Yesterday, Gaza Defense Force (GDF) artillery brigades and elite commando units armed with mobile rocket launchers pounded weapons factories and command and control centers within Usurped Palestine (UP), killing numerous terrorist operatives believed to be responsible for the repeated tank and helicopter gunship attacks upon the defenseless population of the small and largely undefended seaside enclave.
In a press conference following the raids, GDF spokesman, Ihab al-Ghussein declared “We believe we have delivered a strong blow against a terrorist infrastructure that has, for some time now, threatened Gazan civilians as they seek to peacefully live their daily lives and that, just last January, murdered one of the highest elected representatives of our people, Said Siyam, in a brutal missile attack on the home of his brother". The brother, his wife, their son, and Siyam’s son also perished in the attack. Siyam was but one of 1400 Gazans to die in this latest terrorist massacre.
He continued, “Every civilized country on the planet has a right and obligation to protect its citizens from having helicopter gunships float over its major populations centers and fire rockets into homes and cars as they see fit. No American living in Buffalo would tolerate attacks from aerial terrorist units of this type based in Mississauga, Ontario. Neither will we. Perhaps now the terrorists will now think twice about taking such murderous action against Gazan women and children from their safe havens in the Jerusalem Hills or their several large terrorist installations in what they call Tel Aviv on the Palestinian coast near Jaffa.”
When a reporter asked Ghussein to comment on reports that the GDF had employed excessive force in their efforts to root out terrorists located in the large Jewish population centers, he replied “The GDF is the most moral army in the world. It does not and never has made a policy of targeting civilians." He went on to say that “any loss of civilian life unfortunate” but added that“ such casualties are inevitable when the terrorists purposely locate operational centers, like the so-called Ministry of Defense, in the midst of cities. The Zionists have cynically and deliberately put ordinary Jews in harm's way by establishing its terrorist infrastructure – manufacturing, storage, training and strategic planning – within densely populated areas, in the midst of homes, schools, synagogues and hospitals”.
He went on to explain that “Within the Zionist entity it is extremely difficult to differentiate between civilians and terrorist operatives. Every male between 18 and 43 is forcibly conscripted into the terrorist brigades, which they mockingly term “Defense Forces”, for at least part of the year. It is not all uncommon to see heavily armed “civilians” from this group strutting through the streets of the UP intimidating those who might otherwise seek to construct a Palestine of peace where bloodlines don’t determine one’s ability to fully enjoy “democracy”, into adopting ever more intransigent and militant points of view”.
The problem is exacerbated, Ghussein said, by the frequent Zionist practice of employing human shields when GDF commandos close in on embedded facilities. We dropped leaflets warning them of the impending attack. If they wanted to, they could easily move all of their command, planning and supply operations out in to the Negev Desert where the problem of civilian involvement would be largely negated. However, they refuse to do so, insuring that innocent civilians will become collateral damage in our necessary defensive actions. The GDF cannot be held responsible for any loss of life related to such reprehensible policies.”
Finally, Ghussein was asked if the Gazan government and the GDF had any plans to use military solutions against the leadership of the Zionist entity. “As you are aware, our the Security Cabinet of our National Government has already taken the decision to forcibly remove the legally elected head Zionist terror regime, and here I quote from the official communiqué, ‘in a manner, and at a time, of its choosing’. And as our Deputy Prime Minister said on Gaza Radio shortly after that legislative development, “Killing Netanyahu is definitely one of the options”
Ghussein ended his press conference saying that “For some time now, we have found ourselves without anyone to talk to you in peace negotiations. We hope that by removing Netanyahu and his terrorist collaborators Barack, Liberman, Meridor and others, and replacing them with people our choosing like Uri Avnery, Avraham Burg, Neve Gordon, Mohammed Bakri,Ofra Lyth, Udi Aloni, Gilad Atzmonand Ilan Pappé—reasonable and serious people with whom we can do business—we can finally make progress on the Road Map to Peace.
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
Monday, August 24, 2009
Megrahi Case Moves Obama to Extradite Long-Wanted Terrorist to Venezuela for Prosecution
WASHINGTON (MNS) In a dramatic announcement made yesterday shortly after the President’s arrival on Martha’s Vineyard, the Administration declared its intention to hand over Luis Posada Carriles, the widely acknowledged mastermind of the bombing of Cubana Airlines flight 455 that killed 73 people in 1976, to the Venezuelan government for prosecution. According to White House spokesman Robert Gibbs, Obama’s change of heart on the long-requested extradition of Posada (he was a citizen of Venezuela when he allegedly planned the crime) came after watching Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, the convicted planner of the Pan-Am Lockerbie bombing of 1988, return home to a hero’s welcome in Libya.
“The President was sickened to see this man who bears responsibility for ending the lives of hundreds of completely innocent people, and forever altering those of the many thousands that loved them, walk free. Feeling their pain made him acutely aware of just how unfair it was to continue to let Mr. Posada, who in addition to the Cubana bombing has been implicated in numerous assassinations and as many as 41 other terrorist bombings throughout the Caribbean and Central America, to get up each day in Miami and sip his morning coffee in complete freedom”
Since the “declaration” of the “War on Terror” in late 2001, the avowed goal of the US government has been to prosecute terrorists wherever they might be in the world. As President George W. Bush put it in a speech before a joint session of congress on September 20th of that year. “It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated.”
Apparently, however, there was a large loophole in this policy for Posada and the many others like him assigned to use terrorist tactics on behalf of the US government, or organizations which have the backing of key elements of what is often termed the “US intelligence community”.
A brief examination of Mr. Posada’s career demonstrates just how large this loophole is. In addition, to his role in planning Cubana bombing in 1976, Posada worked for the Reagan White House in the Contra War, supplying US backed irregulars and the armies of the Salvadoran and Honduran dictatorships with the arms they used to kill thousands of innocent civilians in those two countries and Nicaragua in the late 80s. In the late 1990s, Posada directed a series of terrorist bombing in Cuba designed to cripple the growth of that nation’s burgeoning tourist industry, attacks he took full credit for in a wide-ranging interview with the New York Times.
And yet, despite his public admission of guilt in this and numerous other cases of terrorism, Posada remains a free man within the US. He has done so, moreover, despite having been caught entering the country illegally (under an assumed name) sometime prior to 2005. At a time when the judges regularly deport Muslim immigrants to the country for the slightest procedural infractions, Mr. Posada was freed on bail by an immigration judge in Texas and allowed to return to Florida in a under a regime of house arrest in April of 2007. A month later, Miami US District Judge Kathleen Cardone miraculously dismissed all of the seven immigration charges against Posada. Though a grand jury in El Paso, Texas has recently issued a new set of indictments against Posada in relationship to the Cuban bombings and his entry into the US on a fraudulent passport, Posada remained a free man until President Obama’s stunning announcement yesterday.
Gibbs concluded his announcement with the following remarks. “In the wake of September 11th, it was frequently asked “Why do they hate us?’. Many concluded that it was because they are jealous of our freedoms. We now know, however, that it is really because of the way we selectively condemn in others the types of murderous activities that we regularly license ourselves and our close allies to carry out with impunity. We believe that the extradition of Mr. Posada will be seen as a valuable first step in closing our enormous credibility gap around the issue of terror.”
“The President was sickened to see this man who bears responsibility for ending the lives of hundreds of completely innocent people, and forever altering those of the many thousands that loved them, walk free. Feeling their pain made him acutely aware of just how unfair it was to continue to let Mr. Posada, who in addition to the Cubana bombing has been implicated in numerous assassinations and as many as 41 other terrorist bombings throughout the Caribbean and Central America, to get up each day in Miami and sip his morning coffee in complete freedom”
Since the “declaration” of the “War on Terror” in late 2001, the avowed goal of the US government has been to prosecute terrorists wherever they might be in the world. As President George W. Bush put it in a speech before a joint session of congress on September 20th of that year. “It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated.”
Apparently, however, there was a large loophole in this policy for Posada and the many others like him assigned to use terrorist tactics on behalf of the US government, or organizations which have the backing of key elements of what is often termed the “US intelligence community”.
A brief examination of Mr. Posada’s career demonstrates just how large this loophole is. In addition, to his role in planning Cubana bombing in 1976, Posada worked for the Reagan White House in the Contra War, supplying US backed irregulars and the armies of the Salvadoran and Honduran dictatorships with the arms they used to kill thousands of innocent civilians in those two countries and Nicaragua in the late 80s. In the late 1990s, Posada directed a series of terrorist bombing in Cuba designed to cripple the growth of that nation’s burgeoning tourist industry, attacks he took full credit for in a wide-ranging interview with the New York Times.
And yet, despite his public admission of guilt in this and numerous other cases of terrorism, Posada remains a free man within the US. He has done so, moreover, despite having been caught entering the country illegally (under an assumed name) sometime prior to 2005. At a time when the judges regularly deport Muslim immigrants to the country for the slightest procedural infractions, Mr. Posada was freed on bail by an immigration judge in Texas and allowed to return to Florida in a under a regime of house arrest in April of 2007. A month later, Miami US District Judge Kathleen Cardone miraculously dismissed all of the seven immigration charges against Posada. Though a grand jury in El Paso, Texas has recently issued a new set of indictments against Posada in relationship to the Cuban bombings and his entry into the US on a fraudulent passport, Posada remained a free man until President Obama’s stunning announcement yesterday.
Gibbs concluded his announcement with the following remarks. “In the wake of September 11th, it was frequently asked “Why do they hate us?’. Many concluded that it was because they are jealous of our freedoms. We now know, however, that it is really because of the way we selectively condemn in others the types of murderous activities that we regularly license ourselves and our close allies to carry out with impunity. We believe that the extradition of Mr. Posada will be seen as a valuable first step in closing our enormous credibility gap around the issue of terror.”
Thursday, August 20, 2009
Liberal Boomers and Courage
by
G. Santayana
CAMBRIDGE (MNS) What is it about liberal boomers and courage? I guess the short answer would be that they OD’d on the John Wayne-style propaganda of the fifties and early sixties and decided that, as Dick Cheney once said, they had “other priorities” for themselves and their children. As a late boomer myself, I very much understand this rejection of the hyper-masculinized, faux patriotic tripe turned out by the media elites born in the teens, twenties and thirties. Indeed, given that the ghost of this childish propaganda still gallops quite happily across great swaths of the nation, I applaud the ongoing efforts of Glenn Greenwald and others to demonstrate how flimsily contrived so much of it really was.
What is less clear to me, however, is how and why this intelligent reaction against a cartoonish and bellicose conception of bravery,--one which sadly still has much relevance on the Fox-consuming Right—morphed, on the so-called Left, into a snoring indifference toward the very ideas of courage and courageous actions. Look around.
When was the last time you heard a well-known person of the Left (or what passes for it today) talk about courage or taking a stand on principle in the face of overwhelming political odds simply because it is the right thing to do? No, the generation that slept and munched out below posters bearing Che Guevara’s “I’d rather die on my feet than live kneeling down”, that used to tell stories of Allende’s machine gun-vs-dive -bomber defense of the Moneda Palace, now prattles earnestly on about requiring a veto-proof majority, about Obama’s need to “say certain things” (a.k.a. placate powerful interests) to get into office, and about “not letting the perfect become the enemy of the possible”.
The political and social sub-culture that used to loudly proclaim its inconformity with existing frames of reality, now assiduously hectors itself and others about the need to work within the set of options provided by a carefully circumscribed political and media system. That said system is, arguably, several times more corrupt and schlerotic than the one they once fantasized about overthrowing, or at least radically modifying, seems to matter little. It’s as if they were still bent, in their late 40s, 50s and early 60s, on apologizing to their now-sainted daddies of the “Greatest Generation” for having questioned their incandescent imperial wisdom all those years ago. “Look at me Dad, I’m serious the way you and your martini-drinking World War II vet buddies were serious. Really Dad. We can do Empire too!”
Some one needs to remind these folks that, believe it or not, young people sometimes get it right when they sense a great and gathering stench over the land and that while a detailed study of one’s “pragmatic possibilities” is generally advisable, it is seldom what allows people to change the course of history or even the course of their own lives. Boris Yeltsin was a drunk and a grafter, but his gut-level decision to climb on top of a tank 18 years ago today, changed the course of history. Had David Axelrod and Rahm Emanuel been at his side surely they would have advised against it.
Whether liberal America wants to admit or not, George Bush Jr. modified the core assumptions of American foreign and domestic policy more than any President since Franklin Roosevelt. The results, from our ho-hum embrace of having every word we write online or speak into the telephone examined by the NSA, to the official doctrine of pre-emptive war (the same thing we found so horrifying and unacceptable when Hitler used it to invade the Sudetenland) and everything in between, are there for all to see.
George Bush was a fool who, at the height of his powers, had only a very slim majority in both houses of Congress. But he did have courage. It was, of course a stupid, ill-informed, racist, delusional form of courage. But guess what? By sticking to these perverse articles of faith, by sending clear and repeated message to his political rivals that he wouldn’t retreat from what he wanted, he changed our lives, and our children’s lives, forever.
Americans love to believe in the perpetually self-correcting nature of their political system. A look at history in other places, however, tells us that this faith is naïve in the extreme. To gain back what we have lost, indeed to even get back to where we were on September 10th, 2001, is going to take courage, lot’s of “take your best shot and I’ll still stand my ground” courage. Unfortunately, Obama and his people, almost all good, culturally refined and ambitious baby-boomers, appear to have no understanding of this salient fact.
G. Santayana
CAMBRIDGE (MNS) What is it about liberal boomers and courage? I guess the short answer would be that they OD’d on the John Wayne-style propaganda of the fifties and early sixties and decided that, as Dick Cheney once said, they had “other priorities” for themselves and their children. As a late boomer myself, I very much understand this rejection of the hyper-masculinized, faux patriotic tripe turned out by the media elites born in the teens, twenties and thirties. Indeed, given that the ghost of this childish propaganda still gallops quite happily across great swaths of the nation, I applaud the ongoing efforts of Glenn Greenwald and others to demonstrate how flimsily contrived so much of it really was.
What is less clear to me, however, is how and why this intelligent reaction against a cartoonish and bellicose conception of bravery,--one which sadly still has much relevance on the Fox-consuming Right—morphed, on the so-called Left, into a snoring indifference toward the very ideas of courage and courageous actions. Look around.
When was the last time you heard a well-known person of the Left (or what passes for it today) talk about courage or taking a stand on principle in the face of overwhelming political odds simply because it is the right thing to do? No, the generation that slept and munched out below posters bearing Che Guevara’s “I’d rather die on my feet than live kneeling down”, that used to tell stories of Allende’s machine gun-vs-dive -bomber defense of the Moneda Palace, now prattles earnestly on about requiring a veto-proof majority, about Obama’s need to “say certain things” (a.k.a. placate powerful interests) to get into office, and about “not letting the perfect become the enemy of the possible”.
The political and social sub-culture that used to loudly proclaim its inconformity with existing frames of reality, now assiduously hectors itself and others about the need to work within the set of options provided by a carefully circumscribed political and media system. That said system is, arguably, several times more corrupt and schlerotic than the one they once fantasized about overthrowing, or at least radically modifying, seems to matter little. It’s as if they were still bent, in their late 40s, 50s and early 60s, on apologizing to their now-sainted daddies of the “Greatest Generation” for having questioned their incandescent imperial wisdom all those years ago. “Look at me Dad, I’m serious the way you and your martini-drinking World War II vet buddies were serious. Really Dad. We can do Empire too!”
Some one needs to remind these folks that, believe it or not, young people sometimes get it right when they sense a great and gathering stench over the land and that while a detailed study of one’s “pragmatic possibilities” is generally advisable, it is seldom what allows people to change the course of history or even the course of their own lives. Boris Yeltsin was a drunk and a grafter, but his gut-level decision to climb on top of a tank 18 years ago today, changed the course of history. Had David Axelrod and Rahm Emanuel been at his side surely they would have advised against it.
Whether liberal America wants to admit or not, George Bush Jr. modified the core assumptions of American foreign and domestic policy more than any President since Franklin Roosevelt. The results, from our ho-hum embrace of having every word we write online or speak into the telephone examined by the NSA, to the official doctrine of pre-emptive war (the same thing we found so horrifying and unacceptable when Hitler used it to invade the Sudetenland) and everything in between, are there for all to see.
George Bush was a fool who, at the height of his powers, had only a very slim majority in both houses of Congress. But he did have courage. It was, of course a stupid, ill-informed, racist, delusional form of courage. But guess what? By sticking to these perverse articles of faith, by sending clear and repeated message to his political rivals that he wouldn’t retreat from what he wanted, he changed our lives, and our children’s lives, forever.
Americans love to believe in the perpetually self-correcting nature of their political system. A look at history in other places, however, tells us that this faith is naïve in the extreme. To gain back what we have lost, indeed to even get back to where we were on September 10th, 2001, is going to take courage, lot’s of “take your best shot and I’ll still stand my ground” courage. Unfortunately, Obama and his people, almost all good, culturally refined and ambitious baby-boomers, appear to have no understanding of this salient fact.
Monday, August 17, 2009
New Historical Think-Tank Launched in Washington
WASHINGTON (MNS) Yesterday, a group of high profile dignitaries from across the political spectrum celebrated the launch of the Society for the Management of Historical Reason (SMHR) in the nation’s capital. To celebrate the event, an all-day inaugural seminar was held at the headquarters of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and featured speeches by Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, Former Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, John Nagl of the Center for New American Security (CNAS), Former Bush speechwriter David Frum, Obama Special Envoy Richard Holbrooke, and Iraq surge architect and West Point professor, Frederick Kagan.
In his opening remarks, the new organization’s Executive Director, Michael O’Hanlon, a long-time fellow at the liberal Brookings Institution, spoke with urgency about the new entity’s mission. “As Isaiah Berlin, the great prophet of the Open Society once said, ‘Analogizing is the lifeblood of historical reason’. We believe this to be true. However, we also know that in times like these allowing anyone, anywhere to establish and publicize parallels between the polices of the US and those pursued by other nations in the course of history, can have far-reaching consequences for American security. We therefore seek to aid those habitually engaged in generating historical reasoning (or reporting it to the general public after a cursory reading of a commissioned think-tank position paper) to channel their ideas toward only those parallelisms which affirm the that the US and its close ally Israel, stand outside the laws of causality that have governed the fate of other peoples on the earth.”
When asked by a reporter to spell out how this actually works in practice, O’Hanlon replied, “Our enemies around the world have long-suggested that when the US and Israel attack or invade other nations, they, like every other militarily strong state before them, do it in order to gain control of the land or resources of the invaded country. When disinformation like this appears, the first line of defense is, as it always has been, to greet the assertion with utter silence, and if that fails, to condescendingly mock the person as a Chomskyite loon. If, after all this, they still get an insufficiently-trained reporter to put this ludicrous notion into print or on the air, that’s where our agents of historical reason spring into action. Within a matter of days, they will generate a minimum of five op-eds in the largest American dailies, designed, each in their own way, to re-affirm the wholly defensive and unfailingly moral underpinnings of American and Israeli foreign policy.”
At the close of the day-long session, both the participants and the assembled members of the press received a small compilation of some of the more specious historical analogies currently being circulated by our enemies as well as the SMHR’s talking points for each. What follows is a small sample from that publication.
Analogy #1: People who invade other people’s lands have almost always done so to aggrandize their own standing in the world. Therefore, the US and Israel are probably doing the same.
Talking point to analogy #1: These two nations attack other people’s nations for largely defensive reasons. Insofar as they have any pro-active goal it is always to bring the invadees the gifts of either an advanced economy or democracy.
Analogy #2: All states in the past that had multiple, continuous and far-flung military engagements with other nations (Spain in the 16th Century, Napoleon’s France, Britain, Portugal in the 20th Century) eventually became impoverished to point where they could neither maintain their international network of influence nor compete economically with the era’s other powerful nations. This is probably happening to the US.
Talking point to analogy #2: Unlike these nations, the US is peopled by individuals with a special, socially programmed “entrepreneurial spirit” that will allow them to perpetually invent their way out of the type decadence and decline that has traditionally befallen other nations.
Analogy #3: When the financial, political and military elites of a country generally see themselves as being above the law and demonstrate far more loyalty to their fellow caste members than the population as a whole, this usually portends an unstoppable decline into social decadence, factional infighting and, ultimately various kinds of coup-making. This is probably going on right now in the US.
Talking point to analogy #3: The US, unlike other nations has a constitutional structure that was born in the glow of our founders’ more or less perfect wisdom and thus will always, through our court system and its assembled jurists, mutate in ways that will safeguard the common good and individual liberties over unwieldy concentrations of power. And even when larger than desirable concentrations of power do occur in a given moment of history, the pendulum will always swing back to correct them in the next generation of political actors.
Analogy #4: Since the dawning of the concept of total war in the 1930s and 1940s, terror has become, for the more militarily advanced states of the world, a prime tool for gaining geopolitical advantage. Thus when the US and Israel use high tech weaponry (B-52 bombers, Apache Helicopter Gunships and drones) on largely unarmed civilian populations in territories that do not belong to them and are often thousands of kilometers from “the Homeland” (from the German Heimat), they are probably seeking to terrorize the inhabitants of these places to submit to their political will.
Talking point to analogy #4: As we have seen in talking point #1 Americans and Israelis almost always attack others for purely defensive reasons. Therefore the only real terrorists involved in situations where they operate are the persons who are foolish enough to try and fight back against their overwhelming force. For example, the Canadian-Afghani teenager Omar Khadr became a terrorist in Afghanistan, requiring several years of appeal-free, rehabilitative torture at Guantánamo, when he lobbed a hand grenade that killed an invading American soldier near his home in Khost. Terrorism will only stop when people like Khadr learn to recognize the core benevolence of American and Israeli actions and learn to stop reacting against it.
Analogy 5#: When, as it did in 2006, Israel launched an essentially unprovoked war aimed at destroying the entire modern infrastructure of a neighboring country, some compared it to the German Blitzkrieg on Poland in 1939. Similarly, when the high tech Israeli military laid siege to the already isolated and already starving population of Gaza at the end of 2008 and the first days of 2009, some compared it to the terrible tragedy of the Warsaw ghetto at the end of World War II.
Talking point to analogy #5: It must always be remembered that the only people licensed to make analogies between the horrors of Nazism and any present-day cataclysm, are Israelis themselves, and that country’s many supporters in the American press. For example, if the Arab scholar Rashid Khalidi were to compare the present-day fate of the Palestinians in any way to that of Jews in Europe between 1933 and 1945, he would be immediately guilty of trivializing the horrors suffered by the Jews under the Nazis. However, any time Bill Kristol or Charles Krauthammer wants to compare Ahmadinejad, Hassan Nasrallah (the head of Hezbullah) or Ismail Haniyeh (the head of Hamas) to Hitler and their followers to the Nazis, no trivialization is ever involved. This is perfectly licit and, more often than not, will be roundly and positively reprinted in the mainstream press.
As they were exiting the conference auditorium, participants and observers were encouraged to sign the pledge which commits them to the guiding principles of the new think tank. David Gregory (GE-NBC), Brian Williams (GE-NBC), John King (Time-Warner-CNN), Guy Raz (NPR), Charles Gibson (Disney-ABC), Mary-Louise Kelly (NPR). Michael Gordon (NYT) were seen chatting amiably among themselves as they awaited their turn to sign up.
In his opening remarks, the new organization’s Executive Director, Michael O’Hanlon, a long-time fellow at the liberal Brookings Institution, spoke with urgency about the new entity’s mission. “As Isaiah Berlin, the great prophet of the Open Society once said, ‘Analogizing is the lifeblood of historical reason’. We believe this to be true. However, we also know that in times like these allowing anyone, anywhere to establish and publicize parallels between the polices of the US and those pursued by other nations in the course of history, can have far-reaching consequences for American security. We therefore seek to aid those habitually engaged in generating historical reasoning (or reporting it to the general public after a cursory reading of a commissioned think-tank position paper) to channel their ideas toward only those parallelisms which affirm the that the US and its close ally Israel, stand outside the laws of causality that have governed the fate of other peoples on the earth.”
When asked by a reporter to spell out how this actually works in practice, O’Hanlon replied, “Our enemies around the world have long-suggested that when the US and Israel attack or invade other nations, they, like every other militarily strong state before them, do it in order to gain control of the land or resources of the invaded country. When disinformation like this appears, the first line of defense is, as it always has been, to greet the assertion with utter silence, and if that fails, to condescendingly mock the person as a Chomskyite loon. If, after all this, they still get an insufficiently-trained reporter to put this ludicrous notion into print or on the air, that’s where our agents of historical reason spring into action. Within a matter of days, they will generate a minimum of five op-eds in the largest American dailies, designed, each in their own way, to re-affirm the wholly defensive and unfailingly moral underpinnings of American and Israeli foreign policy.”
At the close of the day-long session, both the participants and the assembled members of the press received a small compilation of some of the more specious historical analogies currently being circulated by our enemies as well as the SMHR’s talking points for each. What follows is a small sample from that publication.
Analogy #1: People who invade other people’s lands have almost always done so to aggrandize their own standing in the world. Therefore, the US and Israel are probably doing the same.
Talking point to analogy #1: These two nations attack other people’s nations for largely defensive reasons. Insofar as they have any pro-active goal it is always to bring the invadees the gifts of either an advanced economy or democracy.
Analogy #2: All states in the past that had multiple, continuous and far-flung military engagements with other nations (Spain in the 16th Century, Napoleon’s France, Britain, Portugal in the 20th Century) eventually became impoverished to point where they could neither maintain their international network of influence nor compete economically with the era’s other powerful nations. This is probably happening to the US.
Talking point to analogy #2: Unlike these nations, the US is peopled by individuals with a special, socially programmed “entrepreneurial spirit” that will allow them to perpetually invent their way out of the type decadence and decline that has traditionally befallen other nations.
Analogy #3: When the financial, political and military elites of a country generally see themselves as being above the law and demonstrate far more loyalty to their fellow caste members than the population as a whole, this usually portends an unstoppable decline into social decadence, factional infighting and, ultimately various kinds of coup-making. This is probably going on right now in the US.
Talking point to analogy #3: The US, unlike other nations has a constitutional structure that was born in the glow of our founders’ more or less perfect wisdom and thus will always, through our court system and its assembled jurists, mutate in ways that will safeguard the common good and individual liberties over unwieldy concentrations of power. And even when larger than desirable concentrations of power do occur in a given moment of history, the pendulum will always swing back to correct them in the next generation of political actors.
Analogy #4: Since the dawning of the concept of total war in the 1930s and 1940s, terror has become, for the more militarily advanced states of the world, a prime tool for gaining geopolitical advantage. Thus when the US and Israel use high tech weaponry (B-52 bombers, Apache Helicopter Gunships and drones) on largely unarmed civilian populations in territories that do not belong to them and are often thousands of kilometers from “the Homeland” (from the German Heimat), they are probably seeking to terrorize the inhabitants of these places to submit to their political will.
Talking point to analogy #4: As we have seen in talking point #1 Americans and Israelis almost always attack others for purely defensive reasons. Therefore the only real terrorists involved in situations where they operate are the persons who are foolish enough to try and fight back against their overwhelming force. For example, the Canadian-Afghani teenager Omar Khadr became a terrorist in Afghanistan, requiring several years of appeal-free, rehabilitative torture at Guantánamo, when he lobbed a hand grenade that killed an invading American soldier near his home in Khost. Terrorism will only stop when people like Khadr learn to recognize the core benevolence of American and Israeli actions and learn to stop reacting against it.
Analogy 5#: When, as it did in 2006, Israel launched an essentially unprovoked war aimed at destroying the entire modern infrastructure of a neighboring country, some compared it to the German Blitzkrieg on Poland in 1939. Similarly, when the high tech Israeli military laid siege to the already isolated and already starving population of Gaza at the end of 2008 and the first days of 2009, some compared it to the terrible tragedy of the Warsaw ghetto at the end of World War II.
Talking point to analogy #5: It must always be remembered that the only people licensed to make analogies between the horrors of Nazism and any present-day cataclysm, are Israelis themselves, and that country’s many supporters in the American press. For example, if the Arab scholar Rashid Khalidi were to compare the present-day fate of the Palestinians in any way to that of Jews in Europe between 1933 and 1945, he would be immediately guilty of trivializing the horrors suffered by the Jews under the Nazis. However, any time Bill Kristol or Charles Krauthammer wants to compare Ahmadinejad, Hassan Nasrallah (the head of Hezbullah) or Ismail Haniyeh (the head of Hamas) to Hitler and their followers to the Nazis, no trivialization is ever involved. This is perfectly licit and, more often than not, will be roundly and positively reprinted in the mainstream press.
As they were exiting the conference auditorium, participants and observers were encouraged to sign the pledge which commits them to the guiding principles of the new think tank. David Gregory (GE-NBC), Brian Williams (GE-NBC), John King (Time-Warner-CNN), Guy Raz (NPR), Charles Gibson (Disney-ABC), Mary-Louise Kelly (NPR). Michael Gordon (NYT) were seen chatting amiably among themselves as they awaited their turn to sign up.
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
UN Moves to Sanction Rogue Nuclear Program
In a move that was widely expected, the UN, with key US backing, moved to impose a regime of sanctions against the Middle East’s largest uninspected and unregulated nuclear arms program. In announcing the Organization’s harsh, but clearly targeted measures, Secretary General Ban Ki Moon stated: “It is time that Israel join the community of law-abiding nations sign on to the protocols of the NPT (Nuclear Proliferation Treaty) as soon as possible, something its regional neighbor Iran did several decades ago (1968). The program of inspections carried out in Iran under the NPT have”, he explained, “effectively prevented the spread of nuclear weapons to the Islamic Republic. These are not merely the assertions my office or the IAEA and its Nobel Prize winning director, Mohammed El-Baradei, but the official position of the American CIA”
Israel, on the other hand, is believed to possess at least 75 to 100 nuclear warheads able to be delivered in various modalities (plane, rocket and submarine). It has never officially acknowledged the existence of the program, let alone consented to a regime of international inspection. Moon continued, “We view the continued Israeli clamoring for action against Iran to be strange in the extreme given its own four-decade flouting of the inspections regime. Indeed, when we consider that during this same period, Israel, which subscribes to a two-tiered, ethnically-based scheme of citizenship that has long been rendered extinct in all other nations calling themselves democracies, has carried out unprovoked military assaults its regional neighbors on at least four occasions (Egypt 1973, Libya 1981, Lebanon 1982, Lebanon 2006) during that same period, the demands become nearly comic in their audacity. And this, of course, does not include the country’s six-decade campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Palestinian people which culminated in last winter’s month-long massacre in the Gaza strip”.
When asked to respond to Secretary Moon’s statement, Mark Regev, spokesman for Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu said, “As you can see, anti-semitism is alive and well in the world and at the UN”. When pressed by a young pool reporter still unfamiliar with the rules on official assertions never to be challenged to explain exactly what part of secretary Moon’s statement was untrue or slanderous, he replied, “No comment” and walked away.
Israel, on the other hand, is believed to possess at least 75 to 100 nuclear warheads able to be delivered in various modalities (plane, rocket and submarine). It has never officially acknowledged the existence of the program, let alone consented to a regime of international inspection. Moon continued, “We view the continued Israeli clamoring for action against Iran to be strange in the extreme given its own four-decade flouting of the inspections regime. Indeed, when we consider that during this same period, Israel, which subscribes to a two-tiered, ethnically-based scheme of citizenship that has long been rendered extinct in all other nations calling themselves democracies, has carried out unprovoked military assaults its regional neighbors on at least four occasions (Egypt 1973, Libya 1981, Lebanon 1982, Lebanon 2006) during that same period, the demands become nearly comic in their audacity. And this, of course, does not include the country’s six-decade campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Palestinian people which culminated in last winter’s month-long massacre in the Gaza strip”.
When asked to respond to Secretary Moon’s statement, Mark Regev, spokesman for Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu said, “As you can see, anti-semitism is alive and well in the world and at the UN”. When pressed by a young pool reporter still unfamiliar with the rules on official assertions never to be challenged to explain exactly what part of secretary Moon’s statement was untrue or slanderous, he replied, “No comment” and walked away.
Injured Commentator Cites Belief in Bipartisanship as Reason for Staying
WASHINGTON (MNS) A well-known Washington pundit was taken to Holy Cross Hospital in Silver Spring early this morning for the treatment of wounds sustained in a domestic incident with a long-term partner. Though Maryland’s privacy rules do not permit disclosure of either the name or the gender of the parties involved, anonymous sources present at the health center at the time of the admittance, sustained that the person is “someone we all know from TV who is generally viewed as being quite close to both the Clintons and the Obamas”. The source, who is said to have access to important documents related to the incident and hospital admissions process went on to explain, “The victim repeatedly sobbed that ‘Bipartisanship is the reason I stayed’ “.
When clinicians asked the patient to elaborate, the victim said, again according to the source, “For years I have been preaching bipartisanship on the network airwaves and felt it important that I also walk the same walk at home. Back in 2003, even though Grover Norquist, one of the more influential strategists of the Republicans during the Bush years, said in an interview with the Denver Post, that bipartisanship is another name for date rape, I still went on air and encouraged my party to pursue it. When in 2005, the Republicans, who then controlled hearing schedules at the Capitol building, forced John Conyers to hold his inquiry on the Downing Street Memos in small basement compartment, I preached bipartisanship. When the Republicans threatened the nuclear option in judicial hearings, repeatedly left my party out of key briefings and made personal insult and the questioning of our patriotism their only real campaign tactics, I went on TV and called for bipartisanship. If I thought subjecting my party to abuse like this was a good idea, it shouldn’t surprise you that I put up with a lot of real violent crap at home.”
According to Harry Reid, the Nevada-based author of Partners Who Stay and an expert on abusive relationships, the reasons that people like the Washington pundit remain in violent domestic and/or work situations are many. There are, he says, always certain common denominators. One of these is low self-esteem. “The abused entity almost always has a very precarious or unstable sense of self. Generally speaking, victim has spent so many years donning and removing masks in the hope of pleasing others that he or she no longer has any clear idea of where his or her core instincts lie. The abuser, sensing this absence of definable limits, is quick exploit this for his or her advantage”
When asked to give examples of this highly labile personality type, he pointed to the last two Democratic Presidents of the US, “two men of enormous talents whose core personality traits were forged in peripetic and largely fatherless childhoods, precisely the type of shifting environment that can often lead to the creation of a superficially attractive but essentially anchorless ‘pleaser’ personality”.
According the Reid, economics can also play an important role in fomenting abuse. “People can get used having a certain lifestyle and are reluctant to jettison it in order to rid themselves of the abusive partner.” To illustrate his point he again recurred to a political example. “Like all politicians, Democrats like being able to appear on TV and collect corporate money for their campaigns. They know, from looking at the dollars and media coverage awarded, or more accurately, not awarded to people like Ron Paul, Ralph Nader, Dennis Kucinich and Cynthia McKinney that denouncing systematic abuse in matters large and small will put an end to all this. And given their largely “outer-directed” personalities, most figure it is a less than attractive trade-off. Hence, they stay and put up with the abuse”.
When clinicians asked the patient to elaborate, the victim said, again according to the source, “For years I have been preaching bipartisanship on the network airwaves and felt it important that I also walk the same walk at home. Back in 2003, even though Grover Norquist, one of the more influential strategists of the Republicans during the Bush years, said in an interview with the Denver Post, that bipartisanship is another name for date rape, I still went on air and encouraged my party to pursue it. When in 2005, the Republicans, who then controlled hearing schedules at the Capitol building, forced John Conyers to hold his inquiry on the Downing Street Memos in small basement compartment, I preached bipartisanship. When the Republicans threatened the nuclear option in judicial hearings, repeatedly left my party out of key briefings and made personal insult and the questioning of our patriotism their only real campaign tactics, I went on TV and called for bipartisanship. If I thought subjecting my party to abuse like this was a good idea, it shouldn’t surprise you that I put up with a lot of real violent crap at home.”
According to Harry Reid, the Nevada-based author of Partners Who Stay and an expert on abusive relationships, the reasons that people like the Washington pundit remain in violent domestic and/or work situations are many. There are, he says, always certain common denominators. One of these is low self-esteem. “The abused entity almost always has a very precarious or unstable sense of self. Generally speaking, victim has spent so many years donning and removing masks in the hope of pleasing others that he or she no longer has any clear idea of where his or her core instincts lie. The abuser, sensing this absence of definable limits, is quick exploit this for his or her advantage”
When asked to give examples of this highly labile personality type, he pointed to the last two Democratic Presidents of the US, “two men of enormous talents whose core personality traits were forged in peripetic and largely fatherless childhoods, precisely the type of shifting environment that can often lead to the creation of a superficially attractive but essentially anchorless ‘pleaser’ personality”.
According the Reid, economics can also play an important role in fomenting abuse. “People can get used having a certain lifestyle and are reluctant to jettison it in order to rid themselves of the abusive partner.” To illustrate his point he again recurred to a political example. “Like all politicians, Democrats like being able to appear on TV and collect corporate money for their campaigns. They know, from looking at the dollars and media coverage awarded, or more accurately, not awarded to people like Ron Paul, Ralph Nader, Dennis Kucinich and Cynthia McKinney that denouncing systematic abuse in matters large and small will put an end to all this. And given their largely “outer-directed” personalities, most figure it is a less than attractive trade-off. Hence, they stay and put up with the abuse”.
Wednesday, August 5, 2009
Obama Seeks to Ease Partisan Gridlock
WASHINGTON (MNS) In a move that is being widely hailed as a bold step toward breaking partisan gridlock in Washington, the Obama Administration, working in cooperation with Democratic chairman of all major Congressional committees, has decided to formalize the Republican minority’s ability to block or wholly denature all of their major legislative projects.
While full details of the plan have not yet been released, anonymous sources inside the Administration are pointing to a system whereby a full text of any new initiative drawn up by the Democratic caucus or any Cabinet department will be turned over to the staffs of John Boehner, Mitch McConnell and Rush Limbaugh within 6-12 hours of being drafted. If they object to any of its provisions, the president and his party will strike or re-write the troublesome parts within a matter of hours.
In explaining the move one source said, “We view this as a major advance in transparency. For some time now, our leadership has, with the connivance of the mainstream media, cultivated the idea that having control of the Congress and a 60-vote majority in the Senate means that we can basically pass whatever we want. Unfortunately, this much-repeated meme does not take into account our own mortal fear of the Republican attack machine or our party’s complete lack of governing principles.”
The move was prompted by Congressman Henry Waxman’s recent appearance on Democracy Now. When asked by Amy Goodman why he had dropped his long-standing support for a single payer health system, Waxman replied, “There would have to be massive taxes, increases, to make up for the lost money that’s now being spent by employers for their employees. And by the time we would be through trying to accomplish something like that, the Republicans would demonize it. So what President Obama suggested was a practical compromise way to accomplish the goals that we wanted.”
The source went on, “We decided that if Henry Waxman, who generally passes for a very liberal lawmaker in the Beltway imagination, was openly admitting his quaking fear of the minority party on America’s most progressive news program, there was really no reason to continue our pretense of wanting to take the country in bold new directions on this and other issues.”
When asked how it was that during the Bush years, the Republican party had, with only razor thin majorities in both houses, managed to shift the spectrum of acceptable political thought more dramatically than any president since Franklin Roosevelt, he replied, “ We are different from them.” And then to illustrate his point he told a story. “You know, a the end of every cabinet meeting we invoke the memory of that sports groupie we all knew in college who used to service entire varsity teams in the hope of finding the one guy or girl who would set them up in the suburbs. For years, people have portrayed this as a dishonorable way to proceed. We look at it differently. We very much identify with that willing groupie and figure if we just keep on putting out for the varsity, those good jobs will be there for us all on K Street in 2012 or 2016”.
While full details of the plan have not yet been released, anonymous sources inside the Administration are pointing to a system whereby a full text of any new initiative drawn up by the Democratic caucus or any Cabinet department will be turned over to the staffs of John Boehner, Mitch McConnell and Rush Limbaugh within 6-12 hours of being drafted. If they object to any of its provisions, the president and his party will strike or re-write the troublesome parts within a matter of hours.
In explaining the move one source said, “We view this as a major advance in transparency. For some time now, our leadership has, with the connivance of the mainstream media, cultivated the idea that having control of the Congress and a 60-vote majority in the Senate means that we can basically pass whatever we want. Unfortunately, this much-repeated meme does not take into account our own mortal fear of the Republican attack machine or our party’s complete lack of governing principles.”
The move was prompted by Congressman Henry Waxman’s recent appearance on Democracy Now. When asked by Amy Goodman why he had dropped his long-standing support for a single payer health system, Waxman replied, “There would have to be massive taxes, increases, to make up for the lost money that’s now being spent by employers for their employees. And by the time we would be through trying to accomplish something like that, the Republicans would demonize it. So what President Obama suggested was a practical compromise way to accomplish the goals that we wanted.”
The source went on, “We decided that if Henry Waxman, who generally passes for a very liberal lawmaker in the Beltway imagination, was openly admitting his quaking fear of the minority party on America’s most progressive news program, there was really no reason to continue our pretense of wanting to take the country in bold new directions on this and other issues.”
When asked how it was that during the Bush years, the Republican party had, with only razor thin majorities in both houses, managed to shift the spectrum of acceptable political thought more dramatically than any president since Franklin Roosevelt, he replied, “ We are different from them.” And then to illustrate his point he told a story. “You know, a the end of every cabinet meeting we invoke the memory of that sports groupie we all knew in college who used to service entire varsity teams in the hope of finding the one guy or girl who would set them up in the suburbs. For years, people have portrayed this as a dishonorable way to proceed. We look at it differently. We very much identify with that willing groupie and figure if we just keep on putting out for the varsity, those good jobs will be there for us all on K Street in 2012 or 2016”.
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