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 RESPONSES TO A COLUMN IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

“They should ship him to Islamabad and stone him.”

What can one say but that the comment is colossally ignorant?

Breivik was actually quoted previously on his dislike of Arab people, something apparently he shares with the writer of the comment.

His act, if it has any meaning at all, is in line with sympathy for Israel.

By the way, the person commenting clearly does not understand the origins of stoning. I suggest that he read the book of Leviticus.
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“Meanwhile, any Muslim who dares to convert to Christianity gets a death sentence put on their head. Houston, we have a problem here back on earth.”

Death sentence?

Just look back at Christian history.

Centuries of mass killings, burning people alive, and torture over matters so small as a detail of the mass.

We’ve only been free from such horrors for a century or so.

And actually we are not free of them yet if you count places like Latin America and rural India and Africa.

The overwhelming majority of the world’s more than a billion Muslims do not behave this way any more than we do now.

The ones who do are mired in poverty and ignorance and superstition, and if you will just bother to look at the world around you, you will find uncountable horrors in places of poverty and ignorance and superstition – as in rural India or Mexico or Latin America or Africa.
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“The ugly side of socialism”

And your comment qualifies as the genuinely stupid side of free enterprise.

The man is ill.

He is not a whit different to cases like Charles Manson or Robert Picton.

Indeed, he is not a whit different to the American Marines who killed a crowd of innocents recently.

Or Baruch Goldstein, an Israeli who slaughtered a large number of people in a mosque while they were praying.
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“The man is a terrorist and should be tried as one.”

Terrorist?

Is that anything like a witch?

Or one of Stalin’s “wreckers,” of whom he spoke before starting on a new purge?

Is it a special class of human being?

A sick man is a sick man, although he may well have political views too, and in this case his views are much like those of an Israeli settler.

A certain percentage of such people exist in every human population.

The United States has displayed scores of them in Iraq and Vietnam, not to mention all the mass killers right in the dear old homeland.

Israel was founded on the bloody work of the Irgun and Lehi and the Stern Gang.

Israeli soldiers murdered 400 children during the invasion of Gaza, and there are reliable reports of children used as shields by Israeli soldiers.
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“This coward deserves the worst kind of punishment. Typical of the usual suspects to support his views and actions through some convoluted logic. A mass murderer of children is no hero, unfortunately the chickenshit cowards who jack off to war movies and Fox News feel it’s okay to murder children.”

What are you blubbering about?

The only thing remarkable in your comment is a near complete lack of rationality.

Who on this planet called Breivik a hero?

Who on earth supports his views?

Although I must say that some of the violent voices about “terrorism” here in the comments do come pretty close to supporting his views, only the targets of their hatreds are different ones than his.

Bottom line is that Nature regularly produces all kinds of freaks and failed evolutionary experiments, as it were. He is clearly one of them.

It is quite possible that such heartless killers served a purpose once in early human society. Many of the legendary heroes and soldiers were likely the same kind of psychopaths, figures from Achilles to Prince Vlad the Impaler

Vlad was the origin of the vampire legend, a real historical figure, a ruthless killer who fought against Ottoman Empire expansion.

Closer to our own day, it is widely thought that Stonewall Jackson, the Confederacy’s most ruthless general, was a psychopath.

General Curtis LeMay, who ran the savage bombing of Japanese cities and who later advocated in the Pentagon for a nuclear first strike on Russia, almost certainly also was one.

Quite possibly, “old blood and guts” General Patton of WWII also was a psychopath.

The list is a long one, and we are only lucky early detection caught still another, Canadian Colonel Russell Williams.

Some of these psychopaths like to kill in great masses – hence the name mass murder – while others like to enjoy a long series of killings, as did Mr. Picton.
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“Islam slaughtered, enslaved and raped its way out of Saudi Arabia to the doorsteps of Europe and India but I hardly hear a chirp from you.”

History is full of horrors.

But I do tend, quite naturally I think, to be most upset with that happening before my eyes.

Especially when the horrors before my eyes are committed by peoples claiming allegiance to democratic and human values, such as Israel and the United States.

One expects tyrants and ignorant armies to kill and maim and torture, but there is supposed to be something different about countries claiming Enlightenment principles.

By the way, it is estimated that the United States left 3 million people dead in Vietnam.

It left also countless cripples from the bombing.

And it left still more a sea of Agent Orange to cripple babies for centuries.

It was a true Holocaust, in every sense of the word.

And all done for nothing, no point whatever, just mad impulses and paranoid fears.

Lastly, quoting weird sources from the Internet like the one you do is just that, weird.

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.

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“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.

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“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.

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“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 BY HEIDI BLAKE IN THE TELEGRAPH

What a blind piece of writing.

The only “rogue” state in the Middle East is Israel.

Israel has about 150 nuclear warheads, several delivery systems, and a working factory for fissionable material which no one is even allowed to visit.

The same Israel which keeps thousands in jail illegally, attacks every neighbor that it has, relentlessly keeps taking the land of others in an elaborate system of slow-motion ethnic-cleansing, and practices a brutal apartheid.

Now, there is indeed a genuine threat to world peace.

Instead of dealing head-on with a genuine threat to the world, Israel’s illicit nuclear weapons, this article stirs up nonsense about boogeymen, a truly irresponsible game.

What the article actually does is serve Israel’s narrow interests, removing the focus from the world’s outstanding nuclear rogue state, Israel, a state which has supported no international laws or treaties or regulations in building its terror weapons, has stolen, bribed and killed to get its weapons. It is moreover a country which has wheeled-and-dealed in nuclear weapons technology with another rogue state in the past, South Africa.

Israel’s shadow falls on everything for a thousand miles around, and it has a withering effect on the whole region.

Israel has a direct effect on the nature of government in the region. It does not want democracies to emerge, because it is comfortable with autocrats like Mubarak who do not challenge its interests.

It never once tries to respect its neighbors, never once honestly seeks peace, and blubbers on and on about Islamists and terror and its being the region’s only democracy.

What kind of democracy is it that behaves this way? It’s a rather good thing there are no other democracies of this kind.
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From another reader:

“Israel, an island of liberal democracy on the forefront of a wild Muslim-Arab world”

Sorry, that is arrogant, unthinking, and uninformed.

Israel is by no measure a “liberal democracy.”

There is no Bill or Charter of Rights, nor can there ever be one in a state based on ethic/religious identity.

And minorities of many descriptions are treated unfairly and badly in Israel.

And you cannot have a Jewish democracy anymore than you can have an Islamic democracy or a Hindu democracy. Once you place limits on who has access in a democracy, you no longer are speaking of genuine democracy.

I just love that comic-book stuff about a “wild Muslim-Arab world,” a 21st century version of “the yellow peril.”

You could not cite a more stunning example of pure prejudice.

Unfortunately, it represents the attitude Israel works very hard to foster in the world, always hoping to so prejudice everyone’s thinking that Israel can do just as it pleases.

Well, we’ve seen – especially in the last decade – what Israel does when it does as it pleases. Cluster bombs on civilians, four hundred children killed, piracy on the high seas, a cruel blockade to starve people out, a continued brutal occupation, refusal to talk to anyone but a pathetic figure like Abbas who doesn’t even properly hold office, passing the most prejudiced and unfair laws, assassinating anyone who disagrees, refusing even to talk to a cleanly-elected government, torture, seizing the property of others, and practices which people of unqualified credentials to speak have called apartheid – Jimmy Carter, Bishop Tutu, and Nelson Mendella.

And we all know what Lord Acton said about power and absolute power.
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From another reader:

‘”Israel has about 150 nuclear warheads…”
‘Really?
‘If you have accurate data, information and not speculation, why don’t you share it with the rest of humanity…??’

Glad to share, but sorry you are not yourself better informed.

Jimmy Carter gave us that number a year or so ago.

Need I remind you that Carter was President of the United States, is a nuclear engineer, and was a commander of an American ballistic-missile submarine?

He is well connected with international leaders and intelligence sources, and many say he has the highest I.Q. of any president in the last century.

He doesn’t say things he doesn’t know.

Of course, actual pictures of some of Israel’s facilities and even a mold for fissionable material were published in the Sunday Times a few decades ago.

The man responsible for those pictures – an Israeli nuclear technician – was drugged and kidnapped by Israeli agents and spent many years in prison. He still lives under strict limits and threats.