Will Chuck Hagel be Borked by the Israel mafia?

The New York Review of Books has a good piece on the attempt by the Israel mafia to “Bork” Chuck Hagel, President Obama’s likely nominee to be the new secretary of defense.

This wrath has been struck on the former Nebraska senator because in the past, Hagel has taken the highly politically incorrect position of refusing to mindlessly agree with every single policy, no matter how belligerent or immoral, of the Israeli government.

Israel is America's ally. The US is correct to stand up for Israel's right to exist and to be safe. But the mafia goes well beyond this reasonable objective.

The McCarthyistic tactics of this mafia - reflexively equating any disagreement with the Israeli government of the day to anti-Semitism - is despicable and downright un-American.

Israel may be America’s ally but it’s not the 51^st state. It is not American territory. To demand that an American cabinet official should give greater loyalty to a foreign government than the United States is not only absurd, but arguably treasonous.

Romney grants rights to foreigners that he denies to Americans

The juxtaposition of two stories on the front page of today's Oneonta Daily Star caught my eye: "Romney declares Jerusalem capital of Jewish state" and "Area gun enthusiasts take aim at critics."

The latter was the usual mainstream media story run in the aftermath of a mass shooting tragedy in which interviewees claimed that we didn't need more gun restrictions. It's shocking that the group interviewed, participants at a southern New York gun show, would come to that conclusion. Presumptive GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney has agreed with this position.

The former was a story about Romney's visit to Israel. There, Romney said he would back an Israeli military aggression to knock out Iran's alleged nuclear weapons program, which played well with the militaristic government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The Republican said that Israel had the 'right' to live next to a non-nuclear Iran.


At home, conservatives claim that everybody being armed makes things *more* safe.

Abroad, they claim that everybody being armed makes things *less* safe.

They need to pick a propaganda line and stick with it.

Additionally, Romney is claiming that Israelis have the 'rights' to live next to an unarmed neighbor and to aggressively disarm their neighbor to achieve that 'right.'

But he denies that Americans don't have any such rights.

Why does Romney claim a right for foreigners that he denies to Americans?

What country is Romney running to lead?

Update: One gun enthusiast interviewed in The Daily Star piece noted "In a free society, you are going to have crazies and there is no way to stop them." Can you imagine a conservative agreeing with that statement if the word 'crazies' was preceded by the word 'Islamist'?

Iran not a threat to Israel, but olive trees are

The former head of the Israeli security agency Shin Bet has denounced Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Deputy PM Ehud Barak for misleading the public on the threat posed by Iran and for having their feelings clouded by "messianic judgment." He also said that "I don't have faith in the current leadership of Israel to lead us in an event of this magnitude."

A few days earlier, the current head of the Israeli armed forces also veered from the militaristic Script and said he doubts Iran will really try to build a nuclear bomb. He rightly described the Iranian regime as vile but not suicidal.

I assume both of these men are anti-Semitic and hope for the death of the Israeli state, like we're told all critics of the Israeli government's policies supposedly are.

Meanwhile, fanatical settlers launched an operation against an apparent grave threat to their security: olive trees. Or perhaps their real enemy is rationality and civilized behavior.

Update: Former justice and foreign minister Tzipi Livni recently resigned Israel's Knesset (parliament) denouncing the country's leadership. She said that the 'existential threat' to Jewish state comes not from Iran but from Israel's own government.

70% of Israelis want Palestinian statehood: poll

This week, Israel's lawyer Barack Obama made the case before the United Nations that the UN should not recognize Palestinian statehood and that negotiations should allowed to drag on for however long the Netanyahu government wishes to stall. This is the same United Nations that, in 1947, recognized Israeli statehood.

However, an interesting poll was conducted by the Hebrew University and published in the Israeli daily The Jerusalem Post: 70% of Israelis say their government should accept the UN decision on the question, even if it results in Palestinian independence.

That's 70% of Israelis. So whose interests is lawyer Obama representing: the Israeli government's or the Israeli people's?

"CYOA" military provokes press freedom crisis in "Middle East's only democracy"

The Israeli right and its American apologists often refer to the country as the Middle East's only democracy as a sort of inoculation against the slightest suggestion that the actions of Jewish state's government are in any way less than perfect.

(e.g.: It's okay for Israel to commit war crimes or crimes against humanity because it's "the only democracy in the Middle East," just as it's okay for the US to do the same because it's the self-proclaimed "leader of the free world.")

Like the US, Israel is often caricatured as a monolithic state where everyone subscribes to the prevailing militaristic orthodoxy. However in both countries, the reality is much more nuanced. While they don't scream hysterically non-stop like the settlers and others on the far right, there is a not-insignificant percentage of civilized Israelis that support a rational, sensible path toward peace that acknowledges Palestinians as humans, a path that, unlike militarism, might actually have a chance to work.

This group of civilized Israelis is trying to do something controversial: hold the country's security establishment accountable. The establishment has responded by provoking a freedom of the press crisis in "the Middle East's only democracy."

Alternet has a remarkable story on the scandal.

Anat Kam is a 23-year-old Israeli journalist who allegedly procured confidential documents while she worked in an Israeli Army general’s office during her mandatory military service. The documents revealed that in 2007, Israeli Army forces assassinated a Palestinian Islamic Jihad member in direct contravention of a Supreme Court order that banned the killing of wanted militants if there was a reasonable chance to arrest them first. Two top Israeli military officials, former Central Command Chief Major General Yair Naveh, Operations Directorate Head Major General Tal Russo, and Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi, who directed the assault on Gaza in 2008 and 09, are said to have been incriminated in the documents.

Kam allegedly photocopied the documents and passed them along to the security reporter for Haaretz, one of Israel's leading daily newspapers, which published an article based on them.

This aroused the ire of the Israeli military, which since 1988 has demanded that journalists submit all "material relevant to the security of the state" to the military censor for review, and which compels all journalists seeking an official Israeli press card (GPO card) to sign on to the censorship policy. By all accounts, Blau submitted his article for review to the censor and was cleared for publication.

Kam was detained and placed under house arrest last year, though news of this only started coming out in the last few weeks. She is now on trial for treason and espionage and faces up to 14 years in prison.

Meanwhile, the journalist who published the article is hiding in London. He is terrified to return to Israel. His hard-hitting reports on Israeli Army abuses in the occupied West Bank have made him the bane of the military establishment. "At least ten journalists inside Israel have told me [Blau] is the real target," a reporter working in Israel and Palestine told me. "And everyone is saying they’re simply prosecuting Kam to make an example out of her."

The Israeli Shin Bet security service secured a gag order on the media from an apparent rubber stamp judge who had spent almost her entire career in military courts. The order, issued in January, forbade journalists and bloggers in Israel not only from reporting on the details of Kam’s prosecution, but from even acknowledging that she had been detained. A reporter I spoke to was publishing stories on the scandal under an anonymous byline. The New York Times has done the same, meaning even Ethan Bronner might be afraid of the Shin Bet.

The gag order was so secret that even the Speaker of the Knesset was reportedly not allowed to see it.

Perhaps this is the "Middle East's only democracy"'s own ironic way to mark the 40th anniversary of the US Pentagon Papers.


Note: Please see the Alternet story, which links to a number of other relevant places.

"Those who make peaceful change impossible, make violent change inevitable"

Secretary of State-designate Hillary Clinton told a Senate committee that the US would not talk to Israel until Hamas renounced violence. She did not enunciate any requirement that Israel renounce violence. Personally, I would have no problem with both Israeli and Hamas leaders being shipped off to the International Criminal Court, given their mutual disregard for international law with regard to civilians. Though it's worth noting that the biggest difference between the two parties is that the weaponry with which Hamas commits its war crimes was not paid for with billions of my tax dollars.

One of my favorite quotes is from former US president John F. Kennedy who said, "Those who make peaceful change impossible, make violent change inevitable." I said before that as long as Israel continues to occupy the Conquered Territories, there WILL be resistance. Every colonial power in history has found out that the people don't like to be ruled by outsiders, no matter how righteous the latter consider themselves.

Standard Israeli rhetoric is that they would be more thrilled that a 11 year old girl at a Jonas Brothers' concert if the Palestinians would simply renounce violence and try to solve the region's difference through peaceful, democratic means. There's one major problem. The Israeli state has pretty much made that impossible. And you can refer to the JFK quote to figure out what will happen next.

Israel's Central Elections Committee has banned the two leading Arab parties from contesting the next election. The majority of Arab members of the Knesset (Israeli parliament) belong to these two parties.

The ruling Kadima Party (which is actually moderate in the Israeli context) has made its racism clear by opposing demands of one of the banned parties that (gasp) all Israeli citizens be treated equal under the law. Kadima claimed that such equality would "undermine Israel’s identity as a Jewish state." Such naked tribalism is something most westerners stereotype to darkest Africa, not the country that repeatedly pats itself on the back as 'only democracy in the Middle East.'

So Israel's message is that Arabs and Palestinians are not permitted to be part of the 'democratic' process and they are 'terrorists' if they resort to violence. So how exactly are they supposed to express themselves?

Some fanatical pro-Israeli demonstrators in New York City have an answer: the Palestinians should simply be wiped out.

Now, if some random US Muslim called for Israel to be wiped out, it would be news in this country on every major news outlet as well as Fox News. But when it's made by an Israeli supporter about Palestinians, it barely gets a mention even in the alternative media.

One young fanatic said of Hamas, "They are forcing us to kill their children in order to defend our own children. Those who die are suffering God’s wrath."

Given the high percentage of women and children killed in the aggression against Gaza, this gives some insight into the dementia suffered by religious extremists. But really, what rational person can have any comment on such inhuman bile except to shake one's head in disgust?

The only hope is that, according to this article, progressive Jews are trying to take over the American Jewish lobby from the militarists. That's a battle worth fighting.

Some are more equal than others

Ed. note: I usually try to avoid writing about the monthly Israeli-Palestinian wars because hardly anyone can comment on it in a civilized, rational manner and I'll probably regretting making an exception but here goes...

The most famous line of the US Declaration of Independence reads, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal..."

I've concluded that this line is not true. Because whenever erupts the monthly violence in the Middle East, what I hear is that either (though not both) Israeli lives or Palestinian lives are worth more than those of any other human being.

Why?

Because when a few Israelis get killed by Hamas rockets, it's an outrage that requires a massive, completely disproportionate military response. If hundreds of Gazan civilians die in the process, it's unfortunate but it's 'worth it' if it saves the life of one Israeli civilian. There you have it quite explicitly and unashamedly. The life of one Israeli civilian is greater than the lives of hundreds (soon to be thousands?) of Palestinians.

But Israel apologists are not unique in this regard. Several hundred Palestinians have died during the recent Israeli aggression against Gaza. There has been deafening international condemnation of this action.

Some of it has been from Arab countries. Most of these countries have human rights' records that are at least as bad, if not far worse, than Israel's. Most of these are countries that arbitrarily arrest people, make sure opponents are 'disappeared' and ban free speech... except of course when it comes to anti-Israel protests.

A lot of the protest comes from western Europe. They claim it's a disgrace, an outrage, amassive crime against humanity what Israel's doing to Gazans. These poor civilians who had nothing to do with Hamas rockets shouldn't be murdered, claim European (and a few American) protesters.

But this also begs the question. A few hundred have died in Gaza and this has provoked international outrage, especially from the western left. By contrast,5.4 MILLION people have died during the last 10 years of war and chaos in the DR Congo. Are there mass protests in the European streets about this far greater tragedy? The Central African Republic. Burma. Darfur. Northern Uganda. North Korea. There are at least half a dozen places around the world with a humanitarian situation comparably bad to Gaza. You haven't heard about most of them.

Why? Because the Israel-Palestine is a cause celebre. Some see Israel as a projection of their own militaristic tendencies. Some see Palestine as a projection of their own anti-imperialist beliefs.

The truth is that, with a few exceptions, global "concern" for the Israel-Palestine situation really has little to do with the Israeli and Palestinian civilian victims of the violence. The concern has to do with supporting or opposing the US' unconditional support of everything Israel does.

If you oppose this, then Hamas is justified in rocketing Israeli villages and using civilians as human shields. If you support this, then Israel is justified in bombing UN schools and banning humanitarian assistance from Gaza and, if they felt like it, nuking the Occupied Territories.

Viewed objectively, viewed as a human being rather than as a member of one tribe or the other, ALL of these are war crimes. Too bad hardly anyone views it that way.

If the US government weren't involved in this, most Americans wouldn't give a damn what happened to Israeli civilians and most of the rest of the world wouldn't give a damn what happened to Gazan civilians. Just ask the Congolese. Or the Burmese. Or any of the thousands of political prisoners in Syria or Egypt or Iran. Who's protesting on their behalf?

Scumbag of the week

Given that this award is named after Dick Cheney, it's appropriate that this week's winner is our vice-president's ideological twin.

Benjamin Netanyahu, long one of the most despicable characters in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, made headlines recently. The former Israeli prime minister and current opposition leader talked about how fantastic the 9/11 terrorist attacks had been for his country.

"We are benefiting from one thing, and that is the attack on the Twin Towers and Pentagon, and the American struggle in Iraq," he said, noting that events had "swung American public opinion in our favor."

I'm really glad for the always opportunistic Netanyahu that not only has the mass murder of American civilians has given such a fantastic boost to his political career but that he's comfortable publically bragging about it.

Then again, this is a man who's made his career by exploiting for his own political benefit the murder of Israeli civilians, so I suppose this isn't such a great leap.

Silencing dialogue, 'the weapon of dictators'

Every year, Paris hosts a salon du livre (book festival) based around a country. The Salon hosts discussions on literature and with authors from that particular nation. This year's honored country was Israel.

The choice was widely criticized in the Arab world. Critics included not only the predictable ones like the Organization of the Islamic Conference and Arab governments but also Arab-language publishers and writers and even a few prominent Israeli literary figures. Many called for a boycott of the Salon.

The prominent French paper Le Monde ran good editorial on the topic. The daily, hardly an apologist for the Israeli government, blasted these boycott calls.

It noted that it was not the country that's being honored at the Salon but its writers and its literature. The paper also pointed out that these governments weren't in any position to talk, as the Arab world has some of the worst records on respect for freedom of the press and of expression.

It pointed out the assinine illogic of demanding a boycott of a festival where 'most of the Israeli authors who are participating are among the strong advocats of the cause of a viable and independent Palestinian state, next to the state of Israel.'

The French daily condemned as 'absurd' and 'shocking' these attempts to 'hold literature hostage to politics.' Boycotting books, the paper concluded, 'has always been the weapon of dictators.'

The criminal starvation of Gaza won't make Israel safer

I usually don't write about IsraelStine. And I know that, for ideological (not humanitarian) reasons, this smaller man-made disaster will provoke far more reaction than my piece on the much greater man-made catastrophe in the DR Congo (5.4 million deaths = 0 comments). But this story is so disgusting even by the normal low standards of the conflict's participants that I can't help but vent.

In response to rocket attacks on Israeli border villages by Palestinian militants, the Israeli authorities have decided that this situation can only be solved by starving people in the Gaza Strip to death.

The Israelis closed all crossings between occupied Gaza and Israel proper. The state created in response to the Nazi Holocaust EVEN PREVENTED HUMANITARIAN SUPPLIES FROM THE UNITED NATIONS from entering what had been described even before this abomination as the world's largest prison.

The illogic of the Israeli government is that starving Gazans will pressure the militants to stop the rocket attacks. In reality, this will only INCREASE support by ordinary Gazans for the militants. This is what has happened in with past collective punishments. And this is what will happen again. I believe that it was Benjamin Franklin who described insanity as trying exactly same thing over and over and expecting different results. As such, the Israeli government is stupid. The primary cause of terrorism is despair and there's little despair more primal than starving to death.

I am not a reflexive critic of the Israeli government, current or past. Israel has the right to exist in peace. Israel has the right to defend itself. Israel faces real threats. I've said that Israel ought to be allowed to join NATO in exchange for allowing the creation of a truly sovereign Palestinian state.

But the right of self-defense has certain implicit qualities: the self-defensive act should be specifically targeted to the threatening entity and its only objective should be to end the threat.

Israel has been trying collective punishments on its Occupied Territories for over two decades. And the same problems of insecurity remain. This is not surprising to anyone with an iota of understanding of human nature. Sure, you have the rare heroic exceptions like in South Africa. But when you treat people as sub-human savages, it is almost inevitable that they will react in a sub-human savage way.

Let me repeat that: when you treat people as sub-human savages, it is almost inevitable that they will react in a sub-human savage way.

In such crises such as the rocket attacks, there is a completely understandable desire on the part of the aggrieved that their government DO SOMETHING. What often happens is that the government ends up being more concerned about DOING SOMETHING, anything, than about doing something that's ACTUALLY GOING TO SOLVE THE PROBLEM. The appearance of concern ends up trumping common sense and judgment and ultimately results.

This is why the Israel irrationally invaded Lebanon in 2006 and it ended up being the disaster it was always likely to be. This is why the US launched its irrational aggression against Iraq and it ended up being the disaster it was always likely to be.

These governments may have made disastrous decisions that hurt their national interests and security. But hey, at least they DID SOMETHING.

The bottom line is that heavy handed collective punishments in occupied lands do not work. They create resentment and hostility and resistance. Somehow, people forget that the collective punishment (in al-Qaeda's eyes) known as 9/11 failed to cower Americans into subservience to the Islamists. It hasn't worked for America in Iraq. It hasn't worked for Israel in the West Bank.

And Israel's criminal attempts to starve Gazans to death aren't going to serve Israel's interests any better.

Israel's attack on Syria

Adirondack Musing reports on something the mainstream media in this country seems to have missed: Israel's military attack against Syria. So reports both The Washington Post and the Rupert Murdoch-owned Times of London.

The Post speculates that it might have been a dry run for an attack against Iran.

You'd think the broadcast media might be able to cut a minute or so of their OJ Simpson coverage to report on this serious event, but their only responsibility as corporate conglomerates is to 'give people what they want.'