Commenter Profile

Total number of comments: 72 (since 2012-02-25 01:55:40)

"Sometimes only anger is love."--Denise Levertov

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  • Glenn Greenwald brings facts and reason to 'Real Time', ruins Bill Maher's night
    • RudyM May 11, 2013 at 2:27 pm with 19 replies

      Nicely played by Greenwald. I find Bill Maher painful to watch though. He's basically just a clown, egged on by the more idiotic portion of his audience which seems to worship his smugness.

      I think there is more that could be said about the U.S. government playing both sides, including some possible historical ties between CIA and the Muslim Brotherhood, but I haven't looked at that closely enough to be sure. I can say for sure that without the U.S. government's involvement in organizing extremist Islamist guerillas/terrorists as proxies, the phenomenon would be much weaker. Afghanistan, Gladio B (see Sibel Edmonds), and recent surprisingly open instances of U.S. backing for Salafists in Libya and Syria.

      Greenwald has something up now about he Maher segment:

      link to guardian.co.uk

      I do think Islam, as conceived by its founder, lends itself to more repressive, less open societies than Christianity; Jesus was not about taking the reins of political power, even if it didn't take long for Christianity to merge with state power. The fact that all major schools of Islamic law endorse the death penalty for apostasy is unforgivable in my view.

  • Post-Boston vulnerability will at last force Americans to consider 'why they hate us'
    • RudyM April 27, 2013 at 9:37 pm

      Perfect timing: the blog I linked to alongside the link to the Sibel Edmonds video, mad a post more or less attacking Sibel Edmonds. Haha! That's life in the rough and tumble world outside mainstream media.

      I am probably jumping too quickly to repeat what is basically Edmonds's hypothesis (she does present it as a hypothesis and not a certainty) of the likely reason these attacks were made to happen.

      (I have seen more or less the same idea expressed by others, even here I think, in some comments.)

    • RudyM April 27, 2013 at 12:55 pm with 2 replies

      Cut the progressive blowback b.s. There's already more analysis of the Boston Bombing than I've had time to really digest, but this conversation with Sibel Edmonds provides what I find to be a more realistic interpretation of events than what you seem to be embracing:

      Sibel Edmonds on the Boston Bombing

      Lot's of good stuff here, as well: American Everyman

      I guess I'm not feeling to optimistic at the moment, since, no, I don't think this will force Americans to ask what they hate us, not while they are busy chanting "USA!" in Boston. If anything, I think this is another false flag at least partially designed to lead to more war--in this case a sop to Russia in return for getting it to back off on opposing further attacks on Syria.

      (I hope my html works this time.)

  • Boston Marathon bombings unleash a new wave of Islamophobia
  • Swift change in attitudes on same-sex marriage portends swift change on... marriage to Israel
    • RudyM April 6, 2013 at 12:36 pm with 3 replies

      This seems like a pretty shaky comparison. Gay marriage fits with a general trend toward what might be called lifestyle politics. Liberalizing drug laws, mentioned in the quoted passage, tends to fit in with that trend as well. In my view, there is a frightening degree of disengagement (among millennials) on issues of foreign policy, economics (particularly economic issues most relevant to the recent financial crisis/crises), and civil liberties. I admit this is based on personal impressions. I don't have any hard statistics (if they ever are hard) to back up this observation. Also, the traditional signifiers of gay male sub-culture are usually FUN just like America's hyper-extroverted culture is FUN FUN FUN. Palestinians are less immediately and obviously fun. Obviously they can be, but it's not close to being the first thing associated with them in American popular culture.

      While in some way I find the rapid change in attitudes on gay marriage to be dizzying, it has also been a long time coming. Before gay acceptance hit the mass media, there was a history of openly gay figures in high culture unapologetically asserting their identity. I feel that I have some perspective on this thanks to having been seriously interested in poetry in my youth, which, on the side, gave me a bit of a capsule history of the struggle for gay rights. I don't see any corresponding long-term high culture movement or drift on the issue of Palestinian rights. (Reading lots of modern/contemporary American poetry left me as ignorant as I was otherwise on this particular issue.)

      But I agree that if a major shift on Israel-Palestine has occurred on the part of opinion makers, then at some point that could lead to a surprisingly swift change in public opinion. Also, no doubt the internet has made it easier to get out facts and analyses which otherwise would have gone unheard. It's still new enough that one can't predict what further changes it will lead to, though, again anecdotally, I don't observe many of the young people around me taking much advantage of the internet as a source for alternative information. I see a lot of them glued to Facebook and more interested in watching videos of people eating live tarantulas. Or Glee episodes.

      But I hope INSS's worries are justified!

      (As an aside, I am not pleased that public opinion is so easily pushed around by the mass media.

      And apologies for so much half-assed social commentary in this post.)

  • NPR can't stop talking about Jews
    • RudyM March 26, 2013 at 2:36 pm

      I think you missed the joke, actually.

    • RudyM March 25, 2013 at 7:30 pm with 3 replies

      Also, notice the complete lack of coverage of Buddhism.

      I've heard NPR cover Buddhists. What about Philip Glass? Allen Ginsberg? Leonard Cohen?

    • RudyM March 25, 2013 at 4:00 pm with 1 replies

      If there were, for example, a “Methodist state” locked in conflict with its indigenous population. . .

      As the son of a Methodist minister who was the son of a Methodist minister, I demand beach front property in Ocean City, NJ now!

      (Hmmm. Maybe this explains why Jewish humor is more popular than Methodist humor.)

  • Obama's heckler asked about Rachel Corrie, not Jonathan Pollard
    • RudyM March 24, 2013 at 11:31 am

      I think you are claiming a degree of independence for public opinion which is unrealistic. Why would the enormous apparatus of public relations and propaganda exist? You do agree that there is such a thing as public relations and propaganda, or do you think they are conspiracy theories? Once you admit that there are some people out to covertly influence other people's opinion, it could be a slippery slope to the land of conspiracy theory. Better be careful.

      I admit, it's natural enough for people to simply be more concerned with their own immediate lives (though even that is something which can be cultivated and encouraged by outside influences, to produce a more disengaged population).

      Nevertheless, opinions about foreign policy and complex economic issues (among others) don't spring out of nowhere.

      (Don't change the style of your posts. I don't see what is so difficult to read about them.)

    • RudyM March 23, 2013 at 10:49 pm with 10 replies

      If the (Zionist owned, or at least largely so) corporate media pounded the Rachel Corrie story into people's heads; if they frequently showed the full clip of Rachel Corrie's famous childhood speech juxtaposed with footage of her death; if the rest of their coverage went into some detail about the suffering Palestinians experience on an ongoing basis; and if Hollywood routinely turned out new movies, focused on the suffering of specific individuals, about the Zionist's terrorist attacks on villages in the 1940s, or the Israeli killing of "infiltrators" just coming to look once again at their own land in the 1950s, I think their might be a groundswell of interest in Rachel Corrie, or at least the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

  • Day Two of Obama in Israel/Palestine — Obama visits Ramallah and addresses the Israeli people
    • RudyM March 22, 2013 at 6:27 pm

      There is a report on Electronic Intifada that the heckler during Obama's speech was actually pro-Palestinian and raised the issue of Rachel Corrie:

      link to electronicintifada.net

      Can anyone here understand what was said by the heckler?

    • RudyM March 22, 2013 at 1:02 am

      Just as Israelis built a state in their homeland, Palestinians have a right to be a free people in their own land.

      Unfortunately that Jewish homeland happens to be the Palestinians' homeland (only the claims to that land of the former are vastly less convincing than the claims of the latter).

      And one other thing: Obama is unworthy of shaking the hands of children anywhere in the world. They are infinitely worthier than he is as the leader of U.S. empire.

    • RudyM March 21, 2013 at 4:33 pm

      I've got some great Palestinian bagpipe music on cassette, and there is plenty of unequivocally Arab bagpipe music out there. Maybe what I'm hearing is not technically a bagpipe but something closely related, but that's what it sounds like to me.

      Also see comment above that the instrument probably goes back to the Middle East to begin with.

  • Landmark 'NYT Magazine' cover story ennobles resistance in Nabi Saleh
    • RudyM March 17, 2013 at 10:46 pm

      This definitely seems like a big deal, because it's the New York Times. How rapidly would U.S. public opinion change if the coverage of the mainstream media would change along the lines of this story? I wonder.

  • Israelis flock to Berlin-- some for 'multicultural vibe'
    • RudyM March 10, 2013 at 4:28 pm with 2 replies

      This reminds me of Spain inviting Sephardic Jews back to the motherland:

      link to bbc.co.uk

      In November, Spain's justice minister Alberto Ruiz-Gallardon announced a plan to give descendants of Spain's original Jewish community - known as Sephardic Jews - a fast-track to a Spanish passport and Spanish citizenship.

      Beating Zionism at its own game?

      (Granted, Spain isn't the most inviting country at the moment for economic reasons.)

  • NPR blames the victim: Emad Burnat brought suffering to Bil'in by filming occupiers
    • RudyM February 21, 2013 at 11:55 am with 4 replies

      "One listener has written to say that Jews should not be assigned to cover this conflict. An inevitable, unfair response. . ."

      How about a limit on the number of Jews covering it, is that fair enough? Given the tribal identification of even many Jews who aren't necessarily consciously Zionist, wouldn't it be better to err on the side of caution and not have coverage of this issue dominated by Jews? Why do my gentile tax dollars have to go to Jewish dominated coverage of things, since you brought this up?

      I realize there is an endless supply of non-Jews who would gladly toe the line on Zionism, so from that perspective it's a bit futile to focus on Jewish vs. non-Jewish reporters.

  • '5 Broken Cameras' director detained in LAX on way to Oscars (Updated)
  • Bloomberg backs Brooklyn College over BDS event as another official withdraws funding threat
    • RudyM February 7, 2013 at 1:11 am

      Yes, I'd say Democracy Now! is a lot better than mainstream TV news, but obviously that's a low standard.

      I would say what I remember of Democracy Now's coverage of Israel-Palestine is that it tended to be excessively rooted in a Chomskyite sort of prism. Maybe that's gotten better.

      Has As'ad AbuKhalil been on in recent years? I remember him complaining about not being invited onto Democracy Now! any more. I'm not the biggest fan of his really, but he at lest offered a different perspective than the Chomsky-Finkelstein spectrum of acceptable dissent on Israel-Palestine.

      I recently watched a (somewhat self-congratulatory and overly chummy) conversation, with the U.S. police state as the stated overall topic, between James Corbett and FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds in which Edmonds claims that Goodman was told (by funders) to back off from Edmonds because she was too harsh on Obama. I think it may go beyond Edmonds' criticism of Obama, and relate more to what Edmonds has to say about 9/11. At any rate, I remember that when Edmonds was gagged by the Bush administration justice department, Goodman had her on the show quite a bit (pointlessly asking her questions that Edmonds was forbidden to answer). When Edmonds went ahead and revealed a good deal more, under oath, during a deposition that occurred during the Obama administration, Goodman did not have her back on the show. And mainstream and mainstream-alternative media almost completely ignored it. The most "mainstream" outlets to cover the testimony at the time were American Conservative and Hustler magazine.

      (Actually, I haven't regularly watched Democracy Now! for a while. Last time I had cable, Democracy Now! was the only show I watched regularly. I don't have cable and don't regularly watch any particular TV shows online, although I do sometimes watch particularly segments of Democracy Now! as I find out about them.)

  • Poet Joy Harjo responds to boycott demands over Israeli performance by adding a West Bank visit
    • RudyM December 16, 2012 at 1:46 pm

      I have been familiar with Harjo's name for a while now. She may not be a household word, but some of her writing is commonly assigned to high school students (or was in Philadelphia anyway). She has a lot of admirers.

      From what little I've read of Harjo's writing, I get the sense that this situation reflects the drawbacks of applying her free-wheeling spirituality to concrete political issues. (Maybe this has more to do with my own biases than with her work.)

      Honestly, I've been a little reluctant to comment on all of this because she is Native American. As a white man who has only relatively recently moved to New Mexico, where the wounds of conquest and genocide are much more visible (if only in the form of survivors, some doing quite well, some down and out) than they were in Philadelphia, I do feel uncertain about criticizing Harjo. But I certainly wish she had respected the boycott. Hopefully she will get caught up quickly on the realities of the conflict.

  • 'America and Israel are in it together,' Clinton declares-- and nary a word about settlements
    • RudyM December 3, 2012 at 11:18 am

      As for Clinton herself, I've never forgotten or forgiven her comments about Israel and America's shared values, during Israel's 2006 rampage in Lebanon.

    • RudyM December 3, 2012 at 11:15 am

      The Palestinians could have had a state as old as I am if they had made the right decision in 1947.

      There's something actually weird about how mean the tone of this is. And it seems so completely identified with the settler-colonialist bullies.

      I also wonder if she would be so quick to bring up the 40s in any other setting. Does she really want to present the American public with the facts about what Palestinians were asked to agree to? What reasonable person would blame the Palestinians for not wanting to give up more than half their land for an ethnic enclave for a tiny invading minority?

      In turn, it makes me feel determined to see an end to any sort of Jewish state, whatsoever.

  • NPR host Siegel serves as moderator for Avigdor Lieberman at Saban gala
    • RudyM December 1, 2012 at 12:57 pm with 1 replies

      I can't stomach Robert Siegel's cloying delivery in general. At a peak period during the recent (unresolved) financial crisis, NPR did a cutesy story about "Main Street," thanks to the way the phrase was popping up in discussions of public opinion. They actually went to a Main Street somewhere. They made time for that, but they didn't find time (that I heard) to talk to economists who opposed the Wall Street bailout. They chose from a limited range of establishment experts. I didn't hear any input from Michael Hudson or Nomi Prins or Paul Craig Roberts, or the like.

      I largely haven't bothered with NPR news since then, but I had already been down on it for a while.

  • Stevie Wonder, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Marco Rubio -- all pony up for Israel
    • RudyM November 26, 2012 at 11:14 am with 4 replies

      It's very disheartening to me to see Stevie Wonder involved in something like this, more than it would be for lots of other performers, since I feel some sort of emotional bond to peak era Stevie. Friends of the IDF? This seems worse in a way than performing in Tel Aviv.

      I wonder what his religious views are. I accidentally saw him performing at the end of some sort of gospel show on TV several years back (and he sounded great, incidentally). Has he perhaps gotten in with a hard core evangelical/pentecostal Zionist crowd? Or is this mostly a political favor to DNC friends?

  • Israel has already lost this war
    • RudyM November 20, 2012 at 6:52 pm

      Actually, if laws were enforced in the U.S., it would eliminate some of the problem. AIPAC espionage? Sound familiar?

  • On the Jewish Israeli street, there's no solution to Palestinian issue but more violence
    • RudyM November 17, 2012 at 10:47 pm with 2 replies

      This raises a difficult problem. Many who have opposed the policies of Israeli governments may begin thinking that they reflect the general thinking of the Jewish Israeli public. That way leads to stereotyping and ugly antisemitic memes.

      Not high on my list of concerns at the moment.

  • JVP: It is unseemly for Operation 'Pillar of Defense' to invoke biblical passage from Exodus when Israel is dominant military power in the region
    • RudyM November 16, 2012 at 11:16 pm

      These damned religions. You can liberalize the interpretation of genocidal scripture all you want, but it's just there waiting to be reignited. Liberalizing religion just keeps the extremist core alive waiting to be reborn at a later time.

  • Don’t expect a second term Obama to take on Israel
    • RudyM November 14, 2012 at 12:00 pm

      Obama is not going to do any of that. He spent the last four years supporting corporatist policies and not really confronting Zionism (beyond the right-wing push for an all out attack on Iran).

  • UC Irvine student government passes bill unanimously to divest from Israeli military and settlements
  • Exile and the Prophetic: Forget the 'fiscal cliff' -- could Israel fall off the American political cliff?
    • RudyM November 10, 2012 at 5:41 pm with 1 replies

      Am I really reading this correctly? This is pretty stunning:

      Now that the election is over, Jews of Conscience support President Obama’s when he presses Netanyahu and Israel. But just as reelection support for Obama was predicated on dropping the Israel/Palestine issue, do Jews of Conscience have to drop – at least for this moment – the wider critique of American foreign and domestic policy?

      In short, you can’t demand that Obama fight the fight of fights against the Jewish establishment – where, again, there isn’t any politically viable constituency to support him - and be nipping at his heels on other issues or on the limitations of his Israel confrontation.

      In the political world, you can try to have your political cake and eat it, too, but it usually doesn’t work that well. If Jews of Conscience keep their full critique of American power and its Israel policy against such political head winds, advocacy for justice in Israel/Palestine will remain on the sidelines of politically viability – as political viability is defined now.

      It must be a great comfort to Obama, and the U.S. military/intelligence machine, to have voices like yours calling off potential critics.

      Personally, I can't see how a situation like this would constrain me from speaking out against U.S. foreign policy in general (even if I were Jewish).

      Aren't you, in effect, asking American Jews to be Jews first and Americans second, even if it's a mirror-image of the Israel-first approach to being Jews first Maybe American Jews have more responsibility to do something about Israel/Palestine than about other foreign policy issues, but does this cancel out a responsibility to address other foreign policy problems?

      As much as I see Zionism and Zionist penetration of the U.S. government (and closely related corporate entities in the very large gray area between the corporate and the governmental) as a major issue, there are independent actors pushing toward empire (and possibly some sort of world government, or at least a push to greatly limit democracy and override it with corporate-friendly regional agreements).

      As for Obama, I neither voted for nor supported his re-election. While I'm glad Romney lost, Obama did not deserve to win. He has crossed too many of my red lines, and I will not assent to his attack on my rights as a U.S. citizen (an attack he may not have started, but which he has certainly continued).

      My guess is we are all kidding ourselves here anyway, and this country needs a serious uprising of some sort, though I certainly have no clue as to exactly what might work or how to pull together the disparate elements within the U.S. But we need to change a lot of things at once, so we don't, for instance, feel the pressure to be politically realist and give Obama a free pass on everything else (in foreign policy) while he supposedly tackles Zionism. I want to say "Revolution!" but I don't exactly have one I believe in.

      And it's only those with little or no power who can't have their cake and eat it too. The powerful do it all the time, something we should resent.

  • Obama beat Romney, 17-14, in mentions of Israel during debate
    • RudyM October 23, 2012 at 11:14 am with 1 replies

      I think Obama's saying "And [Iran has] said that they want to see Israel wiped off the map" somehow bothers me most of all here. It's been established over and over again that is not what Aahmadinejad said.

      And this is one of the problems I have with giving Obama a pass on his rhetoric on Iran, even if his actions suggest he is actually resisting pressure to attack Iran.

      By saying things like this, Obama has helped to create a climate in which there will be more support for a strike on Iran. When you have the president, one still beloved in some circles and not simply regarded as a lesser of evil by all his supporters, promoting lies like this, it becomes very difficult to change people's minds about the "Iranian threat."

  • Palestine rates one mention in debate-- from Romney; Obama forgot he even went there
    • RudyM October 22, 2012 at 11:59 pm

      Don't blame me. I registered as a Republican for the first time in my life just so I could (pointlessly, really) vote for Ron Paul in the Republican primary, in spite of my being neither a conservative nor a libertarian.

      I had to face the embarrassment of hearing my name called out to vote, followed by "Republican."

  • What We Won't Hear in Boca: Nine things to remember during the Iran section of the presidential debate tonight
  • Politico: 2012 election is 'almost existential test of relevance' for the Israel lobby
    • RudyM October 20, 2012 at 2:04 pm with 5 replies

      I think it will still be significant if the lobby loses on its desire to see Iran bombed, even if not the sort of death-knell being described in this article.

      I don't think I can bring myself to vote for Obama (drones, NDAA, Libya, Guantanamo, running interference for Bush-Cheney crimes, consolidating and expanding the civil liberties abuses of the previous administration, Wall Street bailouts and inaction on making much needed changes in that area, etc.), but it does seem like there is a substantive difference between Obama and Romney on bombing Iran. On Israel-Palestine, not so much. I admit, it's difficult to know exactly what's going on behind the scenes or in people's heads; but if Romney is elected, it's hard to see how he will not be owned by the faction that wants to attack Iran, and he has to know that.

  • Jewish establishment pulls out of interfaith dialogue, threatens Congressional investigation of 'delegitimizers' over Christian letter
    • RudyM October 22, 2012 at 12:51 am

      Here's Jim Wall's take on the NYT article:

      link to alethonews.wordpress.com

      It's a worthwhile read, though I find his attempt to tease apart the religious and moral from the political a little muddled.

    • RudyM October 21, 2012 at 4:10 pm with 3 replies

      This appears to be the first time the NYT has picked up on the letter, and the article is framed around the objections of Jewish leadership, naturally:

      link to nytimes.com

      “What we’re seeing is people in the mainstream Jewish community, doves and hawks, who are really feeling at a point of exhaustion,” said Mr. Felson of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs.

    • RudyM October 17, 2012 at 10:47 pm with 1 replies

      Ethan Felson, the vice president of the JCPA, told the news agency that “JCPA is considering as a response asking Congress to investigate delegitimizers of Israel and to issue a resolution against their efforts.”

      I'm not even sure what to say about this. On the one hand we have a call to investigate, among other things, whether U.S. military aid/sales to Israel are in violation of U.S. law. On the other hand is this frivolous call for some hot air about delegitimizers of Israel.

      It almost makes me wish I were still a Christian, so I could tell these Jewish organizations where to go; but then that wouldn't be the Christian thing to do, not the way I'd like to express it anyway.

  • 'Ecumenical deal' crumbles as Christian denominations press on US aid to Israel
    • RudyM October 13, 2012 at 6:54 pm

      I am not that familiar with the ELCA, but I wouldn't trust the name to tell me much in this case. From what little I know, I was under the impression the ELCA fits more in the "mainline" slot than in what I think of as evangelical, but I may not know enough. I do think "evangelical" is a pretty slippery term. My Methodist clergyman father embraced both the "mainline" and "evangelical" labels, but I think a lot of evangelicals would have trouble recognizing him as such. I should probably leave it to Christians and social scientists to sort this out.

      (I may come back and respond to your response to my proof-texting earlier. Too tired now, but I admit to having Protestant prejudices, and blinders, about these things, even not being a Christian any longer: I almost embraced Calvinism before bailing out altogether.)

    • RudyM October 13, 2012 at 1:00 am with 1 replies

      It's the theology of Romans 13:1-7; Titus 3:1; and 1 Peter 2:13-15. Not saying I endorse it or any other Christian theology (I don't); but I don't see how a seriously Biblical Christian theology can be cavalier about disobeying the law. I can see how you can make a case for certain exceptions (e.g., it's hard to see how the Great Commission wouldn't take precedence over civil law), but unless you are very liberal about how you use the Bible (liberal enough to pretty much dismiss the verses cited above), there is a strong presumption that Christians should obey the civil authorities.

      Then again we are talking mainline denominations here, and they mostly do what they want anyway.

    • RudyM October 13, 2012 at 12:52 am with 2 replies

      Yes, this is a problem. I sent my liberal evangelical brother a link to an earlier post regarding the letter from the Evangelical Lutheran church, and he responded by basically saying he wondered why I was so obsessed with Israel and that surely I didn't really see it as a black and white issue, and that you have to understand that Israel is surrounded by hostile countries, etc. Nothing about whether it might be a good idea to hold the U.S. government responsible to its own laws about the conditions under which arms may provided to other countries. Nothing about either the moral and military asymmetries in this conflict. (Admittedly, his response was probably not so much to this particular link but rather to it and other things I've sent lately.)

      Anyway, I'm not sure even most liberal evangelicals are going to be willing to go very far in questioning Zionism.

  • Evangelical Lutheran Church calls for US inquest into human rights violations in Israel, and some Jewish groups are outraged
    • RudyM October 11, 2012 at 9:40 pm with 3 replies

      I don't really understand why the ADL would be invited to an interfaith conference. I don't think of it as a religious organization (say, an association of rabbis). But especially given its overwhelming emphasis on shilling for Israel.

    • RudyM October 9, 2012 at 11:30 pm

      This is good to see, but I wish the statement from the Evangelical Lutheran Church had mentioned Israel's arsenal of nuclear weapons, and the fact that our military aid to Israel has been illegal under U.S. law for many years now. How many quasi-official confirmations of this "secret" nuclear arsenal does it take before it can be mentioned as a reality?

      Meanwhile the response of the Jewish organizations mentioned is laughable. "If you keep criticizing Israel, we are going to take our ecumenical dialogue marbles and go home."

  • 'Crisis initiation is really tough': WINEP Director of Research suggests a covert attack to get a war on with Iran
  • Change of plan
    • RudyM September 22, 2012 at 2:41 pm

      Yeah, Alex Jones covers some of the same things that interest me, but I find him embarrassing (and frankly consider him controlled opposition of some sort--he's awfully friendly to Zionists, specifically). Anyhow, from Pieczenik's website: "StevePieczenik Alex Jones just pulled me off his 1:30 show today. He was intimidated by the very people we talked about. no worries, truth will prevail."

  • Confronting anti-semitic discourses head on: How to avoid self-silencing
    • RudyM September 7, 2012 at 5:25 pm

      Beryl Satter wants others to be keenly aware of anti-semtism and so on, but thinks nothing of saying “anti-semitism (hatred of jews) is EMBEDDED in Christian Culture.”

      My father was a Methodist clergyman who half the time seemed willing to give Jews (at least, fairly religious ones who attempted to live up to their moral tradition) a special dispensation to be saved without faith in Christ (not a particularly defensible position in Biblical terms, imo, as a recovering Chrisitian), but then he was pretty inconsistent in his theology over the years. Still, that's a funny sort of allowance to make specifically for Jews if anti-semitism is so embedded in Christian culture. Granted, I don't know to what extent my father's position on the salvation of Jews (and what I am remembering at least as his possibly 100% positive statements about Jews in general) was a reaction to anti-Jewish things he may have heard when he was growing up. I think, for instance, that he tried to make a point of embracing Catholics in part because of anti-Catholic things he had heard in the church, as a kid. And in fact, my mother, when she realized I was probably never going to marry a Christian, given my rejection of Christianity, made it clear that she hoped in that case I would marry a nice Jewish girl, as the second best thing.

      Obviously from the more conservative end of the Christian evangelical spectrum (my father actually considered himself an evangelical, but I'm not sure most evangelicals would have accepted him as such if they new the full details of his never quite pinned down theology), there is some sort of perhaps weird love of Jews (certainly of the Jewish state), even if they don't have a problem with you burning in hell eternally if you aren't saved. (Anyway, join the club, since real Bible believing Christians don't have a problem with anyone suffering eternal torment, since that's God's will.)

  • Would I have been defended against smears if I was Palestinian?
    • RudyM July 19, 2012 at 11:03 pm

      The fact that you would even raise this question just proves what a self-hating Jew you are. (Just kidding.)

  • Finkelstein stands by 'BDS cult' accusation, says it's 'historically criminal' to not support the two state solution
    • RudyM June 5, 2012 at 5:42 pm

      I'm coming around to the view that the best way to win the support of the U.S. public for the Palestinian cause is to expose Israeli/Zionist crime and negative influence in the U.S. Documenting or simply publicizing Zionist treachery, espionage, blackmail, the $3 billion+ a year, etc. might be the thing to push conservatives out of the pro-Israel fold.

      Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure the most devastating information is classified.

  • 'King Bibi' is ready for his close up, and 'Time' is willing to oblige
    • RudyM May 20, 2012 at 12:11 pm

      Agree on Time. There is rarely some decent reporting in it, but the overall package--actually the overall package makes me sick. Time magazine is practically network TV news on glossy paper. I could never be "disappointed in Time."

  • Investment in Palestine no substitute for divestment from oppression
    • RudyM April 29, 2012 at 10:48 am

      "So, because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew you out of my mouth."--Rev. 3:16.

  • 1200 rabbis threaten an end to interfaith harmony if Methodists support divestment
    • RudyM April 21, 2012 at 2:56 pm

      What does the DHS know we, the American public, are going to do that we don't yet know we are going to do?

      DHS is also buying bulletproof checkpoint booths (though I haven't seen an exact figure for that).

      The laws are being changed to "legally" overturn our constitutional rights, our police forces are being militarized, and new technologies have already been put in place which offer the powers that be a frightening capacity to surveil and control the 99%. But don't utter the word "police state."

    • RudyM April 20, 2012 at 12:56 pm

      So Methodist ministers like my late father won't be able to mention their rabbi friends any more. Boo-hoo.

  • Sequestering young people in religious/ethnic schools breeds alienation and hatred (Magid takes on Beinart)
    • RudyM April 21, 2012 at 3:43 pm with 3 replies

      On the intermarriage issue. . . It seems to me that people who are blase about religious intermarriage tend to be people who either hold a very liberal version of their particular religion or are just pretty nominal "believers." My brother or sister would never have married a non-Christian; their Christian faith is simply too important to them. Is it really so odd to want the person you share perhaps your most intimate relationship with to have a similar view of the world and to share the same values and the same general goals?

      I don't think people who want to marry others of the same religion are "fanatics," I think they just really believe what they believe, and haven't embraced a watered down version of it. I find: "yeah, I believe my religion is a revelation from the creator of the universe, but it's no big deal" to be a far more perplexing attitude.

      This is more of a response to some of the comments than to the post itself.

      (I'm thing here mostly of the monotheistic religions. I could see how it might legitimately be less of an issue for religions which, even in their original form, accept that there are different religious paths to the truth.)

  • Bono in Jerusalem: 'Hope Is Like A Faithful Dog'
  • Strip searches, and the security state
    • RudyM April 13, 2012 at 12:45 pm with 4 replies

      This ongoing assault on our civil liberties is one of the things that has pushed me to register as a Republican for the first time in my life, so I can vote for Ron Paul in the primary (as hopeless as that is now seeming). The libertarian right seems more organized for the fight than liberals or the left. At any rate, the Democratic party is offering essentially no resistance on this front, under Obama. I am closer to being a green than to being a libertarian, but with federal government powers going out of control, I'm thinking that some sort of provisional libertarianism might be necessary as an emergency measure. (Ultimately there will probably have to be some sort of revolution.) At any rate, I won't vote for Obama. It feels too much like voting for choice of dictator.

  • Video: Arizona State's SJP debka flashmob
    • RudyM April 10, 2012 at 1:07 am

      That kind of flashmob protest I would do. I might debka a little funny though: I learned it from Israeli dancing, something I did back before I really knew anything about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.

  • When did 'Shady companies with ties to Israel' become a term of derision not praise in the US press?
    • RudyM April 9, 2012 at 12:50 pm

      I think the audience for Wired is probably more sophisticated about these issues than the audience for, say, major daily newspapers. And, yeah, Bamford has been writing about Israeli access to sensitive U.S. information for a while now.

  • Jewish establishment-backed mayoral candidates rush to denounce Park Slope BDS effort
    • RudyM March 27, 2012 at 5:53 pm

      Not that long ago I used to think it didn't matter if an elected official at the local level, a mayor in particular, were a Zionist. (I once voted for Sam Katz in Philadelphia, disgusted with the Street administration's open corruption, and not amused by the mayor's seeming cluelessness about certain issues.) Not any more.

  • The 'clash of civilizations' and the death of an Iraqi mother in San Diego
  • Mustafa Bargouti: Jerusalem is at the heart of the Palestinian cause
    • RudyM March 24, 2012 at 1:46 pm with 1 replies

      It's interesting to read this emphasis on Jerusalem. I remember talking with my (late) father about a decade ago about what sort of resolution might be possible, and he was initially dismissive of the idea that Palestinians would have a chance at winning any portion of Jerusalem. I did get him to back pedal a bit, as I usually could in just about any argument. He was a Christian clergyman and his sweeping statement on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict was generally: "there has to be forgiveness," but over time I realized that he seemed to expect the Palestinians seemed to be expected to do a whole lot more forgiving than the Israelis.

      The entire issue of how Christians of various stripe think about Israel is a pretty complicated one, but I think Christianity in America is one of the forces that has held back progress in this conflict. It goes beyond ardent Christian Zionism. Growing up in the church, (ancient) Israel and the Jews were both part of what we learned about, in however skewed a form. So Israel was sort of familiar, from church, but the first time I remember hearing the word "Palestinian" was in connection to terrorist attacks. While Christians don't have the same tribal reasons that Jews have to identify with Israel, there's still a strong sense in which Palestinians (and certainly Muslims) are felt to be more other than Israel and Jews. I think it's difficult for even liberal Christian to recognize Zionism as fundamentally unjust, because they don't want to be on the wrong side of God's dealings with the Jews. (FYI: I am no longer a Christian.)

      Sorry for the tangent.

  • Afghan parliamentary team says many Americans were involved in massacre in which army accuses one
    • RudyM March 18, 2012 at 1:27 am

      I actually picked it up from here, toward the bottom. I'm not entirely sure why the direct link to the article didn't work from my post:

      link to informationclearinghouse.info

      This is the whole article:

      Probe team: Women sexually assaulted before killing in Panjwai
      by Absin ZaheeronMar 17, 2012 - 13:13

      KABUL (PAN): US soldiers were alleged to have sexually assaulted two female victims before they were killed in the Panjwai massacre in southern Kandahar last Sunday, a high-level Afghan probe team revealed.

      The Wolesi Jirga’s, or lower house of Parliament, delegation investigating the Kandahar shootings by US troops said besides killing 16 civilians, the soldiers sexually assaulted them.

      On the ill-fated Sunday, US troops shot 16 civilians, including nine children and three women, and injured five others when they opened fire on houses in Zangabad village, in Panjwai district.

      Some of the victims’ bodies were later set on fire.

      The Wolesi Jirga members jointly probing the Panjwai episode, along with a government team, on Saturday presented their chilling findings to the general session of the Parliament.

      MP Hamidzai Lali, representing Kandahar province and a delegation member, said before the gun attack, US soldiers physically manhandled the two women and later turned their weapons on the helpless residents.

      Shakiba Hashami, another delegation member, confirmed the vicious attack, adding about 15 to 20 American soldiers were involved in the killings and even helicopters were seen hovering the areas.

      Quoting local residents, Hashami, said ahead of the Sunday tragedy, there was a blast in the area and foreign troops had warned of revenge killings.

      The Afghan Parliamentarians strongly condemned the incident and demanded a public trial for the perpetrators.

      US officials had claimed a mentally unstable soldier was responsible for the killings and pledged to put him on trial. Recent media reports said the suspect, in his late 30s, was initially transferred to Kuwait and later flown to the US where he is being interrogated.

      Press TV also has a short article out which mentions the claims of rape.

    • RudyM March 17, 2012 at 11:33 pm with 3 replies

      Here's one way it could be worse if the official story is false:

      US soldiers were alleged to have sexually assaulted two female victims before they were killed in the Panjwai massacre in southern Kandahar last Sunday, a high-level Afghan probe team revealed.

      The Wolesi Jirga’s, or lower house of Parliament, delegation investigating the Kandahar shootings by US troops said besides killing 16 civilians, the soldiers sexually assaulted them.

      link to pajhwok.com

  • Israel will attack Iran-- and Obama gave tacit approval (Haaretz)
    • RudyM March 15, 2012 at 1:03 pm with 4 replies

      Regarding Wolman's comment, I think there's a much greater chance that an attack on Iran (with or without overt U.S. assistance) would hurt Obama's chances than help them. The outcome is too unpredictable, but even the results that can be predicted with some certainty, such as rising gas prices, would, if anything, hurt Obama's chances of re-election. The Republicans are in disarray and it's hard to imagine a likely Republican nominee who could beat Obama. If he just sits tight, Obama will win a second term (and I do not say this as an Obama supporter).

  • Palestinian and Palestine-solidarity activists issue critique and condemnation of Gilad Atzmon
    • RudyM March 14, 2012 at 11:19 pm

      Okay, okay, I'll order a copy of the Wandering Who, even though I've already spent too much money on books this month. (I never seem to read things when I order them interlibrary loan, so I mostly don't even bother with that.)

  • Another civilian massacre and the savagery of our soldiers
    • RudyM March 17, 2012 at 12:47 am

      Sorry, I thought this link was going to show up with that somehow:

      link to telegraph.co.uk

    • RudyM March 17, 2012 at 12:47 am with 3 replies

      Captain Kirby said the transfer did not necessarily mean the trial would be held outside Afghanistan, but Pentagon sources said it was unlikely he would be returned there.

      The decision to remove the soldier from the country may complicate the prosecution, said Michael Waddington, an American military defense lawyer who represented a ringleader of the 2010 thrill killings of three Afghan civilians by soldiers from the same Washington state base as the accused staff sergeant.

      The prosecutors won't be able to use statements from Afghan witnesses unless the defense is able to cross-examine them, he said.

      How inconvenient for the Pentagon.

  • UNM Students for Justice in Palestine issues statement on assault
    • RudyM April 18, 2012 at 12:45 pm

      UNM SJP put up a mock wall on UNM campus yesterday. Some distance away, but within sight lines, there was a pro-Israeli table. I was only in the area a short time, but I couldn't help taking satisfaction in the fact that there was hardly anyone over at the pro-Israeli table, but the anti-Apartheid/pro-Palestinian installation was attracting a fair amount of attention. (Numbers may have been boosted by the fact that UNM SJP collaborated with some other activist groups.)

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