revised

The first edition of this was posted a couple of days ago, but the month changed so I imagine it has already been archived. I’m adding a few comments.

Camus?

I have to say it again. I did not make this up.

It seems George Bush was reading The Stranger by Albert Camus (one sitting, I hear) and then had a conversation with his press secretary Tony Snow, late of Fox News, about the origins of existentialism. There are several main issues in existentialism, and one of them is the notion of the Absurd. Words fail me.

The so-called court appeal in Iraq upheld Saddam’s hanging, to be carried out within 30 days. Now in each case, a judge was replaced, one quit because of government interference and the second because the prosecutor didn’t like him, at least three of his attorneys were murdered, as well as several others, the procedural issues are overwhelming, but it was upheld? Not even our court would do that. Perhaps the only other one I can think of is, well, no, you try to think of one. I’m busy. They will probably execute him tomorrow. [They did. How did I know? I didn’t, but I knew they were such vindictive cowards they didn’t want anyone to so stop them.}

Oh, he then wrote a note to supporters not to hate the occupiers. Right. [I’m still looking for an unexpurgated version of that letter. I’ve heard several excerpt all of which seem to contradict each other, but then the excerpts have one bee a clause or two here and there.]

Gerald Ford died so they are going to shoot off a cannon, one shot/per hour, to remember him. I remember him sliding down an airplane stariway. Anyway, he will first have a funeral in southern California near the Mexican border, then flown to D.C. to the rotunda building for a three day lay and a funeral, then to the senate area for a funeral, then to Michigan for a funeral and, when they are good and sure he is actually dead, be buried there. [He is still “Lying in state,” hm. Just after posting this, I found that he had opposed the war in Iraq all along.}

Here is something about the attacks on Carter. Of all people:

This article can be found on the web at

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070108/hedges

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Get Carter

by CHRIS HEDGES

[from the January 8, 2007 issue]

Jimmy Carter, by publishing his book /Palestine Peace Not Apartheid/,

walked straight into the buzz saw that is the Israel lobby. Among the

vitriolic attacks on the former President was the claim by Abraham

Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, that Carter is

"outrageous" and "bigoted" and that his book raises "the old canard and

conspiracy theory of Jewish control of the media, Congress, and the U.S.

government." Many Democratic Party leaders, anxious to keep the Israel

lobby's money and support, have hotfooted it out the door, with incoming

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announcing that Carter "does not speak for

the Democratic Party on Israel."

Carter's book exposes little about Israel. The enforced segregation,

abject humiliation and spiraling Israeli violence against Palestinians

have been detailed in the Israeli and European press and, with

remarkable consistency, by all the major human rights organizations. The

assault against Carter, rather, says more about the failings of the

American media--which have largely let Israel hawks heap calumny on

Carter's book. It exposes the indifference of the Bush Administration

and the Democratic leadership to the rule of law and basic human rights,

the timidity of our intellectual class and the moral bankruptcy of

institutions that claim to speak for American Jews and the Jewish state.

The bleakness of life for Palestinians, especially in the Gaza Strip, is

a mystery only to us. In the current Israeli campaign in Gaza, now

sealed off from the outside world, almost 500 Palestinians, most

unarmed, have been killed. Sanctions, demanded by Israel and imposed by

the international community after the Hamas victory last January in what

were universally acknowledged to be free and fair elections, have led to

the collapse of civil society in Gaza and the West Bank, as well as

widespread malnutrition. And Palestinians in the West Bank are being

encased, in open violation of international law, in a series of podlike

militarized ghettos with Israel's massive $2 billion project to build a

"security barrier." This barrier will gobble up at least 10 percent of

the West Bank, including most of the precious aquifers and at least

40,000 acres of Palestinian farmland. The project is being financed in

large part through $9 billion in American loan guarantees, although when

Congress approved the legislation in April 2003, Israel was told that

the loans could be used "only to support activities in the geographic

areas which were subject to the administration of the Government of

Israel prior to June 5, 1967."

But it is in Gaza that conditions are currently reaching a full-blown

humanitarian crisis. "Gaza is in its worst condition ever," Gideon Levy

wrote recently in the Israeli paper /Ha'aretz/. "The Israel Defense

Forces have been rampaging through Gaza--there's no other word to

describe it--killing and demolishing, bombing and shelling,

indiscriminately.... How contemptible all the sublime and nonsensical

talk about 'the end of the occupation' and 'partitioning the land' now

appears. Gaza is occupied, and with greater brutality than before....

This is disgraceful and shocking collective punishment."

And as Gaza descends into civil war, with Hamas and Fatah factions

carrying out gun battles in the streets, /Ha'aretz/ reporter Amira Hass

bitterly notes, "The experiment was a success: The Palestinians are

killing each other. They are behaving as expected at the end of the

extended experiment called 'what happens when you imprison 1.3 million

human beings in an enclosed space like battery hens.'"

In fact, if there is a failing in Carter's stance, it is that he is too

kind to the Israelis, bending over backward to assert that he is only

writing about the occupied territories. Israel itself, he says, is a

democracy. This would come as a surprise to the 1.3 million Israeli

Arabs who live as second-class citizens in the Jewish state. The poverty

rate among Israeli Arabs is more than twice that of the Jewish

population. Those Israeli Arabs who marry Palestinians from Gaza or the

West Bank are not permitted to get Israeli residency for their spouses.

And Israeli Arabs, who do not serve in the military or the country's

intelligence services and thus lack the important personal connections

and job networks available to veterans, are systematically shut out of

good jobs. Any Jew, who may speak no Hebrew or ever been to Israel, can

step off a plane and become an Israeli citizen, while a Palestinian

living abroad whose family's roots in Palestine may go back generations

is denied citizenship.

The Israel lobby in the United States does not serve Israel or the

Jewish community--it serves the interests of the Israeli extreme right

wing. Most Israelis have come to understand that peace will be possible

only when their country complies with international law and permits

Palestinians to build a viable and sustainable state based on the 1967

borders, including, in some configuration, East Jerusalem.

This stark demarcation between Israeli pragmatists and the extreme right

wing was apparent when I was in the Middle East for the /New York Times/

during Yitzhak Rabin's 1992 campaign for prime minister. The majority of

American Jewish organizations and neoconservative intellectuals made no

pretense of neutrality. They had morphed into extensions of the

right-wing Likud Party. These American groups, to Rabin's dismay, had

gone on to build, with Likud, an alliance with right-wing Christian

groups filled with real anti-Semites whose cultural and historical

ignorance of the Middle East was breathtaking. This collection of

messianic Jews and Christians, leavened with rabid American

imperialists, believed they had been handed a divine or moral mandate to

rule the Middle East, whether the Arabs liked it or not.

When Rabin, who had come to despise what the occupation was doing to the

citizenry of his own country, was sworn in as prime minister, the

leaders of these American Jewish organizations, along with their

buffoonish supporters on the Christian right, were conspicuous by their

absence. On one of Rabin's first visits to Washington after he assumed

office, according to one of his aides, he was informed that a group of

American Jewish leaders were available to meet him. The surly old

general, whose gravelly cigarette voice seemed to rise up from below his

feet, curtly refused. He told his entourage he did not have time to

waste on "scumbags."