Atheism’s open-door policy. By Ariane Sherine

Via: The Guardian.

Andrew Brown is wrong: atheism isn’t about class. Anyone can join our club if they don’t believe in God
On Friday, Cif belief editor Andrew Brown wrote, “It is entirely possible that Ariane Sherine’s book on enjoying an atheist Christmas will sell this Christmas; but come the new year, it won’t be found on the bookshelf in the toilet but in lavatories nicely warmed by Agas.” His assertion is that atheists (or “new atheists”, as he confusingly calls us – are we the ones who refuse to stay quiet?) are “educated and professional” snobs, and that we use our lack of belief as an excuse to look down on people who are working class: “Obviously, it is no longer done to sneer at the working classes for being idle, brutish, smelly, and breeding too much. But it’s perfectly OK to sneer at ‘faith heads’ for all these things: that shows you’re enlightened. It’s pure coincidence that the despicable believers are for the most part lower class as well.”

This line of thinking is puzzling and wrong on every level. The atheists I know have only one thing in common: we don’t believe in God. Beyond that, there are very few generalisations anyone can make – our social class, ethnic backgrounds and political views are often extremely disparate (though there is a definite correlation between atheism and being a liberal – that is, believing that everyone has the right to do and say whatever they like and express themselves as they choose, so long as their actions are peaceful and don’t hurt anyone). As he himself has come out on this site as an atheist, it is baffling that the majority of Andrew’s pieces seem to lambast atheists, when the sole criterion for being one is merely accepting the truth as science reveals it.

An Ominous Double Standard

Via: Adbusters.org.

While Obama cracks the whip on Iran, Israel’s nuclear arsenal grows ever more sophisticated.

While the US and the UN contemplate imposing harsh sanctions against Iran over its nuclear program, Israel continues to maintain a not-so-secret nuclear weapons plant at Dimona. Take a 3D tour …

PM Netanyahu’s UN Speech – The Pathology Of Evil. By Gilad Atzmon

Via: Rense.com.

Israeli PM Netanyahu’s speech at the UN is a major insight into the Israeli’s mentality, psyche and logic. In his speech Netanyahu, a prolific and charismatic speaker, gives air to his genocidal inclinations, he brings to light the Israeli supremacy but he also allows us to detect some shaky and vulnerable spots at the heart of the Jewish national narrative. Reading Netanyahu’s speech makes it very clear that both the Zionist Shoa and the ‘promised land’ narratives are on the verge of collapse. It seems as if the ‘discredited’ Iranian president Ahmadinejad has managed to succeed after all.

Don’t You Mess With Our Shoa

Israelis love their Shoa, for the Shoa is no doubt their best selling Hasbara (propaganda) product. It somehow allows them to kill en masse and to do it indistinguishably while insisting that it is they who happen to be the victims.

“I went to a villa in a suburb of Berlin called Wannsee.” Said Netanyahu. “There, on January 20,1942, after a hearty meal, senior Nazi officials met and decided how to exterminate the Jewish people.”

PM Netanyahu, if you are genuinely interested in ‘extermination plans’ you do not have to travel to Wannsee, Berlin. All you have to do is visit your IDF’s headquarters in Tel Aviv. Your chief commanders will guide you through their IDF ‘solutions’ for the Palestinians. At the end of the day, it is your army that surrounds Palestinians with barbed-wire, it is you who keep civilian populations in a siege with inadequate food supplies and medicine. It is your army that poured WMD over the most densely populated neighbourhoods on this planet. While the real meaning of the ‘Nazi Final Solution’ (Die Endlösung) is still discussed by historians who fail to agree between themselves what it really meant, the true reality of the Israeli murderous solution has been seen by us all.

The comic genius of Netanyahu. By Stuart Littlewood

Via: RamallahOnline.com.

Knowing that Iran won’t surrender its right to civil nuclear power, the schemers in Tel Aviv and Washington were bound to mount a hysterical campaign to scare the rest of the world into believing this would bring terror to our own streets.

And at the United Nations we saw the process swing into action as Netanyahu tried to whip up support for another Middle East war for Israel’s benefit.

Yesterday, the man who calls the Holocaust a lie spoke from this podium… To those who gave this Holocaust-denier a hearing, I say on behalf of my people, the Jewish people, and decent people everywhere: Have you no shame? Have you no decency?”

Who with a speck of decency would have given Netanyahu a hearing after the atrocities of the Gaza blitzkrieg and the Goldstone Report condemning Israel’s war crimes?

“This Iranian regime is fueled by an extreme fundamentalism… anyone not deemed to be a true believer is brutally subjugated.”

Netanyahu could be describing the Israeli regime.

“…The greatest threat facing the world today is the marriage between religious fanaticism and the weapons of mass destruction.”

He should know. Israel is bristling with both.

“The most urgent challenge facing this body is to prevent the tyrants of Tehran from acquiring nuclear weapons.”

That would be nice for the warmongers in Tel Aviv, who already have them.

“Will the international community thwart the world’s most pernicious sponsors and practitioners of terrorism?”

I do hope so. But are we all agreed who they are?

Afghanistan: NATO’s Graveyard? By John Feffer.

Is the Transatlantic Alliance Doomed?

This article was originally published on TomDispatch.

Celebrating its 60th birthday this year, NATO is looking peaked and significantly worse for wear. Aggressive and ineffectual, the organization shows signs of premature senility. Despite the smiles and reassuring rhetoric at its annual summits, its internal politics have become fractious to the point of dysfunction. Perhaps like any sexagenarian in this age of health-care crises and economic malaise, the transatlantic alliance is simply anxious about its future.

Frankly, it should be.

The painful truth is that NATO may be suffering from a terminal illness. Its current mission in Afghanistan, the alliance’s most significant and far-flung muscle-flexing to date, might be its last. Afghanistan has been the graveyard of many an imperial power from the ancient Macedonians to the Soviets. It now seems to be eyeing its next victim.

For NATO, this year should have been a celebration, not a dirge. After suffering a transatlantic rift of epic proportions during the Bush years, the alliance thrilled to the election of Barack Obama and his politics of conciliation. The new American administration swore it would shift troops from Iraq to Afghanistan to give NATO more of what it wanted to fight “the right war.” Vice President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton both promised to push the “reset button” on U.S.-Russian relations, potentially removing one of the greatest obstacles to NATO’s health and well-being. And in a final flourish for the alliance’s diamond jubilee, France agreed to return to the fold, reintegrating into NATO after 43 years of standoffishness.

But hold those celebrations. Afghanistan has an uncanny ability to spoil anybody’s best-laid plans.

The Real Reasons Behind Fed Secrecy. By Congressman Ron Paul.

Via: www.house.gov

Texas Straight Talk
A weekly column

Last week I was very pleased that the Financial Services Committee held a hearing on the Federal Reserve Transparency Act, HR 1207.  The bill has 295 cosponsors and there is also strong support for the companion bill in the Senate.  This hearing was a major step forward in getting the bill passed.

I was pleased that the hearing was well-attended, especially considering that it was held on a Friday at nine o’clock in the morning!  I have been talking about the immense, unchecked power of the Federal Reserve for many years, while the attention of Congress was always on other things.  It was gratifying to see my colleagues asking probing questions and demonstrating genuine concern about this important issue as well.

The witness testifying in favor of HR 1207 made some very strong points, which was no surprise considering the bill is simply common sense.  It was also no surprise that the witness testifying against the bill had no good arguments as to why a full audit should not be conducted promptly.  He attempted to make the case that the fed is already sufficiently accountable to Congress and that the current auditing policy is adequate.  The fact is that the Fed comes to Congress and talks about only what it wants to talk about, and the GAO audits only what the current laws allow to be audited.  The really important things however, are off limits.  There are no convincing arguments that it is in the best interests of the American people for anything the Fed does to be off limits.

On Palestinian Civil Disobedience. By Neve Gordon

Via: Pulse.

A simple google search with the words “Palestinian violence” yields over 86,000 pages, while a search with the words “Palestinian civil disobedience” generates only  47 pages.

Sometime in 1846, Henry David Thoreau spent a night in jail because he refused to pay his taxes. This was his way of opposing the Mexican-American War as well as the institution of slavery. A few years later he published the essay Civil Disobedience, which has since been read by millions of people, including many Israelis and Palestinians.

Kobi Snitz read the book. He is an Israeli anarchist who is currently serving a 20 day sentence for refusing to pay a 2,000 shekel fine.

Thirty-eight year-old Snitz was arrested with other activists in the small Palestinian village of Kharbatha back in 2004 while trying to prevent the demolition of the home of a prominent member of the local popular committee. The demolition, so it seems, was carried out both to intimidate and punish the local leader who had, just a couple of weeks earlier, began organizing weekly demonstrations against the annexation wall. Both the demonstrations and the attempt to stop the demolition were acts of civil disobedience.

In a letter sent to friends the night before his incarceration, Snitz writes that “I and the others who were arrested with me are guilty of nothing except not doing more to oppose the state’s truly criminal policies.” Snitz also explains that paying the fine is an acknowledgment of guilt which he finds demeaning. Finally, he concludes his epistle by insisting that his punishment is trivial when compared to the punishment meted out to Palestinian teenagers who have resisted the occupation. These thirteen, fourteen, fifteen and sixteen year olds, he claims, are often detained for 20 days before the legal process even begins.

Snitz is not exaggerating.

Time for Citizens to Convene. By Ralph Nader

Via: Nader.org.

Just when many conditions seemed ripe for a progressive political movement, the likelihood is fading fast. Concentrated corporate power over our political economy and its control over peoples lives knows few boundaries.

As Republican investor advocate leader Robert Monks puts it: “The United States is a corporatist state. This means that individuals are largely excluded both in the political and corporate spheres.”
Since Wall Street’s self-inflicted multi-trillion dollar collapse last year, the corporate supremacists have shown no remorse. They have become more aggressive: they are blocking regulatory reforms; pouring campaign donations into the governing Democrats’ coffers; and, shamelessly demanding more bailouts, subsidies and tax reductions. They also continue to block avenues for judicial justice by aggrieved people, whether they be the wrongfully injured, defrauded consumers and investors, or jettisoned workers and bilked pensioneers.

The problem: large corporations have too many structural powers over the citizenry. These “artificial persons” have acquired the constitutional rights originally given in 1787 only to “natural persons.” In fact, corporations have enormously greater privileges and immunities than the people themselves because of their global control over politicians, capital, labor and technology.

Media propaganda on Iran’s nuclear site.

Cartoon Khalil Bendib

Via: Iran Affairs.

Glenn Greenwald on the media’s coverage of the recent “exposure” of the (not really) ”Secret!” Iranian enrichment facility in Qom:

Despite all the rhetoric about Iran getting caught red-handed — it was Iran itself which notified the IAEA of this facility; the facility is far from operational; and there’s no evidence that it contains or even can produce weapons-grade material.  Until there’s an IAEA inspection — which Iran said it would permit — it’s impossible to know the true purpose and capabilities of this facility, which is the cause for the Chinese’s skepticism and should cause skepticism among every thinking person, beginning with the American media.  Can anyone point to any such skepticism anywhere?  Listening to the media coverage, one would think that Iran just got caught sitting on a secret atomic bomb.

Meanwhile, Iran’s representative to the IAEA has expressed surprise at the anti-Iran propaganda onslought:

Salehi also expressed bemusement over the harsh international reaction to the new plant, insisting that ‘whatever we did was within the legal framework and in line with all IAEA regulations.’

These, he said, stipulated that any nuclear plant should be brought to the attention of the IAEA six months before going operational.

‘In the case of the new plant, we did it even more than a year (before the operational phase),’ he said, indicating that the plant would not become operational before the end of 2010.

‘We are really surprised about the international reactions – there is no basis for them,’ he added.

Ralph Nader Throws His Hope in with Enlightened Billionaires. By Matthew Rothschild

Via: The Progressive.

I saw Ralph Nader yesterday, indefatigable as ever.

He was on tour for his new book, and his first work of fiction, “Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us.”

The plot is about how seventeen famous billionaires, like Warren Buffett and Ted Turner, all of a sudden come to their conscience and spend some of their money to bring about the anti-corporate and pro-democracy changes that Ralph Nader has spent his life campaigning for.

This is a Hail Mary pass for progressive change, and it is an expression of Nader’s frustration—even desperation—at our inability to tackle what he rightly calls “the permanent corporate government” in Washington.

His approach, in the book, is about as top-down as you can get, though he says it’s top-down, bottom-up—the billionaires spend the money so that people at the grassroots can effectively organize.

He seems to have lost hope in the labor movement and the environmental movement and the citizen’s movement and the broad civil rights movement getting together or a new progressive movement rising up organically.

Defeating Hitler and Saving Israel. By Benjamin Tua

Via: Foreign Policy In Focus.
Editor: Emily Schwartz Greco.

Avraham Burg, author of The Holocaust is Over: We Must Rise from its Ashes (Palgrave Macmillan 2008), is a left-leaning dissident Israeli whose views on issues such as Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians are well-known but hardly mainstream. Burg comes from a distinguished Israeli political family, and was himself speaker of Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, from 1999-2003 as a member of the Labor Party. He served as a paratroop officer in Israel’s Defense Forces, opposed the 1982 war on Lebanon, and was wounded in a 1983 grenade attack by an Israeli right-winger on a demonstration sponsored by Peace Now, an Israeli nongovernmental organization that supports a just peace and conciliation with the Palestinians. He also has been Chairman of the Jewish Agency and the World Zionist Organization. His mother, born in what’s now the Israeli-occupied West Bank, survived the Hebron massacre of 1929; his father was a refugee from Nazi Germany in 1939.

Harsh Criticism, Fierce Backlash

When the original version of Burg’s provocative book appeared in Israel in 2007, in Hebrew and under the title Defeating Hitler, it created a sensation. It was widely reviewed and broadly denounced, including by some of his friends and political allies. One enraged critic accused Burg of harboring “a deep anti-Zionist pattern.” Another charged him with conferring legitimacy on Israel’s delegitimization; and a member of the Knesset from the center-right Kadima Party said Burg should be denied burial in the National Cemetery in Jerusalem and should instead arrange for burial abroad.

The book’s reception in the United States, however, has been moderate, and the criticism somewhat muted. New Yorker editor David Remnick profiled the Hebrew version, its author, and the Israeli reaction in a long “Letter from Jerusalem” in July 2007; the English version has elicited commentary in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and Time magazine. The Holocaust is Over and Burg were also featured on National Public Radio and on Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now! program, and have been the subject of intense, and often much less respectful, discussion on numerous blogs.

The Rights of Corporations.

Via: The New York Times Editorial.

The question at the heart of one of the biggest Supreme Court cases this year is simple: What constitutional rights should corporations have? To us, as well as many legal scholars, former justices and, indeed, drafters of the Constitution, the answer is that their rights should be quite limited — far less than those of people.

This Supreme Court, the John Roberts court, seems to be having trouble with that. It has been on a campaign to increase corporations’ legal rights — based on the conviction of some conservative justices that businesses are, at least legally, not much different than people.

Now the court is considering what should be a fairly narrow campaign finance case, involving whether Citizens United, a nonprofit corporation, had the right to air a slashing movie about Hillary Rodham Clinton during the Democratic primary season. There is a real danger that the case will expand corporations’ rights in ways that would undermine the election system.

The legal doctrine underlying this debate is known as “corporate personhood.”