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Total number of comments: 7323 (since 2009-07-30 21:08:50)

MRW

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  • Aaron Sorkin's anachronism
    • MRW May 24, 2012 at 5:06 pm with 1 replies

      Also startpage.com and for Mac users, download DEVONagent and learn how to use it. Steep learning curve for the heavy-duty stuff, but you can run detailed queries that take all night but will search every research database in the world, if you want. A scientist's dream.

    • MRW May 24, 2012 at 4:57 pm

      Phil Zimmerman, not Paul Zimmerman.

    • MRW May 24, 2012 at 4:35 pm

      Eben Moglen. Eben Moglen. Eben Moglen. Eben Moglen. Eben Moglen.

      If you are sitting around burnishing Jewish pedestals to put your modern idols on, at least use a real one and one truly emblematic of the 21st C.

      Eben Moglen fits the bill. Zuckerberg only decided on an IPO in the weeks after Moglen's famous Feb 5 2010 talk in which Moglen sneered at Zuckerberg's 1910-level AT&T switchboard hub techno-not (he called them "doodads") and declared Zuckerberg "richly deserves bankruptcy" for his damage to individual freedom, privacy, and the human soul.

      Zuckerberg didn't grow that company. His panoply of experienced adult venture-capital investors did, like Thiel, starting from day one, and there is lots of tech press on that.

      Moglen, on the other hand, changed the world of technology. In addition to being a lawyer, a PhD historian (both Yale, I think), he brought PGP encryption to the world with Paul Zimmerman in the 90s, open source (free as in freedom) software to the world with Richard Stallman and still manages the GNU license, and Moglen INVENTED NETWORKED EMAIL WHEN HE WAS 16 in the 1970s.

      *HISTORY CORRECTION* -- Facebook did NOT figure prominently in the liberation of Egypt. That has been debunked, soundly. Only 2% of the country had computers at the time; people were using Internet cafes that Mubarak disabled (and you should recall how they cut off the net). The Arab Spring was sparked by a 20-year-old girl on YouTube. People used their cellphones and SMS, even though Google tried to take credit...yeah, only if you were rich and living behind walled compounds.

  • Affirming a Judaism and Jewish identity without Zionism
    • MRW May 27, 2012 at 2:59 am

      Hostage,

      Would you be willing to comment on this:
      Israel didn't come into being because of the Shoah; Israel exists in spite of it
      An open letter to Mohammed Bakri about the relationship between the Holocaust and the Palestinian Nakba.
      By Yehuda Bauer May.24, 2012 | 4:09 PM
      link to haaretz.com

  • What forestry teaches us about ethnic cleansing
    • MRW May 19, 2012 at 6:13 pm

      You are using the wrong word, Phil, and hence, are diminishing your argument(s).

      "Environmentalist" is too narrow, and the distinction is important.

      "Ecologist" is the correct term for the breadth it serves because the nature of an ecologist is to consider the consequences of the results of actions upon all living things and the constant/variable processes in an environment. They also consider all interactions of environments (broader: ecologies) within a living system.

      Environmentalists (and single-minded tree-huggers) say don't cut any Rocky Mountain forest trees, among there things.

      Ecologists (and recently US/CAN Park Wardens as a result of the devastating cross-state and province fires in 2000 and rediscovery of 100-yr-old Indian photos and text) know the forest must be culled intelligently and regularly to provide new food growth for wild animals and to give room for elk/deer bucks with 14-point racks and large animal families to roam freely. Ecologists know to rid a forest of pine trees ("gasoline") and keep the firs. It isn't a tree for a tree or forest's sake.

      Ecologists know that it wasn't climate change that caused the severe drought in northern Mexico. As Seth Godin remarked in a talk, it was hunters illegally killing four panthers that were responsible for keeping the rabbit population in check. The rabbits overran the environment, ate all the grasses, and turned the area into a desert.

      So these slow-minded wits who taunt you with Indian Chief garb forget (or don't know) that when the British, French, and Spanish were both forming alliances with Indians--especially in your neck of the NY woods where the Tyendinaga Mohawk and Tekanawita’s 600-year-old representative form of government called Tekanawita’s Great Law of Peace which became the basis for US governance--or were taking their lands in war starting in the 17th C…while all this was going on the Sephardic Jews (starting in the 16th C via Spain/Portugal/Netherlands) were selling Black slaves (a Dutch trade) to Central America and the Brit/Am colonies from their headquarters in Curacao.

      Tell your taunters racism is in their blood. Let's see them try blackface and see how far their constant and tedious fallacy of irrelevance arguments take them.

      For my comments on our Indian history, see
      link to mondoweiss.net

      and
      link to mondoweiss.net
      USG created an Indian policy post-WWII called Liquidation, then changed it to Termination because of WWII. Check out who was Secretary of the Interior then.

  • MSNBC: Israel trains Iranian terror group to kill nuclear scientists
    • MRW February 10, 2012 at 9:57 pm

      Must-read article:

      Published on Thursday, February 9, 2012 by Common Dreams
      Israel vs. Iran: The Truth Slips Out
      by Ira Chernus
      link to commondreams.org

      If Israel did use even one nuke against a conventional attack it would probably lose the last shred of its dwindling support around the world, including most of its support in the U.S., and end up isolated, a pariah in the international community. That’s the greatest nightmare for most Israelis.

      I haven't found Israeli officials good at assessing consequences. Why would I expect them to be any better at it now? Not wanting to be a freier is adolescent, to say the least; it's a peasant or a gang member's over-arching value.

  • Coalition of Syrian artists: Resistance liberates the imagination from slavery
    • MRW February 8, 2012 at 6:04 pm

      Here's some smart insight from "Daniel Trombly, a lowly GWU undergrad International Affairs major."
      "Syria and Irresponsible Protection"
      link to slouchingcolumbia.wordpress.com

    • MRW February 8, 2012 at 5:57 pm with 3 replies

      bumblebye, from MofA's comment section:

      FYI
      MSNBC Headlines Story Given to them by A Phony and a Liar:”Rami Abdelrahman” Does Not Exist According to the SOHR [Syrian Observatory for Human Rights]

      MSNBC is headlining a story this morning about the Syrian government “slaughtering” families in Homs (Group: Militia ‘slaughtered’ 3 families in Syria’s Homs) Their entire story is based on information given to them by a fictitious person inside the fraudulent organization the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR). According to MSNBC, the person who provided the details of this Assad government slaughter is “Rami Abdelrahman” of SOHR. The only problem is that Rami doesn’t exist. He never did exist. And the person writing under his name is a liar and a fraud and is making up bullshit stories. Who says that? The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights says that
      etc
      link to willyloman.wordpress.com

      Here’s what the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said about “Rami” on Jan. 17th 2012:

      We would like to apologise for any confusion that you may be currently experiencing with regards to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR).

      We would like to take this opportunity to give you some background information for your benefit.

      Firstly, there is NO individual by the name of Rami Abdul Rahman. This is just an alias that was being used by all SOHR members and mainly by the founders of the SOHR when articles were being originally published. SOHR

      Read the whole thing. We react to minute-30-quick-and-dirty reports on the TV or radio and have no way of confirming them. The BBC is pounding these stories late in my night with 'local Syrian reporters' who speak impeccable English and spout US/British talking points. I don't know who to believe anymore, but when the death of 1400 Gazans gets a ho-hum from our press, and they parade out these Syrians murders meant to make me wild with rage, my spidey sense goes all electric.
      link to willyloman.wordpress.com
      There are too many links to add here.

    • MRW February 8, 2012 at 5:45 pm

      How the hell do we know what's going on?

      Moon of Alabama is all over this story with succinct reporting and credible reports.
      The Western Logic Of Intervention In Syria
      link to moonofalabama.org
      The comments have lots of good refs.

      Libyan Salafis Killed In Syria
      link to moonofalabama.org

      The Syrian Death Numbers Are All Made Up
      link to moonofalabama.org

      Open Intervention In Syria Seems Unlikely
      link to moonofalabama.org

      So is Washington's Blog highlighted at nakedcapitalism.com
      Guest Post: Independent Report Contradicts Western Portrait of Syria
      By Washington’s Blog
      Arab League Report Shows that Syria Has Been Mischaracterized
      link to nakedcapitalism.com

      Some others from the past
      'Israel finger mark over Syria unrest'
      Jan11, 2011
      link to presstv.ir

      Wes Clark and the neocon dream
      link to salon.com

      Faking the Case Against Syria
      By TRISH SCHUH
      link to counterpunch.org

  • A lull on this site
    • MRW February 16, 2012 at 10:46 am

      Dan, [February 15, 2012 at 11:27 am]

      As I wrote Jeffrey Blankfort: I'm just a GB (Gentile Baseboard) on MW, something that goes around the bottom of the room decorating the wall, while the "elites" are checking out their coifs with both hands in the mirror higher up in the room--♫ I'm so pretty ♫ oh so pretty ♫.

      Me and all the rest of the GBs who helped build the traffic to this site starting over six years when Alexa.com had mondoweiss.net pegged at the equivalent of a high-school after-school craft class URL…well, now we know we're a peg above a guy who initiated the I/P activism in the 1970s, 40 years ago--when NOT ONE SINGLE PERSON ON, OR VISITOR TO, THIS SITE GAVE A DAMN ABOUT IT, OR KNEW ABOUT IT--with a title that did not contain the words Jewish or Zionist, because it wasn't germane, and he concentrated the title with the words of the real issue to be solved: Palestine or Palestinian. The GBs didn't get banned because, why? We didn't know as much as the banned person, the grand-daddy of the I/P movement in this entire country, a guy who started alone and suffered alone in an act of morality and simple justice. He gets banned. The guy who lived through WWII, and swore to never forget its history. That's what the jejune junks because a part of that truth he lived through and could document is apparently not only hard to take, but he refuses to be hijacked by pilpul*. (We GBs, on the other hand, we baseboards, we just take up inches, good for business. Helps the Alexa hit-o-meter. Also keeps the Zios hired by the Ministry of Information & Hasbara in Tel Aviv, whatever it's called, deploying pilpul on this site, 'natch, despite the lack of historical evidence).

      Of course, the commenters that contributed to this site are a good part of the reason why this site was getting national attention lately--attenzione that was BEFORE Blankfort was banned. His crisp thinking--and that of many others--are part of the reason why this site garnered attention. Don't think for a moment the articles were alone in doing it.

      I know some of you probably think: who are you? I didn't have a yellow star beside my name (a sign of donating money), because I forked over my 250 bucks nine months before yellow stardom was introduced, but I was going to contribute a lot more this month. (Now I can splurge on my vices.) But I wrote the equivalent of almost 10 books on this site in 2.5 years. I was here for six. That contribution has to count for something, even though a lot of what I wrote I recognize as an effort at understanding because so many of you here taught me things I didn't know and for which I am grateful and thankful.

      But I'm not sticking around unless Blankfort is here. I can do without the pilpul. So this is my adieu. It's been a great run. Truly. I am going to miss so, so many of you.
      ____________________________

      Don't miss reading these. They couldn't be more timely.

      * David Shasha: What Is Pilpul, And Why On Earth Should I Care About It?
      link to huffingtonpost.com

      * David Shasha: Netanyahu At AIPAC: Pilpul In Action!
      link to huffingtonpost.com

    • MRW February 12, 2012 at 3:22 am

      patm,

      I’m sorry to hear this. How did you hear about it?

      Googled. It's on seanmcbride and anonymouscomments Friendfeed Mondoweiss group. Search for anonymouscomments on Friendfeed and click on the comments link upper right and poke about. I don't know how to add a link; doesn't seem possible, but then I'm not a Friendfeed member. It appears that Jeffrey Blankfort replied there as well to confirm that the moderators threw him off for bringing up facts that Hannah Arendt, Lenni Brenner, Tom Segev, and even Hostage linked to.

      I find objecting to documented historical data dishonest. Doing it in the 21st C is unforgivable, but it seems that's what the moderators decided on. It will diminish this site immeasurably. (What do they say about the hobgoblins of little minds?) To imply, infer, state that Jeffrey Blankfort is an anti-semite, which I understand is what he is accused of (see Friendfeed), when what he actually wrote is far from it--he was fighting the I/P issue when some of the moderators here were in diapers or not even born yet--is tawdry, intellectually dishonest, and a flat-out lie.

      Guess I'm next for saying this.

    • MRW February 11, 2012 at 9:35 am

      Blankfort was banned.

  • Leading Zionist historian was first to say 'Israel Firster'-- in 1960
    • MRW February 10, 2012 at 8:31 am

      Wondering jew, it’s a really really really bad idea for you to equate opposition to ethnic cleansing and apartheid with anti-Semitism.

      And immoral.

    • MRW February 9, 2012 at 8:34 pm

      You know what you’re doing, and so does everybody else. You don’t use terms like France-firster or Russia-firster or China-firster or India-firster or Iran-firster, so why Israel-firster?

      Show me the links to government policy and laws that put France first, Russia first, China first, or India first. Go on, show us. List the names of US congressmen (House and Senate) who waste our national legislative time fighting to get France's, Russia's, India's, or China's best interests introduced into law here. Tell us how much taxpayer money goes to support France, Russia, India, or China. List it. And while you're at it, tell us how much military materiel we donate to those countries.

      None of us here object to personal proclivities, tastes, or emotional attachments. We object to policy manipulation, engaging in wars for the foreign country's benefit, and smearing and labeling Americans who won't go along with it, and who are fed up with it...which you are attempting to do with your sneer of You know what you’re doing, and so does everybody else.

      Edit: France, Russia, India, and China are not trying to start war with Iran with our money, men, or military. You're damn right we're going to object with the Israel-Firster moniker. You don't like it? Tell them to stop doing it.

    • MRW February 8, 2012 at 7:41 am

      Correction: it was November 2009: "Testimony presented before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on November 19, 2009"

    • MRW February 8, 2012 at 7:39 am with 1 replies

      Evan Kohlman is a joke, a phony, and a plant. If you want to read a real terrorism expert, someone who has been advising Congress (House and Senate) for 40 years, it's Brian Michael Jenkins. As Jenkins testified before the Senate in November 2010, there was more terrorism in the 1970s than now.

      Terrorist violence is not a new phenomenon. Al Qaeda and its jihadist followers did not bring terrorism to the United States. Along with its immigrant communities, the United States has imported numerous terrorist campaigns. Cuban, Puerto Rican, Croatian, Serb, Palestinian, Armenian, Taiwanese, and Jewish extremists have all carried out attacks on U.S. soil, in addition to the homegrown terrorist campaigns of the far left and far right. In fact, the level of terrorist violence was greater in the United States in the 1970s than it is today.

  • Bruising Judt, Fukuyama says Arabs aren't ready for liberalism
    • MRW February 9, 2012 at 6:56 am with 1 replies

      Rigging the past is the oldest form of knowledge control.

      Which is why I pissed that Blankfort has been banned here.

    • MRW February 9, 2012 at 6:54 am

      Fukuyama: “[My students] are fortunate not to live in a world where ideas could be translated into monstrous projects for the transformation of society, and where being an intellectual could often mean complicity in enormous crimes.”

      It's happening in the geoengineering world right now. Geoengineering is now called Climate Reclamation and their ideas are stunningly stupid, criminal. AND WITHOUT PUBLIC DEBATE.
      link to agriculturedefensecoalition.org

    • MRW February 9, 2012 at 6:48 am

      seafoid,

      Ten bucks says you're wrong. ;-)

    • MRW February 9, 2012 at 6:47 am

      i.e. the United States essentially reserved the right to commit genocide and it does not accept the jurisdiction of the ICJ (or anyone else) to make determinations regarding its responsibility for that crime.

      Jesus.

  • Jewish substitution and the white gaze
    • MRW February 9, 2012 at 9:11 pm

      Tuyzentfloot,

      I looked at the pictures. Never really read them, frankly. I was just ribbing Shmuel (although I did grow up speaking French.) ;-)

    • MRW February 9, 2012 at 6:38 am

      What I’m wondering though is whether anyone has found an ancient signet ring with the name Sarkozix on it :-P

      Ask Netanyahu Pere. He's the master at finding ancient rings.

    • MRW February 9, 2012 at 6:34 am

      Well, truth be known, I never equated Tintin with colonialism, only too-tight pants and bicycles. And even though I grew up speaking French, I had one of those families that looked down their noses at them. All this went over my black-sheep head. I was too stupid to pick up on what I was supposed to hold my nose over. J'aime les Français.

    • Page: 73
    • MRW February 9, 2012 at 6:23 am

      What are they going to call the "Jewish gaze" 20 years hence?

    • MRW February 9, 2012 at 6:20 am

      I hope you do, annie. It IS classic. (♫ It's my party and I'll cry if I want to... ♫ ... cry if I want to ... ♫ you would cry too if it happened to youuuuuu. ♫ )

    • MRW February 9, 2012 at 6:04 am

      Tintin? You didnt like Tintin?!? (I had no clue he was Belgian.) But his hair is all the rage these days.

    • MRW February 9, 2012 at 5:33 am

      Shmuel, you're developing Mooser tendencies, you realize that, don't you?

  • Would you buy a used metaphor from this warmonger? (Niall Ferguson's 'creative destruction' echoes Rice's 'birth-pangs')
    • MRW February 7, 2012 at 7:36 pm

      American, the blurb for the Op-Ed author says

      Stanley Zir is founder of Never Again is NowandVictorious America.com, "dedicated to the completion of America's destiny... in fulfilling Liberty's mandate: 'Our Eternal War on Tyranny'...."

      This op-ed is an affront to everything this country stands for.

    • MRW February 7, 2012 at 7:31 pm

      Great comment, Inanna, and thanks for rooting out where Creative Destruction came from.

    • MRW February 6, 2012 at 6:44 pm with 1 replies

      This series is banned on US TV. Internet only.

    • MRW February 6, 2012 at 6:29 pm with 1 replies

      teta mother me,

      It was further complicated by the Rockefeller vow after the Standard Oil breakup in 1911 (?) to 'break up' the United States in retaliation. WWI was when it was affirmed that oil determined the outcomes of war, not gold, so Rockefeller, British-Persian (BP), and Royal Dutch Shell divvied up the world into three areas of operation and dispensed with the colonies (Germany, France, Japan, etc) who controlled oil fields afar via war and treaties, and consolidated their hold. Even the Vietnam War had this as one of its basis because the fields off Vietnam in the South China Sea could supply the world for hundreds of years (Standard Oil completed it's 10-year survey of those fields the day our boys were jumping on helicopters form the roof of the embassy in Saigon).

      Laurence Rockefeller was General MacArthur's assistant in Japan in 1945, and had read the renowned geologist Herbert Hoover's book on world resources, the one Hoover wrote before he became Prez. Few know about it. As assistant to MacArthur, he collected all the Japanese weapons and instead of giving them to the Chinese (who would have prevented the Mao Tse Tung takeover), he promised them to Ho Chi Minh to take out the French...in return for Standard Oil getting its mitts on those oil fields. Ho Chi Minh reneged on the deal after ousting the French in 1954 because by then he knew about Hoover's book. So did the French, Chinese, and Japanese.

      There's waaaay more, but it's drinkey-poo time here, and that call is beckoning.

      Ferguson wouldn't write about this stuff. Why upset his sponsors.

    • MRW February 6, 2012 at 6:06 pm

      snowdrift, I loved Exiled during the Kosovo War, and shortly before when I started reading it. My tastes run to base male high school humor, and their escapades made the grade. ;-)

    • MRW February 6, 2012 at 6:03 pm

      Ah, thanks, Philip. Last I looked the Stennis was still in the Gulf or thereabouts.

    • MRW February 6, 2012 at 3:09 pm with 8 replies

      BillM, you mean fourth carrier. They already have three there.

    • MRW February 6, 2012 at 3:08 pm

      Another tidbit about that Adelson caucus on Saturday night, where Ron Paul won by 58%, was that it was specifically run at the Adelson Educational Center, with Adelson and his wife in attendance, after hours for Orthodox Jews and Seventh-day Adventists who observed the Sabbath.
      link to thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com
      link to lvrj.com

    • MRW February 6, 2012 at 2:11 pm with 2 replies

      Without checking, I'll bet Ferguson buys into 'The Precautionary Principle', enshrined now in EU statutory law, and unmasked in Part 3 of Adam Curtis' brilliant The Power of Nightmares that takes on the Neocons and Islamists. Here is a transcript from Part 3, about 48 minutes in. Excuse the length, but you need the preamble, or you can watch it on YouTube or Google video:

      [CUT TO SCENE OF FUTURISTIC ROADWAY AND COUPLE DRIVING IN FUTURE CAR]

      VOICE OVER: In the post-War years, politicians had also used their imaginations, but to project optimistic visions of a better future that they could create for their people, and it was these visions that gave them power and authority.

      [CUT, INTERIOR, DOWNING STREET: ANGLE ON TONY BLAIR]

      VOICE OVER: But those dreams collapsed, and politicians like Tony Blair became more like managers of public life, their policies determined often by focus groups. But now, the war on terror allowed politicians like Blair to portray a new, grand vision of the future. But this vision was a dark one of imagined threats, and a new force began to drive politics: the fear of an imagined future.

      [CUT, INTERIOR, TONY BLAIR ADDRESSING AUDIENCE]

      TONY BLAIR: Not a conventional fear about a conventional threat, but the fear that one day these new threats of weapons of mass destruction, rogue states, and international terrorism combine to deliver a catastrophe to our world. And then the shame of knowing that I saw that threat, day after day, and did nothing to stop it.

      [CUT, ANOTHER ADDRESS]

      BLAIR: It may not erupt and engulf us this month or next, perhaps not even this year or next …

      [CUT, CLOSE-UP ON TONY BLAIR, SPEAKING TO INTERVIEWER BEFORE STUDIO AUDIENCE]

      BLAIR: I just think these— these dangers are there, I think that it’s difficult sometimes for people to see how they all come together— I think that it’s my duty to tell it to you if I really believe it, and I do really believe it. I may be wrong in believing it, but I do believe it.

      [CUT, EXTERIOR, MOONLIT, DARK CITY SKYLINE]

      VOICE OVER: What Blair argued was that faced by the new threat of a global terror network, the politician’s role was now to look into the future and imagine the worst that might happen and then act ahead of time to prevent it. In doing this, Blair was embracing an idea that had actually been developed by the Green movement: it was called the “precautionary principle.” Back in the 1980s, thinkers within the ecology movement believed the world was being threatened by global warming, but at the time there was little scientific evidence to prove this. So they put forward the radical idea that governments had a higher duty: they couldn’t wait for the evidence, because by then it would be too late; they had to act imaginatively, on intuition, in order to save the world from a looming catastrophe.

      [CUT, INTERIOR, MEETING ROOM]

      BILL DURODIE [Director International Centre for Security Analysis, Kings College]: In essence, the precautionary principle says that not having the evidence that something might be a problem is not a reason for not taking action as if it were a problem. That’s a very famous triple-negative phrase that effectively says that action without evidence is justified. It requires imagining what the worst might be and applying that imagination upon the worst evidence that currently exists. [MRW: Durodie just smirks here.]

      [CUT, INTERIOR, HALL ; ANGLE ON TONY BLAIR ADDRESSING STATE FUNCTION]

      BLAIR: Would Al Qaeda buy weapons of mass destruction if they could? Certainly. Does it have the financial resources? Probably. Would it use such weapons? Definitely.

      [CUT, INTERIOR, MEETING ROOM]

      DURODIE: But once you start imagining what could happen, then—then there’s no limit. What if they had access to it? What if they could effectively deploy it? What if we weren’t prepared? What it is is a shift from the scientific, “what is” evidence-based decision making to this speculative, imaginary, “what if”-based, worst case scenario.

      [CUT, EXTERIOR, CAMP X- RAY, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba]

      VOICE OVER: And it was this principle that now began to shape government policy in the war on terror. In both America and Britain, individuals were detained in high-security prisons, not for any crimes they had committed, but because the politicians believed—or imagined—that they might commit an atrocity in the future, even though there was no evidence they intended to do this. The American attorney general explained this shift to what he called the “paradigm of prevention.”

      [CUT, INTERIOR, HEARING ROOM, UNITED STATES CONGRESS]

      ASHCROFT: We had to make a shift in the way we thought about things, so being reactive, waiting for a crime to be committed, or waiting for there to be evidence of the commission of a crime didn’t seem to us to be an appropriate way to protect the American people.

      [CUT, INTERIOR, OFFICE]

      DAVID COLE [Professor of Law, Georgetown University]: Under the preventive paradigm, instead of holding people accountable for what you can prove that they have done in the past, you lock them up based on what you think or speculate they might do in the future. And how—how can a person who’s locked up based on what you think they might do in the future disprove your speculation? It’s impossible, and so what ends up happening is the government short-circuits all the processes that are designed to distinguish the innocent from the guilty because they simply don’t fit this mode of locking people up for what they might do in the future.

      VOICE OVER: The supporters of the precautionary principle argue that this loss of rights is the price that society has to pay when faced by the unique and terrifying threat of the Al Qaeda network. But, as this series has shown, the idea of a hidden, organised web of terror is largely a fantasy, and by embracing the precautionary principle, the politicians have become trapped in a vicious circle: they imagine the worst about an organisation that doesn’t even exist. But no one questions this because the very basis of the precautionary principle is to imagine the worst without supporting evidence, and, instead, those with the darkest imaginations become the most influential.

      [CUT, INTERIOR, RESTAURANT]

      DAVID JOHNSTON, INTELLIGENCE SPECIALIST, NEW YORK TIMES: You’ll hear about meetings where terrorist matters are discussed in the intelligence community, and always the person with the most dire assessment, the person with the—who has the, kind of, the strongest sense that something should be done will frequently carry the day at meetings. We thus believe the most dire estimate of what could happen here. The sense of disbelief has vanished.

      INTERVIEWER: So the person with the most vivid imagination becomes the most powerful.

      JOHNSTON: In a sense, that’s correct.

      Besides, look who Ferguson is married to, Ayaan Hirsi Ali (and Geert Wilders’ buddy), two peas in a pod.

  • Abunimah highlights 'turning point' boycott conference
  • 'Romeo and Juliet' and the politics of occupation
    • MRW February 5, 2012 at 4:13 pm

      " The Jewish Zionist narrative encouraged me to co-opt this Palestinian narrative as a form of play. I molded my relationship with Khalil to fit into my narrative—my homeland told me to—and so with this, I missed the point entirely."

      Nice piece, Liz.

  • Organizers say pro-Israel filmmaker with controversial past deceives, disrupts Penn BDS conference (UPDATED)
    • MRW February 5, 2012 at 4:04 pm with 1 replies

      patm,

      "I imagine someone in the CBC news room is aware of Himmel’s lie."

      Then someone at CBC should be outraged. This is a member of a competing news org (if in fact Himel reports for Global TV) misrepresenting himself.

    • MRW February 5, 2012 at 4:02 pm

      HRK,

      You are missing the point. CBC reporters have press cards and credentials for a reason. You are living in an alternate universe if you can condone this ethically.

    • MRW February 5, 2012 at 4:00 pm

      Oscar,

      "he didn’t play by the rules by not getting the press credential and that is enough to ban him as a member of the media."

      No. He's a Global TV contributing filmmaker who misrepresented himself as a CBC reporter.

      To put this in perspective, it's as if a Fox News reporter presented himself as a NYT reporter.

    • MRW February 5, 2012 at 3:54 pm

      es1982,

      Max Blumenthal distorts what truth?

    • MRW February 5, 2012 at 3:53 pm

      Sez Winnica, who's been here a total of, what, 60 days?

    • MRW February 5, 2012 at 3:50 pm

      Someone in Canada needs to alert CBC that Himel and two women are misrepresenting themselves in the US as CBC producers or reporters. The CBC is a crown corporation.

  • Occupy Oakland's landslide BDS endorsement
    • MRW February 4, 2012 at 5:58 pm

      Allison, this is a good report that dovetails with what Jeff Halper said in Feb 2010 in Seattle about how the I/P issue is affecting domestic politics and law enforcement.

    • MRW February 4, 2012 at 5:56 pm

      So there are agents provocateurs in the crowd. Wonder where they came from.

  • Both sides are wrong in the ‘Israel Firsters’ debate
    • MRW February 7, 2012 at 7:18 pm with 3 replies

      patm,

      While I love Taibbi's work in general, his hard-on against anyone who questions the official story of 9/11, and his sneering that those who do are conspiracy theorists, are hard to take from someone who was a 31-year-old hard-core self-admitted heroin addict (for four years) living in Russia at the time.
      link to vanityfair.com
      His judgment is highly suspect on the issue. He certainly wasn't watching it in real time as we were, nor did he have access to local reports and eyewitnesses.

      Furthermore, there is nothing in his background, zip, to lend credence to any pronouncement he may make that the following (detailed by ABC Nightly News with Peter Jennings on 9/11) can be vaporized by a Jet Fuel A (kerosene) fire in 8.2 seconds, which ample video shows was the case: 43,600 windows
, 600,000 sq ft of glass
, 200,000 tons of structural steel, 5 million sq ft of gypsum
, 6 acres of marble
, and 425,000 cubic yds of concrete.

      So Matt Taibbi needs to be taken with a grain of salt on that issue, because I ain't buyin' stupid.

    • MRW February 7, 2012 at 4:47 am

      Thomson, no truer words:

      Shmuel, there is a deadly serious struggle now underway in America between pro-Zionism and anti-Zionism for influence in the conduct of U.S. foreign policy. As Paul Krugman likes to say in the different context of disputes over macroeconomic policy, “this is not a game.” The lives of many millions will be affected by the outcome.

      And had it not been for the net, we could have been at war by now. Should it get to that, however, the consequences could be so grave that we will have unleashed a horror few seem equipped to imagine. These warmongers need to be lashed to poles in the public square, and left there to live with themselves where they can do no more harm to the unsuspecting and ignorant (which at this point, unfortunately, is the massive majority of the nation). There is no justification for war. Period.

      You are absolutely correct to call it a deadly serious struggle here. And if an inopportune label can divert their insane rumble and use up some of their overwrought agita, so much the better.

    • MRW February 7, 2012 at 4:26 am

      Or, (seanmcbride)

      1. PIA
      2. PIM
      3. PIE
      4. PIT

      ;-)

    • MRW February 6, 2012 at 1:12 pm

      Prof. Emeticus.

      I love it when the vinyl glue fumes inspire you.

    • MRW February 5, 2012 at 4:32 pm

      The throw games analogy is apt, N49.

    • MRW February 5, 2012 at 4:26 pm

      jamiew,

      So, in your first argument in the comments, it is impermissable (OK, less than salutary) to argue against Israeli actions because America's are just as unforgiveable, as opposed to your moral stance that only war crimes in general should be objected to or admired as an objection. And your rationale is that objecting to Israeli actions as opposed to war crimes in general represents the "politics of resentful nationalism, rather than any principled concern for human rights or justice."

      Do I have that right?

    • MRW February 4, 2012 at 5:35 pm with 1 replies

      Yeah, this is happening. Danaa and I have been keeping tabs on the interstices of this in dull corners of (US) Flyover Country whenever we hear or see it for over two years. When people see ###-0 votes for Israel coming out of congress, US laws passed that are for the benfit of a foreign country--imagine a constant US legislative obsession with passing laws for the benefit of Sweden, or France, or India in this downturn--and absolutely zero being done to help people with foreclosures, mortgages, and jobs, resentent builds. The party that finished its eight-year term with this mess in 2008 has not made it a priority to fix it, instead it has (1) sought to undermine the succeeding admin because of it, and (2) gone overbord with Israeli concerns.

      Whether people like Obama or not, the spectacle of according Netanyahu status equal to the US Prez with those 29 congressional ovations years from now will be viewed IMHO as a turning point, and a stained marker of the inherent racism of white Baby Boomerism. By comparison, there isn't a chance this would have happened under Clinton or Bush. Not a chance. Neither the House nor the Senate would have allowed a sitting US President to be preempted that way.

      What happened in May 2011 when US expat Netanyahu from Philly addressed congress as he did had as much to do with putting the Shabos goy Prez in his place as anything else, and there will be a consequence that Boehner and Cantor were too unintelligent to see.

      [The proper place for N's words were at the UN, as he did in 9/10. Now the Occupy Berkeley crowd have made the issue of Israel peddling its Palestine problem to local law enforcement via violating US citizen First Amendment rights, and the issue is going to gain traction.]

    • MRW February 4, 2012 at 10:06 am with 1 replies

      If that's the only problem you foresee in obtaining justice, then getting justice will be a cakewalk. ;-)

      dbroncos, I don't think Max Blumenthal, Weiss, Horowitz, Rosenberg, et al, are going to get mistaken for Israel Firsters.

    • MRW February 3, 2012 at 5:58 pm with 3 replies

      A lot of words to say nothing.

  • Dershowitz justifies war on Iran (and Iraq? again?)-- and Mort Zuckerman rides shotgun-- in fresh attacks on BDS conference
  • Sullivan says passionate American supporters of Israel create a 'problem,' conflating interests
    • MRW February 4, 2012 at 7:31 am

      Thanks for the link, Chet. Gaffney writes about a 2004 Naval event that Bloomberg News covered, quoting US naval officers who said essentially the same thing: we have nothing to counter the Sunburn, or the Onyx.

    • MRW February 3, 2012 at 5:28 pm

      Israel Firster is not an insult. Neither is America Firster, or Cuba Firster. Etcetera.

      I will not be stopped, intimidated, or tried, by language police who seek to impute a meaning to it that does not exist.

      Sullivan is being too cute by half in waving that he would never use the phrase, echoing something Greenwald wrote (which Sullivan grabs onto like a kid behind the back of a bus in a blizzard). Sullivan only had the courage to come out from behind the PEP Israel curtains since Greenwald drew them and let in the light over two years ago. Sullivan is a valuable voice, nonetheless.

      But, why wouldn't Sullivan use that phrase? It's robust and descriptive, and typical American vernacular. It describes a truth.

  • Israeli officials say Iran's 'existential threat' is-- braindrain of 200,000 'best and brightest'
    • MRW February 4, 2012 at 5:07 am with 1 replies

      This is a disturbing article. Imagine if these italicized paragraphs from the article you cite read, instead:

      Virginia is one example of a state that has established a number of formal agreements with Russia. A number of joint operations have been created, including the Virginia Russia Advisory Board (VIAB), the Virginia Russia Partnership – created by Governor George Allen in 1995, and the Virginia Russia Technology Alliance. In September 2008, Virginia and Russia established a formal government-to-government partnership agreement when Governor Tim Kaine and Russian ambassador XXXXXX signed a formal research and development agreement between the Commonwealth of Virginia and the State of Russia. The agreement, like many between Russia and the states, includes military and security technology exchange. The important factor is that the agreement was signed between Richmond and Moscow, by-passing the U.S. Department of State, the federal department that has overall authority over the foreign relations of the United States and other nations.

      Defense links between the United States and foreign nations are under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Department of Defense. In 2003, Maryland Governor Robert Ehrlich and the Russian government signed the Maryland-Russia Partnership in Homeland Security, the first of its kind among America’s states.

      Formal agreements have been established between Russia and Alabama, California, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, North Carolina, Nebraska, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas (Governor Rick Perry received the “Defender of Moscow” and “Friend of St. Petersburg” awards from Russia), Virginia, and Wisconsin. Most of the state agreements with Russia have been concluded over the past five years.

      Or substitute any other country for Russia in the above and there would be an uproar in the nation.

      What are these "formal agreements" subjecting American citizens to? And why the hell don't we know about this?

    • MRW February 3, 2012 at 9:46 pm

      "Israeli officials say Iran’s ‘existential threat’ is– braindrain of 200,000 ‘best and brightest’"

      This artful logic and excuse-making for the over million Israelis who have already left in the last five years (Danaa says there are over 950,000 Israelis in the US alone) shows you how brain-dead Israel has already become: it expects people to buy this line.

      [Gee...it couldn't be because Israel is rapidly becoming a theocratic Sparta? And Shmuel left to protect his daughter's mind.]

  • So the U.S. military doesn't want to attack Iran and neither does Israel. Who does?
    • MRW February 6, 2012 at 12:46 am

      seafoid,

      What would happen if China sold all of its t-bills ?

      It would have to sell them on the open market, just like you and I (we should be so lucky to have that problem, hunh).

      If it took possession of that sale purchase in Chinese currency, China wants the exchange rate to be the same or lower--lower ain't gonna happen--as what it paid for it. This is why China fights the re-evaluation of the yuan. The cost of purchasing more T-bills would skyrocket (although some might argue that they would make more yuan on this exchange, that is not in China's long-term interest).

      On the other hand, if China sold its T-bills, but kept the money in the US in its reserve account, the Fed would credit China's reserve (checking) account at the Fed. A spreadsheet exchange. Why would China want to do that? Purchasing oil and American products, among other things, and a hedge against a repeat of the Asian crisis of 1997. The money stays in the US.

      China uses the Fed as its US local savings (T-securities) and checking (reserves) bank.

    • MRW February 5, 2012 at 2:37 pm

      Seafoid,

      "China is propping up the dollar in 2012."

      No, it's not. China's savings account in the US is at the Fed in a T-securities account. About 1.5 trillion's worth. China bought T-bills from us, and the money used to buy them is parked in this country. The 'full faith and credit' of the US is far, far, far in excess of $1.5 trillion. The US dollar is not in any danger at all.

    • MRW February 5, 2012 at 2:24 pm

      Dan,

      "Openly recruiting mercenaries from the ranks of federal troops, with the governments consent. But it wasn’t just security guys – almost everything from combat to intelligence has a large for profit element in it now."

      Who, other than the US, profits from defense and military equipment contracts in US wars? What Spartan country brags about its military technology prowess, and has positioned itself to supply the US military as if it were a factory in AZ?

      You need to spend some time at Grant Smith's site understanding the net effect of the 1985 Free Trade agreement with Israel, the first US trade agreement, because you are missing a gigantic chunk here in your sweeping description of an innocuous lobby soup. You ain't followin' the money, pal.

      Weissman can write what he wants to rewrite history, and convince people who weren't paying attention in 1990 or who have poor memories. I prefer treaties and actual timelines as a foundation. Go back and check out who was pushing the subsequent free trade agreements, and "fast-tracking" them. Sit down with a pencil and enumerate consequences over time.

    • MRW February 2, 2012 at 6:05 pm with 1 replies

      Gareth Porter adds: "But the Israeli government remains defiant about maintaining its freedom of action to make war on Iran, and it is counting on the influence of right-wing extremist views in U.S. politics to bring pressure to bear on Obama to fall into line with a possible Israeli attack during the election campaign this fall."

    • MRW February 2, 2012 at 5:01 pm with 2 replies

      I'm with you, annie.

      This is also accusatory in a way that derides fear of war that non-Jews like me are entitled to acknowledge and express, because I think there's an undertone of that:

      It does no one any good to conflate Israelis and American Jews in general with the much smaller faction that is beating the drums for war. Yet it happens here quite a bit.

      I am firmly, firmly, in the American Jewish Weiss/Horowitz/Rosenberg/Blumenthal/Blankfort (MW contributors) camp when it comes to a possible war with Iran. Yet, as a non-Jew, I am not entitled to scream bloody murder--even though I do--about the heinous consideration Israel is giving to this war, and for all the usual suspect and shopworn reasons.

      Newclench, like it or not, the people who can ride in with the Don't You Dare Do It In My Name are American Jews. Max Blumenthal's recent appearance on the Real News Network (highlighted on Naked Capitalism), sounding the alarm for the antisemitism that this war could create--corrupting American policy in Israel's interest--was 100% dead on.
      link to nakedcapitalism.com

  • 'NYT' gives Israelis its magazine to make an attack on Iran 'normal'
    • MRW February 1, 2012 at 5:26 am

      Dead right, annie. I've made that mistake before when I've quoted him. ;-)

    • MRW January 31, 2012 at 8:28 pm with 3 replies

      Wonder jew,

      Iranian support for Assad in Syria reassures you people, I suppose?

      Moon over Alabama:
      "Neocon Israel Mouthpiece Writes Syrian Opposition Intervention Paper"
      link to moonofalabama.org
      "Bashar al-Asad is right. There are international conspiracies to take him down."

    • MRW January 31, 2012 at 4:17 pm

      teta mother me,

      I watched that Barak interview on Sept 11, 2001. And I was struck, too, by Barak's preemption of US history as if he were the US President, or even entitled to speak as a US government official about the catastrophe and what it portended for us that day. (I haven't rewatched your link before writing this.) That little bastard was sitting in the BBC Green Room waiting to go on before the first tower fell--my television coverage showed him in a PIP insert sitting there, and he was highlighted as coming up in the next hour sort of thing--and he coined the phrase "global war on terror' that day. Made my blood boil.

    • MRW January 31, 2012 at 4:07 pm with 1 replies

      This could be a judo play on the part of the NYT. Israel now owns any attack on Iran, as Opeleye pointed out. No whining that it's being done for any other reason. The Israelis, and specifically Netanyahu, have put their heads on the chopping block of wanting a preemptive war. And lined up the heads of World Jewry ("The Jews" as they'll be called in shorthand) along with them as instigators of a war should they remain silent, agree to this, and it all goes horribly wrong (the concept of a 'Just War' notwithstanding).

      It raises a lot of questions.

      Did Israel and the Lobby allow this (1) to test US public reaction to a US-backed assault? (2) to taunt Obama into caving with the necessary cavalry? (3) to plunk down more See-we-re-not-freiers-and we-control-Obama bravado? (4) or, to corral the 70 million (per John Hagee) Christian Zionists to vote en masse for their candidate?

      Or, is the NYT cleverly opening up the topic of Israeli aggression and captivity of congress to the Sunday morning talk shows, the Alphabets, and the pundits who are afraid to discuss it head-on? Will Fox be able to avoid typing the topic on every crawl bar in every bar in the country, or avoid captioning Hannity, where it will sink in like a slow drip?

      What will the ex-military and intel officers do? What will they be called upon to leak? (This is the shit I love...when these guys (with their PhDs and MS degrees in military strategy and foreign affairs) combine their decades of experience and knowledge of the inner workings and cosmic/top secret/classified facts to clandestinely protect a country they're still sworn to protect; the Mark Perry leak with Robert Baer on obligatory talkshow parade being one tiny example.)

      Going to be an interesting spring.

  • Raimondo: 'Israel firster' did not originate with neo-Nazis as Kirchick and Ackerman claim, but rather with an anti-Zionist Jew
  • CAP censorship is inconsistent
    • MRW January 30, 2012 at 2:09 pm with 5 replies

      Justin Raimondo's column this morning on antiwar.com is entitled: "Putting Israel First—The War Party's Achilles' heel."

      He clears up where the term "Israel Firster" comes from, and produces proof.

      Today’s war propagandists have figured out a way to make the issue of American interests, as opposed to Israeli interests, go away, and that is by policing the language of the debate. Are you calling someone who wants to pursue Israeli interests over and above those of his or her own country an “Israel firster”? Well, then, you are “anti-Semitic,” you are employing the oldest “anti-Semitic tropes” and echoing “neo-Nazis,” who – James Kirchick assures us – are the originators of the phrase. This is the argument made by “progressive” Spencer Ackerman in a recent issue of the Tablet, in which he joins the neoconservative assault on Glenn Greenwald, M.J. Rosenberg, and four bloggers over at the Center for American Progress who got slapped down for daring to wield (or imply) this supposedly “toxic” phrase.

      There’s just one problem with this argument: it isn’t true. [...] it originated, as one can see here link to books.google.com
      with Alfred M. Lilienthal, an anti-Zionist Jew who wrote several books in the early 1950s and 1960s, notably "What Price Israel?"
      [...]
      It wasn’t any neo-Nazis, but Lilienthal, a political conservative and a devout Jew, who was the first to raise the question of “dual loyalty.” The “Israel Firster” meme originated, not with the neo-Nazi fringe, but with conservative Jews who, like Lilienthal, objected that:

      “My one and only homeland is America. I am proud of my belief in the age-old Judaic concept of one God in Heaven and one Humanity here below. But my faith does not pull me into a feeling of narrowly tribal kinship with all others who worship God in this way. Whenever I read of Americans singing the Hatikvah, Israel’s national anthem, or see youth groups raising Israel’s flag beside the Stars and Stripes. I am outraged. For Israel’s flag and anthem are symbols of a foreign state; they are not mine.”
      [...]
      Lilienthal was no fringe character: a diplomat who worked in the State Department during the war, he served in the US Army in the Middle East, and was later a consultant at the founding conference of the United Nations.

    • MRW January 30, 2012 at 2:05 pm

      Rabbi Haim Dov Beliak's jewsonfirst.org site was the first (early 2007) to get to the bottom of Clarion Fund/Israel/Aish Hatorah/Republican Jewish Coalition/Christian Zionist/Yisrael Beitenu involvement in making and distributing the anti-Muslim DVD Obsession.
      link to jewsonfirst.org

      CAP can scrub its website all it wants, but it cannot overcome the great and in-depth report that Rabbi Haim Dov Beliak, Eli Clifton, Jane Hunter and Robin Podolsky wrote in November 2008. It's a report worth keeping around.
      link to jewsonfirst.org

  • Wait-- do you like Israel? (Jeffrey Goldberg's ultimate test)
  • Abunimah and Woolsey debate BDS in the 'Philadelphia Inquirer'
    • MRW January 30, 2012 at 2:27 pm

      It is ultimately about getting some damn justice, for everyone, including kids and grandmas. That's the point. Chipping away with cultural inconveniences, while useful as a message to the unknowing that something is wrong, does zip to get foundational rights in place unless you demand them, and use the international courts to stop the injustices.

      I agree with both BIOC and Hostage.

    • MRW January 30, 2012 at 7:06 am

      Shaktimaan, I await Hostage's linked (and legal) response to this, which I am sure he has at his fingertips, because this is patently false (they owned the land, sweetheart, they were living there for centuries):

      My point is to demonstrate that the same rules regarding settlements that are currently used to disallow Jewish settlers in the territories can just as easily be used against Palestinian refugees settling in east Jerusalem or the west bank in 1949.

    • MRW January 30, 2012 at 5:30 am

      That Rendon story is something few Americans know about. Ditto Hill & Knowlton.

    • MRW January 29, 2012 at 7:54 pm

      You're right, Boycott Israel on Campus. It's all talk. All hat, no cattle.

  • Chris Hayes stunning 'Story of the Week' featuring Sheldon Adelson
    • MRW January 29, 2012 at 7:46 pm

      I absolutely remember this from the time (October 2001), Kathleen, but then I was travelling abroad and heard it there. It was standard MSM reporting.

      Anyway during our talks he stated that the government of Afghanistan had demanded that the Bush administration suppy hard evidence that OBL’s so called fingerprints were on the 9/11 attacks. . . . They both said that the Bush administration could not provide verifiable evidence at that time that OBL had taken part in the planning or implementaion of the attacks. [I thought everybody knew this!]

      And I absolutely remember the Convoy of Death.

      Adam Curtis has more in Pt 3 of The Power of Nightmares. . . a must-watch as well.

    • MRW January 29, 2012 at 7:40 pm

      All Chris Hayes did was broadcast a New Yorker story. His ass was covered as a result.

  • Isikoff expose of Gingrich backer -- 'All we care about is being good citizens of Israel' -- puts 'Israel firster' issue in mainstream
    • MRW January 29, 2012 at 2:41 am

      sean,

      Tweet this site to her.

    • MRW January 29, 2012 at 2:38 am

      American, peeesss,

      Ashleigh Banfield. She was creamed by the head of NBC News for discussing the dangers of embedding reporters in the military.

      The same reason why Adam Curtis' BBC The Powers of Nightmares is banned from being shown in here in the US. Part 3 of the series would take some heads off. I've been showing it to 14-year-old school kids...and (1) they are sooooo thankful because they realize they don't have to be afraid, (2) they're pissed at being lied to, and (3) I take infinite delight in watching the light dawn in their young heads by empowering them to question the BS they're fed.

      Edit: I start with Part 3. I don't even have to urge they watch the other parts.

    • MRW January 29, 2012 at 2:29 am

      Great catch, Hostage.

  • 'Tablet' says writers who talk about Israel Firsters are channeling Hitler
    • MRW January 30, 2012 at 5:10 am

      That image isn't so smart. It's badly conceived. It could also mean that Israel-Firsters, the ones pushing for it, are Nazis.

    • MRW January 30, 2012 at 4:58 am

      Abarbanel's articles are always illuminating (is she back in England? I thought she was in Australia for a while). I remember when I first read Israel's Growing Insanity. It was so dead on. And especially in her astute observation

      If Israel’s actions lead to an increase in fanaticism and in anti-Jewish sentiment, this is because this is what Israel wants to achieve, albeit unconsciously. But why does Israel need more fanaticism and antisemitism? An increase in real anti-Semitism and attacks on Jews would bring current reality into line with the outdated imaginary reality, and would help keep Jewish identity unchanged. The reality is that Jews have not been victims, certainly not of a genocidal regime for over sixty years—the Holocaust is not happening now and there is no attempt by anyone to annihilate the Jews. The fact that Jews live in safety everywhere and are not persecuted makes Israel uncomfortable. If the Jews are doing well everywhere, then Jewish identity is being put to question, and so is the very reason for the existence of Israel. The very state that was created to save the Jews from persecution, now needs them to be persecuted again so that it can continue to exist.

      These linguistic quibbles over "Israel-Firster" and other terms the self-proclaimed American Israel-First gatekeepers of journalistic and blogger discourse are attempting to stuff into the antisemitic girdle in order to control the discussion are, ultimately, going to have the effect Abarbanel is writing about.

      I'm hearing people who intoned sotte voce not two years ago about the sanctity of our relationship with Israel now heaving with disgust at the constancy of its bitching and warmongering [Israel's push for war with Iran is sinking in] and unending ploys for attention over its imaginary security problems. These are salt of the earth people who use their computers to play Fantasy Football, not nimble urban types who crave their NYT or would blog on MW. It's derision; however, I don't hear antisemitic remarks. (I hear an ennui, or a complaint that congress can't get its act together to deal with economic problems, or the crack I heard last week about 'Hey, you notice how everybody in the movies now is Jewish?') They've all had to go through raising teenagers and dealing with their dumb repetitive mistakes, hyperbolic emotions, and subsequent bad judgment calls. . . . and Israel is feeling about the same to them, a major pain in the ass. And they're switching over to sports in the bar when Hannity or another Fox News pundit is discussing Israel in the crawls.

      It's why I say, and I could be dead wrong, but I sense something beneath the surface that could turn into an equivalent of the hatred for France at the start of the Iraq War when everyone thought Bush was telling the truth: French Fries idiotically turned into Freedom Fries. These salt of the earthers have got kids living at home because they can't find good-paying jobs and they are worried about money, and saying things like 'Nah, they wouldn't be stupid enough to go to war with Iran'--said with apprehension, not assurance--which they know will devastate their pocketbooks with high gas, food, and food transportation prices. It might be the trigger that takes them over the top. Ron Paul is really popular in my neck of the woods, at the street level.

  • Iran sanctions backlash-- oil buyers ditch dollar
    • MRW January 30, 2012 at 3:32 am

      I want to correct the record here: it appears it was 1763 when Franklin went to England, not 1750. Also contains the attribution for the Franklin quote:
      link to coburns.biz

    • MRW January 29, 2012 at 5:32 pm with 1 replies

      The concept of "printing money" is a hangover from the days when we were on the gold standard. It has absolutely no application in today's US economic world. Zero application since 1971 or '72 when we went off it. It was used to describe a condition in which the amount of paper money in circulation, which was supposed to be backed by gold and could be converted to gold (therefore a convertible currency), exceeded the amount of gold available to back it up.

      Tying the US dollar to gold (or any metal) is an idiocy, because he who controls the metal controls the dollar, and the economic life of everyone in the country.

      That is what happened in 1764 when Britain passed The Currency Act to bankrupt and control its American colony...and it was that, not the Tea Party, which caused the American Revolution. Benjamin Franklin went to England in 1750 and was shocked by the poverty of the ordinary people in the streets, because he'd never seen anything like that before. The American colony used something called Colonial Scrip: paper money, which as he wrote of the American population at the time “Impossible to find a happier and more prosperous population on all the surface of the globe.”

      When asked by the Brits how we paid for our poor houses, he said, we don't have any. He said "We issue it [paper] in proper proportion to make the products pass easily from the producers to the consumers. In this manner, creating ourselves our own paper money, we control its purchasing power, and we have no interest to pay to no one.'

      The British bankers were furious and got Parliament to pass The Currency Act, which prohibited the American colony from issuing its own money and forced it to use currency it issued backed by gold. Naturally, it did not send over enough gold to back up the currency and the American colony fell onto hard times within the year. As Franklin wrote in his papers, we would have been more than happy to pay a small tax on tea had we still our own currency.

      This is what started the American Revolution, and why it's written into our Constitution that only Congress has the right to create money.

      Then, of course, Hamilton started a US Bank (private) that had a 20-year charter in 1790 or 1791. He was in cahoots with the British bankers. When it ended in 1810, or thereabouts, congress voted not to renew the charter. Rothschild, who was the power behind the Bank of England, went ballistic, and vowed to destroy us. That's what precipitated the War of 1812 that none of us are taught in school. The Brits won, and we had to go back on a gold-backed dollar that the Bank of England and the Rothschilds controlled. When Abraham Lincoln couldn't get the money to win the civil war from England--because they had all the gold--someone in his cabinet reminded him of the constitutional authority he had, and Lincoln created Greenbacks--PAPER MONEY--to pay the soldiers, and it saved the day.

      Edit: Paper money (like the Greenback) was legal tender based on the 'full faith and credit of the United States'. As the great economist Hyman Minsky used to say, “Anyone can create money; the problem lies in getting it accepted.”

    • MRW January 29, 2012 at 4:57 pm

      "In addition, countries stored their excess US dollars savings in US Treasuries, giving the US government a vast pool of credit from which to draw."

      and . . .

      "But there is one outcome that we foresee with certainty: Gold will rise. Uncertainty around paper money always bodes well for gold, and these are uncertain days indeed."

      . . . indicates to me that the Casey Research writer who wrote this piece picked up by Global Research has no understanding of how reserve accounting works. Zero understanding.

      The USGOV does not draw down on foreign investment in this country as a credit pool. This is absolute lunacy.

      When a foreign government buys US Treasuries, it is essentially banking at the Federal Reserve. It goes into something the Fed calls a "securities account." It is no different than if you or I were to put money in a savings account at a local bank, except in the geo-economic world, the measurement of that parking is called # of US govt treasuries. In addition, in order for that foreign government to get its money out of the Fed, it has to move those 'dollars'--a non-convertible currency--to its Fed "reserve account" (like a checking account) and convert it to something. The conversion can be to something it wants to buy or sell to us, in which case the 'dollars' gets transferred to an American bank via a spreadsheet change, or if it wants the money denominated in another currency, it has to do what you or I do: buy those currencies on the open market at the going exchange rate.

      I urge all of you, as I have before in a heated discussion on this topic, to read Warren Mosler's The 7 Deadly Innocent Frauds of Monetary Policy. Buy the book (which contains handwritten errata) or read online for free, without the two or three corrected errors:
      link to moslereconomics.com

    • MRW January 29, 2012 at 4:27 pm

      slowereastside, I agree.

    • MRW January 27, 2012 at 6:47 am with 6 replies

      B.S. The USA is now being destroyed by Israeli so-called high-IQ smarts on the geopolitical situation. Israel does not know what it means to operate on the geopolitical front. Zero understanding of how consequences produce the future; never had it in the history of the religion, even. Proof? Simple: what's happening.

      Unless Israel has set out to destroy the US specifically, in line with its vaunted self-proclaimed IQ over everything (something every sentient being should question), then the USA has doomed itself by hitching its star to the vagrant stupidity of Israel (doubtful whether Netanyahu could get elected dogcatcher in Philly, from whence he came). If the latter, Israel is destroying the USA and is doing it on purpose because it has another whale in sight to gravitate towards as a parasite. China? The Chinese are not that stupid. They call Israeli-backed businessmen: Tai Ren. A major sneer no one in the USA understands.

      The outcome? One of these three options, or maybe all three:

      (1) WWIII -- and US right-wing Jewish groups are to blame, and should be.
      (2) Anti-semitism in the USA as a result of (1), once the American People find out. And they will.
      (3) A destruction of over 400 years of protected US Jewry that those who should be protecting it failed to do. By implicating and threatening the lives of the 98% who held the 2% in high regard, they placed the 98% in danger, and there will be a cost for this.

  • The antiwar movement must rise again. Now
    • MRW January 30, 2012 at 6:59 am

      Good comment, quercus, especially this: "The feminists among them are convinced that it is acceptable to murder people in countries because the women don’t have the same rights as women here. They believe that mandating the freedom of abortion is more important than the lives of the already born in Afghanistan, Somalia, Sudan, Iraq, Pakistan, and any number of other places that have borne the brunt of American drone attacks."

  • New additions to the Mondoweiss comments policy
    • MRW January 26, 2012 at 4:31 am

      Alec, you could not have said it better than I. Well, yes you could, because you did. In mofo spades.

      Frankly, I think this is a disgrace for Mondoweiss, and the opening sentence announces the capitulation of the power that Mondoweiss once had and previously gave it its power: In a continuing effort to professionalize this site and give it greater impact, we have decided (again) to further police the comment section. When we were nothing, and these commentors (who, like I a gentile POS, have written 1.9 million words carrying you along, championing you) were just excess buttons on the inside of your coat until MW got respectability and suddenly unacceptable when history gets jettisoned because the possible gentrified might be offended, and people like Jeffrey Blankfort (or me, or 12 others) need to be kicked to the curb.

      In other words, 'we surrender to get greater professional recognition'. But Alec stated it better than I could, And he hits every single point that I feel about it.

      Phil and Adam: your site was the neighborhood gym with closet geniuses who showed up in their gonch. You're embarrassed about it, embarrassed about its unruly magnetism and the smelly power it has under the guise of needing to supposedly stroke newbies (fuckim'), and want now you want to be an Upper West Side brunch spot where the cognoscenti are seen with their NYTs and their dignitaries so you can open a branch on the East Side.

      Alec captured it instantly.

  • Video: Atlanta Jewish Times publisher's tearful anti-apology
    • MRW January 25, 2012 at 4:03 pm with 6 replies

      Winnica,

      THE TRAITOR The case against Jonathan Pollard.
      BY SEYMOUR M. HERSH
      The New Yorker, January 18, 1999, pp. 26-33.
      link to cryptome.org

      A conversation with author Seymour Hersh
      The Charlie Rose Show
      Wednesday, January 13, 1999
      link to charlierose.com

      Pollard - "Common Sense and Impudence"
      by Richard Sale (the journalist who broke the Pollard story in 1987)
      September 29, 2010
      link to turcopolier.typepad.com
      Pollard 2 – A Brief Comment Richard Sale
      October 2, 2010
      link to turcopolier.typepad.com

      I talked with Weinberger, who was up at his residence in Maine, over a period of years until just before his death. I won’t quote him, but his reaction to Pollard’s treason was consistently one of implacable outrage....

      Former senior DOD and CIA officials told me that Weinberger gave a secret statement to the court [some 46+ pages], before Pollard’s sentencing, that detailed the trading of stolen US data to the Soviet Union and the extent of the damage that trading had caused....

      The former senior CIA officials told me of the KGB-Sharon deal that took place on Cyprus in 1981 The KGB and the Israelis held regular meetings there. Weinberger never confirmed this, but we spoke on condition that he would correct what was false or mistaken in my writing. He never corrected this. It has to be understood that the trading of the Pollard information had a dual purpose. The first was to get more Jews out of the Soviet Union, but the second was to recruit Jews working for the Soviet Union on sensitive missile and/or nuclear issues.

      But what the soviets got in return was severely damaging to US security....

      However, Pollard’s most damaging gift to the Soviets was that of the US. [nuclear] war plan against the Soviet Union. including firing locations, sequences, and coordinates.

      Supplemental Declaration of Caspar Weinberger, Secretary of Defense
      US District Court, District of Columbia
      link to irmep.org

    • MRW January 25, 2012 at 8:55 am with 6 replies

      Why didn't he apologize to the American people? To Gentiles?

  • Ynet manufactures new threat to promote Ben White book
    • MRW January 25, 2012 at 9:15 am

      From "Searching the Brain for the Roots of Fear"
      By JOSEPH LEDOUX, NYT, January 22, 2012

      ...To make a complicated story very simple (though not inaccurate) a region in the brain called the amygdala connects the two events, forming an unconscious memory of the association. When the neutral stimulus (the rock or the sound of an airplane) later occurs, it automatically activates the amygdala like the original danger did, eliciting fear, and also triggers worry — anxiety. The automatic nature of the activation process reflects the fact that the amygdala does its work outside of conscious awareness. . . .

      In short, the capacity to fear (in the sense of detecting and responding to danger) is pretty universal among animals. But anxiety ― an experience of uncertainty ― is a different matter. It depends on the ability to anticipate, a capacity that is also present in some other animals, but that is especially well developed in humans. We can project ourselves into the future like no other creature.

      While anxiety is defined by uncertainty, human anxiety is greatly amplified by our ability to imagine the future, and our place in it, even a future that is physically impossible. . . . This raises the questions: How much fear and worry is too much? How do we know when we have skipped the line from normal fear and anxiety to a disorder?

      link to opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com

  • Israel is at the heart of Jewish identity, Gorenberg says
    • MRW January 23, 2012 at 7:58 pm with 3 replies

      "often do indeed recognize themselves to be not fully at home in the society they live in."

      Then they should try harder. I don't hear of massive amounts of Jews leaving Argentina, Uruguay, Mexico, China, and Curacao. And I'll bet you Shmuel is learning Italian just fine, and his daughter is picking up being a Roman without losing her Jewish roots.

    • MRW January 23, 2012 at 7:53 pm

      "...nice figleaf..."

      It's a holiday decoration, designed to dupe.

    • MRW January 23, 2012 at 7:51 pm

      Intelligent and logical response, Shmuel.
      January 23, 2012 at 10:52 am

  • Report: Israel to give US only 12-hour warning before attacking Iran because Netanyahu doesn't trust Obama
    • MRW January 23, 2012 at 6:32 am

      Bruce, BS, then he was lying then. Because he was hiding out at Marilu Henner's brother's apartment who was a photographer for the Chicago Herald Tribune. Black also worked for the Chicago Herald Tribune. I spoke to him then. He said the JDL had a contract out on him. I don't give a damn what he is telling you now. He said it to me then. Period.

      Didn't Black became a big Settler supporter in the years hence?

    • MRW January 22, 2012 at 5:18 pm with 31 replies

      Then , there's this Swiss settlement , which hasn't been fully distributed. from wikipedia:

      On November 22, 2000, Judge Edward R. Korman announced settlement of this case with his approval of a plan featuring the payment of $1.25 billion into funds controlled by the plaintiff organizations. He appointed Judah Gribetz Special Master to administer the plan, which is sometimes called the Gribetz Plan after its chief author.[12]

      By October 2009, some $490 million had been paid out to individual claimants, and acceptance of new claims had been discontinued for some time. This amount includes not only amounts deposited into Swiss banks by purported victims, but compensation for labor purportedly performed in displaced-persons camps, the value of purported looted assets, compensation for persons purported to have sought admission to Switzerland as refugees and to have been denied admission, both Jewish and non-Jewish, plus interest calculated on the claimed losses from the time of loss to the time of payment.

  • Community Radio: Media opportunity of a lifetime to build the Palestine solidarity movement
  • The Mondo crew hosts WBAI’s 'Beyond the Pale' to discuss Ron Paul, Dennis Ross and the myth of Obama's 'Jewish problem'
  • Publisher of the 'Atlanta Jewish Times' suggests Mossad should assassinate Obama
    • MRW January 23, 2012 at 3:32 pm

      Sean,

      ''Is Ostrovsky credible? I can’t be sure."

      I'll tell you who was 100% credible: Claire Hoy, the guy who wrote Ostrovsky's first book, in which O. spilled the beans. Hoy was (is) an established respected Canadian parliamentary journalist (or like a Bill Moyers/Woodward/Bernstein/Teddy White type) who only agreed to take on Ostrovsky's project if he absolute control over vetting sources and source documents. And he would not put anything in the book that he could not confirm. [That was one reason why Ostrovsky wrote the second book without him, according to O. who explained this anecdotally in a talk later.] All of this is in the intro to O's 1st book. I seriously doubt Israel would have filed lawsuits in the US and Canada to ban publication if concern was unwarranted.
      link to cwrtkingston.phpwebhosting.com

  • Jesse Lieberfeld is a, a fake, b, about to be swallowed by a whale, c, the Jewish future
  • Cyber-attacks strike Israeli stock exchange, airline, banks
    • MRW January 17, 2012 at 9:46 pm with 1 replies

      What's their operating system? What are they coding in? What language were they written in? English? Hebrew? How many systems are patched together? Who patched them and when? What compilers were used? When was the last time they were updated? Who did it, and what were their credentials?

      This story is lacking so many fundamentals that it is impossible to take it seriously.

      Something gets breached and it's the attacker who's to blame? A basic police report would contain more information about the nature of the breach, and don't tell me its national security not to discuss the details because that BS doesn't fly in an open source world. (Just read discussion of discussion of security holes on the web. Any serious researcher identifies the offending code, and explains why it was breachable.)

      The more I think of it, this is a gigantic bamboozle with a bunch of "Umm's." And there is an ulterior motive. Don't fall for it. It's a lot of hand-waving with no fundamental facts.

    • MRW January 17, 2012 at 9:38 pm

      Yeah, but what if it's kids who just want to have fun. A lot of these electronic systems are decades old with patched code created with out-of-date compilers. Don't buy this bullshit.

      These governments should be made to made to prove their systems are deemed impenetrable before slapping a terrorism label on them if they are breached. It's like calling a burglar a terrorist because he came in through an open window.

    • MRW January 17, 2012 at 9:32 pm

      Anyone notice that whatever curtailing of our freedoms here starts in Israel? Could this be tied to trying to get the net (here in the US) curtailed through phony cyber attacks?

      We now have Israeli-style airport procedures. We now have local law enforcement using Israeli-style tactics on our streets. We now have Israeli-style indefinite detentions of people deemed by an elected or appointed official an 'enemy combatant'.

      Cyber attacks are now Terrorist Operations? Oh, please. How about it's bad coding and poor SOP computer security on your part. How about it's your sloppy fault.

    • MRW January 17, 2012 at 10:20 am with 3 replies

      Shunra, interesting: "There is something very Israeli about the whole way this is done, and I don’t just mean the fact that the IP addresses doing the DDOS were from Israel (which, apparently, they were, according to reporting in Haaretz.)"

      What if it is Ayalon's son and it's coming from his own house.

  • A regular commenter on this site seeks a more temperate comment board
    • MRW January 20, 2012 at 6:56 pm

      Bruce, points taken and duly noted. :-)

    • MRW January 19, 2012 at 10:44 pm

      Probably like shit, Citizen--January 19, 2012 at 9:40 am--but guess what? You probably got better than the BS others, like me, were asked to believe. I'm not that impressed by Ivy League grads. I'm lathered with them.

      The only ones who impress me are the US military Masters degrees, or PhDs. They are drop-bolt sharp. (And the schools they go to are miles above the Ivy Leagues; read the Forbes Magazine rankings.) I'm talking a cut above everybody, just mo-fo smart. But the poor shmucks have someone like Thomas Barnett come along--what an insufferable prig, who denigrates their learning by claiming he can learn strategic planning on the fly...and the asshole (TB) is listened to.

    • MRW January 19, 2012 at 10:25 pm

      Thank you, Shmuel, you write what many of us feel.

    • MRW January 19, 2012 at 10:08 pm

      Bruce:

      "Israel and the main Jewish organizations recognize that non-Jews and non-Zionists made heroic efforts to save Jews during the Nazi era."

      But not the Jewish and Zionist organizations. My Jewish sister-in-law's mother would tell you what she encountered during the war: complete disinterest, they left her to die.

    • MRW January 19, 2012 at 9:58 pm

      Bruce, you asked: "Would the boycott of Germany succeeded had the Zionists supported it wholeheartedly?"

      Edwin Black believed 1000% in 1984 that it would have. I don't care what anyone says now, that is what Black believed in 1984.

    • MRW January 19, 2012 at 9:41 pm

      Bruce, [January 17, 2012 at 7:20 pm] none of us here ignore content that might be inappropriate. We are perfectly capable of writing caveats to content. Just as your uncle is ready to write you off for whatever, according to his worldview, we don't do that here. We give people their fair shake. That is the power of this board.

      That said, David Irving wrote several books about the most fascinating history of Churchill and Hitler. You diminish yourself not to read the books/information just because Deborah Lipstadt won an anti-semitism charge against him, in what? 2000?

      Maybe I am unique. I was accused in civil court, once, of something I didn't do. What I was accused of was so outrageous I thought the jury would see it, would see through it. I was wrong. I learned a punishing lesson: the power of the mob to circumscribe an issue, the power of appealing to the lower common denominator, which was in my case their lower intelligence...something I could do nothing about.

      You indicated earlier that you are much younger than me. If true, then I urge you: read everything you shouldn't, form judgments long after you are expected to, and fill your head with facts without insisting on conclusions. You will become a wiser person than I, and many on this board.

      And we await your wisdom as a result.

    • MRW January 19, 2012 at 9:12 pm

      Bruce, oh yes he would.

      Edwin Black would hardly agree with Blankfort’s analyses and conclusions as expressed in the interchange on MW.

      Wanna know why? Edwin Black had a death contract out on him by the JDL for The Transfer Agreement as originally published. For two years. He was hiding with my friend's brother at the time. I spoke to him (Black) on the phone at the time. I don't care what you gleaned from reading whatever version of the book you read. Blankfort is stating Black's position at the time (1984). Blankfort is dead on the money with what Black discovered. If Black should deny it now, he denies something he felt passionately about at the time. And I know that for a goddam, mothaphucking fact.

    • MRW January 19, 2012 at 8:58 pm

      Yeah, Bruce, I still have to answer LeaNder. I wan't making any point with her. I was just curious...because I wondered if the book was available in Germany. 'Natch I didn't write that, so it was misconstrued. My bad. Or, rather, my sloppiness.

    • MRW January 19, 2012 at 8:53 pm

      Well, Bruce, welcome to the club. You're one of us now. ;-)

    • MRW January 19, 2012 at 8:52 pm

      "your whole society has an air of totalitarianism." No shit, gamal.

    • MRW January 19, 2012 at 12:13 am

      Bruce,

      Oh yes, I did. The original one. It's been edited since. I pre-ordered it, and read it when it came out in early 1984.

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