John Chuckman

EXPANSION OF A COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY CAITLAND JOHNSTONE IN CONSORTIUM NEWS

 

“Biden Can’t Return US to Normal, Because Trump is a Normal President

“Wanting America to go back to how it was before Trump is like rewinding the same horror movie”

 

“‘Trump is a very normal U.S. president”

Despite the seeming contradiction in those words, I completely agree with your meaning, Ms. Johnstone.

When it comes to real substance, America has been killing and torturing people, destroying homes and whole countries, ignoring the rule of law, for many decades.

Trump really hasn’t added much to that “normal behavior” except his crude style of presentation. And his insistence on inflicting his absolutely talentless family on the world, the Beverly Hillbillies of Fifth Avenue.

But many Americans seem to believe otherwise. Or perhaps, it’s just that they wish very much to believe otherwise?

Many are ashamed of Trump as the chief representative of the country, and of course with good reason. He is shabby and ignorant and often ridiculous, but they mostly have not been ashamed of the country’s destructive activities abroad for three-quarters of a century. I think it might be fair to characterize the perspective as somewhat superficial.

Just bury the Trump voodoo doll and everything will be fine, except that it won’t. But Americans look for no truth nor demand any from their government, so long as they feel vaguely at ease, as when wearing comfy old slippers. You could look at Joe Biden as a pair of comfy old slippers.

It really is going to be a dumb game show, the coming election. Even dumber than usual. The choice, after billions of dollars spent on marketing and advertising and trips, comes down to what one writer aptly called “Trump and not-Trump.”

If you know Biden’s record, you find the role of knight on a white charger to be serious miscasting.

This is a loyal party hack. He supported all the killing and destruction abroad, even though he now lies about his early support for the carnage of a million deaths inflicted on Iraq.

He supported all the internal dishonesty of his party, as revealed in the massive DNC and Hillary Clinton material published by Wikileaks.

He scoops up bags of campaign cash from American plutocrats behind closed doors, making them promises we know nothing about.

He pushed for Obama’s hellish extrajudicial killing system, complete with “kill lists” in the Oval Office’s in-box for approval. He never objected to any of the very harsh treatment of whistle blowers, including Assange and Manning, a category of people against whom Obama was relentless.

Biden stood by, watching as Libya and Syria and other countries were torn apart, governments guilty of nothing but independent thinking about American policy. He kept wearing his big smile as Israel bombed and shot the hell out of Palestinians locked by high fences in a big refugee camp, killing several thousand adults and about a thousand kids, some streets running red with blood in photos.

I never heard him once complain about Saudi Arabia’s grisly tyrant or about the blood-spattered Generalissimo running Egypt.

Biden happily served as imperial proconsul for America’s paid coup in Ukraine, a coup against an elected government. He smiled, shaking hands with such Nazi types as the commander of the Azov Battalion. And did all the dirty business he was bidden to do with the corrupt and smarmy President Poroshenko.

He scooped up all the bribes he could for his family. Imagine a big firm in Ukraine suddenly wanting to pay his son, Hunter, fifty thousand dollars per month (yes, that is, “per month”) for years of doing nothing? Yet somehow that wasn’t a grotesque bribe?

A disgusting politician for sure, but he doesn’t bellow like Trump or display laughable facial grimaces. He’s not embarrassing, except when he introduces his wife as his sister or forgets where he is during a speech, but I guess that kind of embarrassing can be endearing.

Americans do not want to see the truth about their country, and the country’s press happily accommodates their wishes.  It is the world’s bully, and it is engaged full-time in state terror. There is simply no other word to describe many of its acts abroad. And it never stops lying about all of it.

No, Americans don’t really mean “to go back to normal.” Normal has never gone away. They mean the normal of their undisturbed ability to pretend the country is something other than what it is.

Americans want a pleasant fantasy, sort of a sugary Walt Disney cartoon – “Uncle Remus’s Tales of Ben Franklin and Betsy Ross” – and that’s just what they’ll get from Joe Biden.

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY HAMZA ABU AL-TARABEESH IN MONDOWEISS

 

“Five years on, a reporter from Gaza remembers the 2014 war”

 

Just a note on words.

Sorry, but I can’t help it, I am always offended when anyone calls one of Israel’s periodic savage attacks on Gaza a “war.”

“War” generally implies two forces of at least some rough equivalence. Otherwise, no conflict would take place, as the greatly weaker side would avoid a fight and retreat.

But you can’t retreat when your home and neighborhood are being assaulted. And where do you run to when you live in a giant open-air prison surrounded by fences and automated machine-gun towers?

No, you cannot dignify Israel’s ruthless assaults on Gaza with the word “war.”

One side has jets, guided missiles, tanks, artillery, armored soldiers, and satellite intelligence while the other has hand-held weapons?

That is the work of the worst kind of cowards, the work of heavily-armed men who kill trapped opponents and women and children and who blow-up homes.

John Chuckman

EXPANSION OF COMMENTS POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN THE INDEPENDENT

 

“Three dead and hundreds injured as protests on Gaza border turn violent

Total killed now stands at 41 since unrest started in March”

 

A ridiculous headline because of its ambiguity.

From the start, Israel’s response has been violence, extreme violence.

The protests are noisy and unpleasant, but they have not really “turned violent.”

The demonstrators are unarmed, but Israeli snipers keep shooting batches of them, killing, among others, two well-marked journalists and some children. Something in the neighborhood of a thousand have received wounds from guns.

Israel’s only real purpose here is not in protecting itself from violence but to make the demonstrators feel the utter futility of their efforts, to demonstrate, yet again, Israel’s overwhelming military strength and its readiness to kill on very little provocation and without compunction.

It’s all stuff we knew, but this brutal state never tires of showing us again.

This week-long event is only rightly termed the Passover Massacre.

__________________________

Response to a comment, “Israel was established largely to provide a safe haven for oppressed Jewish people”:

Yes, as to why, in part, Israel was re-created, but the great tragedy of it is that it was always something of an unrealistic project, bound to be a moral and ethical failure in the face of millions of Palestinians whose towns and farms were stolen as well as the notion that Israel must have only one kind of people. I know there are a fair number of non-Jewish citizens, but their presence was an accident of 1948, and important Israeli leaders do not regard them as either desirable or permanent. More than a few have advocated their expulsion.

As for the many more Palestinians in the occupied territories, they aren’t going anywhere, no matter what horrors Israel inflicts on them. And just where would they go anyway? Who in the region is offering to take millions of refugees? Who anywhere is ready to take millions of refugees? The United States, whose grotesquely unbalanced support of Israel prevents a decent solution, isn’t ready to take even a limited number of refugees from its own bombing campaigns in places like Libya and Syria.

General Dayan, back in the days of the 1967 War, said Israel would have to make the Palestinians miserable enough to want to leave. And that’s just what Israel has never stopped working toward, just with highs and lows in the harshness of the effort. But they are not leaving. The ugly sniper killings plus countless other incidents show Israel’s violent frustration with this reality.

In a way, the demonstrations and Israel’s extreme brutality towards them hide something far larger and more fundamental and ongoing: conditions in Gaza, home to 1.5 million, are approaching the level of not being able to sustain human life, and that’s entirely Israel’s doing, its deliberate and immoral doing.

It is stunning that the world can sit back and watch this all happening. Virtually all of our Western press and politicians just shut their eyes. And even the press that does cover it in the smallest degree, often uses euphemisms to describe things.

It is simply the greatest single shame on earth at this time.

The men who lead Israel seem to have learned, from the suffering of their European ancestors under the Nazis, only how to be extremely brutal and vile themselves.

 

 

NOTE: While the deaths in Gaza appear to be reasonably consistently reported, the wounded are not. It is difficult to get a fix on the number, which, in any case is very high. Looking at different sources, one finds different numbers. The UN, in its latest rather ineffectual call for an end to the violence, cited more than 5,500 having been injured by gunshots.

John Chuckman

EXPANSION OF A COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE AND VIDEO IN THE INDEPENDENT

Here’s more propaganda from The Independent, so poorly disguised you cannot vouch for the source.

God, don’t you ever get tired of pushing this stuff out?

Even if you could account for the source, this is propaganda precisely because it has absolutely no perspective. The best propaganda always has a tiny bit of truth, and the truth here is that, yes, such weapons are used.

You absolutely cannot fairly take one small part of a huge destructive war and suggest that it explains what is going on. It cannot. It can horrify people though, and that would appear to be its purpose here because The Independent makes no practice of presenting such things in most situations.

I can’t recall any equivalent material being used by The Independent for Israel’s slaughters in Gaza, and such material does exist. Some very brave photographers took images of the rivers of blood and smashed children.

I don’t recall such material for America’s (and of course Britain’s) proud invasion of Iraq in which such ghastly weapons as cluster bombs and white phosphorus were used. Thousands of pictures exist of sliced-up children and smashed women, but you never ran any.

The creepy Saudis, whom Britain implicitly supports and with whom it explicitly does a handsome business, are, right now, killing masses of civilians in Yemen, and they are using America’s dreadful cluster bombs to tear them apart, maiming those not killed. Where are your terrifying images?

The horror in Syria did not start by the government’s barrel-bombing places. The barrel-bombing is a response to the infiltration and entrenchment of tens of thousands of heavily-armed terrorists trying to destroy the country from scattered and hidden positions all over it.

They were infiltrated into Syria by the lunatic now running Turkey. They are financed and supplied by the absolute princes of Saudi Arabia. They were assisted, advised, and even led in some cases by the same government of Israel which holds more than five million unwilling people as prisoners. Yet more money came from the absolute princes of Qatar.

And the United States has also supplied and trained elements. It clearly approves of what has been going on or it would be stopped. We know to a certainty that nothing happens anywhere near its Middle East colony of which it does not approve.

Britain under David Cameron, as one of America’s most groveling allies, has also done its dirty bit to help.

This entire misery could be ended if outside help and support for thugs were ended, but that help and support, by the above-named parties, will not stop. Because those countries want Syria destroyed just the way Iraq was destroyed, reduced to a meaningless set of rump states with a population left to suffer for a generation.

And they want to achieve that in the most cowardly of fashions, giving the bloody work over to hired mercenaries and ideological maniacs while standing off – tsk-tsking at the horrors as Cameron is wont to do – pretending they have nothing to do with it.

I simply do not understand how anyone can think human trash like ISIS and al-Nusra Front should prevail over a reasonable, highly-educated man like Assad, a leader who has always protected a secular and diverse society and who keeps the support of large parts of that society.

It is a totally absurd situation, and it can only be explained in light of American policy. It is the policy that destroyed Iraq and Libya and sparked in large covert operations the whole pointless and wrongly-named Arab Spring. There was nothing spring-like in what happened.

A brief experiment with democratic government in Egypt was smothered following Israel’s complaints about the threat it represented. Egypt was returned to a decades-old dictatorship much to Israel’s liking. In other places, like Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, potential uprisings were violently suppressed by absolute governments.

It was all an effort to re-mold the region to the liking of America and its Middle East colony under a façade of popular revolt and never mind all the inconvenience of death, destruction, and misery. The region’s authoritarian governments were overthrown only where they disagreed with America and/or Israel while in all other cases they were left to flourish, and the authoritarian governments overthrown were only replaced by others. Democracy flourishes nowhere.

Well, Mr. Putin understands that, and if the nations doing the deadly supplying aren’t going to stop, he’ll destroy what they’ve supplied. The Syrian army will do the rest.

NOTE:

Julian Assange has said that the massive influx of refugees into Europe is, in fact, part of the American strategy to de-stabilize Syria, and I don’t doubt that he is right. Emptying Syria of good parts of its professionals and technicians only further weakens it.

This, of course, puts in quite a different light Ms. Merkel’s controversial, open-arms support for unlimited refugees in Germany. She, rather than speaking from a heart larger than we would have credited her from past behaviors, is just once again supporting American policy, a much more familiar stance for her.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSE TO AN ASSOCIATED PRESS STORY

“Major escalation“?

Talk about bias in reporting!

This is it, big time.

Israel has pounded Gaza for three days, and it has killed 28 people at last count.

It also ruthlessly assassinated a leader of the government, and did so right as he was negotiating a long-term ceasefire with them.

Netanyahu is simply a madman for whom the lives of Palestinians mean nothing.

All of this savagery by Israel is really for two purposes, neither of which is ethical or honorable.

One, Netanyahu faces election, and he uses the blood of the people of Gaza to fire up support.

Two, Netanyahu clearly is getting ready to steal more land from the Palestinians by annexation. This kind of activity acts a screen and preparation.

Israel’s behavior is completely unacceptable to all fair-minded people.

Please understand, those who know no history, Gaza is essentially a giant refugee camp dating to the 1948 days when Israel’s army and terror squads – the Irgun and Stern and Lehi – fanned out through Palestine to murder many people, hoping to frighten them away.

It is densely populated, and its population is about half children. Every Israeli Prime Minister has hoped to put end to its existence one way or another.

No one but a madman or psychopath would bomb such a place.

Remember too, the last time Israel invaded, it killed 400 children plus about 1400 others.

Ever since that atrocity it has kept a blockade to prevent normal life, and it has murdered unarmed people on the high seas to enforce its bully behavior.

At first, it even calculated what starvation calories would be and only allowed enough food to enter to just barely prevent starvation, not even chocolate bars were let in, nor were the building materials needed to repair the damage from Israel’s ruthless bombing.

After quiet diplomacy from outside, there has been a slight let-up in calories.

Just ask yourself what you would do if treated in this way? I know what most gun-owning Americans would feel like doing against repression, savagery, and abuse.

What are the poor people of Gaza to do? Just all leave? If so, for where? Or are they to lie down and just accept virtual slavery from Israel?

Meanwhile, Israel steals the homes and farms of others week after week in the West Bank and Jerusalem.

American politicians, cowards all, say nothing for fear of being smeared and losing valuable campaign contributions from the Israel Lobby.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

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

“No mention here of the fact that the Israelis tried to negotiate a peaceful boarding, were refused”

And would you or anyone in their right mind permit scores of heavily armed soldiers aboard your boat on the high seas, at night moreover?

Of course not.

But I say that assuming the correctness of the writer’s assertion.

We already have many reports that the Israelis muscled their way on board, indeed started shooting while some people slept in their bunks. And anyone who knows how commandos or SWAT teams work knows which version is more likely.

We have several hundred eye witnesses. Let’s see what they say.

I would be surprised if one word agrees with the assertions of Netanyahu or the Israeli Ministry of Truth or Israel’s apologists writing here.

The history of Israel’s dissimulation is so vast – from the truth about the Six Day War and Israel’s attack on the USS Liberty spy ship, at the time, to the work of spies like Jonathon Pollard against its chief benefactor or Israel’s current president’s agreeing to sell nuclear weapons to apartheid South Africa – that no one can ever believe the official word on anything.

You earn your reputation in this world, and Israel has certainly worked hard to earn hers.

Attacking every neighbor, abusing millions, assassinations, illegal mass arrests, blockades, regular theft of the property of others, building atomic weapons, lying, spying on friends, etc, etc.

Just look at Netanyahu’s words on cutting short his trip to Ottawa: the man slurred the humanitarians by asserting reports of gunfire when there were absolutely no guns on that ship, a fact ascertained in Turkey.

You work hard for a reputation the way Israel has, it seems to me you should enjoy what you’ve earned.
_______________________________

“Israel can not give Hamas what it wants; the total destruction of Israel.”

Surely, those qualify as the most ridiculous words written here, but they are not just here, they are repeated mindlessly everywhere.

But they are utterly false, pure rhetoric.

Hamas has never attempted to destroy Israel, nor would it even be remotely capable of doing so if that were its desire. Yes, it has anti-Israel propaganda, but what else does it have, other than abuse and frustration?

Hamas has the military capacity of a mid-sized town’s police force, at best.

Facing it is a garrison state equipped with sophisticated jet fighters, sophisticated guided missiles, sophisticated tanks and artillery, advanced radars, access to spy satellites, a vast spy network, poison gas supplies, even nuclear weapons, plus a guarantee from the world’s superpower.

To get just a notion of Israel’s overwhelming position, see this image of one of the radar-controlled Gatling gun towers which surround Gaza, ready to riddle anything that moves:

http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/photos/uncategorized/2008/12/04/e2ca3bc6713642d99f3d33082d3d7072lar.jpg

Except for those pathetic homemade rockets fired out of frustration and hopelessness, Hamas has no record of in any way attacking Israel.

To see just how pathetic those homemade rockets are, see this:

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_NtgXlrcvXZA/SWfEpYDqzwI/AAAAAAAAZm0/v8qp2yKvyVo/s1600-h/ROCKET+qassam37.jpg

Now, what is Israel’s record by comparison? It has assassinated many leaders of Hamas, often wiping out families and neighbors in the process. It illegally arrested a major part of an elected government. It refuses even to talk with reasonable men, for many of the leaders of Hamas are genuinely professional people, not guerilla fighters.

Indeed, the measure of Hamas is Israel’s own past treatment of it. Israel’s secret services helped nurture it as a potential opposition to Fatah, Arafat’s party. You don’t subsidize what you are afraid of.

Well, the policy worked in achieving destructive in-fighting between Fatah and Hamas, and Israel just stands back and says look what bad people they are.

Hamas was elected for clean government. Palestinians were tired of Fatah’s corruption, but Israel never gave it so much as an opportunity to talk. Does that sound like an honest desire for peace?

Israel’s extreme response to the election actually caused Hamas to enter into a national unity government with two other parties in 2007. All Israel has done is impose an inhumane and illegal blockade, always yapping about “terrorists.” You never get peace that way, as Northern Ireland and many other examples prove.

But Israel does not want peace as most people understand that word. Israel wants more of other people’s property, minus the people. There is no other rational explanation for its whole set of behaviors.

They don’t deal with Hamas in the West Bank, do they? But do we see peace, or even decent treatment there? No, we see homes and farms seized week after week.
____________________________

“Didn’t the author say that Olmert had negotiated to lift the blockade very quickly, in return for a cessation of hostilities, but was refused when he asked for Hamas to return a kidnapped soldier as part of the deal???”

That is a perfect example of the kind of poor information and deliberately incomplete information which Israel’s apologists repeat and repeat.

The Palestinians agreed to a ceasefire: Israel broke the agreement.

No, the Palestinians would not include the return the one valuable asset they hold, the Israeli soldier. But they are perfectly ready to release him for reciprocal Israeli action as is widely known.

Remember, Israel holds somewhere in the neighborhood of 9 to 10 thousand Palestinian prisoners, most improperly arrested, some held in secret facilities, and many tortured. Even members of the cleanly-elected Hamas government were arrested shortly after the election.

The soldier is the only possession the Palestinians hold valued enough by Israel to trade for the release of a small portion of its illegal prisoners. There is nothing irrational or improper about that desire.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

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

Such brave soldiers of Israel, killing more innocent people, these for the crime of attempting to deliver humanitarian assistance.

I’m afraid Israel has degenerated into nothing more than a criminal enterprise.

What distinguishes Israel from Cosa Nostra or the Russian Mafia?

Israel kills more people.
________________

“I thought Israel had unilaterally withdrawn from Gaza? Did they or didn’t they?”

The only thing withdrawn from Gaza was the small tribe of insane “settlers” – immigrants looking for free land at someone else’s expense – walking around with machine guns and the razor wire and troops which protected them.

That was a perfect example of Israeli duplicity.

They removed their violent idiots from an unsustainable position and instead turned all of Gaza into a giant concentration camp.

Gaza is surrounded by high-tech fences and there are towers with automated gun emplacements in a “killing zone.” The guns are radar controlled and are the similar to the Gatling guns used to protect American Navy capital ships.

Anything which moves within 1500 yards or so of one of these robot sentry towers is riddled with tons of lead. For a picture see:

http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/dangerroom/images/2008/12/04/e2ca3bc6713642d99f3d33082d3d7072lar.jpg

Israel controls all access by air and sea also. The monetary aid sent from Europe is taken by Israel and doled out in only the most dire of situations.

Israel also controls to a considerable extent the small border with Egypt, because President Mubarak – an undemocratic dictator in effect – loves his big aid/bribe cheques from Washington.

If that doesn’t describe a concentration camp (for a million and a half people, many of whom were refugees from Israel’s original wave of terror inflicted at its “founding”) I don’t know what does.
_______________________

Meanwhile, that excellent man, Harper who represents only 1/3 of voters, was glad-handing the criminal responsible for this, assuring himself of a generous flow of campaign contributions for the next election.

Ontario’s Political Weasel-in-Chief, McGuinty, was wandering around on a “trade mission” in a country whose trade for Ontario is less than the amount spent on security for the G20/G8.

Again, undoubtedly assuring himself of a heavy campaign-finance chest.

Now, the importance of money in politics is immensely greater in the U.S.

The Israel Lobby has money and lobbying down to an art, and so America not only supports Israel’s brutality and spurning of peace, it actually subsidizes them heavily.

That’s democracy for sure.
___________________

Post script: The cowardly Netanyahu hurriedly flew home to Israel after news broke of Israel’s atrocity on the high seas against people trying to bring humanitarian aid to Gaza.