John Chuckman

COMMENT TO A VIDEO BY PAUL MASON IN THE GUARDIAN

 

Paul Mason makes no sense to any thinking and informed person, at least one who is not under the influence of some undeclared special interest, as I feel absolutely confident Mason must be.

Russia is not a threat, indeed quite the opposite is true, and that’s why the United States is so keen to make trouble between Europe and Russia these days.

Europe is on the wrong side of history in its recent treatment of Russia, and putting Europe in that position is deliberate, undeclared American policy.

Europe’s current group of ineffective leaders are prostrated before a demanding American colossus, one growing uneasy with a sense of its relative decline in the world, a colossus whose interests indeed are anything but Europe’s.

The ugly colossus in recent years has engineered trouble after trouble, contributing to the insecurity and destabilizing of Europe.

There is paid-for coup in Ukraine ($5 billion) with its ensuing pointless civil war and an effort behind the scenes to bring Ukraine – an economically backward state with a poor human rights record and right-wing militias set loose and with a government of almost comic incompetence – into the EU and NATO.

That is an aim incalculably destructive and dangerous for Europe’s future peace and prosperity, and it is tied in with a second destructive aim of heading-off better and healthier economic relations with Russia, especially what had been a growing healthy relationship with Germany.

The US simply saw its current overall, indirect control of Europe slipping slowly away, and it wanted decisive action to put a stop to it.

At the same time in recent years, America has unleashed an unprecedented assault on many of the countries of the Middle East. The horror of Syria is a deliberately calculated effort to destabilize a government and divide a nation, one conducted largely by proxy armies of thugs attracted from all over the world. It has seen hundreds of thousands killed in the effort, resulting in huge destabilizing streams of refugees to Europe.

This ugly march through the Middle East has had nothing to do with democracy or human rights. The US doesn’t touch absolute regimes like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, or the new junta in Egypt. It never even nudges Israel to end its occupations. No, America’s murderous, years-long effort is aimed at the region’s independent-minded governments who do not toe the line on American policy. By comparison, Russia is a well-behaved state which seeks normal and healthy relationships with its neighbors.

Had Europe’s leaders had the courage to say “no” to those American policies, Europe today would be a far better place, peacefully trading with Russia – increased trade being a tonic for Europe’s economic malaise – and not fighting the immense tragedy of floods of refugees from the Middle East, which event of course includes an unholy agreement with the madman running Turkey, a man responsible for much of the tragedy in the first place. But America only sees Turkey as a bulwark against Russia and couldn’t care less that its leader murders both Kurds and Syrians and suppresses freedom of speech.

But in the end, what really matters for Britain with Trident is that you can never own Trident. You can only pay an immense amount of money, an effective vast and long-term rent, to the Pentagon.

And that is so because you cannot ever use Trident. You can decide almost nothing concerning it. You can only ride around in it watching the flag snap in the breeze when it’s on the surface. When the US decides nuclear war is desirable – and that is not at all inconceivable since as late as the early 1960s, the Pentagon drew up serious plans for an all-out first strike against the Soviet Union – you will be directed how to use Trident and just where to aim your missiles. Of course, if you hesitate in such an event to join in the nuclear fun, you will also be in extremely deep trouble.

You can only use Trident with the permission and cooperation of the United States. The deal is much like one with a tech company such as Apple. If you even open or try to replace anything on some Apple products, they simply stop working, telling you very forcefully who really owns the phone or watch you paid good money for.

It is a terrible deal for Britain. Those tens of billions could do a lot of genuine good instead. As for Paul Mason, he’s about as much a genuine liberal as Hillary Clinton, bloody Goddess of War.

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN RINF

 

The unpleasant Stephen Harper was definitely headed in this direction, with perhaps even more anti-freedom measures added, as criminalizing criticism of Israel.

We’re hoping our fine new Prime minister can resist this kind of genuinely Stalinist law promoted only by special interests.

But, in any event, all of the ugly laws Israel is promoting abroad and Israel’s tireless building of walls simply scream desperation.

If Israel wasn’t threatened by the weakness of its own founding’s logic, it would require none of this.

Just as the Soviet Union was built with a faulty foundation – flaws in logic and basic understanding of economic and social principles – so Israel, an unimaginably inefficient state kept afloat on the world’s greatest flow of subsidies.

Israel is, just like the Soviet Union was, a garrison state where the military/security/police forces are completely out of any sensible balance for a healthy society.

And it holds millions of people as prisoners.

Sooner or later, the crunch is coming, and for all these reasons.

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN THE GUARDIAN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That is the most arrant nonsense and special interest pleading.

The only existential threat to Israel is Israel.

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

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

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

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN THE NATIONAL POST

No one writing for The National Post ever gets the situation in Syria correctly.

All of our national press, like that in the United States, deliberately obscures these matters.

America and Russia both talk about stopping terror, but they each mean completely different things.

Not being at all the aggressive leader America never stops yapping about, Putin has not made up his mind about entering Syria, but if he does go to Syria to fight ISIS, among other terror groups working there, it will be precisely because he is supporting the government of Syria and genuinely fighting terror.

Obama doesn’t want Putin in Syria to fight ISIS because the United States is only making a show of fighting ISIS. You don’t fight the people you set up to do a job you want done. ISIS is doing America’s dirty work trying to topple the Syrian government.

When America talks of bombing, it means bombing which can help ISIS, and the other terrorists, complete their dirty work. America bombs Syrian infrastructure, as does Canada in Harper’s stupid effort to join in the American cause.

Sure, sometimes America actually kills some of their recruited ISIS members, but that is for show or because they have somehow exceeded their mandate. Quite possibly, once the government of Syria has been destroyed, America will go after ISIS, but that would only come after.

For Putin to talk of bombing means genuinely bombing ISIS and hampering its efforts to destroy Syria.

It’s all a filthy business, and the sponsors of all the killing and destruction and homelessness are the United States, Israel, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar. They do everything from training, arming, equipping, and even giving refuge and medical help.

The terrible refugee crisis in Europe is ultimately the complete fault of these parties, none of which even has the decency to take the refugees they create. Harper’s Canada actually takes a token amount of refugees and at the same time joins in the bombing to create more.

The truth is, were Harper to genuinely fight ISIS, Israel would become extremely angry with him, and that could only mean some of Harper’s generous donors of campaign funds – the special interests for Israel he has groomed for years – would also become angry with him.

In this, as in so many things, Harper joins the United States in telling lies to us daily.

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO A COLUMN IN THE NATIONAL POST

It is crap to say Harper can’t be blamed for the horror of a dead Syrian child lying face down in the sand, Christie Blatchford.

Harper comes across in this emotional public event as the dried husk of a human being he truly is.

Leaders lead and set a tone and spirit for others.

Harper has led nothing, and the spirit of his time in office is Canada is as a completely indifferent place to human suffering and to threats and chaos at previously peaceful places like Syria.

I am repeatedly surprised by the depths of emptiness he displays in matter after matter.

Imagine the leader of a nation with the reputation Canada used to enjoy just letting people rot while he actually joins in the killing in Syria, albeit on a limited scale owing mainly to our not having enough fighter jets.

Well, I’ve always said he really secretly wanted to be an American, and I think he now has joined the hallowed ranks of Newt Gingrich and Dick Armey and Dick Cheney. They are not conservatives, they are creatures from Madam Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors.

One thing is sure, when Harper is swept from office in October, he and Laureen will find a warm welcome in East Texas.

______________________________

ISIS is not responsible for the horror in Syria because it is merely a tool of outside powers, a terror weapon dropped into a beautiful, previously peaceful country.

It is the sponsors, suppliers, and enablers of ISIS – and other terrorist organizations like the al-Nusra Front – who are very much responsible for the horrors.

They are the United States, Israel, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia (with some additional money from Qatar).

These gangs of thugs and cutthroats would not even be gangs and they would not be in Syria without massive outside assistance.

The whole aim of the sponsors and suppliers of these horrors is to destroy the beautiful land of Syria and effectively smash it into pieces. The covert, proxy approach being used in Syria is different than the direct, blundering, and murderous American invasion of Iraq, but its goal is precisely the same in the end.

Who cares about the millions displaced, the hundreds of thousands killed, the historic treasures destroyed? Not America. Not Israel. Not Turkey. Not Saudi Arabia.

The chief beneficiary of all this horror is America’s nasty little colony in the Mideast.

And come to think of it, isn’t that same American colony one of Harper’s most intense and continuing focuses, to the point of having made, and causing some ministers to make, the strangest sudden outbursts of loyalty to it without any seeming context or cause on a subject, arbitrarily selected from the affairs of the world’s two hundred or so nations, and of no special interest to most Canadians?

And aren’t Canadian apologists for the colony’s own many atrocities among Harper’s keenest campaign contributors and supporters?

I suspect there is an unspoken but direct connection between those supporters and the idea of not taking in tens of thousands of Syrians, as we very much should. Of course, making no emergency effort in this regard comes easily to Stephen Harper, a man who has proved himself virtually devoid of humanity.

After all, the word “terror” is used by some in exactly the way the word “witch” was used in 17th century Europe, being repeated and echoed countless times like a superstitious mantra, although the genuine threat of terror in North America is virtually non-existent.

 

 

 

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

COMMENT WRITTEN TO CBC NEWS

CBC radio news has been in serious decline for years, but in your recent coverage of events in Syria, you have touched bottom.

In every newscast and every news-oriented show, the subject dominates. Even on fluff shows like Mary Ito or Bret Banbury we hear about Syria from people who know nothing about it. The problem all this “coverage” is that you investigate nothing and simply repeat the official American view, endlessly.

You have not one qualified reporter on site. No one interviews Syrian officials. No one interviews Russian officials who include many experts on the region. No one talks to good independent reporters or observers, people such as Robert Fisk.

Your broadcasts would not differ in substance if you simply read press releases from the White House and Pentagon.

Even when you report facts upon which people might agree – as for example the number of refugees from Syria, recently cited at one million – you offer no vitally-important perspective, so the end result is effectively CBC joining the tireless American drumbeat to war.

You should well know that when America invaded Iraq, breaking all international law and humanitarian agreements, it killed at least half a million people and created four million refugees. It then refused to take almost any of the refugees, while Syria took a massive two million. Very heartless of Assad, don’t you think?

You keep repeating the American accusations about Assad using sarin gas. In fact, the only certain use of that horrible stuff has been by the violent rabble called the Free Syrian Army. They used small quantities more than once, material either captured from overrun military posts or supplied by American intermediaries such as Israel, which is known to have stockpiles.

And what is the “evidence” you blindly refer to over and over? I can tell you. It is a supposed recording of Syrian officials supplied by Mossad.

Yes, Mossad, the very people who pride themselves at deception and who have a long track record of expertly using it, even in several cases successfully against the United States.

And the recording, even if it could be proved authentic, is ambiguous as to meaning.

You do not kill thousands of people and destroy a country’s infrastructure citing rubbish like that.

The truth is that the entire Syrian “civil war,” as I cannot but believe some of your better journalists must know, is an American black-operation, part of a long series of violent efforts to create a huge cordon sanitaire around Israel. And this particular induced-civil war employs many of the same unsavoury characters typically grouped under the rubric “al Qaeda.”

Recently, this massive covert effort has been failing, despite even more American and Israeli weapons being smuggled to the murderous opposition through Turkey, owing to the successes of Assad’s army. So, now a new casus belli is needed to allow American bombing of Assad’s forces.

The “formula” for this kind of operation was worked out in the invasion of Afghanistan where Americans used everything from Tomahawk missiles to B-52s (with hideous cluster bombs as well as “block-busters”) while locals – the Northern Alliance in that case, including such blood-thirsty creatures as General Dostum – did most of the fighting on the ground. The formula was successfully and cynically repeated in Libya.

The cynics running the induced-horror in Syria for America have gone to the extent now of supplying the rabble with small quantities of sarin to generate a tipping point so Libya can be repeated. It is brutal cynicism with absolutely no regard for Syria’s people.

And remember, if you associate America’s impulses in Syria with either the rule of law or humanitarianism, it was Americans who employed white phosphorus, flame throwers, depleted-uranium (cancer-inducing) ammunition, and cluster bombs in Iraq. Some great defenders of humanitarian principles to be judging what anyone else does.

I realize you cannot present all these underlying realities (after all, your president would be called into Stephen Harper’s office immediately for a chair-throwing meeting), but you do not need to sink to the contemptible level of just repeating every American fabrications with no authority of on-site journalism and no expert opinion.

Shabby, simply shabby.

 

 

 

 

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

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

Israel plays this prisoner-release game every time the U.S. manages to push it, once again, into negotiations. I’m amazed people don’t yawn en masse at the announcements.

Each time they play the game, mainline news media give Israel endless positive coverage, as though something significant or hopeful were happening.

But Israel holds many thousands of Palestinians in prisons, including some very young people and people guilty of no crime, so the release of a couple of dozen is virtually meaningless.

And since these particular prisoners are ones convicted of crimes but nearing the end of long sentences, a slightly early release is truly meaningless: it is what happens in the prison system of every Western nation.

The amount of publicity garnered by this paltry act – day after day in all the big-name papers – couldn’t be bought for a billion dollars.

So why do we hear endlessly about nothing as though it were something?

It is only one more stark proof of the inordinate influence of Israel and its apologists have over our sources of information.

These “peace talks” will go nowhere, just as countless others in the past have gone nowhere.

Why is that?

The obvious harsh truth is that Israel does not want, and never has wanted, peace as anyone outside Israel understands it.

Israel wants more land, minus its undesirable Arabic people, and it has had a long, slow process of ethnic-cleansing going on for decades. Just look at the announcement of still more settlements in the West Bank and the ugly manipulations underway in East Jerusalem to separate people from property they’ve owned for centuries. None of it anything less than legalized theft of the property of others who are forced to live under Israeli rule with absolutely no rights.

There is a fundamental truth to human history, and that is that tyranny and abuse ultimately fail. They succeed for a while – the Soviet Union had a run of ninety years – but it is impossible to maintain such a repressive regime indefinitely.

Here is Israel going through the motions yet again of negotiating, only this time it negotiates with an unelected Palestinian, Abbas, the U.S. has propped up in office because of his compliant nature, one moreover who does not even pretend to rule the Palestinians of Gaza.

Peace will come only when the U.S. gets tough with Israel and stops subsidizing and protecting its brutality, and I suspect that will never happen.

________________________________

Note that a new law has been proposed in Israel. This law would allow Israel to seize the property of all “non-resident” Palestinians who own land in East Jerusalem (Arabic in population for centuries), Palestinians who happen to have their primary residence in the West Bank or Gaza.

It is the equivalent of the state of Florida proposing a law to seize all the condos and vacation properties of people who live in the other forty-nine states. It is actually worse than that because Israel as illegal occupier has no right in international law to legislate such matters over the heads of Palestinians.

Apart from the bitter irony of such a law – after all, Jews are supposed to have left what was Israel two thousand years ago, and you cannot get more “absentee” than that – it is extremely difficult to understand how property-worshipping Americans can stomach such rigged legislation.

Of course, the American mainline press carries virtually no mention of the proposal.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

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

More intellectual crap from Aural Braun.

Mr Braun is a full-time lobbyist for the interests of the Israeli-U.S. effort to re-shape the planet.

Mr Putin, as one of the true independent-minded statesmen of our time, is of course at odds many times to a dangerous vision of world affairs.
___________________________

“Please, Obama is a joke. He is a complete amateur, never worthy or prepared to be president.”

I wish it were true that Obama’s behavior could be explained by “amateur” status.

But it cannot be.

He came to office with dreams and enthusiasms and some sound thinking, but in the face of the forces which truly govern America, he quietly threw up his hands and has become effectively a hostage.

He undoubtedly feared assassination, but it is not just such a dark threat which likely influenced him.

Day to day, he works with a relatively small group of people – military and intelligence officials, members of the imperious Senate, big money political contributors, including the powerful Israel Lobby – and that group is not friendly to the language of an Obama before election.

Look at any other notable American politician and presidential aspirant, and you see the same thing at work.

Hillary Clinton, over the last 20 years or so, has gone from a rather idealistic person to an unpleasant, acerbic advocate of Imperial America. She has told bald-faced lies in public countless times and uttered words which might have been written by an old crypto-Nazi like Dick Cheney.

Her husband was once a man of some ideals, too, but his two terms in office were marked by not one achievement of any worth, and he became little more than a kind of giant vacuum cleaner for political donations, setting some ghastly precedents like selling nights in the Lincoln bedroom of the White House or pardoning a big-time criminal at the end of his term in exchange for many millions of political dollars.

This is the modern reality of imperial America: elections at the highest level simply do not matter. By the time a politician has managed to scrabble to become a contender, with all the endless secret begging for campaign funds, he or she has become part of the problem, not the solution.

In economics, we speak of barriers to the entry of markets. The American campaign finance system requiring truckloads of private money to run is effectively a barrier to entry in the political market, a barrier against the idealistic or those who would do anything to interfere with America’s entrenched governing establishment: the military-industrial-intelligence complex along with such powerful special interests as the Israel Lobby.

This barrier is reinforced by a duopoly of parties in that market, each being not very different than the other, except in some volatile social interests of no concern to the establishment.

And anyone who even chances to pass over those barriers faces everyday life with some dark and powerful people who will not watch their power diminished.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

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

Terrorism?

What a joke.

The United States just murdered a number of innocent Yemenis with a drone strike.

That is indeed terror, state terror.
______________________________

There is not, and never has been, an organization called al Qaeda.

We have the words of several important statesmen, including a former British foreign minister, that the word was only used inside the American government as a catch-all for “bad guys” in certain regions of the world.

The word actually means “hole” or “sewer.” Can you imagine a secret fierce group calling itself “sewer”?

Yet the continued use of the term – repeated over and over in the press – undoubtedly lends weight to vague assertions about threats, and that is precisely why Washington continues to use this ridiculous language.

So why does the press keep repeating the nonsense?

The answer is found in the degree of genuine independence of thought and investigation exhibited by our mainline press, and that is simply not much.

It is not an organization. It does not send e-mails. It does not write press releases. If indeed it were an organization and it did these things from time to time, does any thinking person not understand that NSA and others would locate them quickly, causing the launch of drones in minutes?

But there are some pretty nasty people out there in the world. The United States has cynically used some of them again and again to get something it wants, the latest being the effort to topple the government of Syria.

It used them in Afghanistan – twice: once to fight the Russians in the 1980s, and a second time to defeat the Taleban government and carry out acts of terror like the murder of thousands of Taleban prisoners – and in Libya and in other places.

The United States in using these people and heavily assisting them – aided by its friends Israel and Turkey – is responsible for more terror in Syria alone than any so-called terrorist group could conceive of doing on its own anywhere.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

EXPANSION OF A POSTED RESPONSE TO AN INTERVIEW WITH SYRIA’S PRESIDENT ASSAD IN INTIFADA PALESTINE

I am no great defender of unelected leaders like Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, but in the case of Syria’s current troubles I support him and wish him success against the forces responsible for murder and destruction on a large scale in his country.

The great writer, Graham Greene, said:
“…the writer should always be ready to change sides at the drop of a hat. He stands for the victims, and the victims change.”

Syria is the victim in this case, and the bloody bullies attacking Syria are the United States and Israel, both too cowardly to attack directly and both dishonestly claiming that the Free Syrian Army represents a genuine popular revolt.

The aim of the United States and Israel in all this violence is to wipe Syria off the Middle East chessboard, leaving it a divided society with no central direction.

Their efforts are designed to serve Israel’s drive to dominate the Middle East, just as America’s invasion of Iraq served the same drive. Israel aspires to be a miniature replica in the Middle East of what the United States has become globally, and the United States’ government, compromised by its corrupt election financing system and the central role of special interests in that system, is more than willing to grant Israel the role.

The brutality and hypocrisy involved in creating a pseudo-popular uprising and putting millions of innocent people at risk are breathtaking. The United States and Israel have gathered, armed, and supported a gang of thugs and injected them (through Syria’s border with Turkey, Turkey also offering refuge and re-supply) into what was a peaceful country, the very kind of cut-throats neither the U.S. nor Israel would allow to cross their own borders.

The recent death of an American ambassador in Libya at Benghazi, an event which no American official will discuss honestly, was part of the same dark scheme and involved the ambassador working with the CIA to gather killers and arms for export to Syria. The operation badly backfired when some of the thugs being dealt with turned on the Americans, something American officials will not acknowledge out of embarrassment and the desire to hide the dirty business in which they are engaged.

The world is not the simple place of angels and devils as America’s propaganda efforts ceaselessly proclaim it – great camps of goodness and evil ready to do battle for the soul of humanity. No matter whether a government is democratic in origin or not – and given the utter corruption of America’s politics, its claims to authentic democracy are tenuous – powerful insiders are fully capable of bloody, ruthless behavior in secret, destroying the lives of others.

While the United States loves hearing itself talk about being a bastion of freedom and rights, the fact is that over the last 40 or so years, it has been, quite simply, the most murderous nation on earth, killing 3 million in Vietnam plus a host of victims in Cambodia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, and in many, many other places either invaded or toppled in bloody coups. It still runs an international torture gulag, of which Guantanamo is only a part.

The world can support a bloody global dictator even less than an individual country can support a local one. So, in Syria we see a stark choice, and the ethical balance favors for once a local dictator.

If you want the rule of law, you must abide by the rule of law, a principle which neither the United States nor Israel makes even a pretense of embracing although they sure like talking about it between bombing runs and terrorist activities.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

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

This confirms what many believed: that it was the rebels, not the government, using chemical weapons.

Now, where does one obtain this nerve gas, sarin, a deadly and sophisticated one which comes in two compounds only assembled at the time of use?

There are only a limited number of countries who make and store it, including both the United States and Israel.

We know about Israel’s chemical arms because there was a crash of an El Al cargo plane in 1992 in the Amsterdam area, killing dozens of people and releasing toxic substances Israel refused to accurately identify.

It was later determined that at least part of the cargo was one of the components of sarin, a cargo which was not declared and which is illegal to ship in most countries.

One has the well-founded suspicion that Israel supplied some of the sarin material recently to that rabble called the Free Syrian Army.

Its purpose in doing so would be typical of Israel’s nasty security forces practices – of which we have a long history including the 1967 War and Israel’s attempt to sink an American intelligence ship – and that is to create a casus belli with the claim that Assad had crossed one of Israel’s many arbitrary “red lines.”

Only in recent days we read a lot of nonsense about the government of Syria having used poison gas, including from America’s pathetic Secretary of Defense, Chuck Hagel, who managed to reverse himself in less than a day after asserting – rightly – that American intelligence did not believe Assad had used chemicals.

His reversal undoubtedly reflected the immense pressure of the Israel Lobby, incensed that he had effectively contradicted Mr Netanyahu’s earlier public claim about Syria’s use.

We see the outlines here of a very shabby story: the desperate efforts of Israel and the United States to support the phony rebellion they created in Syria because it is beginning to look like that rebellion will fail.

What Israel wants in these matters is for Syria to be removed as a power in the region, left as a weak and divided state whose elements will fight with each other for years to come.

Never mind those elements include the same kind of scum that neither Israel nor the United States would even allow to cross their borders. Who cares about the poor Syrians, just so long as once more Israel gets what it wants.

The whole series of events in Syria will prove a textbook example of arrogance, brutality, and cynicism in foreign affairs.

But then that description pretty well sums up the entire brief history of modern Israel.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN THE NEW YORK TIMES

This is an absurd development.

Yesterday, in the morning, I read Mr Hagel saying that United States’ intelligence did not believe Syria had used chemical weapons.

Because Israel had already just claimed in public that Syria had used such weapons, Mr Hagel was careful to state that the United States used its own intelligence sources.

By that afternoon, we had this new story that indeed the United States thought it likely (but had no hard evidence) that Syria had used chemical weapons.

I know of no example from real life events more deserving of the descriptive term “Orwellian.”

We know from the inadvertently-overheard words of two presidents not terribly long ago, the presidents of France and the United States, talking in private that Mr Netanyahu is regarded by both of them as an inveterate liar.

Mr Hagel, owing to his independence of mind regarding the Mideast, fought quite a battle after the election to be confirmed for his cabinet post.

Of course, his first words about chemical weapons contradicted Mr Netanyahu.

Something happened in the course of one day to turn him around.

Was it the same group which so opposed his nomination and confirmation?

And that group is the special interest of American apologists for Israel’s excesses.

Actually, if anything, virtually the opposite is true. There was a documented incident of the so-called rebels using some form of chemical.

From where did they get the material?

From Israel, in an effort to create a casus belli?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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

What possibly is the value of an apology from an inveterate liar?

We do have, after all, the public words of the presidents of two major countries that Netanyahu is exactly that, an inveterate liar.

It only took a couple of years plus immense outside pressure to have him even offer this poor excuse for an apology.

And I’ll bet a great many pirates, killers, and thieves wish they could get off by muttering a few cheap words.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

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

Ignatieff yet again proves what a remarkably thoughtless person he is for someone who enjoyed the status of an intellectual concerned with human rights.

But then, even in his old sinecure at Harvard, Ignatieff frequently defended American imperial interests and displayed no concern for America’s increasing violence and authoritarianism in the world.

The horrors in Syria exist for one reason only, and that is America’s effort to determine the future of most of the countries of the Middle East for the benefit of its imperial satrapy in the region, Israel, itself a country which regularly kills, tortures, kidnaps, imprisons, and steals.

Turkey’s behavior in offering the “rebels” refuge and border access and its threats against Syria are all at the behind-the scenes behest of the U.S.

The American Ambassador recently killed in Libya – another American disaster – was involved in smuggling weapons and Islamic fighters into Syria. That’s why no one in Obama’s government can give an honest accounting of the event.

Some of the thugs fighting in Syria are the kind of people the U.S. wouldn’t even admit through its own border, yet it seems perfectly okay for them to go to Syria and murder and destroy.

The hypocrisy and lack of ethics are stunning.

Israel’s murderous thug of a prime minister of course just chuckles at Syria being tied down in such a bloody mess.

The aim here is to destabilize Syria, perhaps dividing it into parts, and removing the Syrian army as a piece on the Middle East chessboard.

The fact is that Assad, like Hussein, provides a secular government in a region torn with religious hostilities. That’s why Islamists hate him. Treatment of women too is better than in many parts of the Middle East.

But none of that counts when the U.S. decides in private that it is time for change in your region of the world.

The country which has killed millions over recent decades now feels entitled to control events anywhere its fancy takes it.

And flacks like Ignatieff – for that is what he is – help form the chorus of support for evil.

He’s trying desperately, I think, to reclaim his sinecure at Harvard.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

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

Peter MacKay, as always, talks as the fool he is, a fool who doesn’t understand the extent of his own foolishness.

Among the Harper government’s clearest achievements in international affairs is reducing the country to a length of soiled toilet paper trailing from the Pentagon’s rear end.

We have zero interests in Mali and zero interest in Mali.

There is nothing there for a rational state to fight over.

But the Pentagon is on a holy crusade, stretching over the face of the earth, for anything that might be in any way associated with what it perceives in its dim lights to be Islamic fundamentalism and terror.

It very much resembles an obsessed, insane Captain Ahab sailing the world’s seas to kill the white whale.

It is egged by the domestic lobby of America’s nasty little sidekick, Israel, a country whose mad leaders speak of nothing but war and assault and enemies and hatreds while they continue stealing the property of others and suppress 4.5 million people into utter hopelessness.

We are heading into a long period of senseless, pointless, and destructive conflicts inspired by the military-industrial complex and its Ahab-like search for the white whale.

Traditionally, Canada, a rational people with progressive views, would not even think of joining in such destructive stupidity.

But now this rational people are ruled by a 39% “majority” government of extreme ideology whose major goal is to play a role in international affairs as defined by the seething Captain Ahab.

We literally threw away billions of dollars and about a hundred and fifty lives to achieve absolutely nothing in Afghanistan.

And we wasted millions more in killing civilians and destroying property in Libya to help create a chaotic state whose leader the United States hated.

In state after state the United States is busy killing people, all innocent people by the standards of justice – in Yemen, in Bahrain, in Pakistan, in Afghanistan, in Somalia, and in Syria (through its paid and supplied proxies).

In Egypt, it encourages the government to impose an unjust constitution just to secure the cooperation of that government.

In Iran, it threatens and blusters daily over nothing.

Its achievement in Iraq – besides a million killed, thousands crippled, two million refugees, and an advanced society reduced to poverty – is a nation effectively divided into pieces and endless internal conflict.

Fortunately, Canada played no role in the filthy business.

Repeating what it achieved in Iraq is, of course, America’s aim in Syria.

Israel’s mad leaders are gleeful for such murderous assistance, but no person of democratic and humane principles can possibly agree.

But we do not have a government today dedicated to such principles, and the whole world knows it and treats us with shame in international forums.

Happy New Year, Canada.

 

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

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

Israeli courts speak with just about the same sense of justice legitimacy as did the United States Supreme Court in the 1850s, a court that never saw a case of slavery or abuse of slaves that it didn’t think was just fine.

The legal apparatus of Israel serves as a big dumb show almost like Stalin’s courts.

How else do you explain murders being fine?

Theft being fine?

Abuse being fine?

Arbitrary arrest and illegal imprisonment being fine?

And a systematic race-oriented bias to all the activities and policies of government?

 

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

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

I love that phony word, “militants”?

The people were either criminals or they were not.

If they were all genuine cases of people killed while attacking others, there would be no use for the word, “militant,” and I guarantee Israeli authorities would never use it.

The Globe has accepted Israel’s propaganda by using a euphemistic word which literally means nothing.

Of course, the word was intended to blur the distinction between shooting innocent people and shooting someone attacking you.

It’s a coward’s word.

And its constant propagation through news media is just a sign of how little genuine reporting goes on in these matters.

Shameful.
___________________________

Even Israel’s presentation here is phony propaganda.

The cheap boxes the remains are in are all covered with Palestinian flags, covering a coffin with a flag being the traditionally accepted way of burying a soldier.

But we have not one shred of evidence any of these are soldiers.

And we know, from countless experience, Israel blithely kills people who oppose it in the smallest way.

Witness the Palestinian family wiped out on a beach a few years ago.

Or the lovely young American girl deliberately crushed by a bulldozer.

Or the Canadian officer and 3 others murdered while bravely doing their UN observation duties as Israel once again invaded Lebanon.

Or the 400 children Israel murdered in Gaza.

Or the unarmed party aboard a ship on the high seas which Israeli commandos literally executed.

The list goes on and on.

And of course Israel holds thousands of Palestinians in prison with no proper trials or legal procedures.

And we have the report of the respected UN Raconteur for the region, Mr Falk, that Israel has killed over 1200 children just since 2000.

This pathetic effort by Israel is a cheap show.

It means nothing to return bodies.

And irony of ironies Israel uses a Palestinian flag, the flag of a country Israel refuses to allow to exist.

Good Lord, let’s use our critical faculties, and maybe then we can see some justice.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

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

“Canada had lost sight of religious freedom as human right,” Baird says

John Baird makes me think of a man suffering from rabies, foaming at the mouth and shouting absurdities.

His words are nothing less than the kind of crazed and incoherent shouts we would expect from a person suffering from late-stage rabies.

No country on earth better respects the principles of freedom of religion than does Canada, full stop.

And certainly not the United States where the venom of religious intolerance enters public debate and even policy on a regular basis.

I, for one, deeply resent being preached at in this fashion by a man who holds a senior cabinet post: a torrent of deliberate dishonesty, bent only for his own political advantage.

He not only fails utterly to serve religious freedom, or any other human or democratic value, he clearly serves the opposite purpose, hoping to inject America’s poisonous religious and ideological debate into Canada’s traditionally peaceful politics and policy.

This is just disgusting.

Freedom of religion, everywhere and always, implies freedom from religion.

You cannot have a free society where government serves and promotes religious interests of any kind.

It is up to religious people in the privacy of their homes and religious institutions to make religion part of their lives.

Good God, the very people sharing John Baird’s delusional thinking are the people who hate things like Islamic republics.

This government is now showing the most dangerous signs yet of destroying the very fabric of Canada with such crazed and severely divisive rhetoric.
____________________________________________

“Almost without fail, the lack of religious freedom, except in a few isolated circumstances, can be attributed to religion. Nobody hates and persecutes likely the truly religious, and, they usually go after others who are truly religious.”

The West suffered through centuries of persecution, burning people alive or torturing them with horrible machines, over such trivial matters as the nature of the wine and bread at mass.

Tens of thousands of proud aboriginals in Peru and Mexico and other places were tortured into accepting Christianity, being summarily executed if they did not.

Old women, perhaps suffering from mental illness, were burned at the stake as witches.

There is a huge list, spanning centuries, of abuses by the religious when they were in positions of secular power.

It is so very recently that the West has achieved the precious situation we have of genuine religious freedom.

And people like Baird work relentlessly to set the clock back, hoping in doing so to make a political gain for their party.

Israel styles itself a democracy, but it is a very strange form of democracy we see there.

Do readers know that is against the law in Israel to preach and try converting people to Christianity?

Do readers know that non-Jewish spouses are treated in an entirely unfair way there?

Do readers know that important personal documents in Israel are printed with your religious identity?

That many privileges and public services in Israel depend upon your religious identity?

Is that Baird’s idea of religious freedom?

Is that why he gives public money to a fundamentalist group and now spouts utter nonsense?
__________________________________________

“Problem for atheists: If God doesn’t exist, where did the first life come from? Where did good and evil come from? Why is it that life hasn’t been found on any other planets?

“If we’re all just a fluke of chance, you’d think that there would be many other ‘flukes’ in the universe.”

There is a perfect example of the kind of rubbish bulldozed to the surface, contaminating public policy matters, by Baird’s unacceptable words.

What this pathetically uninformed comment-writer does not understand is that we are at the very dawn of space exploration, comparable perhaps to the first tests of ocean-worthy ships before even travelling to North and South America to discover them teaming with life.

And despite that, scientists at NASA are now convinced some forms of life do exist on Mars, the only planet we have begun to explore. The proof will come within a decade or two.

And, please, our solar system is only one pitifully insignificant collection of matter in the cosmos. Our own galaxy contains hundreds of billions of suns, and so far we know that there are more than a billion other galaxies.

Only genuine fools would say what this comment-writer says in light of any knowledge about the current situation of science.

As to problems for people’s ways of thinking: the biggest one in all of history is whence evil if there is a god who is good?

It’s never been answered – Milton tried and failed and only survives because of his poetic genius.

It is easy to observe in the world, if you bother looking, that evil not only exists, it thrives and prospers almost everywhere. Good people regularly suffer, and monsters enjoy untold influence and wealth and power.

But the important point is this: what does your religious muttering have to do with public policy? Or what should it have to do with public policy?

The answer is obvious: nothing.

And just so Baird’s insane rhetoric.
_______________________________________

“Why didn’t they just give Amnesty International the $5 million and request that it be directed to cases involving religious persecution??”

Good question.

But, of course, Baird has no genuine interest in such matters, and his words only disguise far less worthy purposes.

My great fear here is that they are working towards a government construct that could one day serve to criminalize or penalize those who, for example, speak against the human rights abuses of Israel.

It would be easy to frame that kind of genuinely repressive law in a pseudo-religious context.

And with that, Messrs. Baird and Harper would be taking us back to the 16th century in terms of freedoms.
______________________________

Please see, postings two and three here:

http://chuckmangrotesques.blogspot.ca/

The irony of the reality of Baird’s private life versus the kind of repressive forces he supports – for campaign funds, of course – is genuinely painful.
__________________________________________________________

‘He said that Canada now will “stand with the Jewish state.”‘

That phrase is ominous indeed, suggesting again the sense of my comment, previously, concerning the genuine ultimate aims of this backward idea for a government agency.

By definition, “the Jewish state” is not a place for religious freedom, any more than would be an Islamic republic or a Christian democracy.

You cannot, by law, even preach Christianity in Israel.

And there is a host of other things you cannot do or say in Israel, all of them concerning religious identity.

The very fact that Israel wants to be recognized as “the Jewish state” is frought with danger, because Israel has about 19% of its (formal) population, Palestinians who refused to run from the 1948 terrors of Irgun and Lehi and Stern Gang.

Israel didn’t – and doesn’t – want them but it is more or less stuck for now. Many Israelis speak in public for their expulsion.

I use the word “formal” because in Israel there are effectively two levels of citizenship: those with an Israel passport and those who are part of what is legally deemed the superior Jewish nation. All rights and treatments under law are affected by this terrible distinction.

To endorse that kind of human rights abuse so forcefully as does Baird is frightening to Canadians who regarded theirs as one of the world’s freest and most just societies.

And the same man is trying to create an engine of government that is wholly inappropriate in a free society, and which is potentially far more dangerous than it sounds at first pass.

And the same man gave a million dollars in public funds to a fundamentalist religious group.

Does anyone in his or her right mind trust John Baird?

 

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

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

But who is going to evict Israelis from the rest of their stolen property in the West Bank and Jerusalem?

Those much greater thefts aren’t by right-wing fanatics but by the government of Israel itself.

The Hebron business is pure symbolism and public relations.
______________________________________________

‘The “two-state solution” is actually live and well…, if we only realized that it has been accomplished, legally, long ago, and all that needs to be done at this stage is to tinker with it a bit…

The words would be hilarious were they not so tragic and darkly ignorant.

Two states, one of which weekly steals homes and farms from the other?

The two states are defined by the Green Line, else the phrase “two states” is absurd.
__________________________________________

“Hebron is important for Jews not only because of the tomb of Abraham…”

It would seem that the entire Middle East is important to Israelis, so much so they are ready to start wars regularly to secure their delusional claims.

No modern state can be based on religious texts of 2500 years ago.

Otherwise Turkey belongs to Greece owing to the Trojan War.

And indeed, Israel belongs either to the Phoenicians or the Egyptians, both of which ruled that land before the Hebrews.

One could argue that Italy, too, has a claim.

These arguments over texts of 2500 years ago are irrational and dangerous.

Were it anywhere but Israel, everyone would immediately recognize the fact.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

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

Quits?

Big deal.

Threatening the President’s life is a crime in the United States.

The man belongs in prison.

This whole matter shows how sick and twisted the support for Israel has become.

Bad enough calling every critic of Israel’s ugly policies an anti-Semite, a favorite practice of frustrated supporters who do not get what they want.

But now this?

It is not to be taken lightly that a prominent man feels he can do this.
__________________________________

“The Israelites are given over to murdering people that they don’t like ………

“Shamir and his Stern Gang murdered Count Bernadotte, the Swedish Peace Envoy ………”

Yes, indeed, along with literally hundreds of other murders and acts of terror in the 1940s.

Israel was born in terror, and instead of growing into a respectable member of the world community, it has only gone on to become something very unpleasant, violating all fair-minded people’s sense of fairness and decency.

And it comes as no surprise that its fervent supporters behave in the same fashion.

It was not that long ago that a prominent American lawyer advocated in writing the execution of all family members of any Palestinian caught in an act of terror.

And what single act in our day is more terrifying than Israel’s assault on Gaza, which is basically a refugee camp, killing 400 children, a thousand others, and lying about every detail of that savagery since?

Then still imposing 4 years of illegal and inhumane embargo on the same people and using murderous acts of piracy to enforce it?

Israel, sadly, has become little more than a mafia state: it murders, it steals, it oppresses, and it breaks all international law with impunity, lying and shamelessly claiming the right to do things no one has the right to do.

And the public is supposed to say fine because poor Israel feels threatened.

Israel is threatened seriously by absolutely no one or nothing but its own insanity.

The threat Obama represents, if it can even be called that, is that Israel must eventually abide by rules and treaties, assuming its previous borders, but Israel wants everything and it wants the non-Jews gone.

Hardly a stance any person of ethics can be expected to agree with.

 

 

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

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

If this doesn’t define a rogue state, what does?

Theft, just simple theft, over and over in front of the whole world.

And in effect Israel says none of your business.

Add the thousands of murders, illegal arrests, torture, the abuse of millions, illegal nuclear weapons, selling nuclear weapons technology, and I just do not see what separates Israel from the great thugs of the world.

Every charge we read made in our headlines about Gaddafi or North Korea is completely true of Israel, except the former two aren’t engaged in constant theft of other people’s property and they do not receive billions of dollars in assistance and technical help and receive free trade.

________________________

“Don’t like it? Tough luck.”

It’s all very well to say tough luck.

But that kind of attitude elicits only the contempt of the world.

If Israel wants to be a nation like any other, it must behave the way we expect others to behave.

Right now, Israel is firmly in the camp of thugs and rogue states.

Don’t like it? Tough luck.

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN THE TORONTO GLOBE AND MAIL

I just love that expression “alleged militants.”

Almost certainly, the deaths in fact were 18 civilians guilty of nothing but being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

And even if one or two were suspects of some kind, this kind of extra-judicial murder is absolutely indistinguishable from the death squads in South American countries which periodically made people “disappear.”

It reminds me of each time Israel kills a batch of poor Palestinians: they are invariably called “militants” in the press.

It’s called demonizing your victim. It also clearly is a ghastly use of euphemism for extra-judicial mass-murder.

George Orwell would have loved this terrible and deliberate abuse of language in the interests of power.

He wrote about just such things in his wonderful essay, “Politics and the English Language,” an indictment of power that remains as true as the day it was written.

And our truth-loving press seems to think it’s perfectly acceptable to kill “militants” and even “alleged militants.”

In one stroke the press both horribly abuses language and ignores completely its responsibility to inform people.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED COMMENT TO AN EDITORIAL IN THE TELEGRAPH

‘Well the Jews were there 3,000 years ago, 1,600 years before Islam even existed.’

That is typical of the kind of uninformed statements repeated over and over in defense of Israel’s current brutish behavior.

First, there is no history of Jews in Israel 3000 years ago. At that time, they were likely still part of ancient Mesopotamia, lands we today call Iraq, the place where they are thought to have originated.

But even more importantly, when people write about Israel’s additional territorial claims in terms of Hebrew Scripture, for most of the world’s people it makes as much sense as modern Greece claiming Turkey owing to the stories in the Iliad, Homer by the way actually going back about 3000 years and singing of still earlier events.

If you can quote Scripture as authority in Middle East affairs, you can justify literally anything, including killing all non-Jewish residents, for that is what the Biblical Hebrews were enjoined to do, over and over, supposedly by God but actually by their own prophets assuming the authority of God.

Many countries could have a claim on the territory we call Israel if this cloudcuckooland approach were valid, including the Egyptians who long, long ago ruled there, the Lebanese, viewed as the descendants of the ancient Phoenicians who also ruled there, and perhaps even the Iraqis, whose antecedents conquered the territory.

Go back far enough, and you can claim the territory we call Israel for the decedents of the early people who migrated out of Africa many tens of thousands of years ago.

The silliness of this ancient-writing-based claim is made even greater by the important research of an Israeli scholar who says that the Palestinians are, for the most part, the actual descendants of the ancient Israelis.

When Rome conquered territories, it typically did not remove the inhabitants, and it did not interfere with their religion, so long as they accepted Roman rule. Just because, after two turbulent millennia of history, most of the Palestinians are Muslim does not invalidate this concept. Moreover, DNA testing is tending to support this view.

So what we are really talking about with Israel’s modern activities is removing the descendants of ancient Israel who have lived there countless centuries in favor of new immigrants from New York or London. If that isn’t imperialism, I don’t know what is.

On still another level, Biblical claims must be rejected simply because they are dangerous and de-stabilizing. Greater Israel as it has been defined by Zionist scholars – and mind you, there are no maps in the Bible – includes the West Bank and Gaza and pieces of Syria and Lebanon. Does claiming that, or any portion of it, resemble anything but a certain formula for endless war and unrest?

Personal religious views and 2,500 year-old books have no place in international affairs.

In the end, if Israel wishes to be regarded as a state like any other state, then it must behave as we expect other states to behave, and that does not include undefined borders which constantly ooze out over the property of others.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY MARGARET WENTE IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL‘This regime has taken so many lives. There’s got to be a time when it stops’

Ms. Wente appears now to have exhausted her rational mental faculties in the relentless drive to create propaganda supporting Israel’s military and the Pentagon.

The United States, I remind readers, has killed about a million people in Iraq, unknown tens of thousands in Afghanistan, and three million in Vietnam, and those numbers don’t count all the smaller murderous efforts like Somalia, Pakistan, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Panama, and its loving support for Israel’s bloody predations against largely defenseless people.

In the total of all these places, the United States has created millions of refugees and countless cripples.

It has overthrown legitimate governments all over the world, including democratic ones in Chile, Iran, and Guatamala.

But somehow, Ms. Wente assures us, Iran is so terrible?

Iran, which has started no wars in its entire modern history?

Iran, which while a theocracy (just like Israel) is a relatively open place where one may visit and a great deal of information flows (compared to many other societies on earth)?

Iran, compared to the 3 million annual cases of genital mutilation of women in Africa?

Iran, compared to the routine rape of girls by their fathers and other elders in Africa?

Iran, compare to the bride-burning in India?

Iran, compared to the hideous treatment of millions of widows, including young girls who had been married off for profit to old men who die, in India?

Iran, compared to occupied Afghanistan where a majority of women still wear the burka?

The world is filled with cruelties, and Iran is one of lesser parties to them, but Israel wants Iran attacked, so Ms. Wente does her duty churning out more unbalanced rubbish.
_____________________________________

One further thought.

And just whose holy book is it which commands the stoning of unfaithful women?

Israel doesn’t stone women, but the Ultra Orthodox there often attack women they regard as “loose.”

There have been cases in recent years of prostitutes having been burned alive in homes mysteriously set alight.