On Jewish Intolerance

In a New Statesman article, law professor John Dugard ,who was a Judge on The International Court of Justice as well as being Special Raporteur for United Nations Commission on Human Rights, summarises the Goldstone apology saga : ‘there are no new facts that could possibly have led Richard Goldstone to change his mind about the UN-backed investigation into Israel and the conflict in Gaza.’

While Goldstone claimed that the Israeli investigations produced some results also recognised by a follow-up UN committee report chaired by Judge Mary McGowan Davis, Dugard stresses that the McGowan Davis report was actually very critical of the Israeli investigations, finding them to be “lacking in impartiality, promptness and transparency.”

According to the McGowan Davis report, the Israeli ‘probe’ has resulted in “two convictions; one for theft of a credit card, resulting in a sentence of seven months’ imprisonment, and another for using a Palestinian child as a human shield, which resulted in a suspended sentence of three months.”

Dugard is clearly bewildered by Goldstone’s latest zigzag: “Richard Goldstone is a former judge and he knows fully well that a fact-finding report by four persons cannot be changed by the subsequent reflections of a single member of the committee.”  What made Goldstone change his mind “remains a closely guarded secret,” says Dugard.

Dugard is clearly frustrated, and, somewhat cynical here. But I guess that we all know the answer, because for some time now, we have witnessed Goldstone being subjected to relentless measures of exclusion and abuse from his Zionist brethren.

As a matter of fact, intolerance towards critical voices is inherent within Jewish culture, identity, and politics, for Zionism is clearly a demand for ideological collectivism.

But interestingly enough, Jewish anti Zionism is also no different in its modus operandi : all too often we come across a Jewish ‘progressive’ poisonous smear campaign against one ‘Jewish self-hater’ or another.

Jewish ‘cultural heritage’ could be presented as a chain of different attempts to silence, and even eliminate dissidence: some Jews were nailed to wood; some were assassinated ; others were stoned, and a few were excluded or excommunicated. Many lost their jobs and many others were subject to endless slander.

As tragic as it may sound, Jewish identity politics is an exercise in some different variations of collective hatred; hatred towards the Goyim, but also towards Jewish dissidence.

The Goldstone saga is then, an opportunity to peep into contemporary Jewish political intolerance, and Goldstone emerges as a tragic figure: he sacrificed his professional name for the sake of just a little Jewish empathy.

Yet he clearly forgot that forgiveness is not at all a highly regarded value within the ghetto walls — I learned yesterday that a group of American Jewish lawyers are preparing a civil lawsuit against Goldstone for libel.

I guess that revenge may as well unite them all.

As we are becoming accustomed to Zionism being the biggest threat to world peace, it is also interesting to learn how hostile Jews are towards each other.

Postscript to an Open Letter to President Obama

Mr. President, Know Thyself…

Mr. President, yesterday you proudly and vehemently “raised your voice against the violence of the oppressed” in Libya. You proclaimed:

All attacks against civilians must stop.

Gaddafi must stop his troops from advancing on Benghazi, pull them back… and establish water, electricity and gas supplies to all areas.

Humanitarian assistance must be allowed to reach the people of Libya or the “international community will make him suffer the consequences” with military action.

These words and sentiments are familiar to you, Mr. President, since you lifted them from Afghan President Karzai less than a week ago. The only discernable difference is that President Karzai was not railing about Qadaffi at the time—he was talking about you. In point of fact, he was talking directly to you. He spoke to you as he attended the memorials of nine children your military subordinates killed on your behalf and at your command on the 1^st of March. [I feel compelled to offer a piece of free legal advice at this time: consider refreshing yourself on the law regarding “command responsibility” and the concomitant criminal liability attached thereto.] In that regard, you and Muammar Qadaffi are brothers.  He is killing civilians as we speak. You are killing civilians as we speak. He is bombing civilians. You are bombing civilians. It is your war which will not allow “water, electricity, and gas supplies to all, or hardly any, areas of Afghanistan.  It is your war which prevents humanitarian assistance from reaching the people of Afghanistan, just as you say Qadaffi’s does. And according to both of you, you justify your respective wars on fighting the threat of Al Qaida, the ubiquitous enemy.

You have demanded, backed by an unveiled threat of force, that a sitting president of a sovereign state, Muammar Qadaffi, “stop killing civilians.” The sitting president of another sovereign state, Afghanistan, has demanded the exact same of you–repeatedly–and yet how disparately you deliver and receive the identical message. Your arrogance knows no bounds.

In making that repeated demand as he did last week as he stood with grieving families of dead children, Karzai let it be known that, “This is the voice of Afghanistan.” And notwithstanding that it’s a voice you have ignored, flaunted, denied, and rationalized, for almost three years now, it is the one thing in Afghanistan you have NOT managed to kill or destroy. The Afghan “voice’ is the only “weapon” the people have left and you cannot take it from them. It’s theirs and you can’t have it, no matter how many individual voices you continue to silence by death. It is also the voice of America, but you are as deaf to that voice as you are to President Karzai and his people. But I know you will listen, ever so carefully, to every word and nuance of Muammar Qadaffi in the coming hours, and even before the last word is spoken, you will kill his civilians for him and save him the trouble. You expect, demand, and threaten, while even now your first bombs and those of your “allies” are falling on Libya, that Qadaffi do what you will not– stop killing civilians.

“…I knew that I could not ever again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greater purveyor of violence in the world: my own government.” Dr. Martin Luther King in his “Beyond Vietnam” speech, April 4, 1967.

Mr. President, know thyself.

By: Kathleen Kirwin

March 19, 2011

The next 20 years in America—immigration equation

We are SO unprepared for our future!

Part 3

As I said at the beginning of this series, the next 20 years will be nothing like the last twenty years. If you think gas prices rip money out of your wallet today—watch for water, heating costs and food prices to explode beyond your paycheck in 20 years.  Everything we took for granted for decades will change.

What confounds me stems from the fact that we bring this civilization-breaking predicament down upon ourselves—with no apparent understanding of our dilemma.  We could stop what’s coming at us by a suspension of relentless immigration of 3.1 million annually and another 72 million immigrants within 25 years—because that’s what’s driving our human overload.  If we add another 72 million immigrants as projected, just tell me how we’re going to feed, house, provide healthcare and jobs to that many people when we cannot provide jobs for 15 million of our own citizens today.

Every month, our Congress injects another 225,000 immigrants into this country, month after month, year after year, decade after decade.  We’re cracking up our country faster than Humpty-Dumpty.  Once we manifest another 72 million immigrants, everything will change in this country of ours. Everything!

The great French writer Jean Raspail told his beloved country the same thing in his book Camp of the Saints 35 years ago as a fleet of immigrants steamed toward France: “You don’t know my people—the squalor, superstitions, the fatalistic sloth that they’ve wallowed in for generations.  You don’t know what you’re in for if that fleet of brutes ever lands in your lap.  Everything will change in this country of yours.  They will swallow you up.”  Today, France staggers under its five million Muslim immigrant load that has created two Frances, two incompatible cultures, two languages and a very dim future for the French as they become outnumbered by their immigrants. Note: add UK, Norway, Sweden, Germany, Austria, Spain, Italy and Canada.

If you could imagine the entire island of Haiti with 9.5 million poverty- stricken, illiterate people immigrating into the United States—that’s what we’re doing to ourselves. Times a factor of eight!

“The United States is the only country in history that deliberately changed its ethnic makeup, and history has few examples of diversity creating a stable society,” said Colorado Governor Richard D. Lamm.  By 2045, America’s new majority will become Mexican/Hispanic.

As dozens of ethnic tribes push for dominance in our communities, with their incompatible cultural proclivities, in their insupportable taxpayer-provided baby making, with their reliance to welfare, in their lack of educational propensities, with their crime, and in their drug use—we all lose.  It’s already happening at breakneck speed with flunkout/dropout rates of 7,000 high school kids quitting every day; more than 1.2 million annually. (Source: CNN)  What do you think uneducated people do?  They make more babies like themselves at a rate greater than we can pull them out of the ghetto situation.   We cannot maintain an educated workforce with functionally illiterate individuals.

Dr. George Colburn said, “It is insanity to add new cultures that promote disharmony within an existing peaceful culture.”  www.tomorrowsamerica.com

MULTICULTURALISM: UNCONTROLLABLE CHAOS

Dr. Garrett Hardin’s ‘The Ostrich Factor’ illustrates our folly as to turning our culture over to many cultures: “Multiculturalism presumes peaceful coexistence of many cultures within the boundaries of the same nation. Examples of multiculturalism from USSR, the Baltics, and Central Africa have resulted in violence generated by chaos.”

Hardin suggests the adoption of multiculturalism is based on a serious misunderstanding of culture. “The definition of culture by 19th century anthropologists: “the activities of a society – that is, of its members – constitute its culture” was intended to enlarge sympathy for daily rituals around the globe. The consequences of multiculturalism are much different when many cultures are placed within a single nation (intranational multiculturalism) rather than between nations (international multiculturalism).

“The unity and strength of a nation depends on maintaining the dominance of law-supported discriminations. To achieve world peace, spatially separated countries must obey different ethical mandates. A nation selecting to forbid genital laceration of young girls (Female genital mutilation) cannot tolerate internal diversity. Intranational (within our country) multiculturalism creates chaos and destroys national peace. By contrast, international multiculturalism can promote peace in the short term and still provide appreciation of culture through personal visits and information exchange.”

While the USA suffered(s) racial divides with its Blacks and Whites for the past 236 years, it will now experience greater separation with Blacks, Whites, Mexicans and Muslims—all competing from totally different cultural mandates and religions.  The great philosopher Kant said, “Religion and language are the two great dividers.”  As you can imagine, we’re in for a rough ride as English, Arabic and Spanish all fight for dominance—and completely different languages fighting to be understood within the USA.  Result: ultimately misunderstanding and confrontation on every level, i.e., Balkanization.

FINALLY, THE SHEER NUMBERS OF IMMIGRATION

While most Americans refuse to do anything about the ‘corroding’ of our culture, language and sustainability—it’s obvious in our $13 trillion debt, water shortages, endless wars draining us to death, medical care breakdown and general apathy toward everything.  Yet, the numbers keep rising toward adding 72 million immigrants and another 30 million Americans to reach 100 million by 2035—a scant 24 years from now.

Chris Hedges said, “Civilizations rise, decay and die. Time, as the ancient Greeks argued, for individuals and for states is cyclical. As societies become more complex they become inevitably more precarious. They become increasingly vulnerable. And as they begin to break down there is a strange retreat by a terrified and confused population from reality, an inability to acknowledge the self-evident fragility and impending collapse. The elites at the end speak in phrases and jargon that do not correlate to reality. They retreat into isolated compounds, whether at the court at Versailles, the Forbidden City or modern palatial estates. The elites indulge in unchecked accumulation of wealth and extravagant consumption. They are deaf to the suffering of the masses that are repressed with greater and greater ferocity. Resources are more ruthlessly depleted until they are exhausted.” (Source: “This time we’re taking the whole planet with us”)

I see this ‘thing’ coming as surely as the dawn.  Many others do, too! The question:  how do we ‘get’ to our leaders before we degrade as a civilization?  How do we force them to change course?

“As food and water shortages expand across the globe, as mounting poverty and misery trigger street protests in the Middle East, Africa and Europe, the elites do what all elites do,” said Hedges. “They launch more wars, plunge their nations deeper into debt, and as it all unravels they take it out on the backs of workers and the poor. The collapse of the global economy, which wiped out a staggering $40 trillion in wealth, was caused when our elites, after destroying our manufacturing base, sold massive quantities of fraudulent mortgage-backed securities to pension funds, small investors, banks, universities, state and foreign governments and shareholders. The elites, to cover the losses, then looted the public treasury to begin the speculation over again. They also, in the name of austerity, began dismantling basic social services, set out to break the last vestiges of unions, slashed jobs, froze wages, threw millions of people out of their homes, and stood by idly as we created a permanent underclass of unemployed and underemployed.”

I hope this column wakens you to what we all face in the next 20 years—or more importantly—what our children face.  It’s not pretty, but we can change it.   Ideas for a positive future:

• Moratorium on all immigration into the United States
• Enforce laws to repatriate 20 million illegal aliens
• Cease ‘free trade’ and engage ‘fair trade’
• Bring manufacturing back to America
• Elect a president with integrity, talent and economic skills
• 50,000 U.S. Marines on Mexican border
• Withdraw from Iraq and Afghanistan
• Engage massive conservation efforts for glass, metal and plastics
• Engage massive efforts  for energy efficiency, insulation, conservation
• Engage massive educational thrust for all American kids at every level
• Engage massive education as to nutrition, exercise and quality of life
• That means we cannot remain a nation of 68 percent obesity and expect to enjoy healthy lives or sustainable healthcare systems
• Regain personal accountability and personal responsibility as a way of life
• Elect politicians that work for America instead of liars and incompetents that now dominate Congress
• Your ideas?

These two videos visually tell you what I have written. Send them to all your friends. The more we understand, the more we will take action. The more we take action, the sooner we change our history toward a viable future for our children:

In a five minute astoundingly simple yet brilliant video, “Immigration, Poverty, and Gum Balls”, Roy Beck, director of www.numbersusa.ORG, graphically illustrates the impact of overpopulation.  Take five minutes to see for yourself:

“Immigration by the numbers—off the chart” by Roy Beck

This 10 minute demonstration shows Americans the results of unending mass immigration on the quality of life and sustainability for future generations: in a word “Mind boggling!” www.NumbersUSA.org

Abortion, Birth Control, Common Sense and Reality

Human beings perform 46 million abortions annually around the planet. Year in and year out! That’s 46 million women requesting and accepting an abortion of their fetus. According to the World Health Organization, 96 percent of those abortions represent a secondary form of birth control. That means they did not have access to birth control on the front end. It means they either couldn’t feed a child, shelter it or provide for it—or they already had birthed too many children they couldn’t feed or care for.

At the same time, eight million adults and 10 million children under the age of 12 die of starvation and related diseases annually around this planet—18 million human beings. Year in and year out! In my world bicycle travels, I witnessed such massive human die-offs personally. I also witnessed living conditions that would turn the stomach of an average Canadian, European, American. (Sources: Time Magazine, World Health Organization)

Two billion human beings live on less than $2.00 per day and over 1.5 billion human beings cannot procure a clean glass of drinking water. Over 2.1 billion humans do not have access to or use of flush toilets with water sewage treatment plants. In India, 1,000 children under the age of 12 die of dysentery, diarrhea and other water borne diseases every day of the year. (Source: www.populationmedia.org) Yet, without birth control, India grows by an added 12 million annually, net gain, on their way from 1.2 billion to 1.6 billion in 39 years. The Ganges River, which I witnessed, flows into the ocean loaded with raw sewage, chemicals and cremated human bodies. It forms a 10,000 mile dead zone at its mouth—where few marine creatures can survive the polluted waters. Today!

Another impoverished nation, Haiti, long before the earthquake, suffered under 9.1 million people on a tiny island desecrated by human overload. They cut 98 percent of their trees. Remember Easter Island’s human population fiasco? Result: extinction of their civilization! Haitians run billions of gallons of raw sewage into the ocean. They live in utter poverty, and yet, because the Catholic Church curtails any birth control, Haiti, already living in appalling human misery—expects to add another 3.1 million onto that island within another decade or so. Because of the lack of birth control, Haitian women birth thousands of children they cannot feed, care for or house. Illiteracy: almost 100 percent. Definition and cause of their poverty: illiteracy, religious mandates and babies.

The third world adds 80 million children annually, net gain. Fact: 57 million humans die off around the planet every year. Humans birth 57 million to replace them while birthing another 80 million to create a net gain—on our way to adding 2 to 3 billion more humans within 40 years.

In other words, the human race seems to love its suffering, its deaths by starvation via all religions that stand against birth control and family planning.

Here in the USA, according to Dottie Lamm, Denver Post last Sunday, “A full 69 percent of African-American children are raised by a single parent, usually the mother.”

They birthed those children because they either didn’t have money or access to birth control. Cost to U.S. taxpayers in Aid to Dependent Children: billions since 1965 when government programs paid for those women to be non-responsible for their actions. White, Black, Hispanic—no difference! Current food stamp usage: 43 million Americans too uneducated, too poor, or incapable of holding down a job to buy food! (Source: Reuters News)

Current high school dropout rates across the nation: 76 percent in Detroit, Michigan; 50 percent in Denver, Colorado; 55 percent in Los Angeles; and most other major cities. Result: 7,000 teenagers per day drop out of high school, 1 every 26 seconds—total of 1.2 million annually—illiterate teens hitting our streets. (Source: Brian Williams, NBC News, CNN)

We may prefer to ignore these sobering statistics, but they will not ignore us or our civilization—given enough time—complete breakdown of our welfare, educational, medical and prison systems.

THE GREAT ABORTION DEBATE

Last week, the U.S. House of Representatives voted down funds for International Family Planning as well as in the United States, i.e., birth control, family counseling regarding “wanted births” as well as termination of pregnancy. They removed the very funds that could alleviate human suffering by providing birth control and family counseling for millions of America’s and third world poor.

Let me be clear: I am not in favor of abortion. Used as birth control, it remains insensible!

Common sense: I am in favor of birth control so that abortion would become largely obviated.

If the House carries through with its ‘charge’ to stop family planning, sex education and family size counseling—its collective choice will generate added millions to that 46 million annual abortions. At the same time, it will cause millions more starvations of adults and children that do become born. It will add to environmental devastation now taking place around the planet as we add 80 million humans annually.

CONSIDER THESE FINANCIAL OUTLAYS ON TOP OF HUMAN DEGRADATION

Cost of International Family Planning: $130 million annually. Planned Parenthood in the USA: Less than $50 million.

Cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars: $12 billion every 30 days. That’s correct; we pay out $12 billion every month to kill people. We killed millions in Korea. We killed over 2.1 million in the Vietnam War. We masterfully snuff out lives in other countries. We have killed hundreds of thousands in Iraq and Afghanistan while displacing 2.5 million as refugees.

I must ask: how many rational people reading this column think it’s okay to kill, maim and displace THAT many people in other countries—spend THAT much money on human death—and stand by to witness THAT much misery around the planet, as well as accelerating environmental carnage, while the majority of scientists assure us accelerating backlash by Mother Earth?

You find those actions unconscionable don’t you. Yet by refusing to speak out, you remain complicit in denying to support birth control for women that desperately need it in the USA and abroad.

Tell me—and your friends—why you support the Pope’s advocacy against birth control when you see the poignant results in Haiti, Mexico and every other Catholic-dominated country. The same goes for Islam, Buddhism, Hindus and other religions. What malady within humanity propels human wretchedness over common sense?

When will we Americans face up to the fact that it’s better to proactively prevent conception rather than abort a fetus at the back end of that conception? When will we come to our senses and support birth control rather than do everything in our power to stop it—yet stand gasping in anger at the abortion rates?

You’re invited to get off your ‘righteous indignation’ and get down to reality. Get down to reasoned thinking! Get down to the nitty-gritty of how fast our civilization fails to deal with reality.

As these children grow into illiteracy, poverty, misery, drugs, ghettoes and welfare—you pay the bills. We’re losing the ‘quality’ of our citizens. Every human being wants and deserves to be successful. We need their positive impact on our country, not the other way around. Wouldn’t it be better for the House of Representatives to vote in $140 million for birth control for the whole year rather that $12 billion for killing people every 30 days in Iraq and Afghanistan? Discrepancy: $144 billion for war versus $140 million for birth control. What’s your choice? When will you speak up?

Part 2: humanity’s future, morals, ethics, choice, environment

Wake Up Hillary: We The People of the Internet Have Risen Up!

During a speech about Internet freedom a heckler interrupted Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and was hauled away in a lame attempt to silence him, for within hours this YouTube went viral:

I knew not to drink from Obama’s Kool-Aid of so called change as soon as he chose as his VP, Joe Biden, a blatant and pandering ‘Christian’ Zionist, who stated on Shalom TV, “There is this inextricable tie between culture, religion, ethnicity that most people do not understand…You don’t have to be a Jew to be a Zionist, I am a Zionist.” [1]

Christian Zionism is a contradiction in terms and Christian Zionism is adding fuel to the tensions between Muslims, Christians and Jews. A ‘blind spot’ of Christian Zionists is the fact that the Palestinian people, every day and in every aspect of their lives are living under an oppressive military occupation. [IBID]

Before we the people elected Obama because we trusted he would be an agent for real change, I attended a rally for him on 14 September 2008, hosted by New York Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney and soap opera star Deidre Hall.

Immediately after the two took their final bows addressing “Central Florida Women for Obama” I infiltrated the back room and was allowed a few minutes with the Congresswoman.

I had more than a few questions, so I handed her paper copies of my 13 September 2008 article, “Questions for the Christian ‘Quartet’ Pursuing the White House Regarding the Holy Land”
Read more…

And requested she please deliver them along with the copy of my second book, Memoirs of a Nice Irish American ‘Girls’ Life in Occupied Territory to Joe Biden that I inscribed with this quote from St. Augustine:

“HOPE has two children. The first is ANGER at the way things are. The second is COURAGE to DO SOMETHING about it.”

Congresswoman Maloney said she would deliver my offerings and even added, “I’ll read it too and get back in touch with you.”

I am still waiting for that part of hell to freeze over.

But it is Hillary Clinton, the democrat demimondaine-defined as “a prostitute who provides service to military personnel” and consummate pandering politician that keeps my Irish up and flaming, and which inspired this:

On 1 February 2007, while still a Senator, Clinton gushed for AIPAC, “Both Israelis and Americans know so well, a democracy is far more than just holding elections. Democracy has to spring from an active and open citizenry dedicated to tolerance, to respect for differences, to the rule of law, to policies that lift us up not tear us down as fellow human beings, and to the value of human life.”

It was Jeff Halper, American Israeli, a 2006 Nobel Peace Prize Nominee, Founder and Coordinator of ICAHD/Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions who first explained to me that, “Israel is a not a democracy but is an Ethnocracy, meaning a country run and controlled by a national group with some democratic elements but set up with Jews in control and structured to keep them in control.” [2]

When Israel became a state in 1948, it was contingent upon upholding the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

One of many Articles Israel ignores, is Article 13 which affirms:

(1) Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state.

(2) Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.

The state of Israel allows, encourages and entices any Jew without any historical tie to the so called holy land to migrate-settle/colonize on Palestinian property under the Jewish Law of Return, while ignoring Article 13 of the UN UDHR and UN Resolution 194:

UN Resolution 194 guarantees the Right of Return-or compensation to the indigenous population of the so called holy land-which is in pieces-Bantustans; disconnected enclaves that warehouse Palestinians; akin to what ‘civilized’ white men did when they forced Native Americans onto disconnected reservations in the “bestest and greatest nation in the world”-Sean Hannity.

The indigenous Palestinians were forced from their homes in 1948 and 1967 and are still denied the right to return home.

They will continue to get screwed by THIS ADMINISTRATION, UNLESS they can be moved to conscience by the TRUE facts on the ground in Israel Palestine; and it is Apartheid!

American taxpayers have also provided the state of Israel, “$1.8 billion a year in military aid and $1.2 billion in economic aid, plus another $1 billion or so in miscellaneous grants, mostly in military supplies, from various U.S. agencies. Tax exempt contributions destined to Israel bring up the total to over $5 billion annually.” [3]

IMAGINE how many Americans could receive basic and humane health care with that funding!

Hillary the hawk and Mistress of AIPAC fantasies claimed, “Israel is a beacon of what’s right in a neighborhood overshadowed by the wrongs of radicalism, extremism, despotism and terrorism. We need only look to one of Israel’s greatest threats: namely, Iran. Make no mistake, Iran poses a threat not only to Israel, but to the entire Middle East and beyond… U.S. policy must be clear and unequivocal. We cannot, we should not, we must not, permit Iran to build or acquire nuclear weapons. And in dealing with this threat as I have said for a very long time, no option can be taken off the table.”

I was in the audience on Feb. 10, 2007 when Dr. Phyllis Bennis, Mid East analyst stated, “Iran has signed the NPT, which allows them the right to have nuclear power and to enrich uranium. The 185 non-nuclear states have agreed to give up the right to have nuclear weapons and the five nuclear powers that signed the NPT agreed to get rid of their nuclear weapons… Iran is not in violation of the NPT, but America is! The USA has been in violation ever since the day they signed it. The USA is acting like a rogue state. The rhetoric out of Washington, the arresting of Iranian diplomats in Iraq, are deliberate provocations hoping that the Iranians will take the bait and respond.”

At that same AIPAC fundraiser, Clinton’s pimping continued, “We also know that the dangers posed to Israel have been compounded by the rise to power of Hamas…Hamas leaders have refused to disarm, to reject violence, or even to recognize the right of Israel to exist.”

Not only did the Palestinian Authority first agree in 1988 to recognize Israel, they reaffirmed this in 1993 during the Oslo Accords, and in 2006, Hamas also issued another olive branch of recognition of Israel- but Israel instead ignored all offers to make peace through justice.

The American government also appears to be under Israeli Occupation or how else to explain their silence which colludes and allows the unabated relentless seizure of Palestinian land and resources?

On 15 November 2005, while a Senator, Hillary Clinton stood on the Jerusalem side of The Wall and was quoted in Ha’aretz, expressing support for The Wall stating it “is against terrorists” and “not against the Palestinian people.”

In 2006, Mordechai Vanunu sent this WAKE UP message and invitation to Hillary and US Christians Regarding The Wall:

After I read Senator Clinton’s inaccurate and insensitive remarks in Ha’aretz, I immediately contacted her through her website.

My email bounced back to me, for I am no longer a New York constituent.

That really got my Irish up, for I was born in The Village and came of age in Levittown, Long Island, and that makes me much more New York than Hillary will ever be.

I also snail mailed Hillary a respectful letter informing her that even a little one such as I, knew all about the many gaps and lack of ‘security’ along The Wall that every taxi driver and ANY would be ‘terrorist’ also knew about in order to travel from the West Bank to Jerusalem without stopping for SECURITY checks.

I also reminded her that we were in the midst of the UN Decade of Creating a Culture of NONVIOLENCE for all the Children of the world.

The only response I received from Senator Clinton was to be put on the DNC’s mailing list soliciting funds!

Clinton also said, “I’ve been a strong supporter of Israel’s right to build a security barrier to keep terrorists out. I have spoken out against the International Court of Justice for questioning Israel’s right to build that fence of security.”

International Law states occupation is to be temporary and that the occupiers are not to transfer their population into occupied territory. And what RIGHT has anyone to put a fence up on somebody else’s property?

When The Wall is super-imposed on a map of Palestinian aquifers, it clearly illuminates that The Wall is all about grabbing land and resources from the indigenous peoples of the land.

“Financed with U.S. aid at a cost of $1.5 million per mile, the Israeli wall prevents residents from receiving health care and emergency medical services. In other areas, the barrier separates farmers from their olive groves which have been their families’ sole livelihood for generations.” [Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, Page 43, Jan/Feb. 2007]

On page one of Jeff Halper’s, Obstacles to Peace, A Re-Framing of the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict, he wrote, “Missing from Israel’s security framing is the very fact of occupation, which Israel both denies exists…and that ‘security’ requires Israel control over the entire country…rendering impossible a just peace based on human rights, international law, reconciliation.”

During one of my interviews with Jeff, he also made me laugh out loud when he told me this joke-and jokes are only funny when they are also true:

“Do you know why Israel does not want to become America’s 51st state? Because then they would only have two senators!”

Another reason my Irish stays up over Hillary, is that she went to the illegal settlement of Gilo, but NOT to the Christian neighborhood of Beit Jala, which is less than a mile away and a five minute car ride from downtown Bethlehem.

Hillary said: “I went to see the fence with my own eyes. During a trip to Gilo, a Jerusalem neighborhood, I was greeted by Col. Danny Tirza, who was overseeing the construction of the security fence.”

The Media and most all of Americas politicians spin Israel’s ILLEGAL colonies as ‘neighborhoods’ but the truth is that every one of them is built upon legally owned Palestinian land; and NOT one of the settlements has been built on legally owned Israeli land!

I too have seen “the fence” and reality is that it divides Palestinians from Palestinians with 25 to 30 foot high concrete slabs with razor wire, trenches, sniper towers, electric fences, military roads, electronic surveillance, remote controlled infantry and buffer zones stretch over 100 miles wide and deny Palestinians access to their land, families, jobs, and resources!

The Wall has also eviscerated the sister cities of Bethlehem and Jerusalem and will soon completely separate Bethlehem from her sister villages of Beit Sahour and Beit Jala.

Bethlehem’s significance to and historic ties with Palestinian East Jerusalem and its economic demise caused by The Wall is the end of any viable Two-State solution.

The growing ghettoization of Bethlehem is not only destroying ancient communities, it violates International Law, The Road Map, and basic human rights!

The Wall is an APARTHEID Wall for it divides, separates, humiliates, dominates, controls and denies inalienable human rights to the indigenous people of the so called Holy Land, which it is raping!
Clinton also said, “Col. Tirza’s explanation in his graphic depiction of what was part of the daily life of people living in that one neighborhood, gave me an even greater appreciation for the imperative of the fence and the need to do everything possible to protect Israel against these continuing attacks.”

The truth is that in 2000, before the construction of The Wall began, there were less ‘attacks’ than in 2008!
Clinton is also conveniently clueless that in Beit Jala, in the year 2000, a few hopeless militants who had given up on the ‘peace makers’ of the West to demand Israel adhere to International Law, UN Resolutions and the UN Declaration of Human Rights-instead, infiltrated the Christian village to shoot into the illegal colony of Gilo.

The Israeli Defense Force immediately retaliated and let loose with hell fire upon the innocent ones who are always caught in the crossfire of violence!

One such little one was George Nazzal of Beit Jala, and it is his face that adorns my website.

The shrapnel that blew apart the wall of George’s bedroom read “Made in USA” and was delivered via American made Apache helicopters that buzzed over his innocent head.

If George had been in his bed, he would be dead!

American Israeli,  Professor Jeff Halper also informed me:
“Israel is a not a democracy but is an Ethnocracy, meaning a country run and controlled by a national group with some democratic elements but set up with Jews in control and structured to keep them in control.

“Since 1967 the Israeli government has destroyed over 18,000 Palestinian homes. 95% of the cases have nothing to do with security. All these homes are on Palestinian private property. The Israeli government will not grant permits for them to build on their own land, and in reality are quietly transferring the Palestinians administratively from the land. They make conditions so intolerable that the Palestinians give up and leave and this is exactly what they are after. Not only do the Palestinians receive no warning when their homes are to be destroyed they are fined $1, 500.00!

“The Israeli government simply does not want to take responsibility and the USA government ignores the situation.

“Missing from Israel’s security framing is the very fact of occupation, which Israel both denies exists…and that ‘security’ requires Israel control over the entire country…rendering impossible a just peace based on human rights, international law, reconciliation.

“Israel has no constitution but has a Declaration of Independence, which promised that Israel would abide by conditions and UN resolutions. They have not fulfilled the agreement which was the basis of their independence.

“One out of three Israeli children lives below the poverty line. It’s probably about 80% for Palestinians. Jews are like everyone else, those who have been abused grow up to be abusers. Things here have been turned on their head: its victim mentality and denial about the occupation. Once Israelis accept the fact that they are occupiers they will have to admit their State Terrorism.

“It has been said that the Israeli’s do not love this land, they just want to possess it.

“There have been three stages to make this occupation permanent. The first was to establish the facts on the ground; the settlements. There are ½ million Israeli’s and four million Palestinians here. They have been forced into Bantustan; truncated mini states; prison states.

“It is apartheid and Bush and Hillary are both willing collaborators. In 1977, Sharon came in with a mandate, money and resources to make the Israeli presence in the West Bank irreversible.

“The second stage began in April 2004 when America approved the Apartheid/Convergence/Realignment Plan and eight settlement blocs. This is just like South Africa!

“The Bush Sharon letter exchange guaranteed that the USA considers the settlements non-negotiable. The Convergence Plan and The Wall create the borders and that is what defines Bantustans. Congress ratified the Bush plan and only Senator Byrd of West Virginia voted no and nine House Representatives.

“Israel has set up a matrix of control; a thick web of settlements guaranteed to make the occupation permanent by establishing facts on the ground. Israel denies there is an occupation, so everything is reduced to terrorism. It is our job to insist upon the human rights issue, for occupied people have International Law on their side.”
However, I do agree with one thing Clinton did say while she was a Senator from my home state:

“It is not enough for us to say the right things; we’ve got to be smart and tough enough to do the right things that will protect American and Israeli interests now and forever.”

Tough and smart comprehends that the only way to security for Israelis is to do justice for Palestinians.

Tough and smart would demand an end to the occupation and ensure that all people do indeed have equal human rights.

No enduring peace, no security, and no reconciliation is even possible without the foundation of justice; which equates to equal human rights and international law!

1. http://www.wearewideawake.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1031&Itemid=204

2. eileen fleming, Memoirs of a Nice Irish-American ‘Girl’s’ Life in Occupied Territory, Page 15.

3. Dr. Phyllis Bennis, Understanding the Palestine-Israeli Conflict Page 24.

Other SOURCES:
http://clinton.senate.gov/news/statements/details.cfm?id=268474

Eileen Fleming is a regular columnist for Novakeo.com

Eileen Fleming, Founder of WeAreWideAwake.org
A Feature Correspondent for Arabisto.com
Author of “Keep Hope Alive” and “Memoirs of a Nice Irish American ‘Girl’s’ Life in Occupied Territory”
Producer “30 Minutes with Vanunu” and “13 Minutes with Vanunu”

Don’t Be A Sellout Macy Gray

In 2010, Macy Gray, recorded her fifth album, The Sellout. On 17 January 2010, she wrote:

“I’m booked for 2 shows in TelAviv. I’m getting alot of letters from activists urging/begging me to boycott by NOT performing in protest of Apartheid against the Palestinians. What the Israeli government is doing to the Palestinians is disgusting, but I wana go. I gotta lotta fans there I dont want to cancel on and I dont know how my NOT going changes anything. What do you think? Stay or go?” [1]

So far Macy has received over 8,735 responses on Facebook’s  Wall and because she wants “to be as famous as midnight, as powerful as a gun, as loved as a pizza” I offer her the way because ignorance is our greatest enemy and the truth is more powerful than bullets!

In 2010, Elvis Costello canceled both of his scheduled performances in Israel, as “a matter of instinct and conscience [when he came] to the following conclusions…Sometimes a silence in music is better than adding to the static and so an end to it. I cannot imagine receiving another invitation to perform in Israel, which is a matter of regret but I can imagine a better time when I would not be writing this. With the hope for peace and understanding.”

Despite the protests of many of his fans, Sir Elton Hercules John performed in Tel Aviv on June 17, 2010.  Ever since when any of his songs play on my satellite radio, I boycott him by changing the station.

In 1985 Bono joined forces with a group of artists concerned about Apartheid in South Africa. Inspired by his meetings with several of them, he wrote “Silver and Gold.”

Yep, silver and gold.
This song was written in a hotel room in New York City.
‘Round about the time a friend or ours, little Steven,
was putting together a record of artists against apartheid.
This is a song written about a man in a shanty town outside of Johannesburg.
A man who’s sick of looking down the barrel of white South Africa.
A man who is at the point where he is ready to take up arms against his oppressor.
A man who has lost faith in the peacemakers of the west while
they argue and while they fail to support a man like bishop Tutu
and his request for economic sanctions against South Africa.
Am I buggin’ you?

I hope to ‘bug you’ Macy, because in 2004 the International Court of Justice ruled that The Wall is a violation of International Law because it cuts through the West Bank appropriating Palestinian land and destroying Palestinian villages and economy to make way for further Israeli settlements, all of which are illegal under international law.

“Financed with U.S. aid at a cost of $1.5 million per mile, the Israeli wall prevents residents from receiving health care and emergency medical services. In other areas, the barrier separates farmers from their olive groves which have been their families’ sole livelihood for generations.” [2]

Over six years ago, the International Court of Justice released its Advisory Opinion on the “Legal Consequences of the Construction of a Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territories” which detailed the court’s findings that the Wall violated Israel’s obligations under international law, that the Wall should be removed, and that Israel ought to lift its travel restrictions on Palestinians.

Today construction of the Wall continues, Israel’s restrictions on Palestinians have intensified and over one million food-bearing trees have been destroyed to build The Wall, which for many Palestinians are the last resource to provide food for their children.

The Palestinian aspiration for a viable independent state is also negated by the Wall, for it isolates villages from their mother cities and divides the West Bank into disconnected cantons: which in Afrikaner is spelled Bantustans and universally understood as ghettos!

According to a UN report, Haaretz columnist Danny Rubinstein admitted that “Israel today was an apartheid State with four different Palestinian groups: those in Gaza, East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Israeli Palestinians, each of which had a different status…even if the wall followed strictly the line of the pre-1967 border, it would still not be justified. The two peoples needed cooperation rather than walls because they must be neighbors.” [3]

“An apartheid society is much more than just a ‘settler colony’. It involves specific forms of oppression that actively strip the original inhabitants of any rights at all, whereas civilian members of the invader caste are given all kinds of sumptuous privileges.” [4]

On May 14, 1948, The Declaration of the establishment of Israel affirmed that, “The State of Israel will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel: it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion it will guarantee freedom of religion [and] conscience and will be faithful to the Charter of the United Nations.”

On December 20, 2006, Israeli Minister of Education, Shulamit Aloni was quoted in the popular Israeli newspaper, Yediot Acharonot:“The truth which is known to all; through its army, the government of Israel practices a brutal form of Apartheid in the territory it occupies. Its army has turned every Palestinian village and town into a fenced-in, or blocked-in, detention camp.”

How could a state founded on “equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants” come to be such a state of hypocrisy?

History in a Time Line:

On July 5, 1950, Israel enacted the Law of Return by which Jews anywhere in the world, have a “right” to immigrate to Israel on the grounds that they are returning to their own state, even if they have never been there before. [5]

On July 14, 1952: The enactment of the Citizenship/Jewish Nationality Law, results in Israel becoming the only state in the world to grant a particular national-religious group—the Jews—the right to settle in it and gain automatic citizenship. In 1953, South Africa’s Prime Minister Daniel Malan becomes the first foreign head of government to visit Israel and returns home with the message that Israel can be a source of inspiration for white South Africans. [IBID]

In 1962, South African Prime Minister Verwoerd declares that Jews “took Israel from the Arabs after the Arabs had lived there for a thousand years. In that I agree with them, Israel, like South Africa, is an apartheid state.” [IBID]

On August 1, 1967, Israel enacted the Agricultural Settlement Law, which bans Israeli citizens of non-Jewish nationality- Palestinian Arabs- from working on Jewish National Fund lands, well over 80% of the land in Israel. Knesset member Uri Avnery stated: “This law is going to expel Arab cultivators from the land that was formerly theirs and was handed over to the Jews.” [IBID]

On April 4, 1969, General Moshe Dayan is quoted in the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz telling students at Israel’s Technion Institute that “Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You don’t even know the names of these Arab villages, and I don’t blame you, because these geography books no longer exist. Not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either… There is not one single place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population.”[IBID]

On April 28, 1971: C. L. Sulzberger, writing in The New York Times, quoted South African Prime Minister John Vorster as saying that Israel is faced with an apartheid problem, namely how to handle its Arab inhabitants. Sulzberger wrote: “Both South Africa and Israel are in a sense intruder states. They were built by pioneers originating abroad and settling in partially inhabited areas.” [IBID]

On September 13, 1978, in Washington, D.C. The Camp David Accords are signed by Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and witnessed by President Jimmy Carter. The Accords reaffirm U.N. Resolutions 242 and 338, which prohibit acquisition of land by force, call for Israel’s withdrawal of military and civilian forces from the West Bank and Gaza, and prescribe ‘full autonomy’ for the inhabitants of the territories. Begin orally promises Carter to freeze all settlement activity during the subsequent peace talks. Once back in Israel, however, the Israeli prime minister continues to confiscate, settle, and fortify the occupied territories. [IBID]

On September 13, 1985, Rep. George Crockett (D-MI), after visiting the Israeli-occupied West Bank, compares the living conditions there with those of South African blacks and concludes that the West Bank is an instance of apartheid that no one in the U.S. is talking about. [IBID]

In July 2000, President Bill Clinton convenes the Camp David II Peace Summit between Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat. Clinton—not Barak—offers Arafat the withdrawal of some 40,000 Jewish settlers, leaving more than 180,000 in 209 settlements, all of which are interconnected by roads that cover approximately 10% of the occupied land. Effectively, this divides the West Bank into at least two non-contiguous areas and multiple fragments. Palestinians would have no control over the borders around them, the air space above them, or the water reserves under them. Barak called it a generous offer and Arafat rightly refused to sign. [IBID]

August 31, 2001: Durban, South Africa. Up to 50,000 South Africans march in support of the Palestinian people. In their Declaration by South Africans on Apartheid and the Struggle for Palestine they proclaim: “We, South Africans who lived for decades under rulers with a colonial mentality, see Israeli occupation as a strange survival of colonialism in the 21st century. Only in Israel do we hear of ‘settlements’ and ‘settlers.’ Only in Israel do soldiers and armed civilian groups take over hilltops, demolish homes, uproot trees and destroy crops, shell schools, churches and mosques, plunder water reserves, and block access to an indigenous population’s freedom of movement and right to earn a living. These human rights violations were unacceptable in apartheid South Africa and are an affront to us in apartheid Israel.” [IBID]

October 23, 2001: Ronnie Kasrils, a Jew and a minister in the South African government, co-authors a petition “Not in My Name,” signed by some 200 members of South Africa’s Jewish community, reads: “It becomes difficult, from a South African perspective, not to draw parallels with the oppression expressed by Palestinians under the hand of Israel and the oppression experienced in South Africa under apartheid rule.” [IBID]

Three years later, Kasrils will go to the Occupied Territories and conclude: “This is much worse than apartheid. Israeli measures, the brutality, make apartheid look like a picnic. We never had jets attacking our townships. We never had sieges that lasted month after month. We never had tanks destroying houses. We had armored vehicles and police using small arms to shoot people but not on this scale.” [IBID]

April 29, 2002: Boston, MA. Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who received a Nobel Peace Prize for his relentless work confronting and challenging South Africa’s Apartheid regime said he is “very deeply distressed” by what he observed in his recent visit to the Holy Land, adding, “It reminded me so much of what happened in South Africa [I saw] the humiliation of the Palestinians at checkpoints and roadblocks, suffering like us when young white police officers prevented us from moving about.”

Referring to Americans, he added, “People are scared in this country to say wrong is wrong because the Jewish lobby is powerful—very powerful. Well, so what? The apartheid government was very powerful, but today it no longer exists.” [IBID]

On December 20, 2006, Archbishop Tutu was quoted in The Guardian: “Israel will never get true security and safety through oppressing another people. A true peace can ultimately be built only on justice…if peace could come to South Africa, surely it can come to the Holy Land.”

The following nine categories make up the necessary, sufficient, and defining characteristics of apartheid regimes:

1. Violence: Apartheid is a state of war initiated by a de facto invading ethnic minority, which at least in the short term originates from a non-neighboring locality. In all main instances of apartheid most if not all members of the invading group originate from a different continent. The invading ethnic minority and its self-defined descendants then continue to dominate the indigenous majority by means of their military superiority and by their continuous threats and uses of violence.

2. Repopulation: Apartheid is also a continuation of depopulation and population transfer. One example is seen in the obliteration of the indigenous Bedouins that Israel denies free movement to graze their herds and are silently transferring the Bedouins to new locales, such as atop of garbage dumps.

3. Citizenship: The indigenous people are often denied citizenship in their own country by the apartheid state authorities, which are ironically and irrationally, run and staffed by the recent arrivals to the country.
4. Land: Apartheid entails land confiscation, land redistribution and forced removals, almost without exception to the benefit of the invading ethnic minority. Usually, members of the ethnic majority are forced on to barren and unfertile soils, where they must also try to survive under impoverished and overcrowded conditions.

5. Work: Apartheid displays systematic exploitation of the indigenous class in the production process and different pay or taxation for the same work.

6. Access: There is ethnically differentiated access to employment, food, water, health care, emergency services, clean air, and other needs, including the need for leisure activities, in each case ensuring superior access for the favored ethnic community.

7. Education: There are also different kinds of education offered and forced upon the different ethnic groups.

8. Language: A basic apartheid characteristic is the fact that only very few of the invaders and their descendants ever learn the language(s) of the indigenous victims.

9. Thought: Finally, apartheid contains ideologies or ‘necessary illusions’ in order to convince the privileged minorities that they are inherently superior and the indigenous majorities that they are inherently inferior. Much of apartheid thought is shaped by typical war propaganda. The enemy is dehumanized by both sides’ ideologies, words and other symbols are used to incite or provoke people to violence, but mostly so by the invaders and their descendants. [6]
John Lennon said and sang:

“Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives. I think we’re being run by maniacs for maniacal ends…I believe that as soon as people want peace in the world they can have it. The only trouble is they are not aware they can get it…All we are saying is give peace a chance…All you need is love…Imagine all the people living life in peace. You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one. I hope someday you’ll join us, and the world will be as one.”

Imagine the day when all performing Artists are also people of Conscience with ears to hear and heed the Palestinian civil societies call for BDS: Boycott, Divest and Sanction Israel-until Israel changes its immoral behavior.

I imagine then they all could be “as famous as midnight, as powerful as a gun, as loved as a pizza” because they will have helped usher in a sister and brotherhood of humankind and all people will share, care and nurture a world in harmony because all have eyes to see “the other” is also them; just in different skin and in different places.

Notes

1. 

2. Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, Page 43, Jan/Feb. 2007

3. http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3444320,00.html

4. Apartheid Ancient, Past, and Present Systematic and Gross Human Rights
Violations in Graeco-Roman Egypt, South Africa, and Israel/Palestine, By Anthony Löwstedt. Page 77.

5. The Link, “About That Word Apartheid”, April-May 2007, Published by Americans for Middle East Understanding, Inc.

6. Paraphrased from pages 71-73, Apartheid Ancient, Past, and Present Systematic and Gross Human Rights Violations in Graeco-Roman Egypt, South Africa, and Israel/Palestine, By Anthony Löwstedt. Page 77.

Occupiers who became victims of their Military Occupation Broke the Silence

“Occupation of the Territories” is being published in Hebrew and by Breaking the Silence, “a group of Israeli ex-soldiers with an established record of gathering first-person accounts of IDF operations. The information was meticulously checked and re-checked for accuracy; there is no mistaking the ring of truth in the reports, which reveal consistent patterns, and thus have a powerful cumulative force. To read them is to see the profound moral corruption of the occupation in all its starkness. They show us ordinary, decent young soldiers, caught up in an impossible situation, sometimes trying desperately to make sense of that situation, but mostly following their orders without question. In a number of cases, those interviewed have clearly been psychologically and spiritually scarred by their participation in horrific events of which they had little understanding at the time.

“Most painful of all is the inescapable realization that the events reported by the soldiers—in straightforward, unpretentious, searing language—are in no sense unusual. They describe the rule and the norm, the very stuff of the occupation, now forty-three-and-a-half years old and going strong. No one involved in maintaining it gets away unscathed in heart or soul, including the ordinary soldiers who do what they’re told, although only a small number are capable of the kind of articulate reflection on their experience that we find in this book.

“But it is not only the soldiers and the policemen and the judges and the bureaucrats who pay a personal price, along with their Palestinian victims. As the Israeli philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz predicted forty-three years ago, the occupation has brutalized Israeli society as a whole and eroded the moral foundation of our very existence. If there is still hope for Israel, it lies with those remnants of the peace camp that remain active and, in particular, with groups such as Breaking the Silence, who offer a taste of the bitter, but perhaps ultimately healing, truth.” [1]

In 2009, the testimonies of fifty-four Israeli combat soldiers who participated in Operation Cast was published by Breaking the Silence.

The testimonies exposed significant gaps between the report by the Israeli military and the events on the ground.

Israeli Forces “accepted practices” included the needless destruction of hundreds of homes and mosques, the firing of phosphorous gas into populated areas, the killing of innocent victims with small arms, the destruction of private property, and a permissive atmosphere in the command structure that enabled soldiers to act without moral restrictions.

The testimonies revealed that the soldiers were not given directives stating the goal of the operation and one soldier testified, “there was not much said about the issue of innocent civilians.”

Many soldiers said that they fought without seeing “the enemy before their eyes.”

“You feel like an infantile little kid with a magnifying glass looking at ants, burning them,” one of the soldiers testified that “a 20-year-old kid should not have to do these kinds of things to other people.”

Mikhael Mankin said, “The testimonies prove that the immoral way the war was carried out was due to the systems in place and not the individual soldier. This is an urgent call to Israel’s society and leadership to take a sober look at the foolishness of our policies.”

On the last day of my fifth trip to Israel Palestine, on 27 July 2007, I met with Mikhael Mankin, a religious Jew and former Infantry Lieutenant in the Israeli Defense Force/IDF who served six years in the occupied territories of Bethlehem, Hebron, Ramallah, Jenin and the Gaza Strip.

Mikhael was discharged from the IDF in 2002 and had become the Foreign Relations Manager of Breaking the Silence, and he said:

“I am a practicing Jew and in two weeks we go into the month of repentance; which requires acknowledging our sins. We cannot change things until we acknowledge our culpability.

“The problem is government policy that is implemented by young soldiers and whenever religion is involved, we will have fundamentalism. The Israeli peace and justice activists are less than 1% of Israeli society and anybody who is an activist is an optimist. You cannot do anything if you do not believe you can do something to change the situation. We have to remind ourselves that we are the minority; [it appears that] we are loosing, but we remind ourselves we are right!

“Everybody in Israel knows somebody who has served in the occupied territories. The situation in 2007 is worse than 2006 and it looks worse for 2008, but more and more activists-like Anarchists Against the Wall and Tayoush are actively working with Palestinians against the occupation, they are not afraid to travel in the occupied territories and are learning Arabic. Two, three years ago you wouldn’t have heard anything; but now every week Israelis are getting arrested for fighting the occupation.

“A few years ago, the soldiers you have encountered at the checkpoints would have been me. Soldiers like myself who served during the second intifada, got our education on the job. You all have visited more places [the past nine days] than most Israelis ever have. Israeli’s have no idea what is happening in the occupied territories. But, so far in 2007 we have given more Israeli’s a tour through Hebron than we did in 2005 and 2006 combined. Hebron is a ghost town, the settlers are unbearable and every soldier who is stationed there understands the 600 settlers there are psychotic; insane.

“I became very opinionated while in the army, but I kept it all to myself. Nobody talks about it in the army and I was the commander and did not know until after I got out that one of the other soldiers in my unit was feeling the same way, until he gave his testimony. Israeli society wants you to believe you are a bad apple for speaking out because unless you trust the system, it will fall apart. Most Israelis who get out of the army leave the country and are probably all drugged out. They suffer posttraumatic syndrome but we are the victimizers. My age group is getting the hell out of here or walling themselves off from society and are not involved in anything.

“Over 450 former soldiers have now given their testimonies and we don’t publish any stories without the corroboration coming from another former soldier and the testimonies are kept anonymous.

“You have to understand you must preach to your own people; we want to shake up the comfortable people who may agree with us in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, but are not activists yet.”

Another Israeli ex-soldier of Breaking the Silence wrote:

“Since our discharge from the army, we all feel that we have become different. We feel that service in the occupied territories and the incidents we faced have distorted and harmed the moral values on which we grew up.
“We all agree that as long as Israeli society keeps sending its best people to military combat service in the occupied territories, it is extremely important that all of us, Israeli citizens, know the price which the generation who is fighting in the territories is paying, the impossible situations it is facing, the insanity it is confronting everyday, and the heavy burden it bears after being discharged from the IDF, a heavy burden that hasn’t left us.

“That’s why we decided to break the silence, because it’s time to tell. Time to tell about everything that goes on there each and every day.

“We all served in the territories. Some served in Gaza, some in Hebron, some in Bethlehem and the rest served in other places. We all manned checkpoints participated in patrols and arrests and took part in the war against terror. We all realized that the daily struggle against terror and the daily interaction with the civilian population has left us helpless. Our sense of justice was distorted, and so were our morality and emotions.

“The reality we experienced was made of: Innocent civilians being hurt, Kids not going to school because of the curfew, and parents who can’t bring food home because they can’t go to work.
“This reality has stayed us and will not go away. After discharge from the army, we decided that we shouldn’t go on. We shouldn’t forget what we ourselves did and what we witnessed. We decided to break the silence.”

Another ex-soldier said, “There is a very clear and powerful connection between how much time you serve in the territories and how fucked in the head you get.” [2]

The former soldiers of Breaking the Silence began by breaking the silence about Hebron, the most painful place I have ever been, but I have not yet made it into Gaza!

In June 2005, my guide through Hebron was Jerry Levin, who was then a full-time volunteer with Christian Peacemaker Teams/CPT. Jerry had also once been CNN’s Middle East bureau chief in the 1980′s. At the time, Jerry was a secular Jew who was and is married to Sis, a life-long Christian.
Jerry had been kidnapped and held hostage in Lebanon by the Hezbollah for nearly a year, and after he experienced a mystical Christmas Eve and shortly thereafter escaped from captivity when the door to his ‘cell’ was left unlocked. Ever since Jerry and Sis have dedicated their lives to the Palestinian cause for equal human rights.

Jerry is lightly built and sprouts bilateral hearing aids and he told me, “Every time I get ready to return to Palestine, everyone asks me, ‘Aren’t you afraid?’ I reply, of what, the Palestinians? No way! But when it comes to the Israelis soldiers, you bet I am!”
Hebron in 2005 was filled with three thousand Israeli soldiers and a few hundred Israeli settlers/colonists/squatters who had displaced the indigenous Palestinians.

The eighteen- to twenty-one-year-old soldiers patrolled the streets with their weapons at the ready and turned Jerry and I away at the first checkpoint we came to. Jerry smiled as he told me, “Most of the soldiers don’t like the CPTs. Whenever they won’t let us through, we just go another way, and always, eventually, get where we want to go.”

The narrow, winding stone streets of Hebron are centuries old, but in the 21st century, one side is Palestinian and the other Israeli, but their only connection to the other is a thick, deeply sagging netting strung above ones head that catches the huge rocks, shovels, electronic equipment, furniture, and all manner of debris that have been flung onto it by the settlers/colonists/squatters.

I asked Jerry if it ever gave way and hit Palestinians on the head and he responded, “That’s the intention, but it gets cleaned out about every year or so. Come back in a few months, and this netting will be much closer to your head. The settlers just throw whatever they want onto the netting; they do what ever they want and get away with it. The CPT’s run interference by nonviolent resistance; we get the children and woman to where they need to be going and back again. Sometimes, the settlers curse and stone us all; it keeps it interesting.”

Jerry pointed out all the formerly Palestinian homes that the settlers have painted graffiti, such as “GAS THE ARABS” and Stars of David upon.  The oppression affected me viscerally and I was nauseous all day and threw up all that night. I felt as if I had entered into every movie set and photograph of the Jewish ghettos before the Holocaust.

Ever since my first journey to Israel Palestine in June 2005, I have tried to break the silence about the undemocratic state of Israel -and my governments aiding and abetting of it-on the World Wide Web.

My target audience has always been the misinformed and uninformed American Christians, for as Mikkael said, we must preach to our own, even when our own will not listen.

1. 

2. http://www.breakingthesilence.org.il/about_e.asp

LEARN MORE:

Breaking the Silence

The Little Town of Bethlehem in 2010 is still Occupied Territory

The Associated Press recently reported:

“Tourism is one of the few areas of strong Israeli-Palestinian coordination. So far this year, 1.4 million tourists have visited the traditional birthplace of Jesus and 90,000 are expected during the Christmas season, a significant increase over last year, according to Israeli government figures. The numbers of visitors have been rising steadily in recent years.

“Christians have lost their majority: More than two-thirds of the 50,000 Palestinian residents are Muslim. Still, the town does its best to take advantage of its place in Christian history, going so far as to link the Christmas nativity story to the fact that it houses the West Bank’s best maternity facility…situated just half a mile from the Church of the Nativity which marks the traditional birthplace of Jesus.

“The hospital has been a Bethlehem institution since 1882. Political violence caused it to shut in 1985, but the Sovereign Order of Malta, a lay Roman Catholic order, reopened it as a maternity hospital in 1990. The old building hosts advanced facilities. One wing houses the Palestinian territories’ only intensive care unit for severely premature babies. Its 18 incubators often hold tiny babies born as much as three months early.” [1]

On July 27, 2007 I wrote from Bethlehem:

In a private West Bank pediatric hospital, Dr. Rafat-Allawi, of Bethlehem and four General Practice residents spoke to me for the forty-five minutes that was their break time in a 116 hour week that required them to be on call at forty hour stretches. The residents were paid $1, 400.00 a month, twice what physicians are paid in the public government hospitals.

Dr. Zafer Al-Qaisi, is from Jerusalem, Dr. Mohammad Abu Yousef and Dr. Sufyan Amro are both from Hebron and the lone female, Dr. Ninn Hafiri is from Beit Jala.

Dr. Yousef: “Three days ago, I had a critical cardiac patient that required transport to Israeli hospital, as we do not have the facilities or specialists here to treat critical cases. I had to apply for a permit; permission to travel with the child in the ambulance to Jerusalem, but was refused as the Israelis claimed I was a security risk; a threat to the state of Israel.”

Dr. Amro: “Yes, a threat with his stethoscope! I had a patient that was one week old with severe heart disease and needed to go to Jerusalem for emergency care. The mother, a paramedic and I traveled with the baby in the ambulance. At the checkpoint, the Israeli soldier; a female laughed and told the mother in broken Arabic, ‘You cannot pass through until you admit you are a prostitute.’ The mother did not understand what she was saying and why the soldiers were laughing and joking as her baby was blue, but she said what the soldier demanded and we finally were let through. I do not know what happened with that baby and this harassment at the checkpoints is not unusual. At the checkpoints it is usual to wait 3-4 hours and because Palestinian ambulances are not allowed through, we must hire Israeli ambulances for transport. They charge 1,800 shekels [ 450.00 USA dollars] and the parents cannot even make that much money in a month of work.”

Dr. Allawi: “The other alternative from going to Jerusalem [a few miles away] is to take the children to Jordan for care, but that trip can take two days. Before the intifada, we were able to go to Jerusalem, but not since. Yesterday, I had a child in renal failure and there is no pediatric dialysis available in the West Bank. It took over twelve hours to locate a hospital in Israel to take him, but it was too late and he is dead.”

Dr. Amro: “There are no specialists in the West Bank. The Palestinian Authority pays 80 million a year to Jordan and [Israeli] Hadassah hospitals for medical care. They could build hospitals in the West Bank and train specialists here!”

I asked did any of them have any faith in Tony Blair and the Quartet’s initiative to build Palestinian infrastructures, especially in the medical field. They all laughed and Dr. Allawi added, “We have a very weak Health Ministry and there is no state authority. In 1994, when the PA started, its aim was that Palestine would assume authority and responsibility for ourselves and the Israelis present a false front.”

When I commented that under International Law the occupiers are responsible for the needs and requirements of the occupied, the doctors laughed again, for it is the law of the jungle that rules the Holy Land.

Dr. Amro: “It’s a revolving door in the West Bank. We treat these babies as best we can, the parents don’t have the money to pay for the medicine and milk and the babies return to the hospital every ten days.”

Dr. Al-Qaisi: “We see lots of children with chronic metabolic disorders and there is no money to treat them properly. They should be on special milk for at least six months; we send them home with one bottle and a week’s worth of milk costs 230 shekels that the parents do not have, so they eat potatoes and tomatoes and come back here.”

The doctors see over one hundred children a day and admit a quarter of them. In the public hospitals in places like Hebron, the physicians will see five-hundred a day and admit a fourth of them also.

Dr. Al-Qaisi: “When we [resident doctors] graduate, we can’t find work in the West Bank; you graduate as a GP and you stay that way because there are no facilities to train in specialties.”

Dr. Amro: “The US Aid, the Fulbright Society; they all give food, drugs and money, but don’t support further education.”

Dr. Hafiri: “We need specialists here; this is a major disaster not having any in the West Bank.”

Dr. Amro: “The politicians live in a bubble. We live in the third world, and this is a heaven hospital, the government hospitals in the West Bank are hell! If we need blood for a child, we have to get it from Jerusalem and it takes five hours! So, we are supposed to predict six hours ahead, which child will require blood [stat: immediately].”

Dr. Allawi: “There is no plan, no aim to really change this situation. The world leaders are not serious about changing the situation and really building foundations. Some of us get the opportunity to go to the US and get specialized training, but they don’t come back here.”

But, Dr. Al-Qaisi is the exception to that rule. After the meeting, he offered me a ride back to Jerusalem in his ‘classic’ 18 year old Peugeot. He had come in on his day off and was on his way home after stopping at his brother’s store to pick up some eggs. When he pulled back out into the congested streets, he rear ended a taxi van and dented it slightly. After a few words with the owner of the cab and apology, we were on our way; no insurance info was exchanged and no cop was called; for in Palestine, the people give each other a break.

Dr. Al-Qaisi pulled out his USA citizenship and told me, “In 2004, I won a green card lottery. The USA grants 55,000 green cards a year and if you pass the security checks and all the other criteria, you can get American citizenship. I went to Toledo, Ohio for a while, but I came back home, because my family is the most important thing to me. I don’t care about making a lot of money, I want to be with my family.”
In February 2003, Claire and her family of fourteen -whose three story home and first floor business, adjacent to Rachel’s Tomb in Bethlehem- were informed by the Palestinian Authority that The Wall would soon be coming to their neighborhood.

The family had moved into their comfortable dwelling in 1967, and would spend hours in their back yard garden with a view of open green space and watch pilgrims and tourists visit Rachel’s Tomb and welcome them into their gift shop. The family is now encircled on three sides by 25-30 feet high slabs of concrete which have imprisoned them from the rest of the Little Town of Bethlehem: which is Occupied Territory.

For months the family helplessly observed the preparation work all around them, and then one week before Christmas 2003, Claire’s children went to school and came home to discover that every view from every window was of the concrete monster.

Palestinians like Claire are imprisoned on the Israeli side of the wall and the once economically thriving and vibrant main street in Bethlehem is now a ghost town for stores and restaurants have been abandoned.

Rachel’s tomb and Claire’s tomb are divided by the concrete barrier which is topped by guard towers and patrolled by soldiers in battle gear.

Claire’s home is less than 500 yards inside Bethlehem, and it had been the closest shop to Rachel’s Tomb. Not long ago, multitudes of pilgrims and tourists would shop there, but today only the curious venture down the concrete walled pathway.

According to the Israeli government The Wall which has been deemed illegal by the International Court of Justice in The Hague is for the security of Jewish worshipers at the shrine they revere as the Tomb of Rachel. Rachel was the wife of the biblical patriarch Jacob, who was the first to be named “Israel” for having wrestled and struggled with The Divine being.

On May 14, 1948 The Declaration of the establishment of Israel affirmed:

“One the day of the termination of the British mandate and on the strength of the United Nations General Assembly declare The State of Israel will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel: it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion it will guarantee freedom of religion [and] conscience and will be faithful to the Charter of the United Nations.”

On February 21, 2003, Raanan Gissin, Spokesmen for Ariel Sharon was interviewed regarding The Wall which imprisoned Claire and her family, and he claimed, “The main purpose here is not to annex that land, but to provide security [and to ensure] freedom of access and freedom of religion.”

“Peace, Peace, Peace, they say, when there is no peace.” Jeremiah 8:11

The Wall does not follow the Green Line so even the claims of security are nullified, for The Wall that imprisons Claire and her family divides Palestinians from Palestinians as it eviscerates their economy. Only Jews have freedom of access and religion, for Palestinian civilians are denied access to the holy sites.

The concrete wall and electronic fence has imprisoned hundreds of thousands of Palestinians on the Israeli side, effectively undermining one of the stated purposes which is the policy of Hafrada, which is Hebrew for separation of Israelis and Palestinians and that is: apartheid.

Dr. Jad Issac, the director general of the Applied Research Institute examined a satellite photograph of the area and stated, “Bethlehem is the Bethlehem ghetto now…rather than seeking to ensure freedom of religion, Israel was pushing Bethlehem’s Christian Palestinians to pack up and leave. About 360 Palestinians would be left on the Israeli side and once they get rid of the Christians, then they will label the rest as terrorists.”

Dr. Shmuel Berkovitz, an expert on Jerusalem and Jewish holy places, said The Wall effectively annexed Rachel’s Tomb to Jerusalem from Bethlehem “as a matter of technical separation, without an official declaration. Right now, you can’t see any romantic place there; you can see it only as a military position.”

Rachel’s Tomb is a small stone building with a dome, which was built during the Ottoman rule, but is now completely enclosed by the fortifications, built in 1996 and 1997.

During my first of three visits to Claire, she told me that, “Six years ago when the Israeli army blocked the main street in Bethlehem we hoped it would be temporary. We could not imagine anyone could block another human being and isolate them like they have done to us. A week before last Christmas my children went to school and when they returned they were faced with the concrete wall in front of them. They cried and cried and wanted to know how could such a thing be done to them? We are living in a tomb, we are buried alive. My children suffer and their mother and father can do nothing.

“In another ten years there will be no more Christians in Bethlehem if things do not change soon. Everyone is leaving, we need work, and we need to feed our children. Jesus was born here but we are dying. My children suffer, they are angry and shout because nobody comes to visit us anymore and the children must stay inside after school.

“We use to enjoy being out in our garden watching the people, the trees, the cars that would pass by, but now we only see concrete walls. Our lives have been stolen! Do Americans understand what happens to children when they are buried alive? We need a solution fast so that our children can live like American children! We want human rights! When Hillary Clinton visited Jerusalem and said the wall was not against the Palestinian people, she killed us too! Christians who do not care kill us too!

“My family use to go to Haifa on the weekends, we use to live a peaceful and comfortable life. But now our business is bankrupt and we are in prison for being Palestinians.”

During my last trip to visit Claire, in June 2009, I purchased one of the olive wood nativity sets that she and her family created to symbolize the reality of Bethlehem today. Claire explained, “It has a removable wall; we opened a door where Jesus Christ lays to light our future with hope.”

Visit CLAIRE:

http://www.anastas-bethlehem.com/

1.http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/12/14/AR2010121404292.html

America: Why Ur Peeps B So Dumb?

Ignorance and courage in the age of Lady Gaga…

If you hang out much with thinking people, conversation eventually turns to the serious political and cultural questions of our times. Such as: How can the Americans remain so consistently brain-fucked? Much of the world, including plenty of Americans, asks that question as they watch U.S. culture go down like a thrashing mastodon giving itself up to some Pleistocene tar pit.

One explanation might be the effect of 40 years of deep fried industrial chicken pulp, and 44 ounce Big Gulp soft drinks. Another might be pop culture, which is not culture at all of course, but marketing. Or we could blame it on digital autism: Ever watch commuter monkeys on the subway poking at digital devices, stroking the touch screen for hours on end? That wrinkled Neolithic brows above the squinting red eyes?

But a more reasonable explanation is that, (A) we don’t even know we are doing it, and (B) we cling to institutions dedicated to making sure we never find out.

As William Edwards Deming famously demonstrated, no system can understand itself, and why it does what it does, including the American social system. Not knowing shit about why your society does what it makes for a pretty nasty case of existential unease. So we create institutions whose function is to pretend to know, which makes everyone feel better. Unfortunately, it also makes the savviest among us — those elites who run the institutions — very rich, or safe from the vicissitudes that buffet the rest of us.

Directly or indirectly, they understand that the real function of American social institutions is to justify, rationalize and hide the true purpose of cultural behavior from the lumpenproletariat, and to shape that behavior to the benefit of the institution’s members. “Hey, they’re a lump. Whaddya expect us to do?”

Doubting readers may consider America’s health institutions, the insurance corporations, hospital chains, physicians’ lobbies. Between them they have established a perfectly legal right to clip you and me for thousands of dollars at their own discretion. That we so rabidly defend their right to gouge us, given all the information available in the digital age, mystifies the world.

Two hundred years ago no one would have thought sheer volume of available facts in the digital information age would produce informed Americans. Founders of the republic, steeped in the Enlightenment as they were, and believers in an informed citizenry being vital to freedom and democracy, would be delirious with joy at the prospect. Imagine Jefferson and Franklin high on Google.

The fatal assumption was that Americans would choose to think and learn, instead of cherry picking the blogs and TV channels to reinforce their particular branded choice cultural ignorance, consumer, scientific or political, but especially political. Tom and Ben could never have guessed we would chase prepackaged spectacle, junk science, and titillating rumor such as death panels, Obama as a socialist Muslim and Biblical proof that Adam and Eve rode dinosaurs around Eden. In a nation that equates democracy with everyman’s right to an opinion, no matter how ridiculous, this was probably inevitable. After all, dumb people choose dumb stuff. That’s why they are called dumb.

But throw in sixty years of television’s mind puddling effects, and you end up with 24 million Americans watching Bristol Palin thrashing around on Dancing with the Stars, then watch her being interviewed with all seriousness on the networks as major news. The inescapable conclusion of half of heartland America is that her mama must certainly be presidential material, even if Bristol cannot dance. It ain’t a pretty picture out there in Chattanooga and Keokuk.

The other half, the liberal half, concludes that Bristol’s bad dancing is part of her spawn-of-the-Devil mama’s plan to take over the country, and make millions in the process, not to mention make Tina Fey and Jon Stewart richer than they already are. That’s a tall order for a squirrel brained woman who recently asked a black president to “refutiate” the NAACP (though I kinda like refutiate, myself). Cultural stupidity accounts for virtually every aspect of Sarah Palin, both as a person and a political icon. Which, come to think of it, may be a pretty good reason not to “misunderstimate” her. After all, we’re still talking about her in both political camps. And the woman OWNS the Huffington Post, fer Christsake. Not to mention a franchise on cultural ignorance.

Cultural stupidity might not be so bad, were it not self-reproducing and viral, and prone to place stupid people in charge. All of us have, at some point, looked at a boss and asked ourselves how such a numb-nuts could end up in charge of the joint.

In my own field, the book biz, the top hucksters in sales and marketing, car salesman with degrees, are put in charge of publishing the national literature. Similarly, ex-Pentagon generals segue from killing brown babies in Iraq into university presidents and CEOs. Conversely, business leaders such as Donald Rumsfeld who fancy themselves as battlefield commanders and imagine their employees as troops to be “deployed,” find themselves happily farting behind Pentagon desks. On the strength of having mistaken Sun Tzu’s The Art of War as a business text, they get selected by equally delusional national leaders to make actual war on behalf of the rest of us.

But the most widespread damage is done at more mundane operational levels of the American empire, by clones of the over promoted asshole in the corner office where you work. At least one study demonstrated that random selection for corporate promotions offset the effect significantly. Research again confirms what is common knowledge around every workplace water cooler in the country.

Save my spot in the gulag, I’m off to Wal-Mart

Cultural ignorance of one sort or another is sustained and nurtured in all societies to some degree, because the majority gains material benefit from maintaining it. Americans, for example, reap huge on-the-ground benefits from cultural ignorance — especially the middle class Babbitry — from cultural ignorance generated by American hyper-capitalism in the form of junk affluence.

Purposeful ignorance allows us to enjoy cheaper commodities produced through slave labor, both foreign, and increasingly, domestic, and yet “thank god for his bounty” in the nation’s churches without a trace of guilt or irony. It allows strong arm theft of weaker nations’ resources and goods, to say nothing of the destructiveness of late stage capitalism — using up exhausting every planetary resource that sustains human life.

The American defense, on those rare occasions when one is offered, runs roughly, “Well you commie bastard, I ain’t ever seen a sweatshop and I got no Asian kids chained in the basement. So I’ve got what the guvment calls plausible deniability. Go fuck yerself!”

Uh, don’t look now, but the banksters own your ass, your country has become a work gulag/police state and the most of the world hates you.

Such a thriving American intellectual climate enables capitalist elites to withhold and ration vital resources like health care simply by auctioning it off to the richest. Americans fail to grasp this because the most important fact (that a helluva lot of folks can’t afford to bid, and therefore get to die early) never gets equal play with capitalist political propaganda, to wit, that if we give free medical attention to low income cleft palate babies, a wave of Leninism will seize the nation. That is cultural ignorance. We breathe the stuff every day of our lives.

But when Americans too poor to buy health care nevertheless vote to retain the corporate auction process, that is cultural stupidity.

(Let us now pause to clutch our hair in our fists and scream AAAAAAGGGGGHHHHH!)

Like the old song says, “Them that don’t know don’t know they don’t know.” I venture to say that even if they did, they would not know why. Primary truths elude us because of the junk affluence and propaganda. We get buried under a deluge of commodities that suggest we are all rich, or at least richer than most of the world. A mountain range of cheap shoes, cars, iPods, ridiculous amounts of available foodstuffs, and the entire spectacle of engorgement defines, and is enforced as, “quality of life” under materialistic commodities capitalism. The goods we have in our clutches trump the philosophical, or even the most practical considerations. “I may die early eating unidentified beef byproducts soaked in waste chemicals, but I’ll die owning a 65-inch HDTV and a new five speed automatic Dodge Durango with a 5.7 L Hemi V8 under the hood!”

Even the threat of toasting planetary life is not enough to shake Americans loose from this disconnect. As Professor Emeritus of Natural Resources and Ecology & Evolutionary Biology Guy R. McPherson points out, “79.6% of respondents to a Scientific American poll are unwilling to forgo even a single penny to forestall the risk of catastrophic climate change. Scientific American readers undoubtedly are better informed than the general populace. And yet they won’t pay a thing to avoid extinction of our species. Kinda makes you warm and fuzzy all over, doesn’t it?”

Let us pray the next generation is a tad sharper.

Taser the tots

The “American Lifestyle,” increasingly suspect as it is these days, is heavily soldiered and policed in the name of keeping we self-defined lotus eaters safe and secure from a jealous outside world. Which according to cultural consensus is a world that is at this very moment is stuffing its under drawers with explosives and buying plane tickets to Moline. Cultural ignorance dictates that the best way to stop foreign terrorists flying into the country is by humiliating American citizens flying out of the country. Go ahead, grope me, X-ray my dick and for god sake don’t let anyone bring a large bottle of shampoo on board. In an obedient, authority worshipping police state, physical insult and surveillance are proof of safety.

It’s profitable too, and not just for scanner manufacturers. The brouhaha over body scanners and crotch groping provide media with titillating fuel for ratings, thereby driving up TV advertising rates, which is passed on in the price of products we buy. So we pay to be insulted, have the hell scared out of us, and to unknowingly have our behavior shaped. Under American style capitalism, this mobius strip of cultural ignorance is called a win-win situation for everybody.

This also conveniently distracts us from the everyday human insult we practice on one another, as a result of state manufactured cultural misinformation — fear. Ten years of orange alerts and post 9/11 fear mongering have led us to draw some paradoxical cultural conclusions.

Let us briefly careen off into one of these paradoxes. For instance, that we can taser our way to domestic security and tranquility. Yes, it’s ugly business, but tasing the citizenry must be done. And besides, in these days of high unemployment, it’s a paycheck for somebody — usually, the guy who sat behind us in grade school happily eating chalk.

With taser packing police officers in thousands of schools, even grade schools (a weird enough cultural statement to begin with — needless to say, the resulting deaths and injuries of school kids have personal injury lawyers shouting eureka and contemplating new recreational sail craft moored at Martha’s Vineyard. Such are the rewards of righteous works through cult-ig.

In any case, the chance at a juicy lawsuit is accepted as a satisfactory offset to any screaming and writing in our school hallways. What are 50,000 volts and a little nerve damage, compared to a shot at paying off the credit cards, upgrading the family ride, and maybe remodeling the kitchen too?

But we gotta stick to the subject of cultural ignorance here, mainly because I wrote the title first and am determined to maintain some illusion of a theme here, or at least bullshit the reader into thinking that I have.

Soooo . . .

It can be safely said that cultural ignorance consists of the rational, sensible questions that never get asked. But it also includes the weird ones that are. For instance, one of the questions asked regarding tasering school kids is: What is the allowable weight range of a child to be tased? (Taser manufacturers say 60 pounds.) Somehow, by this geezer’s prehistoric reasoning, that sounds like the wrong question, not to mention one that by its nature leads us away from the cultural truth.

The truth is that we live in a society which sanctions semi-electrocution of its own children on the grounds that it is not fatal, and therefore not true electrocution. It springs from the same streak of cultural cruelty that deems semi-drowning by water boarding not to be torture because it is seldom fatal.

This is not to be uncharitable to American communities willing to pony up tax money for school tasers. They’ve amply demonstrated their affectionate commitment to their children by bringing creationism and pizza-for-breakfast into the schools. But there remains the question, “What kind of community comes up with the idea of tasering its own children?”

The information racketeers

It is the job of our combined institutions to manage cultural information so as to deny the harmful aspects of the rackets they protect through legislation and promote through institutional research. That’s why research shows that cell phone microwaves cause long term memory loss in rats, but do not harm people. Evidently, we are of different, more bullet proof mammalian material.

Our hyper capitalist system, through command of our research, media and political institutions, expands upon and disseminates only that information which generates money and transactions. It avoids, neglects or spins the hell out of information that does not. And if none of those work, the info is exiled to some corner of cyberspace such as Daily Kos, where it cannot change the status quo, yet can be ballyhooed as proof of our national freedom of expression. Here come the rotten eggs from the Internet liberals.

Cyberspace by nature feels very big from the inside, and its affinity groups, seeing themselves in aggregate and in mutual self reference, imagine their role bigger and more effective than it is. From within the highly directed, technologically administrated, marketed-to and propagandized rat cage called America, this is all but impossible to comprehend. Especially when corporate owned media tells us it is.

Take the world recent shaking WikiLeak’s “revelations” of Washington’s petty misery and drivel, which are scarcely revelations, just more extensive details about what we all already knew. Come on now, is it a revelation that Karzai and his entire government is a nest of fraudulent double-crossing thieves? Or that the US is duplicitous? Or that Angela Merkel is dull? The main revelation in the WikiLeaks affair was the U.S. government’s response — which was to bring US freedom of speech policy firmly in line with China’s. Millions of us in cyber ghettoes saw it coming, but our alarm warnings were shouted inside a cyberspace vacuum bell jar.

Bear in mind that I am writing this from outside the US borders and media environment, where people watch the WikiLeaks story unfold more in amusement than anything else.

The WikiLeaks affair is surely seismic to those whose asses ride on the elite diplomatic intrigues. But in the big picture it will not change the way the top lizards in global politics, money and war have done business since the feudal age — which is to say with arrogant disregard for the rest of us. Theirs is an ancient system of human dominance that only shifts names and methodologies over the centuries. Two years from now, little will have changed in the old, old story of the powerful few over the powerless many. In this overarching drama, Obama, Hillary and Julian Assange are passing players. Watching the sweaty, fetid machinations of our overlords with such passionate involvement only keeps us from seeing the big picture — that they are the players and we are the pawns.

Still, I for one am in favor of giving Assange the Médaille militaire, the Noble Prize, 15 virgins in paradise and a billion in cash as a reward for his courage in doing damned well the only significant thing that can be done at this time — momentarily fucking up government control of information. But “potentially stimulating a new age of U.S. government transparency,” (BBC) it ain’t.”

Which brings us to back to the question of cultural ignorance. For ten points, why was Julian Assange forced to do what the world press was supposed to be doing in the first place?

Bulletin: PayPal has caved to government pressure to pull WikiLeak’s PayPal account for contributions. However, the feds generously let PayPal keep its porn and prostitution clients.

The transparency scam

It is a form of cultural ignorance to believe that at some point or other, we were more in charge and that our government was somehow more transparent in the past. Societies declining into obsolescence understandably resist looking forward, and hang onto their past mythologies. Consequently, both liberals and conservatives in America feed on myths of political action which died in Vietnam. The results are ludicrous. Tea Partiers attempt to emulate the 1960s protest gatherings by staging rallies sponsored by the richest beneficiaries of the status quo. For the average TP participant, the goal, near as I can tell, is to “start a new American Revolution,” by wearing foodstuffs, screaming, threatening, and voting for nitwits. Media pundits proclaim the Tea Party “a historic populist movement.”

Neither populist, nor authentic movement, the Tea Party may yet prove historic, however, by seriously fucking things up more than they already are. Spun entirely from manufactured spectacle (and thus void of cohesive political philosophy or internal logic), the Tea Party lurches across the political landscape bellowing at the cameras and collecting the victims of cultural ignorance in sort of a medieval idiots crusade. But to the American public, seeing the Tea Party on television is proof enough of relevancy and significance. After all, stuff doesn’t get on TV unless it’s important.

Progressives also fancy a revolution, one in which they participate through the Internet petitions, and media events such as the risk free Jon Stewart Rally to Restore Sanity, where no one risked even missing an episode of Tremaine. Seeing people like themselves on television was proof fighting the good fight. The Stewart rally was nonetheless culturally historic; we will never see a larger public display of post modern irony congratulating itself.

In the historical view, cultural ignorance is more than the absence of knowledge. It is also the result of long term cultural and political struggle. Since the industrial revolution, the struggle has been between capital and workers. Capital won in America and spread its successful tactics worldwide. Now we watch global capitalism wreck the world and attempt to stay ahead of that wreckage clutching its profits. A subservient world kneels before it, praying that planet destroying jobs will fall their way. Will unrestrained global capitalism, with all the power and momentum on its side and motivated purely by machinelike harvesting of profits, reduce the faceless masses in its path to slavery? Does a duck shit in a pond?

Meanwhile, here we are, American riders on the short bus, barreling into the Grand Canyon. With typical American gunpoint optimism, we’ve convinced ourselves we’re in an airplane. A few smarter kids in the back whisper about hijacking and turning the bus around. But the security cop riding shotgun just strokes his taser and smiles. Not that yours truly has the ass to take on the security surveillance state. Hell no. I jumped out the window when the bus shot past Mexico.

What America needs is some balls

GOP honcho Mitch O’Connell says what America needs is for Republicans to finish beating the snot out of Obama, and strengthen the already rich by eliminating taxes for them and shifting the burden onto us. Obama says America needs to find bipartisan cooperation with the party of ruthlessness. Elton John says that America needs more compassion (Thanks, we never noticed).

What America really needs is a wall-to-wall people’s insurrection, preferably based on force and fear of force, the only thing oligarchs understand. And even then the odds are not good. The oligarchs have all the legal power, police, jails and prisons, surveillance and firepower. Not to mention a docile populace.

Shy of open insurrection, a nationwide refusal to pay income taxes would certainly shake things up. But broader America is happy in the sense they know happiness as an undisturbed regimen of toil, stress and commodity consumption. Despite the way it looks in the news, most Americans remain untouched by foreclosure, bankruptcy and unemployment. So risking loss of their work-buy-sleep cycle in an insurrection looks to be sheer lunacy to them. Like cows, they are kept comfortable in the pure animal sense to be milked for profit. Animal comfort kills all thoughts of revolution. Hell, half of mankind would be thrilled with the average American’s present material situation.

And besides, revolutionary history does not exist for Americans. The 20th Century’s successful revolutions in Russia, Germany, Mexico, China, and Cuba are wired into our minds as history’s evil failures, because all but one were Marxist. (The only successful non-Marxist revolution of the 20th Century was Fidel Castro’s Cuban Revolution).

So if we are talking change through revolt, we’re necessarily talking about deconditioning because the thing we fear already has a life deep in our own consciousness. Deconditioning from cultural ignorance is at the heart of any insurrectionary politics.

Deconditioning also involves risk and suffering. But it is transformative, freeing the self from helplessness and fear. It unleashes the fifth freedom, the right to an autonomous consciousness. That makes deconditioning about as individual and personal act as is possible. Maybe the only genuine individual act.

Once unencumbered by self-induced and manufactured cultural ignorance, it becomes clear that politics worldwide is entirely about money, power and national mythology, with or without some degree of human rights. America still has all of the above to one degree or another. Yet for all practical purposes, such as advancing the freedom and the well being of its own people, the American republic has collapsed.

Of course, there is still money to be made by the already rich. So the million or so people who own the country and the government use their control to convince us that there is no collapse, just economic and political problems that need to be solved. Naturally, they are willing to do that for us. Consequently, the economy is discussed in political terms, because the government is the only body with the power to legislate, and therefore render the will of the owning class into law.

But politics and money are never going to fill what is essentially a public vacuum that is moral, philosophical and spiritual. (The latter was instantly recognized by fundamentalist Christians, disfigured by cultural ignorance, as they may be.) Not many ordinary Americans talk about this vacuum. The required spiritual and philosophical language has been successfully purged by newspeak, popular culture, a human regimentation process masquerading as a national educational system, and the ruthlessness of everyday competition, which leaves no time to contemplate anything.

Still, the void, the meaninglessness of ordinary work and the emptiness of daily life scares thinking citizens shitless, with its many unspeakables, spy cams, security state pronouncements, citizens being economically disappeared, and general back-of-the-mind unease. Capitalism’s faceless machinery has colonized our very souls. If the political was not personal to begin with, it’s personal now.

Some Americans believe we can collectively triumph over the monolith we presently fear and worship. Others believe the best we can do is to find the personal strength to endure and go forward on lonely inner plains of the self.

Doing either will take inner moral, spiritual and intellectual liberation. It all depends on where you choose to fight your battle. Or if you even choose to fight it. But one thing is certain. The only way out is in.

Source: Joe Bageant

Mental Ghettos Weaken the US

So many intelligent Americans believe, say and do stupid things. When a large fraction of the population is like this, a nation rots from the inside and succumbs to external forces.

I have always searched for the simplest yet best ways to explain what I see as a multi-decade decline of every aspect of the United States, especially its political system and government. I keep coming back to the inescapable logic that a large fraction of Americans, regardless of their education, economic status and political alignment, must suffer from delusion. This delusion produces denial about hugely important subjects and issues.

Like a law of physics, this combination makes people seem incredibly stupid to others disagreeing with their positions. Stupid, because they are unable to accept facts and truths that conflict with their views.

This special kind of stupidity is independent of inherent intelligence. In this case brain power is overpowered by psychological deficiency, namely self-delusion.

This delusion is not genetically produced, but is a result of external influences, notably political, government, media and corporate propaganda intentionally designed to produce delusional beliefs and thinking. Who does this? All sorts of commercial and political interests. The result is a series of biases and blocks, such as cognitive dissonance, to objective facts and information that creates denial about very important conditions affecting the planet, the nation and individuals. People afflicted with this deadly combination appear stupid to those outside their mental ghetto that they gladly inhabit, along with similarly afflicted people.

National unity breaks down with countless mental ghettos that span economic, political and geographic boundaries.

Conservatives see liberals as stupid and vice versa. Democrats see Tea Party adherents (who only support Republican candidates) as stupid and vice versa. Those seeing climate change and global warming as serious phenomena posing real threats see deniers as stupid. People who give a high priority to tax cuts that mainly benefit the rich and superrich seem stupid to those who recognize that the wealthiest Americans have hijacked the US economy, as shown by endless statistics that reveal their preferential financial benefits. Those who reject religions think the religious stupid. People who shun social networking sites see those addicted to them as stupid. Growing numbers of obese people seem stupid to those eating healthy and exercising regularly to maintain healthy weights.

A prime example of a mental ghetto is the collection of radical, terrorist Muslims sharing hate and violence and blocking out teachings from authentic Muslims about peace and love.

You surely can think of classes of people who seem stupid, because of a particular belief or viewpoint rather than across-the-board limited intelligence. With conversations that have nothing to do with their position (or maybe several), you would likely think of them as reasonably intelligent and smart, not stupid. In other words, stupidity is often topic or issue specific.

Here are two examples of what I call psychological stupidity with their powerful implications for understanding why the nation is seen on the wrong track by so many Americans who cannot unite behind solutions.

There is no mystery why the top 20 percent of the population in terms of wealth votes for Republicans, but they are not enough to win elections. What makes far less sense is why many more middle class Americans vote for Republicans. They seem stupid in voting against their own economic interests because Republicans pursue policies that preferentially reward the richest Americans. This behavior can only be explained by the success of Republican propaganda (mainly trickle down prosperity), lies and deceptions that instill a set of biases and beliefs that enable Republicans to win elections. A prime example is obtaining broad support for keeping taxes on really rich people low.

On the other side, are millions of people who vote for Democrats because they have been sold rhetoric about reforming the government system, as if Democrats are not also in the pockets of a number of special interests that will not accept truly needed deep reforms. Why have we not seen President Obama pursue punishment of many people and companies in the banking, mortgage and financial sectors that caused the economic meltdown? He had received huge campaign contributions from them and then surrounded himself with cabinet officials and advisors from them. Otherwise intelligent people vote for Democrats because of their psychological stupidity based on false promises of change and reform that they have succumbed to.

Psychological stupidity has become a kind of cultural epidemic that no one is addressing, so it just gets worse. It invites manipulation and the continuing corrosion and corruption of government. The rich and powerful know how to take advantage of this stupidity, obtaining government policies and programs they want, selling products and services that consumers do not really benefit from, and grabbing more of the nation’s wealth.

Those afflicted with psychological stupidity are also likely to exhibit moral superiority, making it even more difficult to have intelligent and productive conversations with them. Such arrogance strengthens their defenses against facts and information that conflicts with their cherished views. The answer: Associate with others having exactly the same views and only get information from like-minded media sources, creating mental ghettos (such as the Tea Party and Fox News) that others can take political or commercial advantage of (Republicans and companies selling gold).

Self-deception is the widespread legal narcotic lubricating the slide of American society into the toilet that other once great nations ended up in. Maybe this old Arab proverb warrants respect: People who lie to others have merely hidden away the truth, but people who lie to themselves have forgotten where they put it.

Which mental ghettos do you belong to?

Has the American Dream come to an end?

“For generations, parents have told their children about “The American Dream.” Basically it has meant building a life based on the foundational principles that created and have sustained America for more than 200 years.”

Greater than any other country in the modern world, the United States offered, from 1776 to 2010, unprecedented opportunities to the common citizen to manifest the “American Dream.” Every resident enjoys the choices of  “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

How do you define the American Dream?  Basically, it allows average citizens to enjoy higher education, greater choices and fulfillment of  their personal goals.  Those aspirations allow farm boys to play in the New York Philharmonic, or a Texas kid to sing the National Anthem in Yankee Stadium, or a poor black girl like Oprah Winfrey to become a movie star, fabulously rich and the host of the Oprah Show.  She educates and enlightens millions around the world.  It allows inner-city ghetto kids like O.J. Simpson to gain stardom, money and a mega-wealthy home—only to sit in prison for his transgressions.

It allows men like Bernie Madoff to rise to astonishing wealth only to fall into disgrace and prison.  The American Dream allows a poor white kid like Abe Lincoln to rise to the presidency as well as an illegitimate black kid like Barack Obama to sit in the White House in 2010.  The American Dream allows anyone with fortitude, integrity, drive and creative talents to chase their dreams.

For example: how could a poor boy step off the farm in the 1950s, graduate from college, become a teacher, and move on to live a life of adventure?  How could he jump on a bicycle and ride it 100,000 miles across six continents and seven times coast-to-coast across America?  How could a kid enjoy such an amazing life that Marco Polo or Captain Cook would envy?  How could he write 10 books with more on the way?   How could he speak up against his own government and fight for what’s right and not get thrown into political prison?  I don’t know, but I am that kid.  I must pinch myself because it all gets down to the luck of my birth and country of origin.

If you look around the planet, you will not see the “Indian Dream” ; “China Dream” ; “Mexican Dream” ; “Bangladesh Dream” or “African Dream.”  In those places—poverty, death, disease, famine, few choices and a pretty unfortunate life experience await many human beings.

For that matter in my 40 years of world travel, only about 15 countries allow their citizens the ability to make enough money to travel the planet.  The rest of humanity scratches out a living.

But, I am willing to bet, that for the United States, the American Dream will turn out to be a brief fantasy in the history of our country, ending circa 2010 or so.  Our own leaders bankrupted our government, defrauded future generations with $13 trillion in debt, forced us into useless and immoral wars like Korea, Vietnam, Desert Storm, Iraq and Afghanistan; they sold the American people downstream by shipping our entire manufacturing foundation and mercantile goods to other countries.   We suffer a mind-numbing 41.8 million Americans subsisting on food stamps. Another 15 million stand in unemployment lines and seven million cannot procure a full time job.  Our country and its citizens morph into a welfare state.  Personal accountability and personal responsibility—die in the schools of America where Black, White and Hispanic kids flunk out of high school at 7,000 per day—over 1.2 million annually.  A record 72 percent of black teens give birth to children without fathers—and live off the backs of taxpaying Americans—without giving it a second thought as they birth two, three and more babies.

“Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’” — Isaac Asimov

Is the American Dream dead?  I submit that it staggers on life-support and the final diagnosis may prove unfortunate.

Charleston Tea Party writer KC said, “We have created a new definition of “The American Dream”. It has nothing to do with values and principles, but has everything to do with “stuff”.   Is the goal an accumulation of possessions? If that’s the case, then our nation of bureaucratic welfare recipients should be the happiest, most fulfilled people the world has ever produced. Instead Prozac, valium and therapists abound. Suicide is an epidemic and we are engaged in major sociological soul searching to find fulfillment in this wealthy but empty lifestyle.”

As I learned in my travels—as human numbers climb into the millions and billions in any civilization, human options diminish and degrade.  As human numbers grow—options and freedoms shrink.  As human numbers accelerate, everything degrades from standard of living to quality of life.  And, once enormous populations manifest—everyone lives in tense toleration, intimidation and diminished opportunities.  Can this country survive the next added 100 million Americans manifesting via immigration within 25 years?

Bill Moyers asked the question to write Isaac Asimov, “What happens to the idea of the dignity of the human species if population growth continues at its present rate?”

“It will be completely destroyed,” said Asimov. “I will use what I call my bathroom metaphor. Two people live in an apartment and there are two bathrooms, then both have the freedom of the bathroom. You can go to the bathroom anytime you want, and stay as long as you want, for whatever you need. Everyone believes in the freedom of the bathroom. It should be right there in the Constitution. But if you have 20 people in the apartment and two bathrooms, no matter how much every person believes in the freedom of the bathroom, there is no such thing. You have to set up times for each person, you have to bang at the door, “Aren’t you through yet?” and so on.

“The same way democracy cannot survive overpopulation. Human dignity cannot survive it. Convenience and decency cannot survive it. As you put more and more people into the world, the value of life not only declines, it disappears. It doesn’t matter if someone dies. The more people there are the less one individual matters.”

From my world traveling perspective, the American Dream will not survive what’s coming.

Gridlocked Congress: Our Country Coming Undone

This article examines seven destructive points being injected into America by over 20 million illegal immigrants already in this country and 2 to 3 million legal and illegal immigrants arriving annually. This massive ‘unarmed Army’ manifests at an ever increasing speed—the undoing of America.

For the first time in history, the United States suffered a crippling attack inside its borders on 9/11. Nine years later, because our government leaders refuse to protect our southern flank, we are being attacked by an ‘unarmed army’ of millions who have invaded our country by crossing our borders.

Time Magazine, September 12, 2004, “Who Left the Door Open?” documented 4,000 illegal aliens crossing nightly and over three million intruders crossed in 2004. It’s an invasion unprecedented in the history of the United States. Worse, it’s being facilitated by our elected leaders to the highest levels in the White House.

Even more distressing is a concerted push by both major parties to assist this army to not only enter our country against our laws, but also to gain access to everything we have built with the blood, sweat and tears of American citizens.  Illegal aliens tap into $346 billion annually across 15 federal agencies. (Source: www.thesocialcontract.com , Edwin Rubenstein report)

Today, millions of illegal aliens cause accelerating damage to our schools, hospitals, social programs, highways, language, sprawl, standard of living and our way of life. Should illegal aliens enjoy driver’s licenses, amnesty, welfare and schooling of their children on our tax dollars? Just because they came here to work for a better life?

The sobering reality is that two billion people would move to America if given a ticket today. However, it’s impossible. We are a nation of laws and we have horrific problems of unemployment at 15 million people, $12 trillion debt, collapsing hospitals, diseases and growing language conflicts.

Somehow, the media and the ‘elite’ of this country have forced us into this accelerating crisis. Polls show 70% of Americans want illegal immigration stopped and serious reductions in legal immigration down to fewer than 100,000 per year.

Astoundingly, 10 percent of Mexico now lives in our country. Fully 75 percent of all drugs cross over from Mexico.  They send home hard currency of $24 billion to Mexico, $25 billion to Latin America, $16 billion to Asia thus draining our country. In short, illegal immigration degrades this country on multiple levels.

We MUST create a dialog on the future prospects of our nation by addressing seven major points: If you own a home, you maintain a door. You welcome guests after they knock and you lock it to keep out unwanted incursions. Just as every house needs a door, every country needs a border to maintain its right to privacy, self-maintenance and personal freedom. Our nation’s door has been invaded by over 10 million people who broke the latch and marched in as if they had the right to such a crime. They continue at 1 million per year.

However, this nation provides the ‘rule of law’ as the most important brick in the foundation of our constitution. The ‘rule of law’ allows our freedom, our integrity and our right to choose what and whom we want or don’t want in our nation. We don’t want terrorists. We don’t want border crashers who bring drugs. We don’t want illegal aliens who suppress wages, over run our schools, usurp our language and overwhelm our social services.

Illegal immigration hurts America’s poor. In a recent account in the New York Times, black children suffered 50 percent greater poverty in the past 10 years due to immigration. Illegal immigrants compete for jobs normally done by America’s poor. A study by the Center for Immigration Studies wrote, “Mexican immigration is overwhelmingly unskilled and it’s hard to find an economic argument for unskilled immigration because it tends to reduce wages for U.S. workers.”

Cheap labor from illegal immigration is not ‘cheap.’ It’s subsidized by all of us in the form of our tax dollars paying for their services. It makes a few employers wealthy at the expense of all of us. The National Academy of Sciences found “…a significant fiscal drain of $7,000 per student per year paid for by U.S. tax dollars.”

These newcomers do not respect our English language. Adding more salt into our national wound of this invasion, there is not a single bilingual country in the world that is at peace with itself. Dozens of languages cause educational confusion, conflict and violence. When people move to this country, but maintain their language, their culture and their old loyalties, it’s a recipe for the undoing of our nation.

With that demise, our cohesive national fabric shreds as ethnic ghettoes advance across our nation with rituals such as female genital mutilation, cock fighting and violent groups espousing clashing cultures. Too many unskilled, uneducated, non-English speaking people living in too much poverty will not advance our nation. The Center for Immigration Studies points out; “The lower educational attainment of immigrants persists across generations as two thirds of immigrant workers lack a high school diploma.” Democracy is a delicate form of government that demands an educated populace with similar moral and ethical standards and a single language.

And finally, illegal immigrants crossing our borders without being health screened have brought us 7,000 new cases of leprosy in the past nine years. Additionally, they brought 16,000 cases of incurable (multiple drug resistant) tuberculosis, thousands of cases of hepatitis, head lice, Chagas Disease and Exotic New Castle. Since 1.1 million illegal alien children attend U.S. schools, our children are at risk.

“The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, or preventing all possibility of its continuing as a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities.” — President Teddy Roosevelt, 1902.

Without a national debate on illegal immigration, our country will continue its downward spiral into conditions resembling the Third World.

Their numbers will burgeon from 10 million to 20 million and beyond. If we don’t take action today, we won’t be able to take action tomorrow.

7,000 American High School Students Drop Out Every Day: 1 every 26 seconds

John Wayne said, “Life is tough; it’s tougher if you’re stupid!”

An incomprehensible 42 million Americans cannot read, write or perform simple math. Another 50 million Americans cannot read past the 4th grade level. (Source: National Right to Read Foundation)

The Foundation reported, “According to current estimates, the number of functionally illiterate adults is increasing by approximately two and one quarter million persons each year. This number includes nearly 1 million young people who drop out of school before graduation, 400,000 legal immigrants, 100,000 refugees, and 800,000 illegal immigrants, and 20 percent of all high school graduates. Eighty-four percent of the 23,000 people who took an exam for entry-level jobs at New York Telephone in 1988, failed.”

NBC anchor Brian Williams reported that 1.2 million teens hit America’s streets every June unable to read or write. Detroit, Michigan epitomizes this country’s educational dilemma: 76 percent dropout/flunkout rate. Dozens of cities across the country suffer 50 to 60 percent dropout rates.

CNN reported on August 30, 2010, “7,000 American high school students drop out every day; one every 26 seconds.”

Everywhere in America, we enjoy food-filled grocery stores, roads, homes and schools. In America, most cities function and the majority of people enjoy happy lives—or at least the opportunity to enjoy fulfilling lives.

Do you ever wonder why countries like Morocco, Pakistan, Mexico, Sudan, India, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Congo—all third world countries—suffer human misery and failures on enormous scales? Why do 18 million third world citizens starve to death annually? (Source: World Health Organization) Why does India allow 1,000 children under 10 to die of dysentery, diarrhea and other water-borne diseases DAILY? (Source: www.populationmedia.org) Why have 12 million Mexicans illegally ventured northward into the United States and Canada seeking a better life? Why does Asia feature a $7 billion annual people-smuggling trade to Western countries? (Source: Forbes Magazine)

The one word that defines third world countries: mass illiteracy!

America faces a predicament more profound than anything ever in the 234 year history of this republic. A republic demands an educated populace. Without an educated citizenry, America cannot expect to remain a viable “people-driven” republic. Why? With continued mass illiteracy, a permanent underclass will become intractable. Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, James Madison and George Washington understood the need for education. The ‘common man’ makes a republic possible according to Thomas Jefferson. Without an ‘educated’ common man, our MOST extraordinary self-governing U.S. Constitution, only 234 years old, cannot and will not function much longer.

One reader said, “Huge government and government entitlement programs is a fundamental problem that affects everything. And, to top it off, the taxpayer base is now closing in on a tipping point where more people do not pay income tax as compared to how many do pay.”

As a teacher for 20 years, I watched our country move from affirmative-action grading in our schools in the 1970s to affirmative-action high school diplomas. Once students discovered they could get something for nothing, they milked the system via affirmative-action jobs. Lyndon B. Johnson’s “Great Society” allowed anyone that could muster little to no effort—could enjoy maximum financial reward—as long as someone else covered by working twice as much.

Today, this country’s inner cities thrive on food stamps for 41.1 million recipients, assisted housing, free breakfasts and lunches for ‘at risk’ children. Over half of all children suffer no father and an illiterate mother.

Back on the world stage, illiterate and destitute mothers birth an added 77 million new babies annually. They birth SO many children, no third world country can manage to educate those children. Thus, mass illiteracy begets mass human population growth that feeds into more human misery on scales heretofore unknown to humanity.

As the CNN report illustrated, only one to two percent of Blacks and Hispanics make up the teaching ranks in America. Without any role models, American minority youth drop out at 7,000 young boys and girls every day.

Can America withstand this accelerating illiteracy epidemic? Can it survive the multiplication of ghettoes, unwed mothers, welfare, crime and drug addiction? At what point does the fabric of America shred into the hopelessness of the third world. For answers: visit LA, Chicago, Detroit, Denver, Houston and any other large city where gangs, graffiti, crime and drugs dominate.

With a new permanent, illiterate sub-class in America that grows too fast to solve, at some point, we will not be able to save ourselves from unraveling as a civilization.

The Right Move

One State is not an apocalyptic vision of the Last Days. It is a perfectly doable and mutually profitable development. The Jewish nationalist One-Staters should be encouraged by our side.

“No, you must finish both the meat and the vegetables; don’t pick the cheese off your sandwich and do not leave bread on the plate” – so we tell to a choosy kid who tries to take his pick and shortcut his way to dessert. Picking and choosing is a troublesome habit at the family table.

This applies to the Israeli settlers and Jewish nationalists as well. At last, at long last, they have begun to recognise the advantages of One State between the Sea and the River, instead of having a Jewish Ghetto and Arab Bantustans. So we have been told by Haaretz writer Noam Sheizaf in a piece with the telling title Endgame. Among new adepts of the One State, one finds the Knesset Speaker Rubi (Reuven) Rivlin, who said, “It’s preferable for the Palestinians to become citizens of the state rather than for us to divide the country.” and ex-Defence Minister Moshe Arens who is ready to grant Israeli citizenship to the Palestinians in the West Bank. These are heavy guns of Israeli politics, and they are apparently supported by other Likud members like MK Tzipi Hotovely, leading settlers like Uri Elitzur, Rabbis like Rabbi Froman of Tekoa, and to an extent even by the icon of settlers, Hanan Porat.

They speak of granting the two and a half million Palestinians of the West Bank full rights and Israeli citizenship. This is a step in right direction, which should be approved of. This is certainly not enough, but as a first step it would do. However, some of these Jews want to pick and choose. Adi Mintz, a former director general of the Yesha Council, would like Israel to annex 60 percent of Judea and Samaria, whose 300,000 Palestinian inhabitants would be granted Israeli citizenship. This is too little too late. Such a harebrained scheme has no chance of being acceptable to the Palestinians, or to decent people anywhere.

“If you want the land, take it with the people”. This was the answer of Glubb Pasha in 1948. This commander of the Arab Legion was forced to surrender the Valley of Ara to the Jews; the Jews wanted – then as now – to have the land without people. He refused. Eventually the Jews relented, and the people of the Wadi Ara remained in their homes, received Israeli citizenship and prospered. This should be the model – but not “pick and choose”. Otherwise the remainder of Palestine will have a lot of people locked up in tiny enclaves.

All of Palestine and all of the Palestinians living there – this is a doable minimum for the first stage. This is much less than what the Palestinians want, for they reasonably want to see the refugees coming back home from Lebanon, Syria and Jordan. The Palestinians also want to regain property lost under racist laws, notably the Absentee Property Law. However, these demands could be more profitably discussed when there are four to five million Palestinian voters in Israel.

Even the most enlightened and accommodating Jewish nationalists do not want to take Gaza, for it has very little land and a lot of Palestinians. This would preclude a true solution, but probably even the absorption of all the West Bank with the full enfranchising of all of its present inhabitants is acceptable as a first step in the right direction. At the same time Gaza’s re-integration could begin and last, say, a year or two; at the end of this period Gaza would be fully integrated and its inhabitants fully enfranchised as well.

Is it possible at all, or do we encounter here yet another example of “Zionist spin that is planted in our discourse in order to disseminate confusion” as our friend Gilad Atzmon has put it? Proceed with caution, I advise. One State is good for Palestinians, and their majority prefers it to “independence” under Mahmud Abbas or even Ismail Hanie. However, One State is good for Jews, not only for Palestinians. It is good for Israeli business. It is good for half-a-million of Jewish settlers who would be able to remain in their homes. It is good for Oriental Jews who would be re-integrated into their native Arabic milieu. It is good for Russians who are anyway considered ‘second-rate Jews’. It is good for honest Jews, for they will find peace of mind. Their persecution mania will hopefully go away. In short, Jews would not regret the change overmuch, just as white South Africans do not miss the days of apartheid. Peace with neighbours will allow full integration in the region, and integration usually is good for Jews.

One State is not an apocalyptic vision of the Last Days. It is a perfectly doable and mutually profitable development. Why it did not occur until now, is a question of psychology rather than realpolitik. Traditionally Jews have been against intermarriage since the days of Ezra, who expelled all mixed-marriage couples from the nascent Jewish state. With the decrease of Jewish religiosity, nationalist Jews have inherited this trait. Jewish nationalism was informed in the 19^th c.; the nationalist (or “proud”) Jews share Hitler’s hate of miscegenation and fear of diluting their ‘pure race’. They correctly believe that peaceful coexistence will bring forth intermarriage, thereby diluting precious Jewish blood, or race, or DNA or whatever you call it. Indeed, in the US, Russia and Europe, intermarriage is more than 50%. If war is the only way to prevent intermarriage, let it be war, they conclude. War is good, for “it keeps the Israeli society from falling apart”, said Israeli historian Ilan Pappe.

This National-Socialist, warlike Judaism is outdated, and is being undermined by Americanisation of Israel on one side of the green line and by the influence of the land on the other side of it. The settlers, a rough lot, live close to the most charming and delightful places in Palestine. It is not surprising that for some of them the land has become more important than blood. Not only the blood to be shed, but also the blood to be mixed. Actually, the owner of Ha’aretz newspaper, Amos Shocken, wrote in favour of the full integration and the mutual assimilation of Jews and Palestinians. Shlomo Sand’s pioneering book Invention of the Jewish People, which debunks the concept of a pure and ancient Jewish race, had astonishing success among Israeli Jews, who apparently are ready for this message.

A foreign reader might be surprised by the Jewish Nationalists’ support of this idea so rigidly rejected by the Israeli Zionist Left. However, for us Israelis, it is not surprising in the light of organisational and moral collapse of the Zionist Left in recent years. After all, the Zionist Left gave us the Nakba under Ben Gurion and a lot of settlements under Rabin and Barak. The Zionist Left also invented the Wall and the apartheid slogan “we are here, they are there”.

Ali Abunimah correctly reminded us that “in South Africa, it was not the traditional white liberal critics of apartheid who oversaw the system’s dismantling, but the National Party which had built apartheid in the first place.” Indeed, liberalism leads nowhere, ditto the wishy-washy leftie attitude. Settlers may contain some very unpalatable elements, but they are hardly worse than average Israeli. Many of them are perfectly human. Their Palestinian neighbours are aware of that. Indeed Raja Shehadeh concludes his wonderful Palestinian Walks by a charming encounter with a young settler who came down to a stream to have his smoke. Shehadeh and the settler pass the joint back and forth, as if it were a calumet of peace.

Gilad Atzmon and Ali Abunima both state that Jewish nationalists are committed to preserving a “Jewish democratic state” as opposed to a “state for all citizens”. True enough. A Jewish democratic state means that it is democratic for Jews and Jewish for everybody else. However, Lincoln and his contemporaries who enfranchised the slaves did not expect that a black man would become the US President one day – yet it happened due to the dynamics they unleashed. Likewise in our case, let millions of Palestinians get on the voter roll, and then these small problems will be taken care of.

The Jewish nationalist One-Staters should be encouraged by our side. Perhaps this is the right time to do a One State Conference like we did few years ago in Lausanne, but this time with settlers and Hamas, and with everybody else who wants to live in One Palestine, Complete, to use the words of Tom Segev.

On The Israeli Right’s New ‘Peace’ Agenda

As the Israelis are becoming conscious of their inevitable tragic circumstances, a final desperate attempt to rescue the Zionist project has come to life. Astonishingly enough it is the Israeli right that is now pushing for ‘one binational State.’ It is pretty staggering to find out that while the Israeli so-called ‘left’ is locked within the 1967 territorial paradigm that is fueled by Judeo centric racial ideology, it is actually the hawkish Zionist thinkers who are willing to move the discourse forward.

In a mind provoking piece Noam Sheizaf outlines in Haaretz the new revolutionary Israeli idea. However, I will maintain at this stage that the new Zionist call for ‘one binational state’ suggests that Zionist ideology is on its last leg. Israel has come to realise its inevitable end. And amidst its terminal conditions Israel tries to buy time.

Israel should apply its law to “Judea and Samaria and grant citizenship to 1.5 million Palestinians,” says Moshe Arens, a former Israeli defense minister, a top leader in the Likud party and a political patron of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Arens is not put off by those who slander him for promoting the idea of a binational Jewish-Palestinian state. “We are already a binational state,” he says.

This approach is now being advocated by leading figures in the Likud and amongst the settlers. A year ago, Uri Elitzur, former chairman of the Yesha Council of Settlements and Netanyahu’s bureau chief in his first term as prime minister, published an article in the settlers’ journal Nekuda calling for the onset of a process, at the conclusion of which the (West Bank) Palestinians will have “a blue ID card (like Israelis), yellow license plates (like Israelis), National Insurance and the right to vote for the Knesset.” Emily Amrousi, a former spokesperson for the Yesha Council, also takes part in meetings between settlers and Palestinians and speaks explicitly of “one land in which the children of settlers and the children of Palestinians will be bused to school together.”

This Zionist political novelty doesn’t take me by complete surprise. Unlike the Jewish left that is tribally orientated both in Israel and in the West, the right wing Zionist philosophy was grounded on a dream of an eternal bond between the Jew and the alleged ‘promised land’. In Zion the Jew was supposed to transcend oneself beyond the race and the tribe. Israel was there to demolish the ghetto wall. As it happened, in practice, Israel had become the biggest ghetto in Jewish history.

However, there is a clear trap here. As much as the peace loving Zionist hawks seem to  champion Palestinian civil rights, the vision of a ‘one binational state’ is still totally Judeo centric.  The Israeli advocates of the one binational state are not talking about a neutral “state of all its citizens”, nor about “Israstine” with a flag showing a crescent and a Shield of David.   One state still means a sovereign Jewish state, but in a more complex reality, and inspired by the vision of a “democratic Jewish state” without an occupation and without apartheid, without fences and separations.

One may wonder at this stage what the notion of “Jewish democratic state” stands for. It is obviously an empty signifier, there is no such a thing as Jewish democracy.  As far as I remember Democracy was born in Athens rather than Jerusalem. And yet, the dream is compelling. In such a state, “Jews will be able to live in Hebron and pray at the Tomb of the Patriarchs, and a Palestinian from Ramallah will be able to serve as an ambassador and live in Tel Aviv or simply enjoy ice cream on the city’s seashore.”

It is clear beyond doubt that a coin has dropped. Some Israeli hawks have come to realise that the occupation cannot be maintained forever. They were also quick to grasp that, in the long run, the separation wall put an end to the Zionist expansionist program. They  also gather that the negative exposure of Jewish lobbies in the West will eventually lead to the down scaling of Israeli political maneuvering.

However, the Zionist tribal orientation is never too difficult to trace. When Elitzur was asked “What do you say to the allegations that you have joined the radical left?” he was quick to reveal his political mantra.

“There’s a clear separation between us. I am talking about a Jewish state, the state of the Jewish people, which will contain a large Arab minority. The left is talking about an Arab state containing a Jewish minority, even if they do not explicitly think that. The leftist demonstrators in (the West Bank village of) Bil’in have totally joined the Palestinian cause.”

I guess that this what it is all about. The Israeli hawks want to counter the inevitable ‘demographic disaster’. They would offer West Bank Palestinians Israeli ID cards, and  offer them to “enjoy ice cream in Tel Aviv” as long as they are kept as a minority. The Israeli hawks ignore Gaza  and the right of return. In practice they dismiss the Palestinian cause for they are certain that the Jewish one is superior. In short, this is not a solution or a resolution. It is just another Zionist spin  that is planted in our discourse in order to disseminate confusion.

Shooting and Sobbing

Hold your breath. This in not a joke, this is not a satire. It is real almost as much as it is pathetic. Israeli Ynet just reported that the images of captured Israeli commandos published in Turkish papers opened “…old wounds among those Israeli commandos involved in similar circumstances. Thus far, at least four combat soldiers have reported worsening of their (mental) condition”

While the rest of the world is caught shocked and angry by the images of Israeli navy seals executing peace activists in cold blood, the Israelis seem to moan over their new emerging phantasmic trauma.

Yent reports, “the difficult images of Israeli commandos tied up and bloody on the deck of the Marmara have had significant effects on soldiers who have been away from the battlefield for more than a year.” Apparently the new sufferers are soldiers who didn’t even take part in the event.

First, let me offer the Israeli traumatised commando ‘victims’ a light remedy. In the following picture they can see that the Turkish medical team was actually treating the lightly wounded Israeli soldiers on the lower deck at the time their friends were executing peace activists on the upper decks. I want to believe that once Israelis grasp that there is compassion out of their Hebraic Ghetto, they may even start to develop some empathic feelings themselves. But I may be over optimistic here.

Ynet learned that at least four “Navy combat soldiers have recently contacted the Defence Ministry to report that the media images of the injured soldiers have instigated a worsening in their mental and psychiatric conditions.” No wonder why Israel needs so many atomic bombs. If this is the way its toughest combatants react to images of light injuries, Israel may as well use its ultimate weapon against the next humanitarian flotilla to Gaza.

One of the ‘suffering commandos’ who was enlisted last year and didn’t participate in the cold blooded murder on the Mavi Marmara reported that he “did not receive any training on how to deal with such situations and their repercussions”, one of which is that he has a hard time falling asleep at night. The kosher warrior cannot close his eyes. Not too bad, I guess, in comparison with the nine peace activists who won’t see daylight.

Interestingly enough, Ynet is yet to report about Israeli commandos who are traumatised by the massacre they committed executing peace activists in international waters. Ynet is also yet to report on any Hasbara officer who committed a suicide after being exposed for  forging and staging footage of violence on the Mavi Marmara.

Maybe the Israelis are not that fragile after all.

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