Cease-fire in Gaza

11.22.2012 Leave a comment

The New York Times reports:

Gazans poured into the streets declaring victory against the far more powerful Israeli military. In Israel, the public reaction was far more subdued. Many residents in the south expressed doubt that the agreement would hold, partly because at least five Palestinian rockets thudded into southern Israel after the cease-fire began.

The Times, putting into practice its vaunted ‘balanced journalistic practices,’ failed to report what the Gazan’s expected from Israel, whether the cease-fire would hold, for how long and for what reasons. Nor did the Times question the origin of the conflict — Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land. The report mostly reflected the foreign policy requirements of the Obama government.

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Recommended: The Limits of Israeli Belligerence

11.21.2012 Leave a comment

Dina Jadallah wrote:

One can watch the latest Israeli assault on Gaza and become overwhelmed with the enormity of the destruction, the loss of human life (one-third of whom are children), and the indiscriminate and disproportionate use of asymmetric power by an occupying state against one million and seven hundred thousand people (mostly refugees) living under an embargo for several years.

On the other hand, one can watch the latest assault and marvel at the resistance, the power of human will, the high morale of a steadfast population that is determined to return to their usurped lands. More importantly, one can be reassured because the people in Gaza are ahead of their leaders, while their resistance is inflicting real damage on their enemy.

The latest conflict might be an inflection point in the struggle, especially if its achievements are employed wisely in order to achieve politically strategic goals such as the lifting of the embargo, a halt to colonies / “settlements, and so forth.

Despite the skewed balance of raw muscular power in Israel’s favor, how is it that it cannot even win what was (wrongly) projected to be a brief and spectacular skirmish that would boost the political fortunes of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and his Minister of Defense, Ehud Barak?

Zohan, like his good friend, Uncle Sam, possesses a vast and ever-increasing military advantage over those he would dominate. But also like Uncle Sam, Zohan mostly fails to achieve the political goals he seeks. Zohan has already lost his latest battle. The imprisoned Palestinians refuse to yield. They continue to fight back, to resist this compelling force. That is his defeat in a nutshell. Zohan now needs a cease-fire settlement as much as the peopled interred in his Gaza prison-land.

When we consider a situation like this one, we should always keep this thought in mind: “You can do anything with bayonets except sit on them,” a maxim attributed variously to Talleyrand, Thomas Hardy, Napoleon I and Bismarck.

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Jimmy Carter calls out the Israeli imperialists

11.21.2012 1 Comment

Elisabeth Braw of Metro International posed the following question to Jimmy Carter:

President Obama says he supports a Palestinian state, but even so there’s a deadlock. Does it take even more than the support of a US President to get a Palestinian state?

Carter’s answer:

I think the big change is that the Israeli leaders have decided to abandon the two-state solution. Their policy now is to confiscate Palestinian territory, and they’ve announced publicly that it the Palestinians have to recognize not just Israel but Israel as a Jewish state, even though 20% of the Israeli community are non-Jews. Netanyahu has also decided that even the Jordan valley has to be under Israeli control. So, those factors indicate quite clearly that Netanyahu has decided that the two-state solution is not what he wants. He wants what is being called Greater Israel, Eretz Israel. That’s a new development, and I think everyone recognizes this.

Zohan does battle with a terrorist

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Quote of the day

11.19.2012 Leave a comment

Chris Hedges wrote:

Gaza is a window on our coming dystopia. The growing divide between the world’s elite and its miserable masses of humanity is maintained through spiraling violence. Many impoverished regions of the world, which have fallen off the economic cliff, are beginning to resemble Gaza, where 1.6 million Palestinians live in the planet’s largest internment camp. These sacrifice zones, filled with seas of pitifully poor people trapped in squalid slums or mud-walled villages, are increasingly hemmed in by electronic fences, monitored by surveillance cameras and drones and surrounded by border guards or military units that shoot to kill. These nightmarish dystopias extend from sub-Saharan Africa to Pakistan to China. They are places where targeted assassinations are carried out, where brutal military assaults are pressed against peoples left defenseless, without an army, navy or air force. All attempts at resistance, however ineffective, are met with the indiscriminate slaughter that characterizes modern industrial warfare.

Can this happen here, in the United States, land of the free and home of the brave? Will Uncle Sam turn on the ‘lesser people’ (Alan Simpson)?

Those questions were rhetorical, of course.

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Zohan mad….

11.17.2012 Leave a comment

 

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Quote of the day

10.20.2012 2 Comments

This one appeared in an article written by Nick Alexandrov which discussed Leon Panetta‘s recent trip to Uruguay. The United States has had a long and disreputable history in that country just as it had throughout Latin America during the Postwar era. Alexandrov shared a bit of that history:

Little had changed in Uruguay by 1969, when U.S. official Dan Mitrione arrived to supervise police training. Writing to Washington late that year, he explained, “Life today seems normal on the streets of Montevideo, and the real problem facing the police is the number of assaults on police officers[.]” The “real problem,” it bears repeating, was not that Uruguay’s government, functionally a one-party system, was forcing citizens to cope with the stark choices a ruined economy imposes. The problem was that Uruguayans protested these conditions. The U.S. government trained Uruguay’s police to punish them for this sin — punishment that would only intensify when a few dared to retaliate against their aggressors. Mitrione himself understood well the business of discipline. His reputation, in certain circles, was that of a master torturer.

He had a simple motto: “The precise pain, in the precise place, in the precise amount, for the desired effect.” And he was proud of his abilities, according to a Cuban double agent working with the CIA in Uruguay. This man attended one of Mitrione’s seminars. Four homeless people were picked up off the street for the occasion. They were used first to show the effects “of different voltages on different parts of the human body.” Next came a demonstration of an emetic’s functions. Once they had finished vomiting, they were forced to ingest another chemical. In the end, all the subjects died. The Tupamaros subsequently kidnapped Mitrione in July 1970, and killed him in early August. Two months later, the Uruguayan Senate issued a report indicating that the Montevideo police tortured its prisoners on a regular basis. By June 1973, President Bordaberry — whom Washington aided in the 1971 election by suppressing his leftist opponents — completed the transformation. Uruguay had become a dictatorship.

Mitrione’s Wikipedia page can be found here.

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I got a letter from Bill Clinton!

9.28.2012 Leave a comment

The text:

I hope you’ll pay attention, Stephen.

We’re facing a big FEC fundraising deadline — after this, there’s only one more before Election Day.

Here’s why that matters: Your donation will go further now than it will next week. That’s because it will immediately be put to use — if your $5 (for example) goes toward hiring an organizer in Akron, Ohio, she’ll have more time to do her job and reach more voters. And that’s how elections are won.

I hope you’ll donate $5 or more before the September fundraising deadline:

https://my.democrats.org/Deadline-September

Thanks for everything you do.

Bill Clinton

P.S. — If you donate $5 or whatever you can today, you and a guest will be automatically entered to fly out to meet President Obama and me on the campaign trail.

Well, Bill, I gave your letter— Thank you so much! — my undivided attention. The first thing I noticed while I read it is a slight of hand trick which suggests that money donated after the September deadline passes will not be put to immediate use. Are we to believe that funds received after the deadline will not be spent until a post-election period? That would be silly, and I do not believe it to be true. Or, are we to believe that money spent next week is not money spent immediately? That too is sill.

So, I believe you lied to me.

I must say I am also surprised that you thanked me for everything I do since a part of what I do is to call for your arrest, trial and conviction for committing crimes of war and crimes against humanity. Why would you want to thank me for that?

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Killer dies

6.30.2012 Leave a comment

It is a shame he did not live another century.

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On this day in 1933

5.10.2012 Leave a comment

The Nazis staged book burnings in order to ‘purify’ Germany’s culture.

A crime against humanity

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Quote of the day

5.4.2012 Leave a comment

Glenn Greenwald castigates the Judicial Branch because of its cowardly support for the ‘war on terror’ methods used by the Executive Branch:

The abdication of U.S. federal judges in the post-9/11 era, and their craven subservience to Executive Branch security claims, has been a topic I’ve written about several times over the past couples of weeks. Yesterday, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals adopted the argument of the Obama DOJ that John Yoo is — needless to say — fully immune from any and all liability for having authorized the torture of Jose Padilla, on the ground that the illegality of Yoo’s conduct was not “beyond debate” at the time he engaged in it. Everything I wrote a couple of weeks ago about the identical shielding of Donald Rumsfeld by federal courts and the Obama DOJ from similar claims applies to yesterday’s ruling, and The New York Times has a good editorial today condemning this ruling as “misguided and dangerous.”

In sum, this yet again underscores that of all the American institutions that have so profoundly failed in the wake of 9/11 to protect the most basic liberties — Congress, both political parties, the establishment media, the Executive Branch, the DOJ specifically — none has been quite as disgraceful as the federal judiciary, whose life tenure is supposed to insulate them from base political pressures that produce cowardly and corrupted choices.

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