John Chuckman
COMMENT POSTED TO ANOTHER COMMENT IN THE INDEPENDENCE
Reader comment:
“It has done nothing but kill people for 65 years, having invaded every neighbor that it has, many of them two or three times.”
Israel was attacked in 48, 67 and 73 by armies (variously) from Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and Iraq. Israel risked being annihilated in all these wars.
Read some history – don’t parrot what you’ve read on far-left hate sites.”
Your comment is arrogant and uninformed. It simply repeats the David and Goliath myths manufactured by the Israeli Ministry of Truth for American consumption.
It is you who should read some history.
The 1967 War was engineered by Israel. Yes, some Arabs attacked, but only after an elaborate series of aggressive and provocative acts by Israel. It was what Israel wanted because its government had made an elaborate calculation ahead and was sure it would win fairly quickly. The prize was all of Palestine and part of Syria.
In the War, Israel also betrayed its best allies.
De Gaulle, a defender of young Israel, warned that he wouldn’t support conquest, but he was ignored.
The United States told Israel not to turn their armor north after defeating Egypt, but that’s just what Israel did because the entire intent of that war was to conquer what Israel still occupies to this day. Just ask yourself why else it still holds millions of people captive and has worked so hard to make their lives miserable as an incentive for their leaving?
In order to turn the armor in the Sinai quickly, Israel had to eliminate its Egyptian prisoners, and that is what it did. It shot hundreds of POWs, much as WWII Germans sometimes did.
To cover this up from the United States and to cover up turning armor north, it attacked the American surveillance ship, USS Liberty, trying desperately for two hours to sink it with everything the pilots had. This was not an error as Israel claimed later, the ship was not only well-marked, Israel had been told of its presence, and the Israeli attack pilots who first buzzed the ship waved to the waving crew.
As to 1948, well, please, it was Israel who was slaughtering Palestinians, driving them out of their own land to seize their farms, homes, and villages – all re-named afterward. There were several documented mass atrocities by people like the Stern Gang, Irgun, and other Jewish terror organizations. Hundreds of civilians were shot and Palestinian women were raped. The hope was that all Palestinians would simply run away as the rumors spread. I should hope some Arab states responded with anger, but they made only a half-hearted effort.
1973 was indeed an attack by Egypt against Israel, but it happened in light of all I’ve written above and far more.
Israel has demonstrated not an ounce of ethics in its 65 years. Duplicity and killing have been the chief features of Israeli policy over the entire period. Let’s not forget several invasions of Lebanon, killing tens of thousands, creating a years-long occupation (against which Hezbollah was formed, an army of genuine freedom-fighters, not terrorists), and using such horrible weapons as large numbers of cluster bombs on civilians.
And then America invaded Iraq, largely on Israel’s behalf, killing a million. Now Israel and America have terrorists doing the same thing in Syria.
It has been a completely destructive and destabilizing history.
JOHN CHUCKMAN
POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL
Turkey is acting as stalking horse for the United States and Israel in their desire to topple Assad and dismember Syria.
Here Syria legitimately downed a warplane either within or on its frontiers.
Yet when Israel murdered about ten Turkish citizens during its high-seas piracy of a humanitarian ship, Turkey took no such action with NATO.
This entire business is a set-up.
The Free Syrian Army is a fraud, an American-Israeli creation, and there too Turkey plays a role in providing refuge for what a group fairly characterized as terrorists.
America and Israel simple do not think any international laws or conventions apply to them when they want something outside their territory.
It is a world governed by bullies they are creating.
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“According to Reuters news (I know, I know….not very reliable), Syria announced that it has killed several Turks who have infiltrated into Syrian space.
In other news….Iran is asking both parties to cool down.
“Will we ever find out the truth about this plane incident?”
Reuters of course has a well-earned reputation as part of the CIA’s “mighty Wurlitzer,” the intelligence agency’s name for the set of news outlets it manipulates in planting of stories.
We’ve had one story that the plane was not a warplane.
One story that it was a warplane.
One story that it was indeed in Syrian airspace and Turkey was sorry.
And now we have a story that it was in international air space.
Good God, we no longer can get reliable news on anything of importance.
Our entire sense of reality, at least in international affairs, is today reduced to a fantasy creation, a few facts hung, here and there like a few nasty-looking ornaments on an ugly Christmas tree, just enough to make the created story seem plausible.
This is because there is so much concentration in the ownership of news outlets, the hands into which it is concentrated are huge corporations sharing interests with governments, and governments like the United States and Israel view it as their God-given right to constantly play with the lives of others.
In effect, the West today, in such matters, is governed by lies in pursuit of goals without ethics or morality.
“Democracy” and “rights” and “law” are words used in Orwellian fashion by these governments and their loyal followers, words without any genuine meaning, resembling the suggestive and untruthful words used in advertising.
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.
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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.
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“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?
CHUCKMAN'S WORDS ON WORDPRESS: COMMENTS FROM THE WORLD'S PRESS 