Commenter Profile

Total number of comments: 3289 (since 2010-05-21 23:21:46)

I am a lawyer with several degrees in Classics (Greek and Latin).

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  • Exile and the Prophetic: Notes from a 'marginal Jew'
  • Video: Medea Benjamin interrupts Obama speech on US drone policy
    • lysias May 24, 2013 at 3:59 pm

      Which perhaps makes it significant that Obama said this war (which I think he has yet to name) will have to end sometime.

    • lysias May 24, 2013 at 3:58 pm

      There was also an article on Medea's confrontation of Obama in this morning's Washington Post (on page A6 or so).

    • lysias May 24, 2013 at 3:56 pm

      In her Democracy Now! interview, she said she would have to keep that (how she got in) secret.

    • lysias May 24, 2013 at 3:55 pm

      Amy Goodman did a long interview of Medea Benjamin on Democracy Now! this morning.

  • Jewish philanthropies stay away from org dedicated to Yiddish culture because it doesn't focus on Israel or the Holocaust
    • lysias May 22, 2013 at 5:34 pm with 2 replies

      Isaac Bashevis Singer's Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech of 1978 is worth quoting here:

      The high honor bestowed upon me by the Swedish Academy is also a recognition of the Yiddish language - a language of exile, without a land, without frontiers, not supported by any government, a language which possesses no words for weapons, ammunition, military exercises, war tactics; a language that was despised by both gentiles and emancipated Jews.

      The truth is that what the great religions preached, the Yiddish-speaking people of the ghettos practiced day in and day out. They were the people of The Book in the truest sense of the word. They knew of no greater joy than the study of man and human relations, which they called Torah, Talmud, Mussar, Cabala. The ghetto was not only a place of refuge for a persecuted minority but a great experiment in peace, in self-discipline and in humanism. As such it still exists and refuses to give up in spite of all the brutality that surrounds it. I was brought up among those people. My father's home on Krochmalna Street in Warsaw was a study house, a court of justice, a house of prayer, of storytelling, as well as a place for weddings and Chassidic banquets. As a child I had heard from my older brother and master, I. J. Singer, who later wrote The Brothers Ashkenazi, all the arguments that the rationalists from Spinoza to Max Nordau brought out against religion. I have heard from my father and mother all the answers that faith in God could offer to those who doubt and search for the truth. In our home and in many other homes the eternal questions were more actual than the latest news in the Yiddish newspaper. In spite of all the disenchantments and all my skepticism I believe that the nations can learn much from those Jews, their way of thinking, their way of bringing up children, their finding happiness where others see nothing but misery and humiliation. To me the Yiddish language and the conduct of those who spoke it are identical. One can find in the Yiddish tongue and in the Yiddish spirit expressions of pious joy, lust for life, longing for the Messiah, patience and deep appreciation of human individuality. There is a quiet humor in Yiddish and a gratitude for every day of life, every crumb of success, each encounter of love. The Yiddish mentality is not haughty. It does not take victory for granted. It does not demand and command but it muddles through, sneaks by, smuggles itself amidst the powers of destruction, knowing somewhere that God's plan for Creation is still at the very beginning.

      There are some who call Yiddish a dead language, but so was Hebrew called for two thousand years. It has been revived in our time in a most remarkable, almost miraculous way. Aramaic was certainly a dead language for centuries but then it brought to light the Zohar, a work of mysticism of sublime value. It is a fact that the classics of Yiddish literature are also the classics of the modern Hebrew literature. Yiddish has not yet said its last word. It contains treasures that have not been revealed to the eyes of the world. It was the tongue of martyrs and saints, of dreamers and Cabalists - rich in humor and in memories that mankind may never forget. In a figurative way, Yiddish is the wise and humble language of us all, the idiom of frightened and hopeful Humanity.

      (Emphasis added.)

  • 'Al Jazeera' reposts Massad piece, after censoring it
  • Biden says Jewish 'influence' behind American cultural politics is 'immense... immense'
    • lysias May 22, 2013 at 7:03 pm with 1 replies

      That may be changing. Of the 13 Nobel laureates in physics from 2008 on, four have been East Asian (2 from Japan, 1 an American born in Japan, and 1 from Hong Kong).

    • lysias May 22, 2013 at 6:56 pm

      On Biden, read The Payoff: Why Wall Street Always Wins by former Biden aide (and fellow Irish-American) Jeff Connaughton. With Biden, it's all about advancing his own career.

  • Video: Paterson, NJ raises the Palestinian flag over city hall for Palestinian-American Day
    • lysias May 21, 2013 at 6:50 pm

      Also quite a few Turks in downtown Paterson. I once had delicious pide (pita) in a pide salonu on Main Street.

  • There's been a sea change in US opinion on the conflict
    • lysias May 21, 2013 at 5:59 pm with 1 replies

      The American people also needs to be told how Syrian Christians support Assad, because they fear what would come after, and they saw what happened in Iraq after Sadddam was toppled.

  • Kennedy's insistence on right of return prompted Ben-Gurion to rewrite history: They fled 'of their own free will'
    • lysias May 22, 2013 at 10:02 am

      Mid-1963 was also when the Kennedy administration was successfully negotiating with the USSR the nuclear test ban treaty, and when JFK delivered his address at American University that basically called for an end to the Cold War.

    • lysias May 20, 2013 at 7:03 pm

      Speaking of dates, the reactor at Dimona went critical on Dec. 26, 1963. Interesting date.

    • lysias May 20, 2013 at 6:53 pm

      Retired Army intelligence Major and history professor John Newman makes a strong circumstantial case in the last chapter of the paperback edition of Oswald and the CIA: The Documented Truth About the Unknown Relationship Between the U.S. Government and the Alleged Killer of JFK that the man who orchestrated the JFK assassination was CIA counterintelligence chief James Jesus Angleton .

      Angleton also occupied the Israel desk of the CIA. He was responsible for liaison between the CIA and Israel. It was Israel which gave Angleton the text of Khrushchev's party congress speech of 1956 denouncing Stalin. Revealing that speech was a big feather in Angleton's cap. Angleton, who grew up in Italy, where his father headed a subsidiary of a U.S. corporation, was in the OSS during World War Two, and in the last months of the war was chief of the OSS station in Italy. His close relations with what became Israeli intelligence began during his time in Italy.

      I wouldn't maintain that Israel was the prime mover in the assassination. That was the CIA, possibly acting with the complicity or worse of higher-ups like Lyndon Johnson. But some in Israel could well have been junior partners in the conspiracy. And, as has been said already in this thread, they certainly had reason to welcome JFK's death (as did the CIA, Lyndon Johnson, and many others).

      We'll never know the whole truth about the JFK assassination. But, with time, we're learning more and more about it. Recent books about it that I would highly recommend are Newman's book (but make sure you read the paperback edition), James Douglass's JFK and the Unspeakable, and the five-volume Inside the Assassination Records Review Board: The U.S. Government's Final Attempt to Reconcile the Conflicting Medical Evidence in the Assassination of JFK, by Douglas P. Horne, a retired naval officer and the former Chief Analyst for Military Records of the Assassination Records Review Board, an official board established by Congress that had subpoena powers.

    • lysias May 20, 2013 at 1:02 pm

      The reason Ben-Gurion resigned as prime minister in 1963 was that he knew JFK was sending a letter demanding the right to inspect Dimona, and he didn't want to be the one who received that letter.

      The 50th anniversary of the JFK assassination draws ever nearer.

  • CNN's Tapper lends himself to claustrophobic discussion of unicorn-- Israel's survival as 'a Jewish democracy'
    • lysias May 19, 2013 at 3:10 pm with 1 replies

      The Afrikaners (i.e., a majority of the whites in South Africa) had plenty of tribal identity, and even national myths, like the Voortrekkers.

  • Guatemalan genocide got assist from US, Christian Right, and Israel
    • lysias May 18, 2013 at 3:09 pm

      Gen. Videla, head of the Argentinian junta, just died in jail. His obituary is in today's Washington Post.

  • Barbara Boxer's visa bill for Israel comes under concerted attack
    • lysias May 22, 2013 at 9:58 am

      But note that Schumer (who wants to become majority leader) is not one of the sponsors of this bill. I regard that as significant.

    • lysias May 20, 2013 at 10:54 am with 1 replies

      The place to beat Boxer would be in the Democratic primary. A Democratic Senate candidate is extremely unlikely to lose in California in the general November election.

  • NPR twice celebrates Israeli army-- once as 'rite of passage' for minorities and beacon to US Jews
    • lysias May 17, 2013 at 6:43 pm

      Unfortunately, it's more and more true that Israel, Canada, the UK, and the U.S. do have similar legal systems.

  • Turkish PM raises Mavi Marmara at White House press conf, calls grow for Obama to investigate killing of Furkan Doğan
    • lysias May 17, 2013 at 10:08 am with 2 replies

      I see no article on this press conference in today's Washington Post. (There is a photo of Obama speaking under an umbrella together with a brief explanation that it was taken during an Obama-Erdogan press conference, but there's no article, as far as I can see.)

      Isn't that something, considering that it was at that press conference that Obama commented on his administration's various current scandals? You would think that would make it supremely newsworthy.

  • Washington Post's racism map omits Israel
    • lysias May 16, 2013 at 4:16 pm

      The study appears to have been done by a couple of Swedish free market enthusiasts. And look what countries came out on top!

      This study is a very good example of one of the corollaries of Murphy's Law: Prolonged research tends to confirm your conclusions.

      I bet the study involved no controls for untruthful responses. So what we get is a study that finds those societies most nonracist where the public declaration of racism meets the most social opprobrium.

  • 'AP' says Barbara Boxer is favoring Israeli travelers over American ones
  • International Criminal Court opens preliminary investigation into attack on Mavi Marmara
    • lysias May 20, 2013 at 10:23 am

      I've read contradictory accounts on whether Ataturk was a Dönme. However, even if he was, you should know that Jews in general do not regard the Dönme as still being Jews. When Muslims in Salonika were expelled to Turkey around 1922, some of the Dönme asked the rabbis there to classify them as Jews, so that they would be exempted from the expulsion. The rabbis refused, and the Dönme had to go to Turkey. I believe that the Dönme themselves regard themselves as being both genuine Jews and genuine Muslims (sort of the way the early Jewish Christians regarded themselves).

      Under the heavy wealth tax (Varlık Vergisi) of 1942-4, both Jews and Dönme, as well as other non-Muslims, had to pay much higher rates, so high that many of them could not pay and were sent to a forced labor camp. Even those who could pay were nearly wiped out financially. This tax was imposed by Ataturk's successors and party comrades less than four years after Ataturk's death.

    • lysias May 17, 2013 at 10:01 am with 3 replies

      The "deep state" in Turkey has always wanted close relations with Israel. But I'm surprised that the deep state retains so much power under Erdogan.

    • lysias May 16, 2013 at 1:57 pm with 6 replies

      Craig Murray now has a piece up on this development: The Mavi Marmara Murders. Catchy title.

  • Dershowitz should stop lying about Tutu's record
    • lysias May 14, 2013 at 4:23 pm with 1 replies

      Never mind apartheid, what about genocide? Look at this from Jim Lobe's piece on the conviction in Guatemala of Gen. Rios Montt on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity and how it taints Elliot Abrams:

      Also likely to be somewhat embarrassed is the government of Israel which moved into the vacuum created by Carter’s and Congress’s cut-off of military and intelligence assistance and subsequently expanded its involvement with Rios Montt’s counter-insurgency efforts with the Reagan administration’s encouragement. In 1982, just before Reagan’s visit, Ríos Montt told ABC News that his success in allegedly defeating the guerrillas was due the fact that “our soldiers were trained by Israelis.” It was the same year as the Sabra and Shatila massacres by Israel-backed Phalange militiamen in Beirut. Now, its Central American client has been convicted of genocide.

  • Newseum honors newsman who ran guns for ethnic cleansing of Palestine
    • lysias May 17, 2013 at 3:49 pm

      The latest volume of Caro's biography of LBJ is extremely disappointing. Caro actually accepts the Warren Commission's account of the JFK assassination. He says nothing about the murders in Texas in which LBJ was implicated (a jury in Texas actually concluded, years after LBJ died, that he was involved in the conspiracy to murder Dept. of Agriculture investigator Henry Marshall, who was resisted all attempts to persuade him abandon his investigation of Billy Sol Estes's frauds). While he has a lot to say about Bobby Baker, he says nothing at all about Billy Sol Estes.

      Estes died just a few days ago. (His autobiographical account, Le dernier témoin [The Last Witness, i.e., the last surviving witness of the conspiracy to assassinate JFK], has only been published in French, without any English-language translation appearing. In the book, Estes blames LBJ for the assassination, as does the very persuasive book LBJ: The Mastermind of the JFK Assassination, by Phillip F. Nelson, which is about to come out in paperback.) The Washington Post's obituary for Estes actually mentions the murders of Marshall and others, as well as Estes's connection with LBJ, but does not draw a connection between the murders and LBJ. I guess that's as close as the Pravda on the Potomac dares to get to telling us the truth.

      I had been hoping to learn something when Caro finally got around to discussing the attack on the USS Liberty, but I fear he has been coopted and will only give us the orthodox version.

    • lysias May 14, 2013 at 12:18 pm with 2 replies

      The 50th anniversary of the JFK assassination will soon be upon us.

  • Israeli airport sorts passengers with 'Jewish stickers' and 'Arab stickers'
  • Boston Globe's groundbreaking salute to BDS will bring 'fierce criticism,' US Campaign says
  • 'Newseum' folds under pressure, will not include Gaza cameramen in program honoring fallen journalists
    • lysias May 13, 2013 at 6:45 pm with 1 replies

      “Terrorism has altered the landscape in many areas, including the rules of war and engagement, law, investigative and interrogation techniques, and the detention of enemy combatants. Journalism is no exception.”

      You're right, Seafoid. That's just the sort of statement that I would expect to see in the prestige Nazi press. In Goebbels's weekly Das Reich, for example. Or in the Frankfurter Zeitung after it was gleichgeschaltet.

  • The power of Stephen Hawking
    • lysias May 13, 2013 at 2:19 pm

      When Maher said something that actually made sense (that the 9/11 hijackers, whatever else they may have been, were anything but cowardly,) he was thrown off the air for his pains.

      I guess he learned his lesson.

    • lysias May 13, 2013 at 2:09 pm

      If I correctly understood the reporting on Democracy Now! this morning, the judge in Guatemala who delivered the verdict finding Gen. Rios Montt guilty of genocide and crimes against humanity spoke about the legal liability of those persons abroad who had assisted Rios Montt's crimes. And the people on Democracy Now! mentioned Elliot Abrams as being one of those persons.

  • US Jews are so 'polarized' over Israel they can't talk about it to each other, 'Jewish Chronicle' reports
    • lysias May 13, 2013 at 5:23 pm

      It occurs to me that, since Barbara Tuchman was the granddaughter of the elder Henry Morgenthau, U.S. Ambassador to Turkey during the First World War, she must have known from family tradition and from her own grandfather's tales that the Palestinians were not recent arrivals.

    • lysias May 9, 2013 at 4:39 pm

      The Morgenthau was Henry Morgenthau, Sr., who was born in Mannheim in Baden shortly before Baden became part of the new German Empire and who will forever have a glorious page in history for having protested the Armenian genocide to the Ottoman government while serving as U.S. Ambassador to Turkey. Unfortunately, the elder Morgenthau's son, Henry Morgenthau, Jr., FDR's neighbor and Secretary of the Treasury, became quite a committed Zionist, and will forever be infamous in history for his Morgenthau Plan to reduce Germany to poverty after World War Two. Barbara Tuchman, Morgenthau, Sr.'s granddaughter and Morgenthau, Jr.'s niece, was later enough of a Zionist to actually pen praise of Joan Peters's From Time Immemorial. It's hard to believe Tuchman was not enough of a historian to recognize what nonsense Peters's book was.

      So Morgenthau's family exhibited as much degeneration as the Ochs-Sulzberger family.

      According to the Wikipedia entry on Morgenthau, Sr., he and Adolph Ochs were friends, and together worked to alleviate the plight of the suffering Armenians.

    • lysias May 9, 2013 at 10:59 am with 39 replies

      Note that one of the signatories of that petition was "Adolph Simon Ochs, publisher The New York Times." How times (and the Ochs-Sulzberger family) have changed!

  • 'The policy of the present Israeli government is likely to lead to disaster': Stephen Hawking pulls out of conference hosted by Shimon Peres, backs academic boycott of Israel (Updated)
  • Mainstream turns against intervention, this time (Tom Friedman has spoken)
    • lysias May 8, 2013 at 10:03 am with 3 replies

      Was that a blunder, or was the U.S. setting a trap for Saddam?

    • lysias May 7, 2013 at 5:36 pm

      RT: Russia - U.S. to convene conference on Syria - Lavrov :

      Russia and the United States agreed to encourage the Syrian government and the opposition to advance efforts in achieving a dialogue, and to this end have decided to convene an international conference in late May which will follow up on the Geneva meeting which took place on June 30, 2012, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said after talks with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry.

      "Russia and the United States will encourage the Syrian government and opposition groups to come to a political solution to the conflict," Foreign Minister Lavrov stated.

      "We also agreed on the need to try, and I think it will happen as soon as possible, possibly at the end of May, to convene an international conference to be organized in on the basis of the Geneva Conference, which was held in June last year," said the Russian Foreign Minister.

    • lysias May 7, 2013 at 5:28 pm

      I just finished Scahill's book. It is one infuriating read. It concludes with the assassination of Awlaki's 16-year-old son.

      The stuff the U.S. is doing makes the Boston Marathon bombers look like pikers.

    • lysias May 7, 2013 at 2:04 pm with 1 replies

      Far from being a creation of European colonialists, Syria was already a unity as the Roman province of Syria, which was established by Pompey.

    • lysias May 7, 2013 at 12:03 pm

      If Clemons wasn't going to say that, would he have gotten on the News Hour?

  • New York mayoral candidates debate police spying on Muslims and Brooklyn College BDS panel
    • lysias May 7, 2013 at 1:53 pm

      Even if the surveillance is popular with a majority of New Yorkers, support of it may not be the way to win the primary.

      Disappointing, by the way, that a gay politician like Quinn should support discrimination against another minority.

  • Oberlin College Student Senate votes to support divestment from companies profiting from Israeli occupation
  • Exile and the Prophetic: Vultures over Syria
    • lysias May 6, 2013 at 1:44 pm

      The joke about the Conquistadors coming to the Americas with the Bible and the sword may apply here. Punch line: They took the land and left the indigenous people with the Bible.

      Western interference in Syria would be as bad news for Syrian Christians as the U.S. invasion was for Iraqi Christians.

  • Israeli minister: Google decision to recognize Palestine 'pushes peace further away'
    • lysias May 6, 2013 at 6:46 pm

      If you actually believe Icke's outlandish claim that the real rulers of the world are lizards disguised as people, you should seek medical help.

      Now, as a metaphor for what's really going on, Icke's idea isn't that bad.

      I quite liked the movie They Live!.

  • Syria wrap: Grumbling This won't be easy, NYT's Bill Keller suits up for another Mid-East war
    • lysias May 6, 2013 at 3:46 pm with 1 replies

      Sibel Edmonds has a new piece on the role of the neocons in this Syria business: Uber-Neocons: The Main Architects of Post-Assad Syria at Work.

    • lysias May 6, 2013 at 2:59 pm

      The White House is doubling down on its lies, and the MSM stenographers report their lies without any skepticism.

      CBS: W.H. on Syria sarin gas claim: Look to regime, not rebels:

      The White House says it's highly likely that Syrian President Bashar Assad's regime, not the rebel opposition, was behind any chemical weapons use in Syria.

      On Monday a U.N. panel looking into war crimes in Syria said it has not found conclusive evidence of chemical weapons use, backing away from a member's claims that there are indications rebel forces used the nerve agent sarin.

      . . .

      At a press briefing today White House spokesman Jay Carney said there is certainly evidence that chemical weapons have been used, but that the U.S. is highly skeptical of claims that rebels put them in play.

      Carney says the U.S. is still looking for conclusive evidence about chemical weapons use. He says there's no timeline for the investigation.

      NPR: UPDATE: White House Doubts Syrian Rebels Used Sarin:

      At the White House this afternoon, spokesman Jay Carney said the U.S. is "highly skeptical" of the comments made over the weekend by international prosecutor Carla del Ponte, who said there are "strong, concrete suspicions but not yet incontrovertible proof" that rebels in Syria have used sarin gas.

      We've been covering del Ponte's comments, and the reaction to them, through the day.

      Funny. I had NPR news on on my radio this morning, and I don't recall any mention of del Ponte's comments.

    • lysias May 6, 2013 at 11:12 am with 1 replies

      If it's the rebels, did they cross a red line?

  • Exile and the prophetic: the Church of Scotland weighs in
    • lysias May 6, 2013 at 3:09 pm

      If Scotland votes for independence in next year's referendum, statements by the Church of Scotland are likely to become more independent as well.

  • 'NPR' suggests that opponent of Syrian intervention has dual loyalty
    • lysias May 3, 2013 at 3:39 pm

      As an Irish-American, I generally support Ireland, but I wouldn't dream of claiming that people who do not are somehow morally defective.

      And I suspect that the same may be said of most ethic groups in this country.

    • lysias May 3, 2013 at 10:55 am with 1 replies

      Interesting fact from Landis's Wikipedia entry:

      Landis has been noted for his friendly relationship to the Ambassador of Syria, Imad Moustapha, but when Landis wrote during the first weeks of the Syrian uprising of 2011 that there was "no soft landing"[3] for the Syria regime and that it was "deeply sectarian",[4] Ambassador Moustapha cut off further contact with him on the grounds that he was a "revolutionary."

      Doesn't sound exactly like a stooge of the Assad regime.

  • Google recognizes Palestine
    • lysias May 6, 2013 at 11:00 am with 1 replies

      Hey, I called it! Now (3 days after my comment) the UN says it was the rebels.

    • lysias May 3, 2013 at 4:15 pm with 3 replies

      Not Wilkinson, but Wilkerson, retired U.S. Army Colonel Larry Wilkerson, who was Colin Powell's Chief of Staff when Powell was Secretary of State.

      Note that Wilkerson has no real evidence for his suggestion that Israel is behind the use of chemical weapons in Syria. He bases himself on these considerations: the evidence that the Syrian government is behind it is really "flaky"; Israel has an interest in getting people to believe that the Syrian government is behind it; and Netanyahu's government is incompetent.

      Myself, I very much doubt that the Syrian government is responsible. The use of the gas is not in that government's interest, whereas it is in the interest of opponents of that government. But other possible actors besides Israel need to be considered, notably the Syrian opposition, which could well have gotten control of some of the government's stores of chemical weapons.

  • What you need to know about Bradley Manning
    • lysias May 2, 2013 at 7:19 pm with 1 replies

      The Obama administration has said that it is not going to seek the death penalty.

      Unfortunately, that is no guarantee that the military jury at Manning's trial will not impose the death penalty. Under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, the military jury can impose the death penalty for any capital crime, whether the prosecution seeks it or not. And "aiding the enemy" is a capital crime under the UCMJ.

      Military juries are composed of officers chosen by the officer convening the court martial. In this case, you can bet we're talking about career officers that the convening authority is confident will vote the way he wants. The defendant at a court martial has the right to demand that one of the members of the jury be a senior enlisted man, i.e., a career sergeant. But career sergeants, especially ones chosen by the convening authority, tend to judge even more harshly than the officers do. A runaway jury that ignores the administration's refusal to seek the death penalty is, I think, a distinct possibility.

      Military juries can only impose the death penalty if the jury votes for it unanimously, but I'm not sure that's much comfort in this case.

  • Land swaps in Israel/Palestine (and a bridge for sale in Brooklyn)
  • 'Strategic Partner Act of 2013' would give US seal of approval to Israeli discrimination against Arab-Americans
  • Anonymous sources in the Israeli US Embassy don't like what they see on television
  • Treatment of Boston suspect exposes 'Muslim exception' to Constitution
  • When will the discourse of the 'two state solution' finally change?
    • lysias May 3, 2013 at 5:44 pm

      I must correct myself on Chile. According to the Wikipedia entry on it:

      A public health book from the University of Chile states that 30% of the population is of Caucasian origin; Mestizos with an average 60% Caucasian ancestry and 40% Native American ancestry are estimated to amount a total of 65%, while Native Americans (Amerindians) comprise the remaining 5%.[2] A genetic study by the same university showed that the average Chilean's genes are 64% Caucasian and 35% Amerindian.[105]

      Despite the genetic considerations, many Chileans, if asked, would self-identify as white. The 2011 Latinobarómetro survey asked respondents in Chile what race they considered themselves to belong to. Most answered "white" (59%), while 25% said "mestizo" and 8% self-classified as "indigenous".[106] A 2002 national poll revealed that a majority of Chileans believed they possessed some (43.4%) or much (8.3%) "indigenous blood", while 40.3% responded that they had none.[107]

      In Argentina, about 97% of the population is of European or partial European descent. An estimated 885 of the population of Uruguay is of European descent.

    • lysias May 3, 2013 at 5:29 pm

      And the dynasty that succeeded the Tudors was Scottish.

    • lysias May 3, 2013 at 5:21 pm with 2 replies

      Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay have very few Mestizos and Indians, and their populations are close to purely of European descent.

      Could their similarity in this respect to Canada and the U.S. (and to Australia) have something to do with climate?

  • Shulman moves from 'Israel in peril' to no possibility of a two-state solution
    • lysias April 30, 2013 at 2:26 pm

      Off topic, Barbara Boxer's bill to allow Israel to continue to have preferential visa treatment even if Israel continues to exclude U.S. citizens has run into trouble in Congress. CQ: AIPAC-Backed Israel Bill Stalls Over Visa Waiver Provision (requires subscription):

      AIPAC usually garners overwhelming majorities of co-sponsors for bills that it prioritizes.

      But this measure has gathered only 24 co-sponsors in the six weeks since Boxer introduced it on March 5 to coincide with AIPAC annual policy conference in Washington. At the event, AIPAC officials made the bill and a companion in the House (HR 938) one its legislative priorities, sending thousands members of the organization to Capitol Hill to lobby their representatives to support the measures.

      The times they are a-changing.

  • In photos: Greek Orthodox Christians celebrate Palm Sunday in Gaza
    • lysias April 30, 2013 at 6:52 pm

      There are a goodly number of blond people in Turkey. Circassians, many of whom are blond, have been in Turkey for centuries. And, as Ottoman rule was displaced from the Balkans during the 19th and the very early 20th centuries, Muslims from the Balkans were driven out, and ended up in places that were still under Ottoman rule.

    • lysias April 30, 2013 at 6:48 pm

      Another factor: Christians from Lebanon and Palestine tend to emigrate to the West a good deal more than Muslims from those places do. They're better educated and more prosperous. They tend to feel more at home in Western countries. They've now been emigrating for such a long time that a lot of them have family connections already in the West.

  • Post-Boston vulnerability will at last force Americans to consider 'why they hate us'
  • Israel supporters use Boston bombing to call for firing of UN Rapporteur
    • lysias April 27, 2013 at 2:49 pm

      Obama is bought.

      But, with his power, why does he stay bought? He has the legal authority to do whatever he wants, and surely he shouldn't feel any moral obligation to continue to do the bidding of the crooks who bought him.

    • lysias April 25, 2013 at 5:46 pm

      I heard Susan Rice deliver a defense of the Kosovo War at an Oxford alumni meeting in 2001. She repeated all the lies about Serbia having committed genocide before NATO entered the fighting.

    • lysias April 25, 2013 at 5:43 pm with 1 replies

      The case for the conclusion that the JFK assassination was an inside job seems overwhelming to me. Wouldn't you say the same thing about that conclusion?

      Are you, by any chance, not familiar with Operation Northwoods?

      Anyway, far be it from me to say that someone believing or having believed that Saddam Hussein was connected with 9/11 -- wrong as I believe that to be -- automatically discredits everything else he has to say.

    • lysias April 25, 2013 at 2:08 pm with 4 replies

      Whether 9/11 was or was not an inside job, people should be allowed to discuss the possibility. Where we don't know what happened and where the government has manifestly been lying about what happened, as is the case with 9/11, no possibility should be ruled inadmissible a priori.

      If we allow the censors to suppress the discussion of the matter, they'll use that to discredit people whom they can associate with the view that they want suppressed, like Falk.

  • D.C. speakers: Walt and Siegman on the conflict, Madar on Bradley Manning
    • lysias April 24, 2013 at 12:24 pm with 5 replies

      Bradley Manning was mentioned in the second installment of the interview with Jeremy Scahill (whose book Dirty Wars has just been published) on Democracy Now! this morning. Scahill learned that Eric Prince, the head of Blackwater, was about to leave the U.S. in an e-mail that he got from Bradley Manning.

  • Reality check-- John Kerry prepares to stick fork in two-state solution
    • lysias April 19, 2013 at 5:54 pm

      What's to stop Kerry from forgetting, in a year or two, that he ever said this?

      If somebody brings this up, his spokesman can call the question "unhelpful".

  • Chris Matthews suggests that Boston suspects are Arabs
    • lysias April 19, 2013 at 3:32 pm

      Could the physician have traveled from Watertown to the hospital along with the dying brother in the same ambulance, and have treated him along the way?

    • lysias April 19, 2013 at 3:28 pm

      The uncle said in his interview that the family are Chechens. So I guess they were just temporarily in Kyrgyzstan.

      So the brothers' radicalization is more likely to be related somehow to the fact that the Chechen rebellion against the Russians was secretly supported by the U.S./CIA and allies.

    • lysias April 19, 2013 at 10:56 am

      If they hated Russia, what would turn them against the U.S.? U.S.-Russian relations have soured the past couple of years.

    • lysias April 19, 2013 at 10:54 am with 2 replies

      But the family apparently originally comes from Kyrgyzstan. The father found a job in Chechnya, so they moved there.

      I wonder if what provoked the brothers' radicalization may not have been resentment of Kyrgyzstan serving as a major terminus for supplying U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan.

  • Israel Project brags on planting story in CNN and taking 38 journalists on helicopter trips in Israel

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