Thursday, February 20, 2014

Putin: Eastern Champion of Western Values

A war against Western civilization is taking place, but it is Russia, in the East, that is defending cultural and religious traditions, not the rulers in America or Europe.

Most of the West has capitulated to the destroyers of truth, goodness and beauty, to the sodomites and usurers, to the abortionists and warmongers, to the adorers of money. It is Russia’s President Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, a former communist, who stands in the breach, while bankers and internationalists promote the likes of Mikhail Borisovich Khodorkovsky, a Russian Jewish oligarch with billions of dollars to use for the re-enslavement of the former Soviet Union.

Putin granted a humanitarian pardon in December 2013 to Khodorkovsky, a decade-long prisoner whose mother has cancer, and to a large number of others described by Putin’s critics as “political prisoners.”

Although convicted of tax evasion and moneylaundering—a conviction upheld by the European Court of Human Rights—Khodorkovsky has been portrayed by Western media and politicians as a “political prisoner” because he opposed Putin. He is the poster boy for the plutocratic fight against Russian nationalism and economic independence.

But according to a January 3 report in Germany’s National-Zeitung, even defenders of the 50-year-old multi-billionaire are forced to admit that his wealth is ill-gotten. In just 15 years, the young communist son of modest engineer parents amassed many billions of dollars under the aegis of former Russian President Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin. He was one of a handful of Jews who were given free rein by Yeltsin to enrich themselves by gaining control of much of Russia’s wealth and politics, according to the “National Journal” website.

Source

Wednesday, February 19, 2014

Tuesday, February 18, 2014

Judaism and Zionism: A Divorce In the Making…?

Way back in October 2001, a prominent and widely respected liberal London rabbi, Dr. David Goldberg, made what I thought at the time was the most remarkable statement ever made by a Jew in the 53 years that had passed since the creation, mainly by terrorism and ethnic cleansing, of the Zionist (not Jewish) state of Israel. He said that Israel’s “colonization” of Palestine had left many Jews “questioning their unconditional support for Israel.” Then this: “It may be time for Judaism and Zionism to go their separate ways.”

The report I read of Goldberg’s remarks was by Andrew Johnson in The Independent On Sunday. Its headline for his story was BRITISH JEWS AT ODDS AFTER RABBI CRITICISES ISRAEL’S “COLONIZATION”. As the report indicated, what Goldberg said had provoked a “passionate argument” in the pages of the Jewish Chronicle, editorially a standard bearer for Israel right or wrong,

I once had the pleasure of talking with Rabbi Goldberg over lunch, just the two of us. From my research I knew that he was what I like to call a GHB (Good Human Being) and a man worthy of respect. He was, for example, the first prominent Jew in the UK to call for recognition of legitimate Palestine rights – he did so in an article for The Times in 1978; and he was the first rabbi to initiate dialogue meetings between Judaism, Christianity and Islam when the Regent’s Park mosque opened in the same year. But what I liked about him most of all was the quite rare thing he had in common with my dear friend Ilan Pappe. He was without a trace of the self-righteousness that is the hallmark of Jews everywhere who have been brainwashed by Zionist propaganda.

He is also a thought provoking author. His books include The Jewish People, Their History and Their Religion, The Divided Self: Israel and the Jewish Psyche, and, in 2012, This (Zionism in action) Is Not the Way.
 
In his review and endorsement of the latter, Avi Shlaim, a leading Jewish “revisionist” meaning honest historian, wrote this. “In the aftermath of its victory in the June 1967 War, Israel lost its moral compass. Many diaspora Jews suffer from selective moral vision about Israel. Rabbi David Goldberg is an admirable exception. He places Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians under an uncompromising lens. After the critique comes an eloquent plea for ethical Zionism – Zionism grounded in Jewish values.”

Friday, February 14, 2014

Is the Tea Party’s Dream an Illusion?

“There is no education in the second kick of a mule,” said Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky.

With some such thought in mind, Speaker John Boehner strode to the floor of the House to offer a “clean” debt ceiling bill and relied on Nancy Pelosi’s Democrats to pass it. They did.

“Surrender” and “betrayal,” are among the epithets coming the Speaker’s way.

Yet Boehner was holding a losing hand. Had he added a GOP wish-list bill to the debt ceiling, Harry Reid’s Senate would have rejected it. President Obama would have denounced it as putting at risk the full faith and credit of the United States.

Big Media would have piled on. The markets would have been rattled. The Dow would have begun to swoon. Corporate America, cash cow of the Republican Party, would have begun to howl.

A clamor to pass a clean debt ceiling bill or risk a new recession would have arisen. And the House Republicans would have caved, as they finally had to cave on the budget bill last fall.

Rather than play Lord Raglan and lead his cavalry in another Charge of the Light Brigade, Boehner chose to withdraw to fight another day on another field.

Yet, the Tea Party has a right to feel cheated.

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Thursday, February 13, 2014

Wednesday, February 12, 2014

"ILLEGAL TO BOYCOTT ISRAEL" BILL ENTERS CONGRESS

A bill that would outlaw academic boycott of Israel by U.S. universities, under penalty of loss of federal funding, was introduced into the U.S. House of Representatives last Thursday by Jewish congressmen Peter Roskam and Dan Lipinski.  H.R. 4009, Protect Academic Freedom Act, is virtually identical to a New York State bill I discussed last week. (See NY Bill Defunds Colleges which Boycott Israel) Its stated purpose is "to amend the Higher Education Act of 1965 to prohibit an institution that participates in a boycott of Israeli academic institutions or scholars from being eligible for certain funds under that act."

This bill reacts to continuing efforts by the prestigious American Studies Association to withdraw U.S. academic cooperation with Israeli educational institutions (but not individual academics) that defend Israel's injustices.

In a video before the House of Representatives, Rep. Roskam described such an effort as "anti-Semitic." His bill says the U.S. has the duty to protect "the principles of academic freedom guaranteed by the United States."  Roskam evidently believes the U.S. government's First Amendment protections should extend to academics of a foreign country!

Like similar legislation in New York and Maryland, this bill attempts to portray academic boycott as a violation of Israeli human rights. In punishing the boycotting universities, their staffs, or even students who have presumed to influence Israel with more than just words, H.R. 4009's penalties could be very great.  Johns Hopkins University receives more than a billion dollars annually in federal aid.  Even more calamitous would be the chill on free speech as universities and colleges are coerced to cooperate or close their doors.

Yes, it is unpleasant for Israeli educational institutions to be restricted because they support Israeli policies of discrimination, harassment, land seizures, arbitrary imprisonment and denial of basic human rights, etc. against the Palestinians. Yet such inconvenience pales before the sufferings and deprivations Israel continues to impose on innocent Palestinians, especially in Gaza but also the West Bank.  

An academic boycott simply says to Israel: "Allow freedom and full human rights and dignity to the Palestinians, and American academic institutions participating in our boycott will restore free academic cooperation." 

Monday, February 10, 2014

The Trillion Dollar Road to Armageddon

In March of last year the Norwegian government convened a gathering of 129 nations in Oslo for a two-day Conference on the Humanitarian Consequences of Nuclear War. This week there will be a follow up meeting in Mexico to further examine the scientific data now available documenting the devastating global impact of even a very limited use of these weapons.

The United States and the other four permanent members of the UN Security Council, who together possess 98% of the world’s nuclear weapons, boycotted the Oslo meeting and have not yet indicated if they will attend the meeting in Mexico. In a joint statement issued before the Oslo meeting, the P5, as they are called, said that a conference that examined what will actually happen if nuclear weapons are used would somehow “distract” them from their efforts to reduce the nuclear danger.

The administration has expressed particular concern that these conferences will somehow endanger the 1968 Non Proliferation Treaty, which makes it illegal for states which do not possess nuclear weapons to build them. But Article VI of the NPT also requires the existing nuclear powers to engage in good faith negotiations to eliminate their own nuclear arsenals.

A recent statement by Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel sheds light on the real threat to the NPT. Speaking after a tour of nuclear weapons facilities in Albuquerque earlier this month, Hagel called for the US to 'upgrade' its nuclear warheads and the submarines, bombers and missiles that deliver them.

The Congressional Budget Office estimated in late December these plans would cost $355 billion over the next decade. The Center for Nonproliferation Studies predicts the new weapons will cost $1 trillion over 30 years.

Meanwhile, the Russians are in the middle of a similar major upgrade of their nuclear forces.


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Thursday, February 6, 2014

The Union’s state: A wounded soldier, a defeated America, and a depraved governing class

–First, Americans must recognize that in the task of defeating our enemies — those who attack us, whatever their motivation — U.S. civilian and military lawyers, law school professors, and most of the rest of the academy and the media are on the enemy’s side. They all accept the killing and crippling of U.S. military personnel as an acceptable price for abiding by the nonsense of what is called “Just War Theory.” Prior to 1945, this theory — which was founded in an era of manly Christianity — never demanded national suicide or giving the enemy an unopposed chance to kill our troops. But today the theory is applied as a means of protecting the enemy. American parents are forced to see their sons and daughters killed — or grievously wounded, as was Sgt. Remsburg — because the U.S. military’s rules-of-engagement require our service personnel to be targets instead of killers, and also require “proportionality” in war, which amounts to fighting on the enemies’ terms. Those who hawk the Just War Theory as its stands and those deluded, usually Ivy-League educated political leaders who apply it in the anti-American form into which academics, clerics, and lawyers have twisted it since 1945 are as much the foes of America — “enemy combatants,” if you will — as are the mujahedin.

–Secondly, Americans need resolutely to use their votes to elect leaders who will stop intervening in overseas events that have nothing to with genuine U.S. national interests. Because of more than thirty years of Washington’s relentless and often mindless bipartisan interventionism, America is fighting what now amounts to a growing world war against Islamist militants and has only its military and intelligence services to defend the republic. Those services cannot win this war so long as our current political class continues to aid the enemy by deliberately losing wars and intervening politically, militarily, and culturally in the Muslim world. As the Islamist threat grows in size, lethality, cohesion, and geographic reach, our bipartisan leaders continue to intervene across the Islamic world and thereby provide the main motivation driving our Islamist foes to attack America. These politicians, for example, support a military coup against a fairly elected Islamist government in Egypt; they back a pervasive Saudi police state and call it America’s trusted ally, even as Riyadh exports a kind of Islam far more vicious than anything bin Laden and his ilk had in mind; and they accept bribery disguised as “campaign contributions” from those disloyal, Israel-First Americans who intend to lead the U.S. military into direct involvement in the wars Israel will soon fight and ultimately lose to the Islamists brought to its borders by the Arab Spring. At all times, there is only a short list of U.S. national interests for which the lives of our military personnel must be risked, but the support of an Egyptian tyranny, the appeasement of a Saudi police state, and perpetual enslavement to Israel’s interests are never on that list. An end to Washington’s interventionism would reduce the motivation of many of Islamists to attack us; shatter their growing cohesion; motivate them to turn more fully on their true enemies: the Arab tyrannies, Israel, and the Shia; and allow the U.S. military a much improved chance to kill those Islamists and their supporters still bent on attacking the United States.

So if Americans want to honestly and substantively honor Sgt. Remsburg — and all U.S. military and intelligence personnel — they must elect leaders who will not start unnecessary wars; who will win the very few necessary wars America must fight; who will not intervene in places and on issues that are none of America’s concern; and who will never forget that the United States is their country of first and only allegiance.

Conversely, Americans must stop electing Democrats and Republicans of the kind now found in Washington. To build their personal and party power, the current U.S. governing class as a whole will continue to ruin the country financially; expand the already near-monarchial powers of the Executive Branch; murder our young by engaging in wars they do not intend to win; intervene in other nations’ affairs, thereby stoking unprecedented hatred for America; and knowingly welcome into the United States the corruption and loss of American independence that results from their groveling devotion to the alien interests of Israel and Saudi Arabia.

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Tuesday, February 4, 2014

Ordinary Citizens Need Not Apply

I read in the newspaper last week now the US Chief Negotiator on the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, Martin Indyk, met with a group of Jewish leaders to brief them on the "tightly held" details of what was being proposed by Secretary of State John Kerry. A few days before, New York’s new mayor Bill de Blasio, who had run for office pledging a new openness and transparency for the city government spoke privately at a dinner hosted by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). The gathering was not on the mayor’s public schedule, received no advanced publicity, and was closed to outsiders. A journalist who succeeded in entering was forcibly removed from the premises. At the meeting de Blasio went way over the top even for a New York politician, saying that it is "part of [his] job description to be a defender of Israel" and that AIPAC "would always have a friend and ally at City Hall." He went on to assert that defending Israel is "elemental to being an American because there is no greater ally on earth."

How de Blasio, a lifelong progressive, squares his commitment to undying fealty to AIPAC with his undoubted knowledge that the group is possibly the most virulent advocate of war with Iran this side of the Israeli government itself might best be left to his conscience, if he has one. And if there was any doubt that there is something rotten in New York, the State Senate meanwhile passed a bill by a vote of 56 to 4 rejecting the use of state funds to support any institution that boycotts "certain countries or their higher education institutions." Senator Jeffrey Klein, the bill’s co-sponsor boasted that he would "not allow the enemies of Israel or the Jewish people to gain an inch in New York." The bill is directed against attempts to divest from or boycott Israeli institutions but it clearly in Klein’s view does not apply to those who are taking every possible step to cripple Iran prior to attacking it.

It should also be noted that New York State, though lacking a foreign policy, is not exactly a disinterested observer of what goes on in the world. Thanks to folks like Klein and the former New York City and New York State Comptroller Alan Hevesi the city and state have been using pension funds to invest in Israel Bonds, which are widely regarded as a huge Ponzi scheme in that they pay the interest for older bond issues by issuing new bonds, which will eventually result in a huge and unsustainable balloon of money due. As the bonds are dollar denominated, Israel can default without any damage to its own economy, making it a bit like being able to print money without actually having to do so. Meanwhile, the income from the purchase of the bonds goes to Israel tax free and can be used for anything, including settlement expansion. It is all part and parcel of the enormous cash flow from the US to Israel, much of it invisible, that occurs every year, but in this case the money frequently comes from state and city pension funds.

For what it’s worth, Hevesi was recently released from prison after being convicted of a $1 million pension fund fraud. Watching the shenanigans of those in power suggests that those who have gained most from New York State’s largesse tend to be those who have the political power and access to have their interests served, no matter how parochial or unwise, while the taxpayer and state pensioners will ultimately be left holding the bag when the Israel bonds eventually do a Madoff.


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