Israel attacks Syria! Surely Syria will be accorded the right to defend itself

It’s the pretext Israel uses whenever it strikes Gaza or Lebanon or European cafes or US ships: the right to defend itself. In fact the right to do it preemptively is how Israel justifies bombing Iran or assassinating Iranian scientists. So where do the rights of others begin? Has not Syria a right to defend her lands and people against this unprovoked attack? Is Israel so cynical to pretend it doesn’t have to declare war on its neighbors because it shares “most belligerent status” with all of them? –even, let’s add, with half its citizens. Of course the US stands with Israel, they share a foreign policy of illegal, preemptive, and/or covert war. No doubt Israel has already calculated that Syria is in no position to retaliate. All Western powers knwo enough to only strike the defenseless. Apparently Israel has grown impatient with the Western-backed attempted overthrow of strongman Assad and fears the astroturf public support will wane before regime change is achieved. Assassination, covert coups, wars of aggression, used to be illegal.

What’s kosher for the goose should be halal for the gander

If Israel can threaten to attack Iran, without drawing the unanimous rebuke of the international community, then it follows Iran cannot be criticized for warning of its imperative to make a preemptive strike. Except that both would be illegal, the United States being the reigning serial aggressor at large. Or maybe you’re of the opinion that Israel can have 200 nuclear weapons and Iran can’t have one, or that if US and Israeli agents detonate bombs in Iran it’s not terrorism.

Mitt Romney trips upon brilliant foreign policy idea, gives Israel’s plan to attack Iran an idiot’s stamp of approval.

Monty Python TwitOn the heels of making A TWIT of himself in London, self-caricaturized Romneyshambles, GOP presidential foil-candidate Mitt Romney traipsed over to Israel and depth-charged their bellicose policy of menacing Iran with continuous threats of preemptive attack by proclaiming his “respect” for it! Then he mistook the capitol of Israel for Jerusalem in the Palestinian occupied territories!
 
American billionaires aren’t underwriting Mitt Romney’s campaign because they think he can be president. They don’t need him. Pro- corporate Barack Obama is already their internationally-populist figurehead. The money the oligarchs are pouring into Election 2012 is to convince a post-hope public that voting still matters. To ease voter buy-in the electoral decision is being made easy: choose smart versus stupid. Barnum dictates you can’t underestimate the American public, but Romney’s lack of political sense may out-dumb common wisdom.
 
UPDATE: What did Romney do next? He praised the Israelis for being more economically successful than the Palestinian neighbors they’d dispossessed, crediting the stereotypical Jewish culture! He closed his standup tour by deliberately soliciting foreign campaign contributions.

If an Israeli preemptive strike against a perceived threat would be legal…

If preemptive war was not against international law, wouldn’t Iran have a good case to launch a preemptive strike on Israel, with all the threats Israel and the US are making against Iran? And while the USG deliberates about how difficult hitting Iranian sites would be, how Iran’s infrastructure is distributed over such a broad expanse, etc, the same cannot be said for not-yet-Greater-Israel. If Western leaders really feared a similarly-lawless Iran, they’d be scrambling to take Israel’s 200+ nuclear arsenal into safekeeping for fear it be set off like a radioactive powder keg. How absolutely shameless to demonize Iran and at the same time count on Iran’s superior morality not to smite its truly corrupt tormentors.

Jeanne Assam, rogue private security shooter, friend of George W Bush, to be honored in Colo. Springs for being gay

That’s it, my romance with the local GLBT community is over. Yes I had some qualms when my fey friends leaned hard on Gay Marriage when it was made a wedge issue in the election of 2004. Yes I rebuffed the campaign against Don’t Ask Don’t Tell because it implicitly encouraged military service in a time of US war crime. But I remained in the fold because I was reminded that equal rights for gays and lesbians are fundamental to the embrace of universal equality. Now my humanitarian tolerance is being tested by having to extend equality to moral-idiocy. Today I received an invitation to a GLBTA gala honoring former Colorado Springs lesbian Jeanne Assam, the most famous lesbian they could tap apparently. Famous for what? The name rang a bell. Assam was the disgraced police officer, redeemed New Life Church security volunteer, who preempted a presumed massacre by a teen abused-churchgoer come home to roost. He was bent on an armed rampage, but does that excuse Assam shooting him from a concealed position, without even an attempt at apprehension? Local GLBTA leaders think it does apparently, and maybe it’s no surprise then that they chose this photo to promote the event. Now I admit, next to preemptive war criminal George W. Bush, Jeanne Assam is an angel, even in sexuality-irrelevant Officer Unfriendly Ray-bans. But I say it’s time local GLBTA leaders give thought to showing equal consideration for the people of conscience community.

American Nazis get fewer recruits

Congratulations to Norway for booting the Israeli weapons program from Norwegian deep water testing facilities. Norway declared last week that German-manufactured submarines destined for Israel would not be permitted to use its submarine base on the southern coast, on account of the ongoing Israeli military aggressions against Palestine and Lebanon. No mention of restrictions against US weapons heading for American war zones.

Not only does Israel have a nuclear arsenal estimated to exceed 200 warheads, they have submarines to launch them from anywhere in the world. Israel is the single nuclear power in the Middle East, now the rogue preemptive warrior has a nuclear reach beyond the purported aspirations of terrorists, alleged.

So Norway has imposed a stumbling block on Israel’s international war plans, but the impediment is merely symbolic in the face of America’s unhindered state terror program. Where are the principled stands against aiding and abetting the US mechanized subjugation of its furthest flung imperial conquests?

Norway earns sizable profits from its weapons industry, and supplies its share of NATO troops in Afghanistan. Its small contingent of soldiers reflects no economic draft, but simply the natural statistical proportion of adventurous, mercenary males. When occupied by the Germans during WWII, over 10,000 Norwegians volunteered to fight for the Nazis. Many on the Russian Front reenlisted. Against that proportion, the few hundreds today willing to join the Americans make the over-worn Nazi comparison even less favorable.

The 911 Reichtag Fire

In 1933 someone set fire to the Reichstag, the historic German Parliament Building. Hitler seized on the occasion to incite in the German population a fear of terrorists and foreign agents, and trumped up his case for the preemptive invasion of Eastern Europe.
 
To prevent further acts of terrorism, Hitler curtailed civil rights and created the first concentration camp at Dachau. Predating the extermination camps by a half dozen years, Dachau began as an internment camp for political foes and other “enemies of the state.” Many Germans felt that the Reichstag fire was a Nazi deception, set deliberately to further Nazi goals.

2001 brought the American People their 9-11, with similar doubt as to how it came to happen. Americans were also given their Dachau at Guantanamo Bay, a prison camp absent every American notion of civil right. Americans soon became responsible as well for waging a preemptive war on Iraq based on trumped up charges of WMDs, and American atrocities at Mazar-i-Sharif and Fallujah, which beg comparison to the Nazi taking of Czechoslovakia, and Nazi acts at Babi Yar and Lidice.

To compare American to Nazis may seem like a profound trivialization of the horror of the Holocaust. There is no evil greater than that which perpetrated the Holocaust. But the Final Solution didn’t start until 1940. The U.S. Neocons are comparatively early in their game.

History has now confirmed that it was the Nazis themselves who started the Reichstag fire. They set the fire at night, while no one was in the building. Not a single life was lost. Not very Nazi-like. Someday history will reveal the truth about who perpetrated the events of September 11, 2001 at the World Trade Center. Time will eventually have to overcome this administration’s persistent efforts to thwart investigation and accountability.

IF the Neocons in the U. S. administration, either by negligence or malice, did allow or facilitate or instigate or perpetrate this ugly tragedy, if they did this, what can they have yet in store for the American people?

(Reprinted ArmchairCommando.)