by Mary Pitt
July 29, 2009
While the Congressional "elephants" are straining at the gnat of Obama's health care plan, the Blue Dogs are busily gorging on the poisonous fat being spread before them by the voracious and monopolistic insurance and pharmaceutical companies, the citizens for whom they were chosen to protect are continuing to be victimized and destroyed.
The handwriting is on the wall to tell us that nothing good is going to come of the enthusiasm with which the American people voted for the longed-for "change".
Neither of these mythical creatures sounded an alarm about the trillions of American dollars that were simply strewn to the wind in the misguided effort to "bring democracy to Iraq".
There was then no outcry about the state of the national debt, no discussion of deficit financing, only great glee at the prospect of all the pork that would be rained upon their constituents and campaign donors. There was no mention of anything resembling a budget.
It was all "off-budget appropriations" in the interest of "national security" Why? Because Bush, Cheney, and Company said it was necessary!
Now, the nation is mired deeply in the greatest depression of a hundred years. The major financial institutions have had to resort to government bailouts because of the greedy abandon with which they tried to corner markets and wring the last drop of lifeblood from the people. Oh, yes, the people! Those mute bovines who toil their lives away and suffer mainfully before being delivered by merciful death. One may feed them more or less, depending on the state of one's wallet and provide them medical care when one deems their services to be necessary to the cause of the enrichment of one's bank account. This is not an exaggeration but an exact assessment of the attitude of the super-rich to the working American.
The facts are that, sooner or later, everyone will become ill if for no other reason than the aging process. The human body is a fantastic machine and, with good care and simple maintenance will often last a long time. However, when given the wrong fuel, and, lacking tune-ups, it may well sputter and die.
The purse-lipped budgeteers will deny these poor creatures the benefit of health care under the pretext of giving them a "choice" when, in truth, the only choice they have is whether to lose their homes and neglect their families or to seek the care that is needed from a recalcitrant welfare system that is being methodically choked by the same pinch-penny politicians who have created the situation. "The poor should make better choices; stop smoking, lose weight, and then they will not become ill!" This mantra resounds through the hallowed halls of Congress and is repeated by the parrots of the mainstream media. In the extremely limited food allowance by the welfare system or food stamps, it is truly not possible to provide children with a diet of fresh fruits and vegetables and protein-rich meat and dairy products.
Rather, the normal diet for the poor will consist of macaroni and cheese, hot dogs, or cheap pizza. This is not very different from the food ingested by the generation of children of the last depression. In that instance, the meals largely consisted of beans, oatmeal, gravy, and whatever Daddy could fell with his shotgun. Pellagra ran rampant in most of the nation as the result of the lack of fresh vegetables in the winter. Now, of course, with most of the population confined to cities, the only "game" that Daddy can bag with his precious Second Amendment gun is only whatever valuables can be garnered from the victim of the moment.
Science has proven that the trend to obesity develops in the early years. As the diet changes to solid food, the inadequate and unbalanced choices will generate too many fat cells in the body which will be with that child for a lifetime. As they grow up without the expensive amenities provided to the wealthy children; piano lessons, soccer practice, little league, poor children are more apt to be left with television sets for baby sitters until they are old enough to go to the streets for their continuing maturation. Some never have any medical care beyond free vaccinations until they must fight for their lives as the result of a gunshot wound. So much for "developing healthy habits".
With more layoffs, more foreclosures, and more hungry and homeless, there truly is a "national emergency" and, as such, it justifies a presidential declaration to that effect and Executive Orders to personnel in Health and Welfare. This could include loosening the eligibility standards on income for food stamps and Medicaid to reflect the true cost of living for the disabled, the unemployed, and uninsured. To that end, President Obama would be roundly applauded for telling the reluctant Congressmen to stop taxing their inadequate brains over a health care measure and, taking a page from the Bush playbook, with such a declaration, take these remedial steps in order to provide every American with the things that we and our forebears have worked, fought, and died for: a place to live in peace, an adequate diet, and health care.
Please, Mr. President, do something good to put in our history books..
The author is a very "with-it" old lady who aspires to bring a bit of truth, justice, and common sense to a nation that has lost touch with its humanity in the search for "societal perfection".
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
Cheney's Inferno
by Jeff Huber
http://www.atlargely.com/atlargely/2009/07/cheneys-inferno.html
I tend to regard Dick Cheney the way most of us divorced folks probably think of our ex-spouses. The ex-spouses are going to hell and revenge is already ours, so why waste our breath on them? It’s likewise with Cheney. He’s out of power, his next political post will be as Vice-Prince of Darkness; is he worth wasting a thousand-word essay on anymore? Then something happens to remind me that there’s a big difference between Dick Cheney and ex-spouses. Ex-spouses may have been bona fide bums and broom jockeys, but none of them was the first arch villain of the 21st century.
Were any of us actually shocked by the recent revelation that Lord Cheney ordered the CIA to withhold information about a secret program from Congress for eight years? Given the galactic scale of his malevolence in the Office of the Vice President, ordering the CIA to lie to Congress amounts to a parking violation. Even before young Mr. Bush was elected, Cheney was a proponent of extra-constitutional presidential powers. Most of us are familiar with the unprecedented extent to which Bush exceeded his Article II authorities. Even more horrifying, though, is the way Cheney expanded the powers of his office.
The Constitution gives the vice president one power only: Article I states that “The Vice President of the United States shall be President of the Senate, but shall have no vote, unless they be equally divided.” Cheney made himself a vice-commander in chief.
On the morning of September 11, 2001, Cheney, from a bunker beneath the White House, called his old pal Donald Rumsfeld at the Pentagon. Cheney told Rumsfeld that "pursuant to the president's instructions,” he had ordered fighter pilots to shoot down the airliners involved in the attacks. What’s wrong with this scenario is that the vice president is not in the military chain of command. As delineated in the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986, command authority passes directly from the president to the secretary of defense to the four-star unified commanders (Central Command, Southern Command, European Command, etc.)
Young Mr. Bush was alive and conscious throughout that crisis—well, as conscious as he ever was. He had no business passing orders through Cheney, and Cheney had no business ordering anybody to fire on anything. It’s possible that the military commanders he spoke to knew this and didn’t pass the orders along to the pilots in the air. Bush should have gone directly through Rumsfeld who, as it played out, was only informed of Cheney’s illegal orders after the fact.
We know that Cheney cooked the intelligence on Iraq through Doug Feith’s Office of Special Plans. Journalist and former CIA officer Philip Giraldi asserts that Cheney was behind the forgery of the Nigergate “Habbush letter” document. Cheney authorized Scooter Libby to leak classified information to discredit Joe Wilson when Wilson refuted the claim that Saddam Hussein had sought uranium from Niger. Cheney also played a key role in revealing Valerie Plame’s undercover role in the CIA. Cheney’s secret White House Information Group, which included Condi Rice, Karl Rove, the nightmarish Mary Matalin and other right wing luminaries, sold the war to the American public through false propaganda echoed by access-poisoned journalists like Michael R. Gordon and Judith Miller of the New York Times.
Cheney used the Iranian Directorate to cook intelligence on Iran much as the Office of Special Plans manufactured WMD evidence on Iraq. The Iranian Directorate was located in the same office as the OSP and included OSP veterans Abram Shulsky, John Trigilio, Ladan Archin and Reuel Marc Gerecht.
Cheney authorized illegal torture. He met secretly with big oil executives to formulate an energy policy that favored his pals at Exxon and Shell and the other major energy companies.
Cheney has a reach-around relationship with Israel’s hard-right Likudniks. Sidney Blumenthal of Salon.com reported in August 2006 that Cheney and his henchmen were sharing National Security Association intelligence with Israel as part of an attempt to escalate the Iraq war into open hostilities with Iran and Syria. Many are convinced, as am I, that Israel’s 2006 invasion of Lebanon was agreed upon at a meeting between Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Likud chairman Benjamin Netanyahu at an American Enterprise Institute conference in Colorado.
Cheney subverted the operations of the entire executive branch by inserting neocon ideologues in key positions. Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith and Stephen Cambone strangled dissent in the Defense Department. Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley ensured that his boss Condoleezza Rice was nothing more to Bush than a workout partner and an office wife. Undersecretary of State for Arms Control John Bolton undermined Colin Powell’s efforts at statesmanship. In the second Bush term, when Rice moved to the top State billet, Cheney arranged to have Bolton made U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., ensuring continuation of the administration’s “make them an offer they can’t accept” diplomacy, of which the Iran policy was a perfect example. Insisting that Iran give up its inherent right—as guaranteed by the U.N. Nonproliferation Treaty—to develop nuclear energy as a precondition to direct talks ensured that those talks would never take place.
Senator Pat Leahy (D-Vermont), speaking of the revelation that Cheney had directed the CIA to withhold information from Congress, said that nobody in America, including Cheney, is “above the law.” Where has Leahy been for the last eight years and change? Everybody in the Bush administration except Scooter Libby was above the law.
President Obama has so far been reluctant to investigate the wrong doing of the Bush administration. That’s a mistake. If we let that administration’s major decision makers walk, we leave the door open for the next generation of tyrants to give us a repeat performance.
Cheney will spend the next life roasting in a room at the Robert McNamara Suite of the LBJ Hilton in Hell, but we need to start rebalancing the scales of justice on this side of eternity.
Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword.
http://www.atlargely.com/atlargely/2009/07/cheneys-inferno.html
I tend to regard Dick Cheney the way most of us divorced folks probably think of our ex-spouses. The ex-spouses are going to hell and revenge is already ours, so why waste our breath on them? It’s likewise with Cheney. He’s out of power, his next political post will be as Vice-Prince of Darkness; is he worth wasting a thousand-word essay on anymore? Then something happens to remind me that there’s a big difference between Dick Cheney and ex-spouses. Ex-spouses may have been bona fide bums and broom jockeys, but none of them was the first arch villain of the 21st century.
Were any of us actually shocked by the recent revelation that Lord Cheney ordered the CIA to withhold information about a secret program from Congress for eight years? Given the galactic scale of his malevolence in the Office of the Vice President, ordering the CIA to lie to Congress amounts to a parking violation. Even before young Mr. Bush was elected, Cheney was a proponent of extra-constitutional presidential powers. Most of us are familiar with the unprecedented extent to which Bush exceeded his Article II authorities. Even more horrifying, though, is the way Cheney expanded the powers of his office.
The Constitution gives the vice president one power only: Article I states that “The Vice President of the United States shall be President of the Senate, but shall have no vote, unless they be equally divided.” Cheney made himself a vice-commander in chief.
On the morning of September 11, 2001, Cheney, from a bunker beneath the White House, called his old pal Donald Rumsfeld at the Pentagon. Cheney told Rumsfeld that "pursuant to the president's instructions,” he had ordered fighter pilots to shoot down the airliners involved in the attacks. What’s wrong with this scenario is that the vice president is not in the military chain of command. As delineated in the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986, command authority passes directly from the president to the secretary of defense to the four-star unified commanders (Central Command, Southern Command, European Command, etc.)
Young Mr. Bush was alive and conscious throughout that crisis—well, as conscious as he ever was. He had no business passing orders through Cheney, and Cheney had no business ordering anybody to fire on anything. It’s possible that the military commanders he spoke to knew this and didn’t pass the orders along to the pilots in the air. Bush should have gone directly through Rumsfeld who, as it played out, was only informed of Cheney’s illegal orders after the fact.
We know that Cheney cooked the intelligence on Iraq through Doug Feith’s Office of Special Plans. Journalist and former CIA officer Philip Giraldi asserts that Cheney was behind the forgery of the Nigergate “Habbush letter” document. Cheney authorized Scooter Libby to leak classified information to discredit Joe Wilson when Wilson refuted the claim that Saddam Hussein had sought uranium from Niger. Cheney also played a key role in revealing Valerie Plame’s undercover role in the CIA. Cheney’s secret White House Information Group, which included Condi Rice, Karl Rove, the nightmarish Mary Matalin and other right wing luminaries, sold the war to the American public through false propaganda echoed by access-poisoned journalists like Michael R. Gordon and Judith Miller of the New York Times.
Cheney used the Iranian Directorate to cook intelligence on Iran much as the Office of Special Plans manufactured WMD evidence on Iraq. The Iranian Directorate was located in the same office as the OSP and included OSP veterans Abram Shulsky, John Trigilio, Ladan Archin and Reuel Marc Gerecht.
Cheney authorized illegal torture. He met secretly with big oil executives to formulate an energy policy that favored his pals at Exxon and Shell and the other major energy companies.
Cheney has a reach-around relationship with Israel’s hard-right Likudniks. Sidney Blumenthal of Salon.com reported in August 2006 that Cheney and his henchmen were sharing National Security Association intelligence with Israel as part of an attempt to escalate the Iraq war into open hostilities with Iran and Syria. Many are convinced, as am I, that Israel’s 2006 invasion of Lebanon was agreed upon at a meeting between Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Likud chairman Benjamin Netanyahu at an American Enterprise Institute conference in Colorado.
Cheney subverted the operations of the entire executive branch by inserting neocon ideologues in key positions. Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith and Stephen Cambone strangled dissent in the Defense Department. Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley ensured that his boss Condoleezza Rice was nothing more to Bush than a workout partner and an office wife. Undersecretary of State for Arms Control John Bolton undermined Colin Powell’s efforts at statesmanship. In the second Bush term, when Rice moved to the top State billet, Cheney arranged to have Bolton made U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., ensuring continuation of the administration’s “make them an offer they can’t accept” diplomacy, of which the Iran policy was a perfect example. Insisting that Iran give up its inherent right—as guaranteed by the U.N. Nonproliferation Treaty—to develop nuclear energy as a precondition to direct talks ensured that those talks would never take place.
Senator Pat Leahy (D-Vermont), speaking of the revelation that Cheney had directed the CIA to withhold information from Congress, said that nobody in America, including Cheney, is “above the law.” Where has Leahy been for the last eight years and change? Everybody in the Bush administration except Scooter Libby was above the law.
President Obama has so far been reluctant to investigate the wrong doing of the Bush administration. That’s a mistake. If we let that administration’s major decision makers walk, we leave the door open for the next generation of tyrants to give us a repeat performance.
Cheney will spend the next life roasting in a room at the Robert McNamara Suite of the LBJ Hilton in Hell, but we need to start rebalancing the scales of justice on this side of eternity.
Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword.
Sunday, July 19, 2009
Fading Into Mist
By Sheila Samples
July 19, 2009
If you keep on excusing, you eventually give your blessing to the slave camp, to cowardly force, to organized executioners, to the cynicism of great political monsters; you finally hand over your brothers
- Albert Camus
There is no subject more restricted nor more controlled in the United States than a critical discussion of Israel. Balanced argument is ignored while each word is parsed -- and condemned. It's strange that we are free to rant and rave and point out the war crimes of our own administration -- of all other administrations throughout the world -- but not those of Israel. The few who dare to question the damage Israel has wrought throughout the Middle East for decades are immediately labeled "anti-Semitic," and are in danger of losing their friends, jobs, their reputations and, if they persist, their country -- for America has zero tolerance for those who recognize Israel's brutality.
Why is this? Are not crimes against humanity just that, regardless of who is committing them? For example, when one-and-a-half million human beings are imprisoned like caged animals, with no food, electricity, medical care, clean water, and then are exterminated like so many insects -- cut to pieces, burned to a crisp with illegal weapons banned by the Geneva Conventions -- is that not a crime against humanity? Are the men, women and children trapped behind the walls of Gaza with nowhere to run -- nowhere to hide -- not human?
Kill Them All
If you've been listening to the Israeli leadership for the past 60 years, the last 10 years -- the last year -- you know very well that Palestinians are many things, but not human. In 1982, former Likud leader and prime minister Menahim Begin said Palestinians "are beasts walking on two legs." The next year, Chief of Staff of the Israeli Defense Forces Raphael Eitan gloated, "When we have settled the land, all the Arabs will be able to do about it will be to scurry around like drugged cockroaches in a bottle." And, in 1988, Yitzhak Shamir, a Likudnik elected Prime Minister twice, told the settlers taking over the Palestinian land, "The Palestinians will be crushed like grasshoppers...heads smashed against the boulders and walls."
But it was our own Evangelical, oxy-moronic (sic) Judeo-Christian (sic) cloven-hoofed Pat Robertson, who chats often with God who gave us the real lowdown on Israel's "moral" savagery. Robertson explained God's rationale to his 700 Club members in May 1985...
"The wars of extermination have given a lot of people trouble unless they know what was going on. The people in the land of Palestine were very wicked. They were given over to idolatry; they sacrificed their children; they had all kinds of abominable sex practices; they were having sex, apparently, with animals; they were having sex men with men, and women with women; they were committing adultery, fornication; they were worshipping idols, offering their children up; and they were forsaking God.
"God told the Israelites to kill them all -- men, women and children, to destroy them. And that seems to be a terrible thing to do. Is it? Or isn't it? Well, let us assume there were 2,000 of them, or 10,000 of them living in the land, or whatever number there was of them. I don't have the exact number. Pick a number. God said, 'Kill them all.' . . . the abomination was there like a contagion. God saw that there was no cure for it. It wasn't going to change; their hearts weren't going to change; and all they would do is cause trouble for the Israelites, and pull the Israelites away from God, and prevent the truth of God from reaching the Earth. So, God, in love, took away a small number that he might not have to take away a large number."
Beasts. Insects. Victims of a relentless, methodical genocide that grinds away, day after day, year after year, with no analysis, no reflection, no questions -- subsidized with US equipment, US political support, US taxpayers' money. How easily we have not only excused, but given our blessing to Israel's crimes -- handed over our brothers -- from the 1967 attack on the USS Liberty using US-financed French aircraft leaving 34 dead and 174 injured American sailors, to massacres using US-furnished weapons in Jenin, Rafah, Sabara, Shatila, Lebanon, and repeatedly in Gaza.
How silently we stood on March 16, 2003 when an Israeli soldier in a US Caterpillar bulldozer crushed to death 23-year-old Rachel Corrie -- shot and seriously wounded 26-year-old Brian Avery on April 5, 2003 -- and, on April 11, 2003, shot and killed 21-year-old Tom Hurndall while he was attempting to save three terrified Palestine children who were being shot at as they played.
Political Monsters
Israel's grotesque 22-day foray into Gaza earlier this year shocked the world with its savagery -- with one notable exception -- the United States. Perhaps that's because, according to the Australian Herald, one week before the invasion, the US shipped 989 containers of munitions, including white phosphorous, to Israel. Three months earlier, Congress approved a $77 million sale to Israel of 1,000 Boeing Corp. GBU-39 bunker-buster bombs which arrived just in time to wreck havoc on the Gaza infrastructure.
Despite the layers upon layers of justification Israel cites, there is only one reason it continues its heinous extermination of the Palestinian people -- because it can. Because the United States supports such atrocity. Because the United States finances, arms and equips Israel, and -- more important -- protects it from having to account for any of its crimes. So, who's to blame here? From whose hands does the blood of Palestinian men, women and children run? Israel or the United States? Who are the monsters?
Speak, memory.
Scarcely a week after the "war" on Gaza began, the jubilation in both houses of Congress was palatable. Members elbowed each other out of the way to co-sponsor and vote for resolutions condemning Hamas for forcing Israel to maim and kill its Gaza population. Resolutions were submitted and passed by voice vote on Jan. 8. The Senate Resolution had 34 co-sponsors; the House Resolution chalked up 116. The votes and the blame were shamefully one-sided, with Hamas being blamed for both the war and the death of its own citizens. Israel did not receive a single rebuke; was praised throughout -- ironically, for facilitating "humanitarian aid to Gaza with hundreds of trucks carrying humanitarian assistance and numerous ambulances entering the Gaza Strip since the war began."
Three days later, investigative journalist Max Blumenthal covered a 10,000-strong rally in New York City. Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) whipped the crowd into a frenzy, shouting about the morality of Israel text-messaging Palestinians to "vacate their homes because there were weapons in them..." Schumer, giddy with pride, his fist waving in the air, cried -- "What other country would do that!"
According to Blumenthal, the rally was pulsating with hate. He said...
"Right in front of the stage, a man held a banner reading, “Islam Is A Death Cult.” Rally attendees described the people of Gaza to me as a “cancer,” called for Israel to “wipe them all out,” insisting, “They are forcing us to kill their children in order to defend our own children.” A young woman told me, “Those who die are suffering God’s wrath.” “They are not distinguishing between civilians and military, so why should we?” said a member of the group of messianic Orthodox Jewish Chabad-Lubavitch group that flocked to the rally.
"No one I spoke to could seem to find any circumstance in which they would begin to question Israel’s war. No number of civilian deaths, no displays of extreme suffering -- nothing could deter their enthusiasm for attacking one of the most vulnerable populations in the world with the world’s most advanced weaponry. There are no limits, no matter what Israel does, no matter how it does it."
As I watched those caught up in the shockingly racist excitement of that rally, I could not help but wonder what these people -- what US politicians -- would do if the children being blown to bits, the homes bombed and bulldozed, the families mutilated, the livelihoods destroyed -- were theirs. And, I also am forced to wonder -- is the inability to hold back tears at the sight of so much inhumane lust for blood anti-Semitic -- even anti-American?
Blame the Jews?
Perhaps I am the wrong person to address this issue. I was raised, for the most part, in the wilds of New Mexico by parents completely devoid of racism, bigotry or hate. Those ugly ideologies weren't just ignored -- they didn't exist. This may sound naive, but I never met a Jew until I was married, my husband was in the Army and stationed at Fort Monmouth in Long Branch, New Jersey. We rented a bedroom "apartment" from the Brodskys, a Jewish family -- wonderful, joyous, good-natured people who welcomed us into their midst as if they had been waiting for us all their lives. For me, for years, the Brodskys personified all Jews.
So, when I look to the Middle East and see human beings abused, without food or adequate health care, their infrastructure destroyed, their children slaughtered for sport, it is difficult for me to believe such barbaric savagery is being committed, or even condoned, by Jews who are aware of what is happening. American Jews, Jews in Israel, Jews around the world are vigorously opposed to such treatment. Far more Jews than non-Jews in this country speak out about Israel's relentless execution of Palestinians. They protest, engage in "die-ins," hold 24-hour vigils with signs heralding their dissent. They scream to heaven -- but their voices are silenced and the media steadfastly refuses to cover their views.
There was no mention of the rally in New York City in support of Gaza on the same day as the Schumer Screamer; no mention of IDF soldiers who refused to serve because of the violence against innocent Palestinians; no mention of the 700 Israeli citizens arrested in the first two weeks for protesting the assault; and no mention of a Jan 8 meeting of prominent Canadians who spoke out against the war on Gaza.
Toronto psychotherapist Judith Weisman, a Jew who is a member of Independent Jewish Voices, Jews for a Just Peace, the Jewish Women's Committee to End the Occupation of Palestine, and a founding member of Not In Our Name, said, "Zionism is the scourge of the Jewish people. It is Zionism that has created all of this."
Weisman, herself a former "committed Zionist," said, "it took many years for the scales to literally fall off of my eyes and for me to see what Israel has wrought among the Palestinians." Weisman says she is frightened at the influence Israel now has around the world, and the "power that Israel and the United States are using to control so much of what is happening around the world."
It's not that nobody is listening, it's that -- for those hog-tied to the US media -- there's nothing to hear but silence, propaganda and lies. Gideon Levy wrote in Haaretz that fully a third of those killed were children. Levy said...
"The public's shocking indifference to these figures is incomprehensible. A thousand propagandists and apologists cannot excuse this criminal killing. One can blame Hamas for the death of children, but no reasonable person in the world will buy these ludicrous, flawed propagandistic goods in light of the pictures and statistics coming from Gaza."
No matter. We here in the United States have moved on. We have given our blessing to the great political monsters. It is as George Orwell wrote in his prescient 1984...
"Everything faded into mist. The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth."
Sheila Samples http://sheilastuff.blogspot.com/ is an Oklahoma writer and a former civilian US Army Public Information Officer. She is a regular contributor for a variety of Internet sites.
July 19, 2009
If you keep on excusing, you eventually give your blessing to the slave camp, to cowardly force, to organized executioners, to the cynicism of great political monsters; you finally hand over your brothers
- Albert Camus
There is no subject more restricted nor more controlled in the United States than a critical discussion of Israel. Balanced argument is ignored while each word is parsed -- and condemned. It's strange that we are free to rant and rave and point out the war crimes of our own administration -- of all other administrations throughout the world -- but not those of Israel. The few who dare to question the damage Israel has wrought throughout the Middle East for decades are immediately labeled "anti-Semitic," and are in danger of losing their friends, jobs, their reputations and, if they persist, their country -- for America has zero tolerance for those who recognize Israel's brutality.
Why is this? Are not crimes against humanity just that, regardless of who is committing them? For example, when one-and-a-half million human beings are imprisoned like caged animals, with no food, electricity, medical care, clean water, and then are exterminated like so many insects -- cut to pieces, burned to a crisp with illegal weapons banned by the Geneva Conventions -- is that not a crime against humanity? Are the men, women and children trapped behind the walls of Gaza with nowhere to run -- nowhere to hide -- not human?
Kill Them All
If you've been listening to the Israeli leadership for the past 60 years, the last 10 years -- the last year -- you know very well that Palestinians are many things, but not human. In 1982, former Likud leader and prime minister Menahim Begin said Palestinians "are beasts walking on two legs." The next year, Chief of Staff of the Israeli Defense Forces Raphael Eitan gloated, "When we have settled the land, all the Arabs will be able to do about it will be to scurry around like drugged cockroaches in a bottle." And, in 1988, Yitzhak Shamir, a Likudnik elected Prime Minister twice, told the settlers taking over the Palestinian land, "The Palestinians will be crushed like grasshoppers...heads smashed against the boulders and walls."
But it was our own Evangelical, oxy-moronic (sic) Judeo-Christian (sic) cloven-hoofed Pat Robertson, who chats often with God who gave us the real lowdown on Israel's "moral" savagery. Robertson explained God's rationale to his 700 Club members in May 1985...
"The wars of extermination have given a lot of people trouble unless they know what was going on. The people in the land of Palestine were very wicked. They were given over to idolatry; they sacrificed their children; they had all kinds of abominable sex practices; they were having sex, apparently, with animals; they were having sex men with men, and women with women; they were committing adultery, fornication; they were worshipping idols, offering their children up; and they were forsaking God.
"God told the Israelites to kill them all -- men, women and children, to destroy them. And that seems to be a terrible thing to do. Is it? Or isn't it? Well, let us assume there were 2,000 of them, or 10,000 of them living in the land, or whatever number there was of them. I don't have the exact number. Pick a number. God said, 'Kill them all.' . . . the abomination was there like a contagion. God saw that there was no cure for it. It wasn't going to change; their hearts weren't going to change; and all they would do is cause trouble for the Israelites, and pull the Israelites away from God, and prevent the truth of God from reaching the Earth. So, God, in love, took away a small number that he might not have to take away a large number."
Beasts. Insects. Victims of a relentless, methodical genocide that grinds away, day after day, year after year, with no analysis, no reflection, no questions -- subsidized with US equipment, US political support, US taxpayers' money. How easily we have not only excused, but given our blessing to Israel's crimes -- handed over our brothers -- from the 1967 attack on the USS Liberty using US-financed French aircraft leaving 34 dead and 174 injured American sailors, to massacres using US-furnished weapons in Jenin, Rafah, Sabara, Shatila, Lebanon, and repeatedly in Gaza.
How silently we stood on March 16, 2003 when an Israeli soldier in a US Caterpillar bulldozer crushed to death 23-year-old Rachel Corrie -- shot and seriously wounded 26-year-old Brian Avery on April 5, 2003 -- and, on April 11, 2003, shot and killed 21-year-old Tom Hurndall while he was attempting to save three terrified Palestine children who were being shot at as they played.
Political Monsters
Israel's grotesque 22-day foray into Gaza earlier this year shocked the world with its savagery -- with one notable exception -- the United States. Perhaps that's because, according to the Australian Herald, one week before the invasion, the US shipped 989 containers of munitions, including white phosphorous, to Israel. Three months earlier, Congress approved a $77 million sale to Israel of 1,000 Boeing Corp. GBU-39 bunker-buster bombs which arrived just in time to wreck havoc on the Gaza infrastructure.
Despite the layers upon layers of justification Israel cites, there is only one reason it continues its heinous extermination of the Palestinian people -- because it can. Because the United States supports such atrocity. Because the United States finances, arms and equips Israel, and -- more important -- protects it from having to account for any of its crimes. So, who's to blame here? From whose hands does the blood of Palestinian men, women and children run? Israel or the United States? Who are the monsters?
Speak, memory.
Scarcely a week after the "war" on Gaza began, the jubilation in both houses of Congress was palatable. Members elbowed each other out of the way to co-sponsor and vote for resolutions condemning Hamas for forcing Israel to maim and kill its Gaza population. Resolutions were submitted and passed by voice vote on Jan. 8. The Senate Resolution had 34 co-sponsors; the House Resolution chalked up 116. The votes and the blame were shamefully one-sided, with Hamas being blamed for both the war and the death of its own citizens. Israel did not receive a single rebuke; was praised throughout -- ironically, for facilitating "humanitarian aid to Gaza with hundreds of trucks carrying humanitarian assistance and numerous ambulances entering the Gaza Strip since the war began."
Three days later, investigative journalist Max Blumenthal covered a 10,000-strong rally in New York City. Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) whipped the crowd into a frenzy, shouting about the morality of Israel text-messaging Palestinians to "vacate their homes because there were weapons in them..." Schumer, giddy with pride, his fist waving in the air, cried -- "What other country would do that!"
According to Blumenthal, the rally was pulsating with hate. He said...
"Right in front of the stage, a man held a banner reading, “Islam Is A Death Cult.” Rally attendees described the people of Gaza to me as a “cancer,” called for Israel to “wipe them all out,” insisting, “They are forcing us to kill their children in order to defend our own children.” A young woman told me, “Those who die are suffering God’s wrath.” “They are not distinguishing between civilians and military, so why should we?” said a member of the group of messianic Orthodox Jewish Chabad-Lubavitch group that flocked to the rally.
"No one I spoke to could seem to find any circumstance in which they would begin to question Israel’s war. No number of civilian deaths, no displays of extreme suffering -- nothing could deter their enthusiasm for attacking one of the most vulnerable populations in the world with the world’s most advanced weaponry. There are no limits, no matter what Israel does, no matter how it does it."
As I watched those caught up in the shockingly racist excitement of that rally, I could not help but wonder what these people -- what US politicians -- would do if the children being blown to bits, the homes bombed and bulldozed, the families mutilated, the livelihoods destroyed -- were theirs. And, I also am forced to wonder -- is the inability to hold back tears at the sight of so much inhumane lust for blood anti-Semitic -- even anti-American?
Blame the Jews?
Perhaps I am the wrong person to address this issue. I was raised, for the most part, in the wilds of New Mexico by parents completely devoid of racism, bigotry or hate. Those ugly ideologies weren't just ignored -- they didn't exist. This may sound naive, but I never met a Jew until I was married, my husband was in the Army and stationed at Fort Monmouth in Long Branch, New Jersey. We rented a bedroom "apartment" from the Brodskys, a Jewish family -- wonderful, joyous, good-natured people who welcomed us into their midst as if they had been waiting for us all their lives. For me, for years, the Brodskys personified all Jews.
So, when I look to the Middle East and see human beings abused, without food or adequate health care, their infrastructure destroyed, their children slaughtered for sport, it is difficult for me to believe such barbaric savagery is being committed, or even condoned, by Jews who are aware of what is happening. American Jews, Jews in Israel, Jews around the world are vigorously opposed to such treatment. Far more Jews than non-Jews in this country speak out about Israel's relentless execution of Palestinians. They protest, engage in "die-ins," hold 24-hour vigils with signs heralding their dissent. They scream to heaven -- but their voices are silenced and the media steadfastly refuses to cover their views.
There was no mention of the rally in New York City in support of Gaza on the same day as the Schumer Screamer; no mention of IDF soldiers who refused to serve because of the violence against innocent Palestinians; no mention of the 700 Israeli citizens arrested in the first two weeks for protesting the assault; and no mention of a Jan 8 meeting of prominent Canadians who spoke out against the war on Gaza.
Toronto psychotherapist Judith Weisman, a Jew who is a member of Independent Jewish Voices, Jews for a Just Peace, the Jewish Women's Committee to End the Occupation of Palestine, and a founding member of Not In Our Name, said, "Zionism is the scourge of the Jewish people. It is Zionism that has created all of this."
Weisman, herself a former "committed Zionist," said, "it took many years for the scales to literally fall off of my eyes and for me to see what Israel has wrought among the Palestinians." Weisman says she is frightened at the influence Israel now has around the world, and the "power that Israel and the United States are using to control so much of what is happening around the world."
It's not that nobody is listening, it's that -- for those hog-tied to the US media -- there's nothing to hear but silence, propaganda and lies. Gideon Levy wrote in Haaretz that fully a third of those killed were children. Levy said...
"The public's shocking indifference to these figures is incomprehensible. A thousand propagandists and apologists cannot excuse this criminal killing. One can blame Hamas for the death of children, but no reasonable person in the world will buy these ludicrous, flawed propagandistic goods in light of the pictures and statistics coming from Gaza."
No matter. We here in the United States have moved on. We have given our blessing to the great political monsters. It is as George Orwell wrote in his prescient 1984...
"Everything faded into mist. The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth."
Sheila Samples http://sheilastuff.blogspot.com/ is an Oklahoma writer and a former civilian US Army Public Information Officer. She is a regular contributor for a variety of Internet sites.
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