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 MARGARET WENTE IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

This is the second trashiest thing Margaret Wente has ever written, and that is saying something because she occupies herself with a great deal of trash.

Apart from insulting brave humanitarians, the underlying theme here is a quieter re-statement of the idiotic assertion that the very selectivity of people’s interest in Israel-Palestine displays their anti-Semitism.

People should show more concern about North Korea? First, North Korea is an absolute government. Israel claims to be a democracy, and with that word “democracy” goes a lot of associated concepts about human rights and ethical government, else it wouldn’t be a claim worth making, but we plainly see endless abuse and refusal to honor human rights by Israel.

Ms Wente truly ought to register as a lobbyist for Israel.

Readers may be interested in the following.

Ms Wente’s all-time great piece of idiocy critiqued at:

http://chuckmanwords.wordpress.com/2009/05/28/the-iraq-wars-trashiest-piece-of-propaganda/

A critique of the moral-trash theme of selectivity buried in her current piece:

http://chuckmanwords.wordpress.com/2009/06/01/the-peculiar-state/

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“Nor should the people of Gaza be punished for the incompetency of its leaders as Ms Wente so kindly suggests.”

True, except that no one has ever demonstrated Hamas as incompetent.

Quite the opposite appears to be the case, Hamas has held its people together after more than three years of brutal, illegal blockade and that after Israel’s inhuman assault called Operation Cast Lead, in which Israel killed 400 children and a thousand others.

I’d say Hamas has shown the qualities of British leadership during The Blitz.

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“Could someone quote a reliable source giving the total of Israelis killed by Hamas rockets or incursions? In the game of numbers, numbers matter.”

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

The rockets – overgrown homemade fireworks – have never been proven to have killed anyone, although while Israel was wading through the blood of 400 children and a thousand others in Operation Cast Lead, it claimed that about ten Israelis were killed, a claim like so many from Israel never substantiated.

By the way, just one fact is most telling here. The United Nations’ Special Rapporteur for Palestine, Richard Falk, a distinguished American academic and a Jew, only recently published the fact that Israeli forces have killed 1,335 Palestinian children since the year 2000 in their various incursions, suppressions, and brutal policing.

Now, there is a real record of achievement of which to be proud, Ms Wente.

The stuff of democracy to be sure.

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“And it is interesting that in UK, France and Canada you have Conservative governments and then all of them including US Congress and Senate creating special committees to fight anti-Semitism.”

“…anyone even tangentially linked to it can kiss his/her career or life good-bye.”

Apologists for Israel use the term “anti-Semitism” in exactly the way the late Senator Joe McCarthy used “communist” or “pinko.”

The technique is called demonizing and intimidating your opponent, and the intention is to stop people from even considering your opponent’s arguments and observations.

Never mind dealing with the facts and arguments of your opponent, just label him as something filthy.

Israel does this with the word “terrorist” also.

It labels people who oppose its ghastly policies as “terrorists,” conveniently forgetting that Israel itself was founded in the terror of the Irgun and Stern and other murderous gangs and forgetting, too, that there is only one source of regular assassination, illegal arrest, property theft, and constant abuse of 4 million people in the Middle East, and that   source is Israel.

We have all heard of narco-states, but I believe today it is right to describe Israel as a mafia-state, a state where the government itself murders whoever it thinks worth murdering and steals whatever it thinks worth stealing.

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“Meanwhile the country is bounded on all sides by hostile nations, much larger than itself.”

Who chose this troubled location?

Who established their beach head, as it were, with the horrors of the Irgun and Stern gangs?

Who has attacked every neighbor it has, and some two or three times?

Who keeps 4 million people in a state of abuse and a lack of any rights at all?

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“Since ceded to the Israels after WWII, a land of mostly wandering shepherds has been transformed into a modern, vibrant, productive land.”

First, no one ceded that land to Israelis.

What authority did the British Empire have giving away the homes and farms of others?

Transformed into a vibrant, productive land?

First, Israel is the most subsidized entity on earth.

It has received hundreds of billions – yes, billions – in subsidies from the United States and others.

The U.S. government gives about $500 per year per Jewish citizen of Israel, and it has done so for decades.

The U.S. also gives priceless technical assistance and access to intelligence and cooperative projects of every description.

Germany has poured tens of billions in reparations into Israel, rightly so in view of past crimes, but still an immense subsidy.

American Jewish organizations have also poured tens of billions into Israel.

Israeli Americans enjoy the special privilege of dual citizenship, something the United States is averse to for others, and this means they can freely travel back and forth transferring technology and other huge benefits.

Its economy only flourishes because half of its trade is with the United States, enjoying as it does a privileged free-trade agreement that would be the envy of any small country.

Its agriculture only flourishes because it diverts the water of others in this dry region.

Then what does it do with the stolen, precious water?

It grows things like tomatoes and clementines to send all the way to the United States, a place with tons of capacity to grow such things.

The real economic cost of this agricultural nonsense is immense. The replacement cost of water in Israel is reflected in its desalination plants (also subsidized) which produce some of the world’s most costly water.

 

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY GIDEON RACHMAN IN THE FINANCIAL TIMES

Gideon Rachman,

On the whole, a very perceptive column.

I believe two changes, both quite significant, are needed however.

Concerning the election in Iran, I do believe you have it a bit wrong. Yes, the election made Obama’s wishes more difficult, but no, the election was not illegitimate nor is there yet reason to believe the government is insecure.

You are following the common wisdom of corporate newspapers, a wisdom which seems little more than consistent support for American policy, however wrong-headed it may be on any topic.

“…left a permanent impression of the instability and illegitimacy of the Iranian government.”

We have absolutely no solid basis for saying that the election was illegitimate. Several observers, very knowledgeable about Iran, including one scholar whom I heard interviewed at length, say that result was accurate. A lot of poor people in Iran like the current president.

The disturbances in Iran’s streets have been at least in part fomented by CIA money. Have you forgotten that Bush earmarked $400 million in his late term for inciting trouble in Iran?

I believe that if I gave those who disagree with the government of any country – including certainly Britain or the United States – $400 million dollars towards subversion and propaganda, we would see trouble in any of them. Many Western governments represent minority opinions.

The story you missed, which I think marked a genuine historical turning point, is Israel’s Operation Cast Lead.

Revulsion at the killing of about 400 children is worldwide, and the act further calls into question Israel’s entire structure of unwarranted siege, apartheid, and slow-motion ethnic-cleansing in Jerusalem and the West Bank.

Even the support of some American Jews is beginning to crumble for what is so clearly a brutal government with absolutely no intention of ever seeking genuine peace with its neighbors.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY CON COUGHLIN IN THE DAILY TELEGRAPH

Well, if the leaders of Israel are not war criminals, just who in the world qualifies?

 

Murdering 400 children in Gaza? Deliberately targeting UN observers bravely doing their job in Lebanon? Laying a blanket of nightmarish, barbaric cluster bombs across Southern Lebanon? And refusing to cooperate in removing them?

Keeping a million and half souls in Gaza under siege, even after killing 1,400 of them? Institutionalizing slow-motion ethnic-cleansing in Jerusalem and the West Bank? Stealing homes and farms from families who have lived there for centuries to hand over to immigrants from London or New York?

Over forty years of humiliation and abuse for the people of the territories occupied in 1967, captured in a war which Israel is known to have engineered to this very purpose? Many thousands held in prison with no proper legal procedures? Building a new Berlin Wall and building it on the property of others?

Arresting the members of a cleanly elected government – far more so than was the case for Mr. Bush – because you disagree with their party? Refusing even to talk to those you disagree with?

Assassinating scores of individuals with no charges or trial or legal procedure, an exact copy of the bloody activity of juntas in South America who made people disappear?

The only reason Israel’s leaders are not all severely dealt with by the Western world is the immense, smothering influence of the United States whose foreign policy in many parts is virtually written in Israel.

A United States, by the way, whose last president was the world’s reigning living war criminal with a million dead souls to his credit.

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Footnote on the USS Liberty attacked by Israel in the 1967 war. Previous comments have made some ridiculous claims about bloody event.

The ship was extremely well marked. The lead pilot of the Israeli attack force made low passes over the ship before the attack, exchanging waves with sailors on deck.

Then, suddenly, a savage two-hour assault with every weapon the Israeli planes had – guns, bombs, and torpedoes. The lame claim made afterward: it was a mistake.

Of course, Israel was trying to get the US into the war. It would have blamed Egypt for the attack.

There is also speculation that Israel was destroying the recorded evidence – the ship was a sophisticated spy craft – of its atrocities in the Sinai where Israelis murdered hundreds of Egyptian troops who had surrendered rather than be burdened with them in advancing.