John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN MIDDLE EAST MONITOR

 

“Jews are being used as human shields in the war of words over anti-Semitism”

https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20190726-jews-are-being-used-as-human-shields-in-the-war-of-words-over-anti-semitism/

 

In the photo at the top of this article, a woman holds a sign saying, “Criticism of Israel is not anti-Semitism.”

That should not even need saying. It is simply a truism. A platitude. Not much different in its analytical content than saying the sun will rise tomorrow.

But it does need saying. Very much so.

Why?

Because we have a vigorous and well-financed group claiming otherwise, and doing so incessantly.

The group has its own reasons for saying so, but those reasons have absolutely nothing to do with human rights or prejudice or fairness or even decency.

It is a well understood principle that when you make enough noise about anything, it has an effect.

It is accepted in advertising and in political propaganda, a branch of the same persuasive art as advertising, that “if you throw enough crap at the wall, some of it will stick.”

That unpleasant reality is just part of our human condition. Fanatical or unscrupulous people will always seek to exploit it. Always.

There is a close-to-exact historical parallel for this controversy of labelling people as anti-Semitic because they criticize Israel, one which I think clarifies things considerably.

Was criticizing the old Soviet Union evidence of hatred for Russians, what has today become known as Russophobia?

Of course, it was not.

There was a great deal to criticize about the Soviet Union, about the way it treated people, its own and others, about its readiness to use brute force to reinforce its position, about its respect for human rights and freedom.

And exactly the same is true today of Israel. Almost down to the last detail, just all on a smaller scale of millions rather than tens of millions.

Israel is a state, not a religion or an ethnicity, not a museum exhibit about events from another continent three-quarters of a century ago. It is a place where millions of people try to live their lives, try to have families, try to become educated, try to get ahead, try to build hopes for the future.

More than one kind of people. Millions of another kind of people.

And those millions are absolutely blunted in their basic human drives.

All states are capable of wrongdoing, of abusing others, of misuse of force, of ignoring human rights and even humanity. Such is the nature of states if viewed as tools for a purpose, as they frequently are.

Democracy or claims of democracy are no defense because a majority of people determined to be unfair can, in fact, prevail indefinitely.

Efforts are made in many democratic states to prevent an ill-intentioned “tyranny of a majority” with Bills or Charters of Rights, documents which define basic rights for all and with legal force to redress injustice through the courts.

But Israel has no such minority-protecting document, nor can it ever expect to have one, given the unusual nature of its founding principles.

If a majority of the residents in a state want to be unfair in some way, the state gives them the machinery to enforce the unfairness in perpetuity. This is precisely what we see in Israel.

It is nothing new. We’ve seen it in many historical examples, from the Soviet Union to Nationalist South Africa and to the old American Confederacy.

Those just happen to be examples of what contemporary Israel represents. I’m sure it is not comfortable to be told so, but who ever claimed that truth is always comfortable? Indeed, we know to a certainty that it often is not.

And right-minded people, people who love human liberty and justice, people who uphold classical Western liberal principles, must speak up in such situations, even though it automatically condemns them to be called names and insulted.

 

 

 

 

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY AS’AD ABUKHALIL IN CONSORTIUM NEWS

 

“Israel’s Overlooked Strategic Losses in Wars Against Arabs

“After conventional Arab armies failed to deter Israeli invasions, Lebanese and Palestinian volunteers have changed the strategic balance in the Middle East”

___________________

Response to a comment saying, “The barrage of anti-Israel rhetoric lost all credibility some time ago. While it remains fashionable among our bourgeoisie, it has defied all logic. Bottom line: Jews are indigenous to that bit of land, restored as the Jewish nation in 1948. Israel is roughly 1% of the Mideast, with the remaining 99% owned by the Arab states, all of which are armed to the teeth by China, Russia, and the US. Although portrayed as a military behemoth trampling over the impoverished oil states, it takes everything Israel has got, just to survive”:

Sorry, but you just repeat lines from pamphlets.

The Ashkenazi – the people running Israel and the main early Zionist writers – are indeed Jews, but that ignores the fact that they are not Hebrews. There is a huge difference.

The Ashkenazi are Europeans. The word, Ashkenazi, means “German.”

Deli food is not Middle Eastern – it reflects German and central European food.

The Yiddish language is not Middle Eastern – it is derived from German.

The dress of the ultra-Orthodox is not Middle Eastern – it is from 18^th or 19th century Eastern Europe.

Yes, most Jews learn some Hebrew in their temples’ Hebrew Schools, but that is no different than the practice of millions of devout Muslims learning Arabic in madrassa schools so that they can read the Koran in the original. It provides no basis for Indonesia laying claim to Saudi Arabia.

Sharing religious beliefs with someone who ages ago owned some real estate buys you nothing in the real world.

All the best evidence we have suggests the Palestinians are the actual remaining descendants of the Hebrews.

The Romans never tossed out whole peoples from conquered lands. There is no record of their ever doing so.

The notion of wandering Jews looking for a home again for two thousand years appears to be just a sentimental myth used by people like the Ashkenazi to feel more connected to the ancient Hebrews whose religion they share.

There are many examples of such myths and beliefs – e.g., a number of American Blacks regard themselves as descendants of the ancient Egyptians – but myths provide no foundation for building new arrangements in the real world.

Besides, time and again, DNA tests of Ashkenazi people tell us plainly they go back about one thousand years or less. Two origins are suggested, and both of them are located in Europe.

Citing ancient texts, and especially religious or superstitious ones, as any kind of basis for the geo-politics of the modern world makes little sense and is actually quite dangerous.

Otherwise, Greece, who won the Trojan War three thousand years ago, would have a claim on Turkey, the site of ancient Troy.

And many other groups besides the ancient Hebrews possessed what we call Israel before the Hebrews, including the Egyptians. By what logic do you stop at just a certain era in any territory’s long history to call it the definitive origin? There’s no such thing.

And there are scores of such examples as the Greeks and Trojans which prove nothing and would only generate confusion and war if taken seriously.

And that is pretty much the case for re-created Israel. Confusion and war.

John Chuckman

EXPANSION OF COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY PETER F COHEN IN MONDOWEISS

 

“Why we can be hopeful on Palestine”

 

I very much wish the title represented something more than a new version of Candide’s optimism.

The single state solution is an idea that has been around a long time.

If I’m not mistaken, the late Edward Said embraced it many years ago.

It’s perfectly rational, but that is part of the reason that the bitter, brutal men running Israel will never accept it.

They are harsh ideologues, embracing a dark fantasy, the re-creation of an ancient land based on doubtful religious texts of 2,500 years, or more, ago. Texts in which people are stoned for doing things we do every day. Texts in which certain kinds of cloth and certain kinds of food, things we all use, are forbidden. Texts in which a great many events are either fantasies – Jonah and the whale or Lot’s wife as a pillar of salt or the Tower of Babel or Noah’s Ark – or things which never occurred – Israel’s captivity in Egypt and the reign of King David.

Those are hardly a sound basis for modern political affairs and the founding of a state which is heavily armed. But the truth is they provide only the start of a grim list of problems associated with today’s Israel.

Jews in fact flourish in a number of places in far better situations than they do in Israel. It seems to me that there is something in the Israeli temperament resembling the reclusive religious institutions of the Middle Ages, the ones where self-flagellation and other extremes were the norm – not the kind of people ready to embrace large numbers of outsiders with different ways. We find the same qualities in cults sometimes, the desire for separateness and unwillingness to mingle with others.

If Zionists had taken Albert Einstein’s advice, embracing the native people and living among them without iron walls, there could have been something harmonious and peaceful and constructive for everyone over the last 70 years.

But they did not embrace that vision. They embraced instead a bitter and hostile vision of iron walls and racial segregation. And militarism and police and security forces everywhere.

Moreover, Israel is the most heavily subsidized entity on earth, counting both government and private subsidies, and we all know the highly debilitating effects of subsidy over time. And subsidies cannot continue indefinitely. People do not endlessly give away money and resources, particularly when they see the recipient makes absolutely no progress at creating an improved situation.

It would be wise to seriously start making peace with the neighbors and cooperating because what we see today in Israel simply is not a situation which can be sustained long term, that is, without the kind of endless harshness we see, much the same kind of harshness we saw in the old Soviet Union, a state whose circumstances also were not sustainable. But fanatics, like the men who run Israel, do not look at hard realities.

Israel deliberately maintains an embattled situation, making life far more difficult for most there than in, say, Canada or the US or France or many other places.

Israel’s open abuse of millions causes its citizens to be greatly disliked in the world, too, and I don’t really think most people enjoy being disliked.

The place is an armed camp, a crusader fortress. The level of military and security services make it in many ways resemble the old USSR. A state top-heavy with military and police and spies is not a healthy one for the long term. A recent book revealed that Israel’s security services have conducted 2,700 assassinations. Serial murder, then, is a founding value of the nation.

The cost of living in Israel is very high, houses are hard to buy, and career opportunities are quite limited. It is a small place, with about half the population of Ecuador. It can never enjoy great economies of scale, and its international trade literally is force-fed by American subsidies and pressures on others.

People only voluntarily live that way – having actually gone out of their way to create the circumstances – when a fantasy or a fanatical belief dominates rational thinking. Fanatical beliefs provide no sound foundation for anything.

I wouldn’t care if Israelis wanted to indulge their fantasies, providing they could do so without hurting and abusing millions of others.

But they are hurting and abusing millions of others. That fact is at the heart of the matter.

It is not a matter of a war or conflict, as it is so often inaccurately and lopsidedly presented in our press and by our politicians, when you have a situation where other people’s farms and houses are regularly stolen. It represents a state where the rule of law does not apply, a kind of ongoing criminal enterprise with no justice for its victims.

The rule of law simply is not to be found in Israel and the territories it occupies. Something called the law exists, but it is the same kind of law we saw in places like the American Confederacy and in Nationalist South Africa. It is law to protect only a specific group of residents, and it is law which oppresses all others.

You simply cannot have a viable country in the long term without the stability of the rule of law, yet the people running Israel appear to believe that you can.

You know, it is impossible to look at images of Gaza and not immediately think of a giant concentration camp. And what we see there is Israel’s doing completely. Penning people in with fences and guard towers, including towers with automated, radar-activated machine guns. Bombing them frequently, invading them periodically, blockading their imports, even the materials required for repairs and rebuilding. Curtailing all their natural rights such as how far fishermen can go out in their boats and whether people can travel anywhere, even for medical care or education.

Just imagine how Israel would thrive treated the same way. Of course, it wouldn’t. It couldn’t. It would stagnate and begin to rot. In a way, Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians provides a self-fulfilling prophecy for them. Many Israelis really do believe it is only themselves capable of making a thriving place. You can very much see that notion on display in propaganda films and lobbying efforts. It surely represents a form of racism which just jumps out at us periodically.

And when peaceful, desperate people protest for rights to which they are entitled by all the reckonings of Western tradition, Israel can only think of lining up firing squads of soldiers to shoot into the crowds from behind fences. Where in God’s name does such behavior take you? It is a one-way trip to nowhere.

The idea of a mixed state is abhorrent to a great many Israelis because it violates the confused dream that dominated the founders’ thinking.

It would only be possible if the United States used its inordinate power and authority to push for justice. Indeed, that is the reality for any settlement, whether two states or one. But how likely is that? It is not only unlikely, it is impossible given the political realities of America with its money-driven elections and its tolerance for powerful lobbies to supply money along with other assistance such as favorable press treatment.

The lobby for Israel in the United States is one of the most powerful and well-run in the country. It is for many a political death sentence to oppose it. It will maintain the status quo so long as the leaders in Israel want it to be so. There is a kind of vicious circle involved in all discussions of Israel-Palestinian peace.

Only in the remote case of American Jews becoming convinced that Israel should no longer be supported so vigorously, or in the equally remote case of America changing its terrible laws around money in politics and the governance of political lobbies, would there be a possibility for America to use its strength and influence for justice. Well, it’s gone on the way it is for seventy years, and there seems little reason to expect change in either of those American circumstances which support Israel.

Further contributing to Israel’s distaste for a single-state solution is the fact that, in general, Arab birth rates are higher, considerably, than Israeli ones. Of course, keeping Palestinians in relative poverty only helps to extend that reality since we know birth rates invariably drop with prosperity. So, how long would it be before Jews became a minority? I know Israel’s leadership is keenly aware of this reality and greatly fears it.

Israel plays an intellectual game around the concept of democracy, always trying to gain plaudits as the “only democracy in the Middle East.” But what kind of democracy is it where only certain people can immigrate, become full citizens, and vote? Yes, there is a minority population of Palestinians who are citizens (now about 20% of total population), but their status was an accident of history, of events around 1948.

It was never intended to be so, and many Israelis would like to change their status. Prominent people have addressed that very subject. Netanyahu once described them as a “demographic bomb,” such are his fair-minded views.

And this minority is treated unfairly with specialized laws against their interests. It is even spoken out against and threatened by some Israeli politicians, men of the caliber of Avigdor Lieberman, of which Israel has considerable numbers, their presence being consistently required in the formation of governments under Israel’s political system.

In effect, some of the darkest voices in Israel always have a seat at the table of government. They provide the required margin to form a government, and they employ that margin to maintain disproportionate influence.

As well, whenever Israel meets democracy in the Arab world around it, it treats it with open hostility. It loved the long-term dictator of Egypt, Mubarak, hated and worked against Egypt’s one brief democratic government, and now embraces the new Egyptian dictator, el-Sisi. It embraces the bloody tyrant in Saudi Arabia. It embraces the King of Jordan.

It tried to totally destroy democratically-elected Hamas in Gaza, whose original non-corrupt and democratic ways only got it labelled as “terrorist.” It somewhat supports the so-called President of Palestine, Abbas, a man whose legitimate mandate ended many years ago and who has not faced an election since. Its tepid tolerance for Abbas is based only on his relative ineffectiveness and his opposition to Hamas in Gaza.

Israel has little prospect for healthy future in-migration of Jews. Indeed, it experiences some years with net out-migration. Jews are a relatively small group in the world, and not many would trade their prosperity and opportunity and freedom for the intense stress and unpleasant realities of Israel.

The Russians were the world’s last remaining large source for serious immigration, and now that’s used up.

It is important for understanding Israel’s political psychology to realize that many of its leaders and leading economic citizens have dual citizenships, as American or British, and they are secure in the backs of their minds that they can always pack-up and leave should the situation become too nasty. That is not the case for many ordinary citizens now born there. They are stuck.

Israel’s prospects, with relatively low birth rates and limited in-migration are for population decline and a whole lot more of the same grief and violence, given the extreme ideologue beliefs of its leaders and the inherent instability of its situation.

It’s a bleak long-term outlook.

But accept Palestinians? Whew, that’s like telling devout, old-fashioned Catholics they should accept abortion and married priests and stop reciting the Rosary.

Modern Israel, by all objective evidence, is, in fact, a pretty racist society, too. We’ve seen ugly controversy and manipulation at every turn involving race. Black refugees were treated terribly. Black Jews from Africa, too, were not even allowed to live in some neighborhoods. Of course, the same is true for Arabs who cannot rent or buy in many places and face open hostility. Some national laws, too, are different for Jews versus non-Jews.

I just do not see how a hopeful future can come from that.

It really was a hopeless enterprise from the beginning, creating a nation based on ancient myths and mumbo-jumbo texts, an enterprise based on anger and desperation with no larger guiding vision. But, again, if it could have been done without hurting millions of others, that would be only Israel’s’ business. But it cannot be done without hurting millions of others, and things continues along that path without any signs of let-up.

There can be no repeat of the Holocaust. It was a unique event under unique circumstances, not to be repeated, which is indeed the case with all truly terrible events. New horrors will happen somewhere to someone, but they won’t be a repeat of the Holocaust. A brilliant ancient Greek compared history to a flowing river into which you could never step into the same place twice.

Yet the Holocaust is used almost as raison d’etre for Israel. It truly is not since most of the world’s Jews do not live there. Of course, this also ignores the fact that the Holocaust was an event in another continent, involving one group of Germans against another. The Ashkenazim who created Zionism and who dominate Israel are a Germanic, Eastern European people. The word Ashkenazi means German.

So, what are they doing in the Middle East generating misery for still another people, people who had nothing to do with the Holocaust? Well, again, who would care about them being in the Middle East so long as they respected their neighbors and lived in peace. But they do not.

It’s nonsense to believe that the Holocaust could be repeated, but holding it over people’s heads serves much like the threat of hell does in American Christian fundamentalism or did in the Catholic Church for centuries of the Dark Ages.

The phrase “never again” contains no hint of reality, both because history never repeats itself and because the very people uttering it have demonstrated insincerity and hypocrisy in their efforts. Again, just look at images of Gaza and see what Israel has consciously created while uttering the words. It’s beyond shameful.

I regret to say that I see virtually nothing in the entire situation about which to be optimistic.

 

 

 

 

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN THE INDEPENDENT

 

“Labour antisemitism row was created by Israel trade union boss suggests”

 

He’s absolutely right. Please recall that Netanyahu himself stuck his nose into the affair, even getting what he was charging quite wrong.

The head of Israel’s Labour Party also butted in with a letter that was published.

And there have been other voices from Israel.

It truly has been the most blatant interference in the internal political affairs of another state, making anything Putin has been accused of look silly.

The “anti-Semitism” line does not give people a free pass to do things that are recognized everywhere as completely unacceptable.Israel hates Corbyn for two facts.

One, he is a “Leftie” and Israel’s government hates “Lefties” in general because they invariably speak to concerns over human and democratic rights in the world.

And, two, he has a balanced view of the Mideast and treats Palestinians as though they were full human beings with fair claims to decent and equal treatment.

Now, those are truly terrible things Corbyn stands accused of, aren’t they? I am sure he would plead guilty.

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

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY FATHI NEMER IN MONDOWEISS

 

Pretty good piece.

But there is a major flaw in starting from the question, “So, in the end, who was there first?”

You are playing Israel’s own crooked game by even trying to answer.

The fact is that that is a totally irrelevant question for any territory or country you care to name.

Should Turkey be Greek owing to the Trojan War three thousand years ago?

Should Israel be Lebanese owing to the ancient Phoenicians who were there before Hebrews?

If you want to get ridiculous, you could say Europe belongs to descendants with Neanderthal genes (and there are such).

What possibly could be more ridiculous than basing anything in modern affairs on words from old manuscripts which speak of turning a woman into salt and a big fish swallowing a man?

It’s not only intellectually obtuse, it is guaranteed formula for conflict.

The fact is that the people running and populating most of today’s Israel are of European descent, the Ashkenazi.

Their native language, Yiddish, is related to German, and their food and physical culture point to central and eastern Europe – Latkes, schmaltz, bagels, etc. None of it is Middle Eastern.

DNA testing indicates two origins. One, a group arising near Italy about a thousand years ago which migrated north into Germany. Other tests support the old Khazars hypothesis, a people from around Ukraine about a thousand years ago.

At some point, it seems clear that the Hebrews became evangelical, seeing the immense success of Christianity which started as an obscure Hebrew cult. The two groups above both were converts.

Ashkenazi DNA shows some admixture of Semite people, but that is to be expected with movements in and out of various Jewish groups over the centuries.

The Hebrew language, except among some scholars and religious students, died. It was artificially revived by modern Israel.

The bottom line is that the Ashkenazi of Israel are not descendants of the Hebrews.

Indeed, the great irony is that the Palestinians have the best claim to that title. The Romans who were excellent record keepers recorded no expulsion of Jews in the conquest of the Holy Land. Indeed, it was not their habit to expel local populations in their various conquests.

The whole story of the wandering Jews of the last two thousand years is a myth, as complete a myth as Jonah being swallowed by a big fish or Noah and the Ark.

The Hebrews in Palestine themselves suffered conquests, conversions, and migrations, but that body of people is as close as we have to the ancient Hebrews.

 

 

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN THE INDEPENDENT

 

‘The creation of the state of Israel was fundamentally wrong’

 I know The Independent is trying to be quite provocative here, but the truth is, there is nothing wrong with Livingstone’s statement. It is not hateful, it is painfully accurate.

Many, many thoughtful people have said more or less the same thing.

It has absolutely nothing to do with anti-Semitism.

It is simply a reflection of all the misery and turmoil Israel, as a state, has generated since 1948.

Albert Einstein himself – often called a Zionist – had a highly qualified view of Israel. He liked the idea of displaced Jews finding homes in the Holy Land, but wrote very forcefully against the kind of state we have seen emerge, one governed only for the benefit of Jews and with a powerful army. He was strongly against that happening.

One of the leading early Zionists, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, established a terrible principle called “the iron wall” which was completely adopted by re-created Israel. The principle is that Jews should show only an iron wall to their neighbors in the Middle East.

How can anything good come of that? Well, it cannot, and it hasn’t.

Had Israel been founded along lines Einstein advocated, the whole story might well have been different, but it did not. It adopted “the iron wall” and has treated its neighbors pretty much with contempt, and nearly endless aggression, since 1948.

The Six Day War, we know from various historical sources including blunt observations from de Gaulle, was deliberately created by Israel. It had calculated and knew that it could win handily against divided and poorly-led Arab states enticed into war. There were a whole series of provocations laid out, and Israel got just what it wanted in terms of land, and the Arabs were left looking like failed aggressors against poor little David. It was a military and propaganda triumph.

The results are what we see today: millions living as prisoners with no rights or future, slow-motion depopulation of the captured territories in favor of new owners, the outright theft of people’s homes and farms week-in and week-out, the disruption of ancient life patterns through walls (built on other people’s land) and countless barriers, the theft of many other resources such as oil from Syria’s Golan Heights or gas from a seabed which should belong to Gaza, theft of precious water supplies through many diversions and projects, and a very great deal more.

How can that kind of state behavior ever produce peace or anything else good? Of course it cannot. It is not meant to do so.

The truth is Israel is not even a very good place for many Jews in which to live. It is an awfully inefficient economy, always heavily subsidized. Prices are terribly high. It is difficult to afford a home. Good jobs are not plentiful. You must see your children in the army, and enforcing the ugliness of the occupation. And you must accept all the noise and ugly violence that goes on. The wealthy class in Israel, many or most of whom are dual-citizens, do very well and are safe in the idea they can easily migrate if required or desired.

Israel has attacked every neighbor that it has, some numerous times. It is always making threats, as against Iran, and the threats are unwarranted because Iran has attacked no one in its modern history and does not threaten Israel. Various modern leaders have demanded American attack every place from Iraq to Iran, and they very much got their way in Iraq, Libya, and Syria. Likely a million have died, and for what?

Well, in the end, re-created Israel is a fact, even if a mistake, and the world can accept it if only it can play by the rules, return to the Green Line, and live in peace with its neighbors. This is the view of people like Uri Avnery whom I support. But voices like his are extremely rare in Israel. So what hope is there ever to see peace and progress with dark figures like Netanyahu or Sharon? None.

Israel will only respond to pressure from Western states, and that is why it is completely right to criticize and try to alter the political environment which allows Israel’s bloody excesses to flourish. It is not anti-Semitism, it is human decency, and I am sure most Jewish people really understand that but feel fearful of saying so.

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN THE INDEPENDENT

 

“Israeli Labor leader slams Livingstone’s ‘horrific, unthinkable’ views”

Well, here is an example of either ignorance or genuine hate, hate posing as the moral high-ground.

Livingston expressed nothing “unthinkable,” he expressed a historical fact, undoubtedly unpleasant for some.

Livingston would have better avoided mentioning it, but it remains a fact, not an expression of hate.

If you want a genuine example of “unthinkable” behavior, and on a massive scale, there is Israel’s holding about five million people completely against their will, giving them absolutely no rights or status, abusing them endlessly with walls, demolitions, imprisonment, checkpoints, limits on their fishing, blockading them, bombing them, seizing homes and farms, assassinating them, and,  yes, documented torture.

Good God, we are all expected to ignore these horrors just because a politician mentioned an inconvenient truth?

The letter by Isaac Herzog is utterly self-serving and represents the cheapest political opportunism.

Again:

http://northshorenumismaticsociety.org/little-known-medal-marks-nazi-zionist-co-operation-in-1933/

 

John Chuckman

EXPANSION OF A COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN RINF

 

You simply cannot say that Jews are not Jews as some do here in comments – that is rather ridiculous.

What you can say is that most of today’s Jews are not the descendants of the Hebrew people – and that is a very different thing.

The origin of the Ashkenazi has not been definitively shown.

DNA tests suggest a people who arose near Italy about a thousand years ago and later moved north to Germany.

Other DNA tests do suggest the Khazaria (an empire above the modern Black and Caspian Seas) hypothesis, again going back roughly a thousand years.

Quite likely, owing to reasons cited below, today’s main Jewish population contains bits of both.

There is in fact some Semitic DNA in some Ashkenazi people, but that is only natural as intermarriage among various early Jewish groups likely took place.

It is important to remember that the Ashkenazi – the dominant group of Jews today and the people who rule re-created Israel – speak as their native tongue a language which is a mix of German and other elements – Yiddish – and the word Ashkenazi means German.

Hebrew is a technically dead language artificially revived in re-created Israel, much as Welsh has had some revival in the UK. Hebrew knowledge was preserved over many centuries mainly by two activities: the work of Biblical scholars, including many non-Jews, and the practice of teaching young Jews some Hebrew in Hebrew schools. Hebrew is an almost intrinsic part of the religion of Judaism in much the same fashion that Arabic is for Islam.

Indeed, Judaism has many of the aspects of an Asian religion in which ancestor worship is important, the Old Testament being mainly a collection of historical fragments and myths about Hebrew ancestors. That shouldn’t surprise because Judaism is thought to have first arisen in the region around Mesopotamia or Persia, key parts of Western Asia.

Today’s Jews – again, overwhelmingly the Ashkenazi – have little to no relationship with that ancient people other than sharing some of their beliefs and using bits of the preserved language as part of religious celebrations.

Parts of the Old Testament such as Leviticus suggest a harsh original people with extreme fundamentalist views, perhaps the very nature of their beliefs being why they left their region of origin, much as a small cult like the Mormons trekked out to Utah. The most typical Jews of today – even most of the Orthodox – have very little to do with those ancient views, and the Jewish people we think of typically are quite worldly in outlook. The population of Israel is extremely so, except for small minority sects, Judaism much as other religions over time having become less an intense faith than a cultural affiliation. We see the same thing with Christians who go to church only on Easter or Christmas.

What happened to the ancient people called Hebrews, the ones discussed in the Old Testament? Their main descendants are certainly the Palestinians. There is no record of Imperial Rome’s having expelled the Hebrews upon conquest of their territories. Indeed, we know that it was not Rome’s practice to expel people almost ever from conquered territories. It wanted them to go on working and even practicing their religion, Rome being extremely tolerant of non-Roman beliefs so long as the people accepted Rome’s authority and paid their taxes (recall Jesus’s admonition about rendering unto Rome).

But two millennia of history in a region of the Mediterranean which has long been very active in trade and migrations and cultural changes has produced a largely non-Jewish people called the Palestinians, people who are Christian as well as Muslim.

Of course the great and bitter irony of re-created Israel is that a largely European people, the Ashkenazi, have driven out the descendants of the Hebrews whose original religion they claim as their own.

What is almost certain is that, following the great evangelical success of Christianity – after all, Christianity even eventually took over the Roman Empire – which originated as a Jewish (Hebrew) sect other Jews (Hebrews) became evangelical, a quality we do not associate with Jews today.

That period of evangelicalism resulted in groupings of Jews arising in a number of places including Khazaria (a region above today’s Black and Caspian Seas), bits of Europe, and pockets of Africa. It is interesting that in re-created Israel, the descendants of Jewish converts from Africa are not generally welcome by the descendants of other Jewish converts, the Ashkenazi.

John Chuckman

EXPANSION OF COMMENTS POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN RUSSIA TODAY

 

Margot Wallstrom, Sweden’s Foreign Minister, is right in speaking out against extrajudicial killings by Israelis.

Sweden is one of the few countries speaking truth to Israel’s terror and abuse of Palestinians.

If America could only get the political courage to speak the same way,things would rapidly change.

How can anyone justify the perpetual bondage and abuse of millions?

And these latest horrors in the streets are only more of what Israel has always practiced, trying to make the Palestinians so miserable that they will pick-up and leave their homeland.

But Israel badly underestimates the courage of Palestinians.

Eventually, what we see in Israel will fall apart, just as the Soviet Union fell apart.

You cannot keep a society going forever based on lies, abuse, and violence – which is exactly what Israel attempts to do.

____________________________

Response to a reader making a comment about the old Mufti and Hitler story used to justify Israel:

The reader is just writing complete nonsense, and he apparently is unaware of the fact.

The “Mufti story” is a pathetic old lie, recently given new life by the madman running Israel, Netanyahu, in a renewed effort to discredit the Palestinians, making it appear they themselves earned their horrible fate under Israel.

It is exactly comparable in its truth and accuracy to “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” which is something of course despised by Jews everywhere.

The Mufti briefly did meet with Hitler, but then so did many eminent people, including the King of England. Hitler was at the time keen to have Jews emigrate anywhere, including to Palestine. He and the Mufti discussed nothing diabolical.

Dieter, at the Nuremberg Trials, was trying to save his own skin in spinning the fable that the meeting was otherwise.

Also, as with many destructive people, nihilists and psychopaths like Dieter, he was leaving behind a web of lies to confuse and damn his opponents and those he hated. We sometimes see, for example, imprisoned serial killers taunting police and relatives about there being more unknown victims and refusing to give any details, leaving at their deaths a horrid cloud of doubts and fears.

Unfortunately, much of Israel is built on just such nonsense, much of it undoubtedly sincerely believed by some Israelis.

The single greatest piece of nonsense accepted in Israel is that today’s Ashkenazi Jews are a people who have been wandering around for two thousand years and have now returned home. It is simply a myth.

Rome did not expel the Hebrews after conquest. This was not its practice anywhere.

The Ashkenazi who run modern Israel are a European people. Their native language – Yiddish – is largely German in origin.

DNA tests in recent years established that they likely arose near Italy about a thousand years ago and later migrated to Eastern Europe.

Virtually all of the food we think of as “deli food” native to Ashkenazi Jews, is actually from Eastern Europe – Germany, Romania, and Russia – where the Ashkenazi lived for centuries.

The word Ashkenazi means German.

After the rise of Christianity – which began as one of many spin-off sects of Judaism, sects we’ve learned about from the Dead Sea Scrolls and other material – mainstream Judaism itself appears to have become more evangelical in light of Christianity’s success in gaining followers, certainly more so than we think of it today.

Various other people in Europe and in Africa were proselytized and adopted Judaism. Thus, we have the rise of the Ashkenazi along with other non-Hebrew, Jewish groups, as in Africa and Central Asia.

So who are the Palestinians? The descendants of the original Hebrews, undoubtedly mixed with other groups who passed through the region over twenty centuries.

Clearly they adopted Islam at some point, although there are many Christians among the Palestinians, something Israel studiously avoids speaking of so as not to anger its supporters among American Protestants.

It is all a terrible situation.

The resolution will come however when the current unsustainable State of Israel goes the same way the unsustainable Soviet Union went.

You cannot long-term maintain an empire built on lies and oppression. It is moreover the most subsidized political entity on earth, receiving huge flows of wealth from America and Europe, public and private.

Jews will always live in the region, but the Israel we see today will crumble away. It is for most not even a good place to live, and many Israelis hold dual citizenship.

___________________________

Response to a reader who asked what Putin would do with Muslims stabbing Russians:

The stabbing events are greatly exaggerated by Israeli propaganda, although they do happen.

And what a surprise if some desperate Palestinians do behave in this way when Israel as a state treats all Palestinians as unwanted trash.

No rights, no freedoms, no common respect or decency – that’s what it means to be born into Palestine. You cannot even own your home or farm with any security. Israel grabs what it pleases.

It is not hard to imagine desperate young men slashing out after a lifetime of such inhuman treatment.

But as I said, the stabbing is exaggerated. We have video on You-tube showing us some true scenes of Israeli soldiers simply murdering Palestinians in the streets.

There was one of an Israeli soldier throwing down a knife at a Palestinian’s feet and barking orders about picking it up, which of course would have meant being blasted full of holes.

The Israeli authorities – always desperate to hide the truths of their state’s existence – just recently met with Google and You-tube to try pressuring them to censor what Israelis call “inflammatory” video. This is video anyone one else in the world would compare to American videos of brutal cops shooting black kids in the back, events which also have become increasingly common.

There can be no valid comparison between Russia, or anywhere else on earth, with Israel in these circumstances.

My own view is that many people in Israel are becoming increasingly frustrated and angry with a situation that has no solution under Israel’s current, self-imposed political assumptions. The Palestinians do not go away. Their numbers grow. Israeli authorities are reduced to really ugly, inhumane tactics day-in, day-out. It is a depressing situation with no good prospects, and it is all the sole responsibility of the government of Israel.

John Chuckman

LETTER TO CBC RADIO’S THE CURRENT

The Rohingya Muslims of Burma by all accounts are treated badly.

But in not one particular cited by your guests does the situation of these oppressed people differ from the situation of the millions of Palestinians under Israeli occupation.

Inability to freely travel limiting opportunities to earn a living; unfair treatment by officials and police; hate speech – all of these and more are the everyday experience of Palestinians.

The Rohingya, concentrated on the west coast of Burma in Rakhine State, sometimes leave their oppression because of the seas, yet the people of Gaza, stretched along the sea in much the same fashion, are not even free to use the sea: fishermen who go outside their tiny permitted zone are shot at regularly by Israeli naval forces; ships of needed supplies from other places are subject to attack by Israel on the high seas; and even natural gas fields discovered in the Mediterranean in areas which under international law should belong to Palestine are seized by Israel.

The comparisons are even closer because if you ask Burmese officials, they would tell you the Rohingya want their own state, something Burma will not grant, and are regarded as rebellious, something none of your guests discussed.

Yet CBC Radio, and The Current in particular, would not dream of treating the Palestinians’ plight, which after all is in every sense closer to home. You have not done so once in any meaningful way.

To add insult to injury in the piece you did, you interviewed a representative of the American Holocaust Museum whose investigations are said to have established that all the “early signs of genocide” were now present in Burma. I wasn’t aware that there was an official handbook of diagnosis for genocide, but these people appear to have one.

It does seem to me in view of the appalling conditions in Israel/Palestine, people from the Holocaust Museum are simply not qualified to comment on Burma.

Indeed, I think it not unfair to suggest that their statements effectively serve as diversions to a faraway topic from what is going on so much closer to home in Israel.

AFTERWORD: In a follow-up interview the next day with Burma’s ambassador to Canada, he said something along the lines of “There’s no such thing as the Rohingya people.”

These were exactly the same words uttered by Golda Meir about the Palestinians decades ago, and her chilling words have been echoed many times since, including a few years ago by Newt Gingrich on the campaign trail after receiving the best part of $20 million in campaign contributions from billionaire Sheldon Adelson, a devoted supporter of Netanyahu’s vision of Israel.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

LETTER TO CBC RADIO’S SUNDAY EDITION ON INTERVIEW WITH DANIEL GOLDHAGEN

Michael Enright is such a fair-minded man, and one articulate in his fair-mindedness, when it comes to most things. Is it too much to ask that that fairness be applied and heard consistently?

The characteristics of a fair-minded person are just a few, and they comprise the gold standard if you will. He or she is willing to discuss almost any topic. He or she is willing to listen to all sides of an issue presented by others. And he or she is open to being convinced he may have been wrong, at least in part.

I think by this set of criteria that Michael and his producers fail, and rather consistently, on a long term basis when it comes to the related topics of Israel and anti-Semitism.

How many times over, say, the last half dozen years has Michael’s program had an articulate spokesperson for Palestinian rights and grievances? I can tell you: close to, if not actually, zero times.

How many times has the program had spokespeople for Israel’s interests or on the much-abused topic of anti-Semitism? I haven’t counted, but I know that it likely would average to as much as once a month.

That may seem to you not excessive, but I think it represents a continuing, subtle, and genuinely unfair practice. One supposes you don’t make it more regular, say every week, because you understand that heavy repetition of these views would generate hostility in your audience. But the issue of unfairness still is glaringly clear here.

Even as you read these words, Israel prepares to seize more of the West Bank and Jerusalem. No compensation is even given to those whose homes and farms are seized for the flimsiest excuse. And when they protest or resist, they are abused, arrested and often imprisoned. Every day millions of Palestinians, never having done anything against the Jewish people, are treated like the residents of an unrelenting police state.

So, how is it that Michael and his producers believe, as they apparently do, that there is only one side in these matters?

The very definition of the word “liberal” does not make it possible for a true liberal to accept these ugly practices. Yet invariably, when anyone objects to Israel’s behavior, he or she is labeled an “anti-Semite” by the government of Israel and its many apologists abroad. It is a dirty and abusive and inherently unfair tactic.

It is this practice which explains illusory increases in anti-Semitism in “statistics” compiled by Israel’s apologists.
I’m sorry but I do not apologize for speaking against the practices of one of the meanest-natured governments on the planet and that does not make me or millions like me any more anti-Semitic than Michael is.

So, please, if you cannot deal with this set of issues fairly – and history indicates you cannot – leave it alone entirely.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

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

Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad quit on Saturday after months of tension with President Mahmoud Abbas

We may safely assume that when the likes of John Baird care about a political figure such as the Palestinian prime minister staying in office, the resignation means absolutely nothing to the Palestinian people.

Apart from the fact that John Baird has no stature whatever in world affairs and no credibility as a statesman, the simple fact is that he is an ignoramus on affairs in the Middle East.

Baird is also a man – perhaps a reflection of his argumentative and destructive life as a domestic politician – who has proven he has no concern for the terrible situation of the Palestinians.

He is in addition a pathetic figure whose only objective in the region is to loyally serve American-Israeli positions – resembling in the act a wagging dog waiting for his master to hand out a treat.

Palestinian politicians like Abbas and those associated with him are pleasing to Israel because they maintain a totally submissive demeanor. There is almost something in them of the nature of the old minor Hollywood black actor known as Stepin Fetchit.

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 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 RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

Romney’s comments may well be racist.

But, without question, they are ignorant beyond comprehension for a man who worked in finance.

He’s comparing apples to oranges on a grand scale.

First, Israel is, without question, the most subsidized entity on earth.

Israel’s economy for that reason cannot be sensibly compared to anything.

It receives about $500 per year per Jewish citizen from the United States, and it has done so for decades.

But that is only the beginning.

There are periodic loan guarantees of tens of billions.

There is constant access at the highest level for this nation with the population of Ecuador, something virtually no other country, even far more important ones, has.

It has a plum free-trade agreement – indeed, without sending its subsidized crops to the U.S. Israel’s agriculture would disappear. It was a gift to Israel because it has no tangible benefits for Americans at all.

The opportunity cost of water Israel squanders on tomatoes and clementines to export is unbelievably high because it is the cost of desalination-plant water. It sends subsidized produce to the United States under free trade, produce the United States doesn’t even need.

Israel receives billions worth of intelligence and defense cooperation every year from the United States, something few other countries receive.

The two billion dollars a year going to Egypt is a bribe paid on Israel’s behalf by Americans since the Camp David Agreements.

Israel receives heavily below cost natural gas from Egypt, the result of U.S. pressure on Mubarak. Everyone knows this is scandalous, and the U.S. has offered to pay a subsidy to top up the price.

Israel also receives billions from the Jewish communities of America and Europe, and it receives important business intelligence and connections.

The great privilege granted to American Israelis to be recognized as dual citizens means they move back and forth regularly, all the while sharing business and other intelligence.

Israel’s farms and cities and water supply were all taken with absolutely no payment or reparations from other people. That is the biggest subsidy ever received, the very substance of the nation.

And it is not satisfied with what happened in 1948, it keeps stealing the property of others regularly, refusing to live in peace because it still wants more.

Israel has received tens of billions in reparations from Germany – wholly appropriate in view of the past – but still a subsidy.

The list is even longer than this, but I think the point is clear: Israel has, in no sense of the words, an independent national economy.

It is in truth a gigantic international welfare case.

Second, and equally important in the ignorance contained in Romney’s speech, Palestine has been under occupation for the best part of half a century.

But it is more than an occupation, it is a set of unfair rules and laws actually designed to discourage Palestinians from staying in their homes.

They are not even allowed to repair things without special permissions.

They are not allowed to build roads without special permissions.

They are not allowed to travel without permissions and going through check-points.

They cannot get supplies for businesses because of Israel’s embargo and controls.

They cannot even fly or travel by sea to do business as they wish.

Even international funds for assisting Palestine have been controlled, and plundered, by Israel.

The last I read, Israel even, in contravention of international treaties, controlled and limited the mail going into Gaza.

And, week by week, Israelis literally steal their homes, their farms, and their water resources.

How on earth can you compare an economy under those circumstances to anything?

You cannot.

And wouldn’t it be amusing to watch the arrogant and unthinking Mr. Romney himself try running an efficient business under the circumstances Israel imposes on Palestinians, instead of benefitting from the freewheeling environment of the United States and his ability to shelter his earnings from taxes in the Cayman Islands?

 

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

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

Breakthrough? Isn’t that a rather delusional word to use in this context?

How do you get a breakthrough from a nasty bully who for some years has had everything going his way? Continued assassination, torture, abuse of millions, illegal blockade, and no one dares say a word.

What incentive can you possibly think of to push Israel towards fairness and decency? How else do you make a bully behave himself if you don’t apply pressure?

Only the United States pushing hard to get results – as Obama started 3 years ago doing – would get even minimal results, but of course Obama was literally reviled and called hateful names in Israel so now he has joined the crowd of bought-and-paid for American politicians who dare not say one tough word about Israel.

We heard the quiet truth from Sarkozy and Obama at the press meeting a while back when a couple of honest exchanges were heard by reporters in error. It was almost the only truth we have had reported in years on this appalling situation.

Israel and its Lobby in the United States have created a virtual machine to stall all meaningful efforts and to create an endless, almost sickening round of absurd statements in the mouths of American politicians hoping to get elected.

Gingrich, Santorum, and Romney – to say nothing of the truly ignorant Bachmann – have all made ridiculous statements on Israel’s behalf just for some campaign funds in Iowa. Where’s Israel’s incentive to compromise?

After the last Congressional elections in the United States, about 80 new Congressman were given deluxe trips to Israel where they are typically feted and fed the right words to use in future. To refuse such a “gift” is almost like signing your own political death warrant, so virtually all of them go.

What have the poor Palestinians to counter that kind of unbelievable influence peddling? Nothing but a just cause, and in the power structure in Washington, that counts little more than spit.

 

 

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN BY YOSSI KLEIN HALEVI IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

A truly uninformative and self-serving article, as it was intended to be – that is, after all the nature of propaganda. It deals with none of the genuine issues, only with Israel’s demands.

You can never make progress with any problem by pretending its reality is only what exists in your mind, and that is precisely what this ridiculous article does. The reality includes the perceptions and feelings of all the parties affected.

Negotiations are about different views compromising, but Israel compromises on nothing. It just makes demands and preconditions, endlessly while it continues to take what it wants to take.

The article begs a gigantic question: how does one – anyone – recognize a “Jewish state”?

Apart from the fact that such an entity is no different in concept to a Muslim state or a Hindu state or a Christian state – all of which are formulations Western minds reject as backward and unhelpful to progress.

Israel – in addition to the more than four million who live under seemingly endless occupation and abuse in East Jerusalem, Gaza, and the West Bank – has about a million non-Jews who technically are citizens, Israeli passport holders.

It wasn’t that Israel wanted them, far from it: they were the Palestinians who refused to run from the waves of terror in 1948 when Irgun, the Stern Gang, the Lehi, and the rag-tag Israeli army of that day worked to terrorize and kill Arabs, chasing them off the land their families owned for centuries.

What happens to that million – who already under Israeli law are treated in many ways as second-class citizens – if Israel is formally recognized as “the Jewish state”?

I think we can all guess, something pretty unpleasant. Just listen to the words of Israel’s Foreign Minister, Avigdor Lieberman, a nasty piece of work who indeed is rather moderate compared to the extremists who burn down homes, destroy orchards, and deface mosques.

And what are the borders of “the Jewish state”? Israel has changed its borders continuously since 1948. How do you recognize a state with no borders? Isn’t that one of the main points of negotiation, to settle borders?

Indeed, while Israel’s leaders never openly talk to the Western press about the matter, Israel has pursued a constant policy of expansion and ethnic-cleansing, its only mercy being that it is done in slow motion so that there is never too much trouble at any one time.

Israel’s aims come hidden under the obscure references to Eretz Israel and Judea and Samaria – terms not ten percent of Western readers understand. They are the words which cover Israel’s expectation of eventually seizing all the land of the Palestinians and even other bits like Southern Lebanon, and they are the words which ipso facto mean endless hostilities.

The entire 1967 war was engineered by Israel to achieve the occupation – and gradual theft of property and expulsion of people – we see now.

Since 1948 and especially since 1967, Israel has broken every international law and convention we have, including those of the UN and Geneva Conventions.

If you have no respect for the laws and rights of others, how can you ever expect others to respect your laws and rights? It’s simply insane to believe otherwise. We have here a lawless state, lawless in all its external relations, demanding that others respect not just its laws, but its every wish.

Israel steals whatever it desires and it pretty much kills any opponent it doesn’t like.

Israel has utter contempt for all of its neighbors, as it has shown on countless occasions.

Israel attacks everyone who does not accept its self-proclaimed truths.

Yet it is somehow Palestinians who prevent their own statehood by denying “the Jewish state”? If ever there was a case of an illogical vicious circle this is it.

The poor Palestinians are told they must achieve statehood only by dealing with their oppressors – not by negotiating, although that word is used as a euphemism, because Israel in fact never negotiates, it only makes preconditions and demands.

Imagine blacks in apartheid South African being told they must deal only with their the apartheid government? Imagine Ukrainians or Byelorussians being told they must only deal with the Soviet Union?

It is itself a laughable demand, laughable because it is so completely irrational and arbitrary.

 

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN BY DOUG SAUNDERS IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

That has always been true, a secure state whose people are assisted by Israel would have been a blessing.

Imagine how much progress could have been made had Israel not spent a gigantic fortune on its military and destruction and killing? Its spending is out of all proportion to its size. It is a garrison state. And its brutality on a per capita basis is world class.

But Israel’s policy from the start was “the iron wall” towards the Palestinians, not helpfulness or friendship.

Einstein has been proven absolutely right in his views on Israel: he favored Jewish settlement in the Middle East, but he thought a formal Jewish state would be a great mistake.

Israel’s leaders for years have viewed the Palestinians only as a burden to be gotten rid of, and it has viewed their land – the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem – as a land bank for Israeli expansion.

There is no other way to understand Israel’s behavior, and that is why it is utterly stupid to say to the Palestinians – as Obama did and Harper did – that the way to peace is through negotiating with Israel.

Israel has never once been an honest negotiator, and the United States has never once been an honest broker.

And the whole world ignores the fact that the 1967 war was engineered by Israel precisely to achieve in the future a Greater Israel, and Greater Israel is what Israel relentlessly works towards year after year, stealing more property and abusing more people.

_____________________________

“Why can’t Obama and Harper just do it. They really are little men.”

Yes, absolutely.

But consider how rare it is in this world for any leader to show genuine statesmanship?

It almost never happens, because it involves risks, the stuff of genuinely heroic behavior.

In Obama’s case, the answer is straightforward. He has proved an unpopular and largely unsuccessful president on almost every front, and he faces an election in which he needs all the campaign funds and favorable press comment he can get – just the things the Israel Lobby can provide in exchange for assuming the “right” posture towards the Middle East.

That’s exactly the situation Harry Truman found himself in with the intense lobby to recognize the self-proclaimed state of Israel. Truman’s instincts were that early recognition of the terrorists and army running people off their land was not wise, but he faced an uphill election and the Israel Lobby, by Truman’s own description, was intense beyond anything he experienced. So he granted early recognition and started the ball rolling towards the godawful mess we now have.

In Harper’s case, he not only mimics everything America does, but he clearly hopes to establish a smaller version of the financial political mechanism that dominates United States policy. He will make our politics even more dependent upon private large donations by doing away with Ottawa’s support for parties, he will then aim at those groups who can best finance Conservative ambitions, and that certainly includes Canada’s proportionately smaller but still important Jewish population.

There was a day when most Jewish people – owing to their own history of suffering and abuse – overwhelmingly supported liberal or progressive parties and leaders.

But the existence and behavior of Israel has greatly changed that fact. You simply cannot be an unquestioning supporter of Israel today and keep a sense of fairness and decency. Israel has proved a destructive and divisive political actor.

_______________________________

“From Israel to America, from Argentina to Swaziland, the people want one thing while their democratically elected governments supposed to represent the people and implement the will of the people, want another thing.”

A very true observation.

By a recent poll the government of Israel no more represents what most people want than Harper’s government in Canada does.

The American political system especially has been carefully built to keep a superficial resemblance of democracy while in fact completely catering to special interests.

Who are the special interests? Those who finance the campaigns.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

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

Hanan Ashrawi is a brilliant and articulate spokesperson for the Palestinians.

I wish her well, but I fear she has against her very powerful and devious foes.

The logic and fairness of Palestinian statehood should be apparent to everyone.

But Israel is interested in neither logic nor fairness.

It is interested in more land, and it wants that land minus its owners and occupants.

And the United States in matters of policy in this part of the world takes its direction from Israel.

_____________________________

“On a separate note – since the Holy Ramadan started, 121 people have been killed in 50 separate terrorist attacks committed by Muslims.”

That is just uninformed trash.

Please note the reader quotes no details at all even as to location.

Just lets readers assume.

This trash is straight from the Israeli Ministry of Truth.

But if you want a documented fact – not a vague assertion – Israel has killed 1335 children in the occupied territories since the year 2000.

And that number is just the children.

______________________________

“The U.S has failed the Palestinians for more than 60 years…”

The U.S. administrations have been over a barrel since the beginning.

Harry Truman did not want to recognize Israel when the gangs of thugs like the Irgun and Stern seized a portion of the land and declared a state with no legitimate basis whatsoever, beyond a vague promise from a British Foreign Secretary decades before.

But Truman was facing an election, and his popularity was sagging.

He faced a literal onslaught of American Jewish leaders pleading and arguing and cajoling for Israel’s quick recognition.

He is quoted himself as saying he never experienced anything quite like it. It was intense.

And, in the end, he gave in.

Of course, with his surrender came generous financial contributions to his campaign plus a good press that built him up as a true statesman.

That is how it was in 1948, and that is how it still is more than sixty years later.

Obama’s polls have slipped. He needs big money for the 2012 campaign, and he needs the kind of press the major networks and papers liker The New York Times can give him.

Not only that but Israel runs a literal machine for influencing American congressmen. About eighty of them, largely freshmen, are going on paid junket to Israel. They will be well indoctrinated and made to understand the benefits of blindly supporting Israel.

This happens all the time.

One could argue that the endless foreign aid America sends Israel – the largest such amount given to any country on the planet – every year enables Israel to organize its elaborate and costly lobbying organization.

Thus the U.S. itself indirectly pays the bills for this massive effort at influence by special interests.

__________________________

“I see injustice in the Palestinians still embracing terrorism.”

What kind of thinking is this?

Who just recently murdered 400 Palestinian children, plus a thousand others, in Operation Cast Lead?

Who pirated a fleet of boats on the high seas, killing nine unarmed people?

Who regularly assassinates people it does not like?

Who fakes passports from New Zealand or Canada to commit its assassinations?

Who regularly steals homes and farms others have owned for centuries?

Who has 150 nuclear weapons, against all international laws and treaties?

Who traded nuclear weapons technology to apartheid South Africa?

Who maintains a literal garrison state, spending an unbelievable part of its wealth on weapons?

Who dropped tens of thousands of cluster bombs on Southern Lebanon to kill and maim for years?

Who killed about 1400 people invading Lebanon?

Who killed four UN Observers, including a brave Canadian officer, while it invaded Southern Lebanon?

Who almost daily flies warplanes over Southern Lebanon?

Who previously invaded Lebanon, killing thousands and occupying parts of it for 18 years?

Whose state started with a concerted terror attack on innocent civilians in 1948, killing and raping and brutalizing hundreds?

Who keeps a million and a half people imprisoned in Gaza?

Yes, Palestinians have at times used terror, but what is their example?

And can anyone reasonably argue that anything Palestinians have done even begins to compare to the endless war and brutal occupation and apartheid for which Israel is responsible?

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“There already is a Palestinian state.
It is called Jordan.”

Oh please, that is a tiresome refrain heard a thousand times.

It is not for Israel to decide such matters. The very repetition of this slogan is arrogant.

Jordan is Jordan.

It is not Palestine.

It does not want the Palestinians.

The Palestinians do not want to live in Jordan.

The Palestinians have a history as old as the Hebrew people.

Indeed, some academic authorities in Israel maintain that the Palestinians are at least in part the descendants of the Hebrews.

When Rome conquered a territory, as it did Israel/Palestine in the first century CE, it typically did not remove inhabitants, unless they were recalcitrant against Roman rule.

Thus, what we likely have in Israel today, are immigrants – most of them hybrid with Germans or Spanish or Russian over centuries – pushing out some direct descendants of the people who lived in Israel in Biblical times.

A dark irony indeed.

No matter what the case, if Israel wants to be regarded as a country like any other country, it must behave as we expect others to behave.

And that doesn’t include apartheid or the regularly stealing of the property of others or torture and assassinations and bloody invasions without pause.

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“Islamic supremacists can never conceal their hatred for the Jews as the worst enemies of the Muslims (cf. Qur’an 5:82) .”

What garbage you write.

The Prophet honored the Jews and called them “the people of the Book.”

Jewish prophets are honored by Islam.

Originally Muhammad had Muslims pray towards Jerusalem.

It was changed to Mecca for various reasons.

I think what this writer is demonstrating is the old idea in psychology called projection.

That is a state of mind in which a person attributes to those he does not like the very feelings he or she exhibits.

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‘”Don’t you ever tire of pitching propaganda? The partial and carefully selected facts here are the sure sign of a non-thinking ideologue” writes the poster in reference to my five point approach, below, to the way Israel should, and in all probability will, act upon the PLO’s move at the UN.’

Hard to believe someone can be so lacking in understanding.

First, anyone who writes of “Eretz Israel” has left the conversation of rational people.

“Eretz Israel” is modern made-up concept, and it is a concept that guarantees endless future troubles.

There are no maps in the Tanakh.

And even if there were, the claim to what temporarily existed in ancient times is a bad joke more than two thousand years later.

The concept also flies in the face of UN resolutions and even American policy.

You use the term “nation-state of the Jewish people” What is that? In fact, it is another made-up concept intended to sound reasonable but actually incorporating dark and dangerous dreams.

Israel is nearly 20% non-Jewish, but those non-Jewish people hold Israeli citizenship and Israeli passports.

It wasn’t that Israel planned it that way. It just happened because a lot of Palestinians refused to be terrorized by Lehi, Stern, and Irgun in 1948.

So Israel made up the concept you mention, a concept which is a legalistic construct above what all nations regard as normal definitions of citizenship, effectively excluding these million people by definition.

Unfortunately, a lot of people do not understand the implications of this construct, just passing over it as a phrase with no special meaning, but they are greatly mistaken in doing so.

But were the world to accept this artificial construct, Israel would without question expel these million souls, despite their passports, to God knows where. Many prominent Israelis have in the past actually advocated this, and they include the current foreign minister, the appalling Avigdor Lieberman.

Of course, the biggest fallacy of your words has to do with the concept of Israel itself. Where is Israel? What are its borders? What defines a citizen?

Good and reasonable answers to none of these can be given beyond Israel is what’s inside the Green Line, and its people are those who live there.

Such a simple concept, really, but one unreasonable apologists for Israel flatly refuse as they go on with dreams of an Israeli Empire  – aka, “Eretz Israel.”

Israel is to close all borders with Gaza? Surely even you know that is impossible. Israel must allow people to move between the West Bank and Jerusalem. That is part of past international understandings and it is a required human need.

“As for the “Palestinians”, they’ll have to fend for themselves, in all respects, including financial!!”

Putting the word Palestinians in quotes and using a triple exclamation mark demonstrates the angry-child tone of your entire words.

Angry children do not make foreign policy, or, if they do, their work proves the despair of the world.

Of course, the last thing your pompous words leave out is the occupation. The 1967 War was deliberately engineered by Israel in an effort to gain the “Eretz Israel” which the Israeli terrorists of the Irgun and Stern and Lehi failed to grab.

Israel must surrender this land or a traded-equivalent to the Palestinians in the end. There is no alternative unless the world agrees that open aggression should be rewarded with expanded borders.

And I doubt even for Israel, with all its lobbying and inordinate influence, that that is going to happen: that would be a formula for chaos in world affairs.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

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

The Palestinians are making plans for unprecedented violence to begin following their United Nations application for statehood?

Avigdor Lieberman is a sick extremist, almost certainly a man suffering from mental illness.

But his idiotic words, time and again, reveal for all the world to see the kind of thinking that genuinely motivates Israel’s government in its brutal behavior, and it sure isn’t the stuff of Netanyahu’s fantasyland speech before Congress.

Israel’s behavior just becomes more and more threatening and irrational as time goes on.

Right now, this small country keeps threatening war with Iran, as well as ceaselessly pushing the United States in that direction.

It has long supported an attack on Syria to overthrow that government.

It is threatening the border of Lebanon with regular incursions of fighter planes and troops, and it is threatening to seize offshore property of Lebanon.

High-ranking people in Israel have spoken of re-taking the Sinai so that the new Egypt cannot interfere with subsidized natural gas sales arranged by Mubarak with American support.

It is into its fourth year of an illegal and brutal blockade of Gaza.

It has alienated Turkey with its piracy and refusal to apologize for the murder of unarmed humanitarians.

Mr Lieberman himself is well known for – or should I say infamous for – his views on running Arabs out of Israel.

Israel continues to steal the property of Palestinians in the West Bank and in Jerusalem, only just recently having announced a development of 900 homes in East (Arab) Jerusalem, 900 homes on property stolen in broad daylight.

The world is reeling from the effects of Islamophobia, constantly promoted by Israel’s apologists, and America is bombing people in half a dozen West Asian and North African locations.

Meanwhile, the United States which cannot pay its bills continues to subsidize on a vast scale this small nation which is disturbing a good deal of the planet.

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“Their policy of always blaming Israel while giving the intolerant religion of killers for allah [sic]a pass as victims is why we are at a dead end.”

Always giving Muslims a pass?

Always blaming Israel?

This is precisely the kind of sick, distorted view that explains the situation we are in.

The mainline press in the West constantly gives Israel good press, excessively so.

Israel never felt, as it should have, the force of the world’s disapproval for its savageries in Gaza and Southern Lebanon and on the high seas.

As for Muslims getting a pass, it is impossible to understand how anyone not as delusional as Avigdor Lieberman could make that statement.

Our press is filled with columnists who constantly speak for Israel. The list is a long one, but we have the likes of Thomas Friedman, Charles Krauthammer, Jeff Jacoby, Margaret Wente, and many, many others giving us reading material which might well have been written by Israel’s Ministry of Truth.

And the world’s most important newspaper, The New York Times, has a highly biased view towards Israel in everything that it writes. As does Rupert Murdoch’s The Times of London.

American television networks never report one tough thing about Israel. The effective censorship is astounding.

For example, right now in Israel, demonstrations on a giant scale – hundreds of thousands out of a small population – have taken place day after day. These demonstrations are by Israelis who are sick of the way the economy and politics of Israel operate.

They are just as real and just as significant as what went on in Egypt, but you will not see them featured all over our newspapers and televisions as were all the “Arab Spring” demonstrations and revolts.

That is absolutely voluntary censorship on Israel’s behalf.

And we have America’s huge Christian fundamentalist community constantly supporting every wrongful act of Israel with words and political pressure and money, even if they do so for their own weird mystical reasons.

Yet Israel’s apologists, like the writer of this comment, can make absolutely outlandish claims, and generally they are not called on them.

You don’t get solutions to ugly problems by not even admitting the truth, by pretending on fantasy concepts.

I am reminded of the United States’ decade of mass murder in Vietnam, and there always being “a light at the end of the tunnel.”

This writer and Avigdor Lieberman remind me of the old fairy tale of the Emperor’s New Clothes in which the Emperor paraded naked in the streets but no one dared call it to his attention.

That is precisely the situation of Israel, pretending to talk about peace, pretending to being a normal state, while constantly assassinating, attacking, torturing, and stealing the property of others.

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“The core cause of the Arab Israeli conflict, local and regional, has nothing to do with “Jerusalem”, “settlements”, “borders”, “refugees”, “security” or “water”….”

There are none so blind as those who will not see.

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

EXPANDED VERSION OF POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY MICHAEL WEISS IN THE TELEGRAPH

What a nonsense column.

First, Judge Goldstone has not retracted what he wrote, rather he has made some very qualified statements about aspects of it a long time afterward.

Even in Goldstone’s original report he went out of his way to portray the event as less of a one-sided slaughter than it in fact was, knowing full well he would be subjected to god-awful treatment afterward.

But even his qualified words come after Judge Goldstone’s life having been made a living hell by Israeli apologists with accusations, sneers, shunning, and violent threats.

Israel and its apologists are known for the intense and ugly pressure they can bring to bear on anyone who fails to follow the official script.

After all, that’s how Israel got itself recognized by the United States in the first place.

President Truman was not inclined to recognize the terrorists who declared themselves a state in 1948.

But he was given the full treatment – he was hounded by apologists and lobbyists in a way he never before experienced.

Moreover, he was running for re-election and the situation looked grim, so the last thing he needed was a howling mob chasing him around the country.

And by finally relenting and granting recognition, he got the kind of campaign contributions he badly needed.

Nothing has changed since 1948.

The truth is we do not really need a report although it is always a good thing to have documentation of terrible events.

Everyone except the howling Israeli apologists knows what happened. We saw it. We heard it. We felt the people’s misery.

And it should make no difference to Israel since Israel has never had any respect for the UN. It stands in contempt of a whole list of resolutions, and, in another of its recent atrocities, the invasion of Southern Lebanon, it deliberately targeted and killed four UN workers bravely doing their job of observation.

When Israel invaded Gaza, it shut down a giant, fenced-in refugee camp, and attacked the occupants as though they were going to war with an army. It attacked civilians with tanks and planes and modern weapons, even employing horrors like white phosphorus.

Israel killed 300 to 400 children alone (plus a thousand others), and we have testimony that Israeli soldiers used children as human shields.

The streets ran red with blood, and the pictures were on the Internet.

And for what? Israel and its apologists insisted on calling it a war, insisted it was justified because some Palestinians, frustrated beyond endurance by Israel’s ill treatment, had been shooting into Israel home-made fireworks called Qassam rockets. Thinking people knew, despite a wall of words over these toy rockets, that that was not what Israel’s atrocity was about.

Well, only the other day Ehud Olmert, prime minister at the time and surely a war criminal now, said the army didn’t do its job in Operation Cast Lead. The job was killing all the members and leaders of a cleanly elected government which Israel hates.

Some respect for democracy and human rights.

And as for the mad pack, well, nothing on earth you could say or do would ever convince them that Israel is the nasty piece of work that it truly is, a brutal garrison state with no respect for any of its neighbors or anyone else who doesn’t agree with its views and demands.

According to the pack, we are all supposed to pretend the plainly naked emperor actually is wearing clothes. We are all supposed to drop our precious and hard-won values regarding human rights and just say Israel must be right whenever it starts slaughtering people.

Cloudcuckooland, only stinking of human gore.

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

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

The United States in vetoing this resolution abuses shamefully its power on the Security Council.

The rightness and the decency of this resolution are apparent to everyone except the same Israelis who do business with the likes of Mubarak or apartheid South Africa.

Also blind to its rightness and decency are the apologists for Israel who fill our media with a biased point of view on everything concerning the Middle East and who keep the American Congress sheepishly following Israel’s narrow and most selfish interests through the corrupt American system of political finance and campaign contributions.

Please ask yourself, what is Israel’s purpose in opposing such reasonable demands?

There is only one: Israel wants all of the Palestinian land and wants it without Palestinians.

There is a slow-motion process of ethnic-cleansing which has been going on before our eyes since the end of the 1967 war.

The occupation serves only to make Palestinians miserable so they want to leave.

Israel stands in contempt of dozens of past resolutions, and it treats the United Nations with contempt always and everywhere.

Indeed, America has gone to war in other places citing such reasons, yet here everything is just fine.

Yet our governments say nothing, our press says nothing, and indeed America’s government acts like this for fear of its political weakness in 2012.

Where is the justice, where is the humanity, where is the acceptance of democratic principles in any of this?

There is none.

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 STEPHEN POLLARD IN THE TELEGRAPH

“So why has the US done nothing except pressurise the Israelis over settlements for the past two years?”

That seems an extremely naive question besides being factually an inaccurate description.

The only way to get a fair peace in the Mideast is with pressure on Israel. After all, Israel literally holds all the cards, occupying the land, controlling the people, regularly stealing bits of the property of others with no effective opposition, and being militarily a Frankenstein monster compared to the Palestinians, a military monster which regularly strikes out killing and maiming large numbers.

Israel has also managed to quash every outside effort to reach peace, as with the Oslo Accords. And Obama started out right, for the first time being a little tough on Israel rather than the usual complaisant attitude.

Still, anyone viewing the last two years objectively would hardly say he has seriously pressured Israel. But, in fact, he has now turned quite around. Why?

The answer is obvious: serious local electoral troubles plus the tireless efforts of the Israeli Lobby.

That is precisely the formula which got Israel recognized as a nation in the first place.

President Truman was under tremendous political pressure in his reelection bid.

He had no intention originally of recognizing Ben-Gurion’s self-declared state. There was no good argument for doing so.

But then Truman was literally inundated by lobbyists and apologists for Israel. His life was almost made a misery by platoons of special pleaders.

So he agreed to recognize Israel, and he was reelected.

Clearly those two things do not constitute cause and effect, but money is the mother’s milk of American politics and, undoubtedly, large campaign funding pledges plus promises of press support were made between the two events.

Obama went into office with a balanced and reasonably fair attitude towards Mideast peace, the first modern president to do so.

But he too was met by a wall of pressure – influential delegation after influential delegation.

His name also became widely hated in Israel, as his assistant, Rahm Emanuel, unhappily discovered on a visit to Israel with his family.

At the same time, his reelection prospects have turned around dramatically owing to the ongoing poor economy in the United States and to Obama’s widespread perception as an elitist serving the interests of bankers and corporations.

So now he has quietly backed off all of his original Mideast positions.

He has also made some dramatic efforts, in light of his new political weakness, to placate Israelis and American Jews – e.g., signing a ten-year arms gift agreement with Israel, supplying Israel with some new weapons technology, and offering Netanyahu a ridiculously extravagant bribe for a few months of cessation of settlements.

Obama’s getting ready to run as a less-than-heroic figure, and he needs all the help he can secure, so he has abandoned any pretence of fairness or the much-required pressure on Israel for a fair peace.