Nazi-Like Law of Return

Here is a great post from Philip Weiss on Zionism and the law of return.

The post-Holocaust west is a utopia for Jews. Jews must recognize this and celebrate this, and deal with the consequences. Herzl's vision of political Zionism was based on a belief in the undying antisemitism of the west. It just ain't true. 2, Political Zionism has run its course. A state based on the idea that I can move there tomorrow and a Palestinian born there has no right to move home is dedicated to an outmoded ideology. 3, Zionism is exacting a terrible price on Jewish identity.

Yup.

MonoWeiss

Greenwald on the Bush Legacy

Glenn Greenwald on what may, and may not, be discussed:

Americans during the Bush presidency have had no significant, constructive discussion of whether the U.S. has any real interests in continuing to exert dominance in the Middle East, primarily because doing so requires a debate about the role of oil and our commitment to Israel, both of which are strictly off limits

Glenn has been a strong advocate for protecting our liberties over the past few years. Patriot would be an accurate word to describe him.

Link

Quote on Qana

What motivated Osama bin Laden?

While largely ignored by the American Press, the [Israeli] massacre at Qana was front page News in London, much of Europe, and throughout the Middle East ... the pictures of headless Arab babies and other grisly photographs were likely the final shove, pushing bin Laden over the edge and leading him to dedicating his life to war against what he would call the Israeli-United State alliance. From then on, he would often use the massacre at Qana as a battle cry, and it would become the match lighting the fuse that would eventually lead to the WTC on Tuesday morning five years later.

James Bamford, page 144 of A pretext for War.

Thanks, that explains a lot.

Quote from Ramzi Yousef

Ramzi Yousef sez:

If the U.S. government keeps supporting Israel ... then we will continue to carry out operations inside and outside the United States... All people who support the U.S. government are our targets in our future plans, and that is becuase all those people are responsible for their government's actions and they support the U.S. foreign policy and are satisfied with it.

Ramzi Yousef's laptop computer as recovered by Philippine authorities in 1995.

Source: page 138 of A Pretext for War, James Bamford.

Terror On The Way

Looks like we have real terrorists headed to America.

We are not hearing much from the Neocons or the Bush admin. No plan to shut down immigration channels or to secure the border.

Maybe that is because Israel's borders are secure, and any terrorist incident in the US will just push us towards more war which is just what they want.

Large teams of newly trained suicide bombers are being sent to the United States and Europe, according to evidence contained on a new videotape obtained by the Blotter on ABCNews.com.

Teams assigned to carry out attacks in the United States, Canada, Great Britain and Germany were introduced at an al Qaeda/Taliban training camp graduation ceremony held June 9.

A Pakistani journalist was invited to attend and take pictures as some 300 recruits, including boys as young as 12, were supposedly sent off on their suicide missions.

The tape shows Taliban military commander Mansoor Dadullah, whose brother was killed by the U.S. last month, introducing and congratulating each team as they stood.

"These Americans, Canadians, British and Germans come here to Afghanistan from faraway places," Dadullah says on the tape. "Why shouldn't we go after them?"

The leader of the team assigned to attack Great Britain spoke in English.

"So let me say something about why we are going, along with my team, for a suicide attack in Britain," he said. "Whether my colleagues, companions and Muslim brothers die today or tonight, every drop of our blood will invigorate the Muslim (unintelligible)."

U.S. intelligence officials described the event as another example of "an aggressive and sophisticated propaganda campaign."

Others take it very seriously.

"It doesn't take too many who are willing to actually do it and be able to slip through the net and get into the United States or England and cause a lot of damage," said ABC News consultant Richard Clarke, the former White House counterterrorism official.

Link

Brzezinski on Lieberman

Quote of the Day:

Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was national security adviser under President Carter, said political leaders such as Lieberman, "echoed by some powerful lobbyists, are actually at the moment pushing the military option."

RawStory

Filtered Views

North American viewers will see a different version of a publically financied program on the six-day war.

The French edition is what Montreal-based producer Ina Fichman calls the "international version," which was sold to Italy's RAI, Australia's SBS and elsewhere.

It depicts, among other historical facts, the expulsion of thousands of Palestinians by the Israeli army, a move the narrator delicately describes as "the first change to the demographics of the West Bank." It shows, through the eyes of a former Arab resident and an Israeli who photographed the event, that, where large villages stood, now are forests (many planted with Canadian charitable donations).

There is also a sequence, as related by the American-born Abdullah Schleifer, editor of Palestine News, as well as an Arab whose home was destroyed, about the overnight razing of a 700-year-old Palestinian neighbourhood in Jerusalem by the triumphant Israeli defence minister, General Moshe Dayan.

But if you don't know the history of Israrel, how can you understand the present situation?

Maybe that is the idea.

TheStar

Opposite Effect

The U.N. middle east envoy, Alvaro de Soto, has resigned his post. A confidential report indicates he felt the U.N. was subservient to U.S. and Israeli interests and that this was making progress in any peace talks useless.

De Soto condemned economic sanctions imposed by Israel, the United States and the EU on Hamas after it won Palestinian elections last year and said their effective endorsement by the Quartet had had "devastating consequences" for Palestinians.

"The steps taken by the international community with the presumed purpose of bringing about a Palestinian entity that will live in peace with its neighbor Israel have had precisely the opposite effect," he wrote.

"Even-handedness has been pummeled into submission in an unprecedented way since the beginning of 2007."

The report is here.

Resolution on Jerusalem

The US Congress passes a motion celebrating the Israeli expropriation of East Jerusalem.

The question is, ts this resolution really in the interest of the United States? Does it advance our interests in any way, or just make us look anti-arab and box us in policy-wise?

The resolution, passed by a voice vote on June 5 – the 40th anniversary of the Israeli conquest of East Jerusalem and other Arab territories – states that U.S. policy should recognize that Jerusalem is “the undivided capital of Israel.” There is no mention that Jerusalem – which has the largest Palestinian population of any city and which for centuries served as the commercial, cultural, education and religious center for Palestinian life – should also be recognized as the capital of a future Palestinian state.

The resolution was sponsored by House Foreign Affairs Committee chairman Tom Lantos (D-CA), widely recognized as the Democratic Party’s chief foreign policy spokesman, and co-sponsored by such Democratic Party foreign policy leaders as Howard Berman (D-CA), Eliot Engel (D- NY), Robert Wexler (D-FL), Joseph Crowley (D-NY), and Middle East subcommittee chairman Gary Ackerman (D-NY).

I would have to say no.

fpif

More Neocon Quotes

More neocon quotes from Philip Weiss' blog:

There was, to be sure, one thing that many of even the most passionately committed American Zionists were reluctant to do, and that was to face up to the fact that continued American support for Israel depended upon continued American involvement in international affairs-- from which it followed that an American withdrawal into the kind of isolationist mood that prevailed most recently between the two world wars, and that now looked as though it might soon prevail again, represented a direct threat to the security of Israel. [PW emphasis]

Norman Podhoretz, neocon godfather, writing about the centralness of Israel, in Breaking Ranks (1979).

"One major factor that drew [the first-generation neo-cons] inexorably to the right was their attachment to Israel and their growing frustration during the 1960s with a Democratic party that was becoming increasingly opposed to American military preparedness and increasingly enamored of Third World causes [e.g., Palestinian rights]. In the Reaganite right's hard-line anti-communism, commitment to American military strength, and willingness to intervene politically and militarily in the affairs of other nations to promote democratic values (and American interests), neocons found a political movement that would guarantee Israel's security."

(Benjamin Ginsberg, The Fatal Embrace (1993), p. 231)

"I’ve always thought it was best for Israel for the U.S. to be generally engaged and generally strong, and then the commitment to Israel follows from a general foreign policy."

(William Kristol to the Jerusalem Post, July 27, 2000)

The last one essentially admits that the other foreign policy issues are essentially "cover" for support for Israel.

Honesty From Neocons

Philip Weiss has unearthed an amazing neocon quote from more honest days.

The neocon is Irving Kristol. He wrote this in a American Jewish Congress publication in 1973:

Senator McGovern is very sincere when he says that he will try to cut the military budget by 30%. And this is to drive a knife in the heart of Israel... Jews don't like big military budgets. But it is now an interest of the Jews to have a large and powerful military establishment in the United States... American Jews who care about the survival of the state of Israel have to say, no, we don't want to cut the military budget, it is important to keep that military budget big, so that we can defend Israel

Mr. Weiss then contrasts this quote with a less explicit discussion from Bill Kristol some years later on the Iraq war. Bill Kristol is Irving Kristol's son.

The moral? It took 30 years for neoconservatives to get all the way inside, and as they did so they became less explicit about their agendas.

It is really worth reading.

Mondoweiss

Fear and Tribalism

Amconmag has a great article about Philip Weiss' struggle between humanism and tribalism.

Actually, Mr. Weiss is not struggling, he has chosen humansim. But he is now dealing with the consequences for making that admirable, but surely difficult, decision

[My editor] has a stronger Jewish identity than I do. A few years back, we were sitting in his office when he said, “You know what the most important question is about your wife’s [Gentile] family?” “What?” I asked. “Would they hide you?” “Huh?” “Would they hide you?” he said again. Oh. He meant if there were pogroms in America.

Wow. This is from a powerful editor of a widely read news source. There is lots more good stuff here:

When Jews left the ghettoes of Europe during political emancipation in the 1800s, they underwent a “spiritual crisis” that fostered messianic movements, as the Jewish historian Gershom Scholem has written, and today the Jewish advance into the American power structure was setting off similar crises. The Jewish community had defined Jewishness as attachment to Israel, and it was not coming to grips with the effect of that attachment on the Arab world or the United States.

Please take the time to read more at Amconmag

Some Truth

Ron Paul on the Daily Show

Boycott Action

Looks like the boycott activity in Britian has struck a nerve.

A top American lawyer has threatened to wage a legal war against British academics who seek to cut links with Israeli universities.

Alan Dershowitz, a Harvard law professor renowned for his staunch defence of Israel and high-profile legal victories, including his role in the O.J. Simpson trial, vowed to "devastate and bankrupt" lecturers who supported such boycotts.

This week's annual conference of Britain's biggest lecturers' union, the University and College Union, backed a motion damning the "complicity of Israeli academia in the occupation [of Palestinian land]".

It also obliged the union's executive to encourage members to "consider the moral implications of existing and proposed links with Israeli academic institutions".

Prof Dershowitz said he had started work on legal moves to fight any boycott.

He told the Times Higher Educational Supplement that these would include using a US law - banning discrimination on the basis of nationality - against UK universities with research ties to US colleges. US academics might also be urged to accept honorary posts at Israeli colleges in order to become boycott targets.

"I will obtain legislation dealing with this issue, imposing sanctions that will devastate and bankrupt those who seek to impose bankruptcy on Israeli academics," he told the journal.

Sue Blackwell, a UCU activist and member of the British Committee for Universities of Palestine, said: "This is the typical response of the Israeli lobby which will do anything to avoid debating the real issue - the 40-year occupation of Palestine." Jewish groups have attacked the UCU vote, which was opposed by Sally Hunt, its general secretary.

It would be interesting to see what steps were taken during the boycott of South Africa...

FT