Avatar is James Cameron's first project since the decade-old Titanic. Whereas Titanic was a megahit because it touched a hundred million teeny-bopper hearts (thus being one of the great 'chick-flicks' of all time) Avatar is far more hard-nosed. Superficially it is about a much-improved 3D technology ('cinema will never be the same') but underneath that gloss Cameron makes a thinly-disguised assault on American neo-imperialism shown most nakedly in the takeover of Iraq but which has had catastrophic impacts on dozens of nations around the globe, as documented by the likes of Noam Chomsky.
The word 'avatar' comes from East Indian mythology, in which divinity 'becomes flesh' from time to time, to destroy the forces of unrighteousness. And consequently the resonances with American history are clear - the military commander's contemptuous reference to the Navi people of Pandora whose planet is being colonized for resources as 'savages' (and later - monkeys) mirrors America's destruction of millions of native Americans from whom the continent was wrested; and alludes to similar racial policies in Asia. The use of gas (chemical weapons) to drive the Navi away from lands where the resource is located mirrors the use of similar weapons in Colombia to displace nearly 3 million people.
The conflict between the scientist (Sigourney Weaver) who finds Pandora's trees and ecology have a living and precious intelligence to be preserved and studied, and the colonizing force who simply bulldoze the trees that provide a spiritual haven for the Navi, mirrors the present divide on Earth on the environmental question.
In the movie the would-be colonizers are defeated. When arrows shot from a seemingly primitive Navi bow penetrate the brutal heart of the military commander to whom the Navi are a pestilence to be crushed, it seems Cameron wants to herald the end of American empire......
Wednesday, December 23, 2009
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
Letter to the National Post on judicial abuse of power
The Post's article (by Mr. Jacob Ziegel of the law faculty at the University of Toront0) in December 14's edition on 'muzzled lawyers' raises an important and troubling issue – the abuse of authority by Canadian judges. Regrettably though, the quote highlighted in the center of the article (“Legal professionals may be the wrong people to trust with protecting freedom of speech”), though technically correct as Law Societies inflicted the punishments, 'muzzles' the real target of the article, which is not lawyers, but judges. Mr. Ziegel however correctly remarks that freedom of speech, in theory guaranteed by the Charter, is in jeopardy by the very people – judges – who should be committed to its protection.
Both cases cited in the article deal with lawyers whose punishments for expressing criticism of judges were upheld by higher level judges at the Nova Scotia and Manitoba Courts of Appeal. Mr. Ziegel writes 'Surprisingly, the Supreme Court of Canada (SCC) refused leave to appeal' the Manitoba Court's decision which 'found that derogatory remarks about a judge were not part of the core values protected by the Charter ' (italics added). I am not surprised. This extraordinary finding, with which the SCC implicitly concurred, speaks volumes about the nature of judicial power and way judges (including our top-most ones) view themselves. Clearly judges see themselves beyond the law – above it, as it were. Core values protected by the Charter do not include the freedom to criticise judges? Justice is in this arrogant view brought into disrepute when a judge is criticised, but not when injustices are meted out by judges, which is hardly infrequently, as more and more cases of wrongful convictions emerge.
When coupled with the historical immunity judges gave themselves – immunity from suit for wrongful decisions, euphemistically called 'errors' by a legal system coerced into deference and fear – these matters constitute an odious double-standard which 21st century democracy must not tolerate. The 2 cases mentioned were in themselves comparatively minor. Every instance of 'miscarriage' of justice, and some deserve to be called abortions – has resulted in catastrophic harm to innocent individuals with no accountability for the judges responsible. And so far the legal system has not even begun to identify abortions of justice in the civil domain.
Both cases cited in the article deal with lawyers whose punishments for expressing criticism of judges were upheld by higher level judges at the Nova Scotia and Manitoba Courts of Appeal. Mr. Ziegel writes 'Surprisingly, the Supreme Court of Canada (SCC) refused leave to appeal' the Manitoba Court's decision which 'found that derogatory remarks about a judge were not part of the core values protected by the Charter ' (italics added). I am not surprised. This extraordinary finding, with which the SCC implicitly concurred, speaks volumes about the nature of judicial power and way judges (including our top-most ones) view themselves. Clearly judges see themselves beyond the law – above it, as it were. Core values protected by the Charter do not include the freedom to criticise judges? Justice is in this arrogant view brought into disrepute when a judge is criticised, but not when injustices are meted out by judges, which is hardly infrequently, as more and more cases of wrongful convictions emerge.
When coupled with the historical immunity judges gave themselves – immunity from suit for wrongful decisions, euphemistically called 'errors' by a legal system coerced into deference and fear – these matters constitute an odious double-standard which 21st century democracy must not tolerate. The 2 cases mentioned were in themselves comparatively minor. Every instance of 'miscarriage' of justice, and some deserve to be called abortions – has resulted in catastrophic harm to innocent individuals with no accountability for the judges responsible. And so far the legal system has not even begun to identify abortions of justice in the civil domain.
Sunday, November 22, 2009
Letter to the Star on its Nov. 20 piece on Martin Amis
Martin Amis is of the view that feminism 'lost its nerve' and accepted second-class status to 'multiculturalism'. He claims the 'race question mutes everything else', and 911 provided a soul-rattling shock that he suggests was seismic, and to which he believes rational debate has been intimidated by the supposed race question. He further opines that it's 'self-evident that it's horrible the way they (Islamists) treat women.'
The article mentions Amis has been called a racist, misogynist, and hate-mongerer. What emanates with crystal clarity from the Star article is how ignorant Amis is, and how poor his judgment is. Yes 911 shook America up. But as world-shaking events go, it has been greatly exaggerated. The most significant aspect of it was simply that a serious attack took place on American soil, something which had never occurred before. And that civilian airliners were hijacked to destroy civilian buildings. Aside from that it was a relatively small event. Less than 3000 people died. The use of civilian airliners is a matter of means and ends. If Al-Qaeda had a military airforce, conceivably that is what they would have used. But weapons of mass-destruction are controlled by the powers that be, and denied to those deemed undesirable, regardless of the merit of their claim to them.
In World War II, not just buildings but entire cities were flattened. Horrific bombings killing hundreds of thousands of civilians or more were also carried out in the Korean and Vietnam wars. Amis seems oblivious to these far more catastrophic events, in comparison to which 911 was but a drop in the ocean of Terror by Western countries. He seems equally ignorant of the real conflict, which is not the much-hyped but misleading 'Clash of Civilizations', but a battle over resources (principally oil) which belong to Muslim countries and which the US and UK in particular have coveted and robbed with overwhelming force, interfering in democratic processes such as the ouster of Mossadegh in Iran in 1953.
Debate on these matters is suppressed, not by the 'race question', but by massive American and British propaganda, such as the lies used to justify the post-911 destruction and occupation of a helpless Iraq, where upto a million people have been killed and several times as many turned into refugees. The number of Afghan victims is not known but may safely be presumed to be in the tens of thousands at the least.
911 was arguably provoked by far worse crimes by the West, and has been avenged a thousand times over with the attacks on Afghanistan and the rape of Iraq. (As for the great American 'sorrow' over 'Ground Zero' - they can stuff it where the sun doesn't shine. They have created a thousand Ground Zero's in a hundred different locations around the globe.....)
On the gender question, Amis is equally misinformed. Perhaps he ought to consider the plight of men in the West, who are routinely 'raped' by a system which has sold them out to feminist ideology. Any woman can have her spouse or boyfriend ejected from the home and charged criminally with the barest of allegations, proven or not. The presumption of innocence has been replaced with one of guilt as lives of men are casually destroyed upon female allegations which may not be true.
Mr. Amis should stick to writing fiction. As far as political and social realities go, he seems to be an utter fool.
The article mentions Amis has been called a racist, misogynist, and hate-mongerer. What emanates with crystal clarity from the Star article is how ignorant Amis is, and how poor his judgment is. Yes 911 shook America up. But as world-shaking events go, it has been greatly exaggerated. The most significant aspect of it was simply that a serious attack took place on American soil, something which had never occurred before. And that civilian airliners were hijacked to destroy civilian buildings. Aside from that it was a relatively small event. Less than 3000 people died. The use of civilian airliners is a matter of means and ends. If Al-Qaeda had a military airforce, conceivably that is what they would have used. But weapons of mass-destruction are controlled by the powers that be, and denied to those deemed undesirable, regardless of the merit of their claim to them.
In World War II, not just buildings but entire cities were flattened. Horrific bombings killing hundreds of thousands of civilians or more were also carried out in the Korean and Vietnam wars. Amis seems oblivious to these far more catastrophic events, in comparison to which 911 was but a drop in the ocean of Terror by Western countries. He seems equally ignorant of the real conflict, which is not the much-hyped but misleading 'Clash of Civilizations', but a battle over resources (principally oil) which belong to Muslim countries and which the US and UK in particular have coveted and robbed with overwhelming force, interfering in democratic processes such as the ouster of Mossadegh in Iran in 1953.
Debate on these matters is suppressed, not by the 'race question', but by massive American and British propaganda, such as the lies used to justify the post-911 destruction and occupation of a helpless Iraq, where upto a million people have been killed and several times as many turned into refugees. The number of Afghan victims is not known but may safely be presumed to be in the tens of thousands at the least.
911 was arguably provoked by far worse crimes by the West, and has been avenged a thousand times over with the attacks on Afghanistan and the rape of Iraq. (As for the great American 'sorrow' over 'Ground Zero' - they can stuff it where the sun doesn't shine. They have created a thousand Ground Zero's in a hundred different locations around the globe.....)
On the gender question, Amis is equally misinformed. Perhaps he ought to consider the plight of men in the West, who are routinely 'raped' by a system which has sold them out to feminist ideology. Any woman can have her spouse or boyfriend ejected from the home and charged criminally with the barest of allegations, proven or not. The presumption of innocence has been replaced with one of guilt as lives of men are casually destroyed upon female allegations which may not be true.
Mr. Amis should stick to writing fiction. As far as political and social realities go, he seems to be an utter fool.
Monday, October 19, 2009
A POST-FEMINIST ERA MALE ANTHEM
(Strictly for Men not afraid to be Men, and for the select few women who understand them)
Meet Marvin, men's answer to Maxine
Men strike back!
How many men does it take to open a beer?
None.... It should be opened when she brings it.
> >> -----------------------------------------------------------
why is a Laundromat a really bad place to pick up a woman?
Because a woman who can't even afford a washing machine will probably
never be able to support you.
> >> -----------------------------------------------------------
Why do women have smaller feet than men?
It's one of those 'evolutionary things' that allows them to stand closer to the kitchen sink.
> >> -----------------------------------------------------------
How do you know when a woman is about to say something smart?
When she starts a sentence with 'A man once told me....'
> >> -----------------------------------------------------------
How do you fix a woman's watch?
You don't. There is a clock on the oven.
> >> ----------------------------------------------------------
If your dog is barking at the back door and your wife is yelling at the
front door, who do you let in first?
The dog, of course He'll shut up once you let him in.
> >> -- --------------------------------------------------------
Scientists have discovered a food that diminishes a woman's sex drive by
90%.
It's called a Wedding Cake.
> >> ----------------------------------------------------
Why do men die before their wives?
They want to.
> >> ------------------------------------------------------
Women will never be equal to men
Until they can walk down the street with a bald head and a beer gut, and
still think they are sexy.
> >> ------------------------------------------------------
> >> Send this to a few good men who need a laugh and
> >> To the select few women who can handle it!
Meet Marvin, men's answer to Maxine
Men strike back!
How many men does it take to open a beer?
None.... It should be opened when she brings it.
> >> -----------------------------------------------------------
why is a Laundromat a really bad place to pick up a woman?
Because a woman who can't even afford a washing machine will probably
never be able to support you.
> >> -----------------------------------------------------------
Why do women have smaller feet than men?
It's one of those 'evolutionary things' that allows them to stand closer to the kitchen sink.
> >> -----------------------------------------------------------
How do you know when a woman is about to say something smart?
When she starts a sentence with 'A man once told me....'
> >> -----------------------------------------------------------
How do you fix a woman's watch?
You don't. There is a clock on the oven.
> >> ----------------------------------------------------------
If your dog is barking at the back door and your wife is yelling at the
front door, who do you let in first?
The dog, of course He'll shut up once you let him in.
> >> -- --------------------------------------------------------
Scientists have discovered a food that diminishes a woman's sex drive by
90%.
It's called a Wedding Cake.
> >> ----------------------------------------------------
Why do men die before their wives?
They want to.
> >> ------------------------------------------------------
Women will never be equal to men
Until they can walk down the street with a bald head and a beer gut, and
still think they are sexy.
> >> ------------------------------------------------------
> >> Send this to a few good men who need a laugh and
> >> To the select few women who can handle it!
Thursday, August 27, 2009
INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS
I have never been a strong admirer of Tarantino. Reservoir Dogs left me cold, and the world-wide acclaim for Pulp Fiction left me bemused. There was no denying the craft and skill in the movie but the characters and plot were loathsome – as if a world-class chef had made a sumptuous-looking delicacy made of mud and perhaps excrement. Kill Bill 1&2 were the only Tarantino movies I liked – even though they were simply revenge fantasies.
Inglourious Basterds is an anomaly – being utterly different in subject than any of Tarantino's former films. As history it is flatout rubbish, with its Jew-sympathizing and Nazi-hating plot. History is clear – America and most allies were largely indifferent to the plight of Jews, and American corporate and government support lay with the Nazis at the beginning of the war, and only turned against it after Nazi Germany became so powerful it threatened American interests. And after the war the OSS-CIA sought out and protected surviving Nazis, for intelligence, weapons research, and strategic reasons. So the raison-d'etre of the movie – with its depiction of an American-Jewish guerilla group inflicting terror on Nazis, and physically scarring them with the swastika to brand them Nazis for life - is sheer fantasy, despite the movie's claim to be based on real events.
How is it as film? Three of the five chapters are brilliant. The first one - in which the SS colonel dubbed 'Jew-hunter' ferrets out the truth from a French farmer who is hiding Jews by effortlessly gliding from exaggerated, almost obsequious courtesy which only serves to terrify the French farmer more, so that the brusque switch to cold intimidation elicits an immediate confession - is reminiscent of the brilliant scene from Schindler's List in which Ralph Fiennes praises the forced rabbi laborer that he is 'doing well' in making a hinge before ruthlessly changing tone to demanding why the rabbi had only managed a few hinges in the morning. But even there one wonders why the German soldiers don't pursue or shoot the escaping Jewish daughter (Shoshanna), whose survival is no doubt necessary for what ensues.
Likewise the 'Chapter 3' restaurant scene in which the colonel interrogates the theatre-owning Shoshanna (who he almost recognizes) as prelude to the holding of the Nazi premiere in her theater is superb. Not just 'Tarantino dialogue', this is the same cat-baiting-mouse strategy of the 'Jew-hunter'. The Operation Kino scenes are also excellent, particularly the tavern scene which is painstakingly built to show how the best plans can be ruined by trivial unexpected events – in this case the presence of German soldiers enjoying a night off awarded by a superior to celebrate one of them becoming a father.
But despite the brilliance of this scene, which includes card-games inspired by a Satyajit Ray film, giant plot-holes now appear. An SS major who conveniently happens to be in the tavern - 24 miles north of Paris though it is - immediately smells a rat upon hearing the accent of the Brit masquerading a German officer, but fails to recognize Hugo Stiglitz, who we are told is 'known to every German soldier for being the notorious murderer of 13 SS officers', even though he sits right next to him. Further Tarantino resorts to cheap misandry by having revolvers held under the table pointed at 'testicles' with a low probability of accuracy. Despite scores of gunshots fired in the ensuing shootout, no police (civilian or military) or German soldiers appear on the scene, and the remaining 'basterds' are able to escort the surviving German actress/spy out of the place, sans le moindre probleme....
But it is the final chapter which is literally 'unbelievable'. A film premiere at which the entire Nazi leadership including the Fuehrer is present is held without even a proper inspection of the cinema. Apparently the Nazis are ignorant that '350 films of highly inflammable nitrate stock' stored in the cinema are a security risk. There are no soldiers guarding the lobby, and Shoshanna's African helper/lover is able to bring massive rods into the lobby and lock the theatre doors shut with nary a problem, thus allowing the fantasy of a Jew burning the trapped Nazis including 'Hitler, Goebbels. Goering and Bormann' alive (to the flickering image of the gloating Shoshanna). Simply absurd.
Tarantino should stick to doing what he knows best - creating clever, sophisticated junk - or as he calls it - pulp fiction. History seems outside his league.
Inglourious Basterds is an anomaly – being utterly different in subject than any of Tarantino's former films. As history it is flatout rubbish, with its Jew-sympathizing and Nazi-hating plot. History is clear – America and most allies were largely indifferent to the plight of Jews, and American corporate and government support lay with the Nazis at the beginning of the war, and only turned against it after Nazi Germany became so powerful it threatened American interests. And after the war the OSS-CIA sought out and protected surviving Nazis, for intelligence, weapons research, and strategic reasons. So the raison-d'etre of the movie – with its depiction of an American-Jewish guerilla group inflicting terror on Nazis, and physically scarring them with the swastika to brand them Nazis for life - is sheer fantasy, despite the movie's claim to be based on real events.
How is it as film? Three of the five chapters are brilliant. The first one - in which the SS colonel dubbed 'Jew-hunter' ferrets out the truth from a French farmer who is hiding Jews by effortlessly gliding from exaggerated, almost obsequious courtesy which only serves to terrify the French farmer more, so that the brusque switch to cold intimidation elicits an immediate confession - is reminiscent of the brilliant scene from Schindler's List in which Ralph Fiennes praises the forced rabbi laborer that he is 'doing well' in making a hinge before ruthlessly changing tone to demanding why the rabbi had only managed a few hinges in the morning. But even there one wonders why the German soldiers don't pursue or shoot the escaping Jewish daughter (Shoshanna), whose survival is no doubt necessary for what ensues.
Likewise the 'Chapter 3' restaurant scene in which the colonel interrogates the theatre-owning Shoshanna (who he almost recognizes) as prelude to the holding of the Nazi premiere in her theater is superb. Not just 'Tarantino dialogue', this is the same cat-baiting-mouse strategy of the 'Jew-hunter'. The Operation Kino scenes are also excellent, particularly the tavern scene which is painstakingly built to show how the best plans can be ruined by trivial unexpected events – in this case the presence of German soldiers enjoying a night off awarded by a superior to celebrate one of them becoming a father.
But despite the brilliance of this scene, which includes card-games inspired by a Satyajit Ray film, giant plot-holes now appear. An SS major who conveniently happens to be in the tavern - 24 miles north of Paris though it is - immediately smells a rat upon hearing the accent of the Brit masquerading a German officer, but fails to recognize Hugo Stiglitz, who we are told is 'known to every German soldier for being the notorious murderer of 13 SS officers', even though he sits right next to him. Further Tarantino resorts to cheap misandry by having revolvers held under the table pointed at 'testicles' with a low probability of accuracy. Despite scores of gunshots fired in the ensuing shootout, no police (civilian or military) or German soldiers appear on the scene, and the remaining 'basterds' are able to escort the surviving German actress/spy out of the place, sans le moindre probleme....
But it is the final chapter which is literally 'unbelievable'. A film premiere at which the entire Nazi leadership including the Fuehrer is present is held without even a proper inspection of the cinema. Apparently the Nazis are ignorant that '350 films of highly inflammable nitrate stock' stored in the cinema are a security risk. There are no soldiers guarding the lobby, and Shoshanna's African helper/lover is able to bring massive rods into the lobby and lock the theatre doors shut with nary a problem, thus allowing the fantasy of a Jew burning the trapped Nazis including 'Hitler, Goebbels. Goering and Bormann' alive (to the flickering image of the gloating Shoshanna). Simply absurd.
Tarantino should stick to doing what he knows best - creating clever, sophisticated junk - or as he calls it - pulp fiction. History seems outside his league.
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
'MADMEN' OF NORTH KOREA AND IRAN
It is a truism that victors write the history. Less acknowledged is that history once written even if false (also more usual than acknowledged) continues through the ages as propaganda. So it is with the Western portrayal of two members of Bush II's infamous 'axis-of-evil' – North Korea and Iran.
North Korea earned international ire with its recent nuclear test, and Iran has been the victim of hysterical propaganda by America and Israel, its two principal foes for several years now. Forgotten are the facts. For example, that North Korea was flattened by American bombing in the Korean civil war in which both North and South plotted attacks on each other with the former beating the latter to the punch. Not satisfied with merely flattening the North's cities and killing millions, the US went on to destroy the North's dams, flooding its rice paddies. Inspite of such crimes, it is North Korea that is regarded as the 'evil' nation. Such is the power of propaganda and the loathsome complicity of the North American media, who did not become evil just after 911 or before the invasion of Iraq.
As Eric Margolis has argued in 'American Raj', however, the North Korean leader may be much saner than imagined. His nuclear capability has been a successful deterrent against the American forces camped at the 38th parallel since the 1950s, although recently they have moved out of artillery range, alarming the North Koreans. So it is with Iran, which was invaded 4 times in the 20th century, and subjected to a proxy colonialism by the US with its puppet 'democrat' the Shah who between 1953 and his ouster in 1979 tortured, imprisoned and killed thousands of Iranians while keeping the Americans ecstatic by selling them Iranian oil for a song, and buying American weapons with the petty cash so earned. That is why Iranians had to be punished when they threw out American 'democracy' in 1979 and took 50 hostages. That is why Reagan/Rumsfeld and Thatcher had to supply the other great 'democrat' in the region, Saddam Hussein, with weapons so he could kill hundreds of thousands of Iranians in an 8-year war.
Iran must love punishment. It eschews dollars for euros, increasing pressure for ending the dollar's status as a reserve currency (pretty much toast anyway with the financial 'crimes' of the market fundamentalists who have manufactured the present economic crisis), and supports resistance movements in Palestine, Lebanon and Iraq (Hamas and Hezbollah). It does so in the face of incomparable military superiority in just about every way of the Israelis (not just with their 200 nukes) - let alone the American colossus.
Another way of looking at this is that Iran is taking a principled stand against American and Israeli crimes of occupation. Iran is being encircled by these two powers and getting a few nukes may be the best deterrent for Iran, as Margolis persuasively argues.
As an American madman visits Toronto to give another speech full of lies, it is worth remembering that truth and victory rarely walk hand in hand.
North Korea earned international ire with its recent nuclear test, and Iran has been the victim of hysterical propaganda by America and Israel, its two principal foes for several years now. Forgotten are the facts. For example, that North Korea was flattened by American bombing in the Korean civil war in which both North and South plotted attacks on each other with the former beating the latter to the punch. Not satisfied with merely flattening the North's cities and killing millions, the US went on to destroy the North's dams, flooding its rice paddies. Inspite of such crimes, it is North Korea that is regarded as the 'evil' nation. Such is the power of propaganda and the loathsome complicity of the North American media, who did not become evil just after 911 or before the invasion of Iraq.
As Eric Margolis has argued in 'American Raj', however, the North Korean leader may be much saner than imagined. His nuclear capability has been a successful deterrent against the American forces camped at the 38th parallel since the 1950s, although recently they have moved out of artillery range, alarming the North Koreans. So it is with Iran, which was invaded 4 times in the 20th century, and subjected to a proxy colonialism by the US with its puppet 'democrat' the Shah who between 1953 and his ouster in 1979 tortured, imprisoned and killed thousands of Iranians while keeping the Americans ecstatic by selling them Iranian oil for a song, and buying American weapons with the petty cash so earned. That is why Iranians had to be punished when they threw out American 'democracy' in 1979 and took 50 hostages. That is why Reagan/Rumsfeld and Thatcher had to supply the other great 'democrat' in the region, Saddam Hussein, with weapons so he could kill hundreds of thousands of Iranians in an 8-year war.
Iran must love punishment. It eschews dollars for euros, increasing pressure for ending the dollar's status as a reserve currency (pretty much toast anyway with the financial 'crimes' of the market fundamentalists who have manufactured the present economic crisis), and supports resistance movements in Palestine, Lebanon and Iraq (Hamas and Hezbollah). It does so in the face of incomparable military superiority in just about every way of the Israelis (not just with their 200 nukes) - let alone the American colossus.
Another way of looking at this is that Iran is taking a principled stand against American and Israeli crimes of occupation. Iran is being encircled by these two powers and getting a few nukes may be the best deterrent for Iran, as Margolis persuasively argues.
As an American madman visits Toronto to give another speech full of lies, it is worth remembering that truth and victory rarely walk hand in hand.
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
LETTER TO NATIONAL POST ON ALAN DERSHOWITZ'S ARTICLE OF MAY 15
On Friday May 15, the National Post published an 'edited excerpt' of Harvard law professor and famed apologist for Israel, to Canada's subcommittee on International Human Rights of the standing committee on foreign affairs and international development
Here is my response, sent to the Post for publication:
LETTER RE. ALAN DERSHOWITZ ARTICLE ON IRAN
1.'The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers'. Shakespeare in Henry The Sixth, Part 2 Act 4, scene 2, 71–78 .
2. Lawyers are liars. Age-old axiom.
Alan Dershowitz enjoys a near-legendary reputation as defender of high-profile (usually rich) clients. He is also a law professor at Harvard. But as Professor Chomsky has written, he is not to be trusted, especially on the question of Israel, and its supposed arch-enemy Iran. The age-old axiom quoted above arises from the centuries-old legal tradition of the 'adversary-system' of justice, by which lawyers with clearly defined interests (of their opposing clients) are allowed to represent (and usually twist) reality to argue a biased point of view, with the judge(s) and jury empowered to separate fact from fiction.
There is plenty of fiction in Professor Dershowitz's statement to the Canadian subcommittee on International Human Rights of the standing committee on foreign affairs and international development. The principal fiction is that Dershowitz takes Ahmadinejad's guilt as proven. A fundamental element of justice is the presumption of innocence. Dershowitz takes the distorted presentation of Ahmadinejad's statements by the American-dominated media as proven facts, rather than the propaganda they are.
It is true Ahmadinejad is virtually alone among international leaders in condemning Israel. But what he has been asking, publicly and repeatedly, is for a referendum of all Palestinian people – including the Israeli Jews from Europe who forcibly conquered (stole) land by displacing the local inhabitants – to determine the future of the political state of Palestine, from which the Zionist state of Israel was brutally created. For this Dershowitz seeks to silence Ahmadinejad, by painting him an 'international criminal' who incites genocide. Ahmadinejad incites no such thing. He calls for a political solution, a referendum. But Israel (and its sponsor America) cannot allow such a referendum for obvious reasons.
Here are some very inconvenient facts the liar Dershowitz fails to mention:
1.It is Israel that possesses over 200 nuclear bombs which can easily evaporate Iran in totality. It owns more nuclear weapons (land, air and sea-based) than Britain and France! Only America, Russia and China own more nukes, and this immense nuclear power Israel is being 'marketed' by the same corrupt and genocidal elite in America that are responsible for 700,000 Iraqi deaths under false pretences, as under threat from a nation that possesses no nukes. As Eric Margolis has argued in American Raj, even if Iran acquires some nukes, it can only be for defensive purposes, as it has no ICBM capabilities and in any event would be completely destroyed by Israel or the US if it attempted an attack on Israel.
It is precisely the American-Israeli axis of evil which seeks to deny Islamic nations access to nuclear energy, that drives ambitions to acquire nuclear bombs. A little like the 'forbidden fruit'. Israel has also been given every biological, chemical and conventional weapon (including the most sophisticated air-force in NATO barring the US) and has used them repeatedly (for decades) to commit genocides against the Palestinians, the most recent example being Gaza, and earlier ones including not only the West Bank, but Lebanon.
2. Many orthodox Jewish rabbi (see worldtorahjewry.com) in New York support Ahmadinejad's denunciation of Zionism, which they say has nothing whatsoever to do with the Jewish religion. They honored him during his 2006 visit to New York and expressed their support, a fact too inconvenient for the major American media to report.
(However, quite naturally many corrupt Jewish priests also exist, infected by Zionism and its powerful allures, principally wealth and power. Zionism is at least as obscene and criminal a perversion of Judaism as Islamic terror is of Islam, or as 'Christianity' has been ever since its founding, down to its latest crime - the invasion and occupation of Iraq by a supposed 'born-again Christian'.
With one crucial distinction: unlike Zionism, Islamic terror is not motivated by greed for lands and resources stolen from or belonging to others, but is a response to American, British and Israeli crimes. Islamic terror seeks justice, which American and British power are denying them, with international institutions like the UN largely helpless.)
America's arming of Israel is only partly at the behest of powerful Zionist lobbies in the US; it has more alarming and devious purposes in keeping Islamic oil flowing to America cheaply – at the point of a gun, the gun being Israel. And of course, Iran itself has been the victim of such imperialist policy since 1953 – another fact which is well-known but which no one talks about. The real facts, as Dr. Chomsky has oft written, are 'off the agenda', which is dictated by the real international criminals, the governments of America, Britain, and Israel. Such naked imperialism may soon plunge this planet in another global war, with consequences that would match our worst fears.
What remains to be seen is if the National Post will print this response. That will depend on whether or not it is owned or controlled by powerful Zionist interests.
Finally - what Dershowitz wants with his anti-Iran rant - is the genocide of Iranian people, through an American-Israeli invasion. America has been openly threatening Iran with obliteration for many years now, with even Democratic candidates like Hilary Clinton joining the chorus, and has also supplied Israel with the latest bombers which Israel has been using to conduct flights along the Iranian border, to rattle and provoke the Iranians.
One major advantage of America's occupying Afghanistan (the other being access to Central Asian oil) would be to 'encircle' Iran. Already threatened by Israel and US-controlled Iraq on the west, Iran would face a 2-front war if the US took over Afghanistan. But these invasion plans would be rendered ineffective if Iran were (like North Korea) to acquire a nuclear deterrent. But all of this is outside the biased purview of the loathsome liar Dershowitz. By his own argument, it is he who deserves to be prosecuted for inciting genocide.
Here is my response, sent to the Post for publication:
LETTER RE. ALAN DERSHOWITZ ARTICLE ON IRAN
1.'The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers'. Shakespeare in Henry The Sixth, Part 2 Act 4, scene 2, 71–78 .
2. Lawyers are liars. Age-old axiom.
Alan Dershowitz enjoys a near-legendary reputation as defender of high-profile (usually rich) clients. He is also a law professor at Harvard. But as Professor Chomsky has written, he is not to be trusted, especially on the question of Israel, and its supposed arch-enemy Iran. The age-old axiom quoted above arises from the centuries-old legal tradition of the 'adversary-system' of justice, by which lawyers with clearly defined interests (of their opposing clients) are allowed to represent (and usually twist) reality to argue a biased point of view, with the judge(s) and jury empowered to separate fact from fiction.
There is plenty of fiction in Professor Dershowitz's statement to the Canadian subcommittee on International Human Rights of the standing committee on foreign affairs and international development. The principal fiction is that Dershowitz takes Ahmadinejad's guilt as proven. A fundamental element of justice is the presumption of innocence. Dershowitz takes the distorted presentation of Ahmadinejad's statements by the American-dominated media as proven facts, rather than the propaganda they are.
It is true Ahmadinejad is virtually alone among international leaders in condemning Israel. But what he has been asking, publicly and repeatedly, is for a referendum of all Palestinian people – including the Israeli Jews from Europe who forcibly conquered (stole) land by displacing the local inhabitants – to determine the future of the political state of Palestine, from which the Zionist state of Israel was brutally created. For this Dershowitz seeks to silence Ahmadinejad, by painting him an 'international criminal' who incites genocide. Ahmadinejad incites no such thing. He calls for a political solution, a referendum. But Israel (and its sponsor America) cannot allow such a referendum for obvious reasons.
Here are some very inconvenient facts the liar Dershowitz fails to mention:
1.It is Israel that possesses over 200 nuclear bombs which can easily evaporate Iran in totality. It owns more nuclear weapons (land, air and sea-based) than Britain and France! Only America, Russia and China own more nukes, and this immense nuclear power Israel is being 'marketed' by the same corrupt and genocidal elite in America that are responsible for 700,000 Iraqi deaths under false pretences, as under threat from a nation that possesses no nukes. As Eric Margolis has argued in American Raj, even if Iran acquires some nukes, it can only be for defensive purposes, as it has no ICBM capabilities and in any event would be completely destroyed by Israel or the US if it attempted an attack on Israel.
It is precisely the American-Israeli axis of evil which seeks to deny Islamic nations access to nuclear energy, that drives ambitions to acquire nuclear bombs. A little like the 'forbidden fruit'. Israel has also been given every biological, chemical and conventional weapon (including the most sophisticated air-force in NATO barring the US) and has used them repeatedly (for decades) to commit genocides against the Palestinians, the most recent example being Gaza, and earlier ones including not only the West Bank, but Lebanon.
2. Many orthodox Jewish rabbi (see worldtorahjewry.com) in New York support Ahmadinejad's denunciation of Zionism, which they say has nothing whatsoever to do with the Jewish religion. They honored him during his 2006 visit to New York and expressed their support, a fact too inconvenient for the major American media to report.
(However, quite naturally many corrupt Jewish priests also exist, infected by Zionism and its powerful allures, principally wealth and power. Zionism is at least as obscene and criminal a perversion of Judaism as Islamic terror is of Islam, or as 'Christianity' has been ever since its founding, down to its latest crime - the invasion and occupation of Iraq by a supposed 'born-again Christian'.
With one crucial distinction: unlike Zionism, Islamic terror is not motivated by greed for lands and resources stolen from or belonging to others, but is a response to American, British and Israeli crimes. Islamic terror seeks justice, which American and British power are denying them, with international institutions like the UN largely helpless.)
America's arming of Israel is only partly at the behest of powerful Zionist lobbies in the US; it has more alarming and devious purposes in keeping Islamic oil flowing to America cheaply – at the point of a gun, the gun being Israel. And of course, Iran itself has been the victim of such imperialist policy since 1953 – another fact which is well-known but which no one talks about. The real facts, as Dr. Chomsky has oft written, are 'off the agenda', which is dictated by the real international criminals, the governments of America, Britain, and Israel. Such naked imperialism may soon plunge this planet in another global war, with consequences that would match our worst fears.
What remains to be seen is if the National Post will print this response. That will depend on whether or not it is owned or controlled by powerful Zionist interests.
Finally - what Dershowitz wants with his anti-Iran rant - is the genocide of Iranian people, through an American-Israeli invasion. America has been openly threatening Iran with obliteration for many years now, with even Democratic candidates like Hilary Clinton joining the chorus, and has also supplied Israel with the latest bombers which Israel has been using to conduct flights along the Iranian border, to rattle and provoke the Iranians.
One major advantage of America's occupying Afghanistan (the other being access to Central Asian oil) would be to 'encircle' Iran. Already threatened by Israel and US-controlled Iraq on the west, Iran would face a 2-front war if the US took over Afghanistan. But these invasion plans would be rendered ineffective if Iran were (like North Korea) to acquire a nuclear deterrent. But all of this is outside the biased purview of the loathsome liar Dershowitz. By his own argument, it is he who deserves to be prosecuted for inciting genocide.
Monday, May 11, 2009
THE TRANSATLANTIC 'SPECIAL' RELATIONSHIP
After the success of the 2006 film 'The Queen' in which Helen Mirren portrayed the reaction of the real Queen to Princess Diana's death, the latter invited the former to dinner at Buckingham. The actor declined, citing shooting commitments in the USA. Tabloids reported the real Queen's displeasure as something along the lines of "Who does this bitch think she is"?
The real Queen found solace from this snub - intended or not - by promptly visiting the White House of Bush II - valiant conqueror of the defenseless Iraq - and in a 'gala' dinner toasting the special transatlantic relationship noted that: "It is the moment to take stock of our present friendship, rightly taking pleasure from its strengths, while never taking these for granted. And it is the time to look forward, jointly renewing our commitment to a more prosperous, safer and freer world".
Here are some of the countries where the American-British 'commitment' for prosperity, security and freedom in the world has paid rich dividends (literally - for the weapons-manufacturers of these and other countries):
1. Iraq after 2003 invasion/occupation - 5 million people displaced and turned into refugees; 700,000 or more killed; infrastructure damage exceeding $1 trillion.
2. Turkey - 1997 recipient of US weapons aid used to displace millions of Kurdish people and kill and torture tens of thousands.
3. Colombia - 1999 recipient of $290 million in weapons aid, because it is the leading human rights violator in the Western hemisphere - used to displace 2.7 million people and kill and terrorize thousands.
4. East Timor - 1999 military & diplomatic aid by US/UK to Indonesia was used to kill 200,000 people, displace hundreds of thousands more, and destroy the tiny nation.
5. Kosovo - US-UK led 'NATO' bombing calculated to teach Milosevic that NATO was the boss in Europe, provoked the crimes that Serbian dictator Milosevic was later convicted of. Like Afghanistan, this nation too was abandoned after a few years by the West, encouraging the development of a Taliban-clone in Europe, taking advantage of the population's misery.
6. Afghanistan - the radicalization of this nation by the Taliban, armed by the weapons and missiles the CIA left there after the Soviets departed, and then destroyed in a criminal assault on it by the US after 911.
A truly impressive record of the achievements of the great American and British nations in making the world freer, safer, more prosperous and democratic. Naturally the brilliant parrots of the Western media and academy, trained at Harvard, Oxford and all the other elite institutions, praise these accomplishments as 'noble', 'altruistic', and 'humanitarian'.
Bravo to Her Majesty the Queen in right of Canada, for setting the record straight!
The real Queen found solace from this snub - intended or not - by promptly visiting the White House of Bush II - valiant conqueror of the defenseless Iraq - and in a 'gala' dinner toasting the special transatlantic relationship noted that: "It is the moment to take stock of our present friendship, rightly taking pleasure from its strengths, while never taking these for granted. And it is the time to look forward, jointly renewing our commitment to a more prosperous, safer and freer world".
Here are some of the countries where the American-British 'commitment' for prosperity, security and freedom in the world has paid rich dividends (literally - for the weapons-manufacturers of these and other countries):
1. Iraq after 2003 invasion/occupation - 5 million people displaced and turned into refugees; 700,000 or more killed; infrastructure damage exceeding $1 trillion.
2. Turkey - 1997 recipient of US weapons aid used to displace millions of Kurdish people and kill and torture tens of thousands.
3. Colombia - 1999 recipient of $290 million in weapons aid, because it is the leading human rights violator in the Western hemisphere - used to displace 2.7 million people and kill and terrorize thousands.
4. East Timor - 1999 military & diplomatic aid by US/UK to Indonesia was used to kill 200,000 people, displace hundreds of thousands more, and destroy the tiny nation.
5. Kosovo - US-UK led 'NATO' bombing calculated to teach Milosevic that NATO was the boss in Europe, provoked the crimes that Serbian dictator Milosevic was later convicted of. Like Afghanistan, this nation too was abandoned after a few years by the West, encouraging the development of a Taliban-clone in Europe, taking advantage of the population's misery.
6. Afghanistan - the radicalization of this nation by the Taliban, armed by the weapons and missiles the CIA left there after the Soviets departed, and then destroyed in a criminal assault on it by the US after 911.
A truly impressive record of the achievements of the great American and British nations in making the world freer, safer, more prosperous and democratic. Naturally the brilliant parrots of the Western media and academy, trained at Harvard, Oxford and all the other elite institutions, praise these accomplishments as 'noble', 'altruistic', and 'humanitarian'.
Bravo to Her Majesty the Queen in right of Canada, for setting the record straight!
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
ISRAEL - HOME OF 'DEMOCRACY'! BAH!
Western media, whose agenda is dictated by the world's greatest 'bully on the block' (to paraphrase Colin Powell's elucidation of what America ought to become following the end of the Cold War) deal in myths and propaganda. Principal among them that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East (Palestinians voted for the wrong party - Hamas - so they are obviously not democratic) and that Iran is the great threat to peace (never mind the pesky real facts - that Iran has been a victim of American and British terror since 1953).
Here is 'an inconvenient truth': the Israeli government cracks down on its own citizens who dissent from its nakedly Zionazist policies against the Palestinians. They are seizing the computers of such citizens, and calling them for 'interrogations' (read 'intimidations') - so they cannot communicate with citizens of other nations, to express their dissent, and so reveal the cracks in the Israeli stance.
The message below was sent by Jewish Voices for Peace, not some 'Islamic' or 'jihadist' organisation:
Let me cut down to the chase. We have just learned that a number of Israeli peace activists have had their computers confiscated, have been called for interrogations, and have only been released upon signing agreements not to contact their political friends for 30 days. We are asking you to contact the Israeli Attorney General to demand an immediate stop to this harassment.
The activists targeted are members of New Profile, a group of feminist women and men daring to suggest that Israel need not be a militarized society. They are being wrongfully accused of inciting young people--like the shministim--not to enlist in the army. The charge is not true. While New Profile does not tell youngsters not to enlist, they certainly support those who do not: pacifists, those who oppose the occupation, and others. New Profile informs them of their rights and gives them legal support when necessary. But Israel is a country that does not acknowledge the basic human right to conscientious objection.
The government's accusation against New Profile is not new. It has been out there for some time, as a source of harassment. Today's police actions tighten the screws considerably. We've seen how international pressure has helped get many shministim out of jail. Now it's time to put as much pressure so that Israeli peace activists can do their work free of intimidation.
I leave you with a note from New Profile: "These recent acts confirm what we have been contending for many years: the militarism of society in Israel harms the sacred principles of democracy, freedom of expression and freedom of political association. One who believed that until now criminal files were conjured up "only" for Arab citizens of Israel saw this morning that none of us can be certain that s/he can freely express an opinion concerning the failures of society and rule in Israel."
Here is 'an inconvenient truth': the Israeli government cracks down on its own citizens who dissent from its nakedly Zionazist policies against the Palestinians. They are seizing the computers of such citizens, and calling them for 'interrogations' (read 'intimidations') - so they cannot communicate with citizens of other nations, to express their dissent, and so reveal the cracks in the Israeli stance.
The message below was sent by Jewish Voices for Peace, not some 'Islamic' or 'jihadist' organisation:
Let me cut down to the chase. We have just learned that a number of Israeli peace activists have had their computers confiscated, have been called for interrogations, and have only been released upon signing agreements not to contact their political friends for 30 days. We are asking you to contact the Israeli Attorney General to demand an immediate stop to this harassment.
The activists targeted are members of New Profile, a group of feminist women and men daring to suggest that Israel need not be a militarized society. They are being wrongfully accused of inciting young people--like the shministim--not to enlist in the army. The charge is not true. While New Profile does not tell youngsters not to enlist, they certainly support those who do not: pacifists, those who oppose the occupation, and others. New Profile informs them of their rights and gives them legal support when necessary. But Israel is a country that does not acknowledge the basic human right to conscientious objection.
The government's accusation against New Profile is not new. It has been out there for some time, as a source of harassment. Today's police actions tighten the screws considerably. We've seen how international pressure has helped get many shministim out of jail. Now it's time to put as much pressure so that Israeli peace activists can do their work free of intimidation.
I leave you with a note from New Profile: "These recent acts confirm what we have been contending for many years: the militarism of society in Israel harms the sacred principles of democracy, freedom of expression and freedom of political association. One who believed that until now criminal files were conjured up "only" for Arab citizens of Israel saw this morning that none of us can be certain that s/he can freely express an opinion concerning the failures of society and rule in Israel."
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
WESTERN INDIGNATION OVER AFGHAN LAW
'Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye.' Matthew 7:5.
Much like Iraqi 'weapons of mass destruction', the Western media has swallowed whole the term 'marital rape' supposedly authorized by the new Afghan law without really studying it, and self-righteous editorials condemning 'marital rape' as a proven fact now abound.. In fact, though the (misreported) Afghan legislation would require wives (except in certain circumstances such as menstruation) to submit/consent to sex with their husbands once in four days.
How hateful for a woman to have to have sex with her husband every four days! How barbaric! What a horror!. But really what's barbaric is the way men are treated in Western society.
In Western society, women apparently have no obligations to their husbands who in consequence have no conjugal rights provided by law, whereas wives are entitled to be provided for eternally even if they are committing adultery – sleeping with someone else. Separated former wives must get paid alimony and/or child support, or else the husband can be jailed. But wives who end up with the matrimonial home in 80% of cases, can deny husbands court-ordered visitation (thus also harming their children by denying them fathers) with nary a chance of being punished. As an idiot judge out West put it: “It is not my job to punish women who don't obey visitation orders'; or something to that effect. This is equality?
This is but one symptom of a eunuch society that has sold out men to male-hating feminist ideology.
A few years ago it was common for the Western media to denigrate arranged marriages which are common in India and other 'Eastern' countries. They ought to look at their own history when such marriages were common, or even to their 'modern' system, where so-called 'love' (really lust characterized by plenty of premarital 'research' in bars, one-night-stands and so on, to be followed naturally by extra-marital activity) results in marriages 'till the next argument do us part', after which the 'loving wife' can legally proceed to grab the house and kids, demand eternal financial support, and pepper-spray the estranged husband with false allegations.
Instead of lecturing other societies, the West ought to look at fixing its own system of marriage, which is BROKEN. Children grow up exposed to multiple sex partners of the spouse they happen to be with, and tiny tots are routinely taken into public bath areas where adult members of the opposite sex stand exposed. What a wonderful system, to be shoved down the throats of people around the world!
Much like Iraqi 'weapons of mass destruction', the Western media has swallowed whole the term 'marital rape' supposedly authorized by the new Afghan law without really studying it, and self-righteous editorials condemning 'marital rape' as a proven fact now abound.. In fact, though the (misreported) Afghan legislation would require wives (except in certain circumstances such as menstruation) to submit/consent to sex with their husbands once in four days.
How hateful for a woman to have to have sex with her husband every four days! How barbaric! What a horror!. But really what's barbaric is the way men are treated in Western society.
In Western society, women apparently have no obligations to their husbands who in consequence have no conjugal rights provided by law, whereas wives are entitled to be provided for eternally even if they are committing adultery – sleeping with someone else. Separated former wives must get paid alimony and/or child support, or else the husband can be jailed. But wives who end up with the matrimonial home in 80% of cases, can deny husbands court-ordered visitation (thus also harming their children by denying them fathers) with nary a chance of being punished. As an idiot judge out West put it: “It is not my job to punish women who don't obey visitation orders'; or something to that effect. This is equality?
This is but one symptom of a eunuch society that has sold out men to male-hating feminist ideology.
A few years ago it was common for the Western media to denigrate arranged marriages which are common in India and other 'Eastern' countries. They ought to look at their own history when such marriages were common, or even to their 'modern' system, where so-called 'love' (really lust characterized by plenty of premarital 'research' in bars, one-night-stands and so on, to be followed naturally by extra-marital activity) results in marriages 'till the next argument do us part', after which the 'loving wife' can legally proceed to grab the house and kids, demand eternal financial support, and pepper-spray the estranged husband with false allegations.
Instead of lecturing other societies, the West ought to look at fixing its own system of marriage, which is BROKEN. Children grow up exposed to multiple sex partners of the spouse they happen to be with, and tiny tots are routinely taken into public bath areas where adult members of the opposite sex stand exposed. What a wonderful system, to be shoved down the throats of people around the world!
Friday, March 27, 2009
MUSINGS ON THE ECONOMIC CHAOS
A few years ago when spectrum was just taking off and new cell phone companies were expanding, I was asked to teach a finance course to radio-frequency engineers and technicians who were unfamiliar with the financial side of things. I had to update myself as I had been out-of-touch with the 'great' new developments in the finance field following my 1982 MBA, because I had been swamped fighting legal battles (allegations of the feminist type - see for instance my blog article on the Right to Not Support of January 2009).
Aside from new terms such as IPO to describe old things, new stuff such as 'securitization' and 'off-balance sheet financing' had mushroomed, not to mention derivatives. I did not immediately catch on that 'off-balance sheet financing' was basically illegal, since the balance sheet is required by law to provide 'full disclosure'.
Perhaps fortuitously in retrospect, there wasn't enough money in my manager's training budget to send me on a course for this topic of off-balance-sheet magic. But it should have been clear even then that securitization was a ripoff of sorts - creating new securities from existing assets, in some cases more than once. so that multiple levels of CMOs/CDOs (collateralized mortgage/debt obligations - try to understand that term) were created, with a loss of trail of who really owned the original mortgages and was responsible for managing them.
The original mortgages issued by a bank for example, were shuffled off to another corporation created for this purpose, which took over the bank's mortgages and replaced them with 'securities' (CMOs), and this process could happen again as the second corporation parcelled off pieces of the mortgages to a third new corporation.
All this was motivated by the need for investment banks to make a quick buck - fat commissions and bonuses on these 'new deals'. In the process however, a system of accountability which originally existed with the issuing bank managing its mortgages with trained staff, was diffused and shifted away to corporations owned by individual investors who had no clue what the mortgages were or what they were worth. They were simply enticed into buying the newly created CMOs with attractive rates of return offered on them, with no idea of how risky the CMOs were.
This is what the geniuses of Wall Street were upto, encouraged by what Soros even then was calling 'market fundamentalism' fueled by the Reagan-Thatcher 'revolutions' of killing regulation, selling off government enterprises to the private sector at give-away prices, and relieving the super-rich of any responsibility for taxes, leaving that for the poor and middle-class whose social programs were being ratcheted down. This was the so-called 'supply-side' economics, later labelled 'voodoo' economics by Bill Clinton, by which tax-cuts would stimulate investments by the rich so that the poor and middle-class would benefit - the super-rich 'Atlas' supporting everyone else per the Ayn Rand theory.
The reality of why this worked for a decade and half is a little different - massive WMD expenditures under Reagan created giant fiscal deficits which were financed by overseas lenders such as oil-exporting countries, as the rest of the world absorbed American inflation caused by such currency expansion (way, way beyond the monetarist limits recommended by Friedmanites) since the US dollar continued to be accepted as the international reserve currency because of America's political dominance and economic clout. All that is now all but over, as the latest G20 summit in London, UK, mused about creating an alternative reserve currency the world could accept, the US dollar no longer being valued after the squandering of American political capital by the Bushites.
On the derivatives question, Niall Ferguson, a brilliant star historian (who I despise because he helped sell the 'Armageddon' myth that Iran was building a bomb to evaporate Israel, while saying not a word about the 200+ nuclear weapons Israel already had which could easily evaporate Iran) has written in his latest book The Ascent of Money (a sort of followup to Galbraith's book of a few decades ago Money - Whence it came, Where it went) that the world economy's GNP is around $45 trillion (if I remember right), the stock and bond markets worth approx. $ 47 trillion, and the derivatives markets worth $473 trillion (all figures from 2006 - current estimates exceed a quadrillion!). Huge sums are also involved in credit default swaps..... another ticker. All of this shows how dangerously leveraged the financial house of cards is compared to actual economic output. And how fantastically overpriced the world of finance is compared to the actual value of goods and services.
Paul Krugman was one of the first big-name economists to 'finger' former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan for keeping tight control over inflation (unless there was a recession-threat in which case liquidity was quickly released and interest-rates slashed) but (except for occasional comments about 'irrational exuberance') exercising ZERO control of 'asset-prices' - ie the prices of stocks and real-estate and other financial instruments where speculation allowed all sorts of dangerous bubbles to develop. This massive casino allowed a few people to make gigantic fortunes but left millions exposed to huge losses when the bubbles came to a bust. What drives these bubbles and busts?
No real basis in economic or technological advancement, but mostly expectations - the fantasies and panics of investors. For example the 'dot-com' bubble, in which inflated claims of the 'information super-highway' led to huge amounts of venture capital being given to very questionable propositions (sometimes on the basis of a PowerPoint presentation) and the vastly over-priced internet stocks. The Economist predicted the crash of these stocks, and Krugman was one of the lone voices who tried to explain that the Internet could not grow more food, or manufacture more products, or ship anything other than information.
'Fergie' also discusses the 'Chimerica' phenomenon (inspired by Chimera - a fabled monster and name of virus in Mission Impossible 2, plus the word 'Chindia' to describe the re-emergence of China and India which were the world's biggest economies 200 years ago before guns and imperialism transferred wealth to the West) by which massive American trade deficits with China were financed by the latter from its low-but-growing wage-earners with high savings rates, and how the sub-prime mess happened because all this finance flowing from China to America led to billions the Wall-Street geniuses did not know how to invest, so they came up with the brilliant idea of lending to people with no income or job or collateral - the so-called 'ninja loans', predicated on the belief that real estate would keep on going up indefinitely.
Now we are seeing the financial collateral damage. And it is poetic given how much murder and genocide America has done in other parts of the world, shrugging it off as collateral damage, as it was done in the worthy cause of making American capitalists richer than ever. And while the lower and middle classes are paying much of the price in lost jobs, many of these people would have voted for the politicians that created the environment in which the seeds of the current chaos were sown.
Aside from new terms such as IPO to describe old things, new stuff such as 'securitization' and 'off-balance sheet financing' had mushroomed, not to mention derivatives. I did not immediately catch on that 'off-balance sheet financing' was basically illegal, since the balance sheet is required by law to provide 'full disclosure'.
Perhaps fortuitously in retrospect, there wasn't enough money in my manager's training budget to send me on a course for this topic of off-balance-sheet magic. But it should have been clear even then that securitization was a ripoff of sorts - creating new securities from existing assets, in some cases more than once. so that multiple levels of CMOs/CDOs (collateralized mortgage/debt obligations - try to understand that term) were created, with a loss of trail of who really owned the original mortgages and was responsible for managing them.
The original mortgages issued by a bank for example, were shuffled off to another corporation created for this purpose, which took over the bank's mortgages and replaced them with 'securities' (CMOs), and this process could happen again as the second corporation parcelled off pieces of the mortgages to a third new corporation.
All this was motivated by the need for investment banks to make a quick buck - fat commissions and bonuses on these 'new deals'. In the process however, a system of accountability which originally existed with the issuing bank managing its mortgages with trained staff, was diffused and shifted away to corporations owned by individual investors who had no clue what the mortgages were or what they were worth. They were simply enticed into buying the newly created CMOs with attractive rates of return offered on them, with no idea of how risky the CMOs were.
This is what the geniuses of Wall Street were upto, encouraged by what Soros even then was calling 'market fundamentalism' fueled by the Reagan-Thatcher 'revolutions' of killing regulation, selling off government enterprises to the private sector at give-away prices, and relieving the super-rich of any responsibility for taxes, leaving that for the poor and middle-class whose social programs were being ratcheted down. This was the so-called 'supply-side' economics, later labelled 'voodoo' economics by Bill Clinton, by which tax-cuts would stimulate investments by the rich so that the poor and middle-class would benefit - the super-rich 'Atlas' supporting everyone else per the Ayn Rand theory.
The reality of why this worked for a decade and half is a little different - massive WMD expenditures under Reagan created giant fiscal deficits which were financed by overseas lenders such as oil-exporting countries, as the rest of the world absorbed American inflation caused by such currency expansion (way, way beyond the monetarist limits recommended by Friedmanites) since the US dollar continued to be accepted as the international reserve currency because of America's political dominance and economic clout. All that is now all but over, as the latest G20 summit in London, UK, mused about creating an alternative reserve currency the world could accept, the US dollar no longer being valued after the squandering of American political capital by the Bushites.
On the derivatives question, Niall Ferguson, a brilliant star historian (who I despise because he helped sell the 'Armageddon' myth that Iran was building a bomb to evaporate Israel, while saying not a word about the 200+ nuclear weapons Israel already had which could easily evaporate Iran) has written in his latest book The Ascent of Money (a sort of followup to Galbraith's book of a few decades ago Money - Whence it came, Where it went) that the world economy's GNP is around $45 trillion (if I remember right), the stock and bond markets worth approx. $ 47 trillion, and the derivatives markets worth $473 trillion (all figures from 2006 - current estimates exceed a quadrillion!). Huge sums are also involved in credit default swaps..... another ticker. All of this shows how dangerously leveraged the financial house of cards is compared to actual economic output. And how fantastically overpriced the world of finance is compared to the actual value of goods and services.
Paul Krugman was one of the first big-name economists to 'finger' former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan for keeping tight control over inflation (unless there was a recession-threat in which case liquidity was quickly released and interest-rates slashed) but (except for occasional comments about 'irrational exuberance') exercising ZERO control of 'asset-prices' - ie the prices of stocks and real-estate and other financial instruments where speculation allowed all sorts of dangerous bubbles to develop. This massive casino allowed a few people to make gigantic fortunes but left millions exposed to huge losses when the bubbles came to a bust. What drives these bubbles and busts?
No real basis in economic or technological advancement, but mostly expectations - the fantasies and panics of investors. For example the 'dot-com' bubble, in which inflated claims of the 'information super-highway' led to huge amounts of venture capital being given to very questionable propositions (sometimes on the basis of a PowerPoint presentation) and the vastly over-priced internet stocks. The Economist predicted the crash of these stocks, and Krugman was one of the lone voices who tried to explain that the Internet could not grow more food, or manufacture more products, or ship anything other than information.
'Fergie' also discusses the 'Chimerica' phenomenon (inspired by Chimera - a fabled monster and name of virus in Mission Impossible 2, plus the word 'Chindia' to describe the re-emergence of China and India which were the world's biggest economies 200 years ago before guns and imperialism transferred wealth to the West) by which massive American trade deficits with China were financed by the latter from its low-but-growing wage-earners with high savings rates, and how the sub-prime mess happened because all this finance flowing from China to America led to billions the Wall-Street geniuses did not know how to invest, so they came up with the brilliant idea of lending to people with no income or job or collateral - the so-called 'ninja loans', predicated on the belief that real estate would keep on going up indefinitely.
Now we are seeing the financial collateral damage. And it is poetic given how much murder and genocide America has done in other parts of the world, shrugging it off as collateral damage, as it was done in the worthy cause of making American capitalists richer than ever. And while the lower and middle classes are paying much of the price in lost jobs, many of these people would have voted for the politicians that created the environment in which the seeds of the current chaos were sown.
AMERICA, ISRAEL, AFGHANISTAN, OIL
Sent to the Star, March 25, 2009.
A fundamental goal of American foreign policy, and one that has been formally enunciated in State Department documents, is to obtain oil cheaply, if necessary by force. That is one of the reasons why America spends half the planet's expenditure on weapons of mass destruction. The American government openly defines access to cheap oil as essential to its 'security'. The use of force in Iran in 1953 for oil, when the CIA acted to remove a democratically-elected leader who threatened to nationalize an oil-company which was taking Iranian oil out at bargain price, is well understood, though not acknowledged. The 'oil' motives in the invasions of Iraq of 1991 and 2003 are also understood, if not acknowledged.
But the 'oil' motive in America's arming of Israel, which has 200 nuclear bombs and every type of state-of-the-art chemical and biological weapon, as well as the best air-force of any non-US NATO country, is less understood. Israel's value to America is that it is the 'gun' pointed at Arab and Iranian heads in the Middle East, the world's most fertile oil region, so that oil continues to flow cheaply to America. Israel is America's gun by proxy, since a gun wielded openly (though it is to Iran and Iraq) is difficult to justify to world opinion.
But delivering the Jews their 'promised land' is a cover story that is very easy to sell, not only to Christian fundamentalists and Bible-thumpers in America, but to most Western governments, because of guilt over the Holocaust. People seem to forget that 200 years ago, when America was being 'settled' by the genocidal unsettling of its original inhabitants, the Puritans invoked the same Old Testament ideas of a 'chosen people' favored by God, who could presumably steal from, murder and exploit 'lesser' peoples. Then it was America that was the 'Promised Land'; now it has shifted to Palestine.
(As 'Zbig' Brzezinski, former US National Security Advisor wrote: "The unwillingess to recognize a historical connection between the rise of anti-American terrorism and America's involvement in the Middle East makes the formulation of an effective strategic response to terrorism that much more difficult".) In simple terms, unless the legitimate and long-standing grievances that have been cynically ignored for decades by a self-serving America are addressed, the terrorism - itself a response to the much greater TERRORISM from America, Britain and Israel - will not die.
It is troubling that PM Harper slavishly follows the rapine policies of former President Bush Jr.. He has apparently not learned from his error in opposition when he would have taken Canada into the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Nor does he seem to appreciate that the real reason for American presence in Afghanistan is not the Taliban, which America never cared about, but that Afghanistan is a gateway to another rich oil region – Central Asia. Canadian soldiers are dying in Afghanistan for all the wrong reasons, and but for former PM Chretien's magnificence, might have been dying in Iraq as well, also for the wrong reasons.
If Afghanistan and Pakistan are today one of the world's most dangerous hot-spots, it is the direct consequence of the short-sighted neglect of the American leaders, who invested billions in giving arms and missiles to local warlords to terrorize the Soviets, but who would not spend a fraction of that to rebuild the shattered country when the Soviets had been pushed out. And of the criminal arrogance and duplicity of the Bush administration which within months of 911 began a shift of resources away from Afghanistan to its real target - the theft of an utterly defenseless but oil-rich Iraq, which 911 gave it the perfect pretext for.
A fundamental goal of American foreign policy, and one that has been formally enunciated in State Department documents, is to obtain oil cheaply, if necessary by force. That is one of the reasons why America spends half the planet's expenditure on weapons of mass destruction. The American government openly defines access to cheap oil as essential to its 'security'. The use of force in Iran in 1953 for oil, when the CIA acted to remove a democratically-elected leader who threatened to nationalize an oil-company which was taking Iranian oil out at bargain price, is well understood, though not acknowledged. The 'oil' motives in the invasions of Iraq of 1991 and 2003 are also understood, if not acknowledged.
But the 'oil' motive in America's arming of Israel, which has 200 nuclear bombs and every type of state-of-the-art chemical and biological weapon, as well as the best air-force of any non-US NATO country, is less understood. Israel's value to America is that it is the 'gun' pointed at Arab and Iranian heads in the Middle East, the world's most fertile oil region, so that oil continues to flow cheaply to America. Israel is America's gun by proxy, since a gun wielded openly (though it is to Iran and Iraq) is difficult to justify to world opinion.
But delivering the Jews their 'promised land' is a cover story that is very easy to sell, not only to Christian fundamentalists and Bible-thumpers in America, but to most Western governments, because of guilt over the Holocaust. People seem to forget that 200 years ago, when America was being 'settled' by the genocidal unsettling of its original inhabitants, the Puritans invoked the same Old Testament ideas of a 'chosen people' favored by God, who could presumably steal from, murder and exploit 'lesser' peoples. Then it was America that was the 'Promised Land'; now it has shifted to Palestine.
(As 'Zbig' Brzezinski, former US National Security Advisor wrote: "The unwillingess to recognize a historical connection between the rise of anti-American terrorism and America's involvement in the Middle East makes the formulation of an effective strategic response to terrorism that much more difficult".) In simple terms, unless the legitimate and long-standing grievances that have been cynically ignored for decades by a self-serving America are addressed, the terrorism - itself a response to the much greater TERRORISM from America, Britain and Israel - will not die.
It is troubling that PM Harper slavishly follows the rapine policies of former President Bush Jr.. He has apparently not learned from his error in opposition when he would have taken Canada into the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Nor does he seem to appreciate that the real reason for American presence in Afghanistan is not the Taliban, which America never cared about, but that Afghanistan is a gateway to another rich oil region – Central Asia. Canadian soldiers are dying in Afghanistan for all the wrong reasons, and but for former PM Chretien's magnificence, might have been dying in Iraq as well, also for the wrong reasons.
If Afghanistan and Pakistan are today one of the world's most dangerous hot-spots, it is the direct consequence of the short-sighted neglect of the American leaders, who invested billions in giving arms and missiles to local warlords to terrorize the Soviets, but who would not spend a fraction of that to rebuild the shattered country when the Soviets had been pushed out. And of the criminal arrogance and duplicity of the Bush administration which within months of 911 began a shift of resources away from Afghanistan to its real target - the theft of an utterly defenseless but oil-rich Iraq, which 911 gave it the perfect pretext for.
Sunday, March 22, 2009
THE ZIONISM OF THE 'PURITANS'
The 'Zionists' of today stole the state of Israel from Palestine by force and are keeping it by force. They are the historical inheritors of the 19th-century Puritan settlers of America, who also justified their armed robbery of the North American continent from the original inhabitants by invoking the Old Testament and its talk of 'chosen people' favored by God, and the right of such people (presumably) to murder, steal from, and otherwise exploit 'lesser' peoples.
Zionism has thus rendered 'unholy' vast sections of the Bible which seem written exclusively for racist and religious propaganda.
In the 1980s, legendary Bollywood film-maker Raj Kapoor (now deceased) ended his career with the superlative 'Ram Teri Ganga Maili', which at one level concerned (as did the very different Vertigo of Hitchcock) the plight of a good soul tormented by deceit and evil, but at another was a commentary on political corruption. The film used the polluted Ganges river - ignorantly revered by millions of Hindus for 'washing away' sins, rivers being as useless as 'confessions' in providing absolution - as a metaphor to say: the sins of humanity overwhelm even the holy river's ability to wash them off.
The crimes of America and Israel - both states invented by armed robbery and genocide, using Zionist ideas of a 'Promised Land' as cover - rely on the unholy sections of the Bible, which nearly one-half of Americans (who vote for the Bible-thumping Republicans) place their literalist 'faith' on. No doubt, at least in the minds of these 'Judeo-Christian' fundamentalists, their crimes have already been 'forgiven' - paid for by the crucifixion of the 'Saviour' - whose teachings therefore no longer hold relevance.
In this moronic ideology, it is not necessary to actually follow any of the Son of Man's teachings, to live by those principles... one can do the total opposite because so long as one 'believes in Jesus' one is 'already saved' ...... (Jesus already paid for the sins of whoever believes in him, so the latter need not worry about sins or crimes ...).
When these murderers reap the consequences of their actions, they'll wish they had never been born, but Mercy will snub their undying screams; as they have meted out, so shall it be done to them. And that 'born-again Christian' who could not resist one last massacre in Gaza even as he exited the White House in near-universal disgrace for earlier crimes - every last molecule of his vanity, whether for the 'white' skin concealing his black soul, the presidential or military power he wielded, or his ill-gotten wealth, will be searingly baked out of him.
This is my curse ...... and the Son of Man's promise.
Zionism has thus rendered 'unholy' vast sections of the Bible which seem written exclusively for racist and religious propaganda.
In the 1980s, legendary Bollywood film-maker Raj Kapoor (now deceased) ended his career with the superlative 'Ram Teri Ganga Maili', which at one level concerned (as did the very different Vertigo of Hitchcock) the plight of a good soul tormented by deceit and evil, but at another was a commentary on political corruption. The film used the polluted Ganges river - ignorantly revered by millions of Hindus for 'washing away' sins, rivers being as useless as 'confessions' in providing absolution - as a metaphor to say: the sins of humanity overwhelm even the holy river's ability to wash them off.
The crimes of America and Israel - both states invented by armed robbery and genocide, using Zionist ideas of a 'Promised Land' as cover - rely on the unholy sections of the Bible, which nearly one-half of Americans (who vote for the Bible-thumping Republicans) place their literalist 'faith' on. No doubt, at least in the minds of these 'Judeo-Christian' fundamentalists, their crimes have already been 'forgiven' - paid for by the crucifixion of the 'Saviour' - whose teachings therefore no longer hold relevance.
In this moronic ideology, it is not necessary to actually follow any of the Son of Man's teachings, to live by those principles... one can do the total opposite because so long as one 'believes in Jesus' one is 'already saved' ...... (Jesus already paid for the sins of whoever believes in him, so the latter need not worry about sins or crimes ...).
When these murderers reap the consequences of their actions, they'll wish they had never been born, but Mercy will snub their undying screams; as they have meted out, so shall it be done to them. And that 'born-again Christian' who could not resist one last massacre in Gaza even as he exited the White House in near-universal disgrace for earlier crimes - every last molecule of his vanity, whether for the 'white' skin concealing his black soul, the presidential or military power he wielded, or his ill-gotten wealth, will be searingly baked out of him.
This is my curse ...... and the Son of Man's promise.
Thursday, March 19, 2009
AIG's 'SCUM'DOG MILLIONAIRES
No further comment needed.
These bonuses are the legacy of the 'free-market' fundamentalism of Reagan and Thatcher, which found its culmination in the lawlessness and greed of the Bush-Cheney years. These adorers of the one-dimensional philosophy of Ayn Rand ('Atlas Shrugged' ought to be renamed 'Atlas Begged', as these hypocrites have been taking handouts in Himalaya-size begging bowls) and the superficial economics of Milton Friedman, purveyor of what George Soros calls the 'false doctrine of monetarism', now stand exposed as the 'scum'dogs they are.
The statue of Saddam Hussein was toppled by the American invaders. Now what's needed is the metaphorical toppling of the 'idols' of Reagan and Thatcher, both of whom - if we had global justice - would have been prosecuted for illegally selling arms to Saddam Hussein for terrorizing Iran. And while the Western news media babbles again about prosecuting a tinpot dictator from Sudan, no one breathes a word about going after the greatest war-criminals of the 21st century - the unholy trinity of Bush Jr., Cheney and Rumsfeld.
That much remains stable amidst the economic chaos.
These bonuses are the legacy of the 'free-market' fundamentalism of Reagan and Thatcher, which found its culmination in the lawlessness and greed of the Bush-Cheney years. These adorers of the one-dimensional philosophy of Ayn Rand ('Atlas Shrugged' ought to be renamed 'Atlas Begged', as these hypocrites have been taking handouts in Himalaya-size begging bowls) and the superficial economics of Milton Friedman, purveyor of what George Soros calls the 'false doctrine of monetarism', now stand exposed as the 'scum'dogs they are.
The statue of Saddam Hussein was toppled by the American invaders. Now what's needed is the metaphorical toppling of the 'idols' of Reagan and Thatcher, both of whom - if we had global justice - would have been prosecuted for illegally selling arms to Saddam Hussein for terrorizing Iran. And while the Western news media babbles again about prosecuting a tinpot dictator from Sudan, no one breathes a word about going after the greatest war-criminals of the 21st century - the unholy trinity of Bush Jr., Cheney and Rumsfeld.
That much remains stable amidst the economic chaos.
Saturday, March 14, 2009
JUDAISM VS. ZIONISM & THE US-ISRAEL AXIS
American propaganda, supported by many Western countries including Canada, accords Israel a near-sacrosanct status. In America this is aided by the ignorance of Bible-thumpers who think their scripture prophecies and 'promises' the nation of Israel to Jews..... but this is just one of the many betrayals and distortions of that book ..... which is (like every other scripture - Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Buddhist, or other) just a book. Like every other book of scripture, its objective was (or ought to have been) the purification of souls, not the propagating of politics.
But throughout history, priests (including Popes) have used religion to acquire power, just as kings and politicians have done. The religion of Christianity was the creation of the emperor Constantine (who is said to have boiled his wife, executed his son, and remained a pagan until his 'last day' when he converted to Christianity as an insurance policy) to consolidate control over the Roman Empire. It had nothing to do with the Son of Man's request to spread the gospel (and which itself never was meant to create or inspire an institution such as the Church). When the body is the 'temple of the Living God' and 'Earth is my footstool, Heaven My Throne, what temple can you build for Me, man?', all human institutional religions are hopelessly corrupted.
And so the 'Christian' nation of America which was founded on the pursuit of private property (almost enshrined in the American Constitution by the 'founding fathers', but replaced at the last minute by 'happiness') - utterly dismissing the Son of Man's edict that no man can follow 2 Masters - holds the simultaneously oxymoronic (and moronic) beliefs that Jews are destined for hell, yet must be delivered to the 'Promised Land' which the Bible-thumpers now say is in the Middle East. (When they were 'settling' America by the genocidal unsettling of its inhabitants, America was the 'Promised Land' - this is how fundamentalists lie...).
But the 'Land' (whether called Israel or Yerushaleim or even 'Zion') promised by Yahweh to Moses, Isaiah and other prophets has nothing to do with this planet. It belongs to another dimension, being the same place the Son of Man referred to as 'my Kingdom ... not of this world' of 'rust, moth and corruption'. This planet is doomed to die in 4 to 7 billion years, when scientists estimate the Sun's fire will burn out, turning it into a 'brown dwarf' incapable of sustaining life on earth, or a 'black hole' which would suck everything around it including the spaceship we live on into an inexorable abyss. That is though an unimaginably long time away.
But the American government, especially the 'Christian' fundamentalists of the Republican Party, have astutely exploited this ignorance of the thumpers of their holy book. Massive eco-military aid (which has given Israel the latest, most sophisticated weapons of mass destruction of every type - biological, chemical, nuclear and conventional including an air-force more lethal than that of any NATO country but the US) was provided under the guise of delivering the Jews their promised land. But the real objective of this aid (though partly to appease the powerful Zionist lobbies of North America) has been to make Israel what imperial America wants it to be - a gun pointed at Arab and Iranian heads in the oil-rich Gulf.
Those oil-rich states remain constantly under threat from the American-Israeli 'axis-of-evil', so that oil continues to flow cheaply to America. This has been a constant goal of American foreign policy since the Second World War. State Department documents openly assert that American 'security' depends on easy access to Middle Eastern oil. The 20th century was the 'American' century because of cheap oil, obtained at the point of a gun - the state of Israel - along with the CIA backed coup of 1953 in Iran, and the invasions of Iraq of 1991 and 2003.
Iran is hated because it threw out the American backed dictator in 1979, and because its post-1979 religious regime has continued to defy the American government, supplying arms to the Iraqi insurgents and to the terrorized Palestinians (laudable objectives in each case). When Iranian President Ahmadinejad visited New York in Sept. 2007, he was vilified by the American media, which parroted their government's depiction of him as one who wanted to wipe Israel off the map with a nuclear bomb, when what Ahmadinejad had said was that the Zionist state of Israel was an abomination and needed to be replaced by the original nation of Palestine incorporating Jews, through a referendum.
What the criminally-conspiring American media did not report was that several Jewish rabbinical leaders had met with Ahmadinejad during that visit, and not only supported him, but eulogized him. This is captured in the following video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNcaQ4k7VM8
The rabbis from World Torah Jewry explained in that meeting that the nation-state of Israel has nothing to do with Judaism, but is the result of Zionism which is a violation of the Jewish teachings, and which materialistic Jews have fallen prey to because of the Holocaust. More details about these matters, and what Judaism truly is supposed to be about, versus the propaganda of the American and Israeli governments, is contained in the following Jewish website:
www.jewsagainstzionism.com
And in the rhetoric of the Canadian Arab Federation and of other Arabs and Muslims in the Middle East, this is exactly how Israel is seen - as a Zionist, not Jewish state - created by a naked grab of territory by force, and supported by American force, for geopolitical reasons that have nothing to do with the Jewish diaspora and everything to do with oil...... and money.
But throughout history, priests (including Popes) have used religion to acquire power, just as kings and politicians have done. The religion of Christianity was the creation of the emperor Constantine (who is said to have boiled his wife, executed his son, and remained a pagan until his 'last day' when he converted to Christianity as an insurance policy) to consolidate control over the Roman Empire. It had nothing to do with the Son of Man's request to spread the gospel (and which itself never was meant to create or inspire an institution such as the Church). When the body is the 'temple of the Living God' and 'Earth is my footstool, Heaven My Throne, what temple can you build for Me, man?', all human institutional religions are hopelessly corrupted.
And so the 'Christian' nation of America which was founded on the pursuit of private property (almost enshrined in the American Constitution by the 'founding fathers', but replaced at the last minute by 'happiness') - utterly dismissing the Son of Man's edict that no man can follow 2 Masters - holds the simultaneously oxymoronic (and moronic) beliefs that Jews are destined for hell, yet must be delivered to the 'Promised Land' which the Bible-thumpers now say is in the Middle East. (When they were 'settling' America by the genocidal unsettling of its inhabitants, America was the 'Promised Land' - this is how fundamentalists lie...).
But the 'Land' (whether called Israel or Yerushaleim or even 'Zion') promised by Yahweh to Moses, Isaiah and other prophets has nothing to do with this planet. It belongs to another dimension, being the same place the Son of Man referred to as 'my Kingdom ... not of this world' of 'rust, moth and corruption'. This planet is doomed to die in 4 to 7 billion years, when scientists estimate the Sun's fire will burn out, turning it into a 'brown dwarf' incapable of sustaining life on earth, or a 'black hole' which would suck everything around it including the spaceship we live on into an inexorable abyss. That is though an unimaginably long time away.
But the American government, especially the 'Christian' fundamentalists of the Republican Party, have astutely exploited this ignorance of the thumpers of their holy book. Massive eco-military aid (which has given Israel the latest, most sophisticated weapons of mass destruction of every type - biological, chemical, nuclear and conventional including an air-force more lethal than that of any NATO country but the US) was provided under the guise of delivering the Jews their promised land. But the real objective of this aid (though partly to appease the powerful Zionist lobbies of North America) has been to make Israel what imperial America wants it to be - a gun pointed at Arab and Iranian heads in the oil-rich Gulf.
Those oil-rich states remain constantly under threat from the American-Israeli 'axis-of-evil', so that oil continues to flow cheaply to America. This has been a constant goal of American foreign policy since the Second World War. State Department documents openly assert that American 'security' depends on easy access to Middle Eastern oil. The 20th century was the 'American' century because of cheap oil, obtained at the point of a gun - the state of Israel - along with the CIA backed coup of 1953 in Iran, and the invasions of Iraq of 1991 and 2003.
Iran is hated because it threw out the American backed dictator in 1979, and because its post-1979 religious regime has continued to defy the American government, supplying arms to the Iraqi insurgents and to the terrorized Palestinians (laudable objectives in each case). When Iranian President Ahmadinejad visited New York in Sept. 2007, he was vilified by the American media, which parroted their government's depiction of him as one who wanted to wipe Israel off the map with a nuclear bomb, when what Ahmadinejad had said was that the Zionist state of Israel was an abomination and needed to be replaced by the original nation of Palestine incorporating Jews, through a referendum.
What the criminally-conspiring American media did not report was that several Jewish rabbinical leaders had met with Ahmadinejad during that visit, and not only supported him, but eulogized him. This is captured in the following video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNcaQ4k7VM8
The rabbis from World Torah Jewry explained in that meeting that the nation-state of Israel has nothing to do with Judaism, but is the result of Zionism which is a violation of the Jewish teachings, and which materialistic Jews have fallen prey to because of the Holocaust. More details about these matters, and what Judaism truly is supposed to be about, versus the propaganda of the American and Israeli governments, is contained in the following Jewish website:
www.jewsagainstzionism.com
And in the rhetoric of the Canadian Arab Federation and of other Arabs and Muslims in the Middle East, this is exactly how Israel is seen - as a Zionist, not Jewish state - created by a naked grab of territory by force, and supported by American force, for geopolitical reasons that have nothing to do with the Jewish diaspora and everything to do with oil...... and money.
Sunday, March 1, 2009
OBAMA MAINTAINS AMERICAN FORKED-TONGUE ON THE MIDEAST
Some months ago, when Obama was campaigning for the Presidency, it was predicted on this blog that he would bring about no significant changes in foreign policy, having appointed the hawk Biden (virulent supporter of the criminal invasion of Iraq) as running mate. Here are more details on Obama's waffling, his obedience to the Zionist (as opposed to Jewish - there is plenty of dissent now in Jews on this question) line in the Middle East, and his lies of omission if not commission - as he pretends not to see his government's conspiracy with its client-terrorist state Israel in murdering Palestinians and their women and children, and taking over whatever precious little remains of the territories they inhabit, however torturously - so it can have its own 'enforcer' in the oil-rich 'Holy' Land.
Some of the highlights:
1. Obama had no comment on the American backed assault on Gaza, which killed over 1400 Palestinians, but which was conveniently halted the day before his inauguration, or (aside from the $4 billion annual eco-military 'aid' Israel has been getting for decades from the US) on 2 ships sent loaded with weapons from the US specifically for the attack on Gaza, one of which was blocked by Greece which refused to allow it to dock. He did however condemn arms shipments to Gaza by others for its defence.
2. He referred supportively to the Arab league's recommendation for Palestinian 'normalizaton' of relations with Israel, while blithely ignoring its central premise - a 2-state settlement, which the US and Israel are virulently opposed to, and with this latest attack, eliminating any hope of.
3. He congratulated Jordan for training Palestinian security forces used to violently suppress Palestinians' support for the democratically elected Hamas; refused to acknowledge Hamas' legitimacy and expressed support only for the defeated party's representatives. He continued the American portrayal of Hamas as a terrorist agency even though it has repeatedly endorsed the 2-state settlement supported by the entire world, except the two 'Holy States'- America and Israel.
4. The US and Israel also voted against a UN resolution affirming the right of Palestinians to self-determination. Naturally, they cannot be allowed to make their own future - only the Americans and Israelis have that inviolable right.
5. Obama repeated US-Israeli demands that Hamas recognize Israel's right to exist (utterly ignoring Hamas' public affirmations of the right of both states to exist), and that Hamas renounce violence, without any such renunciation by the US or Israel..... This is exactly how mobsters dictate terms to their victims...
6. As it did (along with the UK) in 1953 in Iran, the US is using overwhelming force to destroy democracy in Palestine (the one Arab state that practices it), because the democrats in question didn't follow American orders, having voted the 'wrong' way.
Obama is thus keeping his pre-election promises to American Jews, which, as one Israeli writer commented, 'broke all records for fawning'... perhaps it is too much to expect otherwise from the first African-American to occupy the White House. And he certainly faces big challenges on the domestic economic front..... Still, to abandon the Palestinians to butchery by the Israelis does not bode well for the world's future......
America's murderous assault (through Israel) on what remains of occupied Palestine is one of the potential seeds of World War III, which Obama's predecessor made more likely with the naked grab of Iraq, the second rich oil nation in the Gulf..... Do the Americans imagine the rest of the world will just let them loot the world's oil? The Iraqi insurgency and the inability of the world's greatest armed force to tame a tiny nation a fraction of its size has apparently taught the American government nothing....
The US is in the Middle East for oil, not Israel, just as it is in Afghanistan for a gateway to Central Asian oil - the Taliban being as convenient a 'red herring' as Israel.
Obama on Israel-Palestine
Noam Chomsky
chomsky.info, January 24, 2009
Barack Obama is recognized to be a person of acute intelligence, a legal scholar, careful with his choice of words. He deserves to be taken seriously -- both what he says, and what he omits. Particularly significant is his first substantive statement on foreign affairs, on January 22, at the State Department, when introducing George Mitchell to serve as his special envoy for Middle East peace.
Mitchell is to focus his attention on the Israel-Palestine problem, in the wake of the recent US-Israeli invasion of Gaza. During the murderous assault, Obama remained silent apart from a few platitudes, because, he said, there is only one president -- a fact that did not silence him on many other issues. His campaign did, however, repeat his statement that "if missiles were falling where my two daughters sleep, I would do everything in order to stop that." He was referring to Israeli children, not the hundreds of Palestinian children being butchered by US arms, about whom he could not speak, because there was only one president.
On January 22, however, the one president was Barack Obama, so he could speak freely about these matters -- avoiding, however, the attack on Gaza, which had, conveniently, been called off just before the inauguration.
Obama's talk emphasized his commitment to a peaceful settlement. He left its contours vague, apart from one specific proposal: "the Arab peace initiative," Obama said, "contains constructive elements that could help advance these efforts. Now is the time for Arab states to act on the initiative's promise by supporting the Palestinian government under President Abbas and Prime Minister Fayyad, taking steps towards normalizing relations with Israel, and by standing up to extremism that threatens us all."
Obama is not directly falsifying the Arab League proposal, but the carefully framed deceit is instructive.
The Arab League peace proposal does indeed call for normalization of relations with Israel -- in the context -- repeat, in the context of a two-state settlement in terms of the longstanding international consensus, which the US and Israel have blocked for over 30 years, in international isolation, and still do. The core of the Arab League proposal, as Obama and his Mideast advisers know very well, is its call for a peaceful political settlement in these terms, which are well-known, and recognized to be the only basis for the peaceful settlement to which Obama professes to be committed. The omission of that crucial fact can hardly be accidental, and signals clearly that Obama envisions no departure from US rejectionism. His call for the Arab states to act on a corollary to their proposal, while the US ignores even the existence of its central content, which is the precondition for the corollary, surpasses cynicism.
The most significant acts to undermine a peaceful settlement are the daily US-backed actions in the occupied territories, all recognized to be criminal: taking over valuable land and resources and constructing what the leading architect of the plan, Ariel Sharon, called "Bantustans" for Palestinians -- an unfair comparison because the Bantustans were far more viable than the fragments left to Palestinians under Sharon's conception, now being realized. But the US and Israel even continue to oppose a political settlement in words, most recently in December 2008, when the US and Israel (and a few Pacific islands) voted against a UN resolution supporting "the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination" (passed 173 to 5, US-Israel opposed, with evasive pretexts).
Obama had not one word to say about the settlement and infrastructure developments in the West Bank, and the complex measures to control Palestinian existence, designed to undermine the prospects for a peaceful two-state settlement. His silence is a grim refutation of his oratorical flourishes about how "I will sustain an active commitment to seek two states living side by side in peace and security."
Also unmentioned is Israel's use of US arms in Gaza, in violation not only of international but also US law. Or Washington's shipment of new arms to Israel right at the peak of the US-Israeli attack, surely not unknown to Obama's Middle East advisers.
Obama was firm, however, that smuggling of arms to Gaza must be stopped. He endorses the agreement of Condoleeza Rice and Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni that the Egyptian-Gaza border must be closed -- a remarkable exercise of imperial arrogance, as the Financial Times observed: "as they stood in Washington congratulating each other, both officials seemed oblivious to the fact that they were making a deal about an illegal trade on someone else's border -- Egypt in this case. The next day, an Egyptian official described the memorandum as `fictional'." Egypt's objections were ignored.
Returning to Obama's reference to the "constructive" Arab League proposal, as the wording indicates, Obama persists in restricting support to the defeated party in the January 2006 election, the only free election in the Arab world, to which the US and Israel reacted, instantly and overtly, by severely punishing Palestinians for opposing the will of the masters. A minor technicality is that Abbas's term ran out on January 9, and that Fayyad was appointed without confirmation by the Palestinian parliament (many of them kidnapped and in Israeli prisons). Ha'aretz describes Fayyad as "a strange bird in Palestinian politics. On the one hand, he is the Palestinian politician most esteemed by Israel and the West. However, on the other hand, he has no electoral power whatsoever in Gaza or the West Bank." The report also notes Fayyad's "close relationship with the Israeli establishment," notably his friendship with Sharon's extremist adviser Dov Weiglass. Though lacking popular support, he is regarded as competent and honest, not the norm in the US-backed political sectors.
Obama's insistence that only Abbas and Fayyad exist conforms to the consistent Western contempt for democracy unless it is under control.
Obama provided the usual reasons for ignoring the elected government led by Hamas. "To be a genuine party to peace," Obama declared, "the quartet [US, EU, Russia, UN] has made it clear that Hamas must meet clear conditions: recognize Israel's right to exist; renounce violence; and abide by past agreements." Unmentioned, also as usual, is the inconvenient fact that the US and Israel firmly reject all three conditions. In international isolation, they bar a two-state settlement including a Palestinian state; they of course do not renounce violence; and they reject the quartet's central proposal, the "road map." Israel formally accepted it, but with 14 reservations that effectively eliminate its contents (tacitly backed by the US). It is the great merit of Jimmy Carter's Palestine: Peace not Apartheid, to have brought these facts to public attention for the first time -- and in the mainstream, the only time.
It follows, by elementary reasoning, that neither the US nor Israel is a "genuine party to peace." But that cannot be. It is not even a phrase in the English language.
It is perhaps unfair to criticize Obama for this further exercise of cynicism, because it is close to universal, unlike his scrupulous evisceration of the core component of the Arab League proposal, which is his own novel contribution.
Also near universal are the standard references to Hamas: a terrorist organization, dedicated to the destruction of Israel (or maybe all Jews). Omitted are the inconvenient facts that the US-Israel are not only dedicated to the destruction of any viable Palestinian state, but are steadily implementing those policies. Or that unlike the two rejectionist states, Hamas has called for a two-state settlement in terms of the international consensus: publicly, repeatedly, explicitly.
Obama began his remarks by saying: "Let me be clear: America is committed to Israel's security. And we will always support Israel's right to defend itself against legitimate threats."
There was nothing about the right of Palestinians to defend themselves against far more extreme threats, such as those occurring daily, with US support, in the occupied territories. But that again is the norm.
Also normal is the enunciation of the principle that Israel has the right to defend itself. That is correct, but vacuous: so does everyone. But in the context the cliche is worse than vacuous: it is more cynical deceit.
The issue is not whether Israel has the right to defend itself, like everyone else, but whether it has the right to do so by force. No one, including Obama, believes that states enjoy a general right to defend themselves by force: it is first necessary to demonstrate that there are no peaceful alternatives that can be tried. In this case, there surely are.
A narrow alternative would be for Israel to abide by a cease-fire, for example, the cease-fire proposed by Hamas political leader Khaled Mishal a few days before Israel launched its attack on December 27. Mishal called for restoring the 2005 agreement. That agreement called for an end to violence and uninterrupted opening of the borders, along with an Israeli guarantee that goods and people could move freely between the two parts of occupied Palestine, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The agreement was rejected by the US and Israel a few months later, after the free election of January 2006 turned out "the wrong way." There are many other highly relevant cases.
The broader and more significant alternative would be for the US and Israel to abandon their extreme rejectionism, and join the rest of the world -- including the Arab states and Hamas -- in supporting a two-state settlement in accord with the international consensus. It should be noted that in the past 30 years there has been one departure from US-Israeli rejectionism: the negotiations at Taba in January 2001, which appeared to be close to a peaceful resolution when Israel prematurely called them off. It would not, then, be outlandish for Obama to agree to join the world, even within the framework of US policy, if he were interested in doing so.
In short, Obama's forceful reiteration of Israel's right to defend itself is another exercise of cynical deceit -- though, it must be admitted, not unique to him, but virtually universal.
The deceit is particularly striking in this case because the occasion was the appointment of Mitchell as special envoy. Mitchell's primary achievement was his leading role in the peaceful settlement in northern Ireland. It called for an end to IRA terror and British violence. Implicit is the recognition that while Britain had the right to defend itself from terror, it had no right to do so by force, because there was a peaceful alternative: recognition of the legitimate grievances of the Irish Catholic community that were the roots of IRA terror. When Britain adopted that sensible course, the terror ended. The implications for Mitchell's mission with regard to Israel-Palestine are so obvious that they need not be spelled out. And omission of them is, again, a striking indication of the commitment of the Obama administration to traditional US rejectionism and opposition to peace, except on its extremist terms.
Obama also praised Jordan for its "constructive role in training Palestinian security forces and nurturing its relations with Israel" -- which contrasts strikingly with US-Israeli refusal to deal with the freely elected government of Palestine, while savagely punishing Palestinians for electing it with pretexts which, as noted, do not withstand a moment's scrutiny. It is true that Jordan joined the US in arming and training Palestinian security forces, so that they could violently suppress any manifestation of support for the miserable victims of US-Israeli assault in Gaza, also arresting supporters of Hamas and the prominent journalist Khaled Amayreh, while organizing their own demonstrations in support of Abbas and Fatah, in which most participants "were civil servants and school children who were instructed by the PA to attend the rally," according to the Jerusalem Post. Our kind of democracy.
Obama made one further substantive comment: "As part of a lasting cease-fire, Gaza's border crossings should be open to allow the flow of aid and commerce, with an appropriate monitoring regimeÉ" He did not, of course, mention that the US-Israel had rejected much the same agreement after the January 2006 election, and that Israel had never observed similar subsequent agreements on borders.
Also missing is any reaction to Israel's announcement that it rejected the cease-fire agreement, so that the prospects for it to be "lasting" are not auspicious. As reported at once in the press, "Israeli Cabinet Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, who takes part in security deliberations, told Army Radio on Thursday that Israel wouldn't let border crossings with Gaza reopen without a deal to free [Gilad] Schalit" (AP, Jan 22); ÔIsrael to keep Gaza crossings closed...An official said the government planned to use the issue to bargain for the release of Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier held by the Islamist group since 2006 (Financial Times, Jan. 23); "Earlier this week, Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni said that progress on Corporal Shalit's release would be a precondition to opening up the border crossings that have been mostly closed since Hamas wrested control of Gaza from the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority in 2007" (Christian Science Monitor, Jan. 23); "an Israeli official said there would be tough conditions for any lifting of the blockade, which he linked with the release of Gilad Shalit" (FT, Jan. 23); among many others.
Shalit's capture is a prominent issue in the West, another indication of Hamas's criminality. Whatever one thinks about it, it is uncontroversial that capture of a soldier of an attacking army is far less of a crime than kidnapping of civilians, exactly what Israeli forces did the day before the capture of Shalit, invading Gaza city and kidnapping two brothers, then spiriting them across the border where they disappeared into Israel's prison complex. Unlike the much lesser case of Shalit, that crime was virtually unreported and has been forgotten, along with Israel's regular practice for decades of kidnapping civilians in Lebanon and on the high seas and dispatching them to Israeli prisons, often held for many years as hostages. But the capture of Shalit bars a cease-fire.
Obama's State Department talk about the Middle East continued with "the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan and PakistanÉ the central front in our enduring struggle against terrorism and extremism." A few hours later, US planes attacked a remote village in Afghanistan, intending to kill a Taliban commander. "Village elders, though, told provincial officials there were no Taliban in the area, which they described as a hamlet populated mainly by shepherds. Women and children were among the 22 dead, they said, according to Hamididan Abdul Rahmzai, the head of the provincial council" (LA Times, Jan. 24).
Afghan president Karzai's first message to Obama after he was elected in November was a plea to end the bombing of Afghan civilians, reiterated a few hours before Obama was sworn in. This was considered as significant as Karzai's call for a timetable for departure of US and other foreign forces. The rich and powerful have their "responsibilities." Among them, the New York Times reported, is to "provide security" in southern Afghanistan, where "the insurgency is homegrown and self-sustaining." All familiar. From Pravda in the 1980s, for example.
Some of the highlights:
1. Obama had no comment on the American backed assault on Gaza, which killed over 1400 Palestinians, but which was conveniently halted the day before his inauguration, or (aside from the $4 billion annual eco-military 'aid' Israel has been getting for decades from the US) on 2 ships sent loaded with weapons from the US specifically for the attack on Gaza, one of which was blocked by Greece which refused to allow it to dock. He did however condemn arms shipments to Gaza by others for its defence.
2. He referred supportively to the Arab league's recommendation for Palestinian 'normalizaton' of relations with Israel, while blithely ignoring its central premise - a 2-state settlement, which the US and Israel are virulently opposed to, and with this latest attack, eliminating any hope of.
3. He congratulated Jordan for training Palestinian security forces used to violently suppress Palestinians' support for the democratically elected Hamas; refused to acknowledge Hamas' legitimacy and expressed support only for the defeated party's representatives. He continued the American portrayal of Hamas as a terrorist agency even though it has repeatedly endorsed the 2-state settlement supported by the entire world, except the two 'Holy States'- America and Israel.
4. The US and Israel also voted against a UN resolution affirming the right of Palestinians to self-determination. Naturally, they cannot be allowed to make their own future - only the Americans and Israelis have that inviolable right.
5. Obama repeated US-Israeli demands that Hamas recognize Israel's right to exist (utterly ignoring Hamas' public affirmations of the right of both states to exist), and that Hamas renounce violence, without any such renunciation by the US or Israel..... This is exactly how mobsters dictate terms to their victims...
6. As it did (along with the UK) in 1953 in Iran, the US is using overwhelming force to destroy democracy in Palestine (the one Arab state that practices it), because the democrats in question didn't follow American orders, having voted the 'wrong' way.
Obama is thus keeping his pre-election promises to American Jews, which, as one Israeli writer commented, 'broke all records for fawning'... perhaps it is too much to expect otherwise from the first African-American to occupy the White House. And he certainly faces big challenges on the domestic economic front..... Still, to abandon the Palestinians to butchery by the Israelis does not bode well for the world's future......
America's murderous assault (through Israel) on what remains of occupied Palestine is one of the potential seeds of World War III, which Obama's predecessor made more likely with the naked grab of Iraq, the second rich oil nation in the Gulf..... Do the Americans imagine the rest of the world will just let them loot the world's oil? The Iraqi insurgency and the inability of the world's greatest armed force to tame a tiny nation a fraction of its size has apparently taught the American government nothing....
The US is in the Middle East for oil, not Israel, just as it is in Afghanistan for a gateway to Central Asian oil - the Taliban being as convenient a 'red herring' as Israel.
Obama on Israel-Palestine
Noam Chomsky
chomsky.info, January 24, 2009
Barack Obama is recognized to be a person of acute intelligence, a legal scholar, careful with his choice of words. He deserves to be taken seriously -- both what he says, and what he omits. Particularly significant is his first substantive statement on foreign affairs, on January 22, at the State Department, when introducing George Mitchell to serve as his special envoy for Middle East peace.
Mitchell is to focus his attention on the Israel-Palestine problem, in the wake of the recent US-Israeli invasion of Gaza. During the murderous assault, Obama remained silent apart from a few platitudes, because, he said, there is only one president -- a fact that did not silence him on many other issues. His campaign did, however, repeat his statement that "if missiles were falling where my two daughters sleep, I would do everything in order to stop that." He was referring to Israeli children, not the hundreds of Palestinian children being butchered by US arms, about whom he could not speak, because there was only one president.
On January 22, however, the one president was Barack Obama, so he could speak freely about these matters -- avoiding, however, the attack on Gaza, which had, conveniently, been called off just before the inauguration.
Obama's talk emphasized his commitment to a peaceful settlement. He left its contours vague, apart from one specific proposal: "the Arab peace initiative," Obama said, "contains constructive elements that could help advance these efforts. Now is the time for Arab states to act on the initiative's promise by supporting the Palestinian government under President Abbas and Prime Minister Fayyad, taking steps towards normalizing relations with Israel, and by standing up to extremism that threatens us all."
Obama is not directly falsifying the Arab League proposal, but the carefully framed deceit is instructive.
The Arab League peace proposal does indeed call for normalization of relations with Israel -- in the context -- repeat, in the context of a two-state settlement in terms of the longstanding international consensus, which the US and Israel have blocked for over 30 years, in international isolation, and still do. The core of the Arab League proposal, as Obama and his Mideast advisers know very well, is its call for a peaceful political settlement in these terms, which are well-known, and recognized to be the only basis for the peaceful settlement to which Obama professes to be committed. The omission of that crucial fact can hardly be accidental, and signals clearly that Obama envisions no departure from US rejectionism. His call for the Arab states to act on a corollary to their proposal, while the US ignores even the existence of its central content, which is the precondition for the corollary, surpasses cynicism.
The most significant acts to undermine a peaceful settlement are the daily US-backed actions in the occupied territories, all recognized to be criminal: taking over valuable land and resources and constructing what the leading architect of the plan, Ariel Sharon, called "Bantustans" for Palestinians -- an unfair comparison because the Bantustans were far more viable than the fragments left to Palestinians under Sharon's conception, now being realized. But the US and Israel even continue to oppose a political settlement in words, most recently in December 2008, when the US and Israel (and a few Pacific islands) voted against a UN resolution supporting "the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination" (passed 173 to 5, US-Israel opposed, with evasive pretexts).
Obama had not one word to say about the settlement and infrastructure developments in the West Bank, and the complex measures to control Palestinian existence, designed to undermine the prospects for a peaceful two-state settlement. His silence is a grim refutation of his oratorical flourishes about how "I will sustain an active commitment to seek two states living side by side in peace and security."
Also unmentioned is Israel's use of US arms in Gaza, in violation not only of international but also US law. Or Washington's shipment of new arms to Israel right at the peak of the US-Israeli attack, surely not unknown to Obama's Middle East advisers.
Obama was firm, however, that smuggling of arms to Gaza must be stopped. He endorses the agreement of Condoleeza Rice and Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni that the Egyptian-Gaza border must be closed -- a remarkable exercise of imperial arrogance, as the Financial Times observed: "as they stood in Washington congratulating each other, both officials seemed oblivious to the fact that they were making a deal about an illegal trade on someone else's border -- Egypt in this case. The next day, an Egyptian official described the memorandum as `fictional'." Egypt's objections were ignored.
Returning to Obama's reference to the "constructive" Arab League proposal, as the wording indicates, Obama persists in restricting support to the defeated party in the January 2006 election, the only free election in the Arab world, to which the US and Israel reacted, instantly and overtly, by severely punishing Palestinians for opposing the will of the masters. A minor technicality is that Abbas's term ran out on January 9, and that Fayyad was appointed without confirmation by the Palestinian parliament (many of them kidnapped and in Israeli prisons). Ha'aretz describes Fayyad as "a strange bird in Palestinian politics. On the one hand, he is the Palestinian politician most esteemed by Israel and the West. However, on the other hand, he has no electoral power whatsoever in Gaza or the West Bank." The report also notes Fayyad's "close relationship with the Israeli establishment," notably his friendship with Sharon's extremist adviser Dov Weiglass. Though lacking popular support, he is regarded as competent and honest, not the norm in the US-backed political sectors.
Obama's insistence that only Abbas and Fayyad exist conforms to the consistent Western contempt for democracy unless it is under control.
Obama provided the usual reasons for ignoring the elected government led by Hamas. "To be a genuine party to peace," Obama declared, "the quartet [US, EU, Russia, UN] has made it clear that Hamas must meet clear conditions: recognize Israel's right to exist; renounce violence; and abide by past agreements." Unmentioned, also as usual, is the inconvenient fact that the US and Israel firmly reject all three conditions. In international isolation, they bar a two-state settlement including a Palestinian state; they of course do not renounce violence; and they reject the quartet's central proposal, the "road map." Israel formally accepted it, but with 14 reservations that effectively eliminate its contents (tacitly backed by the US). It is the great merit of Jimmy Carter's Palestine: Peace not Apartheid, to have brought these facts to public attention for the first time -- and in the mainstream, the only time.
It follows, by elementary reasoning, that neither the US nor Israel is a "genuine party to peace." But that cannot be. It is not even a phrase in the English language.
It is perhaps unfair to criticize Obama for this further exercise of cynicism, because it is close to universal, unlike his scrupulous evisceration of the core component of the Arab League proposal, which is his own novel contribution.
Also near universal are the standard references to Hamas: a terrorist organization, dedicated to the destruction of Israel (or maybe all Jews). Omitted are the inconvenient facts that the US-Israel are not only dedicated to the destruction of any viable Palestinian state, but are steadily implementing those policies. Or that unlike the two rejectionist states, Hamas has called for a two-state settlement in terms of the international consensus: publicly, repeatedly, explicitly.
Obama began his remarks by saying: "Let me be clear: America is committed to Israel's security. And we will always support Israel's right to defend itself against legitimate threats."
There was nothing about the right of Palestinians to defend themselves against far more extreme threats, such as those occurring daily, with US support, in the occupied territories. But that again is the norm.
Also normal is the enunciation of the principle that Israel has the right to defend itself. That is correct, but vacuous: so does everyone. But in the context the cliche is worse than vacuous: it is more cynical deceit.
The issue is not whether Israel has the right to defend itself, like everyone else, but whether it has the right to do so by force. No one, including Obama, believes that states enjoy a general right to defend themselves by force: it is first necessary to demonstrate that there are no peaceful alternatives that can be tried. In this case, there surely are.
A narrow alternative would be for Israel to abide by a cease-fire, for example, the cease-fire proposed by Hamas political leader Khaled Mishal a few days before Israel launched its attack on December 27. Mishal called for restoring the 2005 agreement. That agreement called for an end to violence and uninterrupted opening of the borders, along with an Israeli guarantee that goods and people could move freely between the two parts of occupied Palestine, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The agreement was rejected by the US and Israel a few months later, after the free election of January 2006 turned out "the wrong way." There are many other highly relevant cases.
The broader and more significant alternative would be for the US and Israel to abandon their extreme rejectionism, and join the rest of the world -- including the Arab states and Hamas -- in supporting a two-state settlement in accord with the international consensus. It should be noted that in the past 30 years there has been one departure from US-Israeli rejectionism: the negotiations at Taba in January 2001, which appeared to be close to a peaceful resolution when Israel prematurely called them off. It would not, then, be outlandish for Obama to agree to join the world, even within the framework of US policy, if he were interested in doing so.
In short, Obama's forceful reiteration of Israel's right to defend itself is another exercise of cynical deceit -- though, it must be admitted, not unique to him, but virtually universal.
The deceit is particularly striking in this case because the occasion was the appointment of Mitchell as special envoy. Mitchell's primary achievement was his leading role in the peaceful settlement in northern Ireland. It called for an end to IRA terror and British violence. Implicit is the recognition that while Britain had the right to defend itself from terror, it had no right to do so by force, because there was a peaceful alternative: recognition of the legitimate grievances of the Irish Catholic community that were the roots of IRA terror. When Britain adopted that sensible course, the terror ended. The implications for Mitchell's mission with regard to Israel-Palestine are so obvious that they need not be spelled out. And omission of them is, again, a striking indication of the commitment of the Obama administration to traditional US rejectionism and opposition to peace, except on its extremist terms.
Obama also praised Jordan for its "constructive role in training Palestinian security forces and nurturing its relations with Israel" -- which contrasts strikingly with US-Israeli refusal to deal with the freely elected government of Palestine, while savagely punishing Palestinians for electing it with pretexts which, as noted, do not withstand a moment's scrutiny. It is true that Jordan joined the US in arming and training Palestinian security forces, so that they could violently suppress any manifestation of support for the miserable victims of US-Israeli assault in Gaza, also arresting supporters of Hamas and the prominent journalist Khaled Amayreh, while organizing their own demonstrations in support of Abbas and Fatah, in which most participants "were civil servants and school children who were instructed by the PA to attend the rally," according to the Jerusalem Post. Our kind of democracy.
Obama made one further substantive comment: "As part of a lasting cease-fire, Gaza's border crossings should be open to allow the flow of aid and commerce, with an appropriate monitoring regimeÉ" He did not, of course, mention that the US-Israel had rejected much the same agreement after the January 2006 election, and that Israel had never observed similar subsequent agreements on borders.
Also missing is any reaction to Israel's announcement that it rejected the cease-fire agreement, so that the prospects for it to be "lasting" are not auspicious. As reported at once in the press, "Israeli Cabinet Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, who takes part in security deliberations, told Army Radio on Thursday that Israel wouldn't let border crossings with Gaza reopen without a deal to free [Gilad] Schalit" (AP, Jan 22); ÔIsrael to keep Gaza crossings closed...An official said the government planned to use the issue to bargain for the release of Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier held by the Islamist group since 2006 (Financial Times, Jan. 23); "Earlier this week, Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni said that progress on Corporal Shalit's release would be a precondition to opening up the border crossings that have been mostly closed since Hamas wrested control of Gaza from the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority in 2007" (Christian Science Monitor, Jan. 23); "an Israeli official said there would be tough conditions for any lifting of the blockade, which he linked with the release of Gilad Shalit" (FT, Jan. 23); among many others.
Shalit's capture is a prominent issue in the West, another indication of Hamas's criminality. Whatever one thinks about it, it is uncontroversial that capture of a soldier of an attacking army is far less of a crime than kidnapping of civilians, exactly what Israeli forces did the day before the capture of Shalit, invading Gaza city and kidnapping two brothers, then spiriting them across the border where they disappeared into Israel's prison complex. Unlike the much lesser case of Shalit, that crime was virtually unreported and has been forgotten, along with Israel's regular practice for decades of kidnapping civilians in Lebanon and on the high seas and dispatching them to Israeli prisons, often held for many years as hostages. But the capture of Shalit bars a cease-fire.
Obama's State Department talk about the Middle East continued with "the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan and PakistanÉ the central front in our enduring struggle against terrorism and extremism." A few hours later, US planes attacked a remote village in Afghanistan, intending to kill a Taliban commander. "Village elders, though, told provincial officials there were no Taliban in the area, which they described as a hamlet populated mainly by shepherds. Women and children were among the 22 dead, they said, according to Hamididan Abdul Rahmzai, the head of the provincial council" (LA Times, Jan. 24).
Afghan president Karzai's first message to Obama after he was elected in November was a plea to end the bombing of Afghan civilians, reiterated a few hours before Obama was sworn in. This was considered as significant as Karzai's call for a timetable for departure of US and other foreign forces. The rich and powerful have their "responsibilities." Among them, the New York Times reported, is to "provide security" in southern Afghanistan, where "the insurgency is homegrown and self-sustaining." All familiar. From Pravda in the 1980s, for example.
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
JAI HO - ONE OF THE GREAT SONGS
Allah Rakha (meaning God-sustained) Rahman's extraordinary career began in Bollywood with Roja (1992) - which revolutionized instrumentation and recording techniques in Bollywood with its innovations, forcing every other composer to follow suit. But its selection by Time as one of the top 10 soundtracks ever was wildly over the top, as it nowhere approached the melodic and emotional content of the great Bollywood songs. Doubts would be expressed in the following years about Rahman's abilities in those areas, where Bollywood is probably unrivalled. He erased those doubts with excellent music in Bombay, Lagaan, and arguably his finest score (both background and songs) - the 2008 Jodhaa Akbar. Lesser efforts including Taal which earned him an undeserved Filmfare award (which should have gone to Ismail Darbar for the vastly superior Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam; only Ishq Bina from Taal approaching the ethereal beauty of the latter's songs) lined this journey.
His background score for Slumdog Millionaire was excellent, but the crowning glory was Jai Ho, which is a universe away from both Roja and O Saya and right up there with Rahman's best songs including Manmohana, Khwaja mere Khwaja, and Mitwa sun Mitwa. Jai Ho is one of the great songs, not just from Rahman but from Bollywood, which means it is comparable to the greatest music written in any form - popular, Broadway, jazz, blues or classical. Mozart and Beethoven would not only have cheered, they might have been envious...
The hype about Slumdog is that it is about 'hope', optimism, and the human spirit. But Rahman knows better than that - the song celebrates the slumdog's victory, but never forgets the hurt and the longing, the terror and horrors, the struggles, the failures and defeats - they are all present in the undercurrents of this most magnificent of songs.
His background score for Slumdog Millionaire was excellent, but the crowning glory was Jai Ho, which is a universe away from both Roja and O Saya and right up there with Rahman's best songs including Manmohana, Khwaja mere Khwaja, and Mitwa sun Mitwa. Jai Ho is one of the great songs, not just from Rahman but from Bollywood, which means it is comparable to the greatest music written in any form - popular, Broadway, jazz, blues or classical. Mozart and Beethoven would not only have cheered, they might have been envious...
The hype about Slumdog is that it is about 'hope', optimism, and the human spirit. But Rahman knows better than that - the song celebrates the slumdog's victory, but never forgets the hurt and the longing, the terror and horrors, the struggles, the failures and defeats - they are all present in the undercurrents of this most magnificent of songs.
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
A COUPLE OF THINGS OUR LEADERS NEED TO KNOW
Things don't change much in our make-believe 'liberal-democratic' societies - in the guise of freedom the same tyrannies and idiocies go on, as our leaders and establishment eunuchs continue to act as slaves to politically-correct insanities even as proof of divergent opinion exists but is drowned out.
This applies to feminist ideology but also to the enshrinement of Israel in Western establishment opinion as morally sacrosanct, where the lobbying of Zionists drowns out the protest of dissenting Jews. Here is a letter from a dissident Canadian Jewish woman on 'Israeli apartheid':
From: Judy Haiven
Date: Wed, Feb 18, 2009 at 2:23 PM
Subject: [IJV-SC] SAIA Anti-Apartheid week and Your censorship of it
Dear President Roseann Runte,
I am a Jewish- Canadian and an academic. I belong to Independent
Jewish Voices which is a cross-Canada Jewish organisation which is
against Israel's illegal and brutal occupation of the West Bank and
Gaza; we also support Palestinian human rights.
I was horrified to read that you and the Provost banned and
confiscated Students Against Israeli Apartheid (SAIA) posters at
Carleton University. These posters announced Isareli Apartheid Week.
Whatever you personally might think of Israeli Apartheid, respected
international figures such as Reverend Desmond Tutu and Jimmy Carter
have named it outright and condemned it.
While I, as a Jew, once had qualms about using the term Israeli
Apartheid --I no longer do. This is because especially since Israel's
last war on Gaza mere weeks ago, it has been clear to me and the broad
international community that Israel's deadly attacks were targetted at
defenceless civilians; that Israel destroyed Gaza and its
infrastructure; that Israel killed 1400 people, horribly maimed about
4,000 (a third of the killed and maimed were children) and
deliberately made 9,000 Palestinians homeless. Israel also used
chemical bombs on Palestinians. These are admitted matters of fact,
not fiction.
I am not the source for these reports however the Red Cross, Amnesty
International, Human Rights Watch and B'Tselem (the Israeli
Information Centre for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories) have
all agreed these murders and maimings and chemical bombings happened,
and that Israel was solely responsible for them.
So it seems Jewish students, or organisations such as the Canadian
Jewish Congress complained about the cartoon on the posters. I
understood they did not like the fact that the fighter aircraft is
about to drop a bomb on a Palestinian child holding a teddy bear. Well
sorry. This just happened IN REALITY, one month ago. Hundreds of
children died and more were terribly maimed and burned. While Israel
can certainly dish it out, Israel cannot "take it." Whenever there is
the slightest criticism of Israel -- its representatives in Canada --
namely the mainstream Jewish Congress or B'nai B'rith -- scream
unfair and demand to close down opposition. Israel's supporters insist
only they have the right to "frame" what is going on. And
unfortunately you -- as the President and the Provost -- fell into the
trap laid by Israel's supporters.
It is very important for students, faculty and the Canadian public to
know the truth about what is going on in Israel and Palestine. These
posters help increase awareness of what Israel is doing "on the
ground."
I think you owe SAIA an apology and should return their leaflets.
Their campaign is vital to human rights in Palestine and Israel and
the world over. Don't censor them.
--
Judy Haiven, PhD
Associate Professor
Department of Management
Saint Mary's University
Halifax, NS
Canada B3H 3C3
tel: 902-491-8650
fax: 902-420-5119
home: 902-429-8868
email: jhaiven@smu.ca
This applies to feminist ideology but also to the enshrinement of Israel in Western establishment opinion as morally sacrosanct, where the lobbying of Zionists drowns out the protest of dissenting Jews. Here is a letter from a dissident Canadian Jewish woman on 'Israeli apartheid':
From: Judy Haiven
Date: Wed, Feb 18, 2009 at 2:23 PM
Subject: [IJV-SC] SAIA Anti-Apartheid week and Your censorship of it
Dear President Roseann Runte,
I am a Jewish- Canadian and an academic. I belong to Independent
Jewish Voices which is a cross-Canada Jewish organisation which is
against Israel's illegal and brutal occupation of the West Bank and
Gaza; we also support Palestinian human rights.
I was horrified to read that you and the Provost banned and
confiscated Students Against Israeli Apartheid (SAIA) posters at
Carleton University. These posters announced Isareli Apartheid Week.
Whatever you personally might think of Israeli Apartheid, respected
international figures such as Reverend Desmond Tutu and Jimmy Carter
have named it outright and condemned it.
While I, as a Jew, once had qualms about using the term Israeli
Apartheid --I no longer do. This is because especially since Israel's
last war on Gaza mere weeks ago, it has been clear to me and the broad
international community that Israel's deadly attacks were targetted at
defenceless civilians; that Israel destroyed Gaza and its
infrastructure; that Israel killed 1400 people, horribly maimed about
4,000 (a third of the killed and maimed were children) and
deliberately made 9,000 Palestinians homeless. Israel also used
chemical bombs on Palestinians. These are admitted matters of fact,
not fiction.
I am not the source for these reports however the Red Cross, Amnesty
International, Human Rights Watch and B'Tselem (the Israeli
Information Centre for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories) have
all agreed these murders and maimings and chemical bombings happened,
and that Israel was solely responsible for them.
So it seems Jewish students, or organisations such as the Canadian
Jewish Congress complained about the cartoon on the posters. I
understood they did not like the fact that the fighter aircraft is
about to drop a bomb on a Palestinian child holding a teddy bear. Well
sorry. This just happened IN REALITY, one month ago. Hundreds of
children died and more were terribly maimed and burned. While Israel
can certainly dish it out, Israel cannot "take it." Whenever there is
the slightest criticism of Israel -- its representatives in Canada --
namely the mainstream Jewish Congress or B'nai B'rith -- scream
unfair and demand to close down opposition. Israel's supporters insist
only they have the right to "frame" what is going on. And
unfortunately you -- as the President and the Provost -- fell into the
trap laid by Israel's supporters.
It is very important for students, faculty and the Canadian public to
know the truth about what is going on in Israel and Palestine. These
posters help increase awareness of what Israel is doing "on the
ground."
I think you owe SAIA an apology and should return their leaflets.
Their campaign is vital to human rights in Palestine and Israel and
the world over. Don't censor them.
--
Judy Haiven, PhD
Associate Professor
Department of Management
Saint Mary's University
Halifax, NS
Canada B3H 3C3
tel: 902-491-8650
fax: 902-420-5119
home: 902-429-8868
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Monday, February 9, 2009
RAW MILK CONTROVERSY - SYMPTOM OF FOOD INDUSTRY CORRUPTION
The prosecution and persecution of Newmarket raw milk vendor Michael Schmidt is symptomatic of long-standing corruption in the gigantic food industry of North America. This should be the argument he makes in his defence, but it is perhaps too big for him to make.
While there are those in the health food industry who are not enthusiastic about milk (raw or not), insisting it is meant for calves (offspring of cows), they are more or less unanimous in declaring that pasteurized milk is useless and may well be harmful.
But that hasn't stopped our authorities from making 'an example' of Schmidt. In the USA the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has moved to pasteurize almonds and peanuts! Simply because a few cases of salmonella occurred, the entire supply of almonds is to be pasteurized - i.e. stripped of its nutritional content - the nutritional equivalent of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
But this is of course the tip of the iceberg...... the FDA has cooperated for decades with giant food companies to inflict millions of North Americans with foods rich in refined flour and sugar (eg. those cereals to be had with pasteurized milk by kids every morning), from which the natural food content was removed and replaced with dangerous preservative chemicals. Canned foods similarly rich in chemicals and containing less than 10% nutrients have been another slow poison the FDA was content to let live and prosper. Others have written about the way cattle have been fed corn and bovine growth hormone to make them as fat and large as quickly as possible, and how the denial of grass to cattle may well have caused mad cow disease.
The high levels of diabetes, heart disease and cancer in North America surely flow from the refined and processed food supply, which has made mega-billions for giant food companies.
It took decades for the tobacco industry to be held accountable - but at least they were forced to put warning labels on cigarette cases. When are warning labels going to appear on food products - eg. "This product contains chemicals which could damage your health, and most of the nutrients have been removed"?
When will this corruption and insanity stop? Are we slaves to corporate America?
While there are those in the health food industry who are not enthusiastic about milk (raw or not), insisting it is meant for calves (offspring of cows), they are more or less unanimous in declaring that pasteurized milk is useless and may well be harmful.
But that hasn't stopped our authorities from making 'an example' of Schmidt. In the USA the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has moved to pasteurize almonds and peanuts! Simply because a few cases of salmonella occurred, the entire supply of almonds is to be pasteurized - i.e. stripped of its nutritional content - the nutritional equivalent of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
But this is of course the tip of the iceberg...... the FDA has cooperated for decades with giant food companies to inflict millions of North Americans with foods rich in refined flour and sugar (eg. those cereals to be had with pasteurized milk by kids every morning), from which the natural food content was removed and replaced with dangerous preservative chemicals. Canned foods similarly rich in chemicals and containing less than 10% nutrients have been another slow poison the FDA was content to let live and prosper. Others have written about the way cattle have been fed corn and bovine growth hormone to make them as fat and large as quickly as possible, and how the denial of grass to cattle may well have caused mad cow disease.
The high levels of diabetes, heart disease and cancer in North America surely flow from the refined and processed food supply, which has made mega-billions for giant food companies.
It took decades for the tobacco industry to be held accountable - but at least they were forced to put warning labels on cigarette cases. When are warning labels going to appear on food products - eg. "This product contains chemicals which could damage your health, and most of the nutrients have been removed"?
When will this corruption and insanity stop? Are we slaves to corporate America?
Saturday, February 7, 2009
REVOLUTIONARY ROAD
Another riveting movie - in which the tension never lets up - as powerful an indictment of American life as Written On The Wind and American Beauty were. Dissects the deep angst, loneliness and desperation that lay beneath the superficial 'American Dream' so extravagantly sold by American culture and the happy-go-lucky movies of Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire.
Friday, February 6, 2009
GRAN TORINO
America will never acknowledge, let alone apologize for, its war-crimes against Korea. The protective umbrella provided by UN approval of the 1950s invasion makes that a non-starter.
Clint Eastwood however does so, kind of - in his latest movie Gran Torino. However unlike his Iwo Jima duet - in which he exposed the blatant propaganda trick that was the famous picture of 'glory' being planted by US marines on a hill on that island (a picture which was taken a month before the island was actually captured) in Flags of Our Fathers, and then in Letters from Iwo Jima presented the human side of the Japanese trapped on that island against overpowering attack by American forces and airpower - this time he presents a fictional fable.
An expose based on history would be almost impossible given the protective 'cover' of the UN sanction for the largely American invasion which killed millions of North Koreans.
So he paints a fictional tale set in modern-day America, with a melting pot now including Koreans and Cambodian Hmongs, in which he himself plays an octogenarian Korean war veteran and widower, apparently racist and misogynist (though not in the distorted feminist sense of that word). The plot includes critiques of the dysfunctional 'nuclear' American family, trashy morals of modern-day kids, the lonely plight of senior citizens, the danger of street gangs and guns, and the futility of ecclesiastical confession. Politically-incorrect racist words like 'gook' and 'mick' are frequently used and serve to underline the present-day hypocrisy of attacking 'slurs' .....when it is actions that count....The most harmful and malicious racists use politically correct language - something like the difference between a bark and a bite.
It would be easy to dismiss this film as a mishmash 'masala' of ideas lifted from The Karate Kid and Boyz'N the Hood with a little Rain Man thrown in, but nonetheless the sum somehow exceeds the parts, as amidst all this emerges a quite wonderful paean of love and a moving fairy-tale of repentance and sacrifice.
Quite possibly the finest thing Eastwood has done.
Clint Eastwood however does so, kind of - in his latest movie Gran Torino. However unlike his Iwo Jima duet - in which he exposed the blatant propaganda trick that was the famous picture of 'glory' being planted by US marines on a hill on that island (a picture which was taken a month before the island was actually captured) in Flags of Our Fathers, and then in Letters from Iwo Jima presented the human side of the Japanese trapped on that island against overpowering attack by American forces and airpower - this time he presents a fictional fable.
An expose based on history would be almost impossible given the protective 'cover' of the UN sanction for the largely American invasion which killed millions of North Koreans.
So he paints a fictional tale set in modern-day America, with a melting pot now including Koreans and Cambodian Hmongs, in which he himself plays an octogenarian Korean war veteran and widower, apparently racist and misogynist (though not in the distorted feminist sense of that word). The plot includes critiques of the dysfunctional 'nuclear' American family, trashy morals of modern-day kids, the lonely plight of senior citizens, the danger of street gangs and guns, and the futility of ecclesiastical confession. Politically-incorrect racist words like 'gook' and 'mick' are frequently used and serve to underline the present-day hypocrisy of attacking 'slurs' .....when it is actions that count....The most harmful and malicious racists use politically correct language - something like the difference between a bark and a bite.
It would be easy to dismiss this film as a mishmash 'masala' of ideas lifted from The Karate Kid and Boyz'N the Hood with a little Rain Man thrown in, but nonetheless the sum somehow exceeds the parts, as amidst all this emerges a quite wonderful paean of love and a moving fairy-tale of repentance and sacrifice.
Quite possibly the finest thing Eastwood has done.
Thursday, January 29, 2009
THE UNTOUCHABLE STATUS OF JEWRY
SENT TO THE SUN AND THE STAR
Jews have been the victims of centuries-old persecution by peoples imagining themselves Christian but who were the exact opposite of what the 'Son of Man' taught. Priests and some Popes over the centuries encouraged this victimization, and if the Son of Man had been alive during these events, it is hard to see how such priests and Popes (and those untold millions following their wicked preachings) would not have been labelled 'hypocrites', murderers, and 'sons of the devil' by that Son. This persecution of Jewry reached its zenith under Nazism.
It is important however to place this persecution in perspective. Jews have now acquired a seemingly 'untouchable' status as no one in our Western establishment seems willing to tolerate any criticism of Jewish behavior. The 'holocaust' is one such untouchable subject and anyone who does not join in the lament is denounced as an 'holocaust-denier'.
But the Jewish holocaust is far from the only one – it is not even the most horrendous one. History contains far worse holocausts and genocides which are effectively being 'denied' by the mainstream Western establishment in their zeal to prove their loyalty to Jewish memory.
During the Second World War in which some six million Jews were killed by Nazis, some 27 million Soviets perished as well, bearing the brunt of the terrible Nazi war-machine, while the Western Allies watched and waited, before launching D-Day to finish off the mortally wounded Nazi behemoth.
Going back further, even greater holocausts took place in North and South America. According to the Oscar-winning film 'Barbarian Invasions' (directed by Canada's Denys Arcand) some 50 million natives were murdered in North America and three times as many in South America. In the latter case this mind-boggling genocide took place without modern 'weapons of mass destruction', and with the complicity of the Roman Catholic Church. (More reliable sources such as the writings of Ronald Wright attribute most of the latter genocide to diseases (smallpox, flu, measles, etc.) brought to Latin America by the Europeans.... a kind of unwitting biological warfare.)
In the recent news flaps involving the Wiesenthal Center's denunciation of the current Pope for reinstating an alleged holocaust-denying priest, and others involving denunciations of dissident columnists who have compared Israel's actions in Gaza and others prior to it to those of the Nazis, we need to remember that the Jews have not been the only victims of human cruelty and insanity. They have not even been the worst victims.
And in any event, what was done to Jews by the Nazis does not justify their theft of Palestinian land and the use of American-supported force to deny the 'legitimate rights of the Palestinian people', who none of the 'right people' in the Western establishment seem to care about.
Israel's treatment of the Palestinians who they evicted from their homeland is an obscenity, and that central fact should not be forgotten in the Jewish lobbying and denunciations of anyone who dares criticize Israeli actions in the Middle East. If 'Yahweh' promised the Jews some miles of burning desert, He conned them, for those few miles are not the 'promised land'. And they have violated all His commandments in their armed robbery and occupation of the 'Holy Land'.
Jews have been the victims of centuries-old persecution by peoples imagining themselves Christian but who were the exact opposite of what the 'Son of Man' taught. Priests and some Popes over the centuries encouraged this victimization, and if the Son of Man had been alive during these events, it is hard to see how such priests and Popes (and those untold millions following their wicked preachings) would not have been labelled 'hypocrites', murderers, and 'sons of the devil' by that Son. This persecution of Jewry reached its zenith under Nazism.
It is important however to place this persecution in perspective. Jews have now acquired a seemingly 'untouchable' status as no one in our Western establishment seems willing to tolerate any criticism of Jewish behavior. The 'holocaust' is one such untouchable subject and anyone who does not join in the lament is denounced as an 'holocaust-denier'.
But the Jewish holocaust is far from the only one – it is not even the most horrendous one. History contains far worse holocausts and genocides which are effectively being 'denied' by the mainstream Western establishment in their zeal to prove their loyalty to Jewish memory.
During the Second World War in which some six million Jews were killed by Nazis, some 27 million Soviets perished as well, bearing the brunt of the terrible Nazi war-machine, while the Western Allies watched and waited, before launching D-Day to finish off the mortally wounded Nazi behemoth.
Going back further, even greater holocausts took place in North and South America. According to the Oscar-winning film 'Barbarian Invasions' (directed by Canada's Denys Arcand) some 50 million natives were murdered in North America and three times as many in South America. In the latter case this mind-boggling genocide took place without modern 'weapons of mass destruction', and with the complicity of the Roman Catholic Church. (More reliable sources such as the writings of Ronald Wright attribute most of the latter genocide to diseases (smallpox, flu, measles, etc.) brought to Latin America by the Europeans.... a kind of unwitting biological warfare.)
In the recent news flaps involving the Wiesenthal Center's denunciation of the current Pope for reinstating an alleged holocaust-denying priest, and others involving denunciations of dissident columnists who have compared Israel's actions in Gaza and others prior to it to those of the Nazis, we need to remember that the Jews have not been the only victims of human cruelty and insanity. They have not even been the worst victims.
And in any event, what was done to Jews by the Nazis does not justify their theft of Palestinian land and the use of American-supported force to deny the 'legitimate rights of the Palestinian people', who none of the 'right people' in the Western establishment seem to care about.
Israel's treatment of the Palestinians who they evicted from their homeland is an obscenity, and that central fact should not be forgotten in the Jewish lobbying and denunciations of anyone who dares criticize Israeli actions in the Middle East. If 'Yahweh' promised the Jews some miles of burning desert, He conned them, for those few miles are not the 'promised land'. And they have violated all His commandments in their armed robbery and occupation of the 'Holy Land'.
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
LETTER TO THE POST - THE RIGHT TO NOT SUPPORT
THE RIGHT TO NOT SUPPORT
Mr. Gunter's editorial critiquing the Ontario Superior Court judgment in the Pasqualino Cornelio case ordering him to continue paying child support to his ex-wife for twin girls fathered by someone else without Mr. Cornelio's knowledge makes the right argument, but too timidly. Mr. Gunter also avoids the major under-currents of Canadian society of which family law is but one part....it is not just in the arena of family law that 'logic is distorted'. And the problem goes far beyond 'distorted logic' to a almost inexorable bias against men in many aspects of society where 'logic' fairness and justice have been aborted to appease extreme male-hating feminist ideology.
Mr. Gunter avoids this 'dangerous' subject to make his article politically palatable. This is understandable, although he does refer to the 'hue and cry' that would occur if a woman were 'press-ganged' by a judge to pay a father child support for children out of wedlock....
Mr. Gunter for example, dilutes his argument by ending his article by saying a man who did not support children fathered by another, would be a 'heel'. But he does not say what a woman who commits adultery and has kids out of wedlock, in flagrant deceit of marital vows, would be.........surely even prostitutes behave more morally, and contractually?
The problem in our post-feminist society is that 'the woman is always right'. Women are never guilty of misconduct – if they 'maliciously' wound their husbands, it is because they are suffering from 'battered woman's syndrome'; if they manufacture allegations of sexual abuse against their ex-husbands to have custody denied to them, that is of no consequence; if they manufacture allegations of rape or sexual harassment, that is simply 'mischief'; if a wife is sleeping with someone else, surely that is the husband's failure to keep her happy and satisfied.........men are only 'deadbeats', wallets...moneybags, who have no moral qualities as they only want 'one thing'.... they are therefore to be presumed guilty as charged, no evidence necessary. The heinous and automatic guilt of men necessitates draconian laws and medieval policies such as 'zero tolerance'.
There are never any consequences for female students who destroy the careers of male teachers with false allegations......in domestic disputes, it is always the man who must be charged with a crime, never the woman.....in a rape case, a woman's previous sexual history cannot now be discussed......no is always no to our idiot system, even though any fool knows that no is usually only a woman's first position, to immediately gain and maintain the upper hand in sexual negotiations, and be changed as the situation dictates, for women must not appear 'easy', or forward.....Women are always the prey, never the pursuers...they never lust, only love...they never use their 'pussy-power' to extract, even extort, the maximum price (emotional and financial) from men....no..they are too kind and loving for that.....The tommyrot just does not end.....but in the Land of the Eunuch, the Home of the John Bobbitt, tommyrot is official policy.
These matters constitute more than 'distorted logic' – they amount to systematic (and quite hideous) corruption by a system that has sold out men to feminist ideology, and idiotology. Some decades ago, an early feminist wrote of the 'female eunuch'......we are long now into an era where male eunuchs and John Bobbitts abound.
Mr. Gunter's editorial critiquing the Ontario Superior Court judgment in the Pasqualino Cornelio case ordering him to continue paying child support to his ex-wife for twin girls fathered by someone else without Mr. Cornelio's knowledge makes the right argument, but too timidly. Mr. Gunter also avoids the major under-currents of Canadian society of which family law is but one part....it is not just in the arena of family law that 'logic is distorted'. And the problem goes far beyond 'distorted logic' to a almost inexorable bias against men in many aspects of society where 'logic' fairness and justice have been aborted to appease extreme male-hating feminist ideology.
Mr. Gunter avoids this 'dangerous' subject to make his article politically palatable. This is understandable, although he does refer to the 'hue and cry' that would occur if a woman were 'press-ganged' by a judge to pay a father child support for children out of wedlock....
Mr. Gunter for example, dilutes his argument by ending his article by saying a man who did not support children fathered by another, would be a 'heel'. But he does not say what a woman who commits adultery and has kids out of wedlock, in flagrant deceit of marital vows, would be.........surely even prostitutes behave more morally, and contractually?
The problem in our post-feminist society is that 'the woman is always right'. Women are never guilty of misconduct – if they 'maliciously' wound their husbands, it is because they are suffering from 'battered woman's syndrome'; if they manufacture allegations of sexual abuse against their ex-husbands to have custody denied to them, that is of no consequence; if they manufacture allegations of rape or sexual harassment, that is simply 'mischief'; if a wife is sleeping with someone else, surely that is the husband's failure to keep her happy and satisfied.........men are only 'deadbeats', wallets...moneybags, who have no moral qualities as they only want 'one thing'.... they are therefore to be presumed guilty as charged, no evidence necessary. The heinous and automatic guilt of men necessitates draconian laws and medieval policies such as 'zero tolerance'.
There are never any consequences for female students who destroy the careers of male teachers with false allegations......in domestic disputes, it is always the man who must be charged with a crime, never the woman.....in a rape case, a woman's previous sexual history cannot now be discussed......no is always no to our idiot system, even though any fool knows that no is usually only a woman's first position, to immediately gain and maintain the upper hand in sexual negotiations, and be changed as the situation dictates, for women must not appear 'easy', or forward.....Women are always the prey, never the pursuers...they never lust, only love...they never use their 'pussy-power' to extract, even extort, the maximum price (emotional and financial) from men....no..they are too kind and loving for that.....The tommyrot just does not end.....but in the Land of the Eunuch, the Home of the John Bobbitt, tommyrot is official policy.
These matters constitute more than 'distorted logic' – they amount to systematic (and quite hideous) corruption by a system that has sold out men to feminist ideology, and idiotology. Some decades ago, an early feminist wrote of the 'female eunuch'......we are long now into an era where male eunuchs and John Bobbitts abound.
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