A Trifecta of Three Phony “Scandals”

This is a letter I just received. The Republicans are going to gin up another fake impeachment proceeding, along with another Congressional investigation. We are back in the Clinton years, when US democracy dove to the stinkingist fascist and totalitarian depths in its history with endless investigations of one phony scandal after another.

Finally, they impeached Clinton on totally ridiculous grounds (Clinton beat the impeachment handily at a trial). There is one place you see the sort of sick, twisted, corrupt politics crap, and that’s in the 3rd World. The Turd World. The Republican Party has turned America into a gigantic Turd World country.

In the Turd World, there are constant fake investigations of fake scandals, and Presidents are always being impeached on phony political grounds. In addition, Presidents are assaulted, placed under arrest, tortured and even murdered on a regular basis, generally in the context of a military coup. This is particularly prevalent in the Sewer of the World, Latin America. This nonsense has gone on in most Latin American shitholes, including Venezuela, Bolivia, Argentina, Haiti, Dominican Republic, Grenada, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Ecuador, Guyana, Colombia, Brazil, Peru and Chile.

All of these coups and assassinations have been done by the Latin American rightwing, which is an objectively fascist rightwing movement and always has been. Whenever any populist or progressive government comes in, the rightwing in that Latin American country tries to oust them via assassination, coup or a fake impeachment. The US has supported 100% of these radically antidemocratic and fascist incidents in Latin America. There has never been a single fascist coup in Latin America that did not have the 100% backing of the United Snakes.

In the rest of the world, it is as bad or worse. In Pakistan, presidential candidates are murdered on a regular basis.In the rest of the Turd World, opposition candidates are often jailed or worse. This is what is happening in Turkey at the moment, and it was going on earlier in Iran. Opposition party candidates are murdered on a regular basis in the Philippines.

Scandal hearings should be reserved for the worst of the worst. Iran-Contra and the S & L Crisis are good examples. If you recall, the Democrats did not turn either of those hearings into impeachment proceedings. Impeachment should only be for the worst of crimes. A good example was President Nixon, who would have been impeached had he not resigned, for bugging the headquarters of the Democratic Party during the 1972 campaign. I can hardly think of a single impeachable case since 1972. This is just dirty politics and nothing else, and it is sleazy as Hell.

Every Administration will have scandals of various types. It is inevitable under our money infested system where both parties are tied to big money and corporate rule. In almost all cases, these scandals are run of the mill things that any Administration goes through. However, whenever a Democratic President is in office, any of the usual scandals that any Administration deals with will have huge hearings in Congress, threats of impeachment and special prosecutors.

Objective evidence shows that there were far more scandals and there was far more corruption under Bush and Reagan than under Clinton or Obama. But no matter how corrupt or scandal ridden a Republican is, the spineless Democrats will never do anything about it. Not a single hearing, no special prosecutor, no impeachment proceedings. On the other hand, the far fewer scandals under a Democrat will be turned into a Ringling Brothers affair that dominates the idiotic headlines for months to years.

Nothing Obama has done warrants impeachment or even a hearing.

The Benghazi Consulate was a CIA office – 80% of the personnel there were CIA officers. The Islamists knew that, and that is why it was attacked. The CIA failed to provide enough security for the consulate, and they relied too much on unproven Libyan security.

The call for backup amounted to a call for “4 men” to arrive. Do you think 4 armed US forces would have turned the situation around? There was a call to bring in a helicopter gunship to fire missiles or machine gun fire or a jet to bomb the area. However, the area is surrounded by civilians, and in the initial attack, no one really had any idea what was going on.

There was an order given to stand down and not send in air power until more could be learned about the confused situation. The forces on the ground evacuated the Americans from the consulate to a safe house, but the Islamists were waiting at the safe house for them.

In a hazy situation were no one knew what was going on, it would have been madness to drop bombs or shoot missiles at the heavily inhabited area at the consulate, the safe house and the area in between. The forces at the consulate fought very well. Although 4 Americans were killed, 32 were rescued. In addition, ~100 Islamist attackers were killed.

          Benghazi #killed

Americans 4
Islamists 100

This was a battle in a war we are fighting with Al Qaeda and allied Islamists. By any standard metric, we won this battle. It is beyond me why this is some sort of a scandal. We fight battles all the time in the war with Al Qaeda, the Taliban and other Islamists. Some we win, some we lose. Sometimes our men are killed or wounded. Should there be hearings, special prosecutors or impeachment proceedings every time an American is killed by the enemy overseas? What kind of insanity is that?

The IRS scandal is a joke. As a result of Citizens United, many political outfits such as Karl Rove’s Crossroads set themselves up as tax exempt social welfare organizations that do not engage in political work. Obviously, this is a lie. This was mostly done on the Right, as word went out via Karl Rove to the rightwing grassroots to claim social welfare status to pay no taxes.

Approximately 250-300 groups with “tea party” in their name engaged in this crime by lying and calling themselves social welfare organizations. The IRS identified all of these groups engaged in this fraud and crime and sent them letters demanding to see their paperwork.

Since a vast amount of “tea party” groups were engaging in this sort of crime, lower level IRS officials in Indianapolis targeted every group with “tea party” in their name and sent them these letters demanding that they prove they were a political group or a social welfare group. Unfortunately, a number of liberal organizations also committed these crimes and called themselves social welfare groups to claim tax exempt status. All of these liberal groups were also targeted by the IRS and they received letters demanding to see their paperwork.

The IRS was completely correct to do what they did. There was no scandal, not even the whiff of one. When 300 groups with tea party in their name are engaging in crime, it looks like smoke. Where there is smoke, there is fire. That massive crime spree by tea party groups was enough to put every group with tea party in their name under suspicion.

It is right and proper for the IRS to determine if any political group of any stripe of committing crime by falsely representing themselves. In addition, liberal groups committing these crimes were also questioned. When you commit crimes, you may get called in for questioning by authorities. This is the job of the authorities. If you abuse tax laws and cheat on your taxes, expect a call from the IRS. This was no political prosecution. The local Indianapolis office was 100% correct in what they did.

Obama caved in spinelessly as usual, firing the IRS Director for the crime of enforcing tax law and fighting tax criminals and massive tax fraud and evasion. A cop was fired for enforcing the law because the Republican criminals and their friends demanded he be fired.

I do not know enough about the targeting of AP reporters’ phone records. This is not a prosecution of the media. Instead, they were trying to find out who was leaking to the AP about the CIA’s secret wars overseas. So this is part of Obama’s war on whistleblowers.

The war on whistleblowers went completely wild under Ronald Reagan, who attacked whistleblowers more than any previous president. It has continued to this day. It was particularly nasty under George Bush and included the outrageous outing of active CIA agents for political purposes. Republican and Democratic Administrations both have gone after whistleblowers in a vicious way.

Republicans screaming about this were utterly silent when George Bush and Ronald Reagan waged all out war against whistleblowers. In addition, Republicans have, up until this point, backed all of Obama’s anti-whistleblower activities.

In fact, they have accused him of being soft of whistleblowers – see the Bradley Manning case, where Republicans have called for Manning to be executed – and the Wikileaks case, where the Republicans have called for Julian Assange to be arrested, sent to the US, tried and executed for treason. They have also called for Assange to be assassinated by a US hit squad. So you see, even if Obama wages a war on whistleblowers, the Republicans support it and even double down on it.

Impeach the President. Seriously?

That’s where the Republicans are going. Rep. Jason Chaffetz could barely keep from giggling at the possibility on CNN yesterday. Even Wolf Blitzer looked a little uncomfortable.

Of course, they want a special prosecutor.

Scott Walker spent his day telling everyone from the La Crosse Tribune to middle-school tour groups that we must appoint a special prosecutor. Guess who’s running for president?

Anyone old enough to remember the nineties knows this can turn ugly fast.

Meanwhile, back in reality, there’s a real scandal taking place: Tens of thousands of kids have been kicked out of preschool. Teachers are being laid off. Meals on Wheels for housebound seniors have been cut.

While GOP consultants across the DC area put Ken Starr back on speed dial, millions of people are suffering from the sequester. The young, the poor and the elderly. Every day, it will get worse.

A Critique of Islam from an Anti-Hindu India

India Land of Rapes is an Indian Hindu who is a strong critic of his society. But he also has a dim opinion of Islam:

Islam is a Semitic religion. Semites suffer from genetic psychological diseases.

They are mostly interested in Domestication, Control and Revenge.

These 3 are fundamental aspects of ISLAM. Domestication of infidel nations, Control of their wealth and Revenge against anyone who opposes their stupidity

The Bedouin landlord Muhammad created a religion of hate. Still these idiots are arguing over their lunatic book and can’t get over their differences.

Switch on any Arabic TV – its all about Shia vs. Sunni, Which Islamic verse sanctions beheading infidel and how much jizya must be imposed on infidels.

Islam today is in dark ages – no intellectual life – intellectual life is detested.

I don’t see any great intellectual life or schools from Islamic nations. Universities like Al Azhar teach lunatic texts.

Islamic idiots know very well that their culture cannot create anything.

A complete generation of human spirit is fucked by Islamic societies.

I am not saying Hinduism is great. Hindus are despicable creatures; most of them are parasitic – they lead parasitic lives.

And South Asian Muslims are seriously fucked in their brains; most of them belong to low caste tribes, and their identity is lost.

This is a most interesting critique.

How is that Islam tries to domesticate infidel societies?

In the past, they tried to conquer us, but honestly, that is not going on anymore. So how are they trying to neuter us at the moment?

Islam, a Religion Programmed to Conquer

Obviously the Islamic plan is to gradually take over all infidel societies via conversion and high birthrates. This is clear from statements out of CAIR, the major Islamic organization in the US. Once a society gets a large number of Muslims, strife and typically terrorism begins against the infidels for all sorts of reasons. Almost all societies with large Muslim minorities or a near parity between Muslims and infidels have a Muslim terrorist problem going on – some sort of a jihad.

Any infidel nation that gets a large number of Muslims situated in part of its land will end up having this part of its land beset by a Muslim separatist insurgency. Interestingly, no Muslim nation will ever allow similarly a heavily infidel part of its land to separate. This is what is behind all of the Islamist rage about East Timor, the Armenians, the Assyrians and even Al-Andalus: they had the nerve to secede. In part, this may also explain the opposition to Israel much as it pains me to say so.

In Islam, once the Muslims conquer a land, it is “consecrated by God to the Muslim waqf for all of time” (read the Hamas charter for more on that.) So Islam gets not only all the lands it has now but all the lands it has ever had. No infidel portion of a Muslim land may secede. Also to some extent, the infidel lands are up for grabs too via conversion, immigration and the jihad of the womb. This is a religion of conquest that is programmed for geographical stasis and at least not loss and at the most for geographical expansion: the lands of Islam must at the very least be constant and not shrink one inch and at best, they should be expandable.

I do agree to some extent with the Islamophobes who say that Islam is a religion of hate. It certainly has elements like that beyond that of most religions. Surely it is not generally a religion of peace.

And many to most Muslims do have violent tendencies in that they will support some sort of religious jihad.

A Pakistani friend supported most of the Muslim jihads around the world – in Iraq, Palestine, Afghanistan, Chechnya and Kashmir. She probably would have supported the ones in Thailand and the Philippines too. And she was a moderate Muslim.

The Sunni Yemenis I know support the Syrian Sunni jihad against the Syrian Shia Nusairi heretics.

A local Yemeni told me that a Yemeni woman who has sex outside of marraige should be killed.

So you see the violence they support is not only against infidels to some extent but also against their own who transcend whatever version of Sharia is applied. Islam is one hardass, badass, mofo religion. It’s not a religion for pussies or sissies, and it is macho and scary to the core.

One thing I will say for Muslims is at least they fight back. In Iraq, Palestine and Afghanistan, the Muslims seem to reject infidel conquest and dispossession forever. For this, I bow down to them, as many Christians will simply roll over and allow themselves to be conquered by the imperialism du jour.

And Muslims will also defend their religion. In Syria, takfiri Sunnis are destroying some of the holiest sites of Shiism. Recently a tomb was desecrated and the body of this Shia holy man was carried off by Al Qaeda. Many Shia have responded to say they will form “sacrifice squads” to defend the Shia holy sites. This is proper and morally correct.

They should fight to the death to defend their religion against those who wage genocidal war against it. And the Shia tend to be pretty circumspect about who they blow up with their suicide missions. A look at Lebanon shows us that they mostly hit Embassies (CIA) and military barracks (US Marine Corps).

They don’t seem to go in for civilian slaughter so much like the Sunni Salafis do, perhaps because Shia holy mean are loath to sanction civilian massacre, especially of other sects. Hezbollah does seem to have been behind some terrorist attacks against Jews in Iran, Israel and Argentina. There have been murders of Sunnis in Iraq and now in Syria, but in those cases, the Sunnis were also committing mass slaughter of Shia civilians.

In Iraq anyway, the Sunnis seem to be killing a lot more Shia civilians nowadays than the other way around. This is because in hardline Sunnism, Shiism is seems as apostasy; the Shia are heretics. In Islam, heretics may be freely killed with religious sanction. Shia religious scholars offer no Islamically sanctioned way to kill Sunni civilians, as Sunnis are not seen as heretics in Shiism. In fact, modern Shiism tends to downplay hostility to Sunnism; in Iran, Sunni hatred for the Shia is even denied and said to be provoked by Israel, the US and the UK using the Sunnis as a tool.

Islam is not exactly the greatest thing on Earth for intellectual life, but Iran is developing some great weapons systems at the very least, and Pakistan invented the Bomb. Iran may well be working towards a bomb. No anti-scientific society can possibly produce an atom bomb. Universities in the Gulf strongly promote medical education and some of the hospitals there are among the world’s best. Even in the Gulf, Islam is not opposed to the life-breathing essence of medical science.

So in terms of guns and smocks, Islam pragmatically sees benefit here.

And just to point out, the Muslims I have met both online and in real life are often quite educated. In fact, they tend to be much more educated than your average American, and most of those that I knew had college degrees. I would hasten to say that your average Muslim values knowledge more than your average Moronican.

The Saffron Brigade

Frightening video about Hindutvadis (Hindu Nazis) in India. Note how the Hindutvadi talks about sending all Indian Muslims back to Pakistan. This is the “unfinished partition” that the Hindutvadis are always talking about.

They talk about a “genocide” of Pakistani Hindus and imply that there needs to be similar treatment of Indian Muslims. The truth is that there was no genocide of Pakistani Hindus. The population did decline from 20% to 2% from 1947 to present, but the vast majority of them were surely not killed, though some were. Most simply converted to Islam (though there were a number of more or less forced conversions, often of young Hindu women). The rest simply emigrated to India.

This collapse of a minority in a Muslim state is typical of most Muslim states. The minorities are persecuted so much that over time, they slowly convert to Islam to get better treatment. In some cases, there is mass emigration, though historically this has not been typical.

In many countries, a Muslim minority conquered the land and ruled over a non-Muslim majority. Once again, over time, the infidel majority simply converted to Islam to avoid persecution. In a few places such as the Balkans, Iberia and India, this did not occur. Muslim minorities ruled Serbia, Macedonia, Bosnia and Bulgaria in the Balkans, Spain and Portugal in Iberia and all of India for centuries though the populations remained either Christian or Hindu in the case of India.

It would be interesting to see why some non-Muslim majorities refused to convert to Islam while others did. Hindus do not have any special immunity to Islam. In Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh, there was mass conversion of Hindus to Islam for some reason, while in the core of India, “the cow belt” and in the South there was little conversion.

Nor do Christians have special immunity to Islam? Neither do they. Syria, Palestine, Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon, Turkey and Egypt were formerly Christian lands that mass converted to Islam.

The pre-Muslim religions of Libya, Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria, the Gulf, the Gulf, the Stans, Xinjiang, the Caucasus and Indonesia are not well known.

In Iran, the population was mostly Zoroastrian with some Christians mixed in. The Zoroastrians probably experienced one of the worst mass conversions to Islam ever seen for unknown reasons.

Real Revolution Versus Fake Revolution

The Syrian Revolution as fake revolution.

I honestly do not think much of this Syrian revolution. Almost all of the revolutionaries are Sunni Muslim Arabs. Few to none of them are Shia, Alawite or Druze Arabs. There are almost no Christians in the ranks. And there are few to no Kurds in the ranks. In fact, the revolutionaries are hostile to all of these groups last time I checked. That’s why those other groups are not signing up. There have been many attacks on Syrian Christians, Shia and Alawites by the revolutionaries. Many from these groups have been kidnapped, beaten, tortured and murdered.

In a city of 50,000, all of the Christians were ethnically cleansed from the city. They received a “leave or die” order from the rebels. Many Syrian churches have been blown up or damaged by the rebels. The Druze are not signing up for the fight, and the Sunni Muslim rebels may not like the Druze very much. No doubt they see them as some sort of heretics or possibly even infidels.

The Syrian Kurds do not like the regime very much, as the regime has not been too kind to them to put it mildly. However, the regime made some huge concessions to the Kurds in recent days, and the regime has now vacated the Kurdish area and the Kurds are more or less in control of their own part of Syria. Why the regime vacated the area, I am not sure, but the Kurds are hostile to the rebels and maybe the regime just felt that the area was not worth fighting for.

A political party which is frankly the Syrian arm of the Turkish PKK has now taken over that part of Syria. The result is that Turkey has threatened to attack and occupy that part of Syria as it is serving as some sort of a PKK base. These threats have not been carried out. The Kurdish government in Iraq has refused to support their brethren in Syria as they are seen as too close to the PKK, and the Iraqi Kurds want to distance themselves from the PKK. The best description of the Syrian Kurds at this point would be to say that they are hostile to both the regime and the rebels. The rebels do not like the Kurds because the Sunni Arab rebels are Arab nationalists and see the Kurds as secessionists.

The revolution has a strongly Islamist character and has had it from the very start. Al Qaeda type groups now form a large part of the rebels. Al Qaeda types from Iraq and hardline Islamists from around the Arab world are going to Syria to fight in the “jihad.” It’s a jihad because they are fighting against the Alawi, who are seen as heretics by many Sunni Muslims. The fight is being manipulated from abroad. The rebels get much of their money and arms from Qatar and Saudi Arabia. The Gulf Arabs hate the Syrian regime because it is made up of Alawites, who they see as heretics.

Turkey has also helped the rebels a lot for reasons that are not clear. However, they are Sunni Islamists who have an Alawi type group in their country that they don’t treat very well. Turkey is also trying to be seen as the light among Sunni Muslims and is attempting to gain points with them that way. The United Snakes is also involved because Syria is one of the pillars of the resistance front against the Zionist regime in Israel. Syria and Iran along with Hezbollah and Hamas make up the resistance front at the moment, although the Egyptian regime may be leaning in that direction. Lebanon is also a sworn enemy of Israel, but they are usually not thought of as part of the resistance front.

Iran is listed because they support Hezbollah and Hamas with arms. The Syrian regime helps ferret those arms from Iran to Hezbollah and also gives Hezbollah a lot of arms of its own. In addition, Syria is still a sworn enemy of Israel because Israel occupies Syrian land in the Golan Heights. It’s also said that Syria supports Hamas, but all they do is give refuge to their leaders. Qatar also gives refuge to Hamas leaders and no one talks about that.

Israel also continues to occupy Lebanese territory in the Shebaa Farms and makes all sorts of phony excuses as to why they can’t give it back. One of the excuses is that the land is really Syrian, but Syria says that even if that is true, they don’t want the land, and Lebanon can have it. Israel is such a disgusting country! This occupation is the stated reason for Hezbollah continuing existence. I really don’t see why Israel doesn’t give the land back to Lebanon to get rid of Hezbollah. I don’t get it.

It is true that another issue is three Lebanese villages that Israel conquered in 1948. Israel invaded far south Lebanon during this war and conquered three villages. They ordered all of the Shia Muslims out at gunpoint, and they went to Lebanon as refugees. I am not sure of their status now. The towns are now 100% full of Israeli Jews. Lebanon says she wants those towns back.

If the Syrian regime can be removed, one leg of the Syria – Iran – Hezbollah axis can be eliminated. The new regime will be Sunni Muslim and will be hostile to both Iran and Hezbollah since Iran and Hezbollah have both helped the regime during the war. They would have been hostile to them anyway though because Sunni Muslims in that region are notorious Shia-haters and both the Syrian and Iranian regimes are Shia.

With the new regime in power, Iran would no longer be able to supply Hezbollah via Syria. She might be able to supply them directly, but that might be pretty difficult. Iran would then be even more isolated in the region. Without the support of its main patron, Hezbollah may wither on the vine. Hezbollah has currently moved into Syria to protect some Syrian Shia villages on the border. The Syrian rebels have ordered the Shia residents and Hezbollah both to evacuate these villages. They refused to leave, and there has been some heavy fighting in the area lately. There have been many reports that Iran has advisers in Syria helping the regime. The reports have been hard to validate, but they are probably true.

So the whole reason for the US supporting Syria is part and parcel of US support for the Zionist regime in Israel. It’s just more “USraeli” foreign policy (the two countries can be seen as one merged entity that I call “USreal”).

Prostitution in the Muslim World: A Survey

North Africa (includes Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Libya and Egypt): I am not aware of much open prostitution in any of these countries. There is definitely prostitution in Egypt (both male and female – male being much more common!) but I do not think that the female prostitution in places like Cairo is so open. In the rest of the lands, I am not aware of much prostitution at all.

Sahel: I don’t know much about these countries, and I’m not aware of much prostitution there.

Eritrea and Ethiopia: There is some prostitution here, but it is not that open. But these land are 50-50 Muslim-Christian.

Palestine, Jordan, Iraq: Little open prostitution. There was little prostitution under Saddam either. There was a case where Uday had ~300 prostitutes murdered. There is a lot of honor killing in these places too, and that tends to discourage prostitution to say the least.

Syria: There has traditionally been some prostitution in Syria in nightclubs. In recent years, many Iraqi women are working there. But Syria is a very secular society. There is some honor killing here though.

Lebanon: For sure there is prostitution in Lebanon, but how open it is is not known. Lebanon has a huge Christian population that liberalizes things.

Turkey: Apparently there is prostitution in Turkey, but how open it is, I have no idea. Turkey also has  legal pornography and it’s supposedly even on TV late at night. But Turkey is a very secular European type society.

Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Azerbaijan: Prostitution levels and openness are not known, but these are pretty open, Europeanized, secular Muslim societies, and Azerbaijan is Shia.

Kuwait, Oman, Yemen, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain: My understanding is that prostitution is nearly nonexistent in all of these places, but I stand to be corrected. Anyway, it is certainly not open. There is a lot of honor killing in Yemen.

UAE: There is quite a bit of prostitution in Dubai anyway, but the girls are almost all foreigners, often Europeans or Russians.

Iran: Discussed earlier. There is quite a bit of prostitution in the religious city of Qom sanctioned under the temporary marriage gambit. There is also more than you might think in Tehran, especially in the more rundown outskirts.

The mullahs have been mulling over making prostitution legal under the rationalization of temporary marriage on the grounds that the girls need to be in houses in order to be better protected. Women arrested for prostitution are often sent not to jail or prison but to houses run by women for rehabilitation under a compassionate interpretation of Islam sanctioned by the mullahs. Iranian Shiism believes that Islam must be constantly updated with the times, and the mullahs can rationalize all sorts of accretions under this theory.

Afghanistan: There is some prostitution, but it is certainly not open, and it is quite hidden. But I was always surprised at how much there was, and I wondered how Hinduized Afghan Muslims were.

India: Prostitution in the Indian Muslim community is not known, but it may be as prevalent as in Pakistan.

Bangladesh: Prostitution levels are not known, but they may be on the level of Pakistan. Bangladeshi Muslims are heavily Hinduized, maybe worse than Pakistani even.

Thailand: I understand that prostitution is known among Thai Muslims, and it may be as open there as elsewhere in Thailand.

I have seen photos online of Thai Muslim prostitutes in the South. I know a Thai Muslim woman on a social networking site, and her sexual openness stunned me. She has married a variety of sociopathic Muslim males, typically Arabs. If you look at her public photos, she is acting very dirty in many of them, posing very sexually. There are even some nudes and partial nudes of her in there! But she is very much a Muslim, and there are photos of a Muslim man and teenage boy there, one holding what looks like a bomb and the other holding an automatic weapon. The juxtaposition between her dirty pics, her nudes, her murderous looking Arab lovers and the armed Islamist jihadis was something else!

I conclude that Thai Islam has a lot of pre-Islamic accretions in it, and furthermore that Thai Muslims may be a highly sexualized people, like the rest of the country.

Malaysia: Prostitution levels not known, but may be relatively open. I understand that most of the prostitutes are Chinese though, who are not Muslims.

Indonesia: There is a lot of prostitution here, and it appears to be pretty open. But Indonesian Islam is full of a ton of accretions from local and pre-Islamic traditions. In addition, they are an easy going tropical Asian people who tend to have loose and relaxed attitudes about sexual matters.

Iran Wants War!

Stop the evil Iranians before they kill again!

Look what Iran did to America! Stop them now, stop them, stop them!

 

Yossi Alpher on the Gaza War

I am reprinting this from the Peace Now site. I do support the efforts of Peace Now in Israel, along with similar efforts by J-Street in the US. In fact, I am on the mailing list of both organizations.

I don’t know who Yossi Alpher is, but I assume he is on the Israeli Left and is associated with Peace Now somehow. As you can see, his line is very Israel-centric, however, I think he is basically correct.

Comments are welcome.

Q. Why did Israel choose the current timing to respond with a major military campaign to rocket attacks from Gaza? Had there been a significant increase in those attacks?

A. In recent months Hamas, after long abdicating the rocket firing to Islamic Jihad and various Salafists, again took the lead in attacking Israel. Not just by rockets, but also through attacks on and through the green line fence into Israel. Some 800 rockets were fired at Israel during 2012 prior to the Israeli response. Repeated Israeli warnings and threats directed toward Hamas were ignored. That’s why this campaign is directed specifically at Hamas and its military leadership.

The timing of Israel’s response probably also has something to do with Israeli elections, though no government minister will acknowledge this. The situation in southern Israel was becoming unbearable for one million people, and both Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak undoubtedly saw this as a political liability with elections near. Nor could they postpone this until too close to elections, lest that too become a liability.

Another rationale for the timing could be to place the PLO initiative for United Nations General Assembly recognition, scheduled for Nov. 29, in a different perspective. PLO Chairman Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) is asking the UN for recognition of a state that includes Gaza, yet he obviously does not control Gaza. Gaza is a warlike quasi-state attacking Israeli civilians–the very opposite of the Palestinian Authority under Abbas.

Q. But if Hamas is launching or consenting to the attacks on Israel, why does it not take into consideration that Israel has a much stronger military capacity? Even with new varieties of rockets, Hamas will never match Israel’s capacity to wreak destruction on the Gaza quasi-state.

Of course Hamas knows Israel is stronger. But it also knows that Israel won’t take the one measure that would close Hamas down once and for all: re-conquering the Gaza Strip, thereby angering the entire world and placing nearly two million civilians under direct Israeli rule. Hamas also likes to play the underdog–guerilla or “resistance” style. It has tens of thousands of cheap rockets to attack the Israeli civilian population. And its fighters ostensibly do not fear martyrdom.

But most of all, Hamas feels empowered to challenge Israel by the tacit support of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. Hamas–the Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood–sees itself, not without reason, as the vanguard of the rise to power of the Brotherhood in the Arab Middle East by democratic vote. Hamas won its vote in early 2006, then took over Gaza by force in mid-2007.

Hamas expects its fellow Brothers, led by Egypt, to support it as it fights “their” war. It has been trying for months to persuade Egypt to recognize Gaza as an independent or quasi-independent Palestinian state and to shower economic and military aid on it. But Egypt–even Egypt under the Muslim Brotherhood–is wary of taking on Gaza as a protectorate and, in effect, releasing Israel of its “responsibilities” toward the Palestinians.

In this sense, this little war is very much about Egypt. Israel and the United States are testing whether Egypt under the Brotherhood will behave responsibly and opt for peace and quiet by demanding of Hamas a ceasefire, so the Egyptian leadership can set about collecting the billions of dollars it needs to keep Egypt afloat economically.

Hamas is testing to what extent Egypt will back it up with threats against Israel, possibly even by radically downgrading relations with Israel. On Saturday, Egyptian PM Kandil led a delegation into Gaza, where he offered lavish verbal support but promised only medical supplies. He apparently also began discussing a ceasefire.

Q. Indeed, aren’t Egypt and the international community working for a ceasefire?

A. The Egyptians, Turks, Qataris and Hamas met on Cairo in Sunday precisely toward this end. According to some reports, a senior Israeli official was also there. All four of these Muslim actors, it should be noted, represent the vanguard of political Islam in the Middle East.

The Turks and Qataris aren’t Muslim Brothers but are close to the movement, with the Turks casting themselves as a role model for Arab regimes and Qatar using its purse-strings to play an independent role that has lately included a royal visit to Gaza and generous financial aid.

Israel and Egypt are also in close touch with the Obama administration and European leaders regarding a ceasefire. President Obama has reportedly placed heavy pressure on Egypt’s President Morsi to rein in Hamas. France’s foreign minister was in Israel today. And United Nations Secretary General Ban ki-Moon is scheduled to arrive in Israel on Tuesday. All are apparently urging Netanyahu to avoid a ground war in favor of a quick ceasefire.

Q. What positions are Israel and Hamas presenting to all these mediators regarding ceasefire conditions?

A. Broadly speaking, Israel wants a verifiable Hamas commitment to cease all attacks from Gaza–meaning to police other, more extreme organizations’ activities as well as its own–and close down its arms importing and indigenous arms production projects.

Hamas reportedly wants an end to all aspects of the Israeli blockade of the Strip as well as an end to Israeli preventive security measures on the Gaza side of the border fence. Presumably, both Israel and Hamas are making security and other demands on Egypt as well. And each side wants to end up in a situation where it proclaims victory.

Q. Are these demands achievable?

A. Israel is backing up its demands with escalation. Most recently, it expanded its list of targets for air and naval attacks to include Hamas government institutions (after Hamas fired a rocket in the direction of Jerusalem and Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh claimed they were aiming for the Knesset) as well as rocket-firing positions and other military institutions placed by Hamas deliberately in the midst of the Gazan civilian population.

By Sunday, Israel was calling up large numbers of reserves and threatening a ground operation.

Hamas was responding with rockets and bravado. Morale appeared to be high in Gaza, uplifted by clips of Tel Avivians running for cover (and reflecting a fundamental misunderstanding of what makes Israel tick; but that’s another story). If matters continue this way, at some point, inevitably, a large number of Gazan civilians could become casualties, thus embarrassing Israel and bringing down upon it heavy regional and international pressure.

Hence it’s almost certain that at the end of the day, one way or another, this will end in yet another limited ceasefire that falls short of both sides’ aspirations.

Q. Some Israelis argue that Hamas military leader Ahmed Jaabari should not have been targeted in Israel’s opening salvo; that he was engaged in an attempt to achieve a long-term ceasefire and was a figure of moderation.

A. Obviously, if you oppose the entire notion of targeted assassination with its heavy moral ramifications, the Hamas military leader should not have been targeted. But a succession of Israeli (and American) governments have adopted this tactic and consider it both effective and acceptable in wartime.

As for Jaabari himself, even as he was ostensibly involved in ceasefire discussions he was sponsoring escalated Hamas attacks on Israeli civilians and building up a murderous arsenal for use against Israeli civilians. In my view, he was fair game and his death a genuine blow to Hamas.

Q. Apropos the likely outcome, how is this operation, dubbed Pillar of Cloud or Pillar of Defense, different in its objectives and its operational profile from the two previous IDF offensives against neighboring non-state actors, the Second Lebanon War in summer 2006 and Cast Lead in 2008-9?

A. Apropos the names of the operation, note that Pillar of Cloud is a murky name reminiscent of the biblical “pillar of fire”, while Pillar of Defense is a more PR-conscious name for use by Israeli public diplomacy. So far, “Pillar” has avoided use of ground forces or artillery, obviously in the hope of reducing highly problematic Palestinian civilian casualties. Air force bombing and rocketing techniques, especially by drones, have been refined admirably toward that same end.

This operation, accordingly, opened with the targeted assassination of a single prominent Hamas military figure, Jaabari, whereas Cast Lead opened with a kind of “shock and awe” approach that featured a controversial attack on a parade of Hamas civilian police.

Both Pillar of Defense and the Second Lebanon War opened with a largely successful attempt by the Israel Air Force to eliminate the enemy’s stores of long-range rockets so as to limit to the greatest extent possible the geographic extent of the enemy’s rocket offensive.

Another difference concerns war aims. Cast Lead of 2008-9 was presented to the Israeli public on several occasions as an attempt to eliminate Hamas rule from Gaza. This corresponded with the declared aim of the economic blockade of Gaza that began in 2007.

Not just the Kadima government of the day harbored these aims; prominent Labor supporters from the political left at one point petitioned Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Defense Minister Barak to go all the way, re-conquer Gaza and reinstall the PLO in power there (at the tip of Israeli bayonets, thereby totally discrediting the PLO) in the hope of facilitating a peace process.

Now, war aims are ostensibly more realistic. Accordingly to Barak, then as now defense minister, the objective this time is to cease rocket fire, eliminate Hamas militants and weaponry, and protect Israeli civilians. In other words, Hamas can remain as long as it stops attacking Israelis. Personally, I doubt that under current circumstances even these objectives can be attained and maintained over any period of time.

On the truly positive side, this operation takes place under the “cover” of the Iron Dome anti-rocket missile system, which has effectively reduced Hamas’ capacity to really hurt the Israeli civilian rear. This gives IDF war planners breathing room, relatively free of public pressure, to try to achieve their objectives. Accordingly, it may be said to actually relieve the IDF of the need to attack aggressively and seek retribution for Israeli losses.

Amir Peretz, who was minister of defense during the Second Lebanon War and bore much of the criticism for that campaign’s seeming failure, deserves great credit for having insisted on developing Iron Dome to protect Israeli civilians from rocket attack despite the opposition of the traditional security community with its emphasis on offense rather than defense.

Peretz, former mayor of Sderot and former head of the Histadrut labor union, showed how a “civilian” defense minister with a strong socioeconomic background can see things differently, to the benefit of the overall war effort. And two American presidents, Bush 43 and Obama, deserve credit for having helped finance the Iron Dome project.

One final and ironic comparison: the Second Lebanon War, waged by Peretz and PM Ehud Olmert, was roundly criticized in Israel for its indecisive outcome, with Hezbollah, Iran, and the Arab public trumpeting claims of victory over Israel. Yet since that war ended more than six years ago, Hezbollah has not lifted a finger to attack Israel–an apparent tribute to the deterrent success of Israel’s war effort.

In contrast, Cast Lead was seen as a triumph that rehabilitated Israel’s deterrent profile. Yet its deterrent effect lasted barely a few months. Of course the two movements, Hezbollah and Hamas, are different entities operating under very different circumstances, particularly with regard to the “Arab spring”: Hezbollah supports Syria in opposing the wave of Sunni Islamist revolution; Hamas is part of that wave.

Q. Apropos Hezbollah and Syria, are they connected to the current Gaza war?

A. Neither Syria nor Hezbollah has in any way intimated they would intervene to support Hamas. Here it’s helpful to recall that Hamas has, in recent months, broken with Syria and Iran and moved into the triumphant Muslim Brotherhood orbit with its fellow Sunnis.

Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which is also firing rockets from Gaza and at times opposes Hamas’ weak attempts to exercise control over it, does retain links to Iran and Syria. But PIJ is not a major factor, and the only relevant question connected with it is whether and when Hamas will behave in Gaza like the sovereign it aspires to be and take control over all aggressors there.

All in all, at the regional level, the current Gaza conflict is about how the emerging Muslim Brotherhood leadership in Gaza, Egypt and North Africa will deal with Israel. At least until now, it is not about Iran and Syria.

Q. Your assessment seems to reflect a sense of pessimism regarding the long-term effect of anything Israel does against Hamas.

A. Neither Israel nor anyone else confronting a non-state actor motivated by an extremist Islamic outlook has found a viable strategy for dealing with it. Look again at Barak’s war objectives (above) and note that they are tactical, not strategic. Israel has to confront the fact that it has no effective strategy for dealing with Hamas: economic blockade has failed; re-occupying the Strip would be hugely counterproductive.

The only strategy Israel has not tried is talking to Hamas, which in any case refuses to talk to Israel and proffers outlandish conditions for agreeing merely to a permanent ceasefire (e.g., return to Israel of five million Palestinian refugees). I don’t know whether such a strategy of engagement, with the aim of long-term coexistence, has any chance of success, but I still feel it is worth a try.

Note, though, that to engage Hamas directly without preconditions means abandoning the “Oslo” conditions agreed with the United States and European Union. It also means, in effect, telling the PLO in the West Bank, Israel’s peace partner, that it is no longer understood to represent Gaza, thereby implying a three-state reality or solution and not a two-state solution.

And as noted, such a gambit could very possibly fail, if only due to Hamas’ out-and-out rejection of all the elements of peaceful recognition and coexistence established by 20 years of the Oslo process.

With the spread of political Islam on Israel’s borders, an attempt at engagement with Hamas may be the best one can hope for by way of a strategy. Obviously, Israel’s political leadership, left as well as right, is not there.

Q. Finally, now that rocket attacks have reached the Tel Aviv area where you live, what are your thoughts?

A. First of all, civilian morale is extremely high. I’ve taken shelter outside my home twice, in each case ending up meeting interesting people for exactly two minutes and going on my way; three grandchildren in Tel Aviv appear to be taking this in stride. But in the Tel Aviv area, the few rocket attacks thus far are more a source of curiosity than anything else.

In the south, the accumulated trauma of, for those closest to Gaza, 12 (!!) years of rocket attacks is something else entirely. Thus not surprisingly, Israelis from the northern Negev attach extremely high hopes to this campaign, egged on by government rhetoric to the effect that this is the war against Hamas to end all attacks forever.

As we’ve seen, that is probably not a realistic aspiration. Already, after over 1,000 targets have been attacked in Gaza, more than 51 Palestinians and three Israelis killed, and at least 270 rockets successfully intercepted, Israelis are inevitably asking where this is going.

What Is Zionism?

Repost from the old site.

I was visiting my Mother the other day (she lives 33 miles away) and she had just read some articles on my blog. She made some negative remarks about “Zionists”, at which point I informed her that she was a Zionist. She looked horrified, which is the way any decent person should look when accused of such a thing. I then patiently explained to her than anyone who supported a Jewish state in Palestine was a Zionist.

She looked disappointed. On further questioning, it turned out that she pretty much thought that the founding of Israel was a great big mistake and a crime – like the founding of the USA via the conquest of the American Indians. However, she said you can’t undo history, and people have to try to make do with reality as it is.

I then told her that her views were probably “non-Zionist” – that being someone who disapproved of the Zionist project, but that that we should live with the reality of it, as Israel is there, and it’s not going away. My brother, on questioning, also did not really know what Zionism is, and also qualified as a non-Zionist who thought we needed to deal with reality as it exists, not as it ought to be.

The views that they espouse – “That the creation of Israel was a mistake, but they are there, they’re not leaving, and we have to deal with that” – ought to rationally be considered by progressives as neither Zionism nor anti-Zionism, but non-Zionism.

In the course of my conversations with these two brilliant, highly-educated immediate family members, I realized that even the best and the brightest in the US did not really know what Zionism was.

So, with that in mind, I felt it was time for a post describing exactly what Zionism was and is, its history and its various forms. Obviously, this brief post will barely begin to nudge the edges of this subject, but still it ought to serve as a nice primer.

What is Zionism anyway? I see Zionism every day on the net. In a nutshell, most Zionists, but not all, argue that both the formation of the state of Israel and the settler-colonial project that created it were right, just and proper.

A principal Zionist argument (though not shared by all Zionists) is this:

1. Jewish land, not Arab land – All of Israel is Jewish land. The Arabs have no right to any of this land.

Several arguments are used to defend this view:

1. Historical- Jews had a continuing presence in the land for 3,000 years, so therefore it is their land. The Arab presence is illegitimate. When the Zionist project began, there were only a few Arabs in Palestine anyway, and they were the ancestors of Arabs who invaded Jewish land in 640 and have been occupying Jewish land ever since.Arabs never controlled Palestine anyway, and all Palestinians are Arab invading colonists who have no right to be there and need to go back to Arabia where they came from. Jews were completely in their right to reclaim their homeland after so many years in exile.This is one of the most vicious and wicked Zionist arguments, and it is extremely popular amongst the hardest of the hardline, blood-and-soil, organic nationalist types.One can argue that this is the philosophy that it is at the core of the mindset of the leaders of the Zionist movement from 1897 to the present. It is this argument, that, like most primordialist ethnic nationalist projects that rose out of Central and Eastern Europe in the 1800′s, is most similar to Nazism.On the other hand, all modern ethnic nationalisms (in particular Arab nationalism, Indian Hindu nationalism, Lebanese Phalangist nationalism and all of the ethnic nationalist projects that swept Central and Eastern Europe in the 1920′s and 1930′s) came from the same 19th Century core as Nazism, so it is somewhat unfair to single out Zionism in that regard.
2. Religious – God gave the land to the Jews. It is Jewish land and will always be so. God watches over the Jews and Israel, and no one can mess with them. Anyone who messes with the Jews or Israel gets punished by God. This is obviously a favorite of conservative Zionists, though some secular liberal Zionists use it too, usually cynically in an effort to get Gentile Christians to go along with the project.
3. Holocaust – Jews needed a safe haven in Israel due to the Holocaust, and it was ok to throw out the Arabs to get this haven. A favorite of liberal Zionists, many of whom are ignorant of the specifics of the project. When questioned, many of this type will insist that no Arabs were thrown out to make the Jewish state. Apparently the land was just empty or something.
4. Freedom From Persecution – Related to the above. Jews have been persecuted everywhere they have been, so it is reasonable for them to have their own state where they can be safe. A favorite of more liberal Zionists. One of their favorite lines is that Zionism is “affirmative action for Jews”. Micheal Lerner of Tikkun is fond of that phrase.
5. UN and League of Nations – These two organizations agreed to give away Arab land to Jews for a homeland at different times. Therefore, Israel is legitimate. Once again, a favorite of more liberal Zionists and folks who are fond of the UN and international law.
6. Self-determination and National Liberation – All other ethnic groups have a right to self-determination on their homeland, and many have developed national liberation movements to obtain their nation-state. Zionism is the Jewish equivalent. This argument is a favorite of Zionist liberals and Leftists.
7. British Donation – Britain gave the land – British land – to the Jews. Therefore, it is the Jews’ land. This one is also a favorite of more liberal Zionists, because it avoids the question of whether or not Israel is Jewish land.

A number of the National-Religious types (see arguments A and B above – they are typically combined into a highly toxic form called National-Religious Zionism) claim that the land of Israel extends from the Nile to the Euphrates. It encompasses most of Lebanon and Syria, all of Jordan, part of Iraq, all of the Sinai, part of Arabia and all of Kuwait.

There are actually a fair number of Zionists who feel that all (or some) of this should be reconquered.

When an aide to President Truman visited the Holy Land around 1947 to try to understand the Zionist-Arab conflict, he said that all of the Jews he met there held the Nile to Euphrates view. He also noted that they did not like to talk about it too much, and they seemed to want to keep it a sort of secret, as if they were afraid of the reaction of outsiders if they learned of the Zionist plans.

Despite super-liar and modern-day Crusader Daniel Pipes’ articulate lie, The Nile to Euphrates Calumny, Nile to Euphrates Zionists are not mythological, and I have run across them fairly regularly on the Net, especially lately.

Does Mr. Pipes feel that I have hallucinated all of these Greater Israel types? Were they all just Arab agents out to make the Zionists look bad? Inquiring minds want to know. Mr. Pipes or his supporters are encouraged to email me here to explain how it is that I keep running into these nonexistent phantasms.

A lesser view holds that “Eretz Israel” at least covers all of Green Line Israel, all of the West Bank, the Golan Heights and the Gaza Strip. Some also include the Sinai Peninsula (or at least a small part of it up to the Wadi Arish) and southern Lebanon to the Litani River.

A map demonstrating Zionist armed settler-colonialism in action. Note the progressive loss of Arab land to Zionist colonization. This was deliberate and planned from the very start. It all stems from the Zionist principle that all of Israel, the West Bank, Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights is Jewish land and that the local Arabs are “squatting” on Jewish land and live there only at the whim of the Zionist owners.

Presently, the project is to make the remaining Arab enclaves so miserable that the Arabs will leave and then the Zionists can colonize their land.

This is a Minimal Greater Israel view and is very common. It was the “minimal view” adopted by the “progressives” of Left Socialist Zionism under David Ben-Gurion, the founder of Israel. It could logically be called Minimal Greater Israel.

Ben-Gurion’s ideological opponents, Vladimir Jabotinsky’s Revisionist Zionists, held similar views, except that they typically claimed all of Jordan for the Jewish state also.

Vladimir Jabotinsky, the founder of the Revisionist Zionist movement. He authored The Iron Wall in 1923, in which he openly advocated a Zionist settler-colonial movement, to be implemented by armed force backed by an imperial power. The reason armed force was needed, he said, was because of inevitable Arab resistance. Before that, Zionism had been largely focused on buying out the Arabs’ land, then throwing them off the land and settling it with Zionists.

 

A poster for the Irgun Zionist armed guerrilla group. This was one of the three major armed Zionist guerrilla factions in Palestine. It focused on attacks against both the British and the local Arabs. Note that Irgun claimed that not only all of Palestine, but also all of Jordan, was Jewish land, to be cleansed of Arab “squatters”, and to be conquered by force (note the rifle).

Irgun dissolved after the founding of Israel, and since then Mainstream Revisionist Zionism has gone pretty quiet about claims to Jordan. Look carefully at the map to see that Irgun also claimed the Golan Heights for the Zionists.

I have recently met Zionist Jews on the Net who are still upset at the British and the League of Nations for “promising” all of Jordan to the Zionists in the early 1920′s, and then “going back on their word”. Actually neither party did any such thing, and such thinking is based on a misreading of the League of Nations Mandate.

In a recent interview, a leader of the Zionist Organization of America, a very powerful, very militant Jewish Zionist group in the US, noted with a twinkle in his eye that all of Jordan was actually part of Israel and implied that Israel should conquer it at some future time. The attitudes of ZOA fanatics are rampant amongst the neoconservatives who were associated with the Bush Administration.

The notion of Greater Israel, not some phony notions about buffer zones or security zones, is and was the real reason for the occupation and colonies in the West Bank, Gaza, the Golan and the Sinai, and for the occupation of Southern Lebanon.

As you can imagine, this political project, Zionism, terrifies the Arabs and sends them into conniptions. My opinion is that Zionism is poisonous and that no people should have to put up with such a dangerous project, least of all the backwards Arabs.

There is a lot of nonsense about Greater Israel on the Internet, with devious Zionist sophists like Pipes holding that it is just a deranged, paranoid Arab fantasy. On the other hand, many anti-Zionists, especially Islamists, insist that all Zionists hold the radical Nile-to-Euphrates view.

As you can see above, that is not the case. The truth is that some Zionists do hold the Nile-to-Euphrates view, but the Israeli government does not, and most major Israeli political parties and political figures do not either.

The Minimal Greater Israel project described above is much more common and relevant. Anti-Zionists should focus on the minimal project for now and forget about the Nile To Euphrates project until we get some evidence that it amounts to more than the ravings of some Zionist radicals.

Anti-Zionism is a radical position, like Zionism. In general, not only do anti-Zionists strongly oppose the whole Zionist project, but they go usually so far as to say that, ideally, Israel has no right to exist, and should be dismantled in one way or another. The vast majority of Arabs are anti-Zionists in one way or another. If they tolerate Israel’s existence at all, it is only grudgingly.

Anti-Zionists differ on what should be done with the Zionist Jews who have settled in Israel.

Some say that all of those who themselves or whose relatives came to Palestine after 1917, when the Balfour Declaration was signed, have to go back where they came from.

This was the line espoused in the original PLO Charter of 1964 and continues to be espoused by some very radical Arab nationalist types, especially some Arab Communists.

Examples of organizations holding such views are NACAZAI (North American Congress Against Zionism and Racism), headed by Ziad Shaker AlJishi, a Palestinian refugee living in the US, and the the PFLP (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine) militants who run the Free Arab Voice website.

The FAV site is edited by Ibrahim Alloush and Mohammad Abu Nasr. Everyone associated with the FAV website is apparently a member of the political wing of the PFLP.

One of the editors takes the not-so-obvious nom de guerre of Nabila Harb. This pseudonym derives from Nabil Harb, an obscure PFLP cadre from the 1970′s who was part of a small PFLP cell that hijacked a Lufthansa airliner in Spain in an attempt to win the release of German urban guerrillas from the Baader-Meinhoff Gang.

The attempt failed when the plane was stormed by German Special Forces in Mogadishu, killing 3 of the 4 PFLP terrorists, but not before the cell had executed the captain of the plane in Yemen an act of gross criminality and stupidity.

The imprisoned members of the German ultra-Leftist group committed suicide right afterwards, effectively ending the existence of Baader-Meinhoff. But from its ashes would rise its successor, the much larger and more successful Red Army Faction.

However, unlike the PFLP, which is fairly heterodox and not necessarily extremely Arab nationalist anymore, the FAV is a hardline, pro-Saddam Arab nationalist site that is an excellent example of Arab Nationalist “Arab fascism” and “Arab Nazism”, as is NACAZAI. Free Arab Voice would be better characterized as a Palestinian Baathist site.

The 40 year old Dr. Alloush is a son of Palestinian refugees in Jordan. He is a Professor of Statistics and Economics at a university in Amman, Jordan. The mysterious Abu Nasr (a nom de guerre) is the author of the Iraqi Resistance Reports that can be found on the Internet.

The 59-year-old Nasr is a Palestinian who may have left Palestine after the 1967 war, may live somewhere in the West, and may have a PhD. He is fluent in Russian as well as English, which suggests he may have received education in the former Soviet Union. The PFLP was sending its higher-ranking cadres to the Soviet Union for education some years ago.

Alloush also runs an Arab nationalist list on the Net and a Yahoo group by the same name. Alloush has received some notoriety for appearing at a conference of Holocaust Deniers in Lebanon and endorsing their views. In fact, the FAV website foments Holocaust Denial itself. Both Nasr and Alloush are virulently anti-Semitic Arab Communists and excellent examples of “Arab fascism” and “Arab Nazism”, to their eternal discredit.

NACAZAI also holds Holocaust Denial views, in addition supporting the genocidal Khmer Rogue, being strongly pro-North Korea, pro-Saddam Hussein’s Baathist regime and in favor of the genocidal ultra-racist Arab-Nazis in Sudan. FAV takes similar positions, except I don’t know how they feel about the Khmer Rogue.

Even worse, a virulently anti-Semitic, Nazi-like position statement by NACAZAI shows that the Zionists and neocons who rant about the anti-Semitic Left are not entirely incorrect. Such beasts do exist.

Other members of NACAZAI include John Paul Cupp, a Communist supporter of North Korea who lives in Oregon, and Kevin Walsh, a Communist white supremacist who was recently arrested in Arizona for threatening to kill President Bush and has been diagnosed as mentally ill under suspicious circumstances (I suspect he may be bipolar). Both Cupp and Walsh are virulent, Nazi-like anti-Semites.

The entire Left should distance itself from Cupp, Walsh, AlJishi, Nasr and Alloush, along with Arab Nazis and Arab fascists in general (which includes a large segment of the Arab nationalist movement) until they pull their heads out and quit preaching racism in the name of anti-racism.

I would like to point out that the ultra-radical views of Nasr and Alloush and some of their colleagues are not held by the PFLP leadership, which envisions a single state in Palestine for both Jews and Arabs (see the recent interview with top PFLP leader Leila Khaled, for example).

The view that all Jews coming after 1917 need to take off was recently reiterated by the late Sheik Yassin, spiritual leader of Hamas, who was assassinated by an IDF missile.

Another related view is held by others, including Ayatollah Khameini, spiritual leader of Iran, who has stated that ideally all of those Jews who themselves or whose relatives came to Palestine after the 1948 founding of the Israeli state have to go back where they came from. It is possible that Hezbollah may hold similar views, due to the close relationship of its leadership with that of the Iranian government.

Other Arab radicals say that Mizrachi Jews (Jews who lived in the Arab World) can stay in the region, but that Ashkenazi Jews, who trace their recent ancestry back to Europe, have to go home.

Many anti-Zionists (especially progressives and Leftists) believe that all of the Jews can stay in Israel, but that they must share the state and land with the Arabs and dismantle the Jewish state.

This view has been espoused by the leadership of the DFLP and PFLP leftwing Palestinian armed fronts, some members of the PLO, the Hamas Charter, an Islamic Jihad leader in an interview 13 years ago, and Libya’s Moammar Qaddafi, who proposed a state called Izratine.

This view has been quite popular with Palestinian Christians and secularists like Edward Said, Mazin Qumsiyeh and Ghada Karmi.

In general, the vast majority of anti-Zionists do not advocate killing all the Jews in Israel, though I have heard some Arab hotheads say that on the Internet. No Arab or Muslim armed group (including Al Qaeda) takes that position, to my knowledge.

Yet this is a staple of Zionist propaganda – that all anti-Zionists and armed anti-Israel groups are all intent on “carrying out a second Holocaust”. If it were true, it would be an excellent reason to support Israel, but there is little evidence for this.

Furthermore, there is a question of how killing 5 million Jewish residents of an industrialized society in a rapid manner in our day and age, given recent human historical memory, is even feasible.

That said, I do not think that Al Qaeda or the groups allied with them are good for the Jews, to say the least. I can’t prove they want to kill all of the ones in Palestine, much less all the ones on Earth, but I do not think these radicals have the best interests of the Jewish people at heart, to put it mildly.

The official Al Qaeda line is that after the liberation of Palestine by Islam, all of the Jews will have to leave. According to Al Qaeda, once the Caliphate is established on Muslim lands, all non-Muslims in these lands will have to either convert to Islam if they wish to remain in Caliphate lands, or leave if they do not convert. Those who will not convert or leave will have to be killed.

For the record, some of those associated with the British Al Qaeda fronts Al-Muhajiroun, The Savior Sect and Al Ghurabaa such as Omar Bakri Mohammad and Abu Hamza have made statements that all Jews on Earth must be killed.

Variations on Qaddafi’s one-state solution, described above, are called the one-state project. That is the position of this blog. There are many variations on this view. Some hold that ideally the region should be an Islamic state and that the Jews should have to live under Islamic Law. This position is held by Islamists and is strongly opposed by this blog.

It is interesting that Qaddafi’s Izratine was considered a slap in the face to Hamas, who apparently are not wild about living in a state with 5 million Jews.

Some high-ranking Hamas members have said as much, admitting that they have had enough misery from the Jews in the region and want a “divorce” from the Jews, hence the popularity of 2 states as an interim solution by some high-ranking pragmatists in the Hamas leadership.

Others hold that the single state should be a “secular state”, which is a great idea except that most citizens of such a state would be anything but secular. Many Arabs (especially Arab nationalists) insist that the single state be an Arab state and that Jews should live as a minority in such a state. Obviously, that view is not popular with Jews at all.

Does the two-state solution look feasible to you anymore? Me either. Note how the Separation Wall actually snakes far into the West Bank to include as many Zionist colonies as possible. Note also the Zionist theft of much of the West Bank (in dark green). The logical progression of history is rendering the 2-state solution a complete non-starter.

Others would grant Jews and Arabs some sort of local rule akin to Switzerland’s cantons. One proposal wants to make the single state a homeland for the Jews and Palestinians, two terribly persecuted peoples. This proposal would retain aliya rights for Jews while allowing all Palestinians to have their own sort of aliya.

It’s clear there are many versions of this single state project. The primary resistance to this project at the moment comes not from Arabs or Muslims but from the very real fears of the Jews in Israel. These reality-based fears will have to be addressed in any such single state solution.

As you can see, there is not much left of the 2-state solution, since Zionist colonialism has devoured much of what was to be the Palestinian state. The remaining Palestinian enclaves are nothing more than disconnected bantustans, surrounded by armed Zionist colonies, bases and roads for colonists. It’s like living in a home but being locked in only one room so you could not access the other rooms in the house.

Getting back to Greater Israel, the Internet is full of statements by Zionist fanatics fantasizing about Greater Israel. They are not made-up lies but instead are well-documented statements. Here is one by David Ben-Gurion (formerly David Green):

David Ben Gurion, Report to the World Council of Poale Zion (the forerunner of the Labor Party), Tel Aviv, 1938. Cited by Israel Shahak, Journal of Palestine Studies, Spring 1981.

“We should prepare to go over to the offensive. Our aim is to smash Lebanon, Trans-Jordan, and Syria. The weak point is Lebanon, for the Moslem regime is artificial and easy for us to undermine. We shall establish a Christian state there, and then we will smash the Arab Legion, eliminate Trans-Jordan; Syria will fall to us. We then bomb and move on and take Port Said, Alexandria, and Sinai.”

Keep in mind that this frighteningly fanatical statement was uttered by the founder of the state of Israel, a socialist, a liberal and a moderate. Note that his rightwing opponents were even more extreme. Note also that his rightwing Revisionist opponents were the forerunners of the modern-day Likud and Kadima Parties, not to mention the many smaller rightwing parties.

How Castro Held the World Hostage

This is a good article. It shows just how insane Castro was during the crisis. He was ready to go to war, even nuclear war, to stop a US invasion of Cuba. Kennedy was also absolutely reckless.

The hero of the whole crisis was Khrushchev. Khrushchev got Castro to back down and he stopped listening to him. He gave in to Kennedy’s outrageous and belligerent demands that nearly set off a nuclear war. Khrushchev was the only one out of the three who wanted to avoid war or nuclear war at all costs. Kennedy and Castro seemed to have that as a secondary goal.

The New York Times
October 25, 2012

By James G. Blight And Janet M. Lang

Waterloo, Ontario. On Oct. 26-27, 1962, human civilization came close to being destroyed. Schoolchildren were ordered into shelters; supermarket shelves were emptied of soup cans and bottled water. It was the most perilous moment of the Cuban missile crisis, and of the cold war. But the danger of Armageddon did not begin, as legend has it, when the United States learned that Soviet missiles had reached Cuba’s shores earlier that month.

Rather, it was driven by Fidel Castro’s fears and insecurities after the botched Bay of Pigs invasion and by the failures of President John F. Kennedy and Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev to take him seriously.

With Soviet missiles stationed on the island and America poised to attack, Cuba 50 years ago was far more dangerous than Iran or North Korea is today. But the 1962 crisis shows that a small, determined revolutionary state, backed into a corner and convinced of its inevitable demise, can bring the world to the brink of catastrophe.

Twenty years ago, we spent four days in Havana discussing the missile crisis with Mr. Castro, former Soviet officials and American decision makers from the Kennedy administration, including the former defense secretary Robert S. McNamara.

Mr. Castro’s interest had been piqued by the declassification and release of Soviet and American documents in 1991 and 1992, which both surprised and angered him. These included long-suppressed passages from memoirs, released 20 years after Khrushchev’s death, in which he wrote that Mr. Castro had become irrational and possibly suicidal and that the crisis had to end before Cuba ignited a nuclear war.

In addition, declassified letters between Khrushchev and Kennedy revealed the extent to which Washington and Moscow cut Cuba out of negotiations, refused to consider Cuban demands and eventually resolved the crisis in spite of Mr. Castro’s objections. So to truly understand how the world came close to Armageddon, one must look not to Washington and Moscow but to Havana.

After the American-sponsored Bay of Pigs debacle, Fidel Castro, then just 35 but already Cuba’s unquestioned ruler, drew an astonishing conclusion. “The result of aggression against Cuba will be the start of a conflagration of incalculable consequences, and they will be affected too,” he told the Cuban people. “It will no longer be a matter of them feasting on us. They will get as good as they give.”

For the next 18 months, Mr. Castro prepared for nuclear Armageddon, while Kennedy and Khrushchev sleepwalked toward the abyss. Focused on their global competition, the United States and the Soviet Union were clueless about the mind-set of the smaller, weaker, poorer party. Kennedy wanted Cuba off his agenda and he resolved never again to cave in to his hawkish advisers and critics, who had continued clamoring for an invasion of the island, even after the Bay of Pigs disaster.

Khrushchev, for his part, was worried about “losing Cuba” and decided in early 1962 to offer nuclear missiles to Mr. Castro to deter the invasion they both believed was being planned but that Kennedy was privately resolved to avoid. But as Khrushchev wrote in his memoirs, the Soviet Union never intended to actually use the missiles; they were merely pawns in a game of superpower competition.

However, Mr. Castro believed the fundamental purpose of Soviet nuclear weapons was to destroy the United States in the event of an invasion. After centuries of humiliation and irrelevance, he concluded, Cuba would matter fundamentally to the fate of humanity. Cuba couldn’t prevent the onslaught, nor could it expect to survive it. He insisted that the Cubans and Russians on the island would resist “to the last day and the last man, woman or child capable of holding a weapon.”

Around noon on Oct. 26, Mr. Castro summoned the Soviet ambassador, Aleksandr Alekseev, to his command post. Mr. Castro couldn’t understand why Soviet troops in Cuba were sitting on their hands while American planes were flying over the island with impunity.

He urged them to start shooting at U-2 spy planes with surface-to-air missiles and suggested that Cuban troops should begin firing on low-flying planes with antiaircraft guns, contrary to Soviet wishes.

Alekseev promised to relay Mr. Castro’s complaints to the Kremlin. Alekseev later told us he felt “almost schizophrenic” when he sent the cables to Moscow, because it was his duty to represent the cautious Soviet position, yet he himself, like Mr. Castro, expected an American onslaught. At that moment, “I was almost 100 percent Cuban,” he recalled.

While Cuba was preparing for nuclear war, Khrushchev and Kennedy were, unbeknown to Mr. Castro, moving toward a peaceful resolution of the crisis. Terrified that a catastrophic war might break out, Khrushchev took the initiative even as Kennedy was preparing an offer of his own. He wrote to Kennedy on Oct. 26: “Let us then display statesmenlike wisdom. I propose: we, for our part, will declare that our ships bound for Cuba are not carrying any armaments.

You will declare that the United States will not invade Cuba with its troops and will not support any other forces which might intend to invade Cuba. Then the necessity for the presence of our military specialists in Cuba will be obviated.” It would take another three agonizing weeks to work out the details, but Kennedy and Khrushchev had finally locked onto a common wavelength.

All these letters (except those delivered over the radio at the peak of the crisis) were methodically dictated, translated, encrypted and then transmitted. Such slow communication in a time of crisis seems inconceivable today, but at the heart of the cold war absolute secrecy was the objective, not speed. (It was only after the missile crisis that the “red phone” hot line between the White House and the Kremlin was installed.)

Unaware of Kennedy’s and Khrushchev’s progress toward a deal, at 2 a.m. on Oct. 27, Mr. Castro decided to write to Khrushchev, encouraging him to use his nuclear weapons to destroy the United States in the event of an invasion. At 3 a.m., he arrived at the Soviet Embassy and told Alekseev that they should go into the bunker beneath the embassy because an attack was imminent.

According to declassified Soviet cables, a groggy but sympathetic Alekseev agreed, and soon they were set up underground with Castro dictating and aides transcribing and translating a letter.

Mr. Castro became frustrated, uncertain about what to say. After nine drafts, with the sun rising, Alekseev finally confronted Mr. Castro: are you asking Comrade Khrushchev to deliver a nuclear strike on the United States? Mr. Castro told him, “If they attack Cuba, we should wipe them off the face of the earth!” Alekseev was shocked, but he dutifully assisted Mr. Castro in fine-tuning the 10th and final draft of the letter.

From his bunker, Mr. Castro wrote that, in the event of an American invasion, “the danger that that aggressive policy poses for humanity is so great that following that event the Soviet Union must never allow the circumstances in which the imperialists could launch the first nuclear strike against it.”

An invasion, he added, “would be the moment to eliminate such danger forever through an act of clear, legitimate defense however harsh and terrible the solution would be, for there is no other.” Mr. Castro was calm as he composed this last will and testament for the 6.5 million citizens of Cuba, and the 43,000 Russians on the island who would be incinerated alongside them.

According to his son and biographer, Sergei Khrushchev, the Soviet premier received that letter in the midst of a tense leadership meeting and shouted, “This is insane; Fidel wants to drag us into the grave with him!” Khrushchev hadn’t understood that Mr. Castro believed that Cuba was doomed, that war was inevitable, and that the Soviets should transform Cuba from a mere victim into a martyr.

By ignoring Mr. Castro’s messianic martyrdom, both Kennedy and Khrushchev inadvertently pushed the world close to Armageddon.

The parallels between the Cuban missile crisis and today’s nuclear standoff with Iran are inexact, but eerie. Cuba then and Iran now share a revolutionary mind-set, a belief that Washington’s goal is regime change, and a conviction that nuclear weapons might guarantee their survival in the face of unrelenting American hostility.

The third player in today’s crisis is not a superpower but Israel, which views a nuclear Iran as an unacceptable threat to its existence. Israel shares with Iran (and 1960s Cuba) a national narrative that is steeped in the glorification of military heroism in the face of potential defeat.

Whoever wins the presidential election must persuade the Israelis to restrain themselves. Iran’s leaders are rational, and Israel’s overwhelming nuclear superiority means that Israel need not fear Iran. America must convince Iran that it doesn’t need nuclear weapons, because it has nothing to fear from Israel or the United States. The American president must do what even Kennedy and Khrushchev could not: treat a lesser power as an equal and pay attention to its fears.

Ignoring Cuba’s insecurities 50 years ago pushed the world to the brink of catastrophe. Today we must be wary of backing the Iranians into a corner so that they feel they must choose between capitulation and martyrdom. In 1962, the Soviets just barely stopped the Cubans; this time, there is no Khrushchev.

James G. Blight and Janet M. Lang are professors at the Balsillie School of International Affairs and the authors of The Armageddon Letters: Kennedy/Khrushchev/Castro in the Cuban Missile Crisis.

“How the U.S. Played Russian Roulette with Nuclear War,” by Noam Chomsky

Great article by Chomsky shows just how sickening US imperialism really is. The Cuban Missile Crisis was caused by the US, which was threatening to invade Cuba since the Bay of Pigs operation was defeated. The purpose of Operation Mongoose, a series of often-terrorist attacks and sabotage, was to prepare for a US invasion of Cuba.

In order to ward off the invasion, the Cubans asked for the missiles to be installed there. The only reason it was resolved was because Khrushchev backed down agreed to Kennedy’s outrageously one-sided terms. However, the US did agree to remove missiles from Turkey and to not attack Cuba. The Pentagon wanted to attack Cuba several times during the crisis, but Kennedy turned them down. He is to be commended for this.

The Soviets pointed out that the US reserved the right to place nuclear missiles anywhere on Earth targeting the USSR, China and anyone else, including right up on their borders (the US put missiles on the USSR’s borders in Turkey), but the USSR and its allies had no right to reciprocate by placing defensive missiles in Cuba.

As usual, the hypocrisy of US imperialism won out. The US has a right to target anyone on Earth with whatever weapons it has, and place those weapons anywhere, even right on country’s borders, but not one nation on Earth has the right to fight back against US imperialism by responding in kind.

US imperialism is one sick, depraved monster!

One thing that Kennedy was worried about was not that the Cuban missiles would attack the US (the lie that was portrayed to gullible American fools) but instead that the missiles would serve to deter the murderous meddlings of US imperialism elsewhere in the Hemisphere. Kennedy worried that the missiles might deter a US invasion of Venezuela that Kennedy was then planning.

We see the same thing with Iran. The US and Israel are presently targeting Iran with nukes. If Iran got a bomb, they might be able to even the score and defend themselves against US and Israeli hegemony. This cannot be tolerated.

Prior to that, Kennedy had run for President on a platform involving a “missile gap” with the US and the USSR. The Soviets supposedly had many more missiles than we did, and it was all Eisenhower’s fault. However, this was a complete lie, and Kennedy knew it at the time. It was disgusting of Kennedy to lie his way into office like that.

During the Yom Kippur War of 1973, the US threatened nuclear war again against the USSR while authorizing Israel to break a cease-fire that had been imposed on both sides.

Again in 1983, Reagan threatened the USSR again by placing Pershing missiles on 5 minute launch and instituting massive US air and naval probe attacks on the USSR. This led to a major war scare.

India and Pakistan have also had a few nuclear war near misses and scares.

Chomsky concludes the article by noting that nuclear war probably cannot be held off forever, and some day, someone won’t back down, or a scare will turn into a launch. He finishes by saying that nuclear missiles are incompatible with the survival of mankind.

How the U.S. Played Russian Roulette with Nuclear War

by Noam Chomsky

The American attacks are often dismissed in U.S. commentary as silly pranks, CIA shenanigans that got out of hand. That is far from the truth. The best and the brightest had reacted to the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion with near hysteria, including the president, who solemnly informed the country that:

“The complacent, the self-indulgent, the soft societies are about to be swept away with the debris of history. Only the strong … can possibly survive.”

And they can only survive, he evidently believed, by massive terror though that addendum was kept secret, and is still not known to loyalists who perceive the ideological enemy as having “gone on the attack” the near-universal perception, as Kern observes.

After the Bay of Pigs defeat, historian Piero Gleijeses writes that JFK launched a crushing embargo to punish the Cubans for defeating a U.S.-run invasion, and “asked his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, to lead the top-level interagency group that oversaw Operation Mongoose, a program of paramilitary operations, economic warfare and sabotage he launched in late 1961 to visit the ‘terrors of the earth’ on Fidel Castro and, more prosaically, to topple him.”

The phrase “terrors of the earth” is Arthur Schlesinger’ s, in his quasi-official biography of Robert Kennedy, who was assigned responsibility to conduct the terrorist war, and informed the CIA that the Cuban problem carries “the top priority in the United States Government all else is secondary no time, no effort, or manpower is to be spared” in the effort to overthrow the Castro regime.

The Mongoose operations were run by Edward Lansdale, who had ample experience in “counterinsurgency” a standard term for terrorism that we direct. He provided a timetable leading to “open revolt and overthrow of the Communist regime” in October 1962.

The “final definition” of the program recognized that “final success will require decisive U.S. military intervention, ” after terrorism and subversion had laid the basis. The implication is that US military intervention would take place in October 1962 when the missile crisis erupted. The events just reviewed help explain why Cuba and Russia had good reason to take such threats seriously.

Years later, Robert McNamara recognized that Cuba was justified in fearing an attack. “If I were in Cuban or Soviet shoes, I would have thought so, too,” he observed at a major conference on the missile crisis on the 40th anniversary.

As for Russia’s “desperate effort to give the USSR the appearance of equality”, to which Stern refers, recall that Kennedy’s very narrow victory in the 1960 election relied heavily on a fabricated “missile gap” concocted to terrify the country and to condemn the Eisenhower administration as soft on national security. There was indeed a “missile gap”, but strongly in favor of the US.

The first “public, unequivocal administration statement” on the true facts, in his authoritative study of the Kennedy missile program, was in October 1961, when Deputy Secretary of Defense Roswell Gilpatric informed the Business Council that “the U.S. would have a larger nuclear delivery system left after a surprise attack than the nuclear force which the Soviet Union could employ in its first strike.”

The Russians, of course, were well aware of their relative weakness and vulnerability. They were also aware of Kennedy’s reaction when Khrushchev offered to sharply reduce offensive military capacity and proceeded to do so unilaterally when Kennedy failed to respond: namely, Kennedy undertook a huge armaments program.

In Retrospect

The two most crucial questions about the missile crisis are how it began, and how it ended. It began with Kennedy’s terrorist attack against Cuba, with a threat of invasion in October 1962.

It ended with the president’s rejection of Russian offers that would seem fair to a rational person, but were unthinkable because they would undermine the fundamental principle that the US has the unilateral right to deploy nuclear missiles anywhere, aimed at China or Russia or anyone else, and right on their borders; and the accompanying principle that Cuba had no right to have missiles for defense against what appeared to be an imminent US invasion.

To establish these principles firmly, it was entirely proper to face a high risk of war of unimaginable destruction, and to reject simple, and admittedly fair, ways to end the threat.

Garthoff observes that “in the United States, there was almost universal approbation for President Kennedy’s handling of the crisis.” Dobbs writes that “the relentlessly upbeat tone was established by the court historian, Arthur M Schlesinger Jr, who wrote that Kennedy had ‘dazzled the world’ through a ‘combination of toughness and restraint, of will, nerve and wisdom, so brilliantly controlled, so matchlessly calibrated’.”

Rather more soberly, Stern partially agrees, noting that Kennedy repeatedly rejected the militant advice of his advisers and associates who called for military force and dismissal of peaceful options.

The events of October 1962 are widely hailed as Kennedy’s finest hour. Graham Allison joins many others in presenting them as “a guide for how to defuse conflicts, manage great-power relationships, and make sound decisions about foreign policy in general”. In a very narrow sense, that judgment seems reasonable. The ExComm tapes reveal that the president stood apart from others, sometimes almost all others, in rejecting premature violence.

There is, however, a further question: how should JFK’s relative moderation in management of the crisis be evaluated against the background of the broader considerations just reviewed?

But that question does not arise in a disciplined intellectual and moral culture, which accepts without question the basic principle that the U.S. effectively owns the world by right, and is, by definition, a force for good despite occasional errors and misunderstandings, so that it is plainly entirely proper for the U.S. to deploy massive offensive force all over the world, while it is an outrage for others (allies and clients apart) to make even the slightest gesture in that direction, or even to think of deterring the threatened use of violence by the benign global hegemon.

That doctrine is the primary official charge against Iran today: it might pose a deterrent to US and Israeli force. It was a consideration during the missile crisis as well. In internal discussion, the Kennedy brothers expressed their fears that Cuban missiles might deter a US invasion of Venezuela then under consideration. So “the Bay of Pigs was really right,” JFK concluded.

The principles still contribute to the constant risk of nuclear war. There has been no shortage of severe dangers since the missile crisis. Ten years later, during the 1973 Israel-Arab war, Henry Kissinger called a high-level nuclear alert (Defcon 3) to warn the Russians to keep hands off while he was secretly authorizing Israel to violate the ceasefire imposed by the US and Russia.

When Reagan came into office a few years later, the US launched operations probing Russian defenses and simulating air and naval attacks, while placing Pershing missiles in Germany with a five-minute flight time to Russian targets, providing what the CIA called a “super-sudden first strike” capability.

Naturally, this caused great alarm in Russia, which, unlike the U.S., has repeatedly been invaded and virtually destroyed. That led to a major war scare in 1983. There have been hundreds of cases when human intervention aborted a first strike minutes before launch, after automated systems gave false alarms. We don’t have Russian records, but there’s no doubt that their systems are far more accident-prone.

Meanwhile, India and Pakistan have come close to nuclear war several times, and the sources of the conflict remain.

Both have refused to sign the non-proliferation treaty, along with Israel, and have received U.S. support for development of their nuclear weapons programs until today, in the case of India, now a U.S. ally. War threats in the Middle East, which might become reality very soon, once again escalate the dangers.

In 1962, war was avoided by Khrushchev’s willingness to accept Kennedy’s hegemonic demands. But we can hardly count on such sanity forever. It’s a near miracle that nuclear war has so far been avoided. There is more reason than ever to attend to the warning of Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein , almost 60 years ago, that we must face a choice that is “stark and dreadful and inescapable”:

Shall we put an end to the human race; or shall mankind renounce war?