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click link to see last 100 comments- Glenn Greenwald on the Woolwich attack and blowback from the ‘war on terror’ (8)
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The War of Ideas in the Middle East
Powerful re-enactment of Deir Yassin at the climax of Peter Kosminsky's UK Channel 4 TV miniseries The Promise (which I was able to get DVD's of from amazon.co.uk).
Yes, the Washington Post article I linked to above does list Robert Kagan as one of Romney's foreign policy advisers as of last October. That article doesn't mention Max Boot, but Boot's own Website says that he is "currently serving as a defense policy adviser to Mitt Romney's campaign."
Mitt Romney taps foreign policy, national security advisers (Oct. 6, 2011).
The advisers: Cofer Black, Christopher Burnham, Michael Chertoff, Eliot Cohen, John Danilovich, Paula Dobriansky, Eric Edelman, Michael Hayden, Kerry Healey, Kim Holmes, Robert Joseph, Robert Kagan, John Lehman, Walid Phares, Pierre Prosper, Mitchell Reiss, Daniel Senor, Jim Talent, Vin Weber, Richard Williamson, and Dov Zakheim.
Interesting paragraph from Jennifer Nelson, The Role the Dutch Reformed Church Played in the Rise and Fall of Apartheid:
Tony Judt confirms in Thinking the Twentieth Century that there were no Arabs working on the kibbutzim where he lived in the 1960's.
Speaking of South Africa in 1988, I recently read Fidel Castro's autobiography (as told in interviews to the journalist Ignacio Ramonet,) and learned to my surprise that there was a big battle at Cuito Cuanavale in Angola in 1988 in which Castro claims his Cuban forces defeated the South Africans (Wikipedia says both sides claimed victory,) after which South African withdrawal from Namibia, the release of Mandela, and the end of apartheid followed in short order. If I had ever heard of that battle before then, I had completely forgotten about it. And yet it was apparently one of the decisive battles of world history.
Wkipedia confirms that the Xhosa, the most southerly group speaking a Bantu language, did not make contact with the Boers (who were themselves migrating north from the Cape) in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
It is a fact generally accepted by linguists that the Bantu languages spread through the southern half of Africa only in relatively recent times. This is what I learned when I studied linguistics over 40 years ago, and I recently heard John McWhorter confirm it in one of his DVD courses from the Teaching Company.
When the UN General Assembly passed a resolution declaring Zionism to be racism in 1975, I remember virtually everyone in this country regarded that proposition as self-evidently absurd. I remember being puzzled at the time, because the proposition struck me as pretty clearly true.
Today's Guardian has a letter on Grass by the British widow of Austrian Jewish poet Erich Fried, who wrote poems criticizing Israel's treatment of the Palestinians starting in 1974. According to the widow, Israel actually sicced the Gestapo on him. Letters: Israel, Günter Grass and the right to artistic licence:
Grass's whole piece is in today's Süddeutsche Zeitung. Has a great final paragraph: Günter Grass reagiert auf Israels Einreiseverbot [Günter Grass Reacts to Israel's Entry Ban]:
Vandals have defiled a memorial to Grass in Göttingen with graffiti: «SS! Günni Halts Maul» ["SS! Günter, Shut Up!"]. Grass-Denkmal in Göttingen beschmiert - Polizei ermittelt [Grass Memorial in Güttingen Vandalized; Police Investigate].
Apparently the German social democratic SPD party is not going to allow Grass to do any more electioneering for them: SPD will auf Wahlkämpfer Grass verzichten [SPD to Forego Electoral Support From Grass].
And look at the bottom of that Süddeutsche Zeitung Web page. There are no comments on the article yet, because they're freezing out all comments overnight until tomorrow morning, so that they can moderate comments more actively.
According to the Financial Times Deutschland, people really don't like this decision in Germany. In fact, the travel ban, not Grass's poem, is now the object of discussion in Germany.
Israel erntet Empörung für Grass-Einreiseverbot [Israel Reaps Outrage With Entry Ban on Grass].
From Fredblogs's source about post-war pogroms in Poland:
Deplorable, yes, but obviously it bears no comparison with what the Germans had done.
A slander against the Poles. I'd be surprised if the Poles were guilty of mass murder even in the four figures. What are your sources?
I just watched On the Beach for the first time in several years. It is still one powerful movie. (Fred Astaire does a fantastic job of acting in it.)
Now the ftd.de site has an article up about the extremely negative reaction in Germany to Israel's prohibiting Grass from entering Israel: Israel erntet Empörung für Grass-Einreiseverbot [Israel Reaps Outrage With Its Entry Ban on Grass]
Ahmadinejad is in a real sense a creation of the Bush administration. If the Bush administration had not rejected Iran's offer of a grand bargain in 2003, Ahmadinejad would probably not have been elected president in 2005.
Sen. Robert Byrd had been a member of the Klan in his early 20's. The future Justice Hugo Black joined the Klan in his mid-30's. I don't think many people think these youthful indiscretions discredited either man.
MJ Rosenberg's piece on Huffington Post from a few days ago about Peter Beinart's book, Why Peter Beinart's Book Is Driving the "Pro-Israel" Establishment Crazy, has a title "THE BLOG (Featuring fresh takes and real-time analysis from HuffPost's signature lineup of contributors)" at the top of the page. Is there any connection between this piece, the Huffington Post, and Rosenberg's new blog?
And yet, it was her use of the word that has given her the coverage.
And, as a result, looks like she won't be permitted to take part in any further debates: Conn. Senate Debate Descends into Name-Calling: A lesser-known candidate may not be allowed to debate again after calling a Congressman a "whore":
Mustn't allow the public to hear such arguments.
If so many powerful "liberal" Jews and Jewish donors to the Democratic Party had not supported the Iraq War, there probably would have been much more determined Democratic opposition to the war, and it probably could not have taken place.
Remember, until the end of 2002 the Democrats had the majority in the Senate.
Violence played as big a role in ending British rule in India as did nonviolence. Indian National Army leader Subhas Chandra Bose is still a big hero in India.
It was the insistence of the British authorities on trying for treason the officers of the Indian National Army that led in 1946 to mutinies of the Indian Royal Navy and the Indian Army that convinced virtually everyone in the British government that the game was up and that they would have to leave India.
You didn't use the word "blacklist". I suspect you had it in mind, but let me at least mention it for the literal-minded.
Brent Black's career is in show business. Maybe he doesn't want that career to be sidetracked?
Didn't Olmert's "epiphany" precede his launching Operation Cast Lead?
Some epiphany.
There's an interesting article in the latest New Yorker about Karl May, the German who wrote novels about the Wild West in the decades before the First World War.
The author, Riva Galchen, observes that a German asked her (I'm assuming from her name that she's a woman), during her recent travels in Germany researching for the article, why the U.S. has a Holocaust museum, but no museums about slavery or the genocide of the American Indians.
Der Tagesspiegel happens to be the newspaper I regularly read during the two years that I was stationed in Berlin with the U.S. Air Force. (Well, my military duties also obliged me to read the official newspaper of East Germany, Neues Deutschland, a paper that our own U.S. newspapers have more and more come to resemble.)
is my no doubt too literal attempt to translate the sentence.
Perhaps one of the native speakers of German who inhabit this site can favor us with a more idiomatic translation.
My chief reason for making my comment was in the hope that Mooser might eventually see it.
Not until you mentioned that there are things on the left of the screen did I realize there was anything there. For me (both in Mozilla Firefox and in Internet Explorer) almost everything to the left is cut off.
Only because of what you said did I notice the "w" of "show" and the "ts" of "contents" that had not been cut off. When I clicked on them, sure enough, the texts of all the comments appeared. But I never would have known that without your comment.
Google's translation of that sentence is not intelligible English, so let me try:
And the next sentence,
I would translate:
For those who can read German, the comments that appear below the Tagesspiegel article are extremely interesting. The usual hasbarists, but a lot of people who disagree with them.
Grass isn't backing down. Der Tagesspiegel: Grass legt nach und warnt vor "Drittem Weltkrieg" [Grass Lays it On, Warns of "Third World War"]:
Interesting observation by Grass later in the article:
So Grass would prefer as his political vision a federation between the Palestinian Territories and Israel, although he considers this possibility as "unimaginable" at the present time.
Grass was born and raised in the Hanseatic Baltic port city of Danzig. Even though that city was within the province of West Prussia, it had the cultural flavor of a Hanseatic Baltic port. Commercial, not Junker.
Because Danzig was made a free city under the League of Nations and outside Germany after World War One, a free city in which the Polish government had many rights, German nationalism was particularly inflamed there. Large parts of the provinces of West Prussia and Posen (Poznań) were taken from Germany and given to Poland at the same time, and, even though these areas had Polish majorities, they also had substantial German minorities, and the Germans felt aggrieved, rightly or wrongly. This served to intensify the German nationalism of the 95% German majority in Danzig.
As a result, Nazism was quite powerful in Danzig. Until World War Two broke out, ultimate authority in the city belonged to the League of Nations High Commissioner, but the city had a local government that had a lot of power within the city. And the Nazi Party took over the local government in May-June 1933.
The overwhelming majority of Danzig Germans fervently wanted to be reunited with the Reich. World War Two opened with the German battleship Schleswig-Holstein shelling the Polish fortress in Danzig harbor, and Danzigers greeted rapturously the arrival of German soldiers and, in short order, of Hitler himself into the city.
Danzig was annexed to the Reich, and local government was taken over by the local party Gauleiter, Albert Forster. The Tin Drum deals with this period, and Forster makes a prominent appearance in the movie (and therefore, I would presume, in Grass's book as well).
From the Wikipedia entry on the Waffen SS:
Well, Bibi seems not to be too happy about Grass's poem: Facebook: Prime Minister Netanyahu comments on the hateful peom by Guenter Grass:
Marc Neunueller's comment says it all:
I should add that Grass joined the Waffen-SS because he was conscripted into it.
People here may remember that, during the Vietnam War, young men were drafted not only into the Army, but also into the Marine Corps.
"b" of Moon of Alabama's thread on the poem is worth a read: Günter Grass - What Has To Be Said.
The poem in the original German was published in yesterday's Süddeutsche Zeitung, very much a mainstream newspaper in Germany: Grass' Gedicht im Wortlaut: Was gesagt werden muss.
Grass is going to recite his poem and be interviewed about it on German national television tonight: Günter Grass äußert sich in «Tagesthemen» und «aspekte».
If memory serves, it was Grass himself who "unveiled" the fact that he had served in the Waffen-SS.
Is there any basis in the Rome Treaty that established the ICC for the conclusion that only entities that have the status of states within the UN can bring charges?
And the electioneering continues: French police arrest 10 suspected of links to radical Islamist websites, official says.
Meanwhile (again off topic,) it looks like Sarkozy is riding the reaction to the Toulouse murders to re-election: Sarkozy Widens Poll Lead:
And look what's just come out about those Toulouse murders: Merah family lawyer claims 'Toulouse Killer' dispatched [i.e., deliberately murdered by the police]:
These murders have turned out to be as convenient for Sarkozy as the way Dominique Straus-Kahn was set up.
Off topic, after the Muslims in Bradford just elected George Galloway to be their Member of Parliament largely on the issue of the wars against Muslims, it looks like Red Ken Livingstone is using similar issues to appeal to the voters in London in his campaign for Mayor of London (Election on May 3.)
What's the date of the report? I.e., when will the 20 years be up?
UPDATE: I see the report was being referred to in print in February 2009: Fearing a One-State Solution, Israel’s President Serves Pabulum to Washington:
So 3 of those 20 years have already passed.
M.J. Rosenberg's Huffington Post piece on Beinart's book is worth a read: Freedom of Speech Except When It Comes to Israel.
Günter Grass speaks up in the Süddeutsche Zeitung about Israel and the looming war with Iran: Gedicht zum Konflikt zwischen Israel und Iran: Was gesagt werden muss [Poem on the Conflict Between Israel and Iran: What Has to be Said]:
Warum schweige ich, verschweige zu lange,
was offensichtlich ist und in Planspielen
geübt wurde, an deren Ende als Überlebende
wir allenfalls Fußnoten sind.
Es ist das behauptete Recht auf den Erstschlag,
der das von einem Maulhelden unterjochte
und zum organisierten Jubel gelenkte
iranische Volk auslöschen könnte,
weil in dessen Machtbereich der Bau
einer Atombombe vermutet wird.
Doch warum untersage ich mir,
jenes andere Land beim Namen zu nennen,
in dem seit Jahren - wenn auch geheimgehalten -
ein wachsend nukleares Potential verfügbar
aber außer Kontrolle, weil keiner Prüfung
zugänglich ist?
Das allgemeine Verschweigen dieses Tatbestandes,
dem sich mein Schweigen untergeordnet hat,
empfinde ich als belastende Lüge
und Zwang, der Strafe in Aussicht stellt,
sobald er mißachtet wird;
das Verdikt "Antisemitismus" ist geläufig.
Jetzt aber, weil aus meinem Land,
das von ureigenen Verbrechen,
die ohne Vergleich sind,
Mal um Mal eingeholt und zur Rede gestellt wird,
wiederum und rein geschäftsmäßig, wenn auch
mit flinker Lippe als Wiedergutmachung deklariert,
ein weiteres U-Boot nach Israel
geliefert werden soll, dessen Spezialität
darin besteht, allesvernichtende Sprengköpfe
dorthin lenken zu können, wo die Existenz
einer einzigen Atombombe unbewiesen ist,
doch als Befürchtung von Beweiskraft sein will,
sage ich, was gesagt werden muß.
Warum aber schwieg ich bislang?
Weil ich meinte, meine Herkunft,
die von nie zu tilgendem Makel behaftet ist,
verbiete, diese Tatsache als ausgesprochene Wahrheit
dem Land Israel, dem ich verbunden bin
und bleiben will, zuzumuten.
Warum sage ich jetzt erst,
gealtert und mit letzter Tinte:
Die Atommacht Israel gefährdet
den ohnehin brüchigen Weltfrieden?
Weil gesagt werden muß,
was schon morgen zu spät sein könnte;
auch weil wir - als Deutsche belastet genug -
Zulieferer eines Verbrechens werden könnten,
das voraussehbar ist, weshalb unsere Mitschuld
durch keine der üblichen Ausreden
zu tilgen wäre.
Und zugegeben: ich schweige nicht mehr,
weil ich der Heuchelei des Westens
überdrüssig bin; zudem ist zu hoffen,
es mögen sich viele vom Schweigen befreien,
den Verursacher der erkennbaren Gefahr
zum Verzicht auf Gewalt auffordern und
gleichfalls darauf bestehen,
daß eine unbehinderte und permanente Kontrolle
des israelischen atomaren Potentials
und der iranischen Atomanlagen
durch eine internationale Instanz
von den Regierungen beider Länder zugelassen wird.
Nur so ist allen, den Israelis und Palästinensern,
mehr noch, allen Menschen, die in dieser
vom Wahn okkupierten Region
dicht bei dicht verfeindet leben
und letztlich auch uns zu helfen.
"b" of Moon of Alabama's translation:
What has to be said
Why am I silent, conceal too long,
what is obvious and in war games
has been trained, at whose end we as survivors
will at the most be footnotes.
It is the alleged right of first strike,
with which the Iranian people,
subjugated by a loudmouth
and steered towards organized elation,
could be snuffed out with,
because the building of a nuclear bomb
within its fiefdom is assumed.
But why do I prohibit myself,
to name that other country,
in which for years - though kept secret -
a growing capability exists
though out of control as
not open for audit?
The general concealment of this fact,
to which my silence subjugated,
feels for me like a burdoning lie
and a coercion, which promises punishment;
the verdict "antisemitism" is commonly used.
But now, because from my country,
which for its very own crimes,
which are incomparable,
is called up again and again and taken to task,
repeatedly and businesslike, though
by slippy lips declared as reparation,
another submarine to Israel
shall be delivered, whose specialty
consists of, steering all-annihilating warheads
whereto, the existence
of a single bomb is unproven,
but as a fear shall be conclusiveness,
I say, what has to be said.
But why my silence so far?
Because I though, my origin,
which has a not redeemable taint,
prohibited me, to strain,
with this fact as spoken truth,
the country Israel, to which I am
and want to stay beholden.
Why do I speak only now,
aged and with my last ink:
The nuclear power Israel endangers
an already fragile world peace?
Because it has to be said,
what already tomorrow could be too late;
also because we - as Germans burdened enough -
could become supplier for a crime,
which is foreseeable, which is why our complicity
could not be redeemed
with the usual subterfuges.
And admittedly: I no longer remain silent,
because I am disgusted with
the hypocrisy of the west; additionally there is hope
that many may liberate themselves from their silence,
to request the originator of the discernible danger
to abstain from force
and also insist,
that unhindered and permanent control
of the Israeli capability
and the Iranian nuclear installations
through an international authority
shall be allowed by both countries governments.
Only this way can all, the Israelis and the Palestinians,
even more, all people who live in the delusion occupied region
near by near as enemies and in the end even us,
be helped.
Stalin's Soviet constitution paid a lot of lip service to all sorts of liberal ideals. They even had elections, of a sort.
What was the ICC's rationale for saying that Palestine was not an internationally recognized state? Surely very many countries do recognize it.
Sorry, I formatted that wrong: the quote from Wikipedia ended at "LRAD deployed at Occupy Oakland link to ustream.tv". The blockquote should have ended there.
The Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD) has been used a number of times against protesters:
At the time the LRAD was used in Honduras, there were reports that a "retired" Israeli general was in charge of the operation:
A president does not have to obey his donor base. Not, that is, if he puts doing the right thing above being re-elected.
George Wallace in his Inaugural Address as governor of Alabama in 1963:
I think the segregationists too were determined to go down in flames if they couldn't preserve segregation.
And, if you question the segregationists' determination, there are other examples, like the pieds noirs European settlers in French Algeria.
Speaking of Jim Crow Virginia, the reason segregation ended in this country was that it became a liability to America's position in the world during the Cold War.
Sounds like Israeli apartheid has become a liability to America's position in the world today.
All that you say could have been said in the middle of the nineteenth century about Ireland by an Englishman who supported the continued domination of the Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland.
John Marshall and the U.S. Supreme Court held the European settlers' rights to land superseded the rights of the American Indians in Johnson v. M'Intosh, 21 U.S. 543 (1823):
Cardin isn't doing this to keep his seat in the Senate. That seat is utterly safe. There is zero chance of a Republican beating him in an election, or of his losing a primary. This is Maryland, after all.
Cardin's committee assignments (according to The 2010 Almanac of American Politics) are: Budget; Environment & Public Works; Foreign Relations (where he also sits on the Subcommittee for Near Eastern & South & Central Asian Affairs); Judiciary; and Small Business & Entrepreneurship.
I don't see any word for "not" in that Hebrew sentence.
Brown v. Board, or Worcester v. Georgia?
Total opposition to apartheid was a hard sell to white South Africans.
Quelle surprise! The French authorities say they were watching the now deceased accused murderer, but somehow that didn't stop him from repeated murders.
Financial Times has an article on how this incident may help Sarkozy's re-election prospects.
Like the way Dominique Straus-Kahn was set up also benefited Sarkozy.
The Hudson Institute was founded by "Thinking About the Unthinkable" Herman Kahn.
Remember, Israel took advantage of the U.S. interregnum between the 2008 election and Obama's inauguration to conduct Cast Lead.
EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs Catherine Ashton said, in reference to the killings in Toulouse, "all should remember the young people who have been killed in all sorts of terrible circumstances - the Belgian children having lost their lives in a terrible tragedy and when we think of what happened in Toulouse today, when we remember what happened in Norway a year ago, when we know what is happening in Syria, when we see what is happening in Gaza and in different parts of the world - we remember young people and children who lose their lives."
Avigdor Lieberman's response:
What about resettling them in the U.S.? This country certainly bears a large share of the responsibility for what happened to the Palestinians.
If they were resettled here, there would at any rate be a large ethnic interest group to counterbalance the Israel lobby.
Her parents were prominent Irgun members. Her father was chief operations officer of the Irgun. Tzipi herself did her military service in the elite Mossad unit responsible for Operation Wrath of God (the tracking down of people involved in the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre that forms the subject of Spielberg's movie Munich.)
Don't forget: the Olmert/Livni government was also responsible for the 2006 Lebanon war.
If Saddam's government forced Christian Arabs to declare that they were Arabs, what's so outrageous about that?
Saddam Hussein's Ba'athist government of Iraq treated Iraq's Christians well. Second man in the regime Tariq Aziz was a Christian. After the U.S. invasion that Israel encouraged, Christians were murdered and terrorized in the civil war conditions that followed, and half the Christians left the country. Various people, notably including the Vatican, had warned the Bush administration that something like this was likely to follow a U.S. invasion.
Most of the Iraqi Christian refugees found refuge in Ba'athist Syria, where the regime also treats Christians well. Now the U.S. and Israel are seeking to undermine that Ba'athist regime as well. And if the Syrian Ba'athists lose power, whatever regime follows is very likely to treat the Christians who supported Assad badly, especially considering that the Muslim Brotherhood, which the Syrian Ba'athists have persecuted for decades, is likely to play a large role in such a post-Ba'athist government.
Israel is doing no favors to the Christians of the Middle East.
Fidel Castro says in his autobiography (as told to Ignacio Ramonet) that the Israeli deal to supply nukes to apartheid South Africa was done with U.S. (clandestine) approval, as was the Israeli attack on Osirak.
Eisenhower's coolness towards Israel was arguably unusual for a Republican. Remember, archisolationist Bob Taft was a fervent supporter of Zionism.
Sebastian Haffner comments in one of his books how Germans on the home front during World War One came to regard war reports like those from sporting events. If memory serves, he also connects this mentality with the Nazis coming to power.
Is it possible to cross-examine witnesses overseas via some kind of data link?
Actually, I did hear an interview with the surviving father of the family of a lot of the victims on the radio overnight. I think it was on NPR, although it might have been on the BBC (I have both of them on overnight.)
People who try to minimize the sergeant's guilt ought to realize that, to the extent that they reduce his guilt, to that same extent they should assign guilt to the people responsible for his having been sent to Afghanistan.
I don't think they do that.
After the last glimmerings of dissent over the Iraq war, pretty much all the main media organs in Britain, notably the BBC and The Guardian, were corporatized.
That moment when the helicopters depart from Afghanistan is drawing ever closer: Panetta Is Safe After Breach Near His Plane at Afghan Base:
AP reports a vidoe showing a lone soldier giving himself up has now surfaced: Afghan official: Soldier's surrender on video:
I thought I had read someplace that U.S. officials have admitted that the story that the soldier gave himself up was untrue.
Five days since the massacre should have given the CIA enough time to fabricate a video.
That's basically why gangs have murders as initiation rituals.
That's what somebody suggested on Moon of Alabama, that they have yet to decide who the fall guy is going to be. The fact that they've already revealed that he's a staff sergeant at a Fort Lewis Army unit, married, with two children, who has done four tours in Iraq, all of that suggests he's already an identified individual that they have just chosen, for whatever reason, not to reveal the name of yet.
Of course, if he's a totally fictional person, like Comrade Ogilvy in Nineteen Eighty-Four, then that might explain why they haven't put a name to him yet. Although that doesn't make much sense either, as it serves to cast doubt on the whole story.
Well, the best explanation I can think of so far has to do with the fact that it's now revealed that he was taking part in a special operations program (although they're careful to emphasize that he himself was not a special operator.) AP: Alleged soldier rampage in Afghanistan a blow to special operations village security program:
Since they are generally reluctant to reveal the identities of special operators, maybe the same applies to NCO's working alongside them. Or maybe they're not telling us the truth about his not being a special operator. Maybe there are other ways to become a special operator than going to special operations training. We know from other reports that this staff sergeant was trained as a sniper.
Or, if special operators went along with the staff sergeant on this rampage, the secrecy of all that special operators do might explain why they are so insistent that the staff sergeant was acting alone.
At the time of the U.S. bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade during the Kosovo War, I had a part-time job transcribing CNN. I was really struck by how, whenever the network's newscasters mentioned the bombing, they always uniformly referred to it as the "accidental bombing".
As a matter of fact, didn't the rest of the media do the same? (I paid less attention to them, because I wasn't transcribing them.)
More comes out that makes the official story seem even less likely: Time: Afghans Skeptical Over Shooting Account:
The U.S. military in Afghanistan had already killed plenty of Afghans during the 10-year occupation, even before the massacre over the weekend. Burning those Korans was just adding insult to injury.
Can't you picture Americans shooting and killing members of a foreign army occupying this country after one member did something like burning a U.S. flag or a copy of the U.S. Constitution?
Remember that?
And still the U.S. government has not released the sergeant's name. I wonder why the long delay. Are they afraid Afghans could kill him if they knew who he was?
The first paragraph of the letter is wildly inaccurate:
The final paragraph reminds me of nothing so much as Kaiser Wilhelm II's blank check to Austria-Hungary after the assassination in Sarajevo:
At least Kaiser Wilhelm and Austria had the plausible pretext of responding to a terrorist assassination.
With Obama's potential Republican rivals committing political suicide, what need does Obama have of those funds?
I'm no scientist. I trust a peer-reviewed scientific journal to get that sort of thing right.
If, by some chance, they didn't, what does that mean? You say they got the mass wrong. Even if they did, does that change their point?
I said nothing. I quoted Wikipedia.
Wikipedia cites as its source T. Lavy and S. Abu Asleh, Ocular rubber bullet injuries, Eye (2003) 17, 821–824, link to nature.com :
I believe Eye is a peer-reviewed journal of the Royal College of Ophthalmologists.
Israeli "rubber bullets" aren't necessarily all rubber:
The Israeli soldiers in the photograph are firing what appear to be rifles, so the "rubber" bullets are apparently of the first kind, metal cores covered by rubber, and that kind of bullet can inflict serious injury.
The Jewish ultras have been spitting at Christians in Jerusalem for years. Our media just haven't been reporting it.
I wonder if Joe Briscoe thinks Protestants and Catholics were treated equally in pre-independence Ireland.
So apparently Ron Paul did not address the AIPAC conference. I wonder if they invited him.
FirsterEthan Bronner is still reporting from Israel/Palestine. Indeed, his article in today's NYT, Mideast Din Drowns Out Palestinians, is actually datelined Ramallah (unlike his recent article about the Israelis shutting down two Palestinian TV stations in Ramallah, which was datelined Jerusalem).
The two 15-year-olds quoted are from New Rochelle, outside New York City, and Memphis. If they were bused in, it was from a lot further away than the D.C. suburbs.
The New Republic was just bought by Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes. I wonder if that will affect its editorial policies.
I would still like to have a date for that clip of Bibi. When it first showed up here on MW, somebody said it came from shortly before 9/11. I would like to have that verified or refuted, if somebody could please do it.
In 1992, Israel was in a desperate situation. The Cold War had ended, and Israel seemed to have lost its strategic value for the U.S. Time to find a new enemy to share with the U.S.
Up to then, Israel had had reasonably good relations (in secret) with the Islamic Republic of Iran -- as Triti Parsi detailed in his Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran, and the United States, and as Israel showed in particular in Iran-Contra. That would have to end. After all, people in the U.S. all hated Iran after the embassy hostages crisis.
No, war with Iran is more insane.
Number one, it's a much more difficult military proposition, and the down side is much worse.
Number two, we've already had the Iraq war, and war with Iran would show we learned nothing from it.