John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY JESUS SILVA IN PRESS T V

 

“Washington targets Venezuela as promoter of terrorism”

“The US government has announced that Venezuela and Cuba along with some other countries have been included in a particular list of nations which Washington believes collaborate with terrorism”

 

My God, what an upside-down world it is.

Venezuela has been the target of a long series of terror attacks, many of them conducted openly by the United States, but here are US officials accusing Venezuela of promoting terror.

Here’s just a portion of recent American activity against Venezuela and its twice-elected government…

Shutting down the country’s electrical grid, several times, spoiling all the food in millions of poor people’s fridges, as well as endangering those dependent on life-saving machines.

Imposing severe sanctions against the health and welfare of millions. Sanctions always disproportionately hurt the poor and vulnerable, and it is important to stress that the way the US uses them, they are simply illegal. They are American laws being applied to people who are not Americans and without the authority of any international organization such as the UN.

Imposing a naval blockade against the same poor people, something which is considered an act of war.

Stealing some of Venezuela’s national assets and turning them over to an unelected man who pretends he is president.

Interfering in the country’s trade and commerce abroad in every way it can think of.

Sending a flotilla of gunboats, destroyers, into the area to intimidate.

Sending a group of private American mercenaries to kidnap or kill the President.

Putting a large bounty on the head of an elected government.

An earlier attempt to kill the President used a drone with explosives.

If that list doesn’t represent authentic terror, then I don’t know what would.

Venezuela has done absolutely nothing a thinking person would regard as terror. No, Venezuela’s “crime” is just peacefully conducting its own affairs with democratic elections and without American approval and supervision.

And just look at the set of unholy messes America’s incompetent government has put itself into. It cannot conduct its own affairs, yet it insists on telling others how to conduct theirs.

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN THE GUARDIAN

An organization, such as ISIS, can only rise out of nothing and literally change a region with a great deal of help.

It cannot be otherwise.

ISIS has been assisted, supplied, and, in some cases, trained by Western interests. We have had countless little revelations of these activities, although we never read about them in the corporate press.

ISIS was even supplied some while back by some of these interests with terrible things like small amounts of nerve gas to use on people so that the United States could blame Syrian forces. Acts just do not come any more cynical and evil than that.

ISIS serves the interest of assisting to bring down a legitimate state, Syria, a state, by the way, which attacks no one and which has never threatened legitimate American interests. They already served to eliminate a leader in Iraq, sending him running off in fear, whom the United States and Israel greatly disliked.

ISIS also serves to solidify the planned smashing of Iraq into mini-states. This was particularly clear in the case of the Kurds, who received great assistance in fighting ISIS, effectively defending their own part of the (former) country against those who now run other parts.

The public does not recognize what is happening because news coverage in our major corporate press is selective and always supports government policy, even black operations policy.

If the United States were serious about fighting ISIS, they could eliminate them in very short order, but they are not serious. They display only token efforts, and increasingly, the reality of these efforts is the destruction of Syrian lives and property – in effect, acting as air support for the terrorists.

Also, the United States appears gradually to be working its way towards direct intervention against the Syrian government, blubbering all along the way about the horrors of ISIS.

When ISIS has served its filthy purpose, maybe it will be seriously attacked. Who knows? But, for now, America’s attacks on ISIS are little more than show and perhaps curbing those who’ve exceeded their brief. After all, these terrorist groups – and there are several doing lots of killing in Syria – do contain some genuinely horrible people, even if they were assembled and assisted through American efforts. The American attacks really assist the terrorists in Syria by attacking Syrian infrastructure.

Turkey, with the blessings of the United States and Saudi Arabia, has given them shelter and border access to Syria, as well as arms shipments. Israel too is involved in surreptitious support, including hospital treatment for wounded fighters in the North and secret arms exports, as is the absolute monarchy of Qatar. And now that proud and fearless defender of American values, David Cameron, has joined the fray in the name of “fighting terror.” My, what a brave fellow he is.

The actual terror that is going on is the destruction of legitimate state, a beautiful and historic land. It is being carved into smaller entities, just as Iraq has been. This comes at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives and the creation of millions of refugees, but the states secretly working on this dirty project only cry crocodile tears over all the deliberately-induced horror.

It’s just one part of a savage scheme to “give birth to a new Middle East,” as former Secretary of State Condi Rice expressed it. So far we have seen a million die in Iraq, aerial bombardment of Yemen, Libya torn apart and reduced to chaos, and Egypt’s fledgling democracy destroyed with a return of dictatorship.

Now, all of this destruction does make people like Mr. Netanyahu very happy, but for countless millions, and for a generation to come, human misery is the chief product of the effort.

Of course, it is this very scheme producing the flood of refugees to Europe, refugees the United States refuses even to help and David Cameron treats as rabble and scum.

The whole business is a psychopathic politician’s dream: inflict all the killing and destruction you wish while condemning the hired help and posing as someone horrified at what they have done. Compared to this, the stunts of Hitler’s Germany to cover its bloody trail – as when it dressed prisoners in Polish uniforms and shot them at the border, claiming they were Polish soldiers attacking Germany – seem amateurish.

The face of evil is no longer merely banal, it is slick and sophisticated and leering at all we hold as values.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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.
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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 AN EDITORIAL IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

“Latest U.S. drone operation in Pakistan should be judged a success”

Surely, the words of an ethical and moral bankrupt.

A target or targets – uncharged and untried – is assassinated by a buzz-cut thug at a computer console.

In the process, a host of others, all innocents for certain, are murdered, and the cretin writing this editorial says it should be judged a success.

Have you lost all sense of values?

If we all nod and accept this absolutely criminal behavior by a great power, we will lose all claims to a free society which has laws and is organized to honor human rights.

If you do not live by the rule of the law, you are not a whit better than the junta generals who used to kidnap people off the streets of South America and fly them out over the ocean to throw out their drugged bodies.

They “disappeared” thousands in that fashion, and it is certain that the horrible governments committing such crimes believed they were every bit as justified as America in getting rid of people working against their interests.

Now, the apologists for Israel’s brutal excesses always support this kind of thing, and indeed Israel is the very model for this behavior. The word “terroriist” is used like a magic word to make any inhuman act perfectly okay.

It is one thing for an irresponsible state like Israel to behave this unacceptable way, but it quite another for the world’s mightiest nation to be reduced to the same behavior.

We are only protected by rule of law from having the violent barbarians and psychopaths of the world governing. If you abandon rule of law, you have abandoned civilization.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

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

“Just as fascism and communism were the great struggles of previous generations, terrorism is the great struggle of ours.”

And what about state terrorism, the largest and most lethal form of terrorism?

State terrorism is an everyday practice today by the United States, and it has been a building block of Israel since the foundation.

The early Zionists called it “the iron wall,” and that phrase encapsulates Israel’s every policy since 1948.

A significant part of Israel’s 1940s effort to carve out a state included the work of terror gangs like Stern, Lehi, and Irgun – all of whom assassinated, planted bombs, and generally terrorized Arabs.

Israel today sits back and claims terror is such a threat, but Israel itself is a garrison state, grotesquely over-armed and ready constantly to assault any neighbor it disapproves of, and it disapproves of virtually all of them.

It is a lawless state, possessing atomic weapons against all international rules and desires, and a state moreover that was willing to proliferate atomic weapons technology with South Africa, something it has never even received censure for.

Israel also stands in contempt of a list of UN Resolutions, the very kind of thing the United States has used as an excuse to bomb some government it doesn’t like.

It also stands in violation of dozens on international agreements and protocols.

Israel does not hesitate to kill children – having slaughtered 400 of them in its vicious attack on Gaza, and according to the UN Special Rapporteur for Palestine, Israel has killed more than 1,200 children since the year 2000.

Israel does not hesitate to kill peace workers, such as those aboard the Gaza humanitarian fleet attacked on the high seas, pictures and eyewitness reports from which clearly show Israeli soldiers shooting unarmed crew members in cold blood.

And don’t forget, while Israel was bombing Southern Lebanon a few years ago, dropping about a million cluster bombs (the world’s most ghastly, inhumane weapon) to maim and kill women and children and farmers for years to come, it also killed 4 UN observers, including a brave Canadian who died at his post.

John Baird’s boss, our glorious prime minister, after that cold-blooded murder said only he couldn’t understand why the UN had observers there: that is the fetid pool of thought from which John Baird’s words come.

On a per capita basis – the only fair way to compare – Israel is pretty much the world leader in brutality and abuse.

It keeps about ten thousand – the number is always changing – Palestinians illegally in prison.

Nearing half a century, it keeps more than 4 million Palestinians under occupation, totally illegal occupation, and it abuses them constantly with checkpoints and endless red-tape.

It helps itself each week or so to any parcel of someone else’s land that it chooses, indeed it has cobbled together a set of laws and regulations designed specifically to allow it to do this to Palestinians who cannot possibly meet the vicious laws’ requirements – anywhere else this would be called theft by a state.

It decides whether it will assassinate leaders that it does not like, and it does so regularly, with complete impunity – that’s the purest form of police-state terror you can come up with.

To carry out these dozens of assassinations, it breaks laws in many countries and it regularly abuses national passports by stealing and altering them or forging them, and Canada’s passport has been a frequent victim of this criminal behavior.

It does all these criminal acts with the complete support and approval of the United States, without whose influence and twisting of arms and rules, Israel might well collapse of its own gross excesses.

You do not and cannot get peace from a state which behaves as Israel does. It’s like saying the blacks in apartheid South Africa could have had peace by talking to the apartheid government – it literally is that absurd.

Only influence from outside can remedy what Israel has inflicted for decades.

But that influence will certainly not come from the dark bulk who represents less than forty percent of Canadians.

He’s too busy trying to please the United States in every nicety and detail, and he is too busy trying to appeal to the minority of intense Israel apologists, hoping to secure his party’s long-term financing, hoping to establish the same kind of arrangement which now absolutely determines the ongoing injustice of American foreign policy for the Middle East.

The dark bulk is ruining our international reputation, in every area of endeavor, making of us a sort of unofficial 51st state in the world’s eyes.

This is a nightmare world John Baird defends, a world where war is peace and hatred is love, but he does it unblinkingly and aggressively like a Joseph Goebbels defending his master’s bloody deeds.
_____________________________________________

FROM A READER:
“Recognizing the Zionist Stab in the back as the cause of their hardship, was the only reason that Germany democratically elected the Nazi party, to keep the Jews from repeating history.”

Absolutely wrong in every detail.

I’m no friend of Israel’s bloody work, but I deal in facts and logic, not ignorance and distortion.

Hitler was never elected.

The highest vote the Nazi Party ever got in free elections was about 37%, and that was after years of furious effort.

He was appointed Chancellor by the aging President, von Hindenburg, who wanted to stop the turmoil and fighting in the streets, part of which was of course Hitler’s own efforts through his private army of Brownshirts, the SA.

The Nazis conducted an elaborate coup with the burning of the Reichstag, and the aged and much admire war-hero president died. Hitler rammed through legislation giving him the presidential powers and more.

Once firmly in power, the Nazis conducted a number of plebiscites, and they got the kinds of votes you always saw in the Soviet Union’s elections, figures like 98%, but if you accept those as valid you really are a sad, uncritical soul.

As for “the stab in the back” there was no such thing. It was a figure of Hitler’s vivid and fetid imagination.

Hitler considered the Weimar Republic itself a stab in the back. He always hated any form of liberalism or popular government.
______________________________________

“Being surrounded by Muslim-only states does that. 4 million Jews live in a tiny state surrounded by a billion Muslims in 57 states, and it is apparently racist for Israel to be a Jewish state. Wow. But I can understand why the Jew haters want this “right to return”; flood Israel with enough Muslims and then you have 58 Muslim states!”

Simply appallingly ignorant.

What does the make-up of other states have to with Israel?

Nothing, and indeed when you make this appalling argument, your words closely resemble those of Hitler in his demands for lebensraum for the German people and his claims that Germans deserved a special space in which to flourish for the future, that too many other European states held more land than they needed.

In case you don’t know it, Israel has about 1 million non-Jewish citizens – I don’t mean the more than 4 million of the occupied territories but people who carry Israeli passports.

These are the descendants of the Palestinians who refused to run from Israeli terror in 1948.

Israel didn’t want them, but it was pretty much stuck with them.

However, Israel has found many ways of treating them through contrived laws as second-class citizens.

More than one prominent Israeli has advocated running them off the land.

The current ethically-obtuse Foreign Minister is definitely sympathetic to that kind of filthy thinking.

So if Israel is formally recognized as “the Jewish state,” what happens to those poor citizens?

I think we can all guess, and it won’t be pleasant.

And do you not recognize the irrational nature of the demand for a single ethic/religious state? It is no different at all to fundamentalist Islamist demands for Islamic states.

The truth is that Israel in concept was an outdated 19th century concept. It has proved divisive and destructive its entire brief history. It ranks among the world’s most unjust states.

But nevertheless, mistake or not, the world accepts its existence so long as it stops violating every law and moral concept we know to maintain its ethnic purity.

Is it too much to ask that it retreat to its borders and to finally start treating its neighbors as human beings?

JOHN CHUCKMAN

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

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

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

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

But Israel is interested in neither logic nor fairness.

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

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

_____________________________

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

That is just uninformed trash.

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

Just lets readers assume.

This trash is straight from the Israeli Ministry of Truth.

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

And that number is just the children.

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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 RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN INTIFADA REPEATED FROM THE TELEGRAPH

The Archbishop has long been one of the West’s most important moral critics, as one might expect from a genuine Christian leader.

Contrast his tough and honest views with the kind of diplomatic pap we typically get from, say, the Vatican.

Or compare his moral bravery with certain American Christian fundamentalists who sound as though their job was to serve as cheerleaders for the American military-industrial complex.

In books and stories about the past, we invariably praise the kind of character we find in the Archbishop.

But in real life, the establishment and substantial parts of the population have no use for them, because their tough views and moral authority call into question accepted clichés and create inconvenient truths.

Recall the powerful and famous scene in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov in which Jesus returns to earth to meet the Grand Inquisitor, and the two have a conversation.

Jesus himself recognizes none of his teachings in the words of the Grand Inquisitor, and the Grand Inquisitor grows irritated with someone he regards as a nuisance, finally sending Jesus off to be heard from no more.

That is, sadly, the immortal truth of how power and establishment welcome honesty, decency, and truth: they don’t, ever.

America has descended to the ghastly moral level of Israel in all of its reactions to 9/11: illegal arrests, kidnapping, torture, assassinations, ignoring international laws and treaties, imposing harsh new laws completely out of the spirit of its Constitution, maintaining an international torture gulag, and making deals with monsters like General Dostum.

When you throw away everything of genuine human value in a place like America, all you are left with is a great imperial power ready to crush anyone with whom it disagrees.

https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2011/05/02/obama-bin-ladens-assassination-nothing-to-celebrate-and-no-justice-at-all-considering-the-facts-this-is-just-one-more-proof-of-might-makes-right/

https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2011/05/06/more-on-bin-ladens-assassination-the-nonsence-of-al-qaeda-web-sites-making-announcements-the-nonsense-of-al-qaeda-background-on-bin-laden/

 

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.