Zionism’s Colonial Enterprise Is Doomed, but… By Alan Hart

Via: Alan Hart.

Ronen Bergman, a senior military and political analyst for the Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth, recently wrote what I consider to be one of the most important articles for decades on the subject of the mindset of the Zionist state’s military and political leaders. It was reproduced in the Wall Street Journal under the headline Siege Fatigue and the Flotilla Mistake.

Getting to the main thrust of his analysis, Bergman wrote this (my emphasis added):

“What we witnessed in the early hours of Monday morning was symptomatic of a new degree of fatigue in Israeli governing circles. The fact that both the political and military authorities could sign off on such an irresponsible operation suggests that the leadership of the country has given up what it has concluded is ultimately a Sisyphean attempt to accommodate world opinion. Isolation is no longer a threat to be fought, their thinking seems to go, because Israel is terminally isolated. What remains is to concentrate exclusively on what is best for Israel’s survival, shedding any regard for the opinion of others.”

Bergman went on to quote from a conversation he had with a very senior military source two days before Israel’s attack on the Gaza-bound flotilla. The source said it made no difference how careful Israel was in its actions or how it tackled the flotilla. “Whatever we do, they’ll all be against us, they’ll condemn us at the UN and we’ll be scolded. We might as well at least preserve our national dignity and maintain the blockade of Gaza.” In other words, Bergman commented, “the war over world opinion is over and Israel has lost.”

A little later in his article Bergman wrote:

“Israel’s fatigue and deep sense of ostracism is, to say the least, unhealthy… And, of course, it is profoundly disturbing when the fatigued and isolated country itself has the means to strike pre-emptively and punishingly at its enemies, including in ways from which, realistically, there may be no return.”

As I note in the three-volume, American edition of my book ZIONISM: THE REAL ENEMY OF THE JEWS (www.zionismbook.com), the question of whether or not Israel should care about what the non-Jewish world thinks was the ticking time-bomb at the heart of Israeli politics from the moment of the Zionist (not Jewish) state’s birth.

Powers of Eight. By Martin Lukacs and Dru Oja Jay

Via: The Dominion.

Enlarge

The G8 accounts for a small portion of the world’s population, but a majority of its power. Through their influence over international financial institutions and their economic and military dominance, the G8 countries shape the world’s economic structures.

Download a pdf version of this infographic.

Morning Picket Shuts Down Israeli Zim Lin Line at the Port of Oakland

Via: Bay Area Indymedia.

In protest of the Israeli’s embargo of Gaza, their recent attack on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla, and other human rights abuses, hundreds and hundreds of labor and community activists picketed three gates at the Port of Oakland in order to shut down unloading of an Israeli Zim Line ship. In the morning when it was official that the ILWU would not cross the picket line, activists set their sights on the evening shift and have issued a call to return to the docks for another picket at 4:30pm in order to effect a 24-hour shutdown of the Zim Line ship, which is expected to arrive from Monterey this afternoon (after being delayed from its scheduled morning arrival). The blockade represents the first time in U.S. history that a protest has stopped an Israeli ship from unloading.

***
Update: First time in U.S. history an Israeli ship stopped from unloading

On the Death of José Saramago

Via: PCP.

Statement by the Secretariat of the Central Committee

The death of José Saramago represents an irreparable loss for Portugal, for the Portuguese people, for Portuguese culture.

José Saramago’s intellectual, artistic, human and civic stature makes him a major figure in our History.

His vast, remarkable and unique literary work – which was recognized through a Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998 – will remain as a milestone in the History of Portuguese Literature, in which his is one of the most prominent names.

José Saramago helped to build [the] April [1974 Revolution] as an active participant in the resistance to fascism. He gave continuity to this activity after the Day of Liberation with his engagement in the revolutionary process that profoundly transformed our country for the better, creating a democracy that had as its prime reference defending the interests of the workers, of the people and of the country.

José Saramago was a member of the Portuguese Communist Party since 1969 and his death represents a loss for the entire Communist Party collective – for the Party which he chose as his own until his final days.

The Secretariat of the Central Committee of the PCP wishes to express its profound sorrow and its enormous pain for the death of comrade José Saramago – and expresses its heartfelt condolences to his companion, Pilar del Rio, and to his remaining family.

The Secretariat of the Central Committee
of the Portuguese Communist Party

Managing the Euro: Mission Impossible! By Samir Amin

Via: MRMzine.

1. No state, no money. Together, a state and its currency constitute, under capitalism, the means to manage the general interest of capital, transcending the particular interests of competing segments of capital. The current dogma that imagines a capitalist system managed by the “market,” i.e. without the state (reduced to its minimal functions of ensuring law and order), is based on neither any serious understanding of the history of real capitalism nor any “scientific” theory capable of demonstrating that management by the market produces — even as a tendency — any such equilibrium (a fortiori “optimal”).

The Euro was created in the absence of a European state that substitutes for national states, whose essential functions of managing the general interests of capital were themselves on the way toward being done away with.  The dogma of a currency that is “independent” of the state is an expression of this absurdity.

“Europe” does not exist politically.  Despite the naive illusion that calls for transcending the principle of sovereignty, national states alone remain legitimate. The political maturity that could make people of historical nations accept a Europe constituted by a “European vote” doesn’t exist yet. One can only hope for it at this point; it remains the case that we would have to wait for the emergence of a politically legitimate Europe for a long time.

Worse, “Europe” doesn’t exist socially and economically either. A Europe composed of 25-30 states remains profoundly unequal in terms of capitalist development. The oligopolies that control the economy of the region (and its current politics and political culture besides) are groups whose “nationality” is determined by that of their major directors. These groups are primarily British, German, and French, only marginally Dutch, Swedish, Spanish, and Italian. Eastern Europe and in part Southern Europe are to Northwestern and Central Europe what Latin America is to the United States. Under these conditions, Europe is little more than a common, indeed single, market, part of the global market under late capitalism of generalized, globalized, and financialized oligopolies. From this perspective, as I have written before, Europe is the “most globalised region” of the world system. This situation, reinforced by the impossibility of a politically united Europe, results in differentiated levels of real wages, systems of social solidarity, and regimes of taxation that cannot be done away with in the framework of such European institutions as exist today.

Oval Office Duplicity: Cover for Corporate Criminality. By Stephen Lendman

Via: SteveLendmanBlog.

Since taking office, Obama proved himself a machine politician, not a man of the people, an earlier article explaining it this way:

He promised peace and delivered war; real health and financial reform, not same old, same old; help for millions losing jobs, homes, hope and futures, not handouts to Wall Street and other industry favorites; regulatory oversight, not the usual incestuous government-industry ties, making disasters like in the Gulf possible, and when they happen conspiring with offenders in coverup, distortion, lies, and a total disregard for the environment, wildlife, and way of life for thousands – let alone permanent damage to a vital ecosystem.

At the same time, Big Oil gets billions in subsidies, special tax breaks and other financial benefits, besides being free to operate recklessly in a regulatory-free environment. Little wonder that a disaster now threatens to become the greatest ecological one ever, gushing oil that’s potentially unstoppably from multiple sea floor ruptures, worsened apparently by BP fix attempts done as PR stunts, the company and administration knowing they wouldn’t work but used them anyway as a charade to fool the public.

In addition, for nearly two months, company officials:

• obstructed cleanup efforts and hasn’t provided proper equipment to do it;
• suppressed vital information;
• told cleanup workers they’d be fired if spoke to the media;
• lied from day one about what happened and its severity;
• denied adequate compensation to Gulf victims;
• withheld respirators and other protective gear from cleanup workers, many now ill from flu-like symptoms, including severe headaches, dizziness, nosebleeds, chest pains, and trouble breathing that may persist, become worse and for many be long-lasting or permanent;
• ordered workers showing up with respirators and other protective gear to remove it or be fired; and
• on June 17, BP CEO Tony Haywood stonewalled the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigation by refusing to provide information he knows as chief operating officer.

Yet BP got White House, cabinet, and congressional backing from the start, collaborating in a likely trillion or multi-trillion dollar crime, affecting the entire regional economy as well as the lives, health and welfare of tens of thousands of its residents, on their own and out of luck, like millions of others nationwide facing enormous hardships from job losses, home foreclosures, growing poverty, hunger, and unaffordable illnesses because of Washington’s indifference during the gravest economic crisis since the Great Depression.

Refugees: a problem that won’t go away. By Gary Younge

Via: The Guardian.

The right to asylum is enshrined in international law – but you wouldn’t know it from the behaviour of many western nations

In early September 2001 a group of mostly Afghan refugees on board a Norwegian freighter sought asylum in Australia from the Taliban. The Australians refused to let them in, in contravention of international law, and instead parked them for processing on the island of Nauru. Less than a fortnight later, a nation not vicious enough to protect refugees from was deemed dangerous enough to bomb. After the terror attacks on 11 September, Australia sent its troops to Afghanistan. In 2003, when some of the asylum seekers went on hunger strike to protest at their treatment, an Australian immigration department spokesman accused them of blackmail and said they should return to Afghanistan – the nation his country, among others, was bombing – and “get on with their lives”.

This glaring contradiction highlights one of the crucial problems regarding the discussion and debate over refugees and asylum seekers today. Alongside decent pensions, a welfare state and the right to a free education, one of the most pernicious attacks on the postwar consensus has been the concerted and largely successful effort to undermine universal human rights in general, and the right to refuge in particular.

The present right to asylum, underpinned by international law, emerged primarily as a result of the Holocaust, when Jews were turned away from many countries (most famously the St Louis ship that was refused the right to dock in the US and Cuba and forced back to Nazi Germany in 1939) and effectively sentenced to death.

But in the past 20 or so years we have reached a place where certain people are not deemed worthy of those basic rights.

Getting Out of Palestine? By M. Shahid Alam

Via: The Palestine Chronicle.

Is that how the Zionist project might end?

When veteran journalist Helen Thomas was asked recently if she had any comments on Israel, she shot back, ‘Tell them to get the hell out of Palestine.’ She apologized for the remark, but, as the campaign against her escalated, she chose to retire from her position as White House correspondent.

Putting aside the edginess in her words, does Helen Thomas’s remark deserve serious consideration?

Over the years, it has been receiving just that from many tens of thousands of Israelis, who have been emigrating from Israel, applying for emigration, or staying in Israel but holding or applying for dual citizenship. According to Arnaud de Borchgrave, half a million Israelis hold dual citizenship.

Although the Israel lobby expressed particular outrage at Helen Thomas’ suggestion that Israelis go back to Germany and Poland, many Israelis have done precisely that. In his book, The Seventh Million, Tom Segev writes that many thousands of Israelis have “requested and received German passports.” According to the Jewish Virtual Library, there were 118,000 Jews living in Germany in 2006. Another 49,700 lived in Hungary and 3,200 in Poland.

Disconcerting as some Zionists may find this, Jews have not stayed away from countries where they faced near extermination under the Nazis. Does this mean that these countries are now safer for Jews than Israel?

Who Says We Can’t Criticize the State of Israel? By Peter Ewart

Israel criticism not allowed. By Carlos Latuff

Via: OPINION250.

Like a postage stamp that has been licked too often, a word can lose its power and authority if it is used indiscriminately.

So it is with the word “terrorist” that is now routinely applied by governments all over the world to demonize and marginalize political opposition. And likewise with the word “anti-semitic” which is a label stuck on just about anyone who is not in total support of the state of Israel and its treatment of the Palestinians.

Indeed, Jimmy Carter, former President of the United States, was given precisely that label after calling Israel an “apartheid state”.

Even South African Judge Richard Goldstone, himself Jewish, who led a UN authorized fact-finding mission into Israel’s invasion of Gaza last year has been called anti-semitic for his findings which have been labeled as “anti-Israel” by the Israeli government.

Closer to home, the aid organization Kairos had its funding cut off by the Harper government because of, the government alleges, its support for the boycott movement against Israel and its “anti-semitism”. Kairos is a joint venture of thirteen Canadian churches and church organizations, including Catholic, Anglican, Christian Reformed, Evangelical Lutheran, Mennonite, Presbyterian, Society of Friends, and United Church.

The latest public figure to get the “anti-semitic” label is NDP MP for East Vancouver, Libby Davies. She has had this pinned on her because she expressed support for the international campaign to boycott and sanction Israel for its blockade of Gaza, as well as suggesting that Israel has been “occupying” the land since 1948.

Prime Minister Harper has since called for Davies to resign as deputy NDP leader and Liberal Bob Rae has accused her of “hostility and ignorance”. Even some members of her own party, the NDP, have attacked her, with Thomas Mulcair NDP MP calling her comments “egregious” and out of step with her party.

BP and Falklands Oil Row. By Eddie Zawaski

Via: Salem-News.

If you haven’t heard enough of BP executives proclaiming innocence over the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster, get ready for act two. The people who brought you tarry beaches and oil-soaked pelicans are all set to do the same to pristine rocky coasts and unsuspecting penguins in the South Atlantic. The only difference when the sea lion well blows off the Malvinas (Falkland) Islands is that there will be no capping and no clean-up. BP will still pin the blame on “contractors” and do whatever it can to walk away with as much salvaged oil as it can muster.

Falkland's Oil Row Photo: priceofoil.org/

Maybe BP will be lucky and the new oil wells down south won’t blow, but the prevailing public opinion down here in the southern cone of South America is that we are next in line for another environmental disaster. This one will be less troublesome for BP as their legal connection to the well is murkier and there is no powerful governmental authority on shore to insist that they pay for their mistakes.

The sea lion well off the coast of the Malvinas came into operation recently despite a current long-standing dispute between Argentina and Great Britain over the right to tap into the hydrocarbon resources in the Malvinas basin. Britain won the Falklands War in 1982, kicking out the Argentine military that had occupied the islands, but the issue of sovereignty and mineral rights has remained unresolved. Since the war, both the United Nations and the Organization of American States have said that the 2,000 British citizens who occupy the islands are colonists and that the Malvinas is a colonial territory. Further, both countries who have claims on the territory must negotiate issues of sovereignty and mineral rights before any activity like increasing the colony or extracting its oil can take place. Since the two combatants resumed diplomatic relations in 1992, Britain has refused to discuss these issues, preferring to rely on war rather than diplomacy as the solution to the problem. This is very convenient for BP as wells have since been drilled in the Malvinas offshore waters with the permission only of Her Majesty’s Government.

A Zionist State of Mind, A Dreamscape Of Ghosts. By Phil Rockstroh

Via: Ebullient Skepticism.

One Jew’s Hard Awakening

Although my mother fled Nazi Germany, as a child, on a Kindertransport, with a few family valuables sown into her clothing, and I was brought up on the myths and hagiography of the Zionist state, I, over time, came to recognize the folly of the whole colonialist enterprise — the folly of ethnic exclusion and expulsion, the inherent tragedy of nationalism based on the delusion of religious birthright. With much sorrow, I came to the sad realization that the dream of the State of Israel was based on European chauvinism and exceptionalism. This reckoning has been a difficult one for me to bear — the hardest awakening of my adult life.

My father was born on a Reservation in the American mid-west. His people, like the Palestinians, resisted invaders of European ancestry and were crushed. At present, both peoples remain exiled and caged in their native land.

The Jewish side of myself understands the historical traumas that gave rise to the yearning for a tribal Homeland.  Atavistically, I suffer the Jewish state’s collective night terrors and reel in its daylight rationalizations for its brutalities. But the Native American in me knows the rage of those crushed by the heartless force of an invading people.

Neither my father’s peoples’ bows and arrows nor the “threat” of metal rods, clutched by a few activists aboard the illegally seized Gaza-bound Peace Flotilla, nor Hamas’ small rockets will change the tragic trajectory wrought by a tribalist land grab. History reveals a conquered and caged people will starve, in both body and soul, as they watch their hopes wither to dust. But I will not condemn them for their struggle, and even their “provocations” — dangerous and outrageous provocations … such as the desire not to live out their lives behind ghetto walls, and the actions they take accordingly. (Even though, a provocation will never soften the banal mind of a bully to end his reign of brutality.)

To this day, within me, there are traits of cultural Judaism that have not been washed away in the deluge of shame I experience when confronted by the actions of the state of Israel and the casuistry of her apologists. Deep in my genetic structure, I carry tribal memories of Diaspora and its concomitant feelings of alienation from majoritarian culture. Most often, I still apprehend human existence from the perspective of an alien and interloper, believing my survival is dependent upon knowing where I stand in hostile terrain. By rote, I play the role of the outsider, wary and savvy in my dealings with a hostile gentile world.

In this, I understand the paranoid nature of the Jewish state and the reasons underlying her supporters’ rationalizations of her many crimes. Self-deception is at the root of habitual deceit. Sadly, the true believers of the Zionist cause have become case studies in that tragic trait.

Why isn’t Anti-Palestinism condemned as a Hate Crime? By Ahmed Amr

Via: Media Monitors Network.

I bet you’ve never heard of anti-Palestinism? In Israel and the United States, defaming and delegitimizing the Palestinians is a national sport; but have you ever heard anybody complain about it? Why didn’t Americans get worked up when 1,400 Palestinians were incinerated with Israeli phosphorous bombs? Why did the murder of 300 children in last year’s assault not touch a nerve? Why did it take three long years and the slaughter of eight Turks and a Turkish-American citizen to notice that Israel has incarcerated 1.5 million Palestinians in a concentration camp?

What if you were Palestinian shell shocked by decades of the world’s collective indifference? What would you tell your children? Is there any way to explain to a child why his people were ethnically cleansed to make room for a State as Jewish as England is English?

Why do pundits and politicians in the West get away with denying that the Palestinians are the indigenous people of the Holy Land? Why do we allow Israelis and their supporters to denigrate the historic rights of the Palestinians to live in the only homeland they’ve ever known? How is it that we don’t notice that, even today, half the population of historic Palestine is of native stock?

Why do the treasonous intellectuals of the West routinely allow Zionists to unabashedly declare their ‘right’ to settle in the Holy Land? Are they really that ignorant of the ethnic cleansing that dispossessed the Palestinians in 1948 or have they been afflicted by the epidemic of anti-Palisitinism? With or without a state, should we accord the Palestinians the right to exist and what kind of existence are they entitled to?

It’s one thing to talk about the facts on the ground and despair at the remote possibilities of a just solution for Palestinian problem. Because we all know what it would take to accord Palestinians the full spectrum of rights that we all take for granted. We all have the right to leave and return to the places where we were born – to the sacred land where our forefathers are buried. But if the Palestinians make legitimate claims to exercise that most basic of rights, they are accused of denying the right of Israel to exist.

Simply put, if international law applied to Palestinians, we would have to restore their rights to live anywhere in their ancestral homeland. But that’s not in the cards – because they’re nothing more than Palestinians and anti-Palestinism is the law of the land. If we were of a mind to accord them their legitimate rights, we would be obliged to issue every Palestinian refugee a visa to return to the Holy Land and we all know where that might lead – a country where immigrant European Jews and their descendents would be ‘deprived’ of an exclusive Jewish state.