Murderers and Liars. At 2 a.m. today, Israel announced a 48-hour (two-day) suspension of airstrikes. Within mere hours (exactly how many hours is not stated in the story I have seen), Israel had resumed airstrikes, in flagrant violation of its pledge. Israel apparently believes that Americans, on whom its very existence depends, will credit them with their pledge of a suspension, and ignore their violation of that pledge. The mere fact that Israelis are liars who say one thing and do another is never to be held against them. And the worthless scum who control American society never do hold them to account.
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Is there no indignation in this country over Israel's endless crimes? Or is there a lot of anger in the general population that is not reflected in the statements of our 'moral leaders'? If it is just the leadership elite that is slime, we can fix that. New leaders can assert themselves and force the evil present lot out. But if the entire society has lost its conscience, then decent people will have to hope that "terrorists" can somehow kill off, for us, the present crop of monsters so we might then cleanse ourselves of our collective national guilt in co-conspiring in Israel's mass murders.
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Collective guilt justifies collective punishment. "Terrorism" inflicts collective punishment. It looks increasingly appropriate that the United States is targeted for terrorist attack. I just hope that if, not when, terrorists break thru, they kill the right people: the President, Vice President, Cabinet, generals, Congress, and select media (Fox News Channel, the New York Post, CBN) that are the bulwark of Israeli mind control over American society and leave the rest of us out of it.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,578.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:27 AM

 
First World Wages for Chicagoans. The New York Times reported Thursday that "Chicago Orders ‘Big Box’ Stores to Raise Wage".

After months of fevered lobbying and bitter debate, the Chicago City Council passed a groundbreaking ordinance yesterday requiring “big box” stores, like Wal-Mart and Home Depot, to pay a minimum wage of $10 an hour by 2010, along with at least $3 an hour worth of benefits.

Some of the enormous, exploitative corporations affected announced that they intend to challenge that legislation in court, pretending that the "equal protection clause" of the Constitution forbids discrimination against corporations of a certain size, even tho, as the Times's story points out, "a legal analysis by the Brennan Center at New York University said there was ample precedent for selective imposition of minimum wages by size of business." The equal protection clause applies to people, not corporations.
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Chicago's mayor had not made plain by Thursday whether he would sign the ordinance or veto it. He would be a fool to veto it, for various reasons, not least of which is that even if one were to see the measure as protecting smaller businesses that charge higher prices, it is those very prices on which sales tax, a major source of city revenue, is based. The lower the price charged by a big-box outfit, the smaller the sales tax the city receives.

The bill comes at a time when many large retailers are increasing their presence in large cities. * * * large retailers had saturated suburban markets and had powerful incentives to move into urban areas.

The big-box companies pretend they have the upper hand and cities and towns must cave in to them or they will set up shop in other municipalities nearby. The reality, however, is that they have already set up shop in pretty much all the suburban areas they can draw business from, and now must move into major cities or content themselves with stagnant revenues. Executives dare not go to shareholders with stagnant revenues, on enterprises that do not grow. So who has the upper hand now?
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The Times points out that:

The drive to raise state and city minimum wages has grown out of frustration with Congress, which has left the federal minimum wage at $5.15 an hour since 1997. At least 22 states have enacted somewhat higher minimum wage laws.

Tho the House of Representatives the very next day voted an increase in the minimum wage to $7.25 an hour by 2010, it would take effect only if the bill in which that provision is contained is passed intact. However, the larger bill calls for a radical diminution in the estate tax to benefit the very wealthiest people in the Nation, so might not pass the Senate.

The bill calls for the minimum wage to rise to $7.25 an hour from $5.15 an hour, an increase that would be phased in over the next three years.

On the estate tax, the bill would exempt $5 million of an individual's estate and $10 million of [a] couple's taxes by 2005 [sic; 2015?]. In addition, estates valued at $25 million would be taxed at the current capital gains rate of 15%, a rate that is scheduled to rise to 20%. The remainder of the estate would be taxed at a rate targeted to fall to 30% by 2015.

Under the current law, the estate tax is due to be phased out completely by 2010, only to be reinstated in 2011, with a tax rate of 55% on estates larger than $1 million.

House members of the Republican Party passed this measure in an election year, pledging stingily to increase the minimum wage for the poorest Americans starting next year ONLY if the richest Americans can cheat the Government out of hundreds of thousands of dollars of tax now due from dead guys, who sure as hell don't need so much as one red cent.
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When will we slaughter Republicans and chop them up for parts for the poor? The only good Republican is a dismembered Republican. I would love to see us create a lot of good Republicans.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,578.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:40 PM

 
Drown the Jury. A group of evil, irresponsible Texans has trivialized and approved the murder of five small children by their own mother, as part of the ongoing assault upon sanity and decency we see everywhere in this demented country.
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Andrea Yates drowned all five of her young children, some of whom fought desperately for life, in details you can see in a commentary today by Mona Charen entitled "Andrea Yates, Insanity and Guilt" that concludes:

Expert witnesses disagree all the time about the nature, extent and effects of mental illnesses. It therefore falls upon juries to use their common sense as to whether a defendant understood what he or she was doing. Many jurors have difficulty applying the words "not guilty" to a person like Andrea Yates -- crazy though she clearly is. For moral clarity as much as anything, there ought to be an option for "guilty but insane."

I don't care what a person's deluded motivation may be for a horrible crime. It is the crime that matters, and the crime must be punished. She didn't understand that what she was doing was wrong? So what? Of what conceivable importance is that? Who cares? She did it. She should die for it. Period.
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The insanity defense is a crime against society that must be abolished everywhere. The legislators and governor responsible for the Texas statute that plays patty-cake with a multiple murderess should be drowned, along with every member of the jury who took the side of a murderess against her victims, and the judges who required a retrial. Drag them screaming to a tub and hold them each, in sequence, under water until they die, and let each one yet to be executed see what is going to happen to them so they have time to appreciate the panic and mental torment of the children the woman they so sympathize with went thru. Drown them all.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,571.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 2:58 PM

 
Backlash against Insane Jewish Rhetoric. The apologists for the endless crimes of Israel are saying things so vile and utterly immoral that it is becoming impossible for hundreds of millions of people around the world to separate Judaism and Zionism, and thus Judaism from the crimes of Zionism. Israel's latest outrage has moved uncountable millions of people around this planet to think, or even say aloud, "Hitler was right."
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John Podhoretz, the idiot Rightwing columnist of the New York Post, said Tuesday:

What if liberal democracies have now evolved to a point where they can no longer wage war effectively because they have achieved a level of humanitarian concern for others ["Humanitarian concern for others"?! Israel?! Bombing civilians and Lebanese government buildings? Bombing the airport so people can't escape abroad? Humanitarian concerns? Israel?!?] that dwarfs any really cold-eyed pursuit of their own national interests? [As tho grotesquely disproportionate collective punishment of innocents advances Israel's national interests.]

What if the universalist idea of liberal democracy — the idea that all people are created equal — has sunk in so deeply that we no longer assign special value to the lives and interests of our own people as opposed to those in other countries? [Which country is his? He can't be talking about the U.S. His country is plainly Israel. He should go there. Put your money where your mouth is.] * * *

Could World War II have been won by Britain and the United States if the two countries did not have it in them to firebomb Dresden and nuke Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

No respectable commentator I have ever heard has said the firebombing of Dresden was either militarily necessary or morally defensible. And there is an immense difference between World War II and the mere kidnapping of two — count 'em: TWO — soldiers (soldiers!). When Germans shot 100 people for each German soldier KILLED by local resistance fiters, they were condemned as monsters. Israel's soldiers weren't even killed, yet Israel launched a war that has killed, to date, some 600 Lebanese! and caused hundreds of millions of dollars of damage to property and infrastructure. Small wonder that Israelis are now often called "Zionazis".
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John Podhoretz and many other Jews think that what Israel is doing is just fine. Jews around the world are rallying to rhetorical defense of Israel, pretending that its hideously, extremely disproportionate reaction to a trivial provocation was fully justified. Are they insane?
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People need to draw distinctions all the time in morality. Podhoretz and his ilk are incapable of doing that because they are fundamentally evil and feeble-minded. In defending Israel's endless collective punishment of all its neighbors, they put all Jews around the world at risk of retaliatory collective punishment, because non-Jews have to believe that all Jews back Israel's outrages. Anti-Zionist Jews understand that perfectly well. The website www.jewsnotzionists.org puts this perfectly plainly:

The ancestors of those who adopt this view [that Jews must control Palestine politically] lived in large numbers in the Holy land long before Zionists arrived and provoked the native Muslim population. They lived at peace with their non-Jewish neighbors. It was after the immigration began, which sought political rule, that animosity started. So, Zionism has protected no one. At first it endangered the old Jewish inhabitants of the Holy Land. Then it endangered the millions who lived there. Finally, it has plunged into danger Jewry world wide and many others, including Americans anywhere around the world.

Comedy Central's Daily Show a couple of nites ago showed Ben Stein on Fox News Channel saying (approximate quote):

Israel is the summit of decency.

What?!? I tried to get the exact wording from Comedy Central's website, but its videos refused to play mid-day. Perhaps the site's capacity is overstrained. But that is at least the import of what he said. Maybe the actual wording was "Israel is the summit of morality", but in either case, the statement was astounding in its madness and moral blindness.
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Ben Stein is a Jew, and every time a Jew says something that vile about his or her beloved Israel — mind you, Ben Stein stays thousands of miles from the greatest danger; Arabs have found a way to bring danger closer to Jews who stay thousands of miles from the fite, as to the island of Manhattan, tho not yet to Beverly Hills and Malibu, where Stein lives, 10,000 miles from his supposedly beloved Israel — everyone who hears it and contrasts it with the news out of Lebanon thinks "The Jews are just utterly, irredeemably evil. Kill them all!" And of course, we see Israelis in Haifa reacting to the nerve of Arabs to rain missiles upon them, by proclaiming in front of TV cameras, "Kill them all!", meaning Arabs.
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The Daily Show also showed Ed Helms speaking of the "Roadmap to Peace", and saying that the timeline presently shows peace being achieved in about 6,000 years. Funny, but not very funny at the same time. Because plainly many people around the world believe, with good reason, that there will never be peace between Israel and Arabs, and the larger Moslem world. But we are all expected to pretend to believe that peace is doable, and continue to spend hundreds of billions of dollars and have thousands of Americans die, one or three a day in Iraq and Afghanistan, thousands on 9/11, and hundreds or thousands more in future "terror" attacks on our soil (we are told, "It's not a matter of if, but when"), because the U.S. Government continues to kill Arabs for Israel, and makes us all answerable for those crimes.
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Thomas Ricks was on the Charlie Rose show last nite. He is senior Pentagon correspondent for The Washington Post and author of the new book, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq. He apparently believes the lie that the U.S. is in Iraq to help Iraqis and stabilize democracy, so the horrendous chaos we have unleashed is a failure of policy. Alas, the destruction of Iraq was not an inadvertent side effect of the invasion but the very purpose of the war. The invasion was launched not to "liberate" Iraq but to destroy Iraq as a threat to Israel, the only country the ruling class of the United States cares a thing about in that entire region.
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The chaos and ongoing death and destruction to that unfortunate country is not a side effect, and the war is not a disaster. The chaos, death, and destruction were all intended, and the war is thus a great success. The U.S. has destroyed Iraq as a threat to Israel, and the ongoing deaths of Arabs and setting them at each other's throats so even more will die in fratricidal war, against each other rather than allowing them to unite against Israel, is deliberate, a triumph of policy. The war is not a fiasco. It is a brilliant success. That it has killed less than 2,600 U.S. soldiers, and perhaps a few hundred more American contractors and the like, and cost us only $400 billion (so far) is a triumph of military supremacy. If you don't understand that the present Administration, and both major parties, are willing to pay a price ten times that large to protect Israel, you don't understand the complete takeover of American society by Radical Zionism.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,570.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 3:09 PM

 
Your Tax Dollars at Work, in Lebanon. A fellow Expansionist sent me an email that shows many pictures of the devastation that Israel, with the active and enthusiastic backing of the Bush Administration and U.S. tax moneys, is inflicting on Lebanon without mercy. Entitled "Look, If You Dare: Lebanon 2006", the site contains graphic pictures of death and destruction that appear to be genuine. If you have the heart — and stomach — to see what the U.S. Government regards as Israeli "self-defense", please visit http://www.middleeast.org/premium/read.cgi?category=Magazine&num=1466&month=7&year=2006&function=text&standalone=0.
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If you view those fotos, I want you to keep the refrain of Lee Greenwood's song "God Bless the USA" constantly in mind, "I'm proud to be an American". If you don't know it, both lyrics and, after a slite delay, music can be found at the link above, written out here: http://www.brownielocks.com/godblesstheusaWAVE.html I imagine George Bush knows all the words.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,567.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 2:47 PM

 
Political Sin and Religious Redemption (Part 2 of 2). Yesterday I focused on political sin. Today I'll focus on one tiny act of redemption by religion, which all too often is part of the political sinfulness we see every day, as superstitious fools assert that theirs is the one true path and every heretic / nonbeliever / infidel must be forced by government to obey religious laws whether they want to or not. Now and then, Christians behave as such, so it's good to be able to report that, when it happens.
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The Episcopal Church in my city has nominated an openly gay priest now living in San Francisco with his lover of 24 years, to become the next Bishop of the Diocese of Newark, which encompasses most of North Jersey (some 6 or 7 million people of all religions, including sizable Jewish and Moslem communities). Alas, this progressive move was denounced by rightwingers who, tho out of step in the United States, are more in tune with the regressive Anglican Church worldwide.
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These are the bastards who broke from the Roman Catholic Church because the Pope wouldn't allow Henry VIII to divorce Catherine of Aragon, youngest child of Ferdinand and Isabella, "Their Catholic Majesties", who united Spain, drove out the Jews and Moors, and sponsored Christopher Columbus's voyages that opened the New World to European settlement and made Spain, for over two centuries, the superpower of the age. What might the world look like today had Henry VIII managed to ally the Anglo and Hispanic worlds?
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There was no significant doctrinal difference between the new Church of England and the Roman Catholic Church, but Henry VIII, one of the most wicked people in all of English history (known for beheading his wives and their lovers — or men falsely accused of being their lovers, so Henry could rid himself of wives he tired of), wanted (a) the right to marry a younger wife who might bear him a son to become king after his death and (b) to control the wealth and policies of the Church (which had power over the minds of the people) in England.
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As I have occasionally observed, history has a sense of humor — or at least irony. Henry's functioning heirs were both girls: first Mary I ("Bloody Mary"), then Elizabeth I!
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Henry VIII's bitter split with Rome produced centuries of conflict and killed unknown numbers of people in mutual attacks (Catholics oppressing Protestants under Bloody Mary; Protestants oppressing Catholics thereafter), then imposed anti-Catholic bigotry upon, among other places, what was to become the United States. To this day we have had only one Catholic President out of 43, even tho the U.S. is about 1/4 Catholic.
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That anti-"papist" bigotry has hugely complicated our relationships with Latin America, and underlies a lot of the present hostility to immigration from Latin America, because the Protestant bare-majority (52%) is deathly afraid that Catholics will replace them as the majority faith and we will have a parade of Catholic Presidents, Speakers of the House, Governors, and Senators, and Catholics will dominate national politics.
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The concern they hide behind is Spanish language, but that is absolutely phony, because everyone knows that almost all Hispanics master English in a single generation and are perfectly content to use it in public discourse with their neighbors. Most even lose Spanish entirely, or have to take it as a foreign language in high school, within two generations. But religion! That's quite another matter. Born Catholic, die Catholic, usually. Latinos meet Anglos in church, and Cuban-Irish, Mexican-Polish, Puerto Rican-Italian babies are raised Catholic.
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Had the U.S. not had Anglican hostility to Catholicism deeply engrained in the dominant Protestant culture, we might long ago have extended our Union to much of Latin America by eagerly courting and admitting new states from the Caribbean to Mexico to Central America, and even to the southern tip of the Continent, Tierra del Fuego. Had we done that, the population explosion that menaces us today would never have happened, because it was driven by poverty, and wide Pan-American Union would have made the entire Hemisphere prosperous.
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There is one salutary good that has emerged from religious diversity, however: Catholic-Protestant tension has enabled nonbelievers and minority religions more freedom from compulsion of conscience than a population unified religiously might have permitted. Now, while the Catholic world struggles to suppress homosexuality, in league with the most regressive forces in the Protestant world (the Anglican communion outside the U.S. and Britain, for instance), much of the push for acceptance of homosexuality (and lesbianism, a parallel, if trivial, phenomenon) comes from liberal Protestantism, including most notably the Episcopal Church. My city, Newark, has played a major role in the liberalization of that Church.
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Episcopalians are among the most liberal of denominations, just having elected a woman to head the entire U.S. church. Moreover, the (Newark) Star-Ledger points out that:

Newark is among the most liberal Episcopal dioceses in the country. Bishop Croneberger, who supported [gay New Hampshire bishop] Robinson's election and another measure authorizing blessings of same-sex unions, became the diocese's ninth bishop in 1998, replacing liberal icon John Shelby Spong.

Wikipedia says "Spong is the bestselling liberal theologian of recent times." He's still alive and kicking, but in Morris Plains, an outer suburb, no longer within Newark.
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Not surprisingly, this nomination was met with hostility by regressives, who identify as Anglicans more than Episcopalians:

"[The Rev. Michael] Barlowe's nomination illustrates clearly that those in the Episcopal Church USA committed to the revisionist agenda with regard to sexuality are willing to sacrifice membership in the Anglican Communion," the statement [by the rightwing Anglican American Council] read.

"We are shocked that just one week after the close of General Convention [which passed a resolution urging restraint on nominating gay bishops] . . . the Diocese of Newark has sent a clear and defiant message nationally and internationally that there will be no turning back," continued the statement.

If Barlowe wins in September, his election would need to be confirmed by the national church. * * * Asked if Barlowe might not be confirmed if he wins in Newark, [a member of the nominating committee] said, "That possibility exists." * * *

The committee had earlier considered a gay woman,* the Rev. Tracey Lind of Cleveland, as a finalist but she withdrew as a potential candidate earlier this month.

None of the finalists was immediately identified as a favorite to lead the 30,000-member diocese, which covers most of northern New Jersey. * * *

New Jerseyans are disinclined to be lectured by bluenoses in the national church:

"I don't feel we need to be under anybody's discipline," . . . said [the Rev. Dwight Neglia, of St. Agnes Church in Little Falls].

Good for them. You see now why I live where I live. The New York-New Jersey-Connecticut Tristate Metropolitan Area is perhaps the most liberal part of this Nation (with Massachusetts?), and is very congenial for people who embrace our unofficial national motto: "Live and Let Live". Now, if only it weren't so cold much of the year. Bring on Global Warming!
____________________

* There is no such thing as a "gay woman" any more than there is a "lesbian man". Homosexuality and lesbianism are parallel, not the same. Parallels never touch, and women should stop hiding behind gay men's numbers, and stop calling themselves "gay". Gay men should stop hiding behind women's 'skirts' and misrepresenting male sexuality behind a New Homosexuality that is to be perceived as dominantly female, on the assumption that straights are less hostile to women "loving each other" than to men having sex with each other.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,565.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 2:51 PM

 
Political Sin and Religious Redemption (Part 1 of 2). President Bush is committing a horrendous crime against humanity that assures that the people of the United States will not just continue to be targeted for death but will be more intensely despised in large areas of this planet for the foreseeable future.
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In this space July 10th, I said of U.S. complicity in Israel's crimes:

[Americans indignantly proclaim] "We were attacked on September 11th", implying we did nothing to incite such an attack. No, we have been angels to Islam. We didn't send $100 billion to prop up the State of Israel and buy ammunition for the guns and cannons, and fuel for the bulldozers, that have killed untold numbers of Arabs, inside and outside Palestine, and destroyed entire Arab neighborhoods. * * * We disown any responsibility, then send Israel more money to replenish the ammunition expended on killing [innocents].

Now, Dubya wants to rush bombs to Israel to replenish the stores depleted by Israel's latest war against its neighbors.

The Bush administration is rushing a delivery of precision-guided bombs to Israel, which requested the expedited shipment last week after beginning its air campaign against Hezbollah targets in Lebanon, American officials said Friday.

The decision to quickly ship the weapons to Israel was made with relatively little debate within the Bush administration, the officials said. Its disclosure threatens to anger Arab governments and others because of the appearance that the United States is actively aiding the Israeli bombing campaign in a way that could be compared to Iran’s efforts to arm and resupply Hezbollah.

Altho the pretense is that these are "arms sales", the reality is that all Israeli 'defense' purchases from the United States are paid for by U.S. aid. That is, you are paying for those bombs. You are paying for that rush delivery. And you will be held to account if you do nothing to stop it. (That passage was directed to Americans. The following imperative applies to everyone, wheresoever situate on this violent and deformed planet.)
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You've got to speak out. "Silence implies assent" in law and morality. As one alternate-religion website points out:

Speak out — do not remain silent. Silence implies assent, and makes it harder for others to speak in turn. If we do not fight for what is right, who will? Stand up and be noticed. Help turn the tide.

I had already emailed the White House on Israel's astonishingly disproportionate reaction to a trivial incident, but this latest decision by the Bushites compelled me to send a second message to the President (president@whitehouse.gov or comments@whitehouse.gov (they go to the same mailbox) with copy to vice.president@whitehouse.gov) today:

HOW on Earth can you be so crazy as to rush bombs to Israel and make uncontradictably clear to all the world that your Government is fully complicit in Israel's crimes? Don't you understand that every U.S. soldier in the Moslem world will now be even more a target for death? Don't you understand that hundreds of millions of people in the Moslem world who were willing to separate the U.S. from Israel will now be forced to see the two as one? Don't you understand that rushing bombs to Israel is equivalent to proclaiming that the United States IS Israel and all Americans share the guilt for Israel's crimes, so can properly be targeted for death?
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Your stupidity is beyond belief. It would seem that Americans will have to destroy the Republican Party in order to save themselves from the permanent war you have started, that kills Americans every day — for Israel.

I also wrote, by feedback form at his website, to one of my U.S. Senators, Robert Menendez. I'm not persuaded there is any point to writing to the other, Frank Lautenberg, because he is a Jew and has always seemed very cozy with Israel.

You disgrace the people of New Jersey by siding with Israel in its insane collective punishment of the entire Lebanese nation for the acts of a few guerrillas. Have you forgotten the many New Jerseyans who died on 9/11? On that day, al-Qaeda inflicted collective punishment upon Americans for the actions of the U.S. Government in siding with Israel in all its crimes. How can we be indignant about 9/11 if we show no indignation about Israel's monstrous over-reaction against Lebanon? How many more 9/11's must we suffer before we accept that Arabs are right to hate us because people in power (like you) side with Israel and make us all targets of retribution?
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You are in a very close race for Senate this November. I would ordinarily vote for the Democrat. But if you behave exactly the same as a Republican, I will vote for your opponent. I'd rather have a real Republican than an imitation Democrat.
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Democrats are concerned with justice. They never side with injustice. They never say that killing hundreds of Arabs and destroying billions of dollars of private property and infrastructure thru an attack upon a sovereign nation in retaliation for the kidnapping — not even killing — of a mere two Israelis by entirely different people is morally defensible. Would you smile upon a full-scale U.S. attack upon ordinary Mexicans for the tacit connivance of their government in illegal immigration? How about a full-scale attack upon the people of your ancestral country, Cuba, for the acts of their government? Would you defend the U.S. killing hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of Hispanics in our neighbors, as you smile upon Israel killing hundreds and hundreds in Lebanon, Israel's neighbor?
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If you have no moral sense, you are unfit to hold public office. Speak out against Israel's grotesque over-reaction, or know that you have put New Jerseyans in peril. And don't expect to triumph in November by pandering to Zionists. The Jewish vote isn't that big, and Republicans can claim part of it.
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Christians should follow Christian moral law and denounce violations by anyone, "friend" or foe without distinction. Decent people do not excuse crimes by their friends, not in the ghettos of New Jersey, not in the Middle East.

I really hate the thought of voting for a Republican, ever, even a "moderate" Republican like Tom Kean (son of the former NJ governor who co-chaired the 9/11 Commission). Tom Kean's website says nothing at all about the Middle East, so we cannot know Kean's stance. His refusing to denounce Israel's invasion suggests he approves of it. ("Silence implies assent", remember?) But the worse offender is the man who should know better but does evil anyway. Republicans just don't know right from wrong.
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It is because both major parties are mortally immoral that I have tried to form a Third Party, the Expansionist Party of the United States, that never willfully does wrong. Alas, people think support for a Third Party is pointless. So we are endlessly required to choose the lesser of evils, being never able to vote for good.
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There is an irony in the behavior of Israel in its latest attack upon Islam, but I doubt Israelis are smart enuf to see it.
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Israel is dropping leaflets and otherwise telling Lebanese civilians to flee the areas it intends to continue to attack, as tho that relieves them of all responsibility for invading and devastating a sovereign state alongside it. But what about the notorious 'voluntary removal' of Palestinians from what became Israel when war broke out at the establishment of the State of Israel? Israel has endlessly proclaimed that there is no "right of return" for Palestinians who left Israel then, to avoid being killed in the hostilities, because they "voluntarily" abandoned their property and gave up any right to live where their families had lived for centuries. So, Israeli 'reasoning' goes, Jews could properly just move in, seize "abandoned" Arab property without compensation (even tho Jews are still suing for restoration of property taken by Germans 60 years ago!), and erect a legal, military, and physical barrier to stop Arab owners from returning to their homes after hostilities ended. Israel has endlessly told displaced Palestinians that their only redress is to seek compensation from the Arab governments that told them to evacuate.
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Apply the same reasoning to today. Israel tells Arabs to flee Lebanon. Does that then give Israel the right simply to march in and take over "abandoned" Lebanese territory too, and deny Lebanese the right to return to their homes? Are Lebanese who flee now to have as their only recourse to petition Israel to pay for the property it has devastated and/or seized? Will any international tribunal make Israel pay?
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Do property rights end when war begins? I don't think that's the way international law works.
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But of course, laws were made for other people, not for Jews. Jews are God's "Chosen People", so non-Jews have no right even to attempt to lay down the law for Jews. Jews are a law unto themselves, and everyone had better bow down to the Jews or they will find themselves bombed into submission or nonexistence. American taxpayers will pay for those bombs, and ship them by rush delivery to make sure Israel never runs out of bombs with which to kill Gentiles. Never mind that almost all Americans are Gentiles, for whom Israel has not one iota more respect than it has for Arabs. If Americans stopped supporting Israel, we too would become enemies of Israel, to be killed if we get in Zionists' way. Note that Israel knew there were 25,000 Americans in Lebanon, but that did not for one second delay Israel's attacks.
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Why is there so little active moral conscience in this country when it comes to outrages by Israel against Arabs? It's as tho we have made an automatic exception to all the rules when it comes to Arabs in particular and Moslems in general. Could it be because Jews control the media?
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Oh, Jews will publicly deny that they control the media, even tho everybody knows it's true. Jewish control has been slitely diluted in recent years, but remains strong. Among themselves, Jews brag about their dominance of media. Works like the formerly published Jewish Almanac contain long lists of "our people" in positions of power in the movie industry, TV, newspaper publishing, magazines, Internet publishing — everywhere. They write books like An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood. Amazon.com's brief review of that book begins thus:

That subtitle may inspire in some readers waves of ethnic pride, and in others waves of ethnic revulsion, but the point of this book is that its claim of origin is quite literally true.

Equally true is the fact that everyone knows that Jews completely and absolutely control major U.S. media. Would the news and human-interest stories you see be different if there were NO Jews in U.S. media? Would the point of view of media be different if every major media outlet of every type (TV, newspapers, magazines, books, entertainment films and documentaries, online news and commentary sites) were owned and controlled by Arabs?
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Why haven't the Saudi, Omani, UAE and other Arab oil billionaires bought up lots of U.S. media? Why not? Why not give us balance by ending Jewish dominance of media? Why the hell not?
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(Part 2 of this essay will appear tomorrow. It is of course much shorter, because it deals with redemption, which in the United States of today is much rarer than sin, be it political or any other kind.)
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,564.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 4:20 PM

 
Getting It Right, for a Change. Today is one of the rarest of days, a day on which I can actually agree with President Bush on something.
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Bush cast his first veto in 5½ years in office to reject loosening standards and increasing funds for embryonic-stem-cell research. In a brilliant bit of theater, the Bush team gathered a group of children born from "surplus" embryos created by fertility doctors, to demonstrate that we're really not talking about "cells" but about people when we talk of cutting up embryos for medical research. Alas, some people were not moved from their doctrinaire contempt for pre-birth babies.
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I overheard two liberals in my office last nite discussing the viability of castoff embryos from fertility clinics, justifying the willful destruction of these tiny children by suggesting that most of them would die in any case, so why not make use of them before then? Why not? Oh, a little thing called "morality". It's inconvenient, but decent people always think about the right and wrong of public-policy decisions. That bad things may happen to some people does not justify taking a public-policy decision to cause bad things to happen to people.
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A large portion of implanted embryos do, in fact, die before birth. Some die within days or weeks. Others die after months but well before full term. That's why fertility clinics routinely implant multiple embryos. That, in turn, is why we sometimes have women giving birth to litters of five, six, seven babies rather than just one, as originally intended. Because the die-off that was expected to happen did not happen, and the embryos proved stronger than expected.
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Even in nature, some unknown proportion of embryos die within hours, days, or weeks, unknown to the mother. When the child gets large enuf to be felt, and then dies, the mother does notice, and "miscarriage" turns celebration of an impending birth into an overpowering sense of loss and grief.
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But the mere fact that some embryos do not survive to infancy does not justify willfully killing all embryos of a given class ("unwanted", "surplus") and chopping them up for parts.
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The rationalization that the embryos at issue were not created to be chopped up, but are just "surplus" or "discard" embryos that would die anyway, without contributing anything to science, constitutes willful moral blindness. You know full well that if "surplus" embryos can be chopped up for parts, there will suddenly come to be a lot more "surplus" embryos, because fertility clinics linked to stem-cell research facilities will deliberately create a lot more embryos than they would if every embryo created were to be used only to make wanted babies. This is the "slippery slope" we set foot upon when we rationalize chopping up "surplus" embryos.
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Consider the accusation made against Communist China, that it not only harvests organs from executed criminals but that it actually trumps up charges against political opponents to justify killing them, at once to eliminate enemies of the state and to harvest a rich cash crop of organs for foreigners. U.S. policy goes much too far in the opposite direction, forbidding even the voluntary donation of organs by prisoners in federal prisons except to family members. That's insane.
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We can certainly justify harvesting organs from executed criminals of our own, whether their families consent or not, as part of the retribution and rebalancing of interests that the criminal law is intended to carry out. We can simply make the public-policy pronouncement that people who forfeit the right of life thru criminal acts forfeit as well the right to decide what happens to their body after death. Easy.
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Does that entail another "slippery slope"? Would such a policy incline juries and judges more readily to convict people whose guilt is in doubt, or impose a death sentence they would otherwise not impose? That strikes me as dubious in the first instance and of questionable impropriety in the second. It's generally very hard to get juries of ordinary people to vote for the death penalty, even for inhuman scum who richly deserve to die for their crimes. If organ harvest made it easier for jurors to accept their moral responsibility to impose the ultimate punishment for the wickedest among us, so much the better.
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The majority of the U.S. public favors embryonic-stem-cell research, because most people don't know the facts, don't understand biology, and have come to have very little regard for innocent human life as long as the person at issue hasn't been born yet. Legalized abortion has produced a callousness to infant death we never as a society felt before.
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Never mind that every last one of us was once unborn, so by the standards of today every last one of us could have been killed with impunity and, thru the technology of the present, have had our parts redistributed to others.
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Perhaps the best line ever written for our first imitation-President, the brilliant actor Ronald Reagan who actually had billions thinking he was President of the United States, was "I've noticed that everybody that is for abortion has already been born." This is, again, like hazing: those who have successfully emerged from it don't think it's such a big deal. Except that if hazing invariably involved death, no one would successfully get thru it and think it trivial thereafter.
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The "Social Compact" is a fictitious contract among the members of society to help each other and defend the rights of every member of the community not because we might ourselves someday need help or defending, but because it is the right thing to do. The prosperous and able-bodied assist and protect the poor and enfeebled not because they think they might someday themselves be poor and feeble (tho they might), but because it is the right thing to do. Men defend women not because they might someday be women themselves, but because it is the right thing to do. And people already born defend the unborn not because we might ourselves someday be unborn, nor even because we were once ourselves unborn, but because it's the right thing to do.
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As is so often the case, perhaps we need to put a "what if" to clarify the moral issues. So, what if we allowed embryos to be created for the express purpose of chopping them up for stem cells, but only embryos of blacks, Orientals, American Indians, Jews, girls, and the poor. Would that be okay? I imagine that rich and powerful white Christian men might be willing to make that compromise with the 'liberals' who want unencumbered embryonic-stem-cell research. Would that be wise and good social policy? I don't think so.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,558.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 2:18 PM

 
Billing Evacuees. The Bush Administration is evacuating some of the 25,000 Americans believed to be in Lebanon, but billing them for that service! I guess that's what Bush means by "compassionate conservatism", his version of "fiscal conservatism". He will run up a deficit in the hundreds of billions of dollars a year, then make up for his profligacy by billing Americans whose very lives his policies put at risk in the Middle East. He backs Israel to the hilt, even as it kills 8 Canadians and attacks an entire country without any regard for innocents, be they 25,000 Americans or anyone else. Why would Israel give a damn about Americans who would live in an Arab country? Plainly they are The Enemy. So a few non-Jewish Americans — or a few dozen — might be killed by Israel's attacks. So what? Bush will excuse it. U.S. media will downplay it, and we'll just go on making excuses for Israeli barbarism.
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Meanwhile, those enemies of Israel will be billed for putting the Zionist U.S. Government to the trouble of pretending to care about them. They don't like it? They shouldn't have been in an enemy of Israel to begin with. If Arabs succeed in launching radioactivity-coated missile warheads into Israeli cities and the many "Americans" in Israel need to be evacuated, will the Bush Administration bill them too? Not bloody likely. But perhaps Congress will balk, and demand equal treatment for evacuees from Israel, so they too will be billed.
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What next? Billing people rescued by the Coast Guard for accidents at sea or rescued by the fire service from wildfires? You've gotta love good old Dubya, huh? Oh. No. That's wrong. You've got to hate George Bush and everything he stands for.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,553.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 2:41 PM

 
Spiraling — but to Where? Regular readers of this blog (yes, there are some) know that I avoid predicting the future, an impossible task which ordinarily resolves to wishful thinking. There are so many ways the latest nitemare in the Middle East can take us, and so many aspects to it, that a quick list of the headings I considered for today's entry, each of which would have taken me in a different direction, should be indicative.
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"Evil, Triumphal." My first version was more negative: "Evil Triumphant." But that suggested that there was no hope. And I'd like to think that there's always hope. If not, we might as well all become suicide bombers. Israel needs to think about that. But Israel can't think about anything, because Israelis are all, uniformly, idiots, consumed by egotistical madness.
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"Moral Bankruptcy". The G8 leaders' complicity in Israel's crimes demonstrates the moral worthlessness of both the West (which includes Russia, culturally) and Japan.
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"And Then They Came for Me." On the silence of the moral leadership of churches and nations in confronting the insanity and evil of Zionism in its latest orgy of mass murder in 58 years of inhuman violence. Why are even Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez, the Pope — all the world's moral finger-waggers — silent?
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"End Times/First Days (of World War III)." On the very real possibility that Israel will plunge us all into full-scale thermonuclear apocalypse, with the active connivance of Rightwing Christian Fundamentalists in the United States, who want the world to end.
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"Over a Barrel". How the Arab oil-exporting countries can ravage the U.S. economy, using the only power they themselves have to strike back at their oppressors.
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"Historic Realignment". How Communist China and North Korea can move huge quantities of missiles and other weapons into the Middle East to destroy Israel and drive the United States out of Asia, and unite groups (Hindus, Moslems; modernizers, traditionalists; India, China) that are ordinarily mutually antagonistic against a common foe, the United States. Compare the alliance during World War II of Western liberal democracy and Stalinism.
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"Not with a Bang but a Whimper". On the end of U.S. hegemony over planet Earth, as forces we have set in motion are now in position to eclipse us and relegate us to the trash heap of history.
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Let's go with that one, which includes elements of "Over a Barrel" and "Historic Realignment".
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If the Arabs are smart, they will cut oil deliveries to the United States by 10% for each day that Israel continues its aggression against Islam, and shift long-term supply commitments to China, India, Japan, and the Old World portion of the Third World (leaving Latin America to fall back upon its own petroleum resources and compete for them with the U.S., unassisted, at least for the time being, by the Arab world). Inasmuch as U.S. gasoline prices are already around $3/gallon and plainly hurting scores of millions of Americans, this is the Arabs' best hope of driving a wedge between Zionists and the Christian population of the United States. They can tell Americans, "Get your gas from Israel."
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China has been concluding long-term exclusive supply contracts for oil supplies all over the world for its growing economy, so Arab nations might well, finally, be able to dispense completely with the U.S. and European markets. Merely threatening to cut off Europe could drive a wedge between the U.S. and its NATO allies, first in making them openly critical of U.S. policy to curry favor with Arabs and second by driving them into the arms of Russia, which has huge reserves of oil and natural gas and which is eager to resume the role of planetary superpower.
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Likewise, China and India, along with various of the smaller Asian economic "tigers", are now well enuf developed that they might be able to replace the U.S. with each other as trading partners and continue their high rates of economic growth, using the unmet needs of 2½ billion people as the engine of perpetual development — without us.
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China might well feel itself empowered by its new economic might to engage in aggressive arms sales to the Middle East. Arab countries could use hard currencies received from Western countries in prior years to buy Chinese armaments, including long-range ballistic missiles — even nuclear weapons — or enter into barter arrangements, oil for arms.
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Asia contains more than half the entire planet's population, and the oilfields of Arabia, Azerbaijan, etc., are all in Asia. Why would it not be largely self-sufficient as to trade and energy, without anything at all from the United States?
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What could the U.S. do if China were willing to risk its enormous trade with the U.S. to pursue its goal of restoring China to its 'natural' role of "Middle Kingdom" — the center of the world?
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China could quietly move huge numbers of missiles into Sinkiang, which is only a couple of thousand miles from Iraq and Israel, and into increasingly friendly nations in Central Asia, to protect its interests if the U.S. threatened reprisal for China's flooding the Arab world with arms and advisors to train Arab armies and various guerrilla organizations to attack Israel and U.S. forces occupying Iraq and Afghanistan. China borders Afghanistan! We have 130,000 hostages in Iraq, and 19,000 more in Afghanistan, all within easy striking distance of Chinese missiles with conventional warheads. This could produce a very hot war for the U.S. military, working over 7,000 miles from our shores but only 2,000 miles, or starkly less, from Chinese territory. Afghanistan is pretty much literally in China's backyard, and the Middle East isn't much farther.
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The U.S. is in no way prepared for full-scale war against China, 1.3 billion people, and U.S. commercial interests would rather sell out their country than lose cheap Chinese imports. It would be extremely difficult for the Bush Administration to move from shipping hundreds of billions of dollars to China in trade deficits — which have richly funded China's military buildup as well as built China's industrial might, the energy demands of which have raised gas prices here — to instead a war footing, even an economic-war footing, because as far as retail giants are concerned, their businesses and the personal fortunes of their managers and shareholders would be the loser in any such conflict, and they just aren't willing to suffer total economic devastation to defend Israel. They can plainly argue that Israel's rash actions threaten to plunge us into a full-scale thermonuclear exchange with China, and that nothing is worth that, not Israel, not Iraq, not the entire Middle East, because 200 million Americans could die in such an exchange, and our civilization and all the hopes we have ever cherished for a major role in world progress would end.
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Republicans, starting with Nixon, have created the present Chinese Frankenstein, except that the Chinese Frankenstein is not a single monster but an army of monsters, with nuclear weapons bought and paid for with American greenbacks.
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What if Iran cozies up to China and supplies radioactive material for "dirty bombs" to ride Russian Katyusha missiles fired by Hezbollah into all of Israel's cities? Could the U.S. stop such dirty warheads from reaching their target, before the fact? How much good would retaliation afterward do? And if China pledges that an attack on Iran is an attack on China, what then?
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China's original timetable to push the U.S. out of Asia called for major action around the year 2020 or 2025. But Israel's fit of madness may have moved that up. Is China ready now to make its move to displace the United States as the world's greatest power? Is it ready to push the U.S. out of all parts of Asia, including Southwest Asia, which we know more commonly as "the Middle East"?
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I don't know. I doubt China's leaders know.
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They have been very quiet about the present crisis. Does that signal unwillingness to do a thing about it? or that they are busy devising a response to take advantage of the opportunities presented?
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Everywhere you look, the Republican Cabal (of which Dubya is just poster boy), which looked so strong not long ago, is looking surrounded, thwarted, drowning in a tsunami of unanticipated events it cannot control.
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The British newspaper The Independent published, five days ago, an article about the swirl of chaos confronting the Bush Administration, which was reprinted the next day by the Belfast Telegraph online. It sums things up like this:

The White House insists that its policies are on track. If there are “a lot of issues in motion”, according to Stephen Hadley, Mr Bush’s National Security Adviser, “in some sense, it was destined to be. We have a president that wants to take on the big issues and see if he could solve them on his watch.” More probably an administration whose energies have been consumed by the war in Iraq, on which Mr Bush has staked his presidency, may be simply overwhelmed. The separate crises amount to “a perfect storm”, Madeleine Albright, who was Secretary of State under Bill Clinton, told The Washington Post last week. “We have not been paying attention to a lot of these issues.”

In the latest flare-up between Israel and its neighbours, Washington has been almost silent. Condoleezza Rice, the Secretary of State, who is struggling to orchestrate the response to Iran’s defiance, merely blamed Hizbollah for upsetting “regional stability”, and urged Syria to rein in its radical protégés.

But Washington’s rebukes are far less pointed than a year ago, in the aftermath of the St Valentine’s Day assassination of the former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri — when the talk here was of “regime change” in Damascus to follow that in Baghdad. The change reflects a growing, if tacit, acceptance that the unilateralist “Bush doctrine”, involving pre-emptive action if necessary to remove a threat, is beyond the power of even the US to implement on its own. Hence the President’s more restrained tone of late, encapsulated by Time magazine’s latest cover, proclaiming an end to “Cowboy Diplomacy”. The problems also reflect a failure to think its policies through. The irony is that Hizbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Palestine achieved their roles in government thanks to democratic elections — exactly what Washington has been advocating for the entire Middle East.

On the periphery of the region, meanwhile, the problems grow more daunting, with the renewed Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan and the apparent seizure of control of much of Somalia, long a potential terrorist redoubt, by Islamic fundamentalist groups.

Further afield, North Korea’s brazen missile tests may be a sign that, like Iran, the reclusive Communist regime does not believe that with so many of its forces tied down in Iraq, Washington has a viable military option.

So what does happen if the Arab oil-exporting states cut off supplies to the U.S.? If China trains Moslem guerrillas and ships hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of advanced armaments — tank killers, surface-to-air missiles — to use against Israel and U.S. forces in Iraq and/or Afghanistan? Will American voters rally round the (Bush) flag while paying $5 a gallon at the gas pump, and re-elect a Republican majority to both Houses of Congress? Would the Democrats do anything different as regards Israel's crimes? Or have Zionists so completely taken over U.S. politics, media, and society that we are destined to be destroyed by Zionist madness?
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I don't know. No one does. We are four months from what may prove the most important election since 1860 (which produced the (first?) Civil War), and no one can know if the major parties can save us from the folly of decades.
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Of course, there is a remote possibility we won't have to worry about an election in November, because our history will end before then, with a full-scale thermonuclear war brought on by the evil lunatics in Jerusalem and American pulpits.
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You might want to spend more time with the people you love. Pet the dog, welcome the cat into your lap. Smell the roses.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,548.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 8:34 AM

 
comments@whitehouse.gov. All Americans, indeed, all people, worldwide, who are indignant about U.S. Government approval of Israel's insanely vile attacks upon millions of Arabs over a few piddling captive Israeli soldiers should write directly to the White House to try to force change. Moreover, it may become necessary to the protection of your own life that you take a public stand against this madness, lest you be killed by "terrorists" who assume you to be their enemy.
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Therefore I suggest (a) that you send email to the President at the address above (comments@whitehouse.gov) to distance yourself from Bush's evil. Send yourself a copy, and print out the version you receive, which will contain the text with date and addressee showing you really did send that text to the White House. Tuck one copy into your passport to carry with you if you travel abroad. Carry a second copy folded up in your wallet. If you are ever taken captive by "terrorists" who want to hold you hostage or kill you for your presumed co-conspiracy in the crimes of Israel, you can tell them to check that email to display your good will toward the hideously wronged people of Palestine, Lebanon — Islam.
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You can as well send email messages of indignation demanding a change in U.S. policy to your U.S. Senators and Representative. Unfortunately, by far most Members of Congress now use feedback forms rather than accept emails from 'ordinary citizens'. I imagine that if you give $65,000 to their election campaign they might give you an email address thru which you can reach them directly. Those of us who don't bribe our Congressman or Senator to listen to our concerns, however, must use feedback forms. Still, you can cut-and-paste your email to the President into a feedback form for your Senators (remember, each resident of a U.S. state has two Senators) and Representative.
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You can of course vary your message for each recipient to argue the specific points you think most relevant to the particular Senator or Representative, rather than simply block-copy your message to the President and put a short introductory remark before it. Messages to individual members of both houses of Congress might actually be more effective in producing change, since (1) there are far fewer people writing to each member of Congress than to the President; (2) Representatives have to run for office more often (every two years) than does the President (four years), and tho the Constitution requires the President to retire after at most two full terms, members of Congress would like to think they can stay in office for decades, so anything that threatens that tenure is taken very seriously; and (3) U.S. Senators run less often (every six years) than either the President or Reps, but in non-presidential election years, they are the top of the ticket, so attract the bulk of the flak.
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The major parties are enormously concerned with retaining control of Congress, but especially of the Senate — which confirms or rejects appointees to courts and other major posts. The Senate is thus the weak underbelly of The System, especially in states of smaller population, since the enormous warchests necessary in huge states are not necessary to sustain a credible challenge to an incumbent. The Senate is also regarded as the more "deliberative" and "august" chamber of Congress, so people who stand for election to the 'elect' 100 of the Senate need to present themselves as more thoughtful and wise than those who seek only to join the 435 members of the House, most of whom are concerned most of the time with domestic matters, even local matters.
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Ever hopeful of helping to save the United States, my country, with which I deeply identify, from the indelible, irremovable disgrace it seems now to be descending, irredeemably, into, I dispatched the following email today to the White House:

The United States must denounce Israel and force it to end its inexcusable campaign of massive violence as collective punishment of millions of Arabs for kidnappings of a few Israeli soldiers by a few individual guerrillas. Cut off all aid to Israel, forever. Warn Israel that if it does not stop its attacks, the United States will bomb the Knesset and all Israeli military targets of every kind whatsoever, and simultaneously move in the United Nations to disestablish Israel and merge it into a United Palestine.
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For the United States to pretend that Israel's campaign of terror is "self-defense" is precisely the kind of insanely immoral and reckless rhetoric that has made all Americans targets for terror by decent people worldwide. If the U.S. smiles upon collective punishment for innocent Arabs, how can we object to being ourselves targeted for collective punishment? You not only stain the honor of the United States in co-conspiring in Israel's endless crimes, but also make a mockery of our indignation over 9/11 and every other past and future "terrorist" attack upon us, at home and abroad, upon Americans as a group or as individuals.
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I do not care to die for Israel. Nor do I care to be stained with the disgrace you bring to the United States, a country that used to stand for justice for the downtrodden but now stands for violent injustice against the helpless. I am ashamed of you, your Party, and the United States Government. I disown your entire foreign policy in the Middle East and hope that the people throw every single Republican out of office this November.

You should then receive a confirmatory email in this form:

On behalf of President Bush, thank you for your correspondence.
We appreciate hearing your views and welcome your suggestions.
Due to the large volume of e-mail received, the White House is
unable to respond to every message, and therefore this response
is an autoreply.

Thank you again for taking the time to write.

You could print that confirmation on the back of the printout of what you sent, as further proof that you really did try to stop the U.S. Government from doing the terrible things it does in our name. Such printouts might not be enuf to save you from being wrongly murdered by people who hold you personally responsible for the crimes of the U.S. Government, but it's your best chance of staying alive, and if enuf people demand an end to U.S. complicity in the outrages endlessly committed by Israel, we might actually cause a shift in policy.
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You think not? Oh, maybe not if the total number of emails objecting to U.S. policy in the Middle East were 6 or 1,000. But what if it were 40 million from within the United States and 300 million from the rest of the world, including 10 million from Dubya's only significant ally in Iraq, Britain? Bush caved on Gitmo. He might very well cave on Israel. But it will take an overwhelming number of emails, letters,* and phone calls (202-456-1111) to make an impression on a White House that thinks itself immune from criticism.
____________________

* The Hon. George W. Bush, President of the United States, The White House, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20500.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,546.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 2:18 PM

 
Do Justice. Period. Human stupidity is very much in the news today, as violence escalates in the Middle East and the bodies are counted in yesterday's train bombings in India. A retired U.S. military man on one of the cable news channels is making typically stupid military noises about fiting al-Qaeda in India no matter the cause that provoked the Indian bombings, because 'al-Qaeda wants the world'. Not "Kashmir wants out of India to join Pakistan, in which it should have been included in 1947", but "al-Qaeda wants the world", and thus we must oppose 'giving in to terrorism' by keeping Kashmir part of India, which it should have been permitted to leave 59 years ago!
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Israel has endlessly committed itself to doing injustice to Palestinians, Lebanese (it has invaded Lebanon again; ah, the Jews are so brite! The last invasion of Lebanon went so well!), and other Arabs, some of them hundreds of miles from Israel's borders, on the same 'theory' — if one could call Israel's insanely stupid, emotional rather than intellectual behavior a "theory" — that to do anything but violence in reaction to violence is to show weakness and thus incite more violence. And the beat(down) goes on.
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There was a guy from that part of the world who lived about 2,000 years ago who saw the folly in an-eye-for-an-eye and said:

Whoa! The way to end violence is not by doing more violence but by refusing to return violence for violence. Defuse rage by doing justice and bringing out the humanity in your enemy, not by dehumanizing him so you can justify continuing to do injustice.

The actual words ascribed to him are more poetic than that, but amount to the same thing:

"You have heard that it was said, 'An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.' But I say to you, Do not resist one who is evil. But if any one strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also; and if any one would sue you and take your coat, let him have your cloak as well; and if any one forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles. ... You have heard that it was said, 'You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for He makes His sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. ... Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect." (Matthew 5:38-48 RSV)

It's a radical concept that, amazingly, actually works. Not always, but more often than Zionists, Hindus, military men, Republicans, and other brutes want you to think. They have gone very far out of their way to keep you from thinking that doing justice works. They tell us we "can't give in to terrorism" or "treason" or "separatism", and even trying other tacks to accommodate the other side short of complete surrender to "demands" from "the enemy" would be the wrong thing to do "right now".
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There have been innumerable wars and smaller violent conflicts only because people's pride — not really anything more exalted than that — would not permit them to admit they were wrong, see the other side, and do justice.
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King George III refused to admit American colonials to Parliament but insisted he had the right to tax them without their consent, and when they said "No taxation without representation", he sent over 30,000 armed men to force a population of about 1.8 million to submit. We did not submit but fought back. Had it not been for France, the Netherlands, and Spain, George III might have triumphed, but at what cost? Would the colonies ever have resumed enthusiastic, patriotic participation in the Empire? Or would a greater conflict merely have been put off to an inevitable future someday?
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Palestine won't submit to Israeli overlordship, but keeps fiting. It has no France, Netherlands, and Spain to fite alongside it, but keeps fiting anyway. Will violence ever crush Palestinians and create a normal situation? Or was the creation of Israel an insanely stupid mistake that can never succeed?
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India refused to let the people of Kashmir decide what country they want to belong to. Sixty years later, India has still not won their allegiance, and now both Pakistan and India have nuclear weapons.
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How long do you hold onto a bad idea? At what cost? When is too long? How much is too much to lose? If the price of keeping Kashmir is full-scale nuclear war, is it really worth it in order "not to give in to terrorists"? If the price of defending Israel is to have a suitcase atom bomb go off in Midtown Manhattan or the middle of Washington, DC, is that a reasonable price to pay for "not giving in to terrorists"? Your call.
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For me, everything is plain. It is never wrong to do justice. There is never a wrong time to do justice. There is never a wrong reason to do justice. Doing justice is always the right thing to do.
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It doesn't matter if it is violence that induces India to give in to demands that it hold a fair and free election to determine the will of the Kashmiri people, to remain part of India or join Pakistan, which the United Nations said it should do in 1949. This is the concept of the "wake-up call". Sometimes people have to be shocked out of apathy, lethargy, stupidity.
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Plainly India expects to lose a plebiscite, so has decided to thwart the will of the people and hold onto a meaningless, economically useless area for reasons beyond the comprehension of sane people. Wikipedia says that the conflict over Pakistan has already killed 100,000 people! — without nuclear war. The beat goes on.
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Violence is the last resort of populations, not the first. It flashes up when people cannot resolve matters calmly, and feel that there is no alternative but violence to protect their rights. Sometimes people are too close to an issue to see the right and wrong of it, so outsiders have to decide. That's why we have counseling, mediation, arbitration, courts, and the United Nations. But when the relevant authority renders a decision and one side says "No!", then the force of law must drop like a ton of bricks and force compliance. That's what police and "police actions" are for, not just to break up the fite but to carry out the orders of the counselor/mediator/arbitrator/court/UN. The world has not done that with India, nor with Israel. Adamant fools refuse to do justice, and are allowed to get away with it because they are powerful in themselves or have powerful friends who co-conspire in injustice, also for reasons that no sane person can comprehend.
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Justice defuses violence. What could be plainer? So I repeat:
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It is never wrong to do justice. There is never a wrong time to do justice. There is never a wrong reason to do justice. Doing justice is always the right thing to do.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,544.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 2:21 PM