification.
True, though it is said that Droit du seigneur (right of the lord) is just apocryphal. You’re correct that many sects, cults, etc., allow the leadership carte blanche in setting themselves beyond the rules everyone else must conform to. Rank has its privileges.
It hurts too much to laugh and I'm too old to cry.
I think it addresses in a sardonic way the "banality of evil." I do not like to ascribe "evil" to another human being, but if by ignorance and/or arrogance you promote injustice so pervasively...the shoe seems to fit.
Silence equals assent.
And arguing *for* injustice in the name of tribal solidarity is convoluted and delusional.
I also think the top down authoritarian structure has a host of flaws. Like a cable comic put it when questioning those who say they require their sacred texts to know how to act ethically,
"I'd like to b4ng my neighbor's wife, but lets see what the good book says first..."
I like it!
Very much enjoyed your observations. Well put. And it's not rejecting justice for them either. It's recognizing that for justice to have any real meaning needs to be truly universal.
An injury to one is an injury to all.
Fascinating anecdote. I saw a PBS program about an Orthodox Jewish pediatric hospital where they rigged the telephones with a peg and hole faceplate so they could dial without violating Sabbath rules (the peg interrupting the light beam was akin to it being OK if a fire in the home went out if it blew out when the door was opened).
I couldn't imagine a more Rube Goldberg setup to get around these sectarian restrictions. I thought it would be easier just to invoke the "It's OK to break the rules if it's to save a life" exemption and just conclude that pretty much everything medical staff do in the long run is to prolong life.
And as far as the assertions of land bought and paid for fair and square; Israeli historian Tom Segev uses declassified Israeli sources to paint an entirely different picture.
See; Looting, Looting, and More Looting - link to palestineremembered.com
To any of those who have wandered over from this tribal installment of "Exceptionalists with Guns," I am not a hater. I truly love communing in this multicultural forum of individuals with the integrity and insight to argue for justice from a humanist universalist perspective.
They are truly "rock stars."
The rest of you pious poseurs...less so.
For any who would consider this site, and the ongoing discourse here "vile,"
I has a sad.
link to 3.bp.blogspot.com
Naiveté and ignorance are certainly part of the destructiveness, but not in the way the speakers imagined.
Couldn't sleep last night and happened to catch "Wars, Lies, and Videotape" on Current TV about Wikileaks and Bradley Manning.
It was uncomfortable to see the Reich Wing spewing heads calling for Manning's head. At issue weren't the war crimes, but Manning revealing them.
Is he still being tortured (i.e. solitary confinement, bare cell, cold exposure, etc.)?
The photo is so universal. My dad is now of Homeric (Simpson) proportions but I remember his photo as a smiling skinny young man in khaki with the US Army Signal Corp (post Korean War era).
"Release the Kraken!"
(aka the 'flood' of misperception and misrepresentation)
On the 1 to 10 creepy scale, this rates an 11.
Could she have said, "I'm not a Jew...I'm Jew-ish."?
"Air France - Fly the Quisling skies!"
"Air France - Vichy do it all for you!"
These are powerful illustrations, Ethan...on par with Joe Sacco's "Palestine" or Art Spiegelman's "Maus."
link to en.wikipedia.org
link to news.harvard.edu
Very astute point.
xD
So a golden-hair Hitler-Jugend clubbing a yarmulke-wearing householder in Jewish-town is an act of barbarism and depravity, but in reverse, brings forth a deep sense of pride.
That is one f#cking magic beanie, baby!
But surely the Hasbarats will point out that not ascribing every manner of atrocity and barbarism carte blanche to those who fought on the German side, regardless of context, details, or truth are de facto Holocaust deniers and worse than Hitler.
Tread lightly, my friend.
What my pal Bernie the Attorney referred to as "The 180 Rule" i.e. accusing the other side of crimes you yourself commit. Straight outta "Mein Kampf."
Read -- I Was Israel's Dupe by TOM HAYDEN
from: link to counterpunch.org
X2
Trust quote above from John Carpenter's "The Thing"
Here's a couple from "the Insider"
Mike Wallace: Do me a favor, will you - spare me, for God's sake, get in the real world, what do you think? I'm going to resign in protest? To force it on the air? The answer's "no". I don't plan to spend the end of my days wandering in the wilderness of National Public Radio. That decision I've already made.
and
Mike Wallace: In the real world, when you get to where I am, there are other considerations.
Lowell Bergman: Like what? Corporate responsibility? What, are we talking celebrity here?
Mike Wallace: I'm not talking celebrity, vanity, CBS. I'm talking about when you're nearer the end of your life than the beginning. Now, what do you think you think about then? The future? In the future I'm going to do this? Become that? What future? No. What you think is "How will I be regarded in the end?" After I'm gone. Now, along the way I suppose I made some minor impact. I did Iran-Gate and the Ayatollah, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Saddam, Sadat, etcetera, etcetera. I showed them thieves in suits. I've spent a lifetime building all that. But history only remembers most what you did last. And should that be fronting a segment that allowed a tobacco giant to crash this network? Does it give someone at my time of life pause? Yeah.
Too much of what passes for "journalism" these days seems more of a case of not biting the hand that feeds them. Imagine if MW (Mike Wallace, not Mondo Weiss) did one of his "gotcha" segements on how the media coddles Israel, and exposed their motivations.
In the docudrama, "The Insider" (about the role of big tobacco killing a story about the manipulation of the addictive compounds in cigarettes), Mr. Wallace did not come off as a principled maverick (that was Pacino's character), but as someone rationalizing how not running the truth was the right thing to do.
MacReady: How you doin', old boy?
Dr. Blair: I don't know who to trust.
MacReady: [swallows, sighs] I know what you mean, Blair. Trust's a tough thing to come by these days. Tell you what - Why don't you just trust in the Lord?
It's like a media class of Sayanim.
Victor Ostrovsky had it right.
link to archive.org
Again, the story Wallace missed was the one Walt & Mearsheimer would so effectively cover years later.