Showing posts with label Gingrich. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Gingrich. Show all posts

Friday, 10 August 2012

UK Ambassador: ‘Israel is being isolated’

British ambassaor to Israel, Zionist Jew Matthew Gould, in a recent interview for Israeli Channel 10 News, warned the Zionist regime that the country is losing international support due to settlement expansion in the West Bank and continued blockade of the Gaza Strip. Matthew Gould, who had spoken of his pride to be a ‘Israel-Firster’ on a number of occasions – had served in both Tehran and Islamabad in the past. When Matthew Gould was appointed as the British first practicing Jew Ambassador to Israel, Labour Member of Parliament Paul Flynn caused quite a stir in questioning Gould’s ‘loyalty’ to the United Kingdom.

There is “growing concern” in the UK over lack of progress towards peace with the Palestinians, and Israel was now being seen as Goliath against the Palestinians as David,” said Matthew Gould, in reference to the biblical story.

Israelis might wake up in 10 years’ time and find out that the level of understanding in the international community has suddenly changed, and that patience for continuing the status quo has reduced,” he said.

Support for Israel is starting to erode and that’s not about these people on the fringe who are shouting loudly and calling for boycotts and all the rest of it. The interesting category are those members of parliament in the middle, and in that group I see a shift,” he added.

In 2010, while presenting his credentials to Netanyahu, Gould said: “My government absolutely agree with your conception of the Iranian threat and the importance of your determination to battle it. Dealing with the Iranian threat will be a large part of my work here“.

Former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, that a trusted source claimed Gould attended meetings the British officials held with the US and Israeli officials on diplomatic preparation to attack Iran. Murray was fired from his post for criticising Uzbek president Islam Karimov and disputing London’s linking of Uzbek Islamic Movement with Al-Qaeda. Murray’s second wife, Nadira Alieva, is Uzbek. Incidently, Craig Murray had banned me posting comments on his personal blog within two weeks.

To learn how much influence the Zionist regime has over British government, watch a video below.
Last year, several pro-Israel Jewish groups and two GOP presidential candidates, Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich demanded that Obama fire his Jewish ambassador to Belgium, Howard Gutman, for blaming Israeli regime for fueling Jew-hatred among Muslims and westerners. Now, the British Israeli dogs are chasing Matthew Gould.


The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of this Blog!

Wednesday, 14 March 2012

Gingrich’s “Invented People” & A Collectivist Distortion of History

by Kevin Croke Tuesday, March 13th, 2012
Banksy
Banksy Graffiti art from Occuppied Palestine


Newt Gingrich’s recent comments that the Palestinians are an “invented people”, while technically correct, is nothing new to the Israel Palestine discourse. The argument has a long history of usage amongst those who seek to distort the history of mass ethnic cleansing and human rights abuse against Palestinians by Israeli Zionist forces. However, the argument made by Gingrich is part of a series of broader pro Zionist collectivist interpretations of the history of the region. This article seeks to show the basis and use of such arguments for political gain.

Collectivism, the analysis of society based on groups as opposed individuals, is ingrained within modern political and historical dialogue. We have come to view classes, nations, and religions as real, living, breathing entities separate and distinct from those individuals whom constitute their membership. These subjective entities have come to dominate political and social discourse. This tendency is particularly acute in historical analysis, for example, it is common to hear in casual, as well as in academic conversation, such collectivist accounts of history as “the Germans killed the Jews in WW2”, the “British colonised the Irish for 800 years” or “the Arabs attacked the Jews in 1948”.

Since the rise of nationalism and the nation state, nations have become the primary means of categorising individuals. Our national identity is often how we define ourselves and how we are defined by others, and can be a source of shame or pride in differing contexts. This was not always the case but has become so as the nation state has become the building block for the international state system. Governments must now claim to be the representative of a coherent distinct national entity to have legitimacy as a state. The challenge of creating coherent unified national entities, often out of thin air, is the main problem facing state elites in newly created nation states. This project often involves creating a common historical narrative, language and culture, often with the aid of mass media and compulsory public schooling.

The Central Role of Nation in Zionism

This challenge is especially apparent in the state of Israel, who has aimed to create national ties and a common historical narrative between individual Jews from highly diverse cultures and backgrounds, few of them with roots in the area currently occupied by the state of Israel.

Israel is highly unusual in the world of nation states in that it doesn’t recognise any such distinct entity as an “Israeli nation”. Instead, the Israeli state recognises only the “Jewish nation” of which is made of up of subgroups of Jewish peoples such as European “Ashkenazy” Jews, North African and Mediterranean “Sephardic” Jews and Middle Eastern “Mizrahi” Jews, amongst over one hundred others.

Uniquely among the international state system, those who hold Israeli citizenship, including around one and half million Palestinians, are not automatically entitled to nationality. As such, Palestinians and their descendants who remained in Israel after the mass ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Mandate Palestine by Zionist forces in 1948 and afterwards, are not entitled to nationality and the many state benefits that are given to Israeli nationals.

Framing the Debate

What is the reason for this? Well, one crucial aspect of creating the “self” is to create the “other”; there can be no “in” group unless there is an “out” group. In Israeli historical and political discourse the “other” is “the Arabs”. Who are “the Arabs”? Well they are certainly not the one million or so Arabic speaking Jews from Arab countries that came to Israel between 1948 and the early 1970’s. Nor are they the Jews who lived in relative peace with their Muslim and Christian brothers for centuries in Historic Palestine. Jews are Jews and cannot therefore, according to Zionist thought, also be Arabs. The Arabs include all non Jewish people of Arab background and, most importantly for Israeli purposes, include the Palestinians.

Now those that have travelled to Palestine as well as the broader Middle East will know that, while Palestinians indeed view themselves as Arabs, they have their own very distinct culture and political outlook, one that has been historically liberal and fiercely democratically minded. The lazy reference to Palestinians as simply “Arabs” is an Orientalist view of the Middle East as being a homogenous mono cultural megalith with little in the way of local tradition or diversity. But classifying Palestinians as such also serves a practical purpose.

It is no accident that the huge cultural and political differences between Palestinians and other Arab countries are ironed over by Israeli historians, educators and media. It is not some simple exercise in taxonomy but serves certain political propaganda functions. The aim in doing so is to frame the debate to one which Zionist thinkers feel they are better equipped to win. If Palestinians can be forced, like a square into a round hole, into a simplified and often ill fitting political entity, they easily slot into the Zionist narrative of Israel’s foundation and raison d’être; which claims that “the Arabs” attacked Israel in 1948, “the Arabs” did not accept the partition and “the Arabs” are barbarous and backward people who have no concept of democracy or human rights.

You will often hear, for example, Israeli commentators claim that “the Palestinian Israeli conflict is a front for the Arab Israeli conflict”. This is because the reality of the foundation of the state of Israel is far more nuanced then the “Israel versus the Arab world” account which Israel likes to present. Individual actor’s roles ranged from hostility to the foundation of Israel, as in the case of Syria, to outright collaboration in the case of Jordan.

Looked at individually, however, the position of Palestinians in the 1948 and 1967 conflicts was clearly that of victim. Relative to the size of the population, the ethnic cleansing of Mandate Palestine during the Nakba is one the worst cases of mass disposition in recent history. To this day the relationship of Palestinians to the state of Israel is entirely asymmetrical: one of colonised and coloniser, oppressor and oppressed. To speak of any meaningful “conflict” in Israel and Palestinian is to mistakenly suggest there are two combatants of relatively equal strength, when there is, in fact, only one. Instead of having to face these realities, Israeli apologists have sought to frame the Israel Palestine conflict in a way more amiable to the David and Goliath story of Israel versus the Arab world.

Collective Responsibility and Punishment

One important aspect of framing the debate in such a way is to put collective responsibility on Palestinian individuals for the perceived misconduct of other Arab leaders. Unfortunately, however, collective entities do not have bank accounts to pay fines or bodies to imprison; they are nonexistent as responsible cognisant actors. As such, the buck for collective responsibility, as conceived by whomever it is that’s passing the buck, is individuals within that collective, however it is envisioned. Whole nations of individuals, under such collectivist logic, can be held responsible for the crimes of “their” nation or group, irrespective of their personal involvement. By identifying Palestinians as simply “Arabs” they become more open to be held responsible for the perceived misconduct against Israel of the broader Arab world.

To give some examples, bellow are the three most common Zionist arguments using the above logic of collectivist responsibility and my attempt to debunk them;

“The Arabs rejected the 1948 partition plan for Palestine and attacked the newly created Israeli state. Why should Palestinians be given rights of national self determination when they rejected Israeli determination in 1948?”

If we accept this argument it would imply that a Palestinian child born this very day is responsible for the decision made by individuals hundreds of miles away, of no relation, from different backgrounds over 60 years ago. This responsibility would not be passed down on the basis of blood ties but on the basis of some loose collective affiliation with a broader entity, not as understood by him or her, but as understood by a hostile state, Israel.

“The Arabs already have several states, why should they be given another one?”

However, for Palestinians the fact that there are several other Arab nation states is irrelevant to the fact there is no Palestinian one. Palestinian refugees in neighbouring Arab states face significant discrimination and are often considered alien both socially and legally, as in the case of Lebanon. That Egyptians or Jordanians or Syrians have a state is no comfort to Palestinians who lack self determination in their places of origin.

The Arab states exiled Jews after the creation of Israel in 1948 and do not recognise their right to return, therefore the Arabs should not be allowed return to their homes of origin in what is now Israel

The right of return for Palestinian refugee’s is an individual right held by every displaced Palestinian person and is recognised as such under international law. Such a right is inalienable and is not dependent on the actions of others.

But what about the holocaust?

The argument here almost suggests that Jewish people as a collective have gained up human rights abuse “credits” from the horrors of the Holocaust that can be spent as needed: in this case on the Palestinians. The reality is that the attempt to dichotomise as antagonistic the Jewish experience of the holocaust with the ongoing Palestinian Nakba is crass and illogical. Both the Nakba and the Holocaust stand together as immense injustices; one could not logically be used to justify the other.

Of course Israel uses collective punishment on a smaller scale as it sees fit. Whole neighbourhoods have been flattened by Israeli bulldozers as punishment for the actions of individual Palestinian fighters and activists and commonly the family home of activists were regularly targeted for demolition during the second intifada, leaving whole families destitute.

Conclusion

Categorising whole groups of people is often a useful and necessary activity to better understand history and society. Since we cannot understand history, society or politics without analysing broader groups and group ties, we must be certain to be as exact as possible in identifying relevant actors and what their relationship is with each other and the rest of society. It will always be, however, an inexact science that simplifies individual experiences and relationships to certain events. Israel’s war has been largely against Palestinians: the Israel state and the Palestinian people are the two principle groups in the Middle East conflict and it is on that basis we should discuss both the conflict and the responsibility. Newt Gingrich’s comments are far from a search for historical truth but an attempt to rig collective arguments in Israel’s favour.


River to Sea Uprooted Palestinian  
The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of this Blog!

Sunday, 4 March 2012

The haunting of Daniel Pipes by Poe’s “Tell Tale Heart”

Franklin Lamb
 Daniel Pipes (left) shares a photo with
Geert Wilders, the man helping fan the
 flames of his PNAC's "New Pearl Harbor."
Daniel Pipes, the anti-Arab Islamophobe is reportedly spooked these days. “Actually he has become an almost terrified man”, so says a colleagues at Pipes Islamophobic Middle East Forum and the MaCartyesque Campus Watch Organization.

MEF was founded by Pipes in 1986 and the witch hunting anti-Arab McCartyesque Campus Watch in 2001. CW’s function is to hound and intimidate faculty and students at colleges who are critical of the Zionist occupation of Palestine. Pipes and CW create “dossiers” on professors, students and university administrations thought hostile to Israel. Under civic pressure from Americans who opposed his tactics and insisted on having their own names added to his personal “terrorist list,” Pipes withdrew his dossiers from the CW website but he still circulates them to scores of “select and executive subscribers” and other hate groups in order to get the word out about academics and others who support Palestine or criticize Israel.
Pipes increasingly exposed racist views are carried by journals like the National Review as well as pro-Zionist Islamophobic internet outlets. In 1990 Pipes wrote in the NR that "Western societies are unprepared for the massive immigration of brown-skinned peoples cooking strange foods and maintaining different standards of hygiene...All immigrants bring exotic customs and attitudes, but Muslim customs are more troublesome than most."
Having briefly written anti-Muslim screeds for Rudy Giuliani’s failed White House quest in 2008, Pipes clams he liked the job and seeks to do the same for Mitt Romney (Pipes has labeled Mormonism “a cult”) or even Rick Santorum ( Pipes has referred to Rick as “one of those kook dispensationalist Christians”). Daniel told a copy editor at the Washington Times who edited his recent WT article noted below, that he would prefer to work for Newt Gingrich if he gets the nomination since they share the same views of Palestinians as “an invented people”. 
Lydda Palestine 1932
The two also agree on moving the US embassy from Tel Aviv to occupied Jerusalem, increasing aid to Israel, and the evitable necessity of transferring most of the remaining Palestinians out of “Eretz Israel” in order to stop once and for all the demographic and existential threat and pressure for a one state solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict which Pipes and Gingrich consider, if not reversed soon will lead to the collapse of Israel.
Pipes makes his fears plain to readers in his recent 2012 Republican presidential candidates “application for a position as Middle East adviser” which he launched in the Washington Times on 2/21/12 but which was first presented in occupied Jerusalem at a recent MEF seminar, what has unnerved him.
nakba  palestine photography
Al Nakba | The Catastrophe | النكبة – in pictures
Pipes choose the low hanging fruit of the underfunded and over stretched UNRWA to target Palestinian refugees and to promote himself and his thesis. But even from the sarcastic title of his article, "Eventually, All Humans Will Be Palestine Refugees!" to his bizarre conclusions, Pipes demonstrates a preference for Arab bashing over truth. Pipes maintains that UNRWA has conspiratorially inflated the number of Palestinian refugees by including the children of the original nearly 800,000 (UNWRA uses a lower 750,000 figure who were ethnically cleansed in 1948 and adding Palestinians ethnically cleansed in 1967. Both groups absolutely should be included on Palestinian refugee’s lists since they are also victims of the original and continuing ethnic cleansing.
the ongoing nakbas
Pipes writes: “In contrast all other refugee populations have diminished in number as people “settle down” or die. By Palestinians “settling down” one guesses Pipes means sardine canned into squalid refugee camps while Jews from Brooklyn or anywhere else can live on their lands and move into new housing financed partly from US taxes and enjoy swimming pools while nearby Palestinian orchards and crops are destroyed by drought, bulldozers or psychotic settlers.
Pipes laments to WT readers that the second thing that should have happened is that “almost all of the real 1948 refugees should have died by now” but for sure the last one will be dead in a few years. Instead, Pipes warns that rather than disappearing as they were supposed to “the Palestine refugee population has dramatically grown over time.” Pipes, claiming to be a historian, calls this apparently unanticipated unwillingness of the Palestinian refugees to forget their country and al Nakab a “bizarre historical phenomenon.”
LIFTA: Ethnically Cleansed 1948
Come from here and remmeber
Considering his “application-article” title about All Humans being Palestinians Refugees, Pipes is well aware that many Human Rights organizations, when it comes to the right and responsibility to resist the Zionist occupation of Palestine and to liberate their stolen land and homes, we are indeed all Palestinians.
An Ode for Lifta
We are all Palestinians because all people of good will who seek justice and the full right of return for those who were ethnically cleansed during the 1948 al Nakba Palestinian holocaust identify with those brutally ethnically cleansed over the past 64 years.
Until Palestine is liberated and its refugees return, as Nelson Mandala has repeatedly instructed us, none of us is truly free. We are all Palestinians as we increasingly support international law’s rejection of any settlement or any colonist on any part of occupied Palestine. 
What haunts Pipes also is Ben Gurion’s failed boast to fellow Zionist terrorists in Palestine during the al Nakba. The Palestinian holocaust which saw the ethnic cleansing of 531 villages in Palestine by more than 62,000 well armed troops, many WW II veterans predictably decimated the approximately 2,500 Palestinian defenders scattered, approximately 25-30 per village across Palestine who were at a hopeless military disadvantage with largely Ottoman era rusting rifles and very little ammunition.
Ethnic cleansing
Given the above noted reality, the Zionist leaders worked arduously so that roughly one-half of the villages and approximately 50% of the population would not be discovered by the west and Ben Gurion’s words that “in any event, the old will die and the young will forget” were more than wishful thinking. Pipes and his associates in the Israel First culture have realized that not only was Ben Gurion fundamentally mistaken, but also that the 19th Century Zionists fundamentally erred in their calculations and hasbara.
Pipes basis for panic appears straight out of Edgar Allen Poe’s Novel “The Tell Tale Heart” where Poe’s character committed a savage crime and then was haunted because the evidence of this crime could not be hidden. The victim’s heart kept beating louder and louder and would not stop informing the World of the crime. Try as he might, the evil perpetrator could not get the heart to stop proving the crime and it drove the criminal more deeply into suicidal insanity.

In some aspects, Poe’s telltale heart appears a microcosm of the 19th Century Zionist colonial crimes which continue to this day in Palestine. The current efforts being made by Israel firsters like Pipes include keeping Palestinian refugees invisible. They were to be erased by now but instead the global community and younger generations are increasingly taking up their cause and joining the BDS and other non-violent campaigns against their Zionist occupiers.
Pipes argues in his Washington Times article, “Were the Palestine refugee status a healthy one this infinite expansion would hardly matter. But the status has destructive implications for Israel which suffers from the “depredations” of a category of persons whose lives are truncated and distorted by an impossible dream of return to their great-grandparents' houses; and the "refugees" themselves, whose status implies a culture of dependency, grievance, rage, and futility.” Pipes continues: “All other refugees from the World War II era (including my own parents ) have been long settled (ed; but not all on stolen Palestinian land) and the Palestine refugee status has already endured too long and needs to be narrowed down to actual refugees before it does further damage to Israel.”

Pipes and his ilk, which appear to tally on a daily basis the Nakba refugees and their families are horrified that Palestinian victims have refused to die off or forget the al Nakba crimes committed against their families while at the same time the global community is beginning to support the Palestinians right to return.
He did it, Hassan Hijazi returned to Yafa (Java) - Millions will follow



Franklin Lamb: Majesty and massacre at Maroun al Ras with Photo Story
Even many American taxpayers, long intimidated by Zionist hasbara and fears of being labeled “anti-Semitic” or “self-hating Jews” but who have long opposed Israel’s occupation of the political power centers in Washington DC, are outing themselves. Increasingly they are calling publicly for their government to break with Israel and its intensely promoted and sometimes engineered US wars in the region, and bring our troops home, heal and repair America while reclaiming American values.
This last remaining 19th Century colonial enterprise, which brutally implanted Israel in the heart of Palestine, has created more than six million refugees each of whom has the separate, personal, and inalienable right and responsibility to return home.
One remarkable quality of the Palestinian refugees which Pipes keeps from his readers, is that in the main they, unlike the European colonists who continue to ethnically cleanse them from their homes, may be willing to share their lands with any Jew who will agree to live as equals in a democratic one person one-vote governed country without religious preferences or a foreign “chosen colonial people” imposing an Apartheid regime.


Photo by Zeinab Hajj, 2/5/12 shows her
father Mohammad al Hajj with the author,
his longtime friend. Mohammad walked
into Lebanon with his family and thatof his
future wife Badrieh, all having been ethnically
cleanced from their village of
Amnouka near Safad, on May 6, 1948.
Franklin Lamb is doing research in Lebanon. He is reachable c\o fplamb@gmail.com
He contribute to Uprooted Palestinians Blog

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The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of this Blog!

Saturday, 4 February 2012

Adelson, Saban, Sembler et al. — Buying the White House for Israel

Via The Passionate Attachment

The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of this Blog!

Tuesday, 31 January 2012

Fire Burn and Cauldron Bubble: Eye of Newt and the ‘Invented’ Palestinians


 
“Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn, and cauldron bubble”

“Perhaps unsurprisingly, the former speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives seems to have a history of deserting the women in his life precisely at moments they find themselves battling debilitating illnesses. Gingrich divorced his first wife, Jackie, as she was being treated for cancer, and then said adios to his second wife, Marianne, after she had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. The 68-year-old is now on his third marriage…”


Normally I don’t write a whole lot on presidential politics for the simple reason that it’s such a Zionist-controlled cesspool it often seems hardly worth commenting on. Moreover, it has always struck me as intellectually dishonest to single out this or that Republican—as a lot of leftwing bloggers do—for criticism, when the Democrats, including the one presently in the White House, are just as bad if not worse. Even so, here are a few items I couldn’t let pass, the first having to do with Newt Gingrich’s comment about the Palestinians being an “invented” people.
Gingrich seems like a reasonably intelligent fellow, and I’m guessing he knows enough about American history to know that white Europeans were not the original Americans. Here are what the original Americans looked like:

Here is what Gingrich looks like:




Gingrich is a white European. For white Europeans to come to America and kill off and displace the original Americans, turn around and claim to be the rightful owners of the land, all the while designating themselves as “Americans” while consigning the original Americans to squalid reservations in the process—very much required a considerable amount of “inventing.” So where does Gingrich get off accusing another people of being “invented”?
Here is what those whom Gingrich dismisses as “invented” look like. These are the original, native, indigenous Palestinians. Notice the brown skin—very similar in shade to the original Americans…



…however, these are Semites. Semites are the people indigenous to the Middle East—just like Native Americans are the people indigenous to America. In other words, the Middle East is the part of the planet Earth in which these people originated. Am I going too fast for you, Newt? Slow me down if I am.
Now as it so happens, there is one other group of people I would like to mention—Ashkenazi Jews. Here is what an Ashkenazi Jew looks like (who happens to be named Benjamin Netanyahu.):
 
Ashkenazi Jews are not Semites. They are white Europeans. Compare the two photos. Notice a certain familial resemblance:
 
Let me repeat: Ashkenazi Jews are not Semites, they are white Europeans. For white European/Ashkenazis to come to Palestine and kill off and displace the original Semites, turn around and claim to be the rightful owners of the land, all the while designating themselves as “Semites” while consigning the original Semites to squalid reservations in the process—very much required a certain amount of “inventing.”
(Yes, I know—the terrain is starting to get repetitious, but given the subject matter, it’s inevitable.)
 
U.S. map showing Native American reservations



Occupied Palestine map showing ethnic cleansing of Palestinians


Are “Ashkenazi Jews” an invented people? Gingrich should avail himself of a book written by a man named Shlomo Sand. And before he makes any more references to the Palestinians as “invented” he should actually, well, open the book and read it. Of course, we don’t know if he’ll bother to do that. Gingrich’s comment about the Palestinians is the bombast of an ignoramus, but rather than suffer public rebuke over his utterance, Gingrich, who in 1999 resigned from Congress after being found guilty of ethics violations, was rewarded with a $5 million check from Zionist Sheldon Adelson—with an additional $5 million donation recently being announced by Adelson’s wife.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the former speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives seems to have a history of deserting the women in his life precisely at moments they find themselves battling debilitating illnesses. Gingrich divorced his first wife, Jackie, as she was being treated for cancer, and then said adios to his second wife, Marianne, after she had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. The 68-year-old is now on his third marriage. It was the second wife, Marianne, who recently offered some telling revelations about her former husband in an interview with ABC News, disclosing, among other things, that Gingrich wanted to have an “open marriage” in which he would be free to see other women while still remaining married to her—a request Marianne rejected. Moreover, it seems there was one woman in particular Newt was desirous of spending time with—the blonde congressional aide who went on to become his present wife, Callista.
 
Gingrich and wife Callista in November of 2000--3 months after their wedding


 Marianne today

Marianne told ABC her husband had been advised by the doctor treating her for MS that stress should be avoided, but that this evidently did not stop him from moving for a divorce just months after she had been diagnosed.

In her most provocative comments, the ex-Mrs. Gingrich said Newt sought an “open marriage” arrangement so he could have a mistress and a wife.

She said when Gingrich admitted to a six-year affair with a Congressional aide, he asked her if she would share him with the other woman, Callista, who is now married to Gingrich.

“And I just stared at him and he said, 'Callista doesn't care what I do,'" Marianne Gingrich told ABC News. "He wanted an open marriage and I refused.”

Marianne described her “shock” at Gingrich’s behavior, including how she says she learned he conducted his affair with Callista “in my bedroom in our apartment in Washington.”

He always called me at night,” she recalled, “and always ended with ‘I love you.’ Well, she was listening.”

Perhaps even more eye-brow-raising is that, according to ABC, all this was going on at the same time Gingrich was publicly denouncing Bill Clinton over his affair with Monica Lewinsky. If you go to the ABC link and watch the video, you’ll see film footage taken from that era showing Gingrich declaring in a speech he delivered, “There’s no administration in American history with less moral authority than the Clinton-Gore administration.”

One would be hard-pressed to point to a more glaring example of hypocrisy. What are we to make of the fact that such an unscrupulous hypocrite has been embraced by a prominent and wealthy Zionist contributor? Does this not tell us something about, a) presidential politics in America, and, b) the state of Israel itself?

Adelson’s support is widely acknowledged as having been a key factor in Gingrich’s victory in the South Carolina primary. According to Wikipedia, the casino magnate, with a net worth of $21.5 billion, is the 8th wealthiest American and 16th wealthiest person in the world. Speaking of Gingrich, Adelson has said , “There is not a better advocate for Israel”—and now thanks to this spigot of wealth, the Georgia Republican has notched up his first presidential primary win. Could there possibly be a plainer, more illustrative example of how Zionism, and Zionist money, have corrupted American politics?

And here’s another rhetorical question: Why does Israel seem to draw so much of its support from some of the most corrupt people on the planet? What is it about the Zionist state that they find so likeable and praiseworthy? I’m not simply talking about the 535 members of the U.S. Congress. No. From France to Germany, from Britain to America, from Belgium to the Netherlands to Denmark, from Spain to Italy to Greece, and from the IMF to the World Bank to the UN Security Council—virtually throughout the entire Western world—the most seriously corrupt, repressive, and dishonest specimens of humanity walking upright on the earth all seem to share one thing in common: they all love Israel.

Imagine that.

All of which brings me to a second point—one which I very much wanted to make about the American political system (although it probably applies to the political systems in all the other countries mentioned as well): namely that it’s a rigged game. It is rigged to ensure that one outcome and one outcome only will occur. Moreover it’s an outcome that will occur repetitively, over and over, time and time again, regardless of the changing faces, the evolving issues, or the advancing body of human thought and knowledge. What I’m speaking of is this: that the system is geared to ensure that the only candidates who stand more than a snowball’s chance in hell of getting elected are the absolute dregs of American society. The most unprincipled. The most corrupt. The most deceitful, profligate, hypocritical, and immoral. The absolute dregs. This is the way the process has been engineered.

In her interview with ABC, Marianne expressed the opinion that Gingrich “lacks the moral character to be president,” but with all due respect to this good lady who endured 18 years of marriage to a hypocrite, she seems a bit confused as to what exactly the job qualifications are for serving as chief executive in this country. Certainly—as we all know—there are bright and talented Americans, Americans who, if given the chance, could, and definitely would, bring the country out of the morass in which it presently finds itself, people of courage, honor, and rectitude, people who remain true to their principles, who would react with indignation were someone to offer them money to invade another country and kill millions of its people, and who would probably even have the person offering such a bribe arrested. Yes. There are lots of Americans like that. They are all over the place. Quite literally. But the thing to keep in mind is that these are the very last people the top 1 percent would ever, ever want to see running the country. Far preferable to them are the moral degenerates. Moral degenerates and miscreants are invariably the ones who get the most money and most media attention, and don’t for a moment believe that’s by accident. As I say the system is rigged. There is no longer anything even resembling a democracy.

Another presidential issue I wanted to comment on, and which kind of ties in with everything I said about Gingrich, is Mitt Romney’s recent impromptu encounter with an Occupy Wall Street protester. Here it is. Check it out.

Now let me see if I understand him correctly. Romney is saying that the rich should continue getting richer and the poor poorer (the trend of the last 30 years or so), and anyone who objects to this state of affairs is being—“divisive”? It isn’t merely that his logic fails the infallibility test. The twin arguments he’s advancing—that wealth should be concentrated and that America should remain united—are diametrically, contradictorily opposed to one another. Wealth disparity, by definition, is a divide. It is a divide between rich and poor. America is very much a divided nation at this moment. It is a country in which CEOs make 325 times the average worker’s pay (up from 263 times as recently as 2009). By trying to reduce economic inequality, the OWS movement is essentially trying to restore unity to the country. If Romney really wanted a united America—rather than an America with a vast gulf between rich and poor—he would actually champion the OWS protesters rather than attack them, but we won’t hear anything like that from Romney because the richest 1 percent are funding his campaign.

Romney, who by the way also insists that corporations are people , vows that if elected president, his first foreign policy trip will be to Israel. No surprise there. But perhaps we could expect him to make a stop at the Cayman Islands on his way home. According to his tax returns, Romney holds a stake in an enterprise called BCIP Trust Associates III, but regulatory filings show that the partnership, valued at $5 million to $25 million, is registered in the Cayman Islands. This presumably would render it sheltered from U.S. taxation. However, with the predictability of a military press office flack denying civilian casualties in the latest drone attack, Romney’s campaign spokesperson, Andrea Saul, has insisted everything is strictly legal and on the up and up.

“The Romney’s investments in funds established in the Cayman Islands are taxed in the very same way they would be if those funds were established in the United States. These are not tax havens and it is false to say so.”

Romney and his wife Ann made $27 million in 2010, and up until that same year held millions in a Swiss bank account. Despite this, their 2010 federal tax rate worked out to 13.9 percent, “a rate typical of households earning about $80,000 a year,” reported the New York Times.

As I said, it’s a bit intellectually dishonest to criticize Republicans while omitting the sins of the Democrats, so let’s talk for a moment about Obama. In his state of the union address last week (full text here ), the chief executive spouted a lot of faux populism, painting himself as a man of action who intends to impose new regulations on Wall Street and close loopholes favoring the rich (apparently hoping people will forget that Wall Street bankers have consistently been among his biggest backers), while championing average Americans. In fact this seems to be his strategy for defeating the Republicans this year: let them flap their jaws about the wonders of the “free market” system while in turn casting himself as a populist—when in fact he is every bit as pro-rich as the Republicans are. In this respect, Obama is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. And of course, significantly missing from his speech was any mention of his recent signing of the National Defense Authorization Act, giving the military the authority to arrest U.S. citizens and hold them indefinitely without trial, essentially shredding the last remnants of our constitutional safeguards. It is an ominous, ill-boding development (one of many these days, it seems) that places all of us in jeopardy.

But bad as the NDAA is—and it is indeed bad—that is not the only issue pertaining to the current president that merits attention. A recent campaign video has been the focus of considerable discussion of late, a video so bad, so exaggerated in terms of its worshipful tones, its deference to the Israeli lobby, that it seems to have left some people almost literally cringing. We see images of Obama wearing a yarmulke, visiting the Western Wall, etc.—as well as footage from various speeches in which he extols the virtues of the Zionist state, not his own country mind you, but Israel. Take a look:



The tone is quite reverential, would you not agree? Particularly striking I think is this image:

 
Obama is in essence worshipping at the altar of the Holocaust religion. Ali Abunimah, at the Electronic Intifada, says the video “takes Israel pandering to dangerous levels,” but actually even more than that is going on. The video is in essence presenting the Zionist state as an object of religious adoration. This is the kind of thing you’d expect to see at a Christians United for Israel conference—not from the Obama campaign. “When I touched my hand against the Western Wall and placed my prayer between its ancient stones, I thought of all the centuries in which the children of Israel had longed to return to their ancient homeland.” What we have here basically is adulation to a deity. Israel is being deified. And of course interjected through it all are Israeli officials bestowing their kosher seal of approval upon the U.S. head of state.

A question has arisen as to whether this is actually an “official” Obama campaign video—or possibly something put together simply to make the commander-in-chief of the United States look like a beggarly, brownnosing fawner. In point of fact, though, if you examine closely you will see that it appears to have been uploaded to YouTube by BarackObamadotcom. So yes, it does look as if it’s a genuine campaign video. But of course, what would you expect? Populist rhetoric is all well and good—it plays well to the masses—but it takes fawning to get Zionist money, and it takes Zionist money to get elected.

And so it goes in the rigged system of U.S. politics. And of course if all else fails, our 1 percent may always fall back upon the electronic voting machines to ensure this year’s election results are the ones they desire…
“For a charm of power trouble,
Like a hell-broth boil and bubble…”

***
The Smirk

Thought I would throw this into the mix (or the cauldron, if you prefer) as well. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a human being smirk quite this often in a 23-minute time segment as does one of the guests on this program. Are facial expressions an indicator of what resides in the heart? Speaking purely subjectively here—and based upon my own limited contact with habitual smirkers—the thing we see forming and dissipating…forming and dissipating…at periodic intervals throughout much of the show, seems to suggest something abnormal, an almost psychopathological disgust for any and all things decent.


One statement made on the show is in fact correct, however. The American people are not sheep. They are in fact much worse off than sheep. Sheep follow a herd instinct, a trait that is in their DNA. The herd instinct is a product of nature, one that functions to help ensure the survival of the entire herd, not simply single individuals, and it is a behavior observable in many species of animals. What the American people have succumbed to is not an innate, naturally-occurring herd instinct, but something far more sinister.
 River to Sea Uprooted Palestinian    
The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of this Blog!

Saturday, 31 December 2011

Via FLC

"The American people hear from government officials and presidential candidates nearly every day about military action against Iran. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta recently said that the United States and Israel would not allow Iran to get a bomb. Are these words standard fare for an election year? A strategy to restrain Israel from unilateral action? Or do these threats signify that war is in the “minds of men”?
Conservative ideologues taste the possibility that a leader whom they might influence may return to the White House. Former House speaker Newt Gingrich has already pledged to appoint John Bolton, a neoconservative superstar, as his secretary of state. Is it surprising that Gingrich, who has said he would rather plan a joint operation with Israel against Iran than force the Israelis to go it alone, is the candidate with the strongest commitment to military action?
Have we forgotten what Iraq and the United States have been through since 2002? Were it not for that ill-begotten war, thousands of Americans (and Iraqis) might still be living. America would be a trillion dollars richer and still be the proud, respected and economically healthy nation the world had known. ..."

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Monday, 26 December 2011

Americans: An Invented People

Comment: If there is an invented people, they are the American and the Israeli peoples




Americans: An Invented People

Declaration_independenceNewt Gingrich was almost right about the Palestinians when he said they were an "invented people" (though the difference between right and almost right, to paraphrase Twain, is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug). Gingrich's statement would be accurate if only he'd go on to say, "but then, Americans are an invented people. And so are Finns and Frenchmen and Filipinos. All peoples are invented."

Gingrich won't be saying that anytime soon, because his whole megalomaniacal vision of himself and his nation depends upon the myth of nationalism. That myth holds that nations have essences, which define them and which they maintain throughout history. This model tells you that there is some kind of Americanness that you share with Gingrich, and me, and some guy in Detroit, and Lincoln and Jefferson. Politicians eat and breathe this myth, which ought to be warning enough that it is a crock of nonsense.

To see why, ask yourself a few simple questions: Have you ever met a Visigoth? Followed election returns from the Roman Empire? Booked a trip to the Aztec Disneyland? If you answered "yes" to any of these, please take the test again, and avoid the comments section in the meantime. The problem with believing in national essences is that so many have disappeared, not by extermination but by transformation into new identities. As for the nations that still endure, their continuity over the centuries is an illusion. As Dante observed in the 1300's, "if those who died a thousand years ago were to return to their cities, they would believe that these had been occupied by some foreign people." He was referring the the inevitable changes that occur in language use, but it's equally true of culture: Even Jack Kennedy, to say nothing of Lincoln or Jefferson, would be astonished, and probably appalled, by American culture in 2012—for reasons we might admit (maybe we have overdone it with Christmas, as Jefferson would probably say) and reasons we'd reject (well, see, now that we don't have slavery or apartheid, we elected a black man President).

"The manners of a people," wrote David Hume, "change very considerably from one age to another." His shrewd essay on "national characters" supplies a proof he could not have intended: The national traits he describes in it—Greeks are cowards, Persians are natural-born comedians, Danes are stupid—are no longer current. (Though it's interesting that the stereotypes themselves persist: In American stereotypes of 2012, it's the French who are "surrender monkeys," Jews who are funny and Poles who are dumb.)

If neither language nor culture persists over time, then where does this feeling of a shared essence come from? And what maintains it? For my money, the best answer is still Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities: A people, like the Palestinians or the Americans, is composed of human beings whose personal experiences and emotions have been fused to a collective identity. As summed up in this insightful essay by Thomas Hylland Eriksen, the effect of this linkage is this: "I owe my existence to my parents, and by metonymical extension they represent the larger, abstract collective. I harbor tender feelings for my childhood, which by extension becomes my group’s glorious and tragic history. I feel attached to the place where I grew up, which was not just any arbitrary place, but the nation (or, as the case might be, the sacred land of Hinduism, the traditional territory of the Fijians, the tormented country of the brave, but sadly misunderstood Serbs)."

The key to a passionate identity, then, is a feeling of personal connection to people you have not met, and who died long ago—a feeling that is as strong as it is illusory. This personal aspect is the reason you can't just make up peoplehood out of anything, anywhere. You can take your identity as a Navi or a Klingon very seriously, but those identities won't impress many other people, and so they won't bite deep into your life. However, if an identity does have a deep, daily, personal, inescapable effect on your life, then it will feel, and be, quite real. Palestinians vote, work, hope and fear and hate as Palestinians. Their prospects for happiness and success are very much dependent on the fact that they see themselves, as others see them, as Palestinians. Palestinian peoplehood, then, is just as real, and just as invented, as is American peoplehood.

What achieves this connection of the personal with the abstract, imagined community? Schools and the media send the message, economics reckons the business of making a living in national terms (as in "our GDP" and "our" balance of payments) and politics pours people (and their expressions of loyalty) into national borders. So, we Americans see ourselves as "one people," so Minnesotans don't stress out about the way they subsidize people in Mississippi. In the European Union, though, history is taught and politics organized so that Germans think the essential boundary for identity is between Germans and non-Germans, while Greeks think it's between Greeks and non-Greeks. If schools, and media, and business, and politics were organized around the difference between Prussians and Bavarians, then there would be no German national identity.

All peoples are portrayed, by their Gingriches at least, as incarnations of some essence that persists through history. But all peoples are, in reality, invented in the present—by teachers, pundits, politicians, bureaucrats and businesses. It's an old cheap trick of propaganda to point out that the other guy's stories are myths while claiming that your own are gospel truth. Yet the fact of invention is shared by all peoples.

So the right question to ask about a people isn't "is it invented?" but rather "is it real?" Is this an identity that people vote in, work in, celebrate in?; is this an identity they teach their children, weep for, and hope for?; is this an identity for which they're getting tortured and shot? When the answer to those questions is yes, then the identity in question is at least as real as your own.
Illustration: People-inventing meetup, 18th-century style.

River to Sea Uprooted Palestinian

  The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of this Blog!