John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY ANNE PERKINS IN THE GUARDIAN

 

“When terror strikes, do something useful…”

I am sorry, Anne Perkins, but your words are meaningless because we live surrounded with almost constant terror today.

And I do not mean (the still comparatively rare) events such as Brussels.

Look at what the poor people in beautiful Syria have endured for five years.

That is terror on a scale which dwarfs Brussels or Paris, yet I don’t read writers such as you saying anything about it.

Perhaps non-Europeans don’t count?

That serious terror in Syria is the work of Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and America, with Britain and France sitting on the sidelines applauding.

How about the horrors in Libya? A decent society smashed for no good reason and never a tear shed.

There’s the grotesque situation now in Ukraine, induced entirely by the United States.

How about the horrors in Yemen as David Cameron’s friends in Saudi Arabia bomb women and children?

And there’s the absolutely pitiless situation in Gaza?

Terror is everywhere, but the mainline press only describes as terror those relatively few and smaller-sized events in Europe or America.

I believe that our quiet acceptance of what is taking place in the world on a grand scale actually makes our journalists morally unfit to comment upon such events as Brussels. At any rate, it leaves them totally lacking in crucial facts around such events, and writing without facts is a perilous business indeed.

So long as our governments either engage in, or tolerate, the terrible things now going on in half a dozen places, there is likely to be no end to what are essentially “blowback” events like Brussels.

You stop terror by stopping your own share of it.

Are you listening, David Cameron, friend and supplier to King Salman for instance?

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN THE NATIONAL POST

This article by Kelly McParland is rubbish propaganda.

Bob Rae introduces his statement about why he supports the Iran agreement with words “conceding that Iran is a repressive regime that can’t be trusted, hates Jews, represents a threat to the very existence of Israel, encourages terrorism, destabilizes the region….”

That is not so much a statement of conviction, I believe, as it is what it is absolutely necessary to say if you don’t want to be pilloried in the press and by many politicians for a view on an important issue which happens to be at odds with the one prevailing in Israel.

His “necessary” statement contains almost nothing but echoes of myths and propaganda repeated a thousand times in our corporate, and very biased, press.

Iran can’t be trusted? Where’s one scrap of evidence for that? So far as I am aware they keep all their agreements and obligations.

Iran hates Jews? There is nothing to support that. Tens of thousands of Jews live good lives in Iran. I guarantee that the Jews of Iran live far, far better lives than do the occupied Palestinians.

Iran encourages terrorism? I’m not aware of any such events. Iran lives at peace with its neighbors and has not started a single war in its modern history. Yes, it supports allies in the region, as do the United States and Israel, but I can’t accept they qualify as terrorists in quite the same fashion as America’s thuggish recruits now working to destroy Syria.

Contrast that with Israel whose brief modern history is one of continuous attacks on every neighbor it has, many more than once.

Indeed, the Six Day War was deliberately started by Israel to seize lands it still holds half a century later against the will of all those living on them.

It seized part of Lebanon too and occupied it for many years, until Hezbollah drove them out, Hezbollah receiving Iran’s assistance. But that was not terror, it was self-defence by any reasonable reckoning. Hezbollah, in contrast to Israel, never invaded and occupied any part of Israel.

If you want an example of genuine terror, look to the two recent invasions of that refugee camp called Gaza in which about a thousand children were killed, apart from thousands of adults. And look to an endless blockade of the same unfortunate people, a blockade which in its earlier days, before international intervention, actually included a calorie count for allowed imports just sufficient to keep the population alive. Even Gaza’s humble fishermen can only go a short distance into the sea before being shot at.

How about the Israeli bombings of Southern Lebanon in which a million horrible cluster bomblets were dropped where farmers and children could step on them?

Iran is a theocratic state, but it is not quite the miserable place so often glibly described in our corporate press. You may easily finds sites with lots of photos of these lovely people smiling huge smiles and doing a great variety of things you might expect to see in a free society.

Meanwhile Israel has not an imaginary but a genuine nuclear arsenal, something about which it daily lies. It is not a member of the nuclear proliferation treaty, as Iran is, and it allows no inspections around Dimona. And, speaking of proliferation, it is an historical fact that Israel conspired with apartheid South Africa to assist them in gaining nuclear weapons.

We are far, far freer of danger originating from Iran than we are from Israel.

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN THE GUARDIAN

While the Klu Klux Klan is a nasty and rather ridiculous organization, as a source of evil in today’s world it is minuscule, almost non-existent.

They were once a true national organization in America, as was the NAZI-like Bund organization, but today they are few in few places and virtually unseen.

It seems to me almost a distraction from our many far more terrible events in the world to spend time on what today is a kind of goofy club for people with various degrees of mental problems.

Actually, it might be said that the modern KKK almost serves a slightly beneficial purpose in bringing such people together into one organization rather than let them all go their various ways, and that organization today is thoroughly penetrated by government agents, a task the creepy FBI of J. Edgar Hoover in his heyday scrupulously avoided. After all, Hoover wouldn’t even employ black agents.

On the measure of threats, the KKK today is close to non-existent.

Hate and twisted minds will never cease to be until science either re-engineers the human brain or replaces it with robots.

You must always take account of perspective in such social phenomena. America’s militarized local police alone kill between 1,000 and 1,500 citizens every year, injuring several times that number.

Americans murdering Americans has ranged over recent decades between 25 and 40 thousand each year. By the way, roughly half of that murder is black-on-black in America’s dreadful ghettos.

The President of the United States signs off regularly now on death-squad killings. Thousands have died this way with no charges, no trial, and no voice, drones and computer operators being the only difference from the old Argentine junta dropping people out of helicopters.

America killed more than a million people in Iraq and pretty much destroyed one of the Mideast’s most advanced and promising lands. It would have become a true democracy before too long under prosperity and a growing middle class. Today it is divided wreck.

America and its friends have created a living hell in Syria by supplying, training, and infiltrating lunatic factions into a beautiful and once relatively peaceful land, killing 200,000 and seeing millions of refugees created, refugees they do not even try to help.

Libya is a flaming wreckage today thanks to America and its spineless European associates.

And only four decades ago, America walked away from a true holocaust it created in Vietnam, 3 million dead from napalm and carpet bombing and fragment bombs and land mines and countless tons of Agent Orange.

Its blundering interference in Cambodia saw a neutral government fall and another million innocents die in the Killing Fields.

America’s quasi-colony in the Middle East just killed 2,200 people including about 500 children using American weapons, and that after a previous slaughter of about 1,200, and still they blockade the poor survivors and make weekly threats.

There are many more statistics I could cite, but truly the KKK is about as important as slipping on a banana peel as a source of genuine danger.

COMMENT ON A PIECE BY DANIEL HALPER IN THE WEEKLY STANDARD

John Chuckman

 

It really does not get more uninformed and deliberately provocative than “U.S. Threatens Sanctions Against Israel, Makes Excuses for Iran.”

This stuff reads like an official news release from the old Politburo.

There is no need for excuses for Iran. It has done absolutely nothing requiring excuses.

It hasn’t attacked anyone in its modern history, is a member of the international treaty on nuclear weapons permitting inspections, and every intelligence service, including Israel’s, knows it has not been trying to build a bomb.

The genuine madman running Israel, on the other hand, has yelled for years that Iran is building a bomb, going against his own intelligence service. The madman just won re-election by promising no state for the Palestinians, so presumably five million people will be kept without any rights or votes forever? Or perhaps expelled in a future massive ethnic cleansing?

Without outside pressure on Israel, clearly nothing will happen to correct this shameful, longstanding, and potentially deadly situation.

Israel, in contrast to Iran, has attacked every neighbor that it has, some more than once. The madman himself killed 2,200 people only recently in a senselessly brutal assault. The madman’s yelling about Iran is about nothing other than wanting complete dominance of the region and as a distraction against the very bad economic conditions in Israel for ordinary people and against the tremendous tensions he has created in Jerusalem with his regular theft of property and mistreatment of ancient residents.

Israel, again in contrast to Iran, does not belong to the international nuclear arms treaty and does not allow inspections of nuclear facilities, and it does have a stockpile of thermonuclear bombs. Moreover, it participated in a deadly serious secret proliferation of nuclear arms with the former apartheid South Africa, then a good friend and trading partner.

Does it feel good to go to bed each night knowing you’re making every effort as a writer to promote war with a peaceful country, Iran, and continued mass slavery in Israel?

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN THE GLOBE AND MAIL BY JOHN MOSCOWITZ

Evil is an out-dated, mumbo-jumbo word.

Indeed, it explains nothing, serving only to consign something to a dark corner of extreme disapproval with zero understanding.

The author in using it makes himself slightly ridiculous.

The truth is that this terrible event is one more brutal proof of how unbalanced the human mind can be.

That most complex of organs can suffer from countless faults and errors in its construction, just as simpler organs – hearts, kidneys, and livers – so often suffer from faults in their make-up.

And just as people sometimes have parts of their bodies missing – a hand or a leg – a portion of humanity have key bits of their brains either missing or mangled.

Such an event has no more “meaning” than does a stroke of lightning or a tidal wave killing innocent people.

It is terrible, but life goes on.

But, yes, a society which actually cares for its children would have effective gun laws, knowing such things are going to happen at intervals.

But where is the concern for children in America?

What of the children slaughtered in Gaza? No chest-beating over them. Indeed, Israel gets resupplied with all the bombs and munitions expended to kill Palestinian children.

What of the thousands of Iraqi children killed and mangled by America’s pointless invasion? Thousands more made refugees?

And what of the tens of thousands more murdered by a decade of horrible American sanctions against Hussein?

How many children have Americans killed in Afghanistan?

In Pakistan?

And now in Syria through the weapons and fighters imported into that country to undo its government?

The countless killed in Vietnam and Cambodia in a war to no point?

Indeed, today, the seas of Agent Orange America left behind go right on killing and crippling babies and children. What of them?

If America, that brutal imperial force, cared one whit about children, none of these questions could be raised.

 

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

Well, we should be grateful for small blessings.

This time we only had piracy on the high seas instead of piracy with slaughter of innocents.

I have no idea how Israel’s defenders and apologists think they are defending something worthwhile.

Israel is a savage state, and almost all of our troubles in the Middle East trace back to its savagery.
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A writer below has pointed out a Salon article on Israel’s detailed planning of just enough calories to prevent those in Gaza from dying, and he wonders if it’s true.

Yes, indeed, Salon actually is rather late in pointing out what was known a long time ago.

Remember, in the early stages of the illegal blockade of a million and a half people how even chocolate bars were seized and not allowed in?

People scratched their heads about why that should be so.

The reason was simply the nazi-like calorie count.

It is not widely understood – you must read many news sources and interpolate – but after Israel’s bloody attack on the convoy of Turkish-origin ships, killing about ten unarmed people in cold blood and seizing everyone’s personal effects, the United States quietly pressured Israel to allow a higher amount of calories in.

That’s just one of the reasons Netanyahu so hates Obama that he’s interfering in an American election with personal ads in places like Florida. He’s committing an illegal act in doing so, but what American politician dare call him on it?

These facts are just the bare suggestion of the dirty stuff that goes on in Israel’s brutal campaign to rid itself of remaining Palestinians and take their land.

No person who loves freedom and human rights can do anything but condemn Israel’s ghastly behavior.

But at the national level in the United States, no one dares say a word, the political campaign-fund and media-treatment consequences being too great for America’s cowardly politicians.

And, by the way, Harper is carefully moving Canada, with each passing day, towards the same ugly destination: a place where Israel’s interests appear equal or even superior to our national interests because of campaign funding and its power to make elections.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO AN EDITORIAL IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

This is an absolutely unbalanced editorial, reminding one of the kind of brain-dead stuff Marcus Gee used to pound out on the Middle East, rewrites of official Israeli press releases.

Who is doing the killing?

Who is depriving people of normal commerce?

Who arrogantly commits piracy on the high seas?

Who runs around stealing passports and murdering people?

Who holds 10,000 people in prison without proper legal procedure?

Who, after Hamas was elected in a clean election, immediately arrested members of the elected body?

Who, after Hamas was elected in a clean election, immediately threatened its leader with assassination?

Who keeps Gaza surrounded by automated radar-operated gun towers which blast anything which moves within a couple of thousand yards?

When was the last time Hamas killed an Israeli politician?

When was the last time Hamas arrested members of Israel’s legislature?

When was the last time Hamas invaded Israel?

Israel’s behavior is the only serious obstacle here.

Every thinking person knows you must talk to your opponents to have peace, yet who refuses to talk to Hamas?

Hamas may not like Israel, but it is not, and never could be, in a position to seriously threaten Israel. To say anything else is paranoid rubbish.

Israel wants the people of Gaza reduced to groveling submission, without even the right to self-determination, and, indeed, it really prefers to make them so miserable they leave their homes.

Hamas does not rule in the West Bank. Do we see peace there? No, every week Israelis steal more homes or farms and continue to keep millions under constant threat and abuse.

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN THE INDEPENDENT

Howard Jacobson,

Yours is a shamefully dishonest article.

You are playing word games with mass murder, and truly, in the end, your circumlocutions restate the same disgusting tactic used by the defenders of Israel’s bloody excesses: you are anti-Semitic if you criticize Israel.

Is Israel a country like any other or is it not? That truly is the heart of the matter.

If it is a country like any other, then its savage behavior in Lebanon and in Gaza and in the West Bank is completely unacceptable.

It has nothing to do with any “ism.”

But if Israel is somehow to be considered by different standards than other countries, if it is to have special rules and allowances, then the real “ism” involved here is Israeli exceptionalism.

You cannot have it both ways, try as you might.

Israel does not talk to its opponents ever. It makes only public show of talking to a pathetic man like Abbas. The others it either assassinates – and there have been many bloody assassinations – or labels as “terrorists.”

These are the techniques of tyrants, not states which respect human rights and democratic values.

Just because Israel is technically a democracy does not mean it cannot act as a tyrant.

A prejudiced majority can keep a technically democratic state behaving like a gang of thugs. We saw this in the American South. We saw this in apartheid South Africa. We saw this with France in Algeria. And we see this in Israel.

Even as Israel went about the business of killing, among others, 400 kids in Gaza, in the West Bank more of other people’s land and homes was being seized.

How can anyone possibly regard this in a positive light?

If Israel would start treating its opponents with decency and respect and agree to return to its 1967 borders, we could have peace, genuine peace.

It is not Hamas that prevents this happening. Hamas has shown readiness to talk and reach a modus vivendi more than once. It kept the previous truce agreement scrupulously, which Israel broke.

The leaders of Hamas are intelligent, educated professionals, elected cleanly.

They represent for Palestinians the same yearning for clean government that Obamas does for America.

But Israel will not even talk. Ridiculous.