1. What a great use of my tax dollars:
“World’s Largest Embassy Opens in Baghdad
Three and a Half Years and $700 Million Later, American Diplomats Finally Move Into Embassy
Weeks of moving are finally completed, and the United States has opened its enormous new embassy in Baghdad. Taking over three and a half years to complete and costing in the realm of $700 million, the gargantuan compound is bigger than the Vatican, and the largest and most expensive embassy on the planet.
A city within a city, the compound will employ thousands, and features a power station, a water treatment plant, schools, restaurants, and shopping areas. All in a fortress-like environment that will make security even in the Green Zone seem lax.“
http://news.antiwar.com/2009/01/05/worlds-largest-embassy-opens-in-baghdad/
2. “Israel in Gaza: Irrationality
Jews, historically, have been irrationally feared, hated and killed. Given that background, it’s not surprising that the irrationality which surrounded them for so long, the fire of irrationality in which they were almost extinguished, has jumped across and taken hold of the soul of many Jews and indeed dominates the thinking of today’s Israeli leaders and their American supporters.
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Consequently it is disgraceful and vile and no favor to the Jews for American politicians–for narrow, short-term political advantage, for narrow, short-term global-strategic reasons and, yes, also in expiation of the residual guilt they feel over what happened to the Jews in the past–to pander to the irrationality of the most irrational Jews.
Actions based on irrational premises inevitably fail in their purposes–they fail, and if the premises don’t change, then the actions are inevitably repeated, in forms which are more and more grotesque. It is unbearable to think that the new American administration would begin with more American dollars being poured into what is unjustifiable. It is also unbearable to think that among the first words we would hear from our new, clearly rational president would be preposterous sentences trying to persuade us that Israeli policies which seem to be appalling are actually quite normal and acceptable. Certainly nothing our new president could do would be of greater value to the world–and greater value to the Jews–than to abruptly end the sickeningly patronizing habit of supporting an irrationality which was born in tragedy and will end in more tragedy.‘
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090112/shawn
3. “ Why Not Kill All Gazans?
Reading the justifications that Israeli supporters are offering for the IDF assault, I don’t see any rationale being offered that would not justify killing everyone in Gaza.
If a single rocket is fired from Gaza territory, does that mean that everyone living in that area has automatically forfeited their life? The New York Times notes today that Israeli supporters believe that “the issue of proportionality… is a false construct because comparing death tolls offers no help in measuring justice and legitimacy.”
And we are obliged to accept whatever exonerations are offered by the IDF and their apologists. Max Blumenthal had an excellent piece on Huffington Post on the response to the initial IDF attacks on Gaza:
Almost as soon as the first Israeli missile struck the Gaza Strip, a veteran cheering squad suited up to support the home team. “Israel is so scrupulous about civilian life,” Charles Krauthammer claimed in the Washington Post. Echoing Krauthammer, Alan Dershowitz called the Israeli attack on Gaza, “Perfectly ‘Proportionate.’” And in the New York Times, Israeli historian Benny Morris described his country’s airstrikes as “highly efficient.” …. “It was Israel at its best,” Yossi Klein Halevi declared in the New Republic.
The cheering by Bush and top Republicans and Democrats for the bombing of the Gaza concentration camp epitomizes how the American political leadership has learned nothing since 9/11. The United States will be blamed for atrocities committed with American weapons and planes.“
http://www.antiwar.com/blog/2009/01/06/why-not-kill-all-gazans/
4. “Most industrialized democracies owe a great deal to Rousseau and Jefferson, and the idea of the equality of all citizens.
You have to ask yourself, why does the Right like to create and perpetuate levels of citizenship? Former US Attorney General John Ashcroft was a segregationist when he was younger, and the American Right fought desegregation and the Civil Rights movement tooth and nail. Rightwingers such as David Horowitz are still attempting to ensure that there is no redress for centuries of formal discrimination against African-Americans. Trent Lott had to step down as the majority leader of the US Senate because he expressed regret that the racist, segregationist platform of Strom Thurmond lost in 1948. (Lott had helped, when a university student, lead the fight to keep African-Americans out of his fraternity.)
And, everyone knows that white Southerners switched over to the Republican Party when the Democrats supported the end of Jim Crow–otherwise they would have had to be equal partners with Blacks in the same party. The Republican Party does not have racial hierarchy as an explicit part of its platform, and it does have a handful of African-American members, but it de facto functions to reinforce that hierarchy.
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If there are groups of people who are either legally or de facto treated differently from others, and if such a system of hierachies is accepted as natural, then the idea of social equality is undermined and perhaps even discredited. Unequal favorable treatment of the wealthy seems less strange if European-Americans also receive better treatment than Latinos, e.g. The hierarchies and divisions also, of course, make it harder or impossible for the popular classes to cooperate with one another against the rapaciousness of the less savory among the wealthy. Lower middle class European-Americans in the South now vote Republican and cannot ally with lower middle class and poor African-Americans.
Capitalism doesn’t have to create racial or sexual or religious hierarchies. Indeed, it can work to break them down. But promoting such hierarchies appeals to some on the Right as a way of justifying unequal treatment for the wealthy and of making class alliances across status groups and ethnicities more difficult.
I think all this explains why Dick Cheney wants to create an underclass of non-citizen residents with lesser rights than citizens, and why he voted against having a Martin Luther King Day when he was in Congress. He is about there being unequal levels in society. Because they in turn justify the inequality in treatment of wealthy people like himself. And the issue of “security” is only a McGuffin that drives the plot. External threats are invoked to justify weakening civil liberties, which in turn allow the reinforcement of hierarchies of rights. The relationship of the concern for “security” and the actual legislation creating inequalities is usually tenuous to say the least.”
http://www.juancole.com/2006/10/corey-robin-on-liberty-versus-security.html
5. “Why do so many Americans – especially politicians and media talking heads – believe that criticizing Israel is wrong, no matter what it does (see this and this)?
I think the main reason is that the wrong lessons have been drawn from the Holocaust . . or at least the wrong lessons are pushed on the American people.
Specifically, the lessons touted by the elites are:
(1) The Jewish people were given a homeland to protect Jews from persecution; and
(2) We must allow the Israelis to use all means necessary to protect that homeland.
Let’s take a deeper look at these claims.
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Israel has committed war crimes, false flag terror, and horrendous violence against the Palestinians and other Arab peoples. As sympathetic as I am to the persecution of the Jewish people – see below- the bullying behavior is not justified.
The “never again” lesson which most people take from the Holocaust is that Israel must do anything and everything to protect itself. But by committing war crimes, false flag terrorism, and other barbarous acts, and by violating one UN resolution after another, Israel has become just like all other ruthless oppressors throughout history. The ends do not justify the means, any more than Stalin’s murder of millions of innocent Russians was justified in the name of creating some crazy communist workers’ “utopia”.
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If Israel was, indeed, sited in Palestine because the Western powers believed that to be the ancestral homeland of the Jewish religion, that would actually have been the use of military might to promote a particular religion. Specifically, if America, Britain and the other Western powers that agreed to the creation of Israel sited it in Palestine because they were sympathetic to the Judeo-Christian religions and not of the Muslims who lived in Palestine, then that is religious war (and a violation of the separation of church and state in American decision-making as to foreign affairs).
But I believe there was another reason that the Western powers sited Israel in Palestine: to gain a foothold to the oil resources in the Middle East.
The historical record is clear: America and England knew how important oil was, and were determined to gain access to it.
What better way than to locate an ally there and arm them to the teeth?“
http://georgewashington2.blogspot.com/2009/01/americans-have-learned-wrong-lesson.html
6. On Leon Panetta heading the CIA:
“ Spencer Ackerman reports that Sen. Dianne Feinstein is upset with the selection of Panetta, petulantly complaining that she wasn’t consulted in advance and that it would be best to have an “intelligence professional” in that position. CQ’s Tim Starks reports that Sen. Jay Rockefeller is making very similar noises about this selection. Few things could reflect better on Panetta’s selection than the fact that Feinstein and Rockefeller — two of the most Bush-enabling Senators — are unhappy with it.”
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/
7. “President George W. Bush was in his stand-up comedian role when he declared that he wanted to be remembered as a fighter for human rights.
Seldom has a fighter for human rights amassed Bush’s death toll. According to Information Clearing House, Bush’s invasion and occupation of Iraq has resulted in 1,297,997 dead Iraqis. Millions more have been wounded, and millions are displaced. Bush’s legions have taken out weddings, funerals, kid’s soccer games, hospitals, and mosques.
And that’s before we come to Afghanistan.
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Does anyone believe that George Bush, who assaulted his own country’s civil liberty, will be remembered as a “fighter for human rights”?”
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article21647.htm
