US Conservatives Are Not Evil; They Are Insane

I really don’t think most US conservatives are evil or bad. I just think they are wrong. Actually I do not think they are wrong. I know they are wrong. Almost everything they say and believe is simply wrong. For the most part, what they believe are lies, nonsense, crap, idiocy and bullshit. If we know a human being whose beliefs are all nonsensical, we usually won’t say he is evil. We might be charitable and just say he is a nutcase.

Almost all of the problems with US conservatives are because they are ludicrously partisan. To be partisan is one thing, but a conservative will never admit he is partisan.

Let us look at some examples:

Benghazi Embassy scandal: There was no scandal. Al Qaeda is waging a global war on us, and they will attack our troops and embassies any chance they can get. The Administration tried their hardest to fortify the embassy, as hard as any other administration would have tried. The diplomatic aspect of the state in the State Department is nonpartisan. Embassy personnel are staffed via the Pentagon and the CIA and contractors. Under any administration, priority will be on protecting the lives of diplomatic personnel and the integrity of US embassies.

Democratic administrations are not so stupid as to scrimp on security overseas, and there is no evidence that Republicans protect embassies any better than Democrats. One of the worst attacks ever on a US embassy occurred in 1983 when Hezbollah hit the US Embassy in Beirut. Almost all the American “civilians” killed were working for the CIA, but don’t let that bother you.

As sometimes happens, our enemies got the best of us one day in Libya. This would never have happened under Gaddafi, but we overthrew him and put Al Qaeda in charge of Libya, so that’s why our embassy got overrun.

Truth be told, wasn’t the 9-11 attack on the US far worse than the Benghazi attack in which one ambassador was killed? On 9-11, 3,000 Americans were killed, on our own soil nonetheless. But somehow to conservatives this is not a failure to protect the US homeland and citizens, but an attack that kills one ambassador is? That’s just partisan bullshit; it’s nothing more and nothing less.

If the Benghazi attack occurred under a Republican President, conservatives would not have said a word. Security failures only occur under Democratic Presidents, never under Republican Presidents. If 9-11 would have occurred under a Democratic President, conservatives would still be screaming about how “the liberals let Al Qaeda attack us.” But since it happened under a Republican, you will never hear a word of this. This makes no sense. 9-11 was either a security failure or it was not. It can’t be the case that it would have been a security failure under a Democrat, but since it occurred under a Republican, it could not possibly be one.

Lie: Obama represents something called “Chicago-style politics.” The implication here is that Obama is corrupt to the core, a representative of corrupt Chicago Democratic Party-labor union machine politics going back decades. The truth is that that corrupt machine got dismantled quite some time ago. It is true that Democratic politics in Chicago used to be very corrupt, especially under Mayor Daley. Corrupt elections were the norm, and dead people voted early and often.

Corrupt Democratic crooks in Chicago stole so many votes in Chicago in 1960 that they probably gave John F. Kennedy the election. So JFK no doubt stole his way into office. The dead have not voted in Chicago in quite some time, and federal RICO prosecutions and raids have pretty much shut down the overtly corrupt aspect of Chicago politics. To my knowledge, Chicago politics nowadays is no more corrupt than the politics of any other large US city.

Furthermore, there is no evidence that Obama is part of any Chicago corrupt Daley-style machine. That machine was made up of old style ethnic Whites, and the new Democratic politics in Chicago is much more progressive, even radical, and clean. It’s true that Penny Pritzger, Rahm Emanuel and Bill Ayers were part of the local politics scene, but neither one is corrupt. In fact Ayers and other radical types would be very against that sort of thing. Emanuel and and Pritzger come out of US finance capital and are as corrupt or non-corrupt as anyone tied at the hip to Wall Street as almost 100% of the Republican Party is.

How about Obama since he has been in office? There is no evidence that the Obama Administration is particularly corrupt as an Executive Branch. Sure, they take lots of corporate money, but the Republicans take way more, and that’s all legal anyway. There have been very few serious corruption cases under Obama.

The truth is that corruption in the US reached an all-time recent high under Ronald Reagan. It was also very high under George Bush Jr. The more capitalist the political party is, the more corrupt it is. The Democrats are not so wedded to US big business and multinational corporations as Republicans are, hence you see a lot less corruption. Any political party with profound ties to Big Capital will almost always be extremely corrupt. This fact can even be shown on a worldwide scale. Parties that are more socialist or populist and less tied to the rich and Big Capital will tend to be less corrupt since there is less Big Money to go around and they at least pay lip service to the lower 80% of the population.

Conclusion: There is no “Chicago-style politics” anymore, and even if there is, Obama is not representative of it. The old machine is dead and gone, possibly never to be revived. That Obama is some corrupt, vote-stealing, bribe-taking, brutal Daley style machine crook is simply nonsense.

Lie: Obama is killing the Keystone XL pipeline because he has ties to the Waltons, heirs to the Walmart fortune, who will lose big money if the pipeline goes through. Truth is that Obama, corporatist that he is, largely supports the Keystone XL, but he is under huge pressure from environmentalists to cave in. So Obama the corporatist is caught between his Big Money backers in Big Oil (Obama is a strong supporter of Big Oil) and the environmentalists on the Left of his party.

Obama, being a rightwing corporate capitalist whore, is inclined to support the pipeline because his corporate pimps demand it of him. However, he is pressured from the Left to kill the pipeline. So he is caught in a bind. The only wavering he is doing at all is because he is under pressure from environmentalists. If he stops Keystone XL, it will be because the environmentalists convinced him.

Conclusion: Obama has no position on Keystone XL, but is inclined to support it. But he is under pressure from his Left to kill it. The verdict is up to him.

Lie: Environmental organizations lie about the environment because they are paid many millions of dollars to lie about it. This is simply not true. Environmental groups are not corrupt, and there is no money in protecting the environment. There are no rich or business interests paying off environmental activists to do this or that. The entire environmental movement really is anti-capitalist.

Its goal is to shut down or regulate various capitalist enterprises so they can not make any money at all since they are not allowed to start up or because their operations are shut down. In other cases, it seeks to regulate capitalist enterprises in such a way as to limit the profits of Capital. The capitalists are the ones with money in capitalist societies. Since the goals of environmentalists’ projects are to limit or in some cases to disallow capitalists’ profits, no capitalist will ever support this movement.

It is certainly possible that there are rich people somewhere dishing out millions of dollars to environmental groups in order to lie about environmental problems, but there is no evidence that this is occurring. Anyway, US environmental problems are bad enough that there is no need to lie about anything; the truth is bad enough as it is. I have been following this movement for decades now and I have never uncovered a single case of environmentalists inventing nonexistent problems or even exaggerating current ones. There’s no need to do so. If projects are environment-friendly, environmentalists are content to let them go forward.

Conclusion: There are no environmental groups lying about environmental problems as the truth is bad enough. 100% of the lying is on the side of the capitalist destroyers and polluters who obviously have huge pecuniary interest in lying. No one is giving millions of $ to environmentalists to make up lies, and there is no evidence that no one ever has.

Lie: China and India are causing the majority of global warming, so we needn’t worry about global warming here in the US. Pollute away!

The truth is that China and India together cause ~8% of global warming in the world. Sure it is on the rise, but that is the current figure. Most global warming is coming out of the West.

Conclusion: The West is causing global warming, not the rest of the world.

Lie: Barack Obama, radical Islamist Kenyan born Muslim, is supporting the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. The MB are radical Al Qaeda style terrorists who hate the US and Israel. It is true that the MB are radical Islamists and they are pretty nasty. But a Republican administration would probably also support the MB regime in Egypt. Egypt gets that $2-3 billion/year as a payoff for making peace with Israel back in 1979.

So all those billions are not going for the radical Islamist MB in Egypt, instead it is going for a bunch of Jews squatting in Palestine. It’s a payoff to the Jews, nothing more, nothing less. If you’re upset about it, head on over to Hymietown, find yourself a deli, and complain to anyone who will listen to you.

Truth is that due to geopolitics, a Republican administration would probably have to support the MB to the tune of $2-3 billion a year too. If you cut off all that aid, Egypt might just tear up that peace treaty with Israel, and we can’t have that. So the aid stays, no matter which administration is in charge.

Besides, there is not a whole lot of evidence that the Egyptian MB is any more radical Islamist than the radical Sunni Islamist regimes in the Gulf. Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Oman and Yemen are all run by radical Islamist regimes. In fact, the Egyptian MB has very deep ties to the Wahhabi clergy in Saudi Arabia, and it was the emigration of many MB Islamists to Saudi Arabia due to persecution by secular regimes that helped fuel Al Qaeda in the first place.

What created Al Qaeda? Al Qaeda was created when large numbers of MB activists from Egypt and then later from Syria migrated to Saudi Arabia due to persecution by secular regimes in Egypt and Syria. The Wahhabi clerics had been rather quietist up until this point. But the MB cadres were radicalized by persecution and torture in their homelands, and they riled up the locals, turning up the heat on the quietist Wahhabi clergy. It was out of this union of Mediterranean MB activists with Saudi Wahhabi clergy that Al Qaeda itself was born.

Conclusion: Obama probably doesn’t like the Egyptian MB regime any more than any Republican would. But the rules of geopolitics are that Egypt must be supported as a consequence of US support for Israel. As with so many things in the Middle East, all roads lead back to Jerusalem.

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”).

Islam and Historical Context

Jaipal, the Hindutvadi in the comments section, has been spamming the blog for a long time now about the horrors and evils of the religion called Islam. This is typical for Hindutvadis and even Hindus. I have found that even average Hindus have a hatred for Islam and Hindus that is so extreme that it is nearly pathological.

As a note, spamming the comments section is not yet banned. I already ban on way too much as it is.There is a downside to banning other than the humanitarian one that the commenter’s human rights have been violated. That is that after every ban of a regular commenter, commenters quit commenting for awhile, as the ban has an inhibitory effect on other commenters. That is, they now fear that they will be banned.

Dota has stated that Islam has to be understood in its historical context. Jaipal has spammed responses to that saying that endlessly that Islam is nothing but the Quran and the Hadiths and anything that goes above and beyond that is simply not Islam.

Jaipal is guilty of reductionist thinking typical of fundamentalists. In voicing this line, Islamophobes are similar to Al Qaeda and the rest of the fundamentalists.

The fundies all say that Islam is frozen in time forever in the 7th Century and cannot be updated. They were even murdering vendors of ice in Iraq because there was no ice in the time of Mohammad. They were murdering children playing soccer because they believe Islam says it is sinful to play sports. They killed sellers of music CD’s because they think Islam says that music is evil.

Actually most of these beliefs stem from the extreme beliefs of Wahhabi Islam from Saudi Arabia. This austere creed started around 1800 in the center of Arabia and then spread out and conquered the peninsula. This is the official creed in Saudi Arabia and all state preachers are Wahhabis. It is a particularly toxic and wicked form of Islam.

Nevertheless, Saudi Arabia has an extremely low crime rate and is a well ordered and functioning society. If you go there, you think you are in suburban Phoenix. No one is starving or shitting on the ground, there are no little girl temple whores and everyone has health care and the benefits of a very generous welfare state. Criminals are treated brutally, often executed by pubic beheading which is a grotesque and evil way to deal with criminals. There have been some injustices, as recently a Filipina maid was beheaded when a child died in her care. But these injustices are not so common. The muttawa religious police bother people, but mostly they just harass you and make you go home.

Some girls died in a girls’ school recently in a fire and this caused outrage in Saudi society and reforms were made. A princess was badly beaten by her husband and this once again caused outrage in Saudi society about the beating of women. Once again, reforms were made. Despite misogynistic restrictions on women, women are not murdered for dowries and do not have acid thrown in their faces. Millions of female children are not murdered every year by starvation and suffocation. It is arguable whether women are treated better in India or Saudi Arabia. In some ways, women have it better in Saudi Arabia!

As you can see from the above, in many ways, even Saudi Arabia, perhaps the nadir of what we can expect from Islam outside of war zones and the Taliban, has even managed to produce a far more functional and even civilized society that the chaos, filth and Hell of Hindu India. So while I dislike both religions, I am not sure that Islam is worse than Hinduism. At least Islam creates working, functional and wealthy societies. Hinduism only seems to create filth and injustice ridden utter Hells. Look at India. India is what Hindus create.

Anyway, Dota is correct. What is practiced as Islam is Islam. Not the Koran. Not the Hadiths. Not both. Islam is what Muslims do, wherever and whenever they do it. As with socialism and everything else, theory is for ideologues. “Actually existing Islam” is like “actually existing socialism.”

Islam is whatever is practiced in whatever country is practicing Islam. Saudi Islam is what is practiced in Saudi Arabia. Shia Islam is what is practiced in Iran. Alevi Islam is what is practiced by Alevis in Turkey. Indonesian and Thai Islam is what is practiced in Thailand and Indonesia. Islam actually differs markedly in all of these places and regional traditions and religious accretions have formed syncretistic traditions.

In addition, moral codes and laws also differ widely across the Muslim World. The mullahs in Iran have sanctioned transsexual operations, and prostitution is nearly legal in the religious city of Qom. The mullahs for some time have been talking about setting up legal prostitution under the temporary marriage rubric. The head mullah of Lebanon’s Shia ruled that female masturbation was permissible and even desirable if she was single or her husband was not present. Everywhere they live, Shia take lovers outside of marriage under the temporary marriage custom. One prominent Iranian woman has had up to 5o lovers, many of them high ranking mullahs.

The Shia in particular believe as the Catholics do that Islam has to be continuously reinterpreted over the centuries to keep up with the times. So they reject the notion that Islam was frozen in time in the 7th Century. That is much more of a Sunni thing – the fascination with the 600′s AD.

In Mali, a group of Al Qaeda fundamentalists impose fierce Islamist rule that horrified that locals, who had a tradition of a much looser and more liberal Islam typical in the Sahel. Which one is the “real Islam.” Al Qaeda and Jaipal would say the Al  Qaedists, but that is an illusion. But groups were practicing different forms of Islam, and neither one was the “real Islam,” because there is no such thing as the real Islam, as I note above. Islam varies geographically and historically it is varied temporally.

Islam is whatever people practice as Islam, whenever they do it and wherever they do it. That’s the definition of Islam as well as any other religion. Always has been, always will be. All else is cant and propaganda fit for ideologues who live in towers, not in realis.

Winston Churchill on Islam

How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. The effects are apparent in many countries.

Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live. A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity.

The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property – either as a child, a wife, or a concubine – must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men. Thousands become the brave and loyal soldiers of the faith: all know how to die but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it.

No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith.

It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science, the science against which it had vainly struggled, the civilisation of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilisation of ancient Rome. Winston Churchill, The River War: An Historical Account of the Reconquest of the Soudan (1899)

Wow! Powerful stuff. Is he not essentially correct though in his assessment of Islam, at least as it existed in 1899? Keep in mind that the Islam of 2012 is not the same erstwhile Islam of a hundred years ago. If Churchill would have observed the Gulf states of today, he would not have written some of the above. The cities of Saudi Arabia, which look like Phoenix, the towering and ultramodern skyline of Dubai – this is hardly a moribund society.

There are scarcely sluggish methods of commerce in Dubai and the rest of Gulf. I understand that Arab agriculture is well developed and highly productive, except in Yemen, where there is a lot of hunger for some reason.

I actually think that Muslim societies work quite well within the reactionary and backwards system. My Yemeni friends tell me there is almost no crime in the cities of Yemen. You can walk down the street and midnight and not fear a thing. Street crime against females is nearly unknown. A woman I knew went to Saudi Arabia and said she used to walk around at midnight not fearing a thing.

There is little of the chaos, filth, random violence and cruelty and sheer evil that we see in South Asia, Black Africa and even Latin America. The preacher calls to prayer several times a day, and all bow down and pray. Men are men and women are women. There is a rhythm that ties it all together and somehow makes it work.

It’s twisted, backwards and nuts, but it’s more or less functional within that archaic mindset.

The problem is that it looks like the Muslim system is not that stable. It is only stable when a dictator is holding everything down. Cut that loose, and things can fall apart quite rapidly with religious based civil wars. Violence and oppression against non-Muslims is a continuous backdrop in most Muslim societies – it’s only a nice place if you are Muslim.

I have a feeling that if you go along with the rules, you will probably be ok under Islam. But I’m an asshole, and I try to break rules everywhere I go. If I were living under Islam, I would probably try to steal some Muslim’s wife and fuck her. I have a feeling that if you break societal codes like that, the punishment is pretty vicious.

There is a background violence in these cultures, a sort of a seething sense of superiority and fanaticism that threatens to rear up at any time. You mess up and you could easily find your ass kicked, in jail or on a slab.

While Muslim society is functional for the complacent and obedient, it seems terrifying to a guy like me.

Israel: Just Pack Up and Go

Repost from the old site.

Very interesting article by Nadim Shehadi, a Lebanese economist, written after the Lebanon War in 2006. In contrast to the raw anti-Semitism that animates so much anti-Israel sentiment in the Arab World (let’s be honest now – it’s a fact), this article makes some very reasonable points.

First of all, Shehadi has argued that the Zionist dream has failed. Keep in mind that Herzl dreamed of a Jewish state that would end anti-Semitism by separating Jews from Gentiles, because the two could not live together due to the innate or at least timeless hatred of the Gentile of the Jew. Keep in mind that Herzl was speaking from the point of view of a European Ashkenazi Jew.

Herzl, an Austrian journalist and the founder of modern Zionism, was a secular Jew who originally was an originally an assimilationist. However, the Dreyfus Trial in France in the late 1800′s shocked him and convinced him that the Gentiles were doomed to forever hate the Jews. He felt that it would be better for both parties to just separate.

In Herzl’s dream, the Jewish state would gather the Jews from all around the Diaspora. Since living together caused anti-Semitism, separation would end it. The Jewish state would be at peace with its neighbors and Jewish-Gentile relations would be harmonious.

By all accounts, Herzl’s dream lies in ruins. Zionism has not resolved the Jewish Question, as its founding has caused four wars, two wars in Lebanon and continuous guerrilla war in the area surrounding Israel. It has arguably contributed to two wars against Iraq, bombing of Libya and the general spread of Islamist terrorism in the region.

Israel has been a disaster. Surely it’s no safe haven for the Jews. Most Jews are safer in the Diaspora, especially in the US. As recently as last summer, there were 13 homicidal attacks against Jews in and around Israel every single day (and that does not count the Lebanon War). In the war on Lebanon, Israel essentially destroyed the state of Lebanon, at least in terms of infrastructure.

As Shehadi notes, if the only way Israel can survive is by destroying the neighborhood, why doesn’t Israel just pack up and go? We can argue forever about the reasons why Israel’s presence in its current state causes so much animosity, but reasons don’t really matter. The truth is a Jewish state is not wanted in the region and its creation created a huge number of refugees whose lands were taken and are forbidden from returning.

As Shehadi notes, Israeli paranoia is not justified. Three Arab states have made peace, most Gulf states have commercial relations with Israel and Tunisia, Morocco and Mauritania have excellent relations with the Jewish state. Saudi Arabia offered total normalization in a peace plan, but Israel rejected it because it contradicts Zionist tenets of colonization of Judea and Samaria.

The West Bank is currently an unlivable prison, and settlements continue to expand there, even in the past year. It’s no wonder Palestinians fight back in the West Bank.

Gaza has been cut off from all funding for the crime of electing Hamas, 70% of the population is unemployed, basic services are at a low level and much of the population is malnourished. Israel appears to be trying to push Gazans to their limits. Understandably, Gazans react to these provocations with continuing rocket attacks.

Zionist propaganda says that Jews can’t live with Gentiles and everywhere they try to do this, life is Hell for Jews. In contrast, life appears to be Hell in the Jewish separation experiment called the Jewish state. In the Diaspora, in the US at least, anti-Semitism is at a low level, and Jews surely face less hostility and insecurity and fewer attacks than they do in Israel.

So the notion that Gentiles are full of homicidal hatred for Jews everywhere the two live together is proven to be false. The main thing that has magnified anti-Semitism has been the deeply flawed separation experiment, an experiment that seems to have failed to achieve its basic objectives.

Time for a reconsideration?

Check the comments at the end for the usual Jewish paranoia, mostly out of Israel. Shehadi is…guess what? A Jew-hater, an anti-Semite, a Nazi, and a genocidal racist. You know, in the real world, people who insist that just about everyone is out to kill them are called…um…mentally ill, specifically, paranoid.

Countering Lies About Hezbollah

Repost from the old site.

Ever since the Lebanon War last summer between Hezbollah and Israel, much nonsense has been written about this organization, much of it from Zionists and US imperialists in the press. It is time for a rational overview.

Lie: Hezbollah is the puppet of Iran and Syria.

Not true! Is Israel the puppet of the US? Well, the US supports Israel, right? Despite the US support, Israel is not the puppet of the US. Israel does what it damned well wants. Well, yes, Hezbollah gets support from Syria and Iran, but they don’t take orders from them anymore than Israel takes orders from America.

In truth, Hezbollah does what it wants. Iran was probably informed before Hezbollah started this war, but that’s about it. And Hezbollah’s autonomy from Syria is well-documented. Syria uses Hezbollah to keep up the pressure on Israel, not because they want to kill all the Jews, like insane Zionists insist, but because they want the Golan Heights back.

Iran supports Hezbollah in order to support Shia power in the region, and because Hezbollah’s leadership supports the Iranian revolution and because Iran hates Israel.

Lie: The Lebanon War was started by Iran to take the heat off its nuclear program.

Not true! It looks like Hezbollah started the war on its own in order to try to win back some Lebanese that Israel has been holding captive for a long time.

But they had no idea that the war would go this way. They thought it would just be a few days of shelling back and forth and then they would get down to some hard bargaining. They were totally taken by surprise by Israel’s response.

Lie: Hezbollah “started the war”.

Well, yes, Hezbollah conducted a cross-border raid, killed and wounded some Israelis, then grabbed some captives and took them back to Lebanon.

But to place all of the responsibility for the resulting war in which Israel destroyed Lebanon is insane. Israel’s wild response was part of a war that they had been planning for over a year, in concert with the US, and the war was conducted by both the US and Israel.

In fact, Ehud Olmert has recently given testimony in Israel that he had been planning this war for months along with the neocons in the Bush Administration. The Israeli military already had advanced plans for this war that they had developed with Ariel Sharon.

The neocons were trying to use the war against Hezbollah as an excuse to attack Syria, but Israel would not take the bait. They wanted to go after Hezbollah’s main backer, Iran. Since Iran could not be hit itself, the second best option was to go after Syria. The apparent purpose was to weaken Iran’s allies Syria and Hezbollah prior to an attack on Iran itself.

This explains why both the US and Israel have been refusing to deal with Syria’s increasingly desperate efforts to negotiate a settlement on the Golan Heights (Syria is even willing to turn the Golan into a “peace park” and give Israelis free access to visit it.

Since this war, logically, Syria has been edgy, and has been building up its forces along the border with Israel. But in the crazy paranoid Israeli mindset, this is seen as Syria preparing for a (in my opinion, an obviously suicidal) war with Israel. Even the distinguished Martin Van Creveld, Israel’s top military historian, has bought into this nonsense.

What will stop the upcoming Syrian war? Let’s ask Van Creveld. Only a US attack on Iran. What will hasten it? A US withdrawal from Iraq and a US refusal to attack Iran. We can see the twisted Israeli thinking. If the US does what Israel wants, the nonexistent war can be prevented. If the US acts against Israel’s wishes in the region, the fake war can be prevented.

Lie: Hezbollah is an insane terrorist group that is dedicated to killing all the Jews.

Jews just love this one, since so many of them are afflicted with a paranoid-masochistic character that just eats this stuff up. It’s not true.

Hezbollah is not opposed to a Jewish state, they just don’t like that Jews stole Palestine, which they did. Lebanon is a Lebanese nationalist organization. They mobilized to fight Israel when Israel annexed South Lebanon. Ten years of guerrilla war won it back for Hezbollah and Lebanon and Hezbollah were the heroes of Lebanese nationalists.

Hezbollah is now fighting to get back the Shebaa Farms, Lebanese land that Israel occupies and refuses to give back to Lebanon on some very phony grounds. They have also made some noises about three or four Lebanese Shia villages that Israel conquered, ethnically cleansed and annexed in the 1948 War.

Many of the people in the South, where many Palestinians live in refugee camps, and people have lived through numerous conflicts with Israel, really hate Israel, and understandably so. So here for an overview of the people’s views of Israel.

Hezbollah has said that if the Palestinians accept Israel for a Palestinian state, Hezbollah will stand by that. Unfortunately, Hezbollah’s leaders have made some lamentable anti-Semitic remarks and it is disgusting that they call one of their missiles “Khaibar” in reference to the Khaibar tribe of Jews who had their men killed and their women enslaved by Mohammad.

Lie: Hezbollah are radical fundamentalist Muslims, like Al Qaeda.

Not so! At the beginning, Hezbollah laid down Islamic Law in south Lebanon but over time they found that it was not going over well, so since 1990 or so, they have lifted most of their restrictions.

At the time, Hezbollah banned alcohol and forced women to wear headcovers. Both of those bans have now been lifted by Nasrallah. However, Hezbollah still arrests homosexuals and turns them over the Lebanese police, since I believe that homosexuality is illegal in Lebanon. They may beat some of them too.

The Shia in particular seem to take a hard line against homosexuality, as the Iranian regime and the Iraq Shia have really persecuted gay men. The Iranians mostly beat them up, harass them and send them to jail for short stays. The Iraqi Shia have also been beating them, but apparently they have also killed quite a few gay men.

The Shia doing this include the Dawa and SCIRI parties that the US supports in Iraq. Hezbollah’s supporters include many liberated females, I saw a video on Youtube of Lebanese women without hijabs driving a car and smoking cigarettes, then doing a belly dance, all the while saying how they supported Hezbollah.

Hezbollah rallies have included quite a few beautiful young women without hijabs, and many have been dressed racily. Josh Landis tells of how during the Lebanese Civil War, when Hezbollah took over a district, they imposed Islamic Law, but it went over so poorly that they soon rescinded most of it.

Lie: Well, at least Iran is a radical fundamentalist state like Al Qaeda.

Nor is Iran. Women have many more rights in Iran than they do in the Gulf. The dress code is loosely adhered to and the religious police no longer bother mixed couples. Fredericks of Hollywood stores dot Tehran.

Middle class and upper middle class young people are engaging in lots of promiscuous sex and not much is being done to stop them. One of Iran’s top race car drivers is a woman. There are many women in Parliament and most or all professions are open to women. Compare to Saudi Arabia where only 5% or so of women are even employed.

Alcohol, marijuana and especially opium are widely consumed at parties and not much is done about that. Prostitution is widespread, especially in the religious city of Qom, where they serve the religious students. There, throngs of young women meet men and go before mullahs to get a temporary marriage in order to have sex.

The temporary marriage is merely a cover for prostitution. There is so much prostitution in Tehran that the religious leadership has suggested having official houses for them, all under the banner of temporary marriage. The religious leadership has also recognized transsexualism and one of the top mullahs is a transsexual.

Temporary marriage is widespread, and a famous Iranian female parliamentarian has had sexual relationships with many men, including top mullahs, under this rubric and has written about it. Also, Iran is much more democratic than most of the Sunni regimes, and this is one of the things that the Sunni regimes fear most about Iran.

Supporters of this theory can always come up with this or that atrocity to demonstrate how Iran is an Al Qaeda-like state, but the truth is more complicated than that.

Lie: Hezbollah has savagely persecuted the Israeli-backed South Lebanese Army.

After Israel’s withdrawal in 2000, most people expected that there would be widespread paybacks for the South Lebanese Army (most of whom were Shia, not Maronites as it is commonly thought.

In fact, after Israel withdrew, Hezbollah issued a directive forbidding any attacks on the South Lebanon Army members, many of whom just went home. Quite a few others defected over to Israel.

That’s pretty amazing, considering that the French Resistance executed 10,000 “traitors” during World War 2. It’s also highly untypical behavior for a “terrorist” group.

Lie: Hezbollah is a terrorist group.

Well, for the most part it is a Lebanese resistance organization, and the vast majority of its attacks are against Israeli military targets.

It’s true that during the war, they fired rockets at Israeli cities and killed some civilians, but many of those attacks were actually aimed at strategic targets like arms factories and military bases that Israel cynically put right in the middle of Arab towns, so that if they enemy attacked, they would kill a lot of Arabs by accident.

On the other hand, Israel killed far more civilians in this war, and somehow avoided the “terrorist” label. Isn’t that kind of unfair?

Lie: Hezbollah and Iran are out to kill or convert all the Sunnis and then attack and kill or convert all the infidels in a world war, after which everyone will be a Shia Muslim.

I could not believe that people actually believed that one, but I heard a number of (mostly) Zionists and US imperialists repeating this bit of Sunni paranoia.

On the Sunni conversion, see here. On the rest of it, forget it. Shia is the nigger of the (Muslim) World. The relationship between Sunni and Shia is similar to that between Whites and Blacks during the Jim Crow South, with the Sunnis being the Whites and Shia being the Blacks.

The notion of Shia takeover is similar to fantasies of poor downtrodden Blacks taking over the South, or America. In Lebanon, the Shia say that the Sunnis used to only let them work as garbage collectors. Shia youngsters were routinely taunted and attacked by Sunni gangs in Beirut in the 1970′s.

Lie: Hezbollah gets Iranian money for schools and hospitals to brainwash Lebanese into supporting the terrorists.

No! The reason they do this is because to this day, the bigoted Lebanese government that the US supports provides almost zero money whatsoever for any kind of development whatsoever in South Lebanon.

This is the reality of Lebanon, and its always been this way. Someone has to do it, the government won’t, so Hezbollah steps in. Good for them!

Lie: Hezbollah is trying to take over Lebanon to make a fundamentalist Islamic state there.

Well, that is their stated intention. In the early days, they may have believed it.

In recent statements, Nasrallah has said that an Islamic state is only possible in Lebanon if the “vast majority”, meaning over 80% or so, or people support it. That is not likely any time in the near future, so the project is all but written off. Hezbollah is reckoning itself to Lebanese reality.

Lie: Lebanese Christians are poor, downtrodden and horribly persecuted by Muslims.

Nonsense. In fact, they have always run the country! This lie is spread by some of the Maronite fascists. In the late 1950′s, Marines landed in Lebanon to help preserve an election that the Christians stole.

The real cause of the Civil War was the Muslims wanting a fairer share of the pie that the Christians had unfairly dominated for far too long. The Christians are being forced to concede some of their excess power in Lebanon (though they still have most of the money and much of the political power) and this is why some of the Maronites are wailing so much about “persecution”.

Lie: The Lebanon War last year was between Israel and a group of terrorists called Hezbollah. Most other Lebanese were not involved or opposed Hezbollah.

As you can see here, Israel was fighting much more than Hezbollah in South Lebanon.

In the Battle of Aita Al Shaab, most of the village fought against Israel, under the leadership of Hezbollah, true, but most fighters were just “local militia” who were not actually Hezbollah fighters. Further, there was quite a bit of fighting from members of the Lebanese Communist Party. The Amal militia fought against Israel too.

Truth is, Israel was essentially fighting a war against the people of South Lebanon. It’s true that a certain amount of that resistance was Hezbollah, but much of it was just local militia fighting for their homes and towns.

In the town of Marjayoun, during the Civil War the headquarters of the pro-Israeli South Lebanon Army, Israel came under attack soon after they entered the town by members of Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP). Most of the members of this party are Greek Orthodox.

In fact, it may be the most popular political party among Lebanese Greek Orthodox. In the Sunni villages, the local Muslim Brotherhood and another fundamentalist group organized an armed resistance.

Furthermore, 80-90% of Lebanese supported Hezbollah during the war, including 80% of Christians. The sickening US media deliberately lied about this, making much of the tiny minority of Lebanese who opposed Hezbollah, acting like they were the majority, and trying to portray the country as “divided”.

Lie: Hezbollah forces salute using “Nazi salutes”, so that means that Hezbollah idolizes and Nazis and wants to kill all the Jews just like Nazis did.

Much is made of this on Zionist and rightwing blogs and even in the mainstream press. See here and here for two examples. For more examples, see here, here and here.

In the last example, written by a militant Jewish Zionist named Lewis Loflin, although the photo on the right is of Hezbollah forces giving a “Nazi salute”, the photo on the right, which he states is of a Hamas fighter giving the Nazi salute, is actually of a PFLP fighter.

You can tell it is a PFLP fighter by the characteristic red headband and the poster and Ahmed Sa’adat, the present leader of the PFLP. Many people say that the PFLP is dead, but it is interesting how a dead organization could afford full uniforms, headbands, posters and automatic weapons.

This blog strongly supports the PFLP, and as leftists, I assure you that the mainstream PFLP does not like Nazis one bit.

The fact is that the “Nazi salutes used by Hezbollah fighters” is propaganda.

This is a type of salute which was originally known as the “Roman salute”. It has a fascinating history, and was widely used by many countries before World War II. Under the name “Bellamy salute” or “flag salute”, it used to be usual salute used when saying the US Pledge of Allegiance to the flag of the United States. A photo of the Bellamy salute is here.

From Wikipedia:

Because of the similarity between the Bellamy salute and the Nazi salute, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt instituted the hand-over-the-heart gesture as the salute to be rendered by civilians during the Pledge of Allegiance and the national anthem in the United States, instead of the Bellamy salute.

The association with Nazism has been so strong that the salute has rarely been used by non-Nazi organizations since the end of World War II. There are several exceptions; one is the Republic of China (Taiwan), where the salute is still used during the swearing of oaths in inaugurations.

The salute is also still used by some Palestinian militant groups. It is also known to be used by the Tamil separatist organization, the LTTE, while saluting their leader Velupillai Prabhakaran.

Lie: Hezbollah does not support Israel’s right to exist and therefore they want to wipe it off and map and kill all 5.1 million Jews there in the process.

Embedded in this clever argument is the notion that any nation or regime has any kind of inherent right to exist.

Did colonies and empires and occupied territories have a right to exist too? The very notion that any nation-state on Earth has some kind of a rock-solid “right” to exist is strange and counter-intuitive.

Sure, humans have a right to get together and make nations out of mapped out geographical parcels, but why does that mean that that nation has some kind of a laid in tone specific right to exist?

The fact is that throughout history, nations, empires and colonies have come and gone. The ones that no longer exist had no greater or lesser right to exist than any existing state does.
*****

Meanwhile, the US has initiated a very controversial plan to counter Shia influence in the region. The plan is being coordinated with Saudi Arabia, specifically Prince Bandar, who has a longstanding relationship with US Administrations, and possibly the Jordanian government, especially Jordanian intelligence.

They are working to arm and build up the pro-US Siniora government and stoke sectarianism in Lebanon.

Part of this plan, outrageously, has involved money given by the US, via the Siniora regime, to three Sunni Salafist groups who are pro-Al Qaeda. These groups are being armed in order to fight Hezbollah (since they loathe Shiites). If push comes to shove between Hezbollah and the Lebanese government, these groups will be used to battle it out with Hezbollah.

Outrageously, the US is once again funding Al Qaeda, which shows that imperialism truly has no morals at all. See The Seymour Hersch’s The Redirection in the latest New Yorker magazine (video here).

The Saudis are racists who hate the Shia and want to keep them down. In fact, most of the Sunni Arab regimes are like this. They all look to the Ottoman Empire when the Sunnis ruled the roost and the Shia were kept down by force. This is the Sunni Jim Crow era that they long for.

It is outrageous that the US is supporting Sunni Jim Crow racism against the downtrodden Shia and it is particularly despicable that the Israeli Jews, considering the history of the Jews, are supporting the oppressor against the oppressed. Or maybe that is what Israel is all about?

You Go, Girl

I support this woman! You tell em, baby.

Pepperoncini on Islam

This is a critique of Islam that was written by Pepperoncini, a commenter on the site. I agree with his critique of Islam to a large degree. It is simply correct.

The problem with the solution as he sees it of Islam being taken over by a secular Ataturk type figure is that this has been tried many times before. To this very day, there are many such experiments going on. They always or almost always fail.

They failed in Libya, Tunisia, Egypt and the Palestinian territories, and are failing at the moment in Syria, the Southern Philippines, Thailand and Nigeria. They failed in 1979 in Iran, in 1989 in Afghanistan and are failing at the moment in the Caucasus, especially in Chechnya. Even in Turkey, where Ataturk set the standard for secular Islam, it is failing as Turkey becomes an increasingly Islamic state.

Secular Islam results in purist Islamist revolutionaries either armed or not who reliably seek to overthrow the non-Islamic secular regime in favor of a more Islamic and purified one. This typical trend has been going on since the beginning of Islam and there doesn’t seem to be any reason to think it is slowing down or losing steam. Muslim countries are becoming increasingly Islamic, not more and more secular, in our modern era.

Of course Islam seeks to dominate everywhere it goes. This is the nature of Islam as perhaps the most supremacist religion of them all. This is no great shakes where Muslims are a tiny minority, but countries with large non-Muslim minorities should be suspicious of their Muslim minorities at least enough to realize that they have a supremacist mindset.

The Arabic chauvinism of Arabs and of Islam itself has long been noted, especially by South Asian Muslims who claim they are given short shrift by Arab Muslims. For a long time, the Koran was not even translated in non-Arabic religions – it could only be read in Arabic. Indonesian Muslims have had similar complaints.

Arab Muslims’ racist attitudes towards Black African Muslims is one of the main reasons why Islam is losing 3-4 million followers a year in sub-Saharan Africa – Arabs won’t invest in mosques and proselytizing in the region, so the religion dies.

One example of the Arabization of non-Arab Muslims can be seen in the Pashtuns, many of whose customs were regarded in the earliest ethnographies as “Arabized.” In particular, honor killings and the idea that the tribe or nation’s esteem and honor revolves around women upholding a chaste sexual ideal was an idea imported from the Arabs. Extreme hospitality may have been one too.

Of course Islam is patriarchal. It is perhaps one of the most patriarchal religions of them all.

However, it is not true that women are treated worse under Islam than anywhere else. Women are treated by far the worst in South Asia under regimes whose religions vary from Hinduism to Islam.

In South Asia, it doesn’t seem to matter to a woman if she lives under a Muslim or Hindu religion – she is treated equally bad under one as the other. This must be seen as a South Asian cultural regionalism that transcends even major religions. The South Asian region has simply inherited a common culture which treats women the worst on Earth.

It may well be the case that this culture has its roots in Hinduism. If it does, this implies that Hinduism is the most misogynist religion and culture on Earth. Is this true? I am not aware of the misogynist nature of Hinduism or Hindu culture, but apparently it exists.

It is certainly the case that the pre-Islamic cultures of converted Muslim countries have been ignored and given short shrift. Worse than that, the era preceding Islam is referred to a Jahiliyya or the Age or Ignorance. Hence it is treated as if it did not even exist. It was this mindset that was beyond that destruction of the Buddhas by the Taliban.

A modernized Islam is not going to happen. Islam is uncompromising and intolerant of other cultures. It seeks domination over all and has never changed in this outlook whereas Christianity in the West became tolerant of others.

The world as we know it will end before Islam becomes tolerant because to do so is to discard core Islamic beliefs of the innate inferiority of other cultures and disregard the inherent rightness and supremacy of Islam.

Unless you envision a secular pan-Islamic power elite that adheres to a secular form of government like the one Ataturk instilled in Turkey, I very much doubt Islam is going to become tolerant in the near future. The problem is an openly and meaningfully secular government is the antithesis of Islam because you would have to divorce Sharia law from Islam to achieve this.

Islam is very attractive to patriarchies and base male instinct because it empowers the males. So how confident are you that Muslim society will move away from this base instinct to an enlightened one adopted in the West?

Some say Islam is not a bad thing. Islam is a bad thing for the non-Muslims who do not want their society to regress to some anti-humanitarian tribal patriarchal past.

The most aggressive and expansionist cultures are patriarchies. Islam is Arab culture forced onto non-Arabs, so of course it is a bad thing for non-Arabs when Muslim men (and women) are the vanguard of Arab cultural hegemony.

Islam does control the media, judiciary, law and damn near everything in many countries of the world. The majority of these places have non-Islamic heritage, and were it not for Arabs imposing their culture (Islam is Arab culture) on the people they conquered, these societies would have kept their pre-Islamic beliefs.

Islamic nations are pushing towards international blasphemy laws and want to curtail criticism of Islam. The Saudis fund and export their virulent religious ideology.

Muslims aren’t a race but certain nationalities are not going to be Muslims (Japanese, Swedes, English, Papuans, Kiwis etc..) while others are (Saudis, Pakistanis, Indonesians etc..). It is racial in nature because it demands the worship of a specific ethnic group and elevates the language of a specific ethnic group as God’s language.

Add to that the fact that Arabic was used to erase the identity of non-Arabs. There have been Berber riots in North Africa against Arabic domination.

Islam is still Arab culture, how can it be not when Arabians invented it?

Lets see now:

Allah is the name for god used by desert tribes in Arabia. Muhammad is an Arabian name and figure. The Quran was written by Arabians in Arabic. Mecca is in Saudi Arabia, an Arab state, and all able bodied and financially able Muslims are required to perform at least one pilgrimage to it. Muslims, be they Arab or non Arabs, bend over and pray to an Arab and in the direction of Mecca, an Arab city.

Western colonialism went with the sword in one hand and the Bible in the other, and Arab imperialists from the Peninsula went with the sword in one hand and the Quran in the other.

Islam seeks to dominate the world through conversion, petrodollars that bribe and fund Islamic goals and demographics.

On the Abuse of the Word “Terrorism”

41 to go on trial for planning attacks on US forces, primarily in Qatar but also in Kuwait. American morons are really brainwashed about this “terrorist” word. I’ve found that almost 100% of White Americans believe that any attack by any non-state force opposed to US interests is automatically a terrorist attack, and that all non-state actors opposed to US interests are automatically terrorists. Amazingly, the Libyan NATO rebels and the Syrian rebels are somehow not terrorists, but everyone else is. Who are terrorists, according to the lying American state?

1. FARC and ELN in Colombia
2. Sendero Luminoso in Peru
3. All armed groups in Palestine
4. The Taliban in Afghanistan
5. The NPA and MILF in the Philippines
6. The Islamist Chechens, Dagestanis and others in the Caucasus
7. The ETA in Spain
8. The IRA in Ireland (there’s no such thing as “Northern Ireland”)
9. The Kurds in Turkey and Iran
10. The Maoists in India
11. Various Islamist groups around the world.

Granted, most of these forces utilize terrorism in some cases, and others do in many cases. But by the rules of war and logic, any attack on security forces and in particular military forces anywhere on Earth cannot possibly be a terrorist attack.

I have had many long and exasperating arguments with staunch US liberals that the attacks on the USS Cole in Yemen, the attack on the Marines in Lebanon and the attack on the military barracks in Saudi Arabia simply was not terrorism.

The attempt to assassinate George Bush in Kuwait in the 1990′s and the attempt by the Iraqi rebels to assassinate Paul Wolfowitz in 2003 were not terrorist attacks in any way, shape or form. Wolfowitz was a deep part of the state apparatus that was persecuting the war against the Iraqi people. He’s clearly a military target. The execution of the US CIA agent in Lebanon was not terrorism either. He’s a spy. Spies are military targets, especially in wartime.

Neither was the attack on US troops at the US base by the US military psychiatrist a terrorist attack. Apparently this guy felt he was at war with the US. Operating as a deep agent for some of the enemies of the US (in his case, apparently Yemeni Al Qaeda), Hassan penetrated deeply into US forces, then used his US military uniform and gun to perpetrate an attack on our own soldiers in the waiting room of a hospital at a US base. Hassan was an enemy soldier, an armed man fighting the US for an enemy army. That’s all he was. Nothing terrorist about it.

The attackers of the Marine barracks, the barracks in Saudi Arabia and the Cole all said that they were at war with the US at the time. These were acts of war during wartime by non-state military actors who were at war with the US. Since they were at war with the US, they have a right to attack our troops anywhere they want to by the rules of war. There’s nothing terrorist about attacking US soldiers.

Now, when you get down to attacking embassies, I agree that things get a lot stickier.

The word “terrorism” really got started, I believe, in 1970′s. Guess who dreamed it up? The Israelis! As with so many forms of lying, devious bullshit in our modern world, there was a Jew behind it. Or a bunch of Jews in this case.

There is good evidence that this word was popularized by Israelis as a way to refer to all of the Arab irregular forces who were attacking Israel. Since then, it quickly spread to the Israeli colony known as the US. After that, it was quickly picked up by every state on Earth as a way to refer to all non-state armed actors that they did not approve of. For some reason, non-state armed actors that they approve or are never terrorists. Instead, they are always “revolutionaries.”

Getting back to the link at the top. These guys are members of an enemy army that is at war with the United States. As a consequence of their war on us, they were planning attacks on our military forces in Qatar and possibly in Kuwait. Nothing terrorist about it. It’s just war, plain and simple.

Who Killed Rafik Hariri?

Repost from the old site.

One wonders where to begin with a post like this. Rafik Hariri, of course, was the Prime Minister and self-made billionaire who ruled Lebanon for a time recently. He was assassinated in an expertly planned car bomb attack, but no one really knows who did it. All suspicion fell on Syria, and Syria did have good reason to kill Hariri.

You really need a lot of background in Lebanese and Middle Eastern politics to even begin to understand the twists and turns of this sinuous murder mystery.

Hariri was elected head of Lebanon and proceeded to go on a borrowing spree, mostly with Saudi money, and rebuilt Lebanon after the Civil War destroyed it. He did this by playing all factions off each other. He also instituted a Lebanese version of free market economics, an economic system that, thank God, is largely absent from the Middle East because it contradicts Arab and especially Islamic values.

Hariri is a Sunni, but a fairly secular one. The Sunnis make up maybe 17% of Lebanon. The Shia, represented by Hezbollah, make up about 40%. The Maronites make up about 30%. The Druze and Orthodox Christians make up about 10%. There has been no census taken in about 50 years, because everyone is afraid of how things are going to turn out.

The Christians used to be the majority – in fact, Lebanon was originally split off from Syria by the French to give the Christians their own country. Partly for this reason, it’s very existence is resented by a number of Lebanese Muslims, especially Sunnis, who figure that Syria and Lebanon are all one country.

Syria itself has long regarded the severance of Lebanon from Mother Syria as illegitimate, and her behavior in recent years has been motivated in part by these feelings. The Shia were long-downtrodden, especially by the Sunnis. The Sunnis were the Muslims who were pretty much in charge of the place in terms of who was in charge of the Muslims in the country. The Sunni held the reigns, and discrimination against the Shia was rife.

Shia were regularly attacked by Sunni gangs in Beirut up into the 1970′s. The Shia complain that the Sunnis would only allow them to be garbagemen – that was the best job they could get. After the late 1950′s, when a Christian lost the election and Lebanese Christians feared that their power would be constricted, there has been a power-sharing agreement in place.

The Prime Minister must be a Sunni, another high post must be a Christian, etc, etc. As the Christians have gone from majority to minority, this system has become less and less fair. In particular, Muslims, especially the Shia, are dramatically underrepresented. The Christians did not want to give up their power in the late 1950′s, so the US Marines landed to enforce illegitimate Christian rule over Lebanon.

The Civil War began in part once again over demands that Lebanese democracy be derived more on one man one vote and that the excessive power of the Christians be curtailed. Further, the Christians have always run the Lebanese economy, at least in recent years.

I say all of this because in the US there is a strong tendency to side with the Lebanese Christians against the evil Muslims. Further, the Lebanese Maronite Christians (the largest sect) have made an important alliance with the Zionist Jews in Israel, an alliance that helped to drive the Civil War.

So US Zionist propaganda, which floods our media night and day, strongly favors the Maronites once again. As an example of this alliance, one of the highest ranking neoconservatives of all is a Maronite Lebanese lawyer named F. Michael Maloof who is very close to uber-neocons Douglas Feith and Richard Perle. He is up to his eyeballs in the planning of the war on Iraq.

With the Lebanese Civil War and the rise of Hezbollah, the Shia have finally been given a place at the table of Lebanese politics. The Druze are a real wild card. They shift all over the place on the whim of their erratic leader, Walid Jumblatt, from anti-Israel and anti-US to anti-Syrian and pro-US.

The Shia, and Hezbollah along with the more secular Amal Party, are allied with Syria and Iran. Syria keeps Hezbollah armed in Southern Lebanon as a tool to threaten Israel with in order to try to get the Golan Heights back. That’s all Syria gets out of the game. If Hezbollah is disarmed in Lebanon, Syria loses it’s most powerful weapon and may never get its land back.

Hezbollah has since taken up the cause of Lebanese nationalism, agitating for the return of the Shebaa Farms and some nearby hills that they say Israel is occupying. It is probably Lebanese land, but Israel seems to have captured that land from Syria when it grabbed the Golan.

For its purposes, Syria wants to say that the Shebaa is Lebanese for purposes of keeping Hezbollah armed, and to say it’s Syrian as soon as Hezbollah tries to make peace with Israel or vice versa. So Syria must play a double game here, but everyone is in this crazy part of the world.

As a condition of ending the Civil War, Syria was tasked with ruling the place. Syria had actually entered the war to save the Maronite Christians from defeat, but the Christians soon forgot about this and turned on the Syrians. The Taba Agreement, constructed with the help of the US and other powers, put Syria in charge until the Lebanese could figure out how to stop killing each other.

Syria quickly started meddling in Lebanese politics bigtime, and an independence movement arose to get Syria out of Lebanon. This was ignored by the US until George Bush came to office. Now the same US that put Syria in power started demanding that Syria leave. Not only that, but there were increasing demands on Lebanon to “disarm all militias”, code words for disarm Hezbollah.

Now, Syria needs Hezb in Lebanon until it gets the Golan back, so them’s fighting words to the Syrians. At the same time, the US invaded Iraq and threatened Iran, Libya, and Syria, while Israel killed Arafat by poisoning him.

This whole process was set into motion by the neocons who were operating in the interests of the Israeli government. It was an Israeli plan to deal a powerful blow to some of their worst enemies in order to secure the realm, as Xymphora lays out brilliantly here.

Part of this Zionist plot was to knock out Hezbollah in Lebanon as part of a triple blow against Syria, Iran and Hezbollah. Hezbollah kept getting more powerful on Israel’s northern border, and the Israelis were getting more upset.

So the US and France pushed through a UN resolution, UN Security Council Resolution 1559, calling for Syria to get out of Lebanon and for the disarming of Hezbollah. Note that France is still an imperialist power in the region, defending the interests of the Christians who they put in charge of their former colony.

Also, the US Congress pushed a bill called the Syria Accountability and Lebanese Sovereignty Restoration Act of 2003, a bill that may as well have been written by the Israeli Knesset. It’s so pro-Israeli, it’s almost impossible to comprehend that the US Congress wrote it. Apparently, it imposes sanctions on Syria for a variety of mostly-bullshit reasons.

The US is in Iraq, apparently forever, threatening Syria and Iran, for the most part in order to benefit the Israelis, since Syria and Iran have no particular beefs with the US. Iran and Syria clearly want the US out of Iraq and US guns away from their doorstep. They have no interest in keeping the US in Iraq at all.

Anyway, the US status of forces agreement that they are trying to negotiate with the Iraqis is explicitly meant to use Iraq as a base for attacking neighboring countries, mostly Iran but possibly Syria too. So rage at Syria and Iran for not being overjoyed about the US military in Iraq is misplaced. No sane Syrian or Iranian leader would want us there.

Amidst this backdrop, Hariri supported UN Resolution 1559, probably because finally even the Lebanese Sunnis were getting fed up with Syria’s high-handedness. They had supported Syria for a long time, but Syria kept trying to push people to their limits.

It was the Maronite Christians who really hated the Syrians being there. Why is uncertain. The Maronites despise the Shia and Hezbollah and want the Palestinian refugees gone too.

By the way, the reason that the Palestinians have never been allowed to work or become citizens in Lebanon is because of the Maronites. The Maronites fear that allowing the Pallies to become citizens will increase the Muslim population at the expense of the Christians.

So the Hariri crowd was riding the wave of anti-Syrianism. At the same time, he was closely allied with the Saudis. The Saudis’ whole role in the region is to support the Sunnis and screw the Shia, in a word. So the Saudis were backing Hariri solely because he is Sunni, and also to stop Iran and Hezbollah and increasingly Syria, who is allied with Iran and Hezbollah and hence in the enemy camp as far as the Saudis see it.

There really is not much sane reason for the Saudis to fear Iran. All the hate in the region goes from Sunni to Shia, pretty much. Perhaps the Iranians could energize the long-downtrodden Saudi Shia to rebel against the Saudis, but the Saudis ought to give them more rights anyway. Sunni fears of Iran attacking the region are simply insane, kind of like Nazi fears of the USSR overrunning Europe, so the Nazis had to attack first.

Iran has never attacked another state in at least 100 years and possibly longer. The Shia are on the outs in the Arab World, and the Sunnis have all the power. There are no nefarious Shia plots to evangelize Shia Islam and convert all the Sunnis – this is just mad Sunni paranoia. But the Saudis do work hard in Iran to convert the Shia Ahwaz Arabs to Wahhabi Sunnism, and they have had some success at this.

The Shia have been killing a lot of Sunnis in Iraq, but the Sunnis started it. Saddam Hussein, a Sunni, started the war against Iran for no good reason, and received volunteers and money from most of the Sunni states in the region.

Against this backdrop, as Syria was leaving Lebanon (though a spy network remains behind) Hariri was killed in the very professional car bomb attack. An Al Qaeda type radical Salafist Islamist associated with Jund al-Sham (Army of the Levant) was promptly fingered in the attack, though there were a lot of questions about whether or not Syria was actually involved.

The US and France got a UN commission to actually send a law enforcement team to investigate the killing. A couple of teams were sent out there and a couple of reports came back. One team was headed by Detlev Mehlis, a German.

Jürgen Cain Külbel, a journalist in Germany, is an acquaintance. He’s a former member of the STASI and is associated with the former East German government and the political party that came afterwards. Külbel is a Leftist, and for a long time he was pushing theories saying that US imperialism was in back of a lot of the shenanigans in the ME, including I guess the invasion of Iraq.

He showed a profound disinterest in investigating any Israeli or Jewish Lobby involvement in many of the conflicts over there. This is standard Leftist line that absolves Israel of everything and pushes it all off on imperialism.

So it is interesting that Külbel has now come around to the notion that Israel killed Hariri and then tried to pawn it off on Syria. He has also shown links that Mehlis had with the US AIPAC. Mehlis, as it turns out, used to work for WINEP, which is nothing AIPAC as a research arm. So his finding that Syria was involved has been attacked by Külbel.

Külbel was subsequently imprisoned for ten days for violating a court order by printing some East German STASI papers on his website. I’m not sure of their contents, but it may have shown how Mehlis was associated with WINEP. So the Voltaire Network has taken up the cause of Külbel, about which I feel they are making a mountain out of a molehill.

Of interest to our Maronite discussion above, a group called UNIFL, which has interests that are almost precisely in line with the Israeli government, figures in all of this. These are the most hardcore radical rightwing Maronites, who are for all intents and purposes a quasi-fascist movement.

They were deeply involved in the War Against Iraq and other great big messes. They’ve been selling this BS story about how the Christians are so persecuted in Lebanon, and the persecution is being done by evil fundamentalist Islamic Syria (run by ultra-secular Alawis).

It’s mostly just a pack of lies, but there were arrests, tortures and killings under Syrian rule, it is true. That’s all over now, and the Maronites did tons of killing in their own day.

After all, they committed the most and worst massacres of all during the Civil War.

Maloof is in with these guys, so is a guy named David Wurmser (Israeli agent neoconservative with dual citizenship) and his evil witch of the West wife Meyrav (read Hebrew for “Mary”, no? Israeli agent neoconservative with dual citizenship).

So is Richard Pele (Israeli agent neoconservative. Dual citizenship?), and worst of all, Daniel Pipes (Israeli agent neoconservative. Dual citizenship?) of Middle East Watch and Campus Watch and all of that Zionist fascist censorship, harassment and firing crap leaping up all over our land). Nice long sentence.

Pipes, whose father was an evil Cold War maniac and professional liar about the Soviet Union, inherited the evil maniac part, but all he cares about is Israel. Paul Wolfowitz (Israeli agent neoconservative with dual citizenship) is also in deep with these guys.

Harold Rhode (Israeli agent neoconservative. Dual citizenship?) is another one, but no one has ever heard of him, so I will make him famous today for all time. Rhode is a Jewish guy who is religious and was obsessed with attacking Iraq. He was in on the plot to attack Iraq with all the rest of them from the very start.

Afterward, he became obsessed with the Jewish religious relics that the evil anti-Semitic Arab-Nazi government had somehow, through a sudden stroke of anti-Semitism, managed to preserve, despite their genocidal intentions towards all the world’s Jews.

Saddam wanted to kill every Jew on Earth, of course, but damn right he was going to save those Jewish holy books. That proves Saddam was a madman all right, just like the yahoos screamed before the invasion.

Rhode ran over to Iraq as soon as the war was done and got himself a big team put together right away while the museums and archaeological relics of the nation were being devastated. After all, the history of Jews receives precedence of the history of those lowly, dirty Arabs and over the very history of mankind itself, right? Jews take precedence over Arabs. Jews take precedence over humanity. You get the picture.

Well, anyway, a lot of money was spent grabbing every single Jewish relic in Iraq and “storing” it away in the US (in Jewish hands, I guess). Well, that’s sort of illegal. Now that Iraq is more stable, the Iraqi government wants their Jewish stuff back. It belongs to Iraq, not to the world’s Jews. Whoops, I forgot. No nation is allowed to own Jewish relics. Jews take precedence over all real nations on Earth.

Also, it’s funny that the US (Are we the second Jewish state?) bent all over backwards to grab all that old Jewish stuff, while we sat back and watched, first, while the whole non-Jewish history of Iraq was looted and destroyed to Hell, in particular the History of the Ottoman Empire.

Well, screw the Ottomans, they were just evil Muslims who ruled the Arab World and treated the Jews like crap, right? Or they were just scummy Muslims, screw em. Anyway, obviously the Jewish history of Iraq got nabbed by the nimble hands of the Jewish “Americans”, but the non-Jewish history of Iraq was scatted to the Seven Winds and the Seventy Thousand Thieves.

After all, in any country with lots of Jews, only the Jewish history matters ,and the non-Jewish history is just, pshaw! Right? Trash the museums and the libraries and re-burn the Library of Alexandria if the US and Israel are in the book-burning and library-sacking business, which apparently they are.

Funny how the US can’t spare a soldier to save the history of Muslim Ottoman Iraq from being ruined. Those records have been flooded and subjected to all sorts of abuse, and the US can’t spare one sentry to guard that stuff. Wow, gee, why do they hate us anyway?

They must be jealous of all of our stuff, and our freedoms, and you know, our stuff.

Ever notice that the far-Right jingoist dickheads who scream the loudest about “our freedoms” and “they hate us for our freedom” are the first ones to start shutting freedoms down? Scooter Libby (Israeli agent neoconservative. Dual citizenship?) is in with UNIFL too. So are Steven Hadley and Donald Rumsfeld. Hadley’s some weird poli-sci ultra-rightwing Vulcan dude.

Külbel also accuses UNIFL along with Israel of killing Hariri.

And it’s surely possible that a Maronite or UNIFL-type spy was used by the Mossad in Syria to kill Iranian super-agent Imad Mughniyeh. My theory, yes, I read up on that one too.

Why can’t Syria uncover the Mossad network deep in its very bowels?

Why can’t Iran either? Iran did catch one Mossad agent, and they just sentenced him to death after one of the shortest trials in recent history. If he’s really Mossad, hang him high, go ahead.

And I know that Iran is full of US spies and even US undercover troops (500 total? How many?). Same with British spies. Iran can’t catch these guys? The US guys are running around blowing up stuff up, and the British are giving bombs to Iranian rebels, including Al Qaeda types called Jundallah in Balochistan.

I guess Mossad, the US and probably the UK too, are all trying to get at Iran’s nuclear sites, and yes, I am certain the Iranians are making a nuclear bomb right now. I think they already have one, but it’s just a uranium bomb, and that isn’t good for anything but making one square mile of Earth uninhabitable for 70 years.

Actually, just to be a completely evil and horrible scumbag and make people hate me even more than they already do, I will right now officially support Iran’s efforts to get a nuclear bomb.

Is that an evil position or what?! Not to shoot one, just to get one.

Also to make a whole bunch of evil biological and chemical weapons and WMD-this and WMD-that. Also, just to be even more of an ass and arouse more hatred, I will say that I was deeply sad when North Korea blew up their reactor, because I wanted them to make more nukes to threaten people, namely the US, my country with. Not to shoot at us. Just to even it up.

Why be an ass? Long argument, but it has to do with imperialism’s gross abuse of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Agreement.

I’m not saying this is what happened or anything, Maronites and Mossad killing Hariri. No one on Earth will ever know what happened. Figure it out yourself, I give, and I spent many long hours reading and poring over this mystery until I finally just gave up and don’t want to read about it anymore.

Such are the homicidal intrigues of the Middle East, like vines in a jungle, no beginning, no end, no middle, nothing much to grab, and every new lead carries you off on more red herrings and impossibilities and possibilities, and everything seems possible, but still nothing ever totally adds up. God I love a mystery. To a point.

Sorry this went on, but I never wrote a Hariri post. Now it’s done, and hopefully I won’t need to write any more. Believe it or not, I could have written way more, but I’m not into putting readers to sleep. I’m long-winded enough, as it is.

Try the Angry Arab blog (I’ve talked to this guy; As’ad, a Leftist Arab nationalist professor at a university very close by) if you can’t get enough of this maddening Lebanon stuff.

Or Joshua Landis’ (an acquaintance) great Syria Comment if you want to dip into the Syrian mystery casserole, where nothing makes sense either, and you think you can see the fish in the bowl, but the more you look, the more you can hardly make them out, and plus they always change.