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WB: A Blight Unto the Nations
Billmon:
It has a nasty edge of hysteria to it, a compulsive need to prove to the Arabs, and the world, that Israel still can and will stomp on anyone who gets in its way. The fact that Hizbullah is now demonstrating the limits of Israeli power — or rather, the limits on how much Jewish blood Israel is willing to spend to exercise that power — is only making matters worse. The Israeli leadership elite is starting to sound like the semen-crusted violence addicts at Little Green Footballs. Given how much real violence the generals and politicians can inflict, that’s a sobering thought, to say the least.
A Blight Unto the Nations
@slothrop:
<sarcasm>Yes, that’s right. Some arabs are nasty racist crackpots, so we should support the people who want to kill all of them. And while we’re at it, let’s apply the same reasoning to everyone else. Oops! Looks like we’re going to have to will everyone in the whole world! Time for mass suicide! Fine with me, but you go first.</sarcasm>
To address your question: if support has to be wholehearted and unconditional, then no, Israel’s explicit enemies are probably not “worthy of support”. Who is? Can you name a single government or government-like body on the planet which doesn’t do at least a few completely objectionable things? Some of them are merely connected on the periphery to some questionable transactions, while others (such as the U.S. government) can hardly close their closet doors because of all the skeletons. That doesn’t mean that every last one of them should be destroyed and all the members executed.
Israel is in the wrong. Obviously, painfully, and stupidly in the wrong. They are pursuing an evil campaign for questionable objectives, using banned weapons and foolish strategies, while attacking civilians, charities, and outside observers. That’s about as wrong as you can get. As long as they remain in the wrong, they must be opposed, just as any other group so thoroughly in the wrong must be opposed.
Opposition must be in more than words, if it is to be any opposition at all. Thanks to Israel’s own policies, the only groups which stand in opposition in more than theoretical form are Hezbollah, Hamas, and the rest of the groups you hate so much. Even constructive criticism is not tolerated. Furthermore, thanks to Israel’s foolish and vindictive actions over the last several decades, in strict justice anti-Israeli groups have been given much better reasons to wish for the destruction of Israel than, say, many anti-Bush groups have been given to wish for an end to the Bush administration. Israel hasn’t been a good neighbor; it hasn’t even been returning tit for tat. It has been a case, all along, of many eyes for an eye, many teeth for a tooth.
We (that is, most of the people who oppose Israel’s actions who are not members of the general anti-Israeli groups) do not unconditionally support Israel’s enemies. But we do support them in a limited, conditional way which you seem unable (or unwilling) to recognize — we seek a middle path, in which everyone is given something at least resembling his due. It is our belief that such is the only realistic hope for a peaceful and lasting end to the hostilities. If Israel’s enemies really were attacking Israel without provocation, we would switch sides. You, on the other hand, seem to want to freeze to death, because you think the only alternative is burning down the house. The world, and in particular the middle east, is not so simple as that.
Posted by: The Truth Gets Vicious When You Corner It | Jul 28 2006 4:27 utc | 45
I don’t buy the victim becomes agressor line. In a certain measure, for individuals, it holds: if you were shouted at, bullied and punished as a child, the probability that you will treat your children in similar ways, though, in today’s history, in a milder fashion, is higher than it is for someone who was brought up in a kindly way. This is how society works, its called cultural transmission. As for the children of murderers becoming murderers in turn (I’m using simplistic examples for brevity) – while the correlation exists, it is to be explained by social conditions (poor upbringing, father absent, poverty, attendant unemployment, etc. etc.) and not by the fact of murder itself.
Millions of abused children, or victims of other people / social conditions, etc. grow up to cherish their children, obey the law, get on well with others, etc. That is the normal human reaction – to overcome, do better, give, as they say, love a chance.
Extreme agression, violent crime towards persons, is not passed down in a simple, direct way.
Shifting a poor argument that pertains to individuals to explain the behavior of very large groups or societies is absurd.
The Jews were victimised, but so were millions and millions of others on earth. No other peoples victims of genocide (American Indians? Bosnians? Ruandas? …..) justify their present agression, if it even exists, by their being past victims of genocide, with the exception of peoples who take, or try to take, direct revenge on their killers (this will be in shorter time spans) – that is the ordinary tit-for-tat thing. Then, they take on the pose of legitimate, vengeful warriors, and not the position of victim who calls for pity and understanding, gives excuses, etc.
I am not an anti-semite, I don’t think Jews are different from other people. I blame the West first of all, and the Arab world second, for the setting up of Israel, its funding, and the continuing endorsement of a trapped people whose very agression today brands them as flunkeys.
Example, as Dick wrote:
It seems to me that Israel has been taken over, from the inside, by the same crew that runs the USA now.
Posted by: Noirette | Jul 28 2006 16:34 utc | 65
Billmon-
You are far too charitable of Israel — both in your list of its suppossed achievements and in your mild condemnation. Israel did not build a state, ex nihilo, “out of nothing;” they built it out of Western capital, technology, weaponry, and complicity, particularly in a racist ideology which is contrary to any Western conception of enlightenment values, but which now stands as a model to be exported around the third world, a la Serbian model, of a kinder, gentler, type of racial cleansing than the Nazis employed. But then as Debs might say, “How could a member of a settler nation — which 90% of us on this blog are — see it any other way?”
slothrup et. al.: For a better understanding of Israeli history you might want to visit this site:
The Origin of the Palestine-Israel Conflict
And let’s get one thing straight here: The Zionists were never victims. The Jews killed in WWII were. There is a difference between the two groups. For the history of the cynical way that Zionists used Jewish survivors of the Holocaust for their own purposes, read Yosef Grodzinsky’s “In the Shadow of the Holocaust.”
Next, the Israeli leadership has NEVER wanted peace with their neighbors who would not be complicit in their aggrandizement. Anytime that a fair peace plan was on the agenda, the Israelis provoked, and “counter-attacked.” I don’t have the time to write a book here. Chomsky’s “Fateful Triangle” is a start. And documentation of century old plans for a “Greater Israel” are all over the place, if one chooses to see them. One could start by reading Gertrude Bell’s (the Godmother of modern Iraq) dairies from around 1917-1920 on the web.
I know people are generally confused when dealing with the imperialist animal, US/Israel (or as Debs might formulate it USukIS) as to just which end of the beast they should be addressing. Not to worry, as they old joke goes, even the asshole thinks that he is the “head” of the body. Of course, one could follow the money……
Following the blow-by-blow developments is certainly important. But when getting lost in minutia blinds you from the greater scope of the crime being perpertrated, it is time to step back to see things more clearly: Kurt Nimmo’s latest postings, especially The Lebanese Invasion and the Beaver Creek Plan, and its link to Thierry Meyssans good old Voltaire Network, are the best synopses around. I hope everyone here takes the time to read them and understand their true import.
That doesn’t mean that the Imperialists will succeed. But it does mean that lulls in the action are just breathers, necessary to re-adjust strategy, not victories. Not until the Imperial beast lies deader and more shattered, physically and ideologically, than the old Soviet Union in 1990, can we trust that the “Great Lunge Forward” has been defeated. And the odds of that happening, and ALSO having a world that is left inhabitable, are smaller than a freckle on that huge elephant’s lumbering tush. When a country like Israel is dumb enough to use DU on its OWN border, and cancer rates have exploded from 3% to 30% (and expected to increase to OVER 50%) in the last century, even that freckle starts to look pretty suspicious…
Of course, as cancer rates go up, so does the GDP. Yes, it’s true, economists were never taught to subtract… But, you have to wonder whether, after we cross the 50% mark, and one out of every two people comes down with cancer, our current “strategy” of developing increasingly costly responses to increasingly costly — and preventable — environmental insults, is working, as we run out of doctors to treat all of the patients. Of course, we could import some from Cuba, but I hear that the plan is to immeadiately bomb the Medical schools over there when Castro dies, as they are harboring Communist terrorists! It’s all part of the greater War on Cancer.
Who should we support — Hizbullah or Hamas? Well, if you are against Imperialism, especially in its current ecologically and demographically suicidal version, you should support whomever stands up against it. After the war is won (if ever….), then you can fight against the victor. It is called “Speaking Truth to Power,” and it never ends. If the US had not been so hellbent on destroying the large constituencies for Communism and Socialism, as well as union movements, in the Arab world, at the same time that it was funding incipient fundamental movements, as hedges, we would not even have to ask this question.
It is good to see that some of the punchdrunk masses, who feel that there is no purpose to life if they can’t support a Democrat, any Democrat, may be slowly sobering up to the non-representational nature of representational politics in our hijacked country today. I believe that it is called Dadaism, because those who begin to perceive the true nature of the plans the elite have in store for us, can only stutter, “Da, Da…” meaninglessly, over and over. I’m told a good two hours visiting DailyKos will cure this affliction and you can go back to believing that the Democrats (even if only Obama and Feingold) will save humanity. Again, wake up and follow the money…Or vote for whichever DU (Depleted Uranium) party you choose.
On a final note, for those who “feel in their bones” that Peak Oil has already arrived, BP reports breezily that World Oil Production increased another 900,000BPD last year. And that, even with fully 5% of World Oil Exports kept off the market in Iraq (for whatever reason one chooses to believe). Analysts believe that up to 40% of oil prices are related to the cocksuckers who are fighting an imaginary TWAT (The War Against Terror). In other words, the true base price of oil should be 40$/Barrel. And, of course, if Iraq was producing and exporting as it was before 1991, that figure would fall to $30. But then companies like Exxon wouldn’t be able to rake in $8 in profit for EVERY SINGLE HUMAN BEING IN THE WORLD last year.
You simply cannot understand the world if you refuse to follow the money….
Ta Da! I’m off to follow some money, folks.
Posted by: Malooga | Jul 28 2006 20:36 utc | 87
How the “Deliberate” Became Only “Apparent”
The Lies Israel Tells Itself (And We Tell On Its Behalf)
By JONATHAN COOK
Nazareth.
When journalists use the word “apparently”, or another favorite “reportedly”, they are usually distancing themselves from an event or an interpretation in the supposed interests of “balance”. But I think we should read the “apparently” contained in a statement from the head of the United Nations, Kofi Annan — relating to the killing this week of four unarmed UN monitors by the Israeli army — in its other sense.
When Annan says that those four deaths were “apparently deliberate”, I take him to mean that the evidence shows that the killings were deliberate. And who can disagree with him? At least 10 phone calls were made to Israeli commanders over a period of six hours warning that artillery and aerial bombardments were either dangerously close to or hitting the monitors’ building.
The UN post, in Khiam just inside south Lebanon, was clearly marked and well-known to the army, but nonetheless it was hit directly four times in the last hour before an Israeli helicopter fired a precision-guided missile that tore through the roof of an underground shelter, killing the monitors inside. A UN convoy that arrived too late to rescue the peacekeepers was also fired on. From the evidence, it does not get much more deliberate than that.
The problem, however, is that western leaders, diplomats and the media take the “apparently” in its first sense — as a way to avoid holding Israel to account for its actions. For “apparently deliberate”, read “almost certainly accidental”. That was why the best the UN Security Council could manage after a day and a half of deliberation was a weasely statement of “shock and distress” at the killings, as though they were an act of God.
Our media are no less responsible for this evasiveness. They make sure “we” — the publics of the West — never countenance the thought that a society like our own, one we are always being reminded is a democracy, could sink to the depths of inhumanity required to murder unarmed peacekeepers. Who can be taken seriously challenging the Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni’s assertion that “There will never be an [Israeli] army commander that will intentionally aim at civilians or UN soldiers [sic]”?
Even the minority in the West who have started to fear that Israel is “apparently” slaughtering civilians across Lebanon or that it is “apparently” intending to make refugees of a million Lebanese must presumably shrink from the idea that Israel is also capable of killing unarmed UN monitors.
After all, our media insinuate, the two cases are not comparable.
There may be good reasons why Lebanese civilians need to suffer. Let’s not forget that they belong to a people (or is it a race or, maybe, a religion?) that gave birth to Hizbullah. “We” can cast aside our concerns for the moment and take it on trust that Israel has cause to kill the Lebanese or make them homeless. Doubtless the justifications will emerge later, when we have lost interest in the “Lebanon crisis”. We may never hear what those reasons were, but who can doubt that they exist?
The “apparent” murder of four UN monitors, however, is a deeper challenge to our faith in our moral superiority, which is why that “apparently” is held on to as desperately as a talisman. No civilized country could kill peacekeepers, especially ones drawn from our own societies, from Canada, Finland and Austria? That is the moral separation line that divides us from the terrorists. Were that line to be erased, we would be no different from those whom we must fight.
An iconic image of this war that our media have managed to expunge from the official record but which keeps popping up in email inboxes like a guilty secret is of young Israeli girls, lipsticked and nailpolished as if on their way to a party, drawing messages of death and hatred on the sides of the missiles about to be loaded on to army trucks and tanks. In one, an out-of-focus soldier stands on a tank paternally watching over the girls as they address another death threat to Hizbullah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah.
Is this the truer face of Israeli society, even if it is the one we are never shown and refuse to believe in. And are “we” in the West hurtling down the same path?
Driving through the Jewish city of Upper Nazareth this week, I realised how inured I am becoming to this triumphal militarism — and the racism that feeds it. Nothing surprising about the posters of “We will win” on every hoarding. But it takes me more than a few seconds to notice that the Magen David ambulance in front of me is flying a little national flag, the blue Star of David, from its window. I have heard that American fire engines flew US flags after 9/11, but this somehow seems worse. How is it possible for an ambulance, the embodiment of our neutral, civilized, universal, “Western”, humanitarian values, to fly a national flag, I think to myself? And does it make a difference that only a few months ago Magen David joined the International Committee of the Red Cross?
Only slowly do my thoughts grow more disturbed: how many hospital administrators, doctors and nurses have seen that ambulance arrive at their emergency departments and thought nothing of it? And is that the only Israeli ambulance flying the flag, or are many others doing the same? Later the BBC TV news answers my question. I see two ambulances with the same flags going to the front line to collect casualties. Will others soon cross over the border into southern Lebanon, after it is “secured”, and will no one mention those little flags fluttering from the window?
A psychologist tells me how upset she is about a meeting she attended a few days ago of the northern coordinating committee of her profession. They were discussing how best to treat the shock and trauma suffered by Israeli children under the bombardment from Hizbullah. The meeting concluded with an agreement that the psychologists would reassure the children with the statement: “The army is there to protect us.”
And so, the seeds of fascism are unthinkingly sown for another generation of children, children like our own.
No one agreed with my friend when she dissented, arguing that this was not the message to be telling impressionable minds, and that violence against the Other is not a panacea for our problems. Parents, not soldiers, are responsible for protecting their children, she pointed out. Tanks, planes and guns bring only fear and more hatred, hatred that will one day return to haunt us.
The slow, gentle indoctrination continues day in, day out, reinforcing the idea among Israel’s Jewish population that the army can do no wrong and that it needs no oversight, not even from politicians (most of whom are former generals anyway, or like the prime minister Ehud Olmert too frightened to stand up to the chiefs of staff if they wanted to). “We will win”. How do we know we will win? Because “the army is there to protect us.” Add into the mix that faceless “Arab” enemy, those sub-beings, and you have a recipe for fascism — even if it is of the democratically elected variety.
The Israeli media, of course, are the key to providing the second half of that equation — or rather not providing it. You can sit watching the main Israeli channels all day, flicking between channels 1, 2 and 10, and not see a Lebanese face, apart from that of Hassan Nasrallah, the new Hitler. I don’t mean the charred faces of corpses, or the bandaged babies, or the amputees lying in hospital beds. I mean any Lebanese faces. Just as you almost never see a Palestinian face on Israeli TV unless they are the mob, disfigured with hatred as they hold aloft another martyr on his way to burial.
Lebanon only swings in to view on Israeli television through the black and white footage of an aerial gun sight, or through the long shot of a distant urban landscape seconds before it is “pulverized” by a dropped bomb. The buildings crumble, flames shoot up, clouds of dust billow into the air. Another shot of arcade-game adrenalin.
The humanitarian stories exist but they do not concern Lebanon. Animal welfare societies plead on behalf of the dogs and cats left alone to face the rocket fire on deserted Kiryat Shemona, just as they did before for foxes and deer when Israel began building its mammoth walls of concrete and steel across their migration routes in the West Bank, walls that are also imprisoning, unseen, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians.
The rest of the coverage is dedicated to Israeli army spokespeople, including the national heartthrob Miri Regev, and media “commentators” and “analysts”. Who are these people? They are from the same pool of former military intelligence and security service officers who once did this job in the closed rooms of army HQ but now wallow in the limelight. One favored pundit is even subtitled “Expert on psychological warfare against Hassan Nasrallah”.
And who are the presenters and anchors who interview them? The other day an ageing expert on Apache helicopters interrupted his interviewer irritatedly to tell him his question was stupid. “We were in the army together and both know the answer. Don’t play dumb?” It was a rare reminder that these anchors too are just soldiers in suits. One of the most popular, Ehud Yaari of Channel 2, barely conceals his military credentials as he condones yet more violence against the Lebanese or, if he can be deflected for a moment, the people of Gaza.
That is what comes of having a “citizen army”, where teenagers learn to use a gun before they can drive and men do reserve duty until their late 40s. It means every male teacher, professor, psychologist and journalist thinks as a soldier because that is what he has been for most of his life.
Israel is not unique, far from it, though it is in a darker place, and has been for some time, than “we” in the West can fully appreciate. It is a mirror of what our own societies are capable of, despite our democratic values. It shows how a cult of victimhood makes one heartless and cruel, and how racism can be repackaged as civilised values.
Maybe those UN monitors, with their lookout post above the battlefield where Israel wants to use any means it can to destroy Hizbullah and Lebanese civilians who get in the way, had to be removed simply because they are a nuisance, a restraint when Israel needs to get on with the job of asserting “our” values. Maybe Israel does not want the scrutiny of peacekeepers as it fights our war on terror for us. Maybe it feared that the monitors’ reports might help to give back to the Lebanese, even to Hizbullah, their faces, their history, their suffering.
And, if we are honest, Israel is not alone. How many of us want the Arabs to remain faceless so we can keep believing we are the victims of a new ideology that wants only our evisceration, just as the “Red Indians” once supposedly wanted our scalps? How many of us believe that our values demand that we fall in behind a new world order in which Arab deaths are not real deaths because “they” are not fully human?
And how many of us believe that deliberate barbarity, at least when we do it, is only “apparently” a crime against humanity?
from counterpunch
in todays internet edition
there are a number of important texts
Posted by: r’giap | Jul 29 2006 0:36 utc | 96
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