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MRW

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  • William Safire: Wars Made out of Words
    • MRW October 1, 2009 at 2:32 pm

      I know....wasn't that a great line?

    • MRW October 1, 2009 at 2:56 am

      I think he was the model Judy Miller must have emulated in her very effective but short career in spreading right wing lies into the population. Great point, syvanen.

    • MRW September 30, 2009 at 9:53 pm

      These struck out at me as so dead-on:
      His record ... would be worth combing ... simply as an exhibition of savage consistency.
      He ... helped to corrupt the public mind, and to break the public peace in America at a time of internal strife.
      [I]n the time he could spare from enlarging a war half a world away

  • No statute of limitations on using the Holocaust
    • MRW October 1, 2009 at 3:09 am

      Well, someone isn't buying it;
      link to huffingtonpost.com

    • MRW October 1, 2009 at 3:05 am

      Actually, Polanski is a hebephile.

    • MRW October 1, 2009 at 3:03 am

      and leave the real victims for the most part in a lurch (many have no idea how destitute some have been and become), but not a dime or extremely little went to them.

      God, this is so true. One of the Bronsteins sued on their behalf years ago in Switzerland and these survivors got bupkes. Zero. Zilch. The Bronsteins pocketed it, the bastards -- actually hid it by dropping it into Israel, which at that time had no money-laundering rules/laws, although all they have now is a semblance of them.

    • MRW September 30, 2009 at 9:40 pm

      Situational morality.

  • Why Obama's gotten nowhere with Netanyahu
  • Dowd breaks 'Times' seal on Safire's 'influential' religion
    • MRW October 1, 2009 at 9:11 pm

      I meant WJ, not MJ in both instances above.

    • MRW October 1, 2009 at 9:10 pm

      MJ, here is some of the evidence:

      [...] Concentration on Palestine

      Following a visit to the Jewish communities in Europe before World War II, Rabbi Morris Lazaron, later to become a leader in the American Council for Judaism, protested against the concentration of funding on projects in Palestine to the detriment of efforts to rescue the Jews of Europe, then under direct threat from the Nazis. He criticized the Zionist assertion that only Palestine could become a safe haven for the Jews and lashed out at the Zionist propaganda that sought to convince Jews that, sooner or later, the entire world would reject them. According to Rabkin, “Rabbi Elmer Berger (another early leader of the American Council for Judaism) attributed to the Zionists the same crime of which the Haredim accused them: of sabotaging any initiative for the rescue of the Jews of Europe, including the decision by President Roosevelt to find, during the earliest days of the war, countries that would offer the refugees asylum.”

      Morris Ernst (1888-1976), a Jewish human rights activist with close ties to President Roosevelt, informed his Zionist friends of the White House initiative to rescue Jews from Europe. He declared: “I assure you that I was thrown out of parlors of friends of mine. And they said very frankly ... ‘Morris,’ they would say, ‘this is treason — you’re undermining the Zionist movement,’ I’d say, ‘Yes, maybe I am. But I am much more interested in a haven for a half a million people — oppressed throughout the world.’” Editorially, The New York Times asked: “Why in God’s name, should the fate of those unhappy people be subordinated to a single cry of Statehood?”

      Several sources accused the Zionists of applying a policy of “selection,” that is, of admitting to Palestine only those most likely to make an active contribution to the Zionist enterprise. A 1938 speech given by Chaim Weizmann, the future president of Israel, is cited in this respect: “Palestine cannot absorb the Jews of Europe. We want only the best of Jewish youth to come to us. We want only the educated to enter Palestine for the purpose of increasing its culture. The other Jews will have to stay where they are and face whatever fate awaits them. These millions of Jews are dust on the wheels of history and they may have to be blown away. We don’t want them pouring into Palestine. We don’t want Tel Aviv to become another low-grade ghetto.” [...]

      link to acjna.org

    • MRW October 1, 2009 at 7:10 pm

      MJ

      In 1893 there were an estimated 10,000 Jews in Palestine, 61,000 in 1920, and 122,000 in 1925. All of these figures are only the best-informed estimates; there were censuses in 1922 and 1931 only, and even the 1922 numbers are contested. But the general trend is beyond doubt and very clear. For every Jew who went to Palestine from 1890 to 1924, at least 27 went to the Western Hemisphere alone. Relatively, the Zionist project was the utopian dream of a tiny minority and it would have failed save for two factors, the Holocaust and the much-overlooked fact that in 1924 the U.S. passed a new immigration law based on quotas using the nationalities distribution in the 1890 census as a basis, effectively cutting off migration from East and South Europe to a mere trickle of what it had been.

      In 1924, Jewish population in Palestine increased 5.9 percent but in 1925 – the first year the American law went into effect – it leaped 28 percent, and 23 percent in 1926. This was still a small minority of the Jews who left Europe but this sudden spurt was directly related to American policy. From 1927 to 1932 it never grew more than 5.3 percent annually and in 1927 it was a mere 0.2%. Very few Jews went to Palestine, and a small proportion of them were ideologically motivated; the vast majority migrated elsewhere.

      The British had always been in favor of Jewish migration and after 1933 it grew greatly – Jews were six percent of the Palestinian population in 1912 but 29 percent in 1935 – but now it was increasingly composed of Jews from Germany rather than Poland. These Jews had to get out of Germany, where the Zionist movement had always been very weak, and they were scarcely ideological zealots. Had there been open migration to the U.S. they would have gone there. Arab riots after 1935 compelled the British to reduce the inflow and in 1939 they adopted a White Paper enforcing strict restrictions on immigration.

      What is certain is that Hitler's importance must always be set in a larger context. Without him there never would have been a flow of Jews out of Germany, and very probably no state of Israel, but also crucial was the U.S. 1924 Immigration Act. Migrants went to Palestine out of necessity, in the vast majority of cases, not choice. Both of these factors were crucial, and to determine their relative importance is an abstract, futile enterprise. But without either the Zionist project of creating a Jewish state in Palestine would have remained another exotic Viennese concoction, never to be realized, because while the Jews in the Diaspora were in favor of a Jewish state, virtually none living in safe nations were ever to uproot themselves and embark on Aliyah – the return to the ancient homeland. They had no reason to do so.

      link to antiwar.com

    • MRW September 30, 2009 at 7:27 pm

      Lots of journalists can measure up to Safire. Chris Hedges comes to mind. And R.W. Apple. And David Binder. And Ambrose Evans-Pritchard. And Andrew Neil.

      He basically got his start as a PR flack who hooked up as Nixon's speechwriter. He got his column from that gig. Safire has nowhere near the on-the-ground background that Hedges has, or any of the others mentioned above. His journalistic stint was in the army during the war as a grunt.

    • MRW September 30, 2009 at 7:20 pm

      The early Zionists despised assimilation, kinda like the secular political version of the rabbinical edicts in the middle ages.

    • MRW September 30, 2009 at 6:59 pm with 1 replies

      mishegoss? That's the new spelling? How about meshegaas, the real spelling.

    • MRW September 30, 2009 at 6:57 pm

      These two hit it on the head. He roused us the Bronx senior-citizen crowd and the older Upper West Side crowd with a frenzy of Israel-Firstism. I know. I listened to it for ten years. the assumption of the most extreme views of Jewish and Israeli vulnerability as if they were inarguably the only positions a non-anti-Semite could take. Dead on.

    • MRW September 30, 2009 at 6:54 pm

      “Mooser September 30, 2009 at 2:13 pm
      Zionism did a lot for certain Zionists. It didn’t do much for the Jews, except to use Jewish desperation to Zionism’s advantage. ”

      Then.

      You may be right, but it doesn’t mean that Zionism/Israel doesn’t get heavy support among Jews.

      Now.

    • MRW September 30, 2009 at 6:50 pm

      As a result of the British mandate during the late twenties and the 1930’s hundreds of thousands of Jews from Germany and other parts of Europe were able to emigrate to Palestine, when the doors of the rest of the world were slammed shut. Those Jews were saved by Zionism.

      You need to read more, bub. Powerful Zionist forces were behind the 1924 US anti-immigration law that curtailed the huge influx of German jews, Catholics and Lutherans into the US and started the anti-German feeling of which Lippmann was a victim. Shut the immigration right down. The Zionist forces wanted the German Jews, of which there were many, to go to Palestine. Powerful US Jews like A.O Sulzberger of the Times and various prominent judges were against the Zionist putsch to create a homeland and cause this dissension. (Search the NYT morgue.) In fact, everything that they said would result, has resulted. Zionist groups convinced FDR and the Canadian Prime Minister not to let Jews into the country; they wanted them to go to Palestine. To say that Jews were saved by Zionism is to debauch history.

    • MRW September 30, 2009 at 6:21 pm

      Gentility comes from Gentile? In what ionosphere?

      No one really knew about the death camps until after the war, WJ. Director Billy Wilder told me that when he was asked by the German army psyops teams General to get over to Germany in 1945 and create newsreels about the concentration camps to disabuse the German people of Hitler-love that he piled tables with typhoid bodies to illustrate what had gone on and make people hate Hitler. The German Army was trying to readdress the message of what was coming out. Wilder had a General with his coat draped over his shoulders walk from table to table shaking his head at the 6-ft piles of naked bodies. It's now a famous newsreel that some mistake for gassed citizens, but they weren't, they were typhoid victims. The death camps info didn't come out until the prisoners talked.

      The persecution of the Jews was certainly well-known in Manhattan in the 1930s. They were massive demonstrations in NYC and at Madison Square Gardens run by various factions of the the Zionist movement. The German boycott was also well underway until that the Zionists broke it with The Transfer Agreement that gave Hitler his $6 million to start the war in return for 60,000 Jews going to Palestine in 1940.

  • Yom Kippur prayers can include Muslims
    • MRW September 30, 2009 at 6:05 pm

      Dead right. This knee-jerk division of the Middle Ages into the Abrahamic Three is so far off the mark as to be laughable. Here's another flush on the history we know so little about because most of us only speak one language and cant read in the original; hence, our arrogance subsumes our lack of a better education, which so few us us got in US high schools.
      link to newdawnmagazine.com

  • Arianna's friends
    • MRW September 30, 2009 at 7:08 pm

      Yeah, it was as if I heard the inherent stupidity for the first time (so that says something about my brainpower, or lack thereof.) I deny there's a Halloween. Shoot me. I deny there was a WWI. Shoot me. I deny Christmas. Run a stake through my heart.

      Wassup.

    • MRW September 30, 2009 at 7:05 pm

      Hunh? I call Likudniks right-wing rednecks; ditto Yisrael Beitenu. Period. Same as I called Bush and his ilk. They are political rednecks. And I've said it many times before on this board.

    • MRW September 30, 2009 at 1:00 am with 3 replies

      Just watched the Arianna clip on Glenn Greenwald's page. One of Arianna's breathless reasons for why Iran is a “grave threat to Israel” is that Iran doesn't accept Israel's history: The holocaust.

      Let pretend that's 100% true. So one country doesn't accept the history of another...that creates license for the historically challenged country to bomb the non-believer? Over not buying their history? That's a reason? I must be in fucking Neverland here. The insanity we're being sold. The idiocy.

    • MRW September 30, 2009 at 12:05 am

      Good piece, Adam.

    • MRW September 29, 2009 at 11:52 pm with 2 replies

      Then Arianna's gone...down the river. She's hooked up with the right-wing rednecks now and there's nothing we can do: HuffPo is IOT. She'll throw a one-sentence nod at the end of something about how things should be fairer, but more than that? Nah.

  • Sullivan says the lobby enables Israel to 'give the U.S. the finger'
    • MRW September 29, 2009 at 12:42 pm

      The blackmail here is the one Chris Matthews echoed piously last night: any criticism of Israel’s behavior is cast as a refusal to give the Jews a refuge in the world.

      Great line.

  • Gen McChrystal and the difference between an insurgency and an occupation
    • MRW September 29, 2009 at 12:34 pm with 4 replies

      For three decades, I believed that 'Israel is the most moral army in the world' myth. For three decades, I bought the fiction that the IDF troops were highly-disciplined and well-trained.

      Then I witnessed the attempted Gaza genocide – I wont call it a war: the Palestinians didn't have the armor or weaponry or troops to fight back; and as Tom Friedman wrote, Israel's goal was to inflict “heavy pain on the Gaza population.” It wasn't military wonderment or might. It wasn't brilliant military strategy carried out by a disciplined army. It was 'lets use all the American toys we have and dump them across the wall'. White phosphorous (now admitted to). Shooting civilians like fish in a barrel. Allowing troops to enter homes, defecate on civilian belongings and in drawers, write graffiti on walls, and terrorize children, with the blessing and urging of military rabbis. Destroying schools and temporary hospital camps. Etcetera. Etcetera. Military run amok.

      The Israeli Army has never fought a prolonged battle outside of its geographical comfort zone. They're big talkers, like the military advice they gave to Saakashvili for years until last summer, then beetle-assed it back home before the fighting began. (Saakashvili lost.) The Israelis wouldn't last two weeks in Iran if they had to actually fight there, which is why they need our troops, and our might, to pull off their preemptive strike. They're good at hit-and-run strikes, like Entebbe, which makes for good movie of the week re-runs later. The Israelis dont have thousands of years of military strategy and military discipline under their belt like the Iranians/Persians, whose history shows they know how to use it wisely. Wise military leaders, unlike Bush and Cheney, know war is the last resort.

  • Eliding Safire
    • MRW September 29, 2009 at 12:47 pm with 1 replies

      Safire was the patron saint of the now-over-65 Israel-First crowd in Manhattan and the Bronx. He led the troops back in the late 70s and 80s. Whatever he wrote, they parroted.

  • Mark Green plays religion card, and Dershowitz card, in bid for Jewish votes
    • MRW September 29, 2009 at 2:42 am

      I supported him to about 20 years ago, and I'm afraid this is the same idiot, although I didn't know it then. How do we extricate ourselves from this mess? Good question.

  • Israel lobby bares its teeth
    • MRW September 29, 2009 at 2:11 am

      correction, should read: that disseminated hundreds of thousands of the anti-Muslim DVD Obsession in a few eastcoast US newspapers under the CUFI umbrella

    • MRW September 29, 2009 at 2:08 am with 1 replies

      And, implicitly, a suggestion that some of the health-care rebellion against Obama was fed by Israel lobbyists. I went to a lot of these demos this summer, and there are Israel lobbyists all around.

      ”fed by Israel lobbyists“ – Of course it was. The health-care rebellions were copycats of Max Blumenthal's Israel videos in vitriol and labeling. I'll bet the Republican Jewish Coalition, the same group that disseminated the anti-Muslim DVD Obsession in hundreds of thousands of US newspapers under the CUFI umbrella, is in it up to its eyeballs. That wonderful Rabbi who runs jewsonfirst.org had the Obsession story nailed; maybe he's tracking this one.

  • On Yom Kippur
    • MRW September 28, 2009 at 1:02 pm

      Wonderful.

      All Americans, regardless of their religion, should heed this, and enjoin their own government from engaging in further global warring cruelties...the pain we inflict as a nation has been staggering during my lifetime. The Lancet said – the Brits maintained the morgue count after the US dropped it – that we killed 1.3 million Iraqis since 2003. For shame.

  • Arianna Huffington slams Israel's colonies/roads for making Palestinians 'strangers in their own land'
  • A prayer against coercion
    • MRW September 28, 2009 at 4:36 pm

      I, certainly, do not know enough to comment on the veracity of court docs, and I have not studied them. I remember reading a long academic study of the Nuremberg trial information, and noted the Red Cross figures, which some agreed with, others said were woefully understated. As far am I am concerned, I accepted the info in the category of 'duly noted'.

      I have no interest in Holocaust denial or its opposite. It does bother me that people go to jail for researching it or questioning the provenance of proof, as is the case in Europe. Sunlight is the best disinfectant, and that should be the criteria; why not let people investigate it to their heart's content? Let's say, hypothetically, that only 400,000 Jews were discovered to be eliminated in the camps. I still hew to the argument that Jews were persecuted for being Jews; that's like persecuting someone for being a woman, or a cripple, or a Muslim for that matter. It is persecuting someone for the concept of their beingness, and that is wrong. The numbers are immaterial. I objected strenuously to the 1400 Gazans killed for what Tom Friedman said was a necessary lesson to teach them not to exist.

    • MRW September 28, 2009 at 3:01 am with 4 replies

      The International Red Cross said at the Nuremberg trials that approx 345,000+ died in the concentration camp system. Total. I dont remember the exact number. But it was around 345,000. That was 'people died'; this number did not distinguish religious groups, and included those who died from typhus, which was rife. This included Roma, Polish, and many nationalities, as well as religions as diverse as Catholic to Muslim, and Jewish to Buddhist.

      The International Red Cross report said that approx 79,000 (74,000?) died at Auschwitz, which comports with the number that the Auschwitz Museum allowed you to peruse in their new database about four years ago, subsequent to the Russians archives discovered. Then they took it down. These were the names that came from the Soviet records, which showed up in 1989-1990 and were incorporated for a time. I spent days and days looking through them for the names of people I had been told died at Auschwitz. In many cases, I couldn't find them. For example, Wiesel's father was not there. So many of them were elderly and died from illness, or old age. The Auschwitz Museum documents provided English translations for a time, but you can't find them now. They were removed in late 2007, as I recall.

      The International Red Cross numbers (1945-47) comported with the Soviet records (1989-1990). You can research the Red Cross numbers at the trials via Google.

    • MRW September 27, 2009 at 2:00 pm with 6 replies

      Shlomo Sand's book is out. Anyone get it yet? My copy is awaiting me at home, which I wont see for a while.

    • MRW September 27, 2009 at 1:59 pm

      Chaos wrote:

      I continue to be amazed that it’s so easy to peddle Palestinian resistance as “Islamic terrorism” when, in fact, the Palestinian identity includes Muslims, Christians and Jews (people seem to forget that European Zionists attacked native Palestinian Jews just as aggressively, if they didn’t take up the banner)

      Very true.

    • MRW September 27, 2009 at 1:51 pm with 1 replies

      It begs the question, doesn't it, that if Zionists can't look at Goldstone's report with a cold eye and vilify anyone connected with it, what is it about the Holocaust historical documents they can't look at with a cold eye and have made it against the law to examine throughout Europe?

      I tell you, the reaction to Goldstone's report makes me think that maybe the International Red Cross reports to the court of the Nuremberg trials were accurate.

    • MRW September 27, 2009 at 1:46 pm

      LOL. You obviously didn't live on my street. Every second house had two kitchens and a van picked them up to go to synagogue on Friday nights when it was too cold to walk to temple. The kids could never come to my house for birthday parties because we didn't keep kosher, so we snuck them all hotdogs in the lane. I remember they always brought their own mustard.

  • Detaining the messenger
    • MRW September 26, 2009 at 5:33 am with 1 replies

      From Gabriel Kolko's How to Inflame the Entire Muslim World (January 22, 2009) antiwar.com.

      ...Charges of war crimes are now being leveled – and justifiably so – at the Israelis, many of whom themselves come from families that suffered at the hands of the Nazis over 60 years ago and now claim that the Holocaust was the only tragedy – as if the far more numerous deaths of non-Jews throughout the world after 1945 count for nothing. The United Nations and human rights groups are demanding that Israel be brought to justice for what now amounts to having killed over 1400 Gazans with immense firepower, many of which, like phosphorous bombs, are illegal. Israel has already prepared its senior officers to be ready to defend themselves against war crimes charges and Israeli Attorney General Menahem Mazuz several weeks ago warned the government was expecting a "wave of international lawsuits."

      It will now have to live with the geopolitical consequences in the region. Israel has, perhaps irreparably, imperiled its relations with the neighboring Arab states and other Muslim nations – Qatar and Mauritania have already suspended diplomatic relations with it – less because the ruling classes of these nations want to penalize it but because the Arab masses demand it, imperiling their own positions as rulers.

      Even more important, although the United States has loyally supported Israel for decades, deluging it with the most modern arms and giving it diplomatic protection, it is now in an economic crisis and needs Arab money, not to mention oil imports, as never before. The stability of this crucial alliance will now be tested.

      Since its inception, a cult of machismo – called self-defense – characterized much of Zionism, and although there were idealists, the mainstream was more and more committed to a violent response to the Arabs who surrounded them. The military was increasing glorified, including by nominal leftists like David Ben Gurion, so that today Israel is a regional Sparta armed with the most modern military and nuclear weapons, giving it a virtual monopoly in a vast region – one that will inevitably be challenged.

      Uri Avnery, a leading Israeli antiwar activist, wrote that "… hundreds of millions of Arabs around us… will see the Hamas fighters as the heroes of the Arab nation, but they will also see their own regimes in their nakedness: cringing, ignominious, corrupt and treacherous….In coming years it will become apparent that this war was sheer madness."

      We are living through yet another great tragedy, and tragedies have been the staple of world history for centuries. Now former victims and their descendants are the executioners.

      So it stands to reason that Israel is going to rope in anyone that accuses it of what we watched, ourselves, on TV during the attempted Gaza genocide last December. Some big effing democracy. It's a tyrant nation run by moral cretins, and what I object to is that it exported its Spartan approach here during the Bush years, and we're still trying to clear out the consequences. The Abu Ghraib tortures came right out of the IDF handbook they claim they dont have, but were proven to have in 1999. We have Tel Aviv-level security in American airports....for what? We have an Israeli security wall on our southern border, actually built by the same company.

  • Too unfair for words
    • MRW September 25, 2009 at 8:30 pm

      Making Aliyah does not excuse either her stupidity or cupidity about who owns the West Bank. Low-rent American escapes to cheaper lifestyle, is what this is about.

  • I got some guys I want to introduce you to you'll really get along
    • MRW September 26, 2009 at 4:47 pm

      What's puzzling about this ruling is that the Judge effectively limits the USA-granted individual rights of these grandchildren to the pursuit of happiness in ways they see fit in the future, unless they dont accept the bribery. Is this also the Jewish equivalent of Sharia Law being imposed in our courts? Have the US Courts permitted Sharia Law to supersede US Federal or State in certain jurisdictions, and for, perhaps, similar reasons? I dont know the answer. I do know that Federal courts have over-ridden religious tenets when adherence to it is deemed, in the eyes of the court, to affect the life of children: not letting a kid get certain cancer treatments, for instance.

    • MRW September 26, 2009 at 4:46 am

      Syvanen,

      I should probably go back and follow the thread before replying, but I'm tired. I pointed out that the charge of Jewish Bolshevism was an old canard that motivated antisemites here in the US and Europe almost 100 years ago.

      You can't possibly be denying the heavy number of Jews involved in the Bolshevik movement. There's too much evidence to the contrary. It was something that Herzl was sensitive to, something he could see coming up:

      Herzl was many things, including a very efficient organizer, but he was also very conservative and feared that Jews without a state – especially those in Russia – would become revolutionaries. [...]

      Europe's Jews have precious little in common, and their mores and languages are very distinct. But the gap between Jews from Europe and those from the Arab world was far, far greater. Moreover, there were many radically different kinds of Zionism within a small movement, ranging from the religiously motivated to Marxists who wanted to cease being Jews altogether and, as Ber Borochov would have it, become "normal." In the end, all that was to unite Israel was a military ethic premised on a hatred of those "others" around them – and it was to become a warrior-state, a virtual Sparta dominated by its army. Initially, at least, Herzl had the fate of Russian and East European Jews in mind; the outcome was very different. [...]

      Only the principle of a Jewish State, anywhere, appealed to him – but mainly for Jews in the Russian Empire. Herzl was only the first in the Zionist tradition of advocating a state for others; he was never in favor of all Jews moving there. Chaim Weizmann wrote Herzl in 1903 that the large majority of the young Jews in Russia were anti-Zionist because they were revolutionaries – which only reinforced Herzl's convictions. In 1913 British Intelligence estimated that perhaps one percent of the Jews had Zionist affiliations, a figure that rose in the Russian Pale – which contained about six million Jews – as the war became longer. [...]

      It is a Zionist myth that there were many Jews who wished to go to a primitive, hot, dusty place and did so. They did not – and all of the available numbers prove this conclusively. After the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917 the Pale was abolished and a very large number of the Jews in it moved to Russia's cities; many of them saw the Bolsheviks as liberators and filled the ranks of the revolution at every level. If they emigrated, and here the numbers are very important, it was not – if they had a choice – to Palestine.

      From Gabriel Kolko's Israel: Mythologizing a 20th Century Accident from the June 2, 2007 edition of antiwar.com

      You call it a 'canard' that Jews are associated with the Bolsheviks. It isn't a canard, no matter how much you might want to will it so. The truth is the Jews were, and no less an historian of Gabriel Kolko's calibre, who speaks and reads Hebrew, and who lived in Israel in 1949, writes about them in his books on the 20th C wars (although he is most famous for his far-reaching Vietnam book).

      Also, Sever Plocker wrote in his YnetNews column (Dec. 21, 2006) Stalin's Jews: We mustn't forget that some of greatest murderers of modern times were Jewish

      Here's a particularly forlorn historical date: Almost 90 years ago, between the 19th and 20th of December 1917, in the midst of the Bolshevik revolution and civil war, Lenin signed a decree calling for the establishment of The All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage, also known as Cheka.

      Within a short period of time, Cheka became the largest and cruelest state security organization. Its organizational structure was changed every few years, as were its names: From Cheka to GPU, later to NKVD, and later to KGB. [...]

      Lenin, Stalin, and their successors could not have carried out their deeds without wide-scale cooperation of disciplined "terror officials," cruel interrogators, snitches, executioners, guards, judges, perverts, and many bleeding hearts who were members of the progressive Western Left and were deceived by the Soviet regime of horror and even provided it with a kosher certificate. [...]

      And us, the Jews? An Israeli student finishes high school without ever hearing the name "Genrikh Yagoda," the greatest Jewish murderer of the 20th Century, the GPU's deputy commander and the founder and commander of the NKVD. Yagoda diligently implemented Stalin's collectivization orders and is responsible for the deaths of at least 10 million people. His Jewish deputies established and managed the Gulag system. After Stalin no longer viewed him favorably, Yagoda was demoted and executed, and was replaced as chief hangman in 1936 by Yezhov, the "bloodthirsty dwarf." [...]

    • MRW September 26, 2009 at 12:02 am with 1 replies

      They are under no societal accepted threat of violence as their Muslim counterparts would be if they marry outside of Islam Yes, they are. Google the past two weeks. And it is incendiary to say that Islam preaches violence if someone marries outside of Islam. It doesn't. Some fundamentalist Muslim groups might preach that, but it's not in the Koran.

      Why do Jews need their own country? [...] Jews need a sanctuary where they do not need to rely on others for their existence and it is people like you and the authors of this site that are making their existence ever more perilous through your fanatical lying. They've had their own country for 60 years, and dont nothing but war for more land. Israelis have relied upon American taxpayers to pay their freight. No on is making their existence perilous: it is the current Israeli leadership that aches for a pre-emptive war with Iran. Mooser's 'fanatical lying' endangers Israel? You sound like a fucking drama queen.

      As to the Arabs calling themselves Palestinians, there was no autonomous group of Arabs connected to the land. No unique group of Arabs ever defined themselves as Palestinians, no semi autonomous region existed during Ottoman times, the area was known for it’s Jewish character and nothing else. Holy smoke! You need to get out on the information superhighway more and do a little research. Palestine had a passport and all Jewish inhabitants of the land had one pre-WWII. You need to see the maps from 200 BCE to now, you need to look at UN documents tabulating who lived there in the 20th C , and you need to look at their money and coinage.

      People on this Web site are a little more sophisticated than you give them credit for. And educated. And the majority do their homework before walking in here with off-the-wall nonsense expecting sentient beings to buy it. Suggest you do the same.

    • MRW September 25, 2009 at 11:43 pm

      My only goal is the prevention of genocide. Of whom and by whom?

      The sort of demonization undertaken here has been proven to be a precursor to genocide and I oppose it heart and soul. Hunh? A little hyperbolic, no? Again, genocide of whom...I thought you didn't give a damn about Palestinians.

      Comparing white supremacists, who were all too willing to use violence in their hatred of the other is not a fair comparison of a Jewish leader who is FRIGHTENED of the other. Fear if fair as a reason to do hateful things, but one its consequences, violence, without the fearful expression to the world, is not? This doesn't make any sense whatsoever, the logic is adolescent and unformed. And furthermore, if Mr. Leader is fearful, he shouldn't be a leader. Dont tell me Jews are in danger of being wiped out in Israel. That's preposterous. [If they bomb another country again, they might be, but that's called creating your own demise.]

      The Rabbis that are afraid of losing numbers are afraid of the genocide that looms just beyond critical mass. Oh, effing pul-eeze. Critical mass of what?

      There is no Israeli law that discriminates based on race. Yes, there is. Israeli Arabs do not have the same civic rights as Israeli Jews or New York Jews, for that matter. What about not allowing Jewish girls to marry Arabs...is that a law or a religious taboo in Israel?

  • Is Rahm Emanuel washing his hands?
    • MRW September 25, 2009 at 2:27 pm

      Is Rahm Emanuel washing his hands?

      His job is done isn't it?

    • MRW September 25, 2009 at 2:26 pm

      From wiki:

      The title is a translation into German of the Old Norse phrase Ragnarök, which in Norse mythology refers to a prophesied war of the gods which brings about the end of the world. However, as with the rest of the Ring, Wagner's account of this apocalypse diverges significantly from his Old Norse sources.

      The term Götterdämmerung is occasionally used in English, referring to a disastrous conclusion of events such as the defeat of Nazi Germany which had an ideology in part based on Norse mythology.[2]

  • The days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are called 'the days of awe'
  • Netanyahu likens Hamas to Nazis attacking England
    • MRW September 25, 2009 at 4:47 am

      I tried to get into Albania in the early 70s. Not a chance. I was told I would be shot if I attempted it; couldn't even go near the border.

    • MRW September 25, 2009 at 4:46 am

      Also in the sense that Japan was aligned with Germany. So when we declared war with Japan, we were now declaring war against Germany.

      The King of Albania specifically aligned himself with Mussolini; he didn't want to have anything to do with Yugoslavia, with whom he was warring.

    • MRW September 25, 2009 at 2:14 am

      potsherd is right. The Albanians were a closed society throughout the 20th C until the 90s. Closed, as in anyone caught trying to leave would be killed, ditto anyone trying to get in. Their religion was what the Ottoman Empire practiced in the main: Islam. They sided with the Italians in WWII, and as such were aligned with Hungary and the Nazis.

    • MRW September 24, 2009 at 5:32 pm

      “A couple of dozen Israelis have died due to Hamas rocket attacks.” In eight years. The blitz lasted 60 days over three months. And the Germans used powerful bombs from planes, not qassam rockets that you make in your backyard, and go a few km.

    • MRW September 24, 2009 at 5:21 pm

      Netanyahu is either profoundly uneducated, or profoundly deceptive. If the former, he has no business being a leader of a 'nation'; if the latter, he needs to be globally derided for his revisionism.

      He's a moral cretin, IMHO.

    • MRW September 24, 2009 at 3:14 pm with 2 replies

      From Memory Lane of nine months ago: Mark Steel writing in The Independent on 21st January 2009:
      Now we've all seen through the Israeli government's excuses:
      If the Hamas rockets are so lethal, why doesn't Israel swap an F-16 for some?

      The worrying part about whether the ceasefire in Gaza can hold together will be whether the international community can stop the flow of arms to the terrorists. Because Israel's getting their planes and tanks and missiles from somewhere and until this supply is cut off there's every chance it could start up again.

      The disregard for life from these terrorists and their supporters is shocking. For example Thomas Friedman, the New York Times columnist, wrote that the purpose of the Israeli attack must be to "inflict a heavy death toll and heavy pain on the Gaza population".

      Replace "Gaza" with "western", and that could have been written by al-Qa'ida. Maybe this is the problem: the Israelis are writing their policies by downloading statements from an Islamic Jihad website and just changing the place names. Also, if the Israelis think the Hamas rockets are as lethal as they say, why don't they swap their F-16 fighters and Apache helicopters for a few of them?

      These things are capable of terrorising a whole nation for years apparently, yet the Israelis have neglected to buy any, wasting their money on gunboats and stuff. Given that their annual arms budget is $7.2bn plus $2.2 bn in "aid", they'd save enough to buy a selection of banks in every country in the world. [...]

      Another way to allay their worries about Hamas breaking the ceasefire is to read the report from their government's own Intelligence and Terrorism Information Centre. This states that during the ceasefire "Hamas did not take part in any rocket fire and sometimes prevented other organisations from attacking." Still, with all that's been going on I suppose they haven't had time for reading. [...]

      Maybe, best of all, was genetics expert Steven Rose who appeared on Radio 4's Today programme to talk about a new study that's located "morality spots", the part of the brain that deals with our morality. Asked how we could know whether this was true, he said in a marvellously posh academic Radio 4 voice "Well we could test the brains of the Israeli cabinet and see if they've got no morality spots whatsoever."

  • the deal
    • MRW September 24, 2009 at 4:34 pm

      Donald, I dont see a problem in Psychopathic god's statement that you cite; I dont see the inherent anti-semitism for this reason: if, if, Israel were to be so stupid as to start a war with Iran that the US has already claimed it would be forced to support, and oil, naturally, will go to $300/barrel, the resulting human catastrophe would sicken the rest of the world – all support for the US g.o.n.e. – the likelihood of World War III would be a 99% certainty, but moreover, the financial pain to Americans unable to afford gas to go to work, or pay the high cost of food transportation, would flick open the veins of anti-semitism in this country the likes of which was never seen in Germany, circa 1936. Support for Israel in this country is a mile wide and an inch deep. Since it is Israel, and not Americans, not Poles, or Senegalese, who claim that Israel is a ”Jewish State“ encompassing all the Jews in the world, it will be Israelis&Jews who will suffer the opprobrium, unless American Jews distance themselves from this insanity. There is no way you can escape that. Israel has set up its own self-fulfilling prophecy; it has not done what Italy has done, which is remain a Catholic country and the seat of Catholic power but be a nation first and foremost. Ditto Great Britain and the Church of England.

      The people who planned Israel were not the sharpest knives in the drawer, just the most ambitious and aggressive, and that continues today. They have zero knowledge of the turns of history and what created the leviathan power of the Catholic Church 1000 years ago that reigned supreme for centuries. If they did, they could have changed the world for real instead of produce the fakakta mess they have. I suggest you read this exciting preface to Tom Holland's spectacular The Forge of Christendom that explains some of how the separation of church and state came about, and the great power in it:
      link to tom-holland.org

    • MRW September 24, 2009 at 3:46 pm

      Not only a “sour take“ on the deal, but an educated one. Look who wrote that article Citizen cites:

      Alan Sabrosky (Ph.D., University of Michigan) is a writer and consultant specializing in national and international security affairs. In December 1988, he received the Superior Civilian Service Award after more than five years of service at the U.S. Army War College as Director of Studies, Strategic Studies Institute, and holder of the General of the Army Douglas MacArthur Chair of Research. He is listed in WHO'S WHO IN THE EAST (23rd ed.). A Marine Corps Vietnam veteran and a 1986 graduate of the U.S. Army War College, Dr. Sabrosky's teaching and research appointments have included the United States Military Academy, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), Middlebury College and Catholic University; while in government service, he held concurrent adjunct professorships at Georgetown University and the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). Dr. Sabrosky has lectured widely on defense and foreign affairs in the United States and abroad

    • MRW September 24, 2009 at 3:39 pm with 2 replies

      “Nations that favor Israel will prosper; nations that do not favor Israel will suffer.”

      Which was written into the Bible in the last 100 years. On purpose. This phrase never existed in the original. Why? The word 'nation' did not come into being until mid-last millennium. Further, the concept of a nation did not exist until mid-last millennium. Until then it was tribes, kingdoms, empires, fiefdoms, duchys, etc.

      The Dispensationalists (and Christian Zionists) use a Bible originally corrupted by Cyrus Scofield in 1906. The Scofield Bible (copyright owned by the Oxford English Dictionary, curiously) was the first time that the mention of Israel as a nation state popped up in any Bible, and it came on the heels of the 1903 Zionist conference in England where it was finally decided to go after Palestine instead of Uganda as a nation state for Jews. Scofield, a Kansas con who re-invented himself as a San Antonio preacher following two years in jail for defrauding his mother-in-law, spent four years in Switzerland reworking the Bible under the employ of Samuel Untermyer of NYC.

  • not everything's happening in Turtle Bay
  • White House phones Jewish leaders to promise veto on Goldstone
    • MRW September 24, 2009 at 6:54 am

      v... I clicked on The Game link, and not only danced around, but reveled in your ongoing great sense of humor. You do this time and again with your links.

    • MRW September 23, 2009 at 6:38 pm

      The American Conservative link is the same thing. The female Illinois congresswoman (senator?) must be quaking in her boots.

    • MRW September 23, 2009 at 6:36 pm

      We'll see. I dont leave out much hope. You have no idea how hard I worked for Obama to win. This is a disappointment to me of the first order. My cut-off with people is their actual moral compass, not their expression of it. So I will wait to see what I am dealing with.

    • MRW September 23, 2009 at 6:34 pm with 1 replies

      Sibel Edmond's testimony is fascinating. Read Giraldi's interview with her on antiwar.com. Yow.

    • MRW September 23, 2009 at 5:44 pm with 1 replies

      If this is true -- and I will make sure it is -- Obama just lost my support. And I worked for him, diligently, for a year before he caught on. I spent 20 hours/day working for him; I paid out of my own pocket to get him elected. He's finished. He's through in my book.

      I will now work as diligently to see that his is a one-term presidency. He doesn't have any balls, nor moral compass if this is allowed to stand.

  • rise of the realists, re Iran
    • MRW September 23, 2009 at 3:06 pm

      If Israel attacks, it will be the end of any sympathy, anywhere, for Israel. It will become a complete pariah state, and spoken anti-semiticism will sprout like spring crocuses worldwide with no one giving a damn for the consequences. Or giving much of a damn what Israel or "the Jews" think of it. Israel will, essentially, be doing to Iran what it did to Gaza, and the reaction will be severe and unpleasant for it. Existential threat or not.

  • misunderstanding the 'white left' and PEP
    • MRW September 23, 2009 at 6:08 pm

      Dont be too hard on Jack Ross. He is presenting potent and controversial ideas that must be discussed. I find his posts intellectually stimulating. Phil's ripostes are equally vivifying, and I enjoy this colloquy.

      Jack is not a knee-jerk whatever. He dares to challenge the status quo, and I thank him for it. His parents should be proud that they raised an independent thinker.

  • 'Israel ultimately is not democratic . . . and they engage in a light form of apartheid'
    • MRW September 24, 2009 at 8:00 am

      You can say that about a helluva lot of members of Congress.

      One thing Spitzer is not is “dumb as dirt.” He was the only one who was actively going after the Wall Street crooks when the MSM and Congress should have been seeing the looming disaster, and, in my opinion now, he was taken down for his pecadillos as a result. Read the WaPo Op-Ed on the day of his demise: Feb 14, 2008.

    • MRW September 23, 2009 at 3:09 am

      A sign in the middle of the clip says, "Pro-Israel U.S. Lobbying Spending (2008) $2.5 Million. Source AIPAC."

      Who do they think they're kidding. $2.5 million? Chicken-feed. And incorrect.

    • MRW September 23, 2009 at 12:12 am with 5 replies

      MSNBC no less. Does that mean Rachel Maddow, Keith Olbermann, and Chris Matthews are going to develop some cajones over the topic?

      Dylan Ratigan has an interesting show. He discusses the financial mess with Eliot Spitzer, who is one smart MoFo and should be pushed back into politics, preferably handling something financially-based. If it takes 72 Virgins to make him change his mind and run, give them to him.

  • Behind the moral veneer of Israel’s liberal establishment
  • Israeli filmmaker to Jerry Seinfeld: 'Don't cooperate with the occupation'
    • MRW September 23, 2009 at 12:54 am

      I also find that humans universally need some safe “bad other” to define themselves against. Yeah, until we mature as a civilization and the idea of a constant diet of the melodramatic cast of mind in which one side is wholly good and the other side is wholly evil isn;t going to define our perceptual beingness anymore.

      The opposite is the tragic cast of mind, or form, in drama wherein the main characters understand their part in their demise, understand they helped create what they're going through, and struggle with what they've wrought. They struggle with self-realization, and redemption. But you can't have this kind of drama in a culture until the civilization matures.

    • MRW September 22, 2009 at 11:47 pm

      I originally read that link as 'kibash'.

    • MRW September 22, 2009 at 11:46 pm

      There's a big difference with me between what I perceive as propaganda schlock and something that is beautifully crafted. But when I hear throw-away lines designed only to demonize groups of people instead of it being a part of the character, and therefore emotionally essential to the story, I get bored toute suite.

    • MRW September 22, 2009 at 11:40 pm

      You're not staying in enough. :-) These are on CineMax, Starz, Whatever, all the time. Usually with US Seals and a US official's relative involved. They're all pro-Bosnia. THey did a nice job of coming out with a raft of these things before the decision to bomb Kosovo, which I objected to. Dont get me started.

    • MRW September 22, 2009 at 8:22 pm with 3 replies

      "We’ll know things are getting better when Hollywood begins to portray Arabs as human being"

      I will no longer watch, or go to see, anti-Arab films made in Hollywood or anti-Serb movies. I turn them off, or I walk out of the theatre, no matter who I am with.

    • MRW September 22, 2009 at 3:28 pm with 2 replies

      I'm with you on this, marc.

  • Do you feel confidence in speaking up for Israel against the anti's?
    • MRW September 23, 2009 at 10:20 pm

      Thanks, tree. It works.

    • MRW September 23, 2009 at 2:59 pm

      Correction: the Bey boys.

    • MRW September 23, 2009 at 2:59 pm

      As I said, it wasn’t “the Jews” who defeated the Ottoman Turks and regained control of Jerusalem.

      Actually, it was, Mooser. It was the Donmeh Jews, the Beys boys, of Salonica who broke up the Ottoman Empire in the 19-teens. Ataturk was one of them -- reason why Ataturk wouldn't allow Muslim religion in government in Turkey -- according to Hillal Halkin, , who broke that story writing from Israel in January 1994 for The Forward. He repeated it in shortened form for the The New York Sun in July 2007 before that paper folded. The Forward story has been wiped clean from Lexis-Nexis and The Forward. But you can buy it from Highbeam Research. You can still google for Hillal's NY Sun story. Fascinating stuff.

    • MRW September 23, 2009 at 2:52 pm

      Ahh...tree asks my question, but in a simpler, and better, way: You feel it is legitimate to criticize Americans as being racist chickenhawks but surely you know that not all Americans are so. So ask yourself, is it also legitimate to criticize Jews as a group for their unthinking support of Israel, even though such blind support is not a characteristic of all Jews? And if not, then how is that different [than] broadbrushing Americans?

    • MRW September 23, 2009 at 2:50 pm

      I tried self-revelation and inquiry once, it was all right, but I never felt the need to masturbate in front of a mirror again.

      LOL.

    • MRW September 23, 2009 at 2:44 pm

      Hey, Mooser, bitch to Jeffrey Blankfort: he said it , not me, in the interview with Stephen Zunes I linked to. I was quoting. That's what italics are for, because I can't figure out how to use blockquote on this board properly. [Do you put that the quote in between the quote marks after blockquote cite="" ? Do you have to close it with a /blockquote or /blockquote cite? I dunno. I fuck it up every time.]

    • MRW September 23, 2009 at 2:37 pm

      I dont really understand your answer to my question, but it may be because I dont have enough coffee in the system right now to think straight; so I'll answer later.

      But I agree with Citizen. You're not on board with any duplicity, nor the other things Citizen mentioned, which is why I chose to engage you with a question I really want answered to understand your thoughts better. I relish the gusto of your posts, and sometimes you make me just laugh out loud. oh god, we are so screwed.

    • MRW September 22, 2009 at 11:36 pm

      What a truism, Todd. d be willing to bet that every person posting on this site has some group that he would be willing to oppress if push came to shove. It's called pecking order and regular humanity has engaged in it forever; the proclivity, however, is something that one overrides with age and wisdom, not necessarily in that order. For example, in Prince Rupert, British Columbia, Canada, the oppressed people are the Finns. The Finns! you say. Who knew.

      It is a characteristic of being unevolved as a human being.

    • MRW September 22, 2009 at 5:04 pm with 7 replies

      I'm a really big Jeffrey Blankfort fan, for two reasons. (1) He's a for-real mensch, epitomizes it. (2) His hard-bitten, high-end thinking is the result of a life lived by evolving, positively, from his experience. He's the only one whose 22-page interviews I can read without diversion. You can watch his wheels grind on paper, and he ensnares bad 'logic'.

      That said, here's Blankfort on anti-semitism: [I]t's only anti-Semitic if the truth is anti-Semitic [...] When the movement is ready to deal with Jewish institutions that are part of the lobby, and not worry about this bogeyman, “anti-Semitism” – to me, that's the first refuge of scoundrels. To me, we have to go beyond that, and one of the problems we have is that people who are not Jewish have been led to believe, to feel that if they speak out against Israel, they'll be called “anti-Semitic,” and that's nonsense. If they are speaking the truth, that's all that counts.
      Read the entire interview here:
      link to cosmos.ucc.ie

      I really hope Mooser re-reads this thread and answers my question, because when you substitute another group for "Jews" or "Israelis" when discussing some of these touchy issues, the arguments sound inane. How do we get beyond this divide?

    • MRW September 22, 2009 at 3:13 pm with 4 replies

      Mooser, suppose I wrote the following, how would you respond...and this is a sincere question because it gets at the heart of what Israel is: is it a nation, or is it some anomaly that no one is allowed to touch or talk about because a discrete group of people say so, and have a moving target of rules that the rest of us must simply abide by, whether logical or not? Further, at what point is criticism possible, and when it is possible, what are acceptable terms in your opinion?

      Generally I dismiss as anti-American any objections to the USA based on essentialist notions about “the Americans” (”the American character”, “American traditions” etc.) People in the USA are the way they are because of the situation they have made for themselves, or that has been made for them. Lot’s of other people, in lot’s of other similiar colonial (to be very general about it) situations have acted the same way, mostly with differences in style.
      But it is hard, very hard to talk to anyone about the USA with they make some stupid statements about the character of Americans and the situation.

  • Pastor Hagee's party of death (with Lieberman and Dore Gold)
    • MRW September 21, 2009 at 11:22 pm

      Part 2 wont go through.

    • MRW September 21, 2009 at 11:18 pm

      Part 1:
      Extremist right-wing Israel needs the Christian Zionists to hold down their US support. Without it, the hew and cry to stop annual payments to Israel would have reached teabagger volume, as it has in spots across the web. Hagee claims a 70 million-strong membership in his beliefs, when, if anything, that number represents the number of evangelicals in the country, and evangelicals are not uniform in believing the CUFI tripe.

  • thought experiment
    • MRW September 21, 2009 at 8:01 pm with 2 replies

      Of course. Then when Iran doesn't do America's bidding, the justification for bombing inches closer. Look how kindly we asked you to give your people their freedom.

      I'm catching on fast to how this zio groups work. Now, even Ehud Barak's statement last week that "Iran is not an existential threat to Israel" is suspect to me. As Jeffrey Blankfort taught me via an interview with Stephen Zunes:

      It's interesting – during the first Gulf War, where Congress was divided, Larry Kohler in the Washington Jewish Week, hardly a PLO publication, wrote how the Israel lobby decided that they did not want it to appear that this is a war for Israel, so they would have Jewish Congresspeople vote against the war, but have Republicans who they give a lot of money to – Mitch McConnell doesn't have a Jewish constituency, he's had a huge amount of money – to vote for the war. And still it was very close until Tom Lantos, who is a U.S. Congressman but who represents … according to the Jerusalem Post, he represents Israel in foreign countries where Israel does not have any formal diplomacy, and he brought over, or participated in bringing over … supposedly brought over a young woman in Kuwait who had been a nurse, and she talked in Congress how she'd seen all these babies thrown out of incubators. And this was a totally false story, but this was so convincing that Amnesty International criticized Iraq, and this was how the Israel lobby, with Lantos a part of it, gave us the first Gulf War.

      The second Gulf War was even more open. Not only do we have the neocons calling for it, but when AIPAC had a conference before the war began, they had all these exhibits about the threats of weapons of mass destruction on the part of Iraq, and a number of Americans, Jewish Americans included, like Robert Zelikow, chair of the 9/11 Commission, said at a panel a year after 9/11, “This war in Iraq was for Israel's security, but we couldn't sell that to the American people.”

  • feeling more hate in Jerusalem
    • MRW September 22, 2009 at 3:43 pm

      NPR, PBS, and now HuffPo, are the grand practitioners of red-herring-journalism when it comes to bigotry and racism.

    • MRW September 21, 2009 at 12:39 pm

      Let's see if they can drive this video off YouTube as they did Max's.

      N.B. For any of you who want to download videos like Max's or this one, use the free service at zamzar.com to convert any YouTube (or other) video in a wealth of file types for viewing on your own computer. MP4 is the best universal one. Zamzar converts it for you, and sends the download link to your inbox.

  • New attack on the Goldstone report - it's thwarting Israeli debate and reflection over Gaza
    • MRW September 20, 2009 at 7:52 pm

      Wow! Loved your comment, Marc. Great job. This is a keeper.

    • MRW September 20, 2009 at 5:29 pm

      Richard,

      The overwhelming majority of the report I've read so far is about Israeli war crimes. Overwhelming.

    • MRW September 20, 2009 at 2:36 pm

      What “war?“ The Israeli soldiers reported that they never once engaged in a battle with Hamas: they did not have one, single, solitary gun fight with a Hamas soldier; some of them lamented that they did not get the opportunity. As Norman Finklestein correctly pointed out on Democracy Now!: this was a massacre. Not a 'war'.

    • MRW September 20, 2009 at 2:33 pm with 4 replies

      Was the manner that military response conducted in conformance with international law, and good moral judgement of sufficiency.

      That's the goddam point. They came to the conclusion it wasn't. The Goldstone Report says no: what transpired amounted to war crimes and crimes against humanity. The report is 575 pages of thoughtful research and agony over the facts, written by four people with the training and skill to examine all elements.

      Landau is a journalist. His Op-Ed is mere inches of ink written over two days to bandaid the pus coming from the global reaction to it. His observations and opinion do not have the benefit of nine months of research and interviews. And you know what they say about opinions....

  • The third rail shrugs (Washington Post publishes Walt on Israel lobby)
    • MRW September 20, 2009 at 2:16 pm

      The is OT, but somehow appropriate to the discussion: I found the following comment on an Israeli blog, DesertPeace, that published “How I’m Losing My Love For Israel — The Polymath” By Jay Michaelson

      Israel has full pariah status now in the Netherlands, and it is not just in leftist circles and universities and campusses.
      It is out on the streets: say Israel and people start shaking their heads.
      Utter disappointment in the pro-Israeli circles, anger and despair in the moderate christian circles, total rejection among otherwise not-so-interested folks, disgust and contempt in comments on blogs left, right and center.
      Middle class, poor, rich, old and young: Israel has lost all support but for a handful of fanatics (and the very unpopular government) – among them Geert Wilders who carefully avoids the subject (like all media do, too) or he would lose votes.
      This is why he only speaks about Israel outside of the Netherlands, in english.
      The situation couldn’t be worse, or better, depending on your perspective.
      The Goldstone report hit home like a clusterbomb.
      This in a country where once 90% of the population backed Israel all the way.
      Israel has dug its own grave: this time, it cannot blame the victims.

  • Conservative rabbis call on American Jews to sing Israeli anthem in synagogues to battle Goldstone!
  • Talk to Ambassador Rice about the future
    • MRW September 18, 2009 at 5:35 pm

      Great letter. I'm traveling, but I'm going to find a Kinkos or facsimile that will allow me to print it out after I make the changes I want to add, and physically mail it in.

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