The Boston Bombings as Blowback

Matt writes:

Sorry, this just doesn’t apply to the Boston bombings at all. The U.S. gave these thugs the best it had to offer, and they bit the hand that fed them. Not to mention the fact that the U.S. had *nothing* to do with the situation in Chechnya.

The Boston Bombings were in fact blowblack. The older brother said he was very angry about the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan at the very least. According to these jihadis, they are only fighting back.

They say that we are killing Muslims in Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan and Afghanistan (not really in Iraq anymore). This is true. We are killing Muslims with drones in the first three places and with guns on the ground in the last. Supposedly they are all part of Al Qaeda (except in Afghanistan), but this is not really true. At least in Pakistan, we are mostly just killing Pakistani Islamists.

The drone war is only allowed by Congress to kill “members of Al Qaeda actively planning immanent attacks against the US homeland.” Obviously most drone attacks are not even sanctioned under US law, and are hence illegal even by our own laws. Not that any American even cares.

Perhaps we should be running around the world zapping Al Qaeda types from the skies. But Congress has not sanctioned us to do that, and that’s a problem.

And as long as we are running around the world hitting Al Qaeda and other Islamist types with drones and with real guns on the ground in Afghanistan, Salafists and Al Qaeda type jihadists say they are going to attack us back anywhere they can hit us, even on our own soil.

War is like a battle between preschoolers. It’s always, “He started it! He hit me back!”

In war, everyone is always “fighting back.” Even Hitler claimed his conquests as defensive. Most of the world’s offensive armies are paradoxically called “defense forces.”

A Capitalist World is a World of Crime, Corruption and Wars of Agression

Dota says:

I think Roger Hill is onto something here. Robert mistakes capitalism for opportunism and sociopathic behaviour in general. As I’ve pointed out before, we’ve seen exploitation in non-capitalist societies during various periods of history. Feudalism and Caste immediately come to mind.

Lee Kwan Yew once said that in order to spread the wealth around, a society must first create it. Capitalism is a good engine for wealth creation. Historically, its egalitarian societies that have been expansionist. The Arabs and Mongols come to mind. They were expansionist because they failed to create any wealth for themselves. Once they acquired wealth through conquest, they divided it amongst themselves equally (more or less).

It’s obvious that the Rockerfellers/Fords etc. represent a ‘capitalism’ that is alien to Smith’s wealth of nations. Capitalism is merely privately owned factors of production. The elites mentioned above represent plutocratic sociopathic insanity at its highest degree.

Under capitalism, all manner and degrees of opportunism, corruption, lying, cheating, stealing and sociopathic behavior becomes positively epidemic.

That is because in pursuit of money, humans will do just about anything: lie, cheat, steal, become opportunists or corrupt, and behave sociopathically in every manner and degree possible. They will also commit tons of crime and will tend to abuse women in all sorts of ways.

We saw much less of this behavior in the socialist societies of the last century. When these socieites such as Eastern Europe, the USSR and China went to capitalism, the crime rate went through the roof, entire nations became corrupt to the core, and the abuse of women increased dramatically. In fact, some socieites were almost completely taken over by organized crime. Russia to this day is significantly controlled by Organized Crime. Organized crime elements run Russia and rule it via the state.

In the past century, the most egalitarian societies committed little aggression, started few wars and committed few acts of conquest in order to obtain more land and acquire new markets and resources. On the contrary, almost all aggression in the past century was committed by unequal capitalist (and imperialist) countries trying to conquer new lands and peoples for new markets and to steal their resources for the capitalists.

In fact a world regime of capitalism virtually guarantees almost continuous wars among capitalist countries over dividing markets and resources. Capitalist countries will always fight each other over markets and resources.  This is almost guaranteed under capitalism, and there does not seem to be any way around it. A world of capitalism is a world of constant war with no way out.

Under more socialist systems, crime, corruption, abuse of women, wars of aggression, homelessness, hunger and preventive disease are dramatically reduced, as is all manner of egoistic sociopathic behavior.

As those societies transition to a capitalist model, crime, corruption, abuse of women, aggressive (imperialist) wars, homelessness, hunger and deaths due to preventive disease often skyrocket.

Bottom line is capitalism is bad for your health.

The North Korean Mess

Here.

Man goes to North Korea and interviews his North Korean tour guides about what is happening there. They are surprisingly intelligent and well informed.

First of all, I would like to say that I support North Korea 100% in their confrontation with the US. However, they are not going to shoot a nuke at us. What is bothering them is the yearly, in this case highly aggressive, war games that the US is playing South Korea right now. This always sets the north off. We really ought to stop these belligerent war games and quit antagonizing them.

North Korea is not going to start any kind of war with anyone and they are not going to shoot any missiles, nuclear or otherwise, at anyone. So we might as well calm down. But the response of Obama, to send B-1 bombers loaded with nuclear weapons to fly up and down the South Korean peninsula, was an extreme provocation. There was no need for this.

Why did the North Koreans build nuclear weapons? Because the lesson they learned after Serbia, Iraq and Afghanistan is that countries without nuclear weapons tend to get attacked by the United Snakes. This lesson was absolutely correct.

The US has been threatening to attack North Korea ever since the end of the Korean War in 1953. The US presently has an incredible 1,000 nuclear weapons in South Korea now, including nuclear artillery, nuclear missiles, nuclear bombers and nuclear mines. The US has had these nuclear weapons in South Korea for decades, and they have been threatening to attack the North with them all this time. Under nuclear control treaties, all nations being threatened with nuclear weapons have a right to develop nuclear weapons to defend themselves. Therefore, the North has a right to develop nuclear weapons as a deterrent against constant nuclear threats by the US. This is right and proper.

How many nukes does the North have? At the moment, they may have around 3 working nuclear weapons, however, they have enough material for more. And thankfully, they have just started up some of their nuclear reactors so they can make more fissile material and hopefully more bombs. The bombs seem to be small, and the general theory is that they are around 1/3 the size of a Hiroshima bomb. They are apparently plutonium bombs and not uranium bombs. Keep in mind that the North also wishes to develop nuclear power for peaceful purposes and they have that right under nuclear treaties.

The north also has missiles, but they don’t work very well. They often fall apart in mid-air. Their longest range missile can hit the eastern part of Alaska. The north has no missiles that can reach the US mainland. Missile technology is however rapidly improving.

The most important thing that we do not know is whether the north has mastered the technique of putting a nuclear warhead on a missile in such a way such that it can be detonated. You need a detonation device to do this and it must be accurate down to the thousands of a second. If you don’t get it right, you will shoot your nuke, and it won’t even blow up. Getting this detonation device correct is maddeningly difficult for any nation. However, with this latest underground test, observers feel that the north may have an operational warhead.

The US embargoes the North, and now the whole world has leveled sanctions on the North via the UN, which is just a tool of US imperialism anymore (I strongly supported the Iraqi resistance car bomb attack on the UN headquarters in Baghdad in the early days of the Resistance.). These sanctions have been strengthened three times now.

These are “dual use sanctions” of the sort that completely devastated Iraq, murdering 500,000 Iraqis, mostly children, via the US and the UK sanctions. Remember how utterly devastated the Iraqi economy was due to dual use sanctions, especially Iraqi medical care? Iraq didn’t have a Communist government, and the sanctions ruined them. These sanctions will destroy the economy of any state.

Under the dual use rubric, most medical supplies and drugs coming into the North are banned under sanctions rules. This is the same mess that devastated Iraqi medicine and the water supply. North Korean medicine has been completely devastated by these dual use sanctions.

In addition, the sanctions mean that most countries have to decide if they are going to trade with North Korea or they are going to trade with the rest of the world. That is because the sanctions also apply to any nation trading with North Korea. The US threatens and punishes any nation who tries to trade with North Korea. Most of the world has decided to trade with the rest of the world instead of trading with North Korea alone, so the North is completely isolated. Almost all of their trade is with China alone.

It is true that agriculture has collapsed, but North Korea fed themselves just fine for 40 years under the same collective agriculture. Soviets ate very well under collective ag until 1991. Cubans eat just fine under a system of collective agriculture. So it’s dubious that collective agriculture can be blamed for North Korea’s food problems.

The US has repeatedly withheld food aid to North Korea, and then they scream that people are harmed or killed by malnutrition. So the US is basically deliberately starving North Koreans to death. In addition, the US bullies and threatens any other country or group who tries to provide food aid to the North. The US’ reason for withholding food aid to the North is that most of it is diverted to the military, but this is not true, and at any rate, the military has to eat too, and obviously they get first priority.

The US under Democratic and Republican Presidents has torn up every agreement that they ever signed with the North. Clinton demanded that the North stop developing nukes in return for providing them with a light water reactor. The reactor was never forthcoming because Clinton was trying to make the regime collapse. Along the same lines, sanctions and suspension of food aid are all intended to cause the collapse of the North Korean regime. It hasn’t happened.

The North’s position is completely reasonable, and I support them 100% in their resolve to stand up to US aggression.

Why The ETA Political Wing Was Banned

Repost from the old site.

I received an interesting email from one Gonzalo Polo (website here), a Spanish nationalist. I am publishing the parts of it that can be published here. I normally don’t post the names of emailers as it is a violation of Netiquette, but he issued a veiled threat to me, so he gets named. If you don’t want me to reveal contents of your mails, don’t threaten me.

I always supported the Basque and even Catalan separatist causes. In the Basque movement, I supported the armed wing called the ETA. This mail points out some less than flattering things about the ETA, so I am running it, and it also tells us some interesting stories about the history of the Iberian Peninsula.

I am posting it to provide another perspective to the National Question in Spain.

I still think that Spain should allow a referendum on independence, and that is really what this whole fight is all about. I understand that Spain will never hold this referendum, which makes me wonder when they crow that only a minority of Basques support separatism. So hold the referendum already. Truth is, I do not think that Spaniards are civilized enough to split up their nation.

Few nations are.

Only the former USSR and Czechoslovakia have broken up peacefully, with Quebec and and the UK showing a willingness at least. Spaniards have always been terribly intolerant as a people, a tradition like the peculiar one of church-burning that is proving hard to break.

At least the intolerance part is traced by Carroll Quigley back to the Arab occupation, said influence of which makes the area from Latin America across the Mediterranean to Pakistan the Peru-Pakistan Axis, as he calls it.

That much of Spain’s industry is in the Basque Region makes separatism supposedly lethal for Spain, but I doubt it. Spain is a mature and wealthy country and I think they could handle separatism just fine, but Spaniards are just too backwards to do it. I include the famously liberty-lovers the French in this backwardsness, and all of Asia, including those supposedly more highly evolved humans in Northeast Asia.

China is utterly insane when it comes to Tibet (as we saw in the past few days) and Taiwan, and in this way they are firmly in a backwards Asian tradition. Burma, Indonesia and India won’t tolerate separatism either, and the result has been horrible massacres and even genocides.

I suggest that a willingness to break up one’s country is the ultimate act of a civilized people, and it is a litmus test for seeing how civilized you are. By that test, most of the world fails except for some Europeans, but that makes sense. Europeans are the only people who will even try to play by the rules of war either.

The Catalans seem to be debating separatism in their media, and there are some interesting debates going on. One of them is revolving around the nature of the ethnic nationalism that Catalan nationalism is. There are good progressive arguments saying that all ethnic nationalism leads to some variety of fascism, since, like the anti-Semitism I discussed previously, the impulse has nowhere to go but to the Right.

Put another way, internationalism is language of the Left (yet note armed separatists are often Leftists) and nationalism is the language of the Right. It was only the stew of 70 years of internationalism that so wore down the nationalist sentiments of the USSR and enabled them to cleave off 15 republics with very little bloodshed.

There were bloody and fascist-like nation-building episodes in many of these new countries, but that’s just the normal nation-building experience, and if we had to deny the legitimacy of every nation that had ever done this, we would have few countries left on the globe.

It’s probable that that same evil Commie internationalism allowed the Czechoslovaks to separate so amicably. You can’t say that 43 years of Goulash Communism didn’t do any good at all.

Nationalism created the Axis in World War 2 and probably led to World War 1 too. All these fetishists of the state that demand states have their precious “monopoly on violence” and that all armed non-state actors surrender all arms immediately or be destroyed as “terrorists” might want to think that one over sometime. Note that the worst enemies of the Axis ultranationalists were the armed partisans, often Communists.

If you lurk around Internet fascist, Nazi or nationalist forums long enough (and I like to do this for a lark) you will notice that these types hate no one worse than Communists. As nationalists are often not members of the towering heights of capital, one wonders what all the fuss is about.

Fascists, and the nationalists who dress up like them once in a while, Halloween-like, hate Commies over the nationalism question. Commies are dubious, at best, about nationalism. The blood drenched soil of ethnic and Lazarus-like nationalism is the essence of fascism. That’s what the whole bloody Commie-fascist fight is all about in a nutshell.

There’s also the fact that fascism is a last-ditch effort of capital to preserve its privileges in the environment of a serious threat by the Left. The seriousness of the Left Threat provokes a deadly anti-Communist reaction in the fascist. Commies are no longer some ludicrous phantasm – they are marching in the streets – and we need to kill as many of them as possible and put the rest in jail.

It’s curious why more don’t support ethnic separatism. Ask an American, if you can get lucky and find one who even understands the concept, and 90% chances are they support the state and oppose the armed separatists everywhere on Earth. Most folks you meet on the Net are the same way.

But go to a separatist region and you will find large numbers who support separatism. It seems we are not empathizing well enough with the national aspirations of our brother humans.

That ethnic nationalism brings out the caveman in anyone is shown how the separatist Catalans are total nationalist pigs when it comes to granting the Occitan speakers their legitimate human rights.

The ETA political wing was banned (although their men were elected in the last elections to the Basque Parliament under another name, and therefore they act as deputies in the Basque Parliament and mayors in some villages) because they used the public money they earned to send it to the ETA, and also because they gathered information about politicians and submitted it to ETA.

They have decided to boycott Spanish elections so they do not present candidates.

The current President of the Basque Parliament (the moderate Basque PNV) and all political parties of Euskadi (including leftist radical but non-violent Basque parties) define the ETA as a terrorist group (the EU and the US also).

In the last general elections of Spain the political wing of ETA asked Basques not to vote. Even considering that in the villages where ETA supporters have more influence, that this means that if you vote you become a target, people who decided not to vote grew 10 per cent since last elections.

ETA murdered a retired socialist politician who walked in the streets along with his wife and daughter a day before the elections. He was a poor man who worked in a highway booth and handed tickets to the drivers. ETA political wing’s major of the village of Arrasate-Mondragon refused to condemn the assassination.

For this reason all the rest of the parties who governed the town in coalition with this party (including radical left parties) determined not to back her position. This means that there will be soon be another mayor in this town formed by a coalition of the rest of the parties.

For your information I would like to highlight that the PNV (the moderate Basque party) is so scared about the ETA that in the last Basque elections, they could not find candidates for some towns. The Spanish socialist and conservative parties found candidates and, for instance, Mrs. Regina Otaola (Otaola is a Basque name and she is 100% Basque) is the current mayor of Lizarra.

All socialist and moderate candidates in the Basque Country have bodyguards. The man who was murdered two days ago had no right to have a bodyguard because he retired from politics so he was an easy target.

I also would like to inform you that the population of the Basque country is diminishing, the reason being that about 1/3 to 1/4 of 100% Basques have determined to run away from their homeland – the reason being that they want their children to live in a non-violent atmosphere so they have moved to other regions of Spain, for instance my brother-in-law Mr. Aguirre Ormaetxea (100% Basque).

For your information, the language spoken in Galicia is not a dialect of Portuguese, although both languages have a common origin. In the 8th century the Arabs invaded the entire Iberian Peninsula except the mountains of the north. Only the mountains of the North of Spain from Galicia to Catalonia were not invaded.

The original Spaniards (a blend of races and peoples united under the Roman Empire and highly sophisticated at that time, as opposed to people from Northern Europe) started to recover territory from North to South.

Little kingdoms such as Portugal, Castilla, Navarra, Leon and Aragon started to fight Arabs. Galicians joined the kingdom of Leon and Portuguese created the kingdom of Portugal.

Catalonia at that time was invaded by the Emperor of the Sacred Roman Empire, a German emperor of the tribe of the Francs who controlled France and Germany under the blessing of the Pope. The Catholic Church maintained the fiction that the Roman Empire was still alive.

Catalans expelled the Francs from the Hispanic Mark (the name of Catalonia at that time that included a province that nowadays belongs to France) and joined the kingdom of Aragon (a big kingdom that nowadays covers the regions of Aragon, Catalonia, Majorca and Valencia). The French Catalans do not have a Catalan department; Catalans have no rights as a minority in France.

The valley of Aran is part of the province of Lerida (Catalonia), although it is located in the Northern part of the Pyrenees Mountains. People from Aran speak an Occitan (Langue d’Oc) dialect similar to the one was spoken in all Provence before the Germanic tribes imposed French (the former Langue d’Oil that was spoken in Norther France).

Occitan is not spoken nowadays in France. The nationalist Catalan parties do not allow the Aranese language to be taught at school, and they force children to learn Catalan instead of their native language.

The Catalan and Spanish languages are spoken in all the Mediterranean coast from the Border of France to the region of Murcia (including the Balearic Islands). Catalan was never spoken in the current region of Aragon except in the border with Catalonia where children are able to learn the Catalan language thanks to the Aragon Government.

In the Regions of Majorca and Valencia, Catalan is freely spoken as well as Castilian. The people of these regions vote PP or PSOE – Spanish conservative or socialist parties. In the last general elections, the winning party was the Socialist Party, and nationalist CIU party obtained only 11 seats. Furthermore, the president of the Catalonian Parliament is also a socialist.

Catalan radical nationalists pretend to create a new country that would include the regions of Catalonia, Valencia and Majorca together with French Catalonia. French Catalans, Valencians and people from Majorca want to remain in Spain and dislike Catalan imperialism.

I would also like to point out that Guernica is a painting the Republican Legitimate Spanish Government asked Picasso (Picasso was born in Andalusia, namely in Malaga) to paint in order to show the world the horrors of the Spanish Civil War. Once the painting was finished, it was shown for the first time in the Universal Expo of New York, namely in the Spanish pavilion.

The US government refused to return the painting to Spain once the war was over, and it remained in the Metropolitan until Franco died. I would like to point you out that around one million people died in the Spanish Civil War. Guernica was bombed by the Germans, but many other Spanish towns were also bombed and destroyed by the Russians.

I would like to highlight that neither the US nor the European democracies helped the Republican Government of Spain because they were scared about Hitler so they preferred not to see what it was happening except for Germany (who backed Franco) and Russia (who backed Republicans.)

Once the Civil War was over, many republicans ran away from Spain and stayed for years in concentration camps in France (my grandfather among others).

Many democrats felt that the US and the European democracies were acting in bad faith, so many people (like Hemingway) came to Spain to fight as volunteers with the Republic.

P.S. In a recent poll published by The Economist, you can read that only between 1/4 and 1/3 of Spanish Basques back independence. In the last elections to Spanish parliament Basque PNV party obtained only 300,000 votes in the Basque Country.

The Jewish Media Boycott

Repost from the old site.

It is said that you know who really controls power in a society when you hear the names that are spoken of only in frightened whispers, if at all. In this post from Joachim Martillo, we see that axiom spelled out clear as air. And so the sprectre of the Jewish media boycott looms, something most Americans know almost nothing about.

There was another post along these lines that appeared in Usenet a few years ago, about a small paper in the Midwest that ran an article about the fact that supposedly 59% of Bill Clinton’s cabinet was Jewish.

Seeing as Clinton insisted his Cabinet look like America, it seems that making it look like America would have meant a Cabinet that was 2% Jewish, no? The article was an opinion piece something along those lines. Pretty innocuous, right? Well, no. Not at all.

A Jewish media boycott soon ensued. These strange things happen pretty regularly in this land, but as the adage above implies, they get almost zero publicity. To even speak of their existence is probably a death sentence for any small paper, as the very weapon that denies it’s own existence will be used to take down the paper.

In this case, a boycott was announced, and it’s always Jewish advertisers. Jews are 2% of the population and control probably 25% of the wealth in the US. Normally this is no big deal, and it’s only important in that a good career move is arguably marrying a Jewish woman. If she’s not flush, maybe the relatives are.

But in the case of the Jewish media boycott, Jewish economic power is wielded to ferocious effect. The boycott was announced, and I believe the paper even ran some articles along the lines of a Jewish advertiser boycott. One day the editor got a call from what sounded like the world-weary voice of an upper-class US White woman. These was old White money talking.

She had seen this happen so many times before, and the result was always the same. The paper usually lasts only a few months, but sometimes they last longer. There is no antidote. Death of the media outlet is virtually certain. And so it happened that the paper was laid to rest.

Now here I see for the second time the specter of the Jewish media boycott being wielded as a threat against a paper on the end of a demand that they run pro-Israeli propaganda. I have no reason to believe the guy is lying. This is how Jewish media power works in the US. It’s not that the media is owned by a bunch of grasping Jews (that’s not even completely true anyway).

It’s more that there are just enough of them sprinkled around high media places to keep a negative talk about Jews or their KKK-state to a minimum, if not off the table. And then there are the Jewish advertisers. In this case, there don’t even need to be any Jews on staff – threats alone will suffice.

Other than the Jewish boycott stuff, this is pretty much ordinary dialog along the lines of Martillo and Weiss’s blogs; interesting as far as that goes. The bit about the media going after Obama due to doubts about how pro-Israel he will be sounds far-fetched, but we cynical observers of US policy find it quite believable.

I deleted most of the third comment, as it pointed out that Mondoweiss’ comment section is getting polluted up by idiotic anti-Semites. I don’t think these are the garden variety type, I think they are more the confused Leftists and confused liberals I alluded to earlier.

Confronted for the first time with unstoppable bulldozer of US-backed Zionism, people get angry and frustrated, and anyway, anti-Semitism, like religion, pretty much explains all the mysteries in the universe and that way you don’t have to think too much. I got into it myself in 2001 when I first got into anti-Israel activism until I figured out that so much of it was nonsense and pulled my head out, thank God. Racism is lame.

There follows a bunch of Judeophilic stuff about how much Jews have contributed to our world, which anyone with a brain can see for their eyes.

Why people bother reciting this chauvinist cant I have no idea, but I think it’s mostly because they are trying to fight off accusations of anti-Semitism. Yeah, Jews are smart. Yeah, they are educated. Fine, Germany and Japan were two of the smartest and most educated nations in the world in the 1930′s and 1940′s. So much for brains and degrees as intrinsic values.

 

EdFomNH on “Fealty to Israel”

by Joachim Martillo

[These comments refer to the Mundoweiss blog entry Apparently Without Irony, Washington Post Says Jewish Advocates Demand that Obama Show 'Fealty to Israel'.]

First Comment

THE ROLE OF THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES IS TO SUPPORT THE DECISIONS THAT ARE MADE BY THE PEOPLE OF ISRAEL. IT IS NOT UP TO US TO PICK AND CHOOSE FROM AMONG [ISRAEL'S] POLITICAL PARTIES.” THE AUDIENCE MEMBERS APPLAUDED.”

That comment, by Ann Lewis, one of Hillary Clinton’s most trusted aides and the other comments recorded in Dana Milbank’s enlightening article The Audacity of Chutzpah, referred to by Mondo above, prove the current treasonous extreme of America’s pro-Israeli lobby — the lobby many say is the most powerful in America — the lobby that many believe almost single-handedly pushed America into its ill-considered and ill-fated war in Iraq.

This lobby has now become so hyper-arrogant that they claim it is the “duty” of the President of the United States to support the will of the electorate of a foreign state no matter how much it might conflict with the interests of America.

They are, in effect, demanding that any candidate for President must surrender America’s sovereignty to Israel, a state founded for the purpose of discriminating against people based on whether or not they are Jewish.

My family was in the media. We repeatedly received letters from Rabbis, co-signed by all our Jewish sponsors, threatening to put us out of business unless we carried pro-Israeli or pro-Jewish propaganda, which we did. If you understand the power of the pro-Israeli lobby, not only in Washington, but also in the news media, the article The Audacity of Chutzpah explains why Barak Obama is being smeared by certain loud voices in our media.

Consider Saturday Night Live’s claim the press was “in the tank” for Obama — when the real problem is that Obama is not 100% “in the tank” for Israel.

Obama’s relationship with his single sleazy money man, Rezko, has received much more publicity than the Clintons’ more questionable relationships with hundreds of sleazy money men, including a handful that were channeling money from the Chinese Communists to the Clinton’s in return for the dangerous sale to the Chinese of important U.S. military assets.

The media has virtually refused to remind America of just how much evidence there is of just how many serious crimes the Clintons appear to have committed. Most of the right-wing voices on talk radio and cable news, who are currently fanning the anti-Obama movement and encouraging Republicans to vote for Hillary, have been constant supporters of the Zionist-racist end of the pro-Israeli lobby.

The media uproar about Rev. Jeremiah Wright is not really about his anti-white racism. Many black leaders, including Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton have said things just anti-white as Rev. Wright — but no prominent leaders of the Democratic party have ever been forced to disown them.

Instead it is all about Israel, and the Zionist-racists’ fear Obama cannot be trusted to commit the treason of putting the interests of Israel before those of America.

To understand the ugly power of the pro-Israeli lobby, just look at the vicious smear job it did on Jimmy Carter, who has done more to help Israel in real terms than any U.S. President since Truman.

He was repeatedly smeared as anti-Semitic when he dared write in his book Peace Not Apartheid statements about Israel’s unfairness to the Palestinians that are commonly discussed within the Israeli media itself. Even American Jews who have dared to make similar statements in this country have been attacked by the Zionist-racists as aiding anti-Semitism.

ZIONISM AND ANTI-SEMITISM ARE EVIL TWINS. THEY ARE BOTH IDEOLOGIES FOUNDED ON DISCRIMINATING AGAINST PEOPLE BASED ON WHETHER OR NOT THEY ARE JEWISH. IT IS HYPOCRITICAL TO ATTACK ONE WITHOUT ATTACKING THE OTHER.

Racial discrimination practiced by Jews is just as ugly as a similar degree of racial discrimination practiced against Jews, and vice versa. Anything else would be a racist double standard on its face.

And since, as is shown in Jimmy Carter’s book, the current racial discrimination practiced by Israel is more ugly and extreme than the anti-Semitic discrimination practiced by any but an extremely small, nut-case fringe in America, the vast majority of charges of anti-Semitism made by the powerful pro-Israeli Jewish groups in this country are nothing but pure hypocrisy.

It is time that all fair-minded Americans, including all fair-minded Jews, condemn the offensive discrimination, censorship, McCarthy-like smear campaigns, and treason of the Zionist-racists who force our politicians to subject the sovereignty of America to the will of Israeli voters and who seek to prevent American gentiles and Jews from having the same freedom to criticize Israel as the Jews of Israel, themselves.

It is time America have the freedom to honestly and openly consider the costs, as well as the benefits, of continuing to be the world’s major funder, supplier of arms, and supplier of diplomatic support for Israel’s anti-Arab racism.

Second Comment

That the American media is spending so much time focusing on Rev. Wright’s mere ugly words, and virtually no time on the pro-Israeli lobby’s treasonous, ugly requirement that American presidents put the interests of Israel before those of America, is proof of just how dominated by Zionist-racism the American media is.

It is ridiculous that Obama is being pressured to distance himself from Rev. Wright’s ugly words, when nobody is ever forced to distance themselves from Israel’s much, much, much uglier deeds.

In a cycle of violence that started when the Zionists moved into Palestine and made clear they wanted to drive the Palestinians out of their own land — much as Hitler originally wanted to drive the Jews out of Germany — the Zionist have killed many more Palestinians than Palestinians have Jews.

In response to almost every tit for tat in this cycle of violence the Zionist-racists started, they have killed many more Arabs than Arabs have Jews. The fact that one side’s bombs are now delivered by human suicide bombers while the other side’s are delivered by American-made mechanical bombers does not make one side’s violence worse than the other.

People who have been robbed have more right to use force to get their stolen property back than the robbers have to steal it.

Why is there a racist double standard that says Zionists are allowed to kill and commit acts of terror to steal, keep, and steal even more stolen land, but Palestinians are not allowed to kill and commit acts of terror to get back the land that has been stolen from them, or to fight to prevent even more land from being taken from them.

Why is there always a (usually unspoken) racist double standard in the American public forum, which accords more rights to Jews than gentiles.

When will the Jewish people as a whole ever be satisfied with equality, rather than continuing to have powerful elements within their population that constantly demands racial superiority, including the right to have a nation state that discriminates against the racial and ethnic background of 97% of Americans and 99.5% of all of humanity.

When will the Jews stop having powerful groups within their population that demand to be the pigs of Animal Farm, the animals that are “more equal” than all the others.

The answer is that it would happen within a decade or two after America was free to honestly discuss Israel and Zionism.

It would because Jews are basically just as decent as the rest of America, and if there could only be honest discussion of how ugly Israel’s racism is, and how ugly the claims of Zionists to special privilege are, most Jews would come to understand that Zionism and certain strands of racism in the Torah and the Talmud are ugly and outdated, just as most American whites took a decade or two to understand how ugly and outdated the racism against Afro-Americans — that was so deeply ingrained in many of white America’s sacred institutions — was.

The Zionist-racists of the pro-Israeli lobby know this. They know that most American Jews are fair minded enough that if there could be an open and honest discussion of Israeli and Zionist racism, and how offensive many people consider it to be, the large majority of American Jews would distance themselves from both these ugly institutions.

That is why they work so hard to seek total censorship of all things that relate to Israel and Zionism.

That is why they feel such a need to smear Obama, because, God forbid, since he had an Islamic father, he might just spread the idea that Arabs are human beings of equal intrinsic worth as Jews, and without the implicit assumption that Jews are somehow superior to Palestinians and entitled to special rights the justification for Israel brutal treatment of the Palestinians disappears.

So that cannot be allowed. That is why the Zionists fight in such an ugly and underhanded manner to prevent any honest discussions on the subject, because they know that Americans and American Jews are basically decent people, and, thus, they cannot be allowed to have free and open discussions of the ugly racism and discrimination that is the very essence of both Zionism and Israel.

Third Comment

Reading the comments on this list [Mundoweiss] I am happy to hear that so many oppose Israel, the pro-Israeli lobby, and Zionism. But I am not happy to see that some remarks in this list appear to be anti-Semitic, even to me…

Conn Hallinan, “Hugo Chavez: Lest We Forget”

Nice piece on Chavez.

Hugo Chavez: Lest We Forget

“Charismatic and idiosyncratic, capable of building friendships. Communicating to the masses as few other leaders ever have, Mr. Chavez will be missed.”

Conn Hallinan
Dispatches From The Edge: March 11, 2013

Paying Last Respects

In early December 2001, I was searching through my files looking for a column topic. At the time I was writing on foreign policy for the San Francisco Examiner, one of the town’s two dailies. A back page clip I had filed and forgotten caught my attention: on Nov. 7 the National Security Agency, the Pentagon, and the U.S. State Department had convened a two-day meeting on U.S. policy vis-a-vis Venezuela. My first thought was, “Uh, oh.”

I knew something about those kinds of meetings. There was one in 1953 just before the CIA and British intelligence engineered the coup in Iran that put the despicable Shah into power. Same thing for the 1963 coup in South Vietnam and the 1973 coup against Salvador Allende in Chile.

Chavez had reaped the ire of the Bush administration when, during a speech condemning the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, he asked if bombing Afghanistan in retaliation was a good idea? Chavez called it “fighting terrorism with terrorism,” not a very good choice of words, but, in retrospect, spot on. The invasion of Afghanistan and the subsequent Iraqi War have been utterly disastrous for the U.S. and visited widespread terror on the populations of both countries. Upwards of a million Iraqis died as a direct and indirect effect of the war, five million were turned into refugees, and the bloodshed is far from over. Much the same-albeit on a smaller scale-is happening to the Afghans.

Would that we had paid the man some attention.

But for the Bush administration, Chavez’s statement presented an opportunity to rid itself of a troublesome voice. In came the White House’s Latin America “A Team.”

The top gun in that odious outfit was Otto Reich, assistant secretary of state for western hemispheric affairs and former Reagan Administration point man for the 1981-87 Contra War against Nicaragua. The General Accounting Office had nailed Reich during the 1986 Iran-Contra scandal for “prohibited convert propaganda,” planting false stories and opinion pieces in newspapers. A Cuban exile, Reich had helped spring Orlando Bosch in 1987 from a Venezuelan prison where Bosch was in jail for bombing a civilian Cuban airliner and killing 73 people.

Rogelio Pardo-Maurer, deputy assistant secretary of defense for western hemisphere affairs, also a Cuban exile and former chief of staff for the Contras, was the Pentagon side of the team.

While Reich met with civilian opponents of Chavez and conservative businessman Pedro Carmona, Pardo-Maurer huddled with military leaders, including Gen. Lucas Romero Rincon. Carmona and Rincon would play a key role in the April 11, 2002 coup against Chavez. The National Endowment for Democracy and United States Agency for International Development were also supporting Chavez’s opponents with money and advice, and both organizations have long histories of subversion and covert operations.

I had no special information about the possibility of a coup but it didn’t take a crystal ball to see that the armies of the night were on the move. So I wrote a column titled “Coup in the Wind” that laid out the meetings, identified the actors, and reminded readers that the U.S. has a long and sordid history of organizing and supporting coups in Latin America.

A little more than three and a half months later, the plotters struck, arrested Chavez, suspended the constitution, dissolved the legislature, dismissed the Supreme Court, the Attorney General and the National Election Commission, and fired provincial governors. We had seen this all before, and I flinched at what I thought would inevitably follow: executions, death squads, “disappeared” opponents, smashed unions, and a cowed population.

But April 11, 2002 was not 1954 in Guatemala, 1964 in Brazil, 1973 in Chile, or 1976 in Argentina. Chavez had lifted millions of people out of poverty, opened schools, increased literacy, and tackled malnutrition. In vast numbers those people rose up, and, for the first time in Latin American history, a coup was overturned.

Three days after Chavez was returned to office, Martha Honey at Foreign Policy In Focus sent me an email saying she liked the coup column and would I consider writing a follow-up for the think tank? I knew all about Martha Honey and her husband, Tony Avirgan. As reporters for the Costa Rican Tico Times, they had uncovered much of the Iran-Contra plot and were legends among those of us in the alternative press. I also knew about FPIF. It is hard to write sensible things about U.S. foreign policy without it. So I did a piece called Anatomy of a Coup, detailing U.S. support for the plotters. Since then I have written over 200 columns, so in a way it was Hugo Chavez that landed me at FPIF.

Chavez became the president of a country where 70 percent of the population was considered “poor,” in spite of $30 billion in yearly oil revenues. It was a country where two percent of the population owned 60 percent of the land, and where the gap between rich and poor was among the widest on the continent.

Today, according to the Gini Coefficient, Venezuela has the lowest rate of inequality in Latin America. Poverty has been reduced to 21 percent, and extreme poverty from 40 percent to 7.3 percent. Illiteracy has been eliminated and, proportionally, Venezuela is number two in Latin America for the number of university students. Infant mortality has dropped from 25 per 1,000 to 13 per 1,000, the same as it is for Black Americans.

Chavez’s government increased the number of health clinics by 169.6 percent and hands out free food to five million Venezuelans. Take a moment to read The Achievements of Hugo Chavez by public health experts Carles Muntaner, Joan Benach, and sociologist Maria Paez Victor in CounterPunch.

Comparing the man’s accomplishments to his U.S. obits was like taking a trip through Alice’s looking glass. Virtually none of the information about poverty and illiteracy was included, and when it was grudgingly admitted that he did have programs for the poor, it was “balanced” ; with claims of soaring debts, widespread shortages, rampant crime, economic chaos, and “authoritarian ism.”

Venezuela’ s debt as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product is lower than that of the U.S. and Europe. Inflation has fallen to a four-year low. There is crime, but neighboring Colombia is far more dangerous, particularly if you happen to be a trade unionist. And more people in Venezuela are eating better than they have ever eaten in the history of the country. Over the past decade growth has averaged 4. 3 percent, and joblessness dropped from 11.3 percent to 7.7 percent. Americans would kill for those figures.

As for being an “authoritarian ,” most the country’ s media is venomously anti-Chavez and publishes regularly, and his opponents hold weekly rallies and protests. Want to try that in U.S. ally Honduras (or Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, United Arab Emirates, etc.)?

The old Venezuelan elites-aided by the U.S.-will now attempt to turn the clock back to 1997, the year before Chavez took over. But that will not be easy. Quite literally millions of people have been brought into the democratic process and they will not cede power without a fight. Once people have better housing, schools, nutrition, jobs and health care, it is very difficult to take those things away. Chavez handed a better life to the vast majority of Venezuelans, and, as they demonstrated in April 2002, they are perfectly able to defend those gains.

“Charismatic and idiosyncratic, capable of building friendships. Communicating to the masses as few other leaders ever have, Mr. Chavez will be missed,” is the way former Brazilian president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva put it.

He will be missed, indeed.

Martyr of Nablus

The first Palestinian fighter to fall in defense of Nablus, 1967. She is beautiful, and she has an interesting phenotype. Quite dark for a Caucasoid.

I do not have her name at the moment, but it’s available on the Web if you want to sleuth around. Back then, the Palestinians had a lot of female fighters in their ranks as the PLO was a secular Leftist organization. Nowadays there are few if any female Palestinian fighters. Both secular and Islamist Palestinian armed groups are pretty sexist and fueled by Arab machisimo, and they won’t tolerate female fighters in their ranks.

The Spirit of the Middle East

Click to enlarge. Nice spirit.

Would it not be nice if this spirit was more widely shared. Unfortunately, there are just as many on the Palestinian side who are intransigent as there are on the Jewish side. A lot of Palestinians want to live with few if any Jews in historic Palestine, from the river to the sea. They are the other side of the intolerant coin. No matter what, those Jews are not leaving. Any future settlement will have to allow a place for the Jews presently in Palestine to remain there.

“The Great Book Robbery”

Here.

This video almost makes me sick to my stomach. It shows how in the War of 1947 (the so-called Israeli War of Independence) in the course of The Nakba, or the forcible expulsion of 800, 000 Palestinians from their land, the Jews actually stole just about every single book in Palestine!

One thing that people do not realize about The Nakba is that it plays into some nasty stereotypes about Jews. The stereotype of the grasping, greedy Jew is hard one to get rid of, and Jewish folks’ behavior doesn’t exactly work to disabuse us of that notion!

Anyway, not only were 800,000 Arabs thrown out of their homes and not allowed to return. They were not allowed to take anything with them when they left. They were ordered out of their homes by Jewish militias. In the wake of these Jewish militias were various Jewish “thieving crews” for want of a better word. What did they want? The stuff. You know, the stuff. As per the old Jewish stereotype, the Jew always wants “the stuff.”

Various thieving crews were assigned to steal various types of items. One crew was called the book crew. It was more or less the “book stealing gang.” Yes, the fledgling state of Israel actually set up a little militia for the sole purpose of stealing just about every book in Palestine. Arab prisoners were press-ganged into gathering up the books from vacated homes. Jews then moved into the Arab homes, and they every single thing that was in  the home for themselves. All of the furniture, the clothing, the silverware, the paintings, everything, everything, everything, the Jews stole it all. They literally stole everything in Palestine that was not locked down.

And you wonder why the Arabs are pissed.

These stolen books still exist to this day. They are in special Jewish institutions in Israel, and all of them are outrageously labeled “abandoned property.” The nerve!

Of course what followed were pogroms against Jews in Arab lands. Jews were thrown out of these lands, and they were also forced to leave all of their belongings in the country. They could hardly take anything they owned with them. The difference is that the Arab Jews only want to be compensated for their “stuff.” None of them want to go back and live in their Arab countries. They are now quite happy in Israel.

However, the Palestinians not only want their stuff back, but they also want to go back to their homes, and they can’t. This desire to go home and the Jews’ refusal to let the Arabs go back is what makes the Palestinian refugee question different from just about every other refugee and ethnic cleansing question on Earth. Persians who left Iraq? Croats, Bosnians and Serbs in former Yugoslavia? Russians who left Chechnya? Pandits who left Kashmir? None of those people want to go home and none of them are prevented from going home anyway. Palestine  and Israel is the only place on Earth where the refugees want to go home but are prevented from going home. And this makes it a very special case.

I still can’t believe those Jews stole all those books! Those bastards.

Civil War in Balochistan

Fascinating documentary on the Baloch civil war in Pakistan. The Balochis never agreed to be part of Pakistan. One year after Pakistan was formed, a referendum was held, and Balochistan voted to be a separate country. Pakistan’s army then invaded Balochistan, conquered it and made it a part of Pakistan.

A similar thing happened in India. On the eve of India’s independence, India was actually about 3,000 princely states. These states voted on whether to become part of India or not. Almost all of them voted to be part of India, but a few did not. Every state that voted to not join India was immediately attacked by Indian army. Many people were killed in these battles to force these states at gunpoint to join India. All of the Northeast did not want to be part of India.The Northeast was attacked and forced to join India at gunpoint.

Kashmir did not want to be part of India. The Indian army invaded Kashmir and forced Kashmir to join India. The UN ruled that India had to allow Kashmir to vote on whether they want to join India, join Pakistan or be independent, but India never allowed the vote. Almost 100% of Indians you meet, if you ask them about this UN vote and they know about it, will get very agitated and angry, start pounding the table, raise their voice and get threatening and arrogantly bellow that India will never allow this vote to occur.

As you can see, your average Indian is a fanatical nationalist (an Indian fascist if you will), as malign and horrific as the fanatical nationalists in Palestine (the Zionists or Jewish fascists) or any other fascist like nationalists everywhere on Earth. So not only do Indians follow an amoral, cruel, backwards pagan religion that belongs back in 1,500 BC, apparently most of them are fascist-like ultranationalists.

These two reactionary poisons come together in Indian nationalism or the Hindutvadi movement, which are two separate things but in practice merge together. I note that they are separate because one of the worst Indian nationalists on this board was an Indian Muslim! And in my town, we have many Sikhs. One thing I have noticed about them is that support for Punjabi independence is about nil in this group, and most of them are now very strong Indian nationalists, sort of like Hindutvadis minus the Hindu element.

The fact that India thumbs its nose at the UN means that India is an outlaw state, a scofflaw state, a pariah among the world’s nations.

Really, Pakistani nationalists are not much better than Indian nationalists, and Pakistan as a nation is not much better than India.

The Pakistanis do not have the best interests of Kashmir at stake either. They invaded Kashmir back in 1947 because they wanted to annex the place! Just like Indian wanted to annex it to her state.

The truth is that whatever Kashmiris wanted back in the late 1940′s, right now, if they want anything, they want to be independent. Only 6% of Kashmiris want to join Pakistan. Most Kashmiris simply want an independent state. A fair number of them want to stay with India now, but one wonders where those figures came from, since 15 years ago, about 90% of Kashmiris wanted to leave India. Now the number wanting to stay in India is much higher. I would guess that many years of war and 70,000 dead has convinced many Kashmiris that India is never giving up the place, so they may as will quit fighting and agitating for an independence that will never happen.

Back to the Balochis. The Balochis have been fighting for their independence off and on ever since the late 1940′s. The war continues to this very day. Balochi independence has huge support inside Balochistan, surely it has majority support. Only a few Balochis support the Pakistani state, but those are the Balochis who run the Balochi regional government, who most Balochis consider to be a bunch of traitors.

The Balochis point out that the Pakistani state hardly spends one nickel on Balochistan. Almost no money for schools, hospitals, water, sewage systems, roads, infrastructure projects, jobs, nothing, nothing, nothing. In that sense the Pakistani state is like the Indian state in that it cares nothing about its people and only serves a tiny elite. In the case of Pakistan, this elite is made up of a feudal landowning group and addition to a military officer corps group.

Balochistan has a deep water part at Gwadar. This is Pakistan’s only deep water port and it is doubtful that they will give it up. Almost zero jobs at this port have gone to local Balochis. The locals have a very high unemployment rate. Most of the jobs were given to outsiders imported from other parts of Pakistan. So though the Pakistani state has sunk a lot of money into this port, almost none of it has gone to the locals.

Pakistan feels that both China, India and the US are its enemies and are out to screw it over in a geopolitical sense. One of the prizes is this port. To give up Gwadar, the Pakistani state feels it would be handing a victory to its Chinese, Indian and American enemies. Ain’t going to happen.

At the end of the day, the Pakistani state is as backwards, evil and monstrous as the scofflaw state of India. Its criminality approaches the Jewish fascist state in Palestine. One wonders if it is the nature of a state to be essentially criminal in nature.