World War III for Israel? Hell, NO!
The Israeli government is making constant noises about launching a preemptive strike against Iran. Insane Radical Zionists in the United States demand that the U.S. join in any attack by Israel. Iran says that if it is attacked by Israel, it will counterattack, at least by blocking the Strait of Hormuz and possibly with missiles capable of reaching Israel. Radical Zionists say that if Iran COUNTERattacks Israel, the U.S. is bound by law and morality(!) to attack Iran, even if we did not authorize nor approve of the initial Israeli attack.
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It cannot be that the U.S. is required by treaty to back a sneak attack by Israel, an act of arrant aggression, that would be completely illegal without sanction by the UN.
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Russia and Communist China have used their veto in the UN Security Council to prevent any UN military action against Iran (or even Syria, which we might be tempted to add to the target list, if we attack Iran in that vicinity anyway). There is very good reason to believe that both Russia and China would rally to defend Iran from U.S. aggression, starting with a minimal show to scare the U.S. away from more aggressive action lest things escalate, step by step or suddenly, all the way to a full-scale nuclear exchange: World War III.
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Anyone who thinks WW3 could not erupt from such an Israeli attack knows nothing about history. The assassination of one man, a Central European archduke, by people who were not even members of a government, produced WWI, which killed 10 million people and led directly to WWII, which killed another 54 million or so, which led directly to the Cold War, which killed millions more.
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What reason have we to believe that an attack upon Iran without prior UN approval (that is, without Russian and Chinese consent in the Security Council) would NOT produce intervention on Iran's side by Russia, China, and countries across the Moslem world?
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Americans must in all seriousness make a decision before any Israeli attack upon Iran occurs: do we want the United States to be destroyed by nuclear missiles falling on all our major cities, killing 100 million or 200 million Americans and causing us to kill 500 million Russians and Chinese for the sake of Israel? I don't. No loyal American does. No sane person does.
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We didn't seem to enjoy losing fewer than 3,000 Americans on 9/11, and there are to this day Americans who feel guilt over our having killed some 250,000 people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. How would any survivor of a full-scale nuclear war that produced the end of our civilization and induced us to murder half a BILLION people feel about the decision to commit ourselves to the defense of Israel literally "at all cost"?
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How, then, should we regard Radical Zionists in Israel and in the United States, who insist that Americans are absolutely required to destroy the world, and ourselves, for the sake of Israel? That is, that Christians, Moslems, and atheists should kill each other for the sake of the Jews? Would such massive, worldwide death, in initial blasts and radiation sickness thereafter, even achieve the defense of Israel? Or would Israel be incinerated by Russian and/or Chinese nuclear weapons even before the first warheads could fall on New York, Washington, Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, and every other center of our civilization?
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Messrs. Obama and Romney must lead on this issue, and state very publicly and very loud that the U.S. will NOT defend Israel if it attacks Iran, under any circumstances other than a first-strike attack upon Israel by Iran — which is very unlikely. Obama, Romney, and every opinion leader in the United States should be compelled to declare themselves: do you want the United States to suffer full-scale nuclear attack by Russia and China for Israel? Are you so fanatical in your religion that you think God wants the world to be destroyed for Israel, because "Amageddon" would be a wonderful thing?
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Anyone who says "Yes" should be fired from whatever position has given them a role in leading public opinion. Indeed, we should seriously consider laying charges of sedition, terrorism, and treason to empower us to round them up, silence them in solitary confinement in Gitmo, and thus end their work to destroy this country and make us the worst mass murderers in the history of the world — rendering Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot angels by contrast — for the sake of foreigners thousands of miles from our shores who don't share our language, culture, or dominant religion. Why would there ever be any doubt that the U.S. would refuse to destroy itself for such foreigners? Why would any patriot even hesitate to say aloud that under no circumstances should the U.S. risk WW3 for Israel?
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 8:44 PM

 
Muhammed Was Not God
Islam's most fundamental statement of the faith is the shahada, most simply stated as, "There is no God but God, and Muhammad is his messenger". A messenger is not a god, much less the sole God of Islam. So why are the protestors against the odious video The Innocence of Muslims treating Muhammed as God? That is HERESY.
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It's bad enuf that there is no God of any kind — not one, not many — so all these protests are idiocy. But for these rioters to KILL people in pursuit of heretical deification of an ordinary man, in absolute contravention of THE most important principle of Islam, is appalling.
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For fanatical morons to insist that the United States Government is responsible for the actions of every single individual — all 313 million of them — who resides within our territory, is inexcusable nonsense. They can't believe that, unless they are completely ignorant of the devotion of the United States to free speech. And if that is the problem, then it is up to the U.S. to make this legal right known by forceful information by all media, including YouTube, thru which the objectionable video became known in the Arab world.
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President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton must issue a very public reminder to President Morsi that he, who was educated, in part, in the United States, knows full well that the First Amendment forbids the Government from censoring people's political and religious speech.
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That public statement should also tell the people of the Moslem world that they need to respect differences of opinion on religion — and everything else — as the only way to join the civilized world and gain the benefits that tolerance gives all societies, for allowing new ideas to flourish. Instead of wasting their time fiting over nonsense, the people of all countries need to focus on their own lives and their responsibility to others, not wall themselves off from others by pretending to be high and mighty. The Government could say,

Only God is high and mighty. Moslems are supposed to be humble. If you bow down to your God five times a day, maybe you should realize that you do so to remind yourself of how insignificant you, or any individual, is in the grand scheme of things. Give to your fellow men — and women and children — a tenth the honor you give your God, and your society, your life, will improve immensely. Don't worry about offenses to God. He can take care of those things Himself. God does NOT need your help. Nor do you have the right to assume you know God's mind. You do not. God has not authorized you to speak for him. Leave to God what is God's.

- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 7:47 PM

 
The Not-So-Innocent Victims of 9/11
Every year on this date, Americans pretend that they were the victims of an unprovoked sneak attack in which a small number of Islamic fanatics committed an act of insane terrorism against innocents, when little could be further from the truth.
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The reality that we have still not accepted as a Nation is that on September 11th, 2001, true victims of endless, monstrous crimes committed by the United States Government in our name, STRUCK BACK and did a tiny fraction of the damage the U.S. Government, with the implicit and even forthritely stated backing of the great preponderance of the American people, has done to Palestinians, Egyptians, Lebanese, Jordanians, Syrians, and other Moslem Arabs — and even, as "collateral damage", some Christian Arabs — in decades of violence on behalf of the insane, STUPID project, Radical Zionism, which was practically guaranteed to produce endless war. The King-Crane Commission foresaw that no Jewish state in that Arab land could be created or maintained except by force. Why didn't the Jewish Diaspora, which likes to think itself the smartest people on Earth, see that?
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In non-radical Zionism, Jews would have sought to move to the land of their ancestors as individual immigrants eager to live in peace with the people who were already there, as Mexicans have migrated to the United States. But Zionists came not as mild immigrants grateful for the right to tread the streets that the prophets walked upon, but as a conquering army. Why don't Americans put the Israel-Palestine conflict in American terms: millions of Mexicans reconquering the U.S. Southwest, and ripping it away from the United States as "Aztlán"? If we support Israel, why don't we equally support Aztlán, and consent to have Americans in the Southwest treated by their Mexican conquerors the same way Palestinians are treated by Israel?
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We were too stupid to learn the lesson we should have drawn from 9/11, and disown our to-the-hilt backing of every single crime committed by Israel against Arabs and decency, in a racist, theocratic war without end. Quite the contrary, we made a pious show of our innocence, and indignation that anyone would attack us angels. We are not angels.
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In a democracy, The People are ultimately the ones responsible for the acts of their government. So, if the U.S. Government conducts decades of military and financial backing of the most extreme and violent outrages against morality by the government and people of Israel, the people of the United States must be held responsible. They could have ended U.S. support for Israel at any time, be it at the time of the Israeli sneak attack upon Egypt that started the 1967 War, the mass murders at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, the Israeli bombing of Tunisia and Iraq (two countries that don't even adjoin Israel), or a thousand other points in Israel's endless war against Arabs and, by extension, against Islam. But we didn't, did we? We still haven't, so still deserve to be COUNTERattacked by the victims of Israel's crimes, which the U.S. Govenment, politicians of both major parties, and opinion leaders in the punditocracy and churches, have backed without fail, and with only the most timid of fake criticisms. How do we know they are fake? Because every brief moratorium on strident U.S. support and massive financial backing ended soon after, and the U.S. resumed shipping thousands of tons of military hardware and boatloads of money to Israel. And the voices that expressed tiny reservations about Israel's prior crimes went silent, to permit Israel's NEXT crime, and the one thereafter, and the one after that, and the next — on and on without end.
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How does it ever end? Politicians fall all over themselves to sound as Radical Zionist as they possibly can, as tho Israel not only IS the United States, but that, if anything, Americans owe their FIRST loyalty to Israel, NOT the United States, and that any politician who stands for American principles and the defense of the United States by tossing Israel overboard is guilty of TREASON.
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So, how many genuine innocents were killed on September 11th? How many of these victims actually backed the crimes of Israel? How many of the people killed at the World Trade Center, Pentagon, or on Flite 93, tho privately appalled at the behavior of Israel, ever acted on their concerns by writing even a single email to any national politician, or even one letter to the editor of any major newspaper or magazine? How many ever signed an online or hardcopy petition to the President or Congress demanding that we stop supporting racism, theocracy, and religious discrimination by Israel, on pain of a permanent and total cutoff of all U.S. aid — public and private, by a ban on private transfers to an embargoed Israel? How many sent a letter or email, or made a telefone call to the Israeli embassy to express their opposition to the extension of settlements, or the unilateral annexation of all of Jerusalem, or the use of live ammunition against unarmed demonstrators, or anything else?
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If anyone killed on 9/11 did NOTHING to object to or stop the wrongful behavior of Israel or U.S. support for that behavior, how innocent, truly, were they of the crimes they did nothing to stop? To quote — or paraphrase(?), Edmund Burke — "All that is necessary to the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." Another version of that sentiment known actually to have been uttered by Burke may be even more relevant to the death of thousands whose only crime was in not standing against U.S. Govenment support of Israel's crimes: "When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle."
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How many more Americans have to die before this Nation stands against Zionism and demands that Israel be peacefully merged back into Palestine to create a tolerant, religiously neutral, multiethnic nation more along our lines? We are a tolerant, multiethnic, multiracial, multireligious, huge success. Israel is a massive failure held afloat only by $3 billion a year of intergenerational WELFARE from the American people. Rewarded year after year for stupid and violently bigoted behavior, Israelis will never stop their self-destructive, evil acts. Throw them back upon their own resources ONLY, and maybe they'll find a way to make peace.
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But there IS only one WAY to make peace in that area: reunite Palestine. Two peoples can share a common territory — see any U.S. state or well-integrated city. But they cannot each dominate. It is the insistence on dominating that produces war. And the refusal ever to give up on one-sided domination produces endless war.
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If Israel cannot emulate us, it can at least stop parasitizing us and forcing us to co-conspire in its crimes. Then the attacks on us by indignant Moslems will just stop.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 8:59 PM

 
Give the Postal Service Gorgeous, Sexy Spokesmodels
The United States Postal Service is in deep financial trouble. To counter misperceptions of the relative advantage of sending packages by UPS or FedEx, the USPS is airing commercials in which a pleasant, pudgy letter carrier says, "If it fits, it ships for a low flat rate." That's fine, but the guy has absolutely no sex appeal nor charisma. He seems a nice guy, who is finishing last.
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Replace him with two gorgeous, sexually hot spokespersons, one male, one female, in body-clinging USPS uniforms, and I think TV viewers would pay much more attention to those commercials — and many of those viewers would both remember them better and consider USPS instead of UPS or FedEx next time they have a package (or ten packages, or a thousand packages) to send.
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Sex appeal sells. The United States Postal Service needs sex appeal.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 4:50 PM

 
Trying to Lose — and Doing a Good Job of It
The Democrats plainly do not want to win this election, because they have permitted to go utterly unanswered the claim that Obama's policies have failed to energize the economy and bring back jobs. The fact that the Republicans OBSTRUCTED EVERYTHING THE DEMOCRATS TRIED TO DO to stimulate the economy and create jobs, has been left completely unmentioned. The Democrats have, by that silence, CONCEDED the outrageously dishonest assertion of the Republicans that what is at work today is Democratic economic policy, rather than REPUBLICAN do-nothing-and-the-economy-will-just-recover-magically policy. That cannot be an innocent mistake. The conclusion is very hard to evade that the Democrats are trying to lose.
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Perhaps key people within the Democratic leadership have reached the judgment that world economic conditions are in an extremely perilous state, at the edge of a cliff we are certain to plunge over, and whichever party is in power when the calamity strikes will be damaged for a generation, as Republicans were ruined by the explosion of the Great Depression in 1929. So Democrats have made the judgment that they'd rather lose in 2012 and have a chance in 2016 than win in 2012 and lose in 2016, 2020, 2024, 2028, 2032, and maybe even 2036. Remember that the Republicans were shut out of the White House for 20 years after the first election following the 1929 Crash (1932, 1936, 1940, 1944, and 1948), and that string of defeats might have continued had the Republicans not managed to persuade the great war hero Dwight Eisenhower to accept their 1952 nomination.
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The Wall Street Journal, I am led by a friend to believe, says that the world is in a depression, not recession, and that the international economic order is not going to recover fully for years, no matter who wins the White House. Rather, some observers think that there may be a disastrous further unraveling of the world economy if, for instance, (1) Republicans refuse, at the end of this year, to cooperate with Democrats to solve the tax-and-deficit problem as would trigger automatic cuts to Government programs across the board; or (2) any major country in the Eurozone collapses (and several are in peril); or (3) Israel launches a military strike against Iran that produces a counterstrike that closes the Strait of Hormuz and draws in the U.S. military in an escalation that produces a sudden, immense increase in oil prices, which in turn throws the U.S. into a second Great Recession that in turn produces a full-scale depression in China, which is in serious trouble as things stand. [Update, 9/7/12: an analysis of the world economy confirms this version of a dismal forecast for the world economy: "Global Economy Faces 'Perfect Storm' With Eurozone Crisis, 'Fiscal Cliff,' Slowdown, Iran Conflict".]
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"Dominos" (now contemplated or surprises) far outside the borders of the United States could fall, one after another, turning a Great Recession into a second Great Depression. And whoever is in power in the United States will NOT be able to disown responsibility for being unable to do a thing about it, on the basis that these triggers happened abroad. When you are President of the United States, you can't simply throw up your hands and claim that anyone in the White House would be equally unable to prevent such a catastrophe, or recover from it quickly.
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If the doomsayers are right, no matter who wins in November, it will be years before we return to anything like economic normality. If the Democrats lose (and those doomsayers are right), Republicans will be completely incapable of calming the maelstrom or rebuilding prosperity for an entire Presidential term, and by the time the new Great Recession (or Depression)'s natural course has run, and the economy is just about to turn around (but has not yet shown any real strength, so voters will still be disgusted with the Republicans), the Democrats will be able to sweep back into power, seizing control of the White House and both Houses of Congress — just in time to fall heir to a naturally occurring recovery.
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There is, of course, one major problem with that strategy: the world economy might NOT plunge over a cliff, so if Republicans win in November, they could fall heir to a naturally occurring, if all-too-long-delayed recovery from the current Great Recession. Altho they will have done nothing to produce that recovery, it will nonetheless occur on their watch, because recessions don't last forever, but invariably end, sooner or later, in the ordinary course of events. The Republicans will then be credited with having CAUSED the recovery, and it is the Democrats that will be ruined for a generation, for being regarded as the party that produced the Great Recession (because, of course, the public will have forgotten, thanks to Republican rewriting of history, that the Great Recession actually started under the Republican George Bush) and then proved absolutely incapable of getting us out of it.
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If we don't fall off the cliff, and Republicans inherit a naturally recovering economy, the Democrats have only one fallback position: to become The Party of (Hell) No!, blocking every single thing the Republicans try to do, since the extremely stupid public, with an extremely short memory easily remolded by spin doctors, will not hold Democrats any more responsible for that obstructionism than Republicans are being held responsible for being The Party of No since January 2011. But if the Republicans win the White House, retain the House of Representatives, and take control of the Senate as well, Democrats will be unable to stop anything, and the extreme, regressive program of the Radical Right will destroy the Nation's economic and social structure.
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The Democratic strategists who are now counseling a deliberate loss this year may have planned for that too: the electorate has become lazy, naive, and complacent, and needs actually to experience a Republican triumph to realize that all the progress of a century has been lost. Only then will they recoil in horror and return Democrats to a filibuster-proof majority to undo as much of the damage as can be undone. So what if 230 million Americans are crushed by the Republican Revolution? If that's what it takes to teach voters to get their lazy asses out to vote, so be it.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 7:44 PM