PPLFF says no BDS of Israeli Apartheid

Posted on September 23, 2010 by Eric Verlo

Crap. The Anti-Apartheid BDS campaign targeted Cannes because of it, Hollywood luminaries boycotted the Toronto Film Festival over the same principles in 2009, you’d think the Springs gay community might have paid heed. Instead the 2010 Pikes Peak Lavender Film Festival opted to screen the Israeli melodrama Eyes Wide Open, Zionists’ illegal appropriation of Jerusalem be damned. When Canadian gays made international news for allowing Queers Against Israeli Apartheid to march in their pride parade, in spite of Jewish philanthropists pressuring the City of Toronto to withdraw funding, I hoped that COS pride festivities might opt to climb aboard. Instead this weekend Colorado Springs gets a full-on endorsement of Israel’s ongoing illegal invasion of Palestine.

It was a false hope. The Pikes Peak area gay community has found itself so embattled since Amendment Two’s 1992 measure to legalize discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, that common social causes are easily crowded out by Gay Marriage, DADT and brand recognition for LGBT. So much so that social justice activists can only participate in the pride parade on the condition that it be about solidarity, not antiwar. With gay issues being so politicized, should gays and lesbians get a pass on staying apolitical about war or racism? Whatever excuses we make, it’s a perfectly flamboyant example of silence equals consent. I count apolitical queens every bit as complicit with US military criminality as the above-it-all new-agers and NASCAR jackasses.

Set in an Orthodox neighborhood of Jerusalem, Eyes Wide Open doesn’t address the Israeli-Palestinian troubles, it ignores them, effectively normalizing an ethnically-cleansed Palestine. The film tells the story of an extramarital gay affair between Jewish scholars, blablabla, minus the evictions of Palestinians in the path of encroachment by Israeli settlers, and the hijacking of Muslim holy sites . “Beverly Hills 90210” was fine without scenes of the LAPD repression of Watts or East LA, but 90210 wasn’t pretending to be taped on non-Jewish land.

Eyes Wide Open was the title of the 2005 American Friends Service Committee antiwar boot-counting exercise to open American eyes to the enormity of casualties of the Iraq War — before the Eyes Wide Open slogan was adopted by a 2008 Israeli PR project to encourage American Jews to pay more attention to their birthright offer of Israeli citizenship. The death count of US soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan (now that the AFSC has been cleared to consider both wars illegal) has long since outgrown the AFSC budget for buying boots or lugging them around in rented trucks, and now EWO (Einaym Pkuhot) is a miserable tale about infidelity and sin.

Frankly, Trembling Before G-d was an incredible documentary about gay Orthodox men struggling with the DADT policy of Orthodox Judaism. I remember seeing it at the 2003 PPLFF, or so. I remember Rabbinical experts expounded on both sides of the argument with authority and humor. But that was before the BDS movement to curb Israel’s racist apartheid system. You either support the picket or you scab.

Objective reviews of EWO are scarce in the Zionist-dominated press, and increasing numbers are honoring the cultural and academic boycott of Israeli Apartheid. Refusing to see EWO is by no means concluding it is bad. For all I know the film may be using the ostracism of homosexuals within the Orthodox community to represent the growing alienation Israelis are feeling in the face of the open revulsion expressing itself by the rest of the world. Maybe it’s brilliant.

But I’m not deliberating about whether to see it. BDS means no to Israel, to its statesmen, artists, scholars and products. And the American companies which support Israel’s policy of Apartheid, several dozen, and now that includes our own PPLFF.

DEC 28 mile long march for Gaza

Posted on November 15, 2009 by Eric Verlo

Bill and Genie Durland, Colorado Springs’ most vocal champions for Palestine, will be among a tidal wave of peace activists converging on Palestine on the first anniversary of Israel’s unrestrained attack of Gaza. With a Mile Long March to break Israel’s blockade of Gaza, the UN Goldstone Report pushing Israeli IDF commanders inexorably to The Hague, the snowballing Boycott-Divestment-Sanctions campaign supported by Israel’s own peace activists, and Israeli professor Shlomo Sand unmasking the Zionist’s defrauding of Judaism, the self-righteous death grip on Palestinians will lose its cheerleaders.

Sept 11 – America Reaps What It Sows!

Posted on September 11, 2009 by NMT

A post-911 perspective by Black Liberation Army prisoner of war Jalil Muntaqim.

U.S. International Warfare Initiates World War III Human Rights During Wartime
By Jalil A. Muntaqim

In the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, Americans have displayed their true colors of jingoism, a militaristic spirit of nationalism. Similarly, it was witnessed how the people of Iraq rallied in support of their President, Saddam Hussein, after the U.S. bombed to death 250,000 Iraqis, and continued devastation of that country with collateral damage of 1 million dead women and children. Hence, people rallying in support of their government and representatives is a common phenomenon when a country is attacked by an outsider. The U.S. has been foremost in the world extending foreign policy of free-market economy, to the extent of undermining other countries cultures and ideologies expressed as their way of life. Such conflicts inevitably positions the U.S. as the centerpiece, the bulls-eye for international political dissent, as indicated by demonstrations against the U.S. controlled IMF, WTO and World Bank conferences. The attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon did not occur in a vacuum. The people that carried out the attacks were not blind followers or robots with an irrational hatred of the U.S. peoples. Rather, this attack was part of an overall blowback to U.S. imperialist policy in support of zionist Israel and opposition to fundamentalist Islam.

There are essentially three primary world ideologies or world views: the capitalist free-market economy/democracy; the socialist production economy; and Islamic theocratic government, of which has been in competition for many decades. However, in the last 20 years the socialist economies has been severely subverted and co-opted by free-market economies, the ideals of American style democracy. This isolated, for the most part, Islamic theocratic ideology and system of government as the principle target of the U.S. in its quest for world hegemony. This reality of competing world views and economies is further complicated due to religious underpinning of beliefs that motivates actions, especially as they are expressed by U.S. and Western European christianity and Israel zionist judaism in opposition to Islam. From the struggles of the Crusades to the present confrontation, the struggle for ideological supremacy reigns, as the faithful continue to proselytize in the name of the Supreme Being.

When geopolitics are combined with religious fervor in the character of nationalist identity and patriotism, rational and logical thinking is shoved aside as matters of the moment takes historical precedents. It has often been said that “Truth Crush to the Earth Will Rise Again”. Since truth is relative to ones belief, can it be safely said that America has reaped what it has sowed? The American truth of capitalist christian democracy and its imperialist hegemonic aspirations has crushed both socialist and Islamic world views. It has extended its avaricious tentacles as the world police and economic harbinger of all that is beneficent, in stark denial of its history as a purveyor of genocides, slavery and colonial violence.

The U.S. was the first to use biological-germ warfare on people when it distributed blankets infected with smallpox to Native Americans; it has refused to apologize for Afrikan slavery acknowledging it engaged in a crime against humanity requiring reparations; it is the first and only country to use the atomic bomb on the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and intern thousands of Japanese and Italians in this country; it used carpet bombing and defoliates against the peoples of Vietnam; it has initiated embargoes, coup d’etats and assassinations against those it opposes, while propping-up right-wing military dictators; as well as continued military bombing of Vieques. In essence, the U.S. governments hegemonic goals has created the ire of millions of people throughout the world. While domestically, racial profiling, police killing and mass incarceration of Black and Brown people has eroded patriotic sentiments in opposition to white supremacy.

As America weeps and laments its loss, the public find itself joining the torn ranks of those whose heartaches beat opposing U.S. greed and international profiteering. The American public acquiesce to U.S. international folly has cause them to feel the economic pains of those who live daily in poverty. Indeed, Americans should brace for years of economic uncertainty, where the American ideal of freedom and liberty will resemble plight of those who live under the right-wing dictatorships the U.S. has supported. The tyranny suffered by others in the world as a result of U.S. imperialism, has come full circle to visit this country with the wrath of the U.S. own mechanization. Since the U.S. taught and trained right-wing military dictators in the School of the Americas, including the CIA training of Osama bin Laden in the Afghanistan proxy war against the Russians, it will be this same kind of terrorist activist that will be unleashed on American soil, as El-Hajj Malik Shabazz stated after the assassination of John Kennedy, a matter of the chicken coming home to roost. Therefore, American civil liberties and human rights are being garrotted by the yoke of the right-wing in the name of national security. The legalization of U.S. fascism was initiated with the war against political dissent (Cointelpro); the war against organized crime (RICO laws); the war against illegal drugs (plethora of drug laws) and now culminating in the war against terrorism with the American Joint Anti-Terrorist Taskforce and Office of Home Security, further extending police, FBI and CIA powers to undermine domestic civil liberties and human rights.

The U.S. Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, recently stated that the U.S. need to create a new language in defining how to combat terrorism. This Orwellian propaganda in the media espouses the U.S. is venturing in a new type of warfare to defend the American way of life. However, what this double-speak propagates as a long-term and sustained initiative against terrorism is essentially a way of embellishing and enlarging U.S. counter-insurgency activity it has been engaged in since the advent of the Green Berets, Rangers, Delta Force and Navy Seals. The U.S. has been involved in counter-insurgency activity in Afrika, Latin America and Asia for decades. But due to the September 11, 2001, attack on U.S. soil, the government has seized the opportunity to offensively pursue left-wing revolutionaries and Muslim insurgents throughout the world. This U.S. military action extends and substantiates its position as the international police.

Since the establishment of the Trilateral Commission that initiated the process for the development of one world government, the U.S. has broaden its capacity to impose and enforce its will on oppressed peoples globally. The FBI and CIA has been operating in Europe, Afrika, Asia and Latin America establishing the long arm of U.S. law and order. Its bases of operations have conducted surveillance, investigations to arrest, prosecute or neutralize left-wing revolutionaries or Muslim insurgents. As the U.S. consolidates its political and economic influence throughout the world, it will seek to protect its overall hegemonic imperialist goals. After the Gulf War, and the air (bombing) campaign in Yugoslavia, the U.S. has employed its military might to ensure its foreign policy are achieved.

Because NATO has evolved into a European military entity that Russia is seeking to join, today, the U.S. has positioned itself beyond the mission of NATO. The U.S. now concentrates its military might in opposing Islamic countries (Iran, Iraq, Libya, Sudan, Afghanistan, Philippines, etc.) and those the U.S. deem as rogue nations (North Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, etc.). The new military initiatives will be directed to towards Southeast Asia as the secondary target, as it continues to direct the Middle East conflict to preserve its oil investments and zionist interest. As the U.S. expand its imperialist military mission, as seen with committing military troops in Uzbekistan to also protect oil interest in the Caspian Sea, it has sought to redefine itself by targeting what it identify as the terrorist thereat wherever in the world it might exist. Hence, with the employment of conventional warfare combined with counter-insurgency tactical activities, the U.S. has pronounced itself as the military guardian of the world.

Although, the U.S. states its actions are in its self-interest, in terms of what is euphemistically defined as defending the free world, the truth of the matter is this action is a prelude to evolving one world government with the U.S. as its governing authority. Once the Peoples Republic of China becomes a full member of the WTO, and North Korea and Vietnam has been compromised, with Russia becoming an ally of NATO, the U.S. political-military influence in the world will be consolidated. The U.S. geopolitical strategy is not confined to the present crisis in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, attack and targeting Osama bin Laden as the world’s nemesis. Rather, the U.S. strategy is to preserve its capacity to establish one world government as originally envisioned by the Trilateral Commission.

Nonetheless, there are some serious obstacles to this hegemonic goal, of which the world of fundamentalist Islam has become the principle target. Here, it should be noted that Islam condemns suicide or the mass killings of women, children and non-combatant males. Yet, the U.S., Israel, western Europe, Russia, India and China all view Islam as the enemy. Although, there are over 1.2 billion Muslims in the world, the current alliance of economic interest headed by the U.S., are united to vanquish what they consider the growing menace of fundamentalist Islam. It is with this understanding of U.S. geopolitics one is able to comprehend why the U.S. has redefine its military mission, as opposition to globalization and U.S. imperialism metamorph into a political struggle without borders or territorial imperatives.

The ideological struggle between capitalist free-market economy and Islamic theocratic determinates has exploded into an international conflagration of insurgency with the potential of initiating World War III. The Islamic fundamentalist movements throughout the world has the potential to test the U.S. military, political and economic resolve as the world’s leader and authority of an one world government. With over 1.2 billion adherents, Islam has become a formidable foe to contend with for ideological supremacy in the world’s geopolitics. Even without discussing the religious (moral and ethics) aspects that motivates the geopolitics of Islam in opposition to U.S. imperialist hegemony, the call for Jihad/Holy War against the U.S. presents a serious threat that could precipitate WW-III. Therefore, the U.S. find it necessary to redefine its military mission, develop new language to codify warfare and legitimize its international political and economic purpose. Yet, many of the world’s oppressed peoples’ have already experienced U.S. military counter-insurgency tactics (Ethiopia, Somalia, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Chile, Congo, etc.), including parts of the Islamic world. No matter how or why the U.S. attempts to persuade Americans that it is entering a new type of warfare, in reality it is more of the same, only extending the military arena to further protect its authority to establish one world government.

However, the U.S. is not the homogeneous country that people are deluded into believing exist. Rather, the U.S. has been held together due its ability to exploit the world’s resources and distribute (unequally) the profits amongst its citizens with its culture of conspicuous consumption. But, the recent attack on the U.S., and its aftermath may very well lead to the untangling and unraveling of the U.S. fabric as has been witnessed with the USSR and Yugoslavia. In understanding this true history of U.S. imperialism, outside and within its borders, essentially tells a story of why U.S. imperialism has been and will continue to be attacked.

Ultimately, the U.S. will eventually find itself at war with itself, as the ideology of a free democratic society will be found to be a big lie. This is especially disconcerting as greater restrictions on civil and human rights are made into law eroding the First and Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. As during the Vietnam conflict, internal contradictions of racism, poverty and inequality will be exacerbated as a result of the U.S. military campaign and domestic undermining of civil and human rights. It is expected that strife in America will eventually become violent dissolving any semblance of the illusion of America the Beautiful. In anticipation of U.S. progressive activist opposing this claimed war against terrorism, the federal government will pass new laws to severely restrict protest, demonstrations and dissent. In the ’60s, U.S. progressive activists evolved the slogan “Bring the War Home!” – the question is what will be the slogan this time, now that the war has been brought home?

Free the Land!!

In Israeli Apartheid, you and I are black

Posted on September 1, 2009 by Eric Verlo

Sorta-leftist websites are touting use-to-be-leftist Uri Avnery’s weekend article in Ma’an called “Tutu’s Prayer.” Where, the founder of Israel’s Gush Shalom (touted as “fairly far left” as opposed to grandfather- clause’d phony) argues against the BDS boycott of Israel and against comparisons to South African apartheid. And where, Avnery shows himself blind to his own Judeo-centrism. Rejecting the term apartheid, Avnery writes: “It seems that the blacks in South Africa are very different from the Israelis–“

Whaaaaat? Israelis see themselves as not the colonists but the natives! Who is it in Israel that has to wear the sunscreen?

Avnery relates his conversation with Archbishop Desmond Tutu as reinforcing why a boycott will not work. Oh, Tutu testifies that the boycott worked against the South African regime. But Avnery points out the uniqueness of the Jews, who suffered the Holocaust. All Jews, he explains, believe the whole world is against them. An international boycott will only reinforce that belief. His conclusion: Israel will resist a boycott forever. Ergo, it won’t work.

Israelis as forever the victims; doesn’t that point to why Israelis cannot begin to see why their actions against their neighbors are likened to war crimes? They see themselves as the black of South Africa. They probably see themselves as the Palestinians in the struggle over Gaza.

You don’t have to explain to the rest of the world, who is oppressing whom in the Middle East. And that’s who has the fuller view of Israeli Apartheid.

Apartheid in Israel is much simpler than between Israeli Jews and the dispossessed Palestinians.

Under Israeli Apartheid, every Jew in the world has the preferential right to the land of the Palestinians. You, if you are a Jew, have a birthright to Israel, to the roads and lands designated for Jews only. You, if you are not a Jew, do not.

That is Israeli Apartheid. To Israel, everyone else, you , me, and the Palestinians are the black.

Anti-Zionism 4D: Defining Demonization Double Standards and Delegitimization

Posted on May 5, 2009 by Eric Verlo

The word “nutritious” defines a food quality that provides sustenance. I’ve no doubt as skepticism grows about the likely poisonous aspects of refined sugar and High Fructose Corn Syrup, the corporate sugar-water purveyors will append “satiates your subliminal impulses” to the meaning of nutritious. Who safeguards our dictionaries from authoritarians who profit from reweaving the fabric of knowledge we consider inviolate?

We expect facts to change, but it is unsettling to be robbed of the words which we count on to measure the change.

Did you think “anti-Semitic” meant prejudice against the Jews? It does, except the Zionists behind sustaining Israel want it to indemnify their unpopular endeavor too. Anti-Semitism now means opposing Israel, although the stigma implied is of course still “Jew Hater.” But the appropriation is unseemly. Crusading Evangelicals could tell you, if you oppose their bloody incursions into the lands of Islam, then you must be anti-Christian. But are you?

It would seem only fair that the victims of anti-Semitism should be entitled to define what oppresses them, but that’s not who’s wrapping themselves in its protection. Zionists (both Jewish and Christian) claim that an overwhelming percentage of World Jewry supports sustaining the US-Israel occupation of Palestine. Is it true? I wager that the far greater proportion of both Jews and non-Jews repudiate military aggression, occupation, ethnic cleansing and religious oppression. But if it were true, claims of suffering historical persecution are not grounds to be given license to persecute others.

Anti-Semitism describes real, tradition-rooted anti-Jewish sentiment. To expand its meaning disrespects the very tangible prejudice which Jews still face. Opposition to sustaining Israel is actually Anti-Zionism, which is neither for nor against Judaism. Anti-Zionism denounces another long-held prejudice: White European Man’s assertion that the Holy Land belongs to him.

Anti-Zionism is the opposition to sustaining an illegally invaded, illegally occupied, racist administration of Palestine in the name of “Zionism.” Anti-Zionism calls for “the destruction of Israel,” meaning the dissolution of the Western colonial theocracy imposed on the indigenous population of the Middle East. To oppose the sustaining of Israel is a call to exterminate Israeli apartheid. Anti-Zionism is no resurrection of the Final Solution. It means leave people be. White settlers should not assume to usurp the lands and water rights of the native Palestinians.

Zionism defender Nathan Sharansky has constructed a definition of anti-Semitism with an expanded breadth, he calls them the three Ds: Demonization, Double Standards and Delegitimization. It’s this 3D definition with which Zionists are branding UCSB professor William Robinson, himself a Jew, as an anti-Semite. Professor Robinson circulated an email among his sociology students, comparing Israel’s actions in Gaza to methods used by the Nazis, now US-Israeli lobby groups are calling for UCSB to censure him.

Sharansky’s three Ds are easily refuted because he offers no more than circular argument. Ipso Facto my eye. I reprint Sharansky’s explanation below, but first an abridgment:

Demonization: “…having [the Jewish state’s] actions blown out of all sensible proportion … can only be considered anti-Semitic.”

Double Standards: “It is anti-Semitism … when Israel is singled out by the United Nations for human rights abuses while tried and true abusers … are ignored.”

Delegitimization: “…the denial of Israel’s right to exist is always anti-Semitic.”

Thus, if Israel considers the criticisms leveled against it to be insensible, then the criticisms are anti-Semitic; also, so long as abusive regimes persist, Israel reserves its prerogative to abuse; and, the legitimacy of Israel’s biblically ordained Manifest Destiny is never to be questioned. These are self-rationalizations which beg ridicule, but doing so would appear anti-Semitic.

Sharansky finishes: “If other peoples have a right to live securely in their homelands, then the Jewish people have a right to live securely in their homeland.” To suggest that the right of the Palestinians to live in their homeland, have been usurped by the Jewish people, most of whom knew other homelands, is apparently anti-Semitic.

Here is Nathan Sharansky’s statement to support the 3-D formula for decrying “ANTI-SEMITISM!”

I propose the following test for differentiating legitimate criticism of Israel from anti-Semitism. The 3D test, as I call it, is not a new one. It merely applies to the new anti-Semitism the same criteria that for centuries identified the different dimensions of classical anti-Semitism.

DEMONIZATION
The first D is the test of demonization.

Whether it came in the theological form of a collective accusation of deicide or in the literary depiction of Shakespeare’s Shylock, Jews were demonized for centuries as the embodiment of evil. Therefore, today we must be wary of whether the Jewish state is being demonized by having its actions blown out of all sensible proportion.

For example, the comparisons of Israelis to Nazis and of the Palestinian refugee camps to Auschwitz — comparisons heard practically every day within the “enlightened” quarters of Europe — can only be considered anti-Semitic.

Those who draw such analogies either do not know anything about Nazi Germany or, more plausibly, are deliberately trying to paint modern-day Israel as the embodiment of evil.

DOUBLE STANDARDS
The second D is the test of double standards. For thousands of years a clear sign of anti-Semitism was treating Jews differently than other peoples, from the discriminatory laws many nations enacted against them to the tendency to judge their behavior by a different yardstick.

Similarly, today we must ask whether criticism of Israel is being applied selectively. In other words, do similar policies by other governments engender the same criticism, or is there a double standard at work?

It is anti-Semitism, for instance, when Israel is singled out by the United Nations for human rights abuses while tried and true abusers like China, Iran, Cuba, and Syria are ignored.

Likewise, it is anti-Semitism when Israel’s Magen David Adom, alone among the world’s ambulance services, is denied admission to the International Red Cross.

DELIGITIMIZATION
The third D is the test of deligitimization. In the past, anti-Semites tried to deny the legitimacy of the Jewish religion, the Jewish people, or both. Today, they are trying to deny the legitimacy of the Jewish state, presenting it, among other things, as the last vestige of colonialism.

While criticism of an Israeli policy may not be anti-Semitic, the denial of Israel’s right to exist is always anti-Semitic. If other peoples have a right to live securely in their homelands, then the Jewish people have a right to live securely in their homeland.

UCSB Prof William Robinson pro-Semite

Posted on April 30, 2009 by Eric Verlo

Wouldn’t you think it bad form for Israeli militants to behave like Nazis, while immunizing themselves with the self-righteous indignation that any criticism of their actions can simply be dismissed as “anti-Semitic?” Photographs and confessions emerging from the IDF’s atrocities in Gaza just beg comparison the German Einsatzgruppen in Poland. Earlier this year UC Santa Barbara professor William Robinson forwarded an email photo essay to a UCSB listserv, the already much-circulated side by side comparison to the WWII atrocities. Two students complained, plagiarizing stock IDF lingo. Now the Anti-Defamation League wants Robinson to recant. With IDF propagandists pouring on the bullshit, let’s revisit the documents.

As has already been noted, Professor Robinson is a harsh critic of US foreign policy, and already a likely target for the goon squad enforcers of Western Capitalism. Not many of America’s actions are defensible, so Robinson has to be attacked by desperate means. Lucky for the lackey-jackals, Robinson chose to criticize Israel’s atrocities against the Palestinians of Gaza. Bingo!

The Israeli propaganda machine has armed aspiring Israel-defenders with a blanket rebuttal: just yell “ANTI-SEMITISM!” And what a load of crap that is. Much turns on the definition of “anti-Semitism.” It packs the punch of meaning someone who hates Jews, but the advocates of Zionism have expanded the definition into 3-D! Zionist apologist Nathan Sharansky has coined the 3D definition of ant-Semitism: demonization of Israel, double standards, and delegitimization. You don’t have to look closely to note that those points outline all the rebuttals of criticisms of Israel and any question of the legitimacy of the Zionist usurpation of Palestine.

The criticisms posed by those concerned for the fate of Gaza are the same expressed by a large portion of the Israeli Jewish population as well. But the US Israeli lobby, militantly Zionist, has the complicity of the US war-mongering corporate media, thus the IDF Megaphone protestations get traction. These are the same cheap shots leveled against Ward Churchill. By flooding the internet to create the sensation that the indignation was shared, the IDF spammers have been successful in slandering these dissenting academics.

Since we’re seeing this technique being slopped unto our comment forums, let’s examine the statement for which Robinson is being attacked. First we’ll present Robinson’s email. The next post will feature the ensuing letters of complaint, two from UCSB students, and third from the ADL.

Original Email
Here is Professor Robinson’s original email, including his attachment of the Judith Stone article. This accompanied the aforementioned photo essay he forwarded.

Subject: [socforum] parallel images of Nazis and Israelis
From: “William I. Robinson” …
Date: Mon, 19 Jan 2009 21:00:05
…

If Martin Luther King were alive on this day of January 19, 2009, there is no doubt that he would be condemning the Israeli aggression against Gaza along with U.S. military and political support for Israeli war crimes, or that he would be standing shoulder to shoulder with the Palestinians. I am forwarding some horrific, parallel images of Nazi atrocities against the Jews and Israeli atrocities against the Palestinians. Perhaps the most frightening are not those providing a graphic depiction of the carnage but that which shows Israeli children writing “with love” on a bomb that will tear apart Palestinian children.

Gaza is Israel’s Warsaw – a vast concentration camp that confined and blockaded Palestinians, subjecting them to the slow death of malnutrition, disease and despair, nearly two years before their subjection to the quick death of Israeli bombs. We are witness to a slow-motion process of genocide (Websters: “the systematic killing of, or a program of action intended to destroy, a whole national or ethnic group”), a process whose objective is not so much to physically eliminate each and every Palestinian than to eliminate the Palestinians as a people in any meaningful sense of the notion of people-hood.

The Israeli army is the fifth most potent military machine in the world and one that is backed by a propaganda machine that rivals and may well surpass that of the U.S., a machine that dares to make the ludicrous and obnoxious claim that opposition to the policies and practices of the Israeli state is anti-Semitism. It should be no surprise that a state founded on the negation of a people was one of the principal backers of the apartheid South African state not to mention of the Latin American military dictatorships until those regimes collapsed under mass protest, and today arms, trains, and advises military and paramilitary forces in Colombia, one of the world’s worst human rights violators.

Below is an article written by a U.S. Jew and sent to a Jewish newspaper. The editor of the paper was fired for publishing it.

Quest for Justice

By Judith Stone

I am a Jew. I was a participant in the Rally for the Right of Return to Palestine. It was the right thing to do.

I’ve heard about the European holocaust against the Jews since I was a small child. I’ve visited the memorials in Washington, DC and Jerusalem dedicated to Jewish lives lost and I’ve cried at the recognition to what level of atrocity mankind is capable of sinking.

Where are the Jews of conscience? No righteous malice can be held against the survivors of Hitler’s holocaust. These fragments of humanity were in no position to make choices beyond that of personal survival. We must not forget that being a survivor or a co-religionist of the victims of the European Holocaust does not grant dispensation from abiding by the rules of humanity.

“Never again” as a motto, rings hollow when it means “never again to us alone.” My generation was raised being led to believe that the biblical land was a vast desert inhabited by a handful of impoverished Palestinians living with their camels and eking out a living in the sand. The arrival of the Jews was touted as a tremendous benefit to these desert dwellers. Golda Mier even assured us that there “is no Palestinian problem.”

We know now this picture wasn’t as it was painted. Palestine was a land filled with people who called it home. There were thriving towns and villages, schools and hospitals. There were Jews, Christians and Muslims. In fact, prior to the occupation, Jews represented a mere 7 percent of the population and owned 3 percent of the land.

Taking the blinders off for a moment, I see a second atrocity perpetuated by the very people who should be exquisitely sensitive to the suffering of others. These people knew what it felt like to be ordered out of your home at gun point and forced to march into the night to unknown destinations or face execution on the spot. The people who displaced the Palestinians knew first hand what it means to watch your home in flames, to surrender everything dear to your heart at a moment’s notice. Bulldozers leveled hundreds of villages, along with the remains of the village inhabitants, the old and the young. This was nothing new to the world.

Poland is a vast graveyard of the Jews of Europe. Israel is the final resting place of the massacred Palestinian people. A short distance from the memorial to the Jewish children lost to the holocaust in Europe there is a leveled parking lot. Under this parking lot is what’s left of a once flourishing village and the bodies of men, women and children whose only crime was taking up needed space and not leaving graciously. This particular burial marker reads: “Public Parking”.

I’ve talked with Palestinians. I have yet to meet a Palestinian who hasn’t lost a member of their family to the Israeli Shoah, nor a Palestinian who cannot name a relative or friend languishing under inhumane conditions in an Israeli prison. Time and time again, Israel is cited for human rights violations to no avail. On a recent trip to Israel, I visited the refugee camps inhabited by a people who have waited 52 years in these ‘temporary’ camps to go home. Every Palestinian grandparent can tell you the name of their village, their street, and where the olive trees were planted. Their grandchildren may never have been home, but they can tell you where their great-grandfather lies buried and where the village well stood. The press has fostered the portrait of the Palestinian terrorist. But, the victims who rose up against human indignity in the Warsaw Ghetto are called heroes. Those who lost their lives are called martyrs. The Palestinian who tosses a rock in desperation is a terrorist.

Two years ago I drove through Palestine and watched intricate sprinkler systems watering lush green lawns of Zionist settlers in their new condominium complexes, surrounded by armed guards and barbed wire in the midst of a Palestinian community where there was not adequate water to drink and the surrounding fields were sandy and dry. University professor Moshe Zimmerman reported in the Jerusalem Post (April 30, 1995), “The Jewish children of Hebron are just like Hitler’s youth.”

We Jews are suing for restitution, lost wages, compensation for homes, land, slave labor and back wages in Europe. Am I a traitor of a Jew for supporting the right of return of the Palestinian refugees to their birthplace and compensation for what was taken that cannot be returned?

The Jewish dead cannot be brought back to life and neither can the Palestinian massacred be resurrected. David Ben Gurion said, “Let us not ignore the truth among ourselves…politically, we are the aggressors and they defend themselves…The country is theirs, because they inhabit it, whereas we want to come here and settle down, and in their view we want to take away from them their country…”

Palestine is a land that has been occupied and emptied of its people. It’s cultural and physical landmarks have been obliterated and replaced by tidy Hebrew signs. The history of a people was the first thing eradicated by the occupiers. The history of the indigenous people has been all but eradicated as though they never existed. And all this has been hailed by the world as a miraculous act of G-d. We must recognize that Israel’s existence is not even a question of legality so much as it is an illegal fait accompli realized through the use of force while supported by the Western powers. The UN missions directed at Israel in attempting to correct its violations of have thus far been futile.

In Hertzl’s “The Jewish State,” the father of Zionism said, “…We must investigate and take possession of the new Jewish country by means of every modern expedient.” I guess I agree with Ehud Barak (3 June 1998) when he said, “If I were a Palestinian, I’d also join a terror group.” I’d go a step further perhaps. Rather than throwing little stones in desperation, I’d hurtle a boulder.

Hopefully, somewhere deep inside, every Jew of conscience knows that this was no war; that this was not G-d’s restitution of the holy land to it’s rightful owners. We know that a human atrocity was and continues to be perpetuated against an innocent people who couldn’t come up with the arms and money to defend themselves against the western powers bent upon their demise as a people.

We cannot continue to say, “But what were we to do?” Zionism is not synonymous with Judaism. I wholly support the rally of the right of return of the Palestinian people.

Barack Obama: Next Year in Jerusalem

Posted on April 14, 2009 by Eric Verlo

President Obama and family marked the start of the Jewish Passover by hosting a traditional Seder ceremony at the White House, apparently in fulfillment of a campaign promise. Last year Obama participated in a similar dinner with Jewish campaign workers, and when reciting the Haggadah which ends with the wish “Next Year in Jerusalem,” Obama tacked on “Next Year in the White House.” If we assume he didn’t need to add that wish this time, did the White House prayer end: Next Year in Jerusalem?

I find the official photograph released by the White House disturbing all in itself. The higher resolution image reveals that the Obamas and friends are reading from Haggadah pamphlets published by Maxwell House Coffee, a free hand-out at supermarkets. Wouldn’t you imagine the White House has its own printing wing for such occasions? Aren’t most presidential guests expecting to come away with something more than a promotional brochure for a White House dinner keepsake?

And there’s something a-kilter with the dining furniture. The observation has been confirmed in the blogosphere that everyone’s sitting on plastic catering chairs. The chairs are uncomfortable obviously, because everyone’s using cushions behind their backs. These plastic chairs are presumably what you’d use when you have to set extra places. In this case, an entire extra table. Nothing odd about an extra table, but not where you’d expect to have to bump the First Family. Which family is seated at the main table?

Was it deemed imprudent to depict the first Presidential Seder at the formal table, with all the dignified trappings of a White House occasion?

Assuming there’s an art director behind every detail, including the mixed-bag assortment of pillows used to cushion the chairs, the Obamas appear to be cast into a less-than-affluent kitchen table scene, perhaps out of sensitivity for our nation’s recent hard times. It’s a look that might mimic a Depression Era dinnertime, but I cannot conjure when austerity ever reflected a modern White House. Was even down-home Jimmy Carter ever directed to pretend he was more Good Times and less like the Huxtables?

Israel and the surplus Passover bread

Posted on April 8, 2009 by Eric Verlo

I thought the NPR human interest story about Passover was going to be a PR piece: What do Israeli Jews do with their leavened bread during Passover, when religious observance forbids not just the consumption of bread, but the possession of it? What do Jewish bakeries, grocers, eateries, distributors and warehouses do with their un-unleavened inventories? I’ll bet you were going to guess that they give it away!

Not to other observers of Passover obviously, but to non-Jewish needy maybe, who can eat it.

No doubt Israeli Jewish bread purveyors schedule inventory reductions to coincide with Passover. But according to the news segment, the mass of raised dough, for the brief Passover hours untouchable to Jewish adherents, regularly amounts to $150 million, every year. So what do they do with it?

Well according to NPR, here’s the deal.

On paper, the bread is entrusted to the governing rabbis, who make a collective deal with a single cooperative non-Jew. This Israeli Arab agrees to purchase the lot, by making a down-payment, with the proviso that he cannot take delivery until the balance is paid, and a further understanding that he will intentionally default on the transaction. He joked with the reporter that every year he falls short of the sum required. When the Passover restriction lifts, possession of the bread reverts to its Jewish owners, whose premises it never left, physically. The stock goes back on the books, and everyone is back in business.

No details about whether this is how Jewish communities have always overcome the Passover prohibition. Which we might assume has been a pressing challenge for centuries. And to be fair, the restriction was never about divesting of the bread, or being charitable, but more about commemoration through sacrifice, the flight from Egypt when Jews were compelled to take with them only unleavened bread.

So this news segment was not a heavy handed PR message about the piety of Israeli Jews, but a subtle glimpse into the pragmatic world of Judaism. Either message serves to familiarize the 98% of Americans who are not Jewish, with the daily life of Israelis. Though Israel may be a foreign nation, with the foreign concept of a state religion, the people of Israel are otherwise close kin of the white European Americans, as their blood-surrogate claimants to the Holy Land.

If you’re still wondering about the Arab Israelis who could have been in line for day old largess, don’t worry, this segment had that loose end tied up.

By the oddest of twists, the Israeli Arabs interviewed for this story declared their own preference for unleavened bread, for the Passover. This drew incredulous prompts from nearby Israeli Jews. Why would Arabs chose Matzo, the poor man’s bread, without being obligated?

But so says NPR. There it is. So no one’s missing the uneaten bread.

The lingering motif being, that while religious differences may remain, in terms of baked-goods gastronomy, Arab Israelis are wannabe Jewish Israelis.

God’s Chosen People, America’s chosen cousins, are even their captives’ chosen masters.

Do Jews and Muslims actually benefit from anti hate speech laws?

Posted on February 13, 2009 by Tony Logan

hate-speech-law The United Kingdom just denied entry to a Dutch Right Winger because he supposedly said bad things about Muslims, and meanwhile, Germany continues to imprison people who say bad things about Jews. Who came up with this idea that if you can just shut speech up that that somehow solves the problem? That’s got it totally backwards, doesn’t it?

Free speech, even when it is hateful speech, actually serves to often times open up channels of communication between 2 groups of hostile people. Worried about hate speech? If you solve the problem in the first place then you won’t have that hate speech follow more often than not.

Sure, there are hate mongers who will never respond to any speech to them other than mere repetition of their own hateful attitudes towards the target group for their hate. That being said, if you outlaw the expression of their hate through their speech, then you just hide it away where it begins to fester into more dangerous possibilities of expression.

Society has much more to gain by not outlawing speech of any kind than it generally does in trying to limit and outlaw it. Does anybody really think that if a person is thrown into jail for 2 years for saying bad things about Islam or Judaism that they will return to society a better person? Isn’t that just a version of a school yard bully who tells the smaller kid that if he doesn’t shut up that he will go and kick his ass? What’s the lesson learned there?

It’s time to stop making hate speech an illegal speech threatened by jail time if you engage in it per somebody else’s opinion. That’s pretty stupid law. Meanwhile, we have all sorts of other laws on the books that actually do more harm than good. We have laws that legalize torture, and laws that throw people in jail for life for the use of some self abusing substance or other. Jailing people for saying nasty things about other people or their religion or social grouping is also a stupid law that does just the opposite of what it is intended supposedly to accomplish. It makes people hate others more instead of less. It’s time to do away with this sort of law hiding behind the idea that it is in someway a supposed tolerance campaign for multi-diversity. It just isn’t so.

And when Comrade Netanyahu speaks…

Posted on February 11, 2009 by Brother Jonah

Yeah, I know, Animal Farm is supposed to be a dystopia all about the Soviets and can NOT be applied to any other political group… The American ~~Fascist~~ errr… “Republican” yeah, that’s the ticket… Forbid You To Say Otherwise..

I wonder why our friends from the Megaphone don’t just as loudly trumpet anything Israelis other than Likud say?

Like when Comrade Chairman Liebermann compared peace activists to Nazi Collaborators… that gets huge cheers from the Likud Megaphone…

But then a strange thing happens…

On Saturday night Shas spiritual leader Rabbi Ovadia Yosef said that, “Whoever votes for Lieberman gives strength to Satan.”

Shas is a political arm of a religious Fundamentalist sect of Judaism who would make the Pharisees say they should lighten up

But in the book, you know, whenever Comrade Napoleon or Comrade Squealer said anything, there was reverent silence followed immediately by the Sheep chanting “Four Legs Good, two legs Baaaddd”

And when anybody else stood up to speak, especially if it was a Comrade who wasn’t in full agreement with Comrades Napoleon and Squealer, The Likud Megaphone errr The Sheep would start chanting “Four Legs Good, Endless war with Palestine Better!

I know I’m only slightly mixing the metaphors.

Actually it’s clarifying the blurred areas between metaphors.

So that even the Loudest, Blindest Stupidest sheep can see….

Israelis indignant at being called Nazis

Posted on January 22, 2009 by Eric Verlo

Jewish leaders object to Nazi imagery at rallies. Avner Shalev, chairman of the Yad Vashem museum and memorial, called for the Holocaust to be left out of contemporary political discourse.

Is that rich?! There’s not a day goes by that Holocaust Remembrance isn’t in the news, propagated by Israel’s constant PR campaign. Google “Holocaust” for news items. There are remembrance press releases every news day.

“It is legitimate to constructively criticize the policies of any nation, including Israel. However, the baseless use of Holocaust imagery and terminology as a weapon against Israel has incited a tangible surge of anti-Semitism,” he said. “That is the danger inherent when people cynically use the Holocaust to distort a present political conflict.”

Is it really anti-Semitic to condemn the inhumanity of the Zionists? Does Judaism condone ethnic cleansing? If Israel doesn’t want to be compared to the Nazis, it should stop exterminating the Palestinians. What fucking gall.

The Nazis had a word for their anti-Fascist critics. They called them Communists. That’s why they had the support of industrialists, even Jewish industrialists, and the ruling classes. But sympathy for the barbaric Third Reich quickly wore thin.

Recent events only suggest to me that the Nazis lagged behind today’s Zionists. They lacked the technology. Do you think they would have dicked around with train schedules and relocation ruses if they’d had white phosphorous, free access to the entire US arsenal, and an international community indifferent to the fate of their victims?

The Godless God fearing Americans

Posted on January 21, 2009 by Eric Verlo

What is all this Goddamn pomp? “Non-believers” got a mention in Barack Obama’s inaugural address, dead last after Christians, Muslims, Jews and Hindus, even though they rank second, and even though church abstainers actually comprise the majority of Americans. Yet even this second day, mentions of God, Lord, and prayer, continue ad nauseum. Talk about disrespect.

And why are atheists and agnostics named in the negative? Why aren’t they called rationalists? Churchgoers should be called reason disabled. What a farce. Are Americans to believe that Obama and his wife, Harvard grads, are religious? And which of the shysters of DC can be considered spiritual?

I’m watching the service at the National Cathedral, which, taking into account the time zones, is eating well into Obama’s first day in office. Assembled are a bunch of pharisees, a disproportionate sampling for certain, to voice their prayers for our lawmakers. Where were they when Bush and cronies were in attendance?

NOTE:
Was Obama’s multi denominational ceremony representative of American believers? Let’s have a look at the distribution of the 20 religious leaders attending the National Prayer Service, as they relate to their corresponding population segments, in descending order of size:

5 PROTESTANT EVANGELICALS, representing 27% of the US population:
Rev. Sharon Watkins, president, Disciples of Christ in North America
Rev. Andy Stanley, North Point Community Church
Rev. Suzan Johnson-Cook, Believers Christian Fellowship Church
Rev. Cynthia Hale, Ray of Hope Christian Church
Rev. Jim Wallis, Sojourners

7 MAINLINE PROTESTANTS, 21%
Katharine Jefferts-Schori, presiding bishop, Episcopal Church
Rev. John Bryson Chane, Washington Episcopal Bishop
Rev. Samuel Lloyd, dean of the cathedral, Episcopal Church
Canon Carol Wade, cathedral’s precentor
(Note: Episcopalians represent !.3%, but are third richest group)
Rev. Otis Moss Jr., father of pastor, Trinity United Church of Christ
Kirbyjon Caldwell, Windsor Village United Methodist Church
Rev. Wesley Granberg-Michaelson, Reformed Church in America

2 CATHOLICS, 22%
Donald Wuerl, Washington Catholic Archbishop
Rev. Francisco Gonzalez, auxiliary bishop, Washington archdiocese

1 MUSLIM, at 3%
Ingrid Mattson, president, Islamic Society of North America

1 each, HINDU and ORTHODOX, in sum 1.7%
Uma Mysorekar, president, Hindu Temple Society of North America
Archbishop Demetrios, primate, Greek Orthodox Church in America

3 JEWS, at 1.5% (but richest)
Rabbi Jerome Epstein, United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism
Rabbi Haskal Lookstein, Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun
Rabbi David Saperstein, Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism

(Is that AIPAC’s influence extending to America’s Christians?)

How about that corpulent Saddleback creep Rick Warren, reciting a completely forgettable invocation at yesterday’s inauguration?

Unheard by the masses was Episcopal Bishop Gene Robinson’s earlier invocation, which was fathoms deeper than any of these high priests. HBO didn’t air it in their coverage of the Sunday inaugural buildup, but it’s available on Youtube. Here’s the transcript:

A Prayer for the Nation and Our Next President, Barack Obama
(Opening Inaugural Event, Lincoln Memorial, Washington, DC, January 18, 2009)
By The Rt. Rev. V. Gene Robinson,
Episcopal Bishop of New Hampshire

Welcome to Washington! The fun is about to begin, but first, please join me in pausing for a moment, to ask God’s blessing upon our nation and our next president.

O God of our many understandings, we pray that you will…

Bless us with tears – for a world in which over a billion people exist on less than a dollar a day, where young women from many lands are beaten and raped for wanting an education, and thousands die daily from malnutrition, malaria, and AIDS.

Bless us with anger – at discrimination, at home and abroad, against refugees and immigrants, women, people of color, gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people.

Bless us with discomfort – at the easy, simplistic “answers” we’ve preferred to hear from our politicians, instead of the truth, about ourselves and the world, which we need to face if we are going to rise to the challenges of the future.

Bless us with patience – and the knowledge that none of what ails us will be “fixed” anytime soon, and the understanding that our new president is a human being, not a messiah.

Bless us with humility – open to understanding that our own needs must always be balanced with those of the world.

Bless us with freedom from mere tolerance – replacing it with a genuine respect and warm embrace of our differences, and an understanding that in our diversity, we are stronger.

Bless us with compassion and generosity – remembering that every religion’s God judges us by the way we care for the most vulnerable in the human community, whether across town or across the world.

And God, we give you thanks for your child Barack, as he assumes the office of President of the United States.

Give him wisdom beyond his years, and inspire him with Lincoln’s reconciling leadership style, President Kennedy’s ability to enlist our best efforts, and Dr. King’s dream of a nation for ALL the people.

Give him a quiet heart, for our Ship of State needs a steady, calm captain in these times.

Give him stirring words, for we will need to be inspired and motivated to make the personal and common sacrifices necessary to facing the challenges ahead.

Make him color-blind, reminding him of his own words that under his leadership, there will be neither red nor blue states, but the United States.

Help him remember his own oppression as a minority, drawing on that experience of discrimination, that he might seek to change the lives of those who are still its victims.

Give him the strength to find family time and privacy, and help him remember that even though he is president, a father only gets one shot at his daughters’ childhoods.

And please, God, keep him safe. We know we ask too much of our presidents, and we’re asking FAR too much of this one. We know the risk he and his wife are taking for all of us, and we implore you, O good and great God, to keep him safe. Hold him in the palm of your hand – that he might do the work we have called him to do, that he might find joy in this impossible calling, and that in the end, he might lead us as a nation to a place of integrity, prosperity and peace.

AMEN.

Compare and contrast to Rick Warren’s pop Sunday School simpleton-centric tripe. Transcripts have been posted online, discreetly correcting Warren’s 44/43 arithmetic error.

Almighty God, Our Father, everything we see and everything we can’t see exists because of You alone. It all comes from You, it all belongs to You, it all exists for Your glory. History is your story. The Scripture tells us, ‘Hear, oh Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is one’ and You are the compassionate and merciful one and You are loving to everyone You have made.

Now today we rejoice not only in America’s peaceful transfer of power for the 44th time, we celebrate a hinge-point of history with the inauguration of our first African American president of the united states. We are so grateful to live in this land, a land of unequaled possibility, where a a son of an African Immigrant can rise to the highest level of our leadership. And we know today that Dr. King and a great cloud of witnesses are shouting in heaven.

Give to our new president, Barack Obama, the wisdom to lead us with humility, the courage to lead us with integrity, the compassion to lead us with generosity. Bless and protect him, his family, Vice President Biden, the Cabinet and every one of our freely elected leaders.

Help us, oh God, to remember that we are Americans. United not by race or religion or by blood, but to our commitment to freedom and justice for all. When we focus on ourselves, when we fight each other, when we forget you, forgive us.

When we presume that our greatness and our prosperity is ours alone, forgive us. When we fail to treat our fellow human beings and all the earth with the respect that they deserve, forgive us. And as we face these difficult days ahead, may we have a new birth of clarity in our aims, responsibility in our actions, humility in our approaches and civility in our attitudes—even when we differ.

Help us to share, to serve and to seek the common good of all. May all people of good will today join together to work for a more just, a more healthy and a more prosperous nation and a peaceful planet. And may we never forget that one day, all nations, all people will stand accountable before You. We now commit our new president and his wife Michelle and his daughters, Malia and Sasha, into your loving care.

I humbly ask this in the name of the one who changed my life—Yeshua, Esa, Jesus, Jesus—who taught us to pray:

Our father, who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name. Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil, for thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen.

Israel has always been genocidal

Posted on January 14, 2009 by Thomas Mc

Israeli and Palestinian sides
Zionist puppet Hillary Clinton declares she will NOT talk to Hamas. So why the Hell is she going to be Secretary of State, again?

UN President Accuses Israel of Genocide.

Neo-Nazi Israel planning to demolish hospitals in Gaza.

Nazi troops have already massacred over 1,000 people in Gaza.

More Jewish protests against ZioNazi war crimes in Gaza.

Israel preparing to nuke Iran before Bush leaves office next week?

The Bible is a handbook of genocide. After the exodus, God told the Jews to go into the land and drive the natives out, and to kill every man, woman and child who remained. This is beyond dispute, it is right there in the text. So, one must come to one of two conclusions, either God is a genocidal maniac, or the book is a lie written by genocidal maniacs, to excuse their crimes. Either way, Judaism exists because of genocide, and what Israel is doing in Gaza is just a modern recurrence of what the evil they brought to the region over 3,000 years ago. They believe that they are the only people on the planet who matter, and anything they want belongs to them. No wonder the world keeps driving the Jews out.

“In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”
–Martin Luther King, Jr.

Enough. It’s time for a boycott. By Naomi Klein

Excerpts from Thomas McCullock’s Jan 14 notes, thomasmc.com.

ZIONISM = NAZISM !

Posted on December 30, 2008 by Thomas Mc

Happy Hanukkah from Israel “My awareness of the essential nature of Judaism resists the idea of a Jewish state with borders, an army, and a measure of temporal power, no matter how modest. I am afraid of the inner damage Judaism will sustain — especially from the development of a narrow nationalism within our own ranks, against which we have already had to fight strongly, even without a Jewish state.” –Albert Einstein

ISRAEL COMMITS ACT OF WAR AGAINST USA! Israeli Nazis attack boat attempting to deliver medical supplies to Gaza. The boat was in international waters, and carried US Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney! If that isn’t an act of war, I don’t what the hell would be.

Linux forever! Microsoft plans to charge you by the hour for using your own computer.

The auction for Obama’s Senate seat is over, apparently the high bidder was Illinois AG Roland Burris. The Secretary of State has already declared he will refuse to certify the appointment, and the leaders of the Senate have declared they will not seat any appointment by the Governor of Corruption.

Excerpts from Thomas McCullock’s Dec 30 notes, thomasmc.com.

Israel end Palestine Occupation now!

Posted on December 30, 2008 by Eric Verlo

Need some protest slogan ideas for Tuesday’s JUSTICE FOR PALESTINE demonstration in Acacia Park? (4:30-5:30pm)

CSAction offers the following:
Free Palestine / Free Gaza
Justice for Palestine
Right of Return
Stop Apartheid
Judaism Yes, Zionism No
Make PEACE, not war
Stop the Gaza massacre
Stop the Killing
Genocide is not self defense
Massacre is not proportional
Collective Punishment is a War Crime

I would add:
Support the One State Solution
Democracy for all Israeli Citizens
Israel Give Non-Jews Right to Vote
Cease Zionist Apartheid Rule
Zionism = Racism

Holy Land claimants want DNA pedigree

Posted on October 17, 2008 by Eric Verlo

OMG-d. In their continuing effort to rationalize Israel’s right to exist as a European Jewish colonial authority over the lesser Palestinian Semites, Zionists are reconstituting a DNA claim check to redeem their lost Judea. Researchers are hoping to link today’s Israelis via DNA to the forefathers to whom their G-d, so the scripture says, promised the land. Though the scientific sampling is still small, the “proof” thus far is already showing an incredible racist temerity.

Anti-Negroid, anti-Semite, and anti-Goyim.

The following excerpts are from a 1999 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA revealing the intent to differentiate Jewish DNA.

Several lines of evidence support the hypothesis that Diaspora Jews from Europe, Northwest Africa, and the Near East resemble each other more closely than they resemble their non-Jewish neighbors. … The only exception was the Ethiopian Jews, who were affiliated more closely with non-Jewish Ethiopians and other North Africans.

Anti-Negroid
Does this suggest to you that Zionists may be more interested in granting a right-of-return El-Al ticket to white Jews over black? Forget Affirmative Action. They didn’t report the detail that only a handful of Ethiopian “Beta Israel” had yet been surveyed.

Emphasizing that the Beta Israel of Ethiopia were largely only converts to Judaism, fends off another contentious population, the Khazars of Ukraine/Turkey/Kasakhstan who converted during the Middle Ages. Why? It’s disputed that the European, less-Semitic looking Ashkenazi Jews may have originated from Khazaria.

–The graph above positions DNA types in relation to each other. Jewish groups (ASHkenazi, ROMan, North AFrican, KURdish, Near EAstern, YEMenite, and Ethiopian EtJ) are marked with triangles. Note the proximity of the non-Jewish PALestinian and SYRian. Likewise the Turk. (Algebra students will note the locations are plotted according to two coordinates, out of 18 possible lines.)

Let’s revisit the aim of the 1999 study. To bolster the claim of modern Jews to the ancient lands of Judea, required this hypothesis:

…a major portion of NRY biallelic diversity present in most of the contemporary Jewish communities surveyed here traces to a common Middle Eastern source population several thousand years ago.

This places the Jewish Peoples at the scene of the original land grant. But hark, the 1999 study came to an additional conclusion, less welcome, but significant enough to become the study’s vexing title:

Jewish and Middle Eastern non-Jewish populations share a common pool of Y-chromosome biallelic haplotypes

The possibility has been oft suggested by “Anti-Semites” of course, that the pre-1948 inhabitants of Palestine could be more closely related to the original Chosen People, than the prodigal European Jews. In lieu of a “Diaspora,” many of the original Israelites might more pragmatically have abandoned Judaism in order to assimilate with their conquerors. In other words, the Palestinians and Syrians of today might have a genetic claim to match their hereditary claim to ownership of the farms and orchards inhabited over a continuum of millennia.

Anti-Semitic
Semantics, like DNA, accord the inhabitants of the Middle East a common heritage. “Semites” refer to the Semitic people, not just the Hebrew.

The 1999 study was quick to put qualifiers on the direction in which the findings appeared to be leading:

The extremely close affinity of Jewish and non-Jewish Middle Eastern populations observed here supports the hypothesis of a common Middle Eastern origin. Of the Middle Eastern populations included in this study, only the Syrian and Palestinian samples mapped within the central cluster of Jewish populations. Continued studies of variation in larger samples, additional populations, and at other loci are needed to confirm our inferences as well as to clarify the affinities of Jewish and Middle Eastern Arab populations.

Imagine a South African Boer using such evidence to lay claim to the Transvaal, without of course wanting to suggest a common heritage with native Africans. Note too, here the researchers will point out that additional data is needed, whereas no such footnote accompanied their dismissal of the Ethiopian Jews.

Regardless, finding affinities between the Semitic peoples does not serve a Jewish state, created from land seized from Palestinians, and growing by the acquisition of more. What to do about this troublesome suggestion? Discredit the work of the past:

A number of earlier studies found evidence for Middle Eastern affinities of Jewish genes; however, results have depended to a great extent on which loci were being compared, possibly because of the confounding effects of selection. Although the NRY tends to behave as a single genetic locus, the DNA results presented here are less likely to be biased by selective effects.

Obfuscate with genetic drift, gene flow, admixture and ancestry.

At the most basic level, the genetic distances observed among Jewish and non-Jewish populations can be interpreted as reflecting common ancestry, genetic drift, and gene flow. The latter two processes will tend to increase genetic distances among Jewish populations, whereas admixture will also have the effect of decreasing genetic distances between Jewish and non-Jewish populations. Our results suggest that common ancestry is the major determinant of the genetic distances observed among Jewish communities, with admixture playing a secondary role.

And emphasize the insufficient breadth of this survey:

Although some mtDNA studies suggest close affinities of Jewish and Middle Eastern populations, comprehensive comparisons of mtDNA variation in Jewish and neighboring non-Jewish populations are not yet available.

But don’t let that hinder your overreaching premise:

The results support the hypothesis that the paternal gene pools of Jewish communities from Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East descended from a common Middle Eastern ancestral population,

And try a dose of straight-speak about your assumptions, lest scientists notice you pretend to have proven your assertion. In particular that you are overriding the DNA processes of drift, flow and admixture with assumptions of “ancestry.”

A Middle Eastern origin of the Jewish gene pool is generally assumed because of the detailed documentation of Jewish history and religion. There are not many genetic studies that have attempted to infer the genetic relationships among Diaspora Jews and non-Jewish Middle Eastern populations.

Anti-Goyim
Finally, note the problem of tracing DNA through paternal lines. Although in Judaism the priesthood is traced through men, membership is matrilineal. Drawing some conclusions requires the need for approximation, in particular for the Ashkenazi Jews of Europe.

To address the degree to which paternal gene flow may have affected the Jewish gene pool, we estimated approximate admixture levels in our Jewish samples from Europe. This question remains unresolved in particular for the Ashkenazi community. Our results indicated a relatively minor contribution of European Y chromosomes to the Ashkenazim.

Ashkenazi Jews are the progenitors of the Jewish populations who came to America, coming from Europe and before that Central Europe. In contrast to the Sephardic Jews of Southern Europe and the Mizrahi Jews of the Middle East, the Ashkenazi were the primary community behind Zionism, who lobbied the United Nations to legitimize the creation of a Jewish nation of Israel. DNA researchers are as motivated to link the Ashkenazi to Middle Eastern origin as they are to break their connections to Eastern Europe and the Caucasus.

Some genetic studies suggest that Jewish populations show substantial non-Jewish admixture and the occurrence of mass conversion of non-Jews to Judaism. In contrast, other research points to considerably greater genetic similarity among Jewish communities with only slight gene flow from their respective host populations. Furthermore, it has been demonstrated that the degree of genetic similarity among Jewish communities and between Jewish and non-Jewish populations depends on the particular locus that is being investigated. This observation raises the possibility that variation associated with a given locus has been influenced by natural selection.

Subsequent genetic studies are chipping away at the original construct. Here’s a 2003 study: Multiple origins of Ashkenazi Levites: Y chromosome evidence for both Near Eastern and European ancestries.

Comparisons with other Jewish and non-Jewish groups suggest that a founding event, probably involving one or very few European men occurring at a time close to the initial formation and settlement of the Ashkenazi community, is the most likely explanation for the presence of this distinctive haplogroup found today in >50% of Ashkenazi Levites.

A 2004 study published in the European Journal of Human Genetics further explores the founder effect, opening the door to the influence of the Khazars: Y chromosome evidence for a founder effect in Ashkenazi Jews.

Recent genetic studies, based on Y chromosome polymorphic markers, showed that Ashkenazi Jews are more closely related to other Jewish and Middle Eastern groups than to their host populations in Europe. However, Ashkenazim have an elevated frequency of R-M17, the dominant Y chromosome haplogroup in Eastern Europeans, suggesting possible gene flow. In the present study of 495 Y chromosomes of Ashkenazim, 57 (11.5%) were found to belong to R-M17. Detailed analyses of haplotype structure, diversity and geographic distribution suggest a founder effect for this haplogroup, introduced at an early stage into the evolving Ashkenazi community in Europe. R-M17 chromosomes in Ashkenazim may represent vestiges of the mysterious Khazars.

And a 2006 study: The matrilineal ancestry of Ashkenazi Jewry: portrait of a recent founder event.

Both the extent and location of the maternal ancestral deme from which the Ashkenazi Jewry arose remain obscure. Here, using complete sequences of the maternally inherited mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), we show that close to one-half of Ashkenazi Jews, estimated at 8,000,000 people, can be traced back to only 4 women carrying distinct mtDNAs that are virtually absent in other populations, with the important exception of low frequencies among non-Ashkenazi Jews. We conclude that four founding mtDNAs, likely of Near Eastern ancestry, underwent major expansion(s) in Europe within the past millennium.

A 2008 study: Counting the founders: the matrilineal genetic ancestry of the Jewish Diaspora.

Unlike the previously reported pattern observed among Ashkenazi Jews, the numerically major portion of the non-Ashkenazi Jews, currently estimated at 5 million people and comprised of the Moroccan, Iraqi, Iranian and Iberian Exile Jewish communities showed no evidence for a narrow founder effect,

Shlomo Sand and shattering a national mythology

Posted on October 9, 2008 by Tony Logan

Shattering a ‘national mythology’ Shlomo Sand’s book is titled “When and How the Jewish People Was Invented?” and you probably will not find it stacked up on tables for sale in Barnes and Noble or Borders. I don’t expect it to be readily available for Colorado Springs librarian patrons either. Ask for it though.

The Haaretz interview:

Actually, most of your book does not deal with the invention of the Jewish people by modern Jewish nationalism, but rather with the question of where the Jews come from.

Sand: “My initial intention was to take certain kinds of modern historiographic materials and examine how they invented the ‘figment’ of the Jewish people. But when I began to confront the historiographic sources, I suddenly found contradictions. And then that urged me on: I started to work, without knowing where I would end up. I took primary sources and I tried to examine authors’ references in the ancient period – what they wrote about conversion.”

Experts on the history of the Jewish people say you are dealing with subjects about which you have no understanding and are basing yourself on works that you can’t read in the original.

“It is true that I am an historian of France and Europe, and not of the ancient period. I knew that the moment I would start dealing with early periods like these, I would be exposed to scathing criticism by historians who specialize in those areas. But I said to myself that I can’t stay just with modern historiographic material without examining the facts it describes. Had I not done this myself, it would have been necessary to have waited for an entire generation. Had I continued to deal with France, perhaps I would have been given chairs at the university and provincial glory. But I decided to relinquish the glory.”

Inventing the Diaspora

“After being forcibly exiled from their land, the people remained faithful to it throughout their Dispersion and never ceased to pray and hope for their return to it and for the restoration in it of their political freedom” – thus states the preamble to the Israeli Declaration of Independence. This is also the quotation that opens the third chapter of Sand’s book, entitled “The Invention of the Diaspora.” Sand argues that the Jewish people’s exile from its land never happened.

“The supreme paradigm of exile was needed in order to construct a long-range memory in which an imagined and exiled nation-race was posited as the direct continuation of ‘the people of the Bible’ that preceded it,” Sand explains. Under the influence of other historians who have dealt with the same issue in recent years, he argues that the exile of the Jewish people is originally a Christian myth that depicted that event as divine punishment imposed on the Jews for having rejected the Christian gospel.

“I started looking in research studies about the exile from the land – a constitutive event in Jewish history, almost like the Holocaust. But to my astonishment I discovered that it has no literature. The reason is that no one exiled the people of the country. The Romans did not exile peoples and they could not have done so even if they had wanted to. They did not have trains and trucks to deport entire populations. That kind of logistics did not exist until the 20th century. From this, in effect, the whole book was born: in the realization that Judaic society was not dispersed and was not exiled.”

If the people was not exiled, are you saying that in fact the real descendants of the inhabitants of the Kingdom of Judah are the Palestinians?

“No population remains pure over a period of thousands of years. But the chances that the Palestinians are descendants of the ancient Judaic people are much greater than the chances that you or I are its descendents. The first Zionists, up until the Arab Revolt [1936-9], knew that there had been no exiling, and that the Palestinians were descended from the inhabitants of the land. They knew that farmers don’t leave until they are expelled. Even Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, the second president of the State of Israel, wrote in 1929 that, ‘the vast majority of the peasant farmers do not have their origins in the Arab conquerors, but rather, before then, in the Jewish farmers who were numerous and a majority in the building of the land.'”

And how did millions of Jews appear around the Mediterranean Sea?

“The people did not spread, but the Jewish religion spread. Judaism was a converting religion. Contrary to popular opinion, in early Judaism there was a great thirst to convert others. The Hasmoneans were the first to begin to produce large numbers of Jews through mass conversion, under the influence of Hellenism. The conversions between the Hasmonean Revolt and Bar Kochba’s rebellion are what prepared the ground for the subsequent, wide-spread dissemination of Christianity. After the victory of Christianity in the fourth century, the momentum of conversion was stopped in the Christian world, and there was a steep drop in the number of Jews. Presumably many of the Jews who appeared around the Mediterranean became Christians. But then Judaism started to permeate other regions – pagan regions, for example, such as Yemen and North Africa. Had Judaism not continued to advance at that stage and had it not continued to convert people in the pagan world, we would have remained a completely marginal religion, if we survived at all.”

How did you come to the conclusion that the Jews of North Africa were originally Berbers who converted?

“I asked myself how such large Jewish communities appeared in Spain. And then I saw that Tariq ibn Ziyad, the supreme commander of the Muslims who conquered Spain, was a Berber, and most of his soldiers were Berbers. Dahia al-Kahina’s Jewish Berber kingdom had been defeated only 15 years earlier. And the truth is there are a number of Christian sources that say many of the conquerors of Spain were Jewish converts. The deep-rooted source of the large Jewish community in Spain was those Berber soldiers who converted to Judaism.”

Sand argues that the most crucial demographic addition to the Jewish population of the world came in the wake of the conversion of the kingdom of Khazaria – a huge empire that arose in the Middle Ages on the steppes along the Volga River, which at its height ruled over an area that stretched from the Georgia of today to Kiev. In the eighth century, the kings of the Khazars adopted the Jewish religion and made Hebrew the written language of the kingdom. From the 10th century the kingdom weakened; in the 13th century is was utterly defeated by Mongol invaders, and the fate of its Jewish inhabitants remains unclear.

Sand revives the hypothesis, which was already suggested by historians in the 19th and 20th centuries, according to which the Judaized Khazars constituted the main origins of the Jewish communities in Eastern Europe.

“At the beginning of the 20th century there is a tremendous concentration of Jews in Eastern Europe – three million Jews in Poland alone,” he says. “The Zionist historiography claims that their origins are in the earlier Jewish community in Germany, but they do not succeed in explaining how a small number of Jews who came from Mainz and Worms could have founded the Yiddish people of Eastern Europe. The Jews of Eastern Europe are a mixture of Khazars and Slavs who were pushed eastward.”

If the Jews of Eastern Europe did not come from Germany, why did they speak Yiddish, which is a Germanic language?

“The Jews were a class of people dependent on the German bourgeoisie in the East, and thus they adopted German words. Here I base myself on the research of linguist Paul Wechsler of Tel Aviv University, who has demonstrated that there is no etymological connection between the German Jewish language of the Middle Ages and Yiddish. As far back as 1828, the Ribal (Rabbi Isaac Ber Levinson) said that the ancient language of the Jews was not Yiddish. Even Ben Zion Dinur, the father of Israeli historiography, was not hesitant about describing the Khazars as the origin of the Jews in Eastern Europe, and describes Khazaria as ‘the mother of the diasporas’ in Eastern Europe. But more or less since 1967, anyone who talks about the Khazars as the ancestors of the Jews of Eastern Europe is considered naive and moonstruck.”

Why do you think the idea of the Khazar origins is so threatening?

“It is clear that the fear is of an undermining of the historic right to the land. The revelation that the Jews are not from Judea would ostensibly knock the legitimacy for our being here out from under us. Since the beginning of the period of decolonization, settlers have no longer been able to say simply: ‘We came, we won and now we are here’ the way the Americans, the whites in South Africa and the Australians said. There is a very deep fear that doubt will be cast on our right to exist.”

Is there no justification for this fear?

“No. I don’t think that the historical myth of the exile and the wanderings is the source of the legitimization for me being here, and therefore I don’t mind believing that I am Khazar in my origins. I am not afraid of the undermining of our existence, because I think that the character of the State of Israel undermines it in a much more serious way. What would constitute the basis for our existence here is not mythological historical right, but rather would be for us to start to establish an open society here of all Israeli citizens.”

In effect you are saying that there is no such thing as a Jewish people.

“I don’t recognize an international people. I recognize ‘the Yiddish people’ that existed in Eastern Europe, which though it is not a nation can be seen as a Yiddishist civilization with a modern popular culture. I think that Jewish nationalism grew up in the context of this ‘Yiddish people.’ I also recognize the existence of an Israeli people, and do not deny its right to sovereignty. But Zionism and also Arab nationalism over the years are not prepared to recognize it.

“From the perspective of Zionism, this country does not belong to its citizens, but rather to the Jewish people. I recognize one definition of a nation: a group of people that wants to live in sovereignty over itself. But most of the Jews in the world have no desire to live in the State of Israel, even though nothing is preventing them from doing so. Therefore, they cannot be seen as a nation.”

What is so dangerous about Jews imagining that they belong to one people? Why is this bad?

“In the Israeli discourse about roots there is a degree of perversion. This is an ethnocentric, biological, genetic discourse. But Israel has no existence as a Jewish state: If Israel does not develop and become an open, multicultural society we will have a Kosovo in the Galilee. The consciousness concerning the right to this place must be more flexible and varied, and if I have contributed with my book to the likelihood that I and my children will be able to live with the others here in this country in a more egalitarian situation – I will have done my bit.

“We must begin to work hard to transform our place into an Israeli republic where ethnic origin, as well as faith, will not be relevant in the eyes of the law. Anyone who is acquainted with the young elites of the Israeli Arab community can see that they will not agree to live in a country that declares it is not theirs. If I were a Palestinian I would rebel against a state like that, but even as an Israeli I am rebelling against it.”

The question is whether for those conclusions you had to go as far as the Kingdom of the Khazars.

“I am not hiding the fact that it is very distressing for me to live in a society in which the nationalist principles that guide it are dangerous, and that this distress has served as a motive in my work. I am a citizen of this country, but I am also a historian and as a historian it is my duty to write history and examine texts. This is what I have done.”

If the myth of Zionism is one of the Jewish people that returned to its land from exile, what will be the myth of the country you envision?

“To my mind, a myth about the future is better than introverted mythologies of the past. For the Americans, and today for the Europeans as well, what justifies the existence of the nation is a future promise of an open, progressive and prosperous society. The Israeli materials do exist, but it is necessary to add, for example, pan-Israeli holidays. To decrease the number of memorial days a bit and to add days that are dedicated to the future. But also, for example, to add an hour in memory of the Nakba [literally, the “catastrophe” – the Palestinian term for what happened when Israel was established], between Memorial Day and Independence Day.”

The Jewish Nation

Posted on October 9, 2008 by Tony Logan

Yes, there has already been the establishment of ‘a Jewish nation’ and ‘Jewish Homeland’ since the Roman soldiers destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem after its siege in 70 AD.
khazaria kingdom

Most Christian Zionists (like Joseph Biden or Joe Lieberman, for examples) remain rather ignorant of this Jewish history though. The ‘Jewish Homeland’ was established not in Palestine, but in an area between the Black and Caspian seas, just north of what is today’s far Eastern Turkey and far Western Iran. Surprise! Not Palestine at all.

Like the Roman Emperor Constantine who made Christianity today’s dominant religion, Emperor Bulan of Khazaria made Judaism the state religion in this ‘Jewish Nation’ 600 plus years after the sacking of Jerusalem by the Romans. Didn’t know anything about that? Well, it does kind of conflict with today’s mythology around Israel, does it not?

Some might not want you to know much about real Jewish history, including Zionist Jews themselves! See this link for some information about Khazaria The fact that this area of Khazaria was right next to Persia might help explain some of the current President of Iran’s (Ahmadinejad) differing ideas about the origins of the Jewish people, perhaps?

AIPAC, Still in bed with anti-semite McCain…

Posted on June 3, 2008 by Brother Jonah

The Wreligious Wrong who mis-advise Bush and now McCain have long been clear in their statements that the reason they back the State of Israel is because they believe that it will bring on the Apocalypse, and that the first people to be eaten by The Beast will be the Nation of Israel.

Mossad is one of the more efficient ~~Assassination Bureaux~~ Intelligence agencies in the world today, surely they know about this.

So many of the signatories to the PNAC are (technically) Jews that The Fat Stupid One (the one who tells the DittoHeads what they should say, do and believe) calls the very term “NeoCon” a Liberal Code Word for “Jew-boy” and it’s a form of hate speech.

That in itself is odd, that they would willingly align themselves with people who tell them (on the one hand) (and everybody else too) that they’re setting the Jewish State up for “the Big Fall” ushering in the End of Days… and on the OTHER hand boldly make plans for at least another century (pnaC) of their American (pnAc) dominance of the world, including the State of Israel.

That would be bad enough, it would send up so many red flags for me, personally, that I would see nothing but a sea of red cloth.

Then, even after it’s revealed that McSame is one of the Signatories, AND even though one of the more blatant and arrogant statements in the PNAC is that a plague tailor-made to strike Semitic peoples should be unleashed in the Arabian Peninsula…

Which is… oh, let me see… Oh, Yeah, where the State of Israel is physically located….

They STILL endorse McCain and his racist policies.

Do these jackasses believe for an instant that these Neo-Nazi freaks actually will keep them from going into the ovens, by licking their jackboots for them, selling them the very lives of their entire people?
That they somehow developed a love for those Jews who “go along to get along”?

What of their profession of either Christianity or Judaism? How do they think taking part in what’s planned to be the extermination of their families is going to play with G-d?

There’s a “Camp word” for their kind, LagerKapo. The ones who assisted the Nazis in the Final Solution.

Worse than the very worst of the Snitch-Bitch Warden’s Boy types in prisons around the world. The lowest level of Treason one can possibly attain.

And now the AIPAC is striving for that same “honor”…

Betrayus redux

Posted on March 16, 2008 by Brother Jonah

So, now, the one general Bush could find willing to be his bag-man and “take one for the Team” is apparently not happy taking one for the Team, and taking another one for the Team, and then taking another one…

Apparently, the Surge is not working as splendiferously as Mr Bush lies to us. It’s gotten so bad the trained liars are circumventing the story by screaming about shit that means absolutely nothing, but does keep our minds off the fact that the situation in Iraq sucks much dog. And now even Petraeus is saying it.

The latest “scandal! Outrage! there must be Blood shed!” is about a presidential candidates preacher saying that (gasp!) there’s RACISM IN AMERICA!

Hard to follow an act like that. WC Fields or Foy or one of those Last of the Vaudevilleans, great actors, said you should never try to follow an act involving animals or children. I guess the Chimp and his ministry of Lies kinda qualify as both.

But the slaughter goes on… sure, you can keep the boot heel firmly on the necks of the conquered, provided you’re willing to spend the economy of your entire nation to do it.

Then one day, you have to let up, you can’t keep the boot heel on the neck forever. Physical and logistical impossibility.

But it’s not really as sad and pathetic as it seems…

actually, it’s much much worse…

Maybe that’s part of the reason Bush is willing to put the already overstretched military, most of the combat-ready brigades are already in the line of fire, in the line of Further and More intense Fire with his really stupid idea to jump a nation with 5 times the population of the nation they can’t govern effectively.

Some of the Military in town here have called this “sedition” to say things like that.

The actual charge of sedition is to teach the violent overthrow of the government and laws of the united states.

George Bush has not only TAUGHT this doctrine, he and his Gang of Thugs have accomplished it. And put in place a system wherein they might be able to make their Terroristic Dictatorship permanent.

Soldiers and Airmen read this, I know because when I first looked for the blog (not knowing the name) I googled “camp casey colorado springs” and got a discussion forum for soldiers, who were saying that we are seditious.

Fellas, your Commander in Thief is the one committing sedition. You guys swore the same oath I did, and incidentally, the one Bush swore once when he joined the National Guard and twice as POTUS, to uphold and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign AND Domestic. That would be the same Constitution he and his group of thugs Openly Declared they would eliminate, by whatever means they considered necessary. The one Bush called “just a piece of goddamned paper” in one of his Imperial Hissie Fits when he was informed that the actions he was proposing were unconstitutional.

He wants to use you as instruments of his Imperial Will, and is willing to make a burnt offering of YOUR blood in the sands of Arabia, but, if you notice, not HIS blood.

To deny this, or denounce this, you first have to read it. Some of your officers will want to suppress this idea by mocking it into disappearing. Or use your muscle to Threaten it into disappearing.

The Romans tried that with Judaism and Christianity.

How’d that work out for y’all?

And I say that because you are the heirs to that empire. Have fun trying to destroy an idea.

You’ll drive yourselves mad trying.

Ask your General with the name of a Roman Legionnaire.

Ask your president whose foreign policy is an exact copy of that offered by Emperor Caligula “Let them hate, so long as they Fear”.

Not all of the Jewish faith are Zionists who desire the US to attack Iran

Posted on September 28, 2007 by Tony Logan

Meeting between Orthodox Jewish leaders and the President of Iran, New York City, September 23, 2007

Rabbi Yisroel Dovid Weiss, spokesman of Neturei Karta International, issued the following statement on the eve of the group’s meeting with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

“It is always our pleasure to visit with President Ahmadinejad. This will be the third such meeting, in addition to our many visits to Iran in the past. We have each time emphasized to the Iranian leadership that, despite media hysteria and the statements of some misinformed Jews, we have found the Iranian people and their leaders to be friendly and respectful.”

“Likewise, although we as Jews are not to be involved in politics, (According to Jewish law, Jewish people are required to be loyal citizens to the countries wherein they reside), We have found the Iranian President to be a deeply religious man, dedicated to a peaceful world, based on mutual respect, fairness and dialogue.”

“Judaism seeks peace. Unfortunately, there are some Jews today, influenced by the barely century old, philosophy of Zionism, who feel that the proper Jewish response to enemies, be they real or fantasized, is aggression and calls for violence and unfortunately attempts to drag other nations down the path of war.”

“It as sad that so few have actually attempted to speak to the Iranian President or seek the true opinion of Iranian Jewry who live in peace and practice their faith throughout that nation. We have met this man who has demonstrated time and again that he is sincerely interested in the well being of Iran’s Jewish community and has deep respect for world Jewry and their Torah faith, The Zionist attempt to socially isolate this man and his people is immoral and disastrous”

“Zionism is antithetical to Torah beliefs. It believes in creating our own sovereign entity which is expressly forbidden due to the Divine decree of exile. This ideology leads to aggression against nations and is incarnated in the State of “Israel”. This State continually oppresses other people in the name of Judaism and the entire Jewish people. This movement has exacerbated anti Semitism throughout the world. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad understands this distinction between traditional Judaism and Zionist distortion.”

“We view our approach to Iran as a model for all Jews and all mankind. The Torah is the Almighty’s blueprint of mercy and justice for all creation. We have followed this modal in our dealings with the Iranian President and found in him an individual dedicated to these same ideals. There is much to be gained by talking and listening and everything to be lost by raising the rhetoric in the direction of war.” Â The grave tragedy of our era is the inordinate power garnered by Zionism, whose acceptance of force as the only means to reconcile conflicts, has influenced some to abandon Torah fundamentals. We hope and pray that they too will adopt the traditional Jewish approach of dialogue, respect and reconciliation.”

“War is a horrible thing. The dark clouds of a future conflict are now on the horizon in the Middle East. Torah Jewry hopes and prays that this may yet be averted.”

In conclusion says Rabbi Weiss, “Out of great respect to the Iranian Nation and their leadership we proudly welcome the Honorable President Ahmadinejad to New York, WELCOME!”

——————————————————————————–

President Ahmadinejad meets Jewish rabbis in New York

Posted on September 27, 2007 by Tony Logan

President Ahmadinejad meets Jewish rabbis in New York. Did you miss seeing this article in The Gazette and/or on the national network news? Here it is on World Network News if you follow the link and scroll down a notch. He also met with Pacifist Christian leaders from The Friends, Mennonites, and other denominations, too.

Here is the text of the coverage…

President Ahmadinejad meets Jewish rabbis in New York
PRESIDENT – Thu, 27 Sep 07

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad Monday afternoon met with a group of Jewish rabbis who gave him a silver grail as a sign of friendship.

The president is currently in New York to address the United Nations General Assembly.

The rabbis carried a placard which read, “I am Jewish not a Zionist.”

A senior rabbi of the group said that they considered the visit to New York of President Ahmadinejad as an exceptional opportunity and would never forget it.

He referred to the Iranian president as a person who made a distinction between Jews and Zionists.

“You understand us and make a distinction between the violent behavior of Zionists and the religious beliefs of Jews,” said the senior rabbi who called President Ahmadinejad “a pious man who is seeking to restore peace in the world and has humanitarian plans.” Appreciating the rabbis for their gift, President Ahmadinejad said he was happy to visit them.

“All people in the world have now understood that Judaism is different from Zionism,” said the president.

He added, “Zionists are a political group looking for taking advantage of the opportunities while Jews are the followers of the Moses who promoted peace and friendship.”

President Ahmadinejad stressed that there was no disagreement between the followers of Judaism, Christianity and Islam as they all pray the same God and are brothers.

The president said the future belongs to the monotheist faiths and that liars would be eliminated.

He stressed that all followers of divine faiths were responsible to promote monotheism and defend peace, justice and brotherhood.

From http://www.SpideredNews.com

damn I can’t think of a good title

Posted on January 5, 2007 by Brother Jonah

But I was just checking my yahoo mail. Nothing special, every day I get good stuff to ridicule, applaud, or just plain run through the streets singing “man, check out what those freak peckerheads did THIS time”
which one first which…hhmmmmm
Ok the first one is on the yahell news ticker about bush overhauls iraq team just before the Big Announcement.
now I am putting some of my own words on the title, because they sound better.
One may well ask oneself “Self, what do they mean “overhaul”? are they sending the team to get their brakes checked? Maybe fitting themselves for those prison uniforms that are loosely based on overalls? (one can only hope)

but of course there is the teaser, almost obligatory, that Mr Bonzo ooops I mean Bush is going to unveil his new plan for the New Direction in Iraq. Apparently the media whores have this idea that all of America, left right and in the middle, (and the guy in the rear, burned his driver’s license, but that’s another story) are actually awaiting and anticipating and also anxiously (sorry, got on a roll with the A) but we are sitting on the edge of our seats EXPECTING the trained Chimp to come up with a plan.

Ummmm….. in light of his recent “leadership” experience, I’m not quite convinced that he will. I mean, call me a doubter or a nay-sayer or whatever but I just can’t muster much confidence and optimism.

But if you don’t have any other game plan, fake it and maybe nobody will notice that you are packing your bags to split the country. That’s called “spin”. But apparently this story has been spun so long it should be called a dreidel.
For those not familiar with Judaism that is a sort of a top kids play with and also has mystical meanings.

Then the other is some stock market news, actually an online broker publishing what he hopes I will believe enough to buy into his crazy scheme. I guess I used keywords like capitalism and Stocks and Bonds and money grubbing greedheads enough to make some automated spam program think I was actually interested in sending my money down the hole.

But the header on it was Applications rise greeted as positive sign by investors….

ok. What investors? By applications of course they mean job applications. Which means large unemployment.
and thus less inflation. And more people willing to work for lower wages.

See, to these kids, anything is positive investment news. A flood in China? Buy stock in companies that make sandbags… Nuclear war imminent? buy companies that make survivalist crap to supply your worthless bunker…
Massive cases of people dropping dead of bird flu? Invest in coffin manufacturers. A rise in the Death Penalty? Buy companies that make ropes and gallows. Ok I’ll stop, before giving myself a complex.

The good news is that we can still see the signs. You are still able to read what I write, so neither of us is in jail…. yet.

Meet you at the barricades.

Jews for Allah might be for you!

Posted on November 23, 2006 by Tony Logan

Tired of intolerant religion of the Dobson/ Haggard type? There are some alternatives out there. You might consider the Unitarians, Friends, Mennonites, or even Jews for Allah! Hey don’t laugh. I have a good friend that took a wrong turn in life and became a Jew for Jesus for a while. If so many Jews can join the Christian religion that persecuted the Jewish people for centuries, certainly some might find a yet more hospitable environment within Islam.

Funny though, that there is no Muslims for Moses organization that I know of. If there were, then all the Palestinian refugees could convert to Judaism and reenter their Homeland, Pales… uh that would then be Israel.. Seems like converting others to their faith is not the strongpoint of the Jewish religion. It’s an intolerant religion it might seem. And now that I think of it, nobody has everr accused Moses of being like Jesus, say… Can you imagine Moses turning the other cheek? I can’t.

Oh well, what do I know or understand of theology, me being a nonbeliever and all? But you of the Jewish faith, you might want to check out Jews for Allah

Seriously. Don’t tell us it’s not your tribe. Go check them out.

The Golden Rule in world religions

Posted on September 26, 2006 by Eric Verlo

What kind of christianity is it we’re practicing with our tortures and war?

Islam 622 AD	No one of you is a believer until he desires for his brother that which he desires for himself. Sunnah
Christianity 27 AD	Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Luke 6:31
Taoism 200 BC	Regard your neighbor’s gain as your gain, and your neighbor’s loss as your own loss. Tai Shang Kan Yin P’ien
Confucianism 500 BC	Do not do to others what you would not like yourself. Then there will be no resentment against you, either in the family or in the state. Analects 12:2
Zoroastrianism 600 BC	That nature alone is good which refrains from doing another whatsoever is not good for itself. Dadisten-I-dinik, 94,5
Buddhism 600 BC	Hurt not others in ways that you yourself would find hurtful. Udana-Varga 5,1
Judaism 1300 BC	What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellowman. This is the entire Law; all the rest is commentary. Talmud, Shabbat 3id
Hinduism 1500 BC	This is the sum of duty; do naught onto others what you would not have them do unto you. Mahabharata 5,1517

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