John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN THE GUARDIAN

Mr Corbyn strikes me as an inherently fair-minded person.

Why should there be a relationship that is somehow different than the relationships with all other groups?

The very idea that there should something extra here is pure bias.

It is also an invitation to establishing the kind of leverage the Israel Lobby (not some fetid fantasy but an established fact of serious academic study) enjoys in the United States.

Nothing could be less fair than that special interest relationship which sees a great nation’s policies and acts distorted unnaturally towards one very small nation.

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“…existential threat to Israel from Iran and extremist organisations such as Hamas.”

That is boiler-plate language from Israel’s official playbook.

There is no genuine threat of any kind from Hamas, let alone “an existential one.”

That is the most arrant nonsense and special interest pleading.

The only existential threat to Israel is Israel.

Its behavior of occupation and abuse of millions cannot go on indefinitely.

It will certainly go the way of the Soviet Union if it doesn’t behave as a nation of laws fair to all.

And living in the kind of dark security state Israel has become is simply not attractive to most Jews in the world.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED COMMENTS TO A COLUMN BY NEIL REYNOLDS IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

From another reader:

“It [the US] talked Israel into letting Hamas contest Palestinian elections.”

‘The results of which, when Hamas won, were ignored by both Israel and the US, leaving Abbas in power more than two years after his term officially ended.’

Yes, and further, Mark Shore, Israel’s secret service is well known to have helped Hamas in its early days.

It wanted an opponent for Fatah, so that we would end up with the very kind of mess we have.

I am sure in doing so, Israel never once regarded Hamas as a potential dangerous enemy, and it most definitely is not dangerous today.

The “terrorist” bit is a fraud which serves Israel’s larger purpose of keeping the Palestinians divided and politically ineffective while Israel slowly continues to absorb more of other people’s property.
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A number of readers have looked at my article of some years ago, “Hiroshima, Mon Amour.”

I encourage others to do so because it convincingly puts the lie to people like Neil Reynolds and their facile, dishonest generalizations.

Since I wrote it, the assessment for the damage to Iraq has only grown. One scientifically-sound study put it at over half a million deaths, and another at about a million.

There have been more than two million refugees (that glorious bastion of democracy, the U. S., having refused to take any of them). Even today, huge numbers are unemployed and the basic services still do not operate dependably. A generation of people has no chance to make a better life in a country which once had great promise.

Quite an achievement, that.

Needless to say the U.S. has always kept quiet, except for the most innocuous remarks. It never reveals the horrors it has created, just as in the First Gulf War, the bodies of tens of thousands of poor Iraqi conscripts who were forced to sit in sand dunes while being carpet-bombed by B-52s were bulldozed into the ground. No numbers were ever given.

You’ll find the essay at:

http://chuckmanwords.wordpress.com/2009/06/01/hiroshima-mon-amour/

Readers may also enjoy:

“Favorite Contradictions and Absurdities Concerning the War in Iraq”:

http://chuckmanwords.wordpress.com/2009/05/27/favorite-contradictions-and-absurdities-concerning-war-in-iraq/

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

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

Too early to write-off direct talks?

Please.

Representatives for these “direct talks” on the Palestinian side in a sense do not even exist: Abbas’s election mandate timed out a year ago, and he stays in office under emergency measures – i..e,, he has absolutely no democratic legitimacy.

But even poor Abbas, a kind of Palestinian “step’n’fetch it” figure if ever there was one, wanted nothing to do with such talks while Israel continued stealing land. The American administration browbeat him for months, threatening him with loss of all aid, into attending.

The only genuinely elected government in any of the territories of Palestine, Hamas in Gaza, remains under Israel’s brutal blockade and imprisonment – that is, those elected representatives who were not illegally arrested by Israel or murdered in assassinations or murdered in Operation Cast Lead.

Representatives for these “direct talks” on the Israeli side are from the Netanyahu government, a group of people who have not the least interest in what any normal person would call peace. The “foreign minister” qualifies surely as a David Duke figure.

Now David Duke in the United States – former Klu Klux Klan chief and minor politician – is treated anytime in the press as a lowlife. Avigdor Lieberman is every bit the hateful racist as Duke, but he is far more poisonous, being the foreign minister he is in a position to make his hate wreck the lives of millions. Because he is an Israeli, Lieberman is treated with respect he does not deserve.

Does anyone but a madman believe anything can come out of that set of circumstances?

The only possibility is that Abbas is virtually beaten down into signing something utterly inappropriate for his people. In that case, the “agreement” won’t be worth the paper on which it is written.

This entire matter is utterly meaningless as statesmanship, it is brutal political theater, intended to please the Israel Lobby in the U.S. to get the Democrats through the mid-term elections without a catastrophic loss of campaign contributions.
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The Six Day War was an elaborate black operation by Israel. It prodded the Arabs over and over with many aggressive acts into hostility, and then it attacked first.

The intention was to seize the lands not seized in 1948 with the terrors of Irgun and Stern – that is, to create Greater Israel, a self-defined concept that has always motivated Israel’s government.

The attack on the USS Liberty, a US spy ship on station in the Mediterranean, was intended to blind the US administration while General Dayan turned around his armor to attack in the North.

It was not a “mistake.” It was a deliberate two-hour attack on a well-marked ship, one moreover that Israel had been advised would be on station to guard against its ambitions.

Dayan felt that if he had the slot of time, he could achieve all Israel’s goals of conquest, and he pretty much did, presenting the world with the fait accompli whose ghastly consequences we have endured since.

It was all a neat trick, wage a lightning war of conquest while getting sympathy as little David fighting off hoards of nasty Philistines, but Israel knew from its first planning it was sure to win.

And we’ve learned since that the “little David” image is a sentimental fairy tale: Israel behaves the part brutal bully in its part of the world, attacking and terrorizing every neighbor that it has, even now threatening people a thousand miles away who have never attacked anyone.

See:
http://chuckmanwords.wordpress.com/2009/05/27/was-einstein-right/

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.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN BY PATRICK MARTIN IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

 

“Hamas does not maintain an independent judiciary with rule of law.

“Homosexuality is a crime in Gaza, punishable by up to 10 years imprisonment. Gays are lucky to make it to prison, they are frequently murdered if exposed.

“There have been no free elections in Gaza since Hamas overthrew the Presidential Authority.”

 

Oh, please, spare us the highly selective statistics.

A Palestinian who marries an Israeli and the children of such a marriage are punished under Israeli law in a number of ways.

A Christian, under Israeli law, who goes to Israel to do the same proselytizing he or she does anywhere else is to be deported.

Israel is 19% Arabic – not by choice but because those people are the descendents of Palestinians who refused to run from Irgun and Stern Terror in the 1940s – but under Israeli law these Israeli passport holders are second-class citizens.

Israel has an elaborate set of discriminatory rules against non-Jewish citizens. Just holding a passport is not enough for what anyone anywhere else would call equal treatment. You must be part of the class of “the Jewish nation” which Israeli law and courts recognize as something higher and more exclusive than mere citizenship by birth.

Indeed, a senior minister of Netanyahu’s government, Lieberman, favors the deportation of Arabs with Israeli citizenship, and his is a view with a good deal of support in Israel. There are many quotes from prominent Israelis, even rabbis, calling the Palestinians, vermin. How would you like to try making a life with that hanging over your head?

Those are just some of the unfair laws against Arabs and others living as part of Israel proper. The other 4 million or so Palestinians who live under Israeli occupation – Gaza, the West Bank, and Jerusalem – are treated terribly as is plain to the whole world.

Any backward law in Gaza, as against homosexuality, rather pales in comparison to the endless abuse of 4 million people with check points, arrests, assassinations, torture, stealing more land, stealing more water, and a set of regulations against these people designed to make them frustrated enough to leave.
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“And now, it would appear that some believe the Israelis will be defeated by obtuse and willfully- ignorant remarks.”

No thoughtful person wants Israel “defeated,” whatever that means anyway.

That is a classic straw-man argument, against the rules of logic.

What honest critics want is an Israel which returns to its borders and treats its neighbors as human beings.

What critics want is the end of Israel’s string of atrocities.

And what Israel’s critics want is an end of the ghastly lies and misrepresentations which stream like Noah’s flood from Israeli apologists with every incident of Israel’s behaving the bloody bully.
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“Israel will get through this, alone as in the past.”

Another Israeli apologists’ myth.

Alone? When has Israel ever got through anything alone?

With $3 billion assistance per year from America?

Plus a great power’s guarantee of defence?

With billions in gifts and loans from the Jewish people of North America?

With billions in reparations from Germany – deserved, of course, but hardly standing-alone stuff?

With a free-trade treaty with the United States that many countries would give a great deal to have?

With a constant flow of technical and intelligence assistance from the United States, something no other place on earth receives?

With favorable treatment for its products in Europe?

So bent in Israel’s favor are international arrangements that Israel exports farm produce which is the most subsidized on the planet, using precious water in a dry region whose actual economic cost is many times the value of exported produce.

And, of course, when you can just take someone else’s land and water for your economy, you do have a remarkable advantage, don’t you?

And even more, when everyone is afraid to criticize your most brutal actions, you have still another special advantage.

Stand alone is the last thing Israel does: it’s rather like claiming bravery for what is basically cowardice.
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“Funny how those who stole land from the Jews 1200 years ago are complaining how those people stole land from them 70 years ago.”

No one stole land from Israelis 1200 years ago.

The Roman conquered the region in the first century of the Common Era.

There is no record of the Roman’s turning out the inhabitants, and, indeed, expelling the natives was not the practice of Rome.

One Israeli professor eloquently argues that the Palestinians are the true descendants of the ancient Israelis.

Now, as for the “70 years ago,” that is precisely the point of Israel’s critics.

The whole world, including Arab states like Saudi Arabia, accepts or is willing to accept Israel’s existence, despite the rather bloody and unfair events of 70 years ago.

But do we see Israel within the borders of 70 years ago?

No, we see it spreading constantly, its borders always changing, more land and more homes seized from others. Land taken, farms taken, people turned out with nothing.

We see a suppurating wound of abuse to approximately 4 million people (Gaza and the West Bank) who do not live inside the recognized borders of Israel.

We see Israel not permitting even a democratic government (Gaza) to exist without arrests, assassinations, and a horrible blockade.

There would be no problem were Israel to return to its proper borders and to begin treating its neighbors with respect and decency.

Saying anything else just is just ignoring reality.

And saying anything else supports the efforts of an imperial apartheid power imposing its will on everyone a thousand miles around its ever expanding borders.

Which all means insisting that Israel is a democracy only makes one glad there are not more such democracies