Posts
First, we have two illustrations. They represent what is posed to us as the solution to what is wrong in the United States today. Below, are some of the problems. I do not think the problems and solutions quite match.
I’d like to start off with the poem that was somehow missed by so many last time, a poem that very succinctly summarizes in general terms the problems:
*LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI: *Especially since Khalil Gibran has been
in the news lately, including yesterday or the day before on your
program. “Pity the Nation,” after Khalil Gibran.
Pity the nation whose people are sheep,
and whose shepherds mislead them.
Pity the nation whose leaders are liars, whose sages are
silenced, and whose bigots haunt the airwaves.
Pity the nation that raises not its voice,
except to praise conquerors and acclaim the bully as hero
and aims to rule the world with force and by torture.
Pity the nation that knows no other language but its own
and no other culture but its own.
Pity the nation whose breath is money
and sleeps the sleep of the too well fed.
Pity the nation -- oh, pity the people who allow their
rights to erode and their freedoms to be washed away.
My country, tears of thee, sweet land of liberty.
That just about sums it up, but let’s look at the past week or so. [For those of you on the mail-list, a sound file of Larry reading it is attached.]
The decider told us back in spring that he needed a “surge” and then, in September, he would wait for a report from Patreaus and then begin withdrawal. Well, it turns out that his program has 130,000 official U.S. soldiers in Iraq when he escapes the White House and the mess is left to whoever.
Much was made of Anbar Province where the Sunni had turned against Al Qeada. The tribal leader, supposedly, was Abu Reesha, or Risha, which mean “Father of the Feather.” Actually, he spent most of his time in a penthouse at the Marriot in Jordan, with occasional visits to Saudi Arabia. However, when The Decider went to Anbar he had to meet the great leader who joined him there. {Bush, depending on how you accent it, means “nothing” in Arabic, and “Shrub” in Spanish.} So, nothing met the father of the feather and pronounced victory. If the father of the feather’s daughter [actually, it’s a neuter noun so could either mean daughter of son, but Abu is usually reserved for the arrival of the first son], well, um, the mother would be Um Risha, or Mother of the feather. Quite a biological breakthrough.]
Anyway, the Decider gave a speech to praise the father of the feather, but he was killed just 6 hours before speech time, so one more draft had to be written {a total of at least 30). He should have stayed in Jordan.
I have noticed a lot of nonsense by Gulliani over the moveon.org commercial that made a pun on the General’s name. It was stupid, I admit, because no one is more of an expert on puns that can be made on their own name than the person himself. In fact, about 70% of people I know have changed their names, just for the variety. Still, I do not think attacking it qualifies someone to tackle the problems discussed below.
Now, it costs about 3 to 5 billion dollars a week to support the occupation in Iraq. I could do quite a lot with just one billion.
Well, below we have essays on Jews getting fed up with Israel, the betrayal of Petraes, and a Peoples report on Iraq.
Tom Dispatch
posted 2007-09-13 15:07:59
Tomgram: Tony Karon on Growing Dissent among American Jews
I often think of the letters that come into the Tomdispatch email box as
the university of my later life -- messages from around the world,
offering commentary, criticism, encouragement, but mainly teaching me
about lives (and versions of life) I would otherwise know little or
nothing about. Then again, the Internet has a way of releasing
inhibitions and, from time to time, the Tomdispatch email box is also a
sobering reminder of the mindless hate in our world -- of every sort,
but sometimes of a strikingly anti-Semitic sort, letters that are wildly
angry and eager, above all, to shut down or shut up commentary or debate
of any sort.
It's ironic, then, that the threat of sparking such "anti-Semitism," as
well as charges of being functionally anti-Semitic, have been used for a
long time in this country as a kind of club to enforce, within the
Jewish community, an exceedingly narrow range of correct opinion on
Israel and its behavior in the world. In recent months, such attacks
from within the Jewish establishment seem to have escalated whenever any
professor or critic steps even slightly out of line, and the recent
controversial book, The Israeli Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy
John Mearsheimer and Steven Walt has caused a little storm of
consternation. Tony Karon, who runs the always provocative Rootless
Cosmopolitan
attacks may not be what they seem, that the need to turn back every
deviation from Jewish orthodoxy may actually reflect a loosening of
control within the political world of American Jews, and a new opening,
a Jewish /glasnost/. /Tom/
Is a Jewish Glasnost Coming to America?
*Despite a Backlash, Many Jews Are Questioning Israel*
By Tony Karon
First, a confession: It may tell me that I hate myself, but I can't
help loving Masada2000, the website maintained by militant
right-wing Zionist followers of Rabbi Meir Kahane. The reason I love
it is its D.I.R.T. list
-- that's "Dense anti-Israel Repugnant Traitors" (also published as
the S.H.I.T. list of "Self-Hating and Israel-Threatening" Jews). And
that's not because I get a bigger entry than -- staying in the Ks --
Henry Kissinger, Michael Kinsley, Naomi Klein, or Ted Koppel. The
Kahanists are a pretty flaky lot, counting everyone from Woody Allen
to present Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on their list of Jewish
traitors. But the habit of branding Jewish dissidents -- those of us
who reject the nationalist notion that as Jews, our fate is tied to
that of Israel, or the idea that our people's historic suffering
somehow exempts Israel from moral reproach for its abuses against
others -- as "self-haters" is not unfamiliar to me.
In 1981, my father went, as a delegate of the B'nai B'rith Jewish
service organization, to a meeting of the Cape Town chapter of the
Jewish Board of Deputies, the governing body of South Africa's
Jewish communal institutions. The topic of the meeting was
"Anti-Semitism on Campus." My father was pretty shocked and deeply
embarrassed when Exhibit A of this phenomenon turned out to be
something I'd published in a student newspaper condemning an Israeli
raid on Lebanon.
By then, I was an activist in the anti-apartheid movement in South
Africa, which was consuming most of my energies. Having been an
active left-Zionist in my teenage years, I had, however, retained an
interest in the Middle East -- and, of course, we all knew that
Israel was the South African white apartheid regime's most important
ally, arming its security forces in defiance of a UN arms embargo.
Even back then, the connection between the circumstances of black
people under apartheid, and those of Palestinians under occupation
in the West Bank and Gaza, seemed obvious enough to me and to many
other Jews in the South African liberation movement: Both were
peoples harshly ruled over by a state that denied them the rights of
citizenship.
Still, this was a first. I could recite the kiddush from memory,
sing old kibbutznik anthems and curse in Yiddish. I had been called
a "bloody Jew" many times, but never an anti-Semite or a self-hating
Jew. What quickly became clear to me, though, was the purpose of
that "self-hating" smear -- to marginalize Jews who dissent from
Zionism, the nationalist ideology of Jewish statehood, in order to
warn others off expressing similar views.
What I like about the S.H.I.T. list's approach to the job -- other
than the "Dangerous Minds" theme music that plays as you read it --
is the way it embraces literally thousands of names, including many
of my favorite Jews. Memo to the sages at Masada2000: If you're
trying to paint dissenters as demented traitors, you really have to
keep the numbers down. Instead, Masada2000's inadvertent message is:
"Think critically about Israel and you'll join Woody Allen and a
cast of thousands..."
*A New Landscape of Jewish Dissent*
The Kahanists are a fringe movement, but their self-defeating list
may nonetheless be a metaphor for the coming crisis in more
mainstream nationalist efforts to police Jewish identity. The
Zionist establishment has had remarkable success over the past
half-century in convincing others that Israel and its supporters
speak for, and represent, "the Jews." The value to their cause of
making Israel indistinguishable from Jews at large is that it
becomes a lot easier to shield Israel from reproach. It suggests, in
the most emphatic terms, that serious criticism of Israel amounts to
criticism of Jews. More than a millennium of violent Christian
persecution of Jews, culminating in the Holocaust, has made many in
the West rightly sensitive towards any claims of anti-Semitism, a
sensitivity many Zionists like to exploit to gain a carte blanche
exemption from criticism for a state they claim to be the very
personification of Jewishness.
So, despite Israel's ongoing dispossession and oppression of the
Palestinians in the occupied territories, then-Harvard president
Larry Summers evidently had no trouble saying, in 2002, that harsh
criticisms of Israel are "anti-Semitic in their effect if not in
their intent."
Robin Shepherd of the usually sensible British think-tank Chatham
House has gone even further, arguing that comparing Israel with
apartheid South Africa is "objective anti-Semitism." Says Shepherd
can criticize Israel, but there is a litmus test, and that is when
the critics begin using constant key references to South Africa and
the Nazis, using terms such as ?bantustans.' None of these people,
of course, will admit to being racist, but this kind of
anti-Semitism is a much more sophisticated form of racism, and the
kind of hate-filled rhetoric and imagery are on the same moral level
as racism, so gross and distorted that they are defaming an entire
people, since Israel is an essentially Jewish project."
I'd agree that the Nazi analogy is specious -- not only wrong but
offensive in its intent, although not "racist". But the logic of
suggesting it is "racist" to compare Israel to apartheid South
Africa is simply bizarre. What if Israel objectively behaves like
apartheid South Africa? What then?
Actually, Mr. Shepherd, I'd be more inclined to pin the racist label
on anyone who conflates the world's 13 million Jews
with a country in which 8.2 million of them -- almost two thirds --
have chosen /not/ to live.
Although you wouldn't know it -- not if you followed Jewish life
simply through the activities of such major Jewish communal bodies
as the Conference of Presidents of American Jewish Organizations and
the Anti-Defamation League -- the extent to which the eight million
Jews of the Diaspora identify with Israel is increasingly open to
question (much to the horror of the Zionist-oriented Jewish
establishment). In a recent study funded by the Andrea and Charles
Bronfman Philanthropies (an important donor to Jewish communal
organizations), Professors Steven M. Cohen and Ari Y. Kelman
revealed that their survey data had yielded some extraordinary
findings: In order to measure the depth of attachment of American
Jews to Israel, the researchers asked whether respondents would
consider the destruction of the State of Israel a "personal
tragedy." Less than half of those aged under 35 answered "yes" and
only 54% percent of those aged 35-50 agreed (compared with 78% of
those over 65). The study found that only 54% of those under 35 felt
comfortable with the very idea of a Jewish state.
As groups such as the Jewish Agency in Israel (which aims to promote
Jewish immigration) and the American Jewish committee expressed
dismay over the findings, Cohen and Kelman had more bad news: They
believed they were seeing a long-term trend that was unlikely to be
reversed, as each generation of American Jews becomes even more
integrated into the American mainstream than its parents and
grandparents had been. The study, said Cohen
reflected "very significant shifts that have been occurring in what
it means to be a Jew."
Cohen's and Kelman's startling figures alone underscore the
absurdity of Shepherd's suggestion that to challenge Israel is to
"defame an entire people." They also help frame the context for what
I would call an emerging Jewish glasnost in which Jewish critics of
Israel are increasingly willing to make themselves known. When I
arrived in the United States 13 years ago, I was often surprised to
find that people with whom I seemed to share a progressive,
cosmopolitan worldview would suddenly morph into raging
ultranationalists when the conversation turned to Israel. Back then,
it would have seemed unthinkable for historian Tony Judt to advocate
Israelis and Palestinians or for /Washington Post/ columnist Richard
Cohen to write
that "Israel itself is a mistake. It is an honest mistake, a
well-intentioned mistake, a mistake for which no one is culpable,
but the idea of creating a nation of European Jews in an area of
Arab Muslims (and some Christians) has produced a century of warfare
and terrorism of the sort we are seeing now." Unthinkable, too, was
the angry renunciation
of Zionism by Avrum Burg, former speaker of Israel's Knesset.
And, in those days, with the internet still in its infancy, the
online Jewish dissident landscape that today ranges from groups in
the Zionist peace camp like Tikkun
Americans for Peace Now
Policy Forum
anti-Zionist Jews of the left such as Not in My Name
Indeed, there was no Haaretz online English edition
candidly reported and debated in terms that would still be deemed
heretical in much of the U.S. media.
Thirteen years ago, there certainly was no organization around like
"Birthright Unplugged,"
aims to subvert the "Taglit-Birthright Program,"
government of Israel, that provides free trips to Israel for young
Jewish Americans in order to encourage them to identify with the
State. (The "Unplugged" version encourages young Jews from the U.S.
to take the Birthright tour and its free air travel, and then stay
on for a two-week program of visits to the West Bank, to Israeli
human rights organizations, and to peace groups. The goal is to see
another side of Israel, the side experienced by its victims -- and
by Israelis who oppose the occupation of the West Bank.)
Clearly, much has changed, and the ability of the Zionist
establishment -- the America Israel Political Action Committee, the
American Jewish Committee, the Anti-Defamation League, and others --
to impose nationalist boundaries on Jewish identity is being eroded.
It's worth remembering in this context that anti-Zionism was
originally a /Jewish/ movement -- the majority of European Jews
before World War II rejected the Zionist movement and its calls for
a mass migration from Europe to build a Jewish nation-state in
Palestine. The most popular Jewish political organization in Europe
had been the Yiddishe Arbeiter Bund, a Jewish socialist party that
was militantly anti-Zionist. Even among the rabbis of Europe, there
was considerable opposition to the idea of Jews taking control of
Zion /before/ the arrival of the Messiah (and there still is, of
course, from a sizable minority of the ultra-Orthodox).
Of course, the Holocaust changed all that. For hundreds of thousands
of survivors, a safe haven in Palestine became a historic necessity.
But the world has changed since then, and as the research cited
above suggests, the trends clearly don't favor the Zionists. I was
reared on the idea that a Jewish nation-state in the Middle East was
the "manifest destiny" of the Jews. I learned in the Zionist
movement that Jewish life in the Diaspora was inevitably stunted and
ultimately doomed. But history may have decided otherwise. The
majority of us have chosen to live elsewhere, thereby voting with
our feet. Indeed, according to Israeli government figures
some 750,000 Israeli Jews (15% of Israel's Jewish population) are
now living abroad, further undermining the Zionist premise that the
Diaspora is an innately hostile and anti-Semitic place.
*The Ferocity of Nationalism, The Universality of Justice*
Increasingly anxious that most of us have no intention of going to
Israel to boost Jewish numbers, the Israel-based Jewish Agency --
apparently oblivious to the irony of its own actions -- has
complained
Germany over official policies that make life there so attractive to
Jewish immigrants from former Soviet territories, thus discouraging
them from going to Israel. More immediately threatening to the
Zionist establishment, however, is another reality: Many Jews are
beginning to make once unthinkable criticisms of Israel's behavior.
If you want to bludgeon Jewish critics with the charge of
"anti-Semitism" when they challenge Israel's actions, then it's
hardly helpful to have other Jews standing up and expressing the
same thoughts. It undermines the sense, treasured by Israel's most
fervent advocates, that they represent a cast-iron consensus among
American Jews in particular.
That much has been clear in the response
to the publication of John Mearsheimer and Steven Walt's
controversial new book The Israeli Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy
which challenges the wisdom and morality of the unashamed and
absolute bias in U.S. foreign policy towards Israel. In an exchange
on the NPR show /Fresh Air/, Walt was at pains to stress
in his book, that the Israel Lobby, as he sees it, is not a Jewish
lobby, but rather an association of groupings with a right-wing
political agenda often at odds with majority American-Jewish opinion,
Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League, argued
exactly the opposite: Walt and Mearsheimer, he claimed, were
effectively promoting anti-Semitism, because the Israel lobby is
nothing more (or less) than the collective will of the American
Jewish community. Which, of course, it isn't. In fact, in the
American Jewish community you can increasingly hear
Mearsheimer and Walt's skepticism over whether the lobby's efforts
are good for Israel.
But Foxman's case is undercut by something far broader -- an
emerging Jewish /glasnost/. Of course, like any break with a
long-established nationalist consensus, the burgeoning of dissent
has provoked a backlash. Norman Finkelstein
and fierce critic of Zionism recently hounded out of De Paul
University in a campaign of vilification
fierce criticism of Israel is the equivalent of "hate speech" --
could be forgiven for being skeptical of the idea that the grip of
the ultranationalists is weakening.
So, too, could Joel Kovel
found his important book /Overcoming Zionism/ pulled by his American
distributor
the University of Michigan Press, also on the "hate speech" charge.
(This decision was later reversed, but it may have long-term
consequences for the distributor's relationship with Kovel's
publisher, the British imprint Pluto.)
Jimmy Carter -- who was called a "Holocaust denier" (yes, a
Holocaust denier!) for using the apartheid analogy in his book on
Israel -- and Mearsheimer and Walt might have reason for skepticism
as well. But I'd argue that the renewed ferocity of recent attacks
on those who have strayed from the nationalist straight and narrow
has been a product of panic in the Jewish establishment -- a panic
born of the fact that its losing its grip. As in the former Soviet
Union with the actual /glasnost/ moment, this is a process, once
started, that's only likely to be accelerated by such witch-hunting.
Last year, a very cranky academic
by the name of Alvin Rosenfeld, on behalf of the oldest Jewish
advocacy group in the U.S., the American Jewish Committee, got a
flurry of attention
warning that liberal Jews such as playwright Tony Kushner, Tony Judt
and Richard Cohen, all of whom had recently offered fundamental
criticisms of Israel, were giving comfort to a "new anti-Semitism."
"They're helping to make [anti-Semitic] views about the Jewish state
respectable -- for example, that it's a Nazi-like state, comparable
to South African apartheid; that it engages in ethnic cleansing and
genocide. These charges are not true and can have the effect of
delegitimizing Israel."
In reality, though, whether or not you agree with the views of those
critics, they simply can't legitimately be called anti-Semitic.
Actually, I doubt any of those he cited have accused Israel of
genocide or compared it in any way to the Nazi state. (Former
Israeli Knesset Speaker Avram Burg, however, recently did write
Israeli militarism and hostility to Arabs, "It is sometimes
difficult for me to distinguish between the primeval
National-Socialism and some national cultural doctrines of the
here-and-now."). But the ethnic-cleansing in which the Israelis
expelled 750,000 Palestinians in 1948 and the apartheid character of
Israel's present occupation of the West Bank are objective
realities. Rosenfeld is suggesting that, to take an honest look at
either the occupation or the events of 1948, as so many Israeli
writers, journalists, and politicians have done, is to
"delegitimize" Israel and promote anti-Semitism.
Just last week, Danny Rubinstein, senior correspondent covering
Palestinian affairs for the Israeli newspaper /Haaretz/, was slated
to speak to the British Zionist Federation ? and then, at the last
minute, his speech was canceled
The reason? Rubinstein had pointed out that "today Israel is an
apartheid state with different status for different communities."
(While many liberal Jewish Americans can't bring themselves to
accept
the apartheid comparison, that's not true of their Israeli
counterparts who actually know what's going on in the West Bank.
Former education minister Shulamit Aloni
for example, or journalist Amira Hass
the comparison. (The comparison first occurred to me on a visit to
Kibbutz Yizreel in 1978, when the elders of my Zionist youth
movement, Habonim, who had emigrated from South Africa to Israel,
warned that the settlement policy of the then-new Likud government
was designed to prevent Israel letting go of the West Bank. The
population there, they told us, would never be given the right to
vote in Israel, and so the result would be, as they presciently put
it, "an apartheid situation.")
Use of the term "apartheid" in reference to the occupation does draw
the attention of those who prefer to look away from the fact that
Israel is routinely engaged in behavior democratic society has
deemed morally odious and unacceptable when it has occurred in other
contexts. It is precisely because that fact makes them
uncomfortable, I suspect, that they react so emotionally to the
A-word. Take black South Africans who suffered under apartheid on a
visit to the West Bank -- a mild-mannered moderate Nobel Peace Prize
winner such as Bishop Desmond Tutu
for example -- ask them about the validity of the comparison, and
you know the answer you're going to get.
Moreover, it's an answer with which a growing number of Jews, who
place the universal, ethical and social justice traditions of their
faith above those of narrow tribalism, are willing to deal.
In an earlier commentary
perhaps presaging his break with Zionism, Burg noted in 2002:
"Yes, we Israelis have revived the Hebrew language, created a
marvelous theater and a strong national currency. Our Jewish
minds are as sharp as ever. We are traded on the Nasdaq. But is
this why we created a state? The Jewish people did not survive
for two millennia in order to pioneer new weaponry, computer
security programs or antimissile missiles. We were supposed to
be a light unto the nations. In this we have failed. It turns
out that the 2,000-year struggle for Jewish survival comes down
to a state of settlements, run by an amoral clique of corrupt
lawbreakers who are deaf both to their citizens and to their
enemies. A state lacking justice cannot survive. More and more
Israelis are coming to understand this as they ask their
children where they expect to live in 25 years. Children who are
honest admit, to their parents' shock, that they do not know."
Although I am not religious, I share Burg's view that universal
justice is at the heart of the Jewish tradition. Growing up in
apartheid South Africa was an object lesson in Jewish ethics. Yes,
there was plenty of anti-Semitism in the colonial white society of
my childhood, but the mantle of victimhood belonged to others. And
if you responded to the in-no-way-exclusively-so, but very Jewish
impulse to seek justice, you found yourself working side by side not
only with the remarkable number of Jews who filled leadership roles
in the liberation movement, but also with Christians, Muslims,
Hindus, and others.
Judaism's universal ethical calling can't really be answered if we
live only among ourselves -- and Israel's own experience suggests
it's essentially impossible to do so without doing injustice to
others. Israel is only 59 years old, a brief moment in the sweep of
Jewish history, and I'd argue that Judaism's survival depends
instead on its ability to offer a sustaining moral and ethical
anchor in a world where the concepts of nation and nationality are
in decline (but the ferocity of nationalism may not be). Israel's
relevance to Judaism's survival depends first and foremost on its
ability, as Burg points out, to deliver justice, not only to its
citizens, but to those it has hurt.
/Tony Karon is a senior editor at TIME who also maintains his own
website, Rootless Cosmopolitan
comments on everything from geopolitical conflict to Jewish identity
issues. "Rootless Cosmopolitan" was Stalin's euphemistic pejorative
for "Jew" during his anti-Semitic purges of the late 1940s, but
Karon, who grew up in South Africa and whose family roots lie in
Eastern Europe, and before that France, takes the term as a badge of
honor. Karon was a teenage activist in the left-Zionist Habonim
movement before finding his way into the big tent of the
anti-apartheid liberation struggle, an experience that prompted him
to re-imagine what it meant to be a Jew in the world./
Copyright 2007 Tony Karon
*ZNet | Anti War*
*Iraq: The People's Report*
*by United for Peace and Justice -- UFPJ; UFPJ
2007*
*For Immediate Release: *September 10th, 2007
*Contact: *Sue Udry: 301-325-1201; Leslie Cagan: 212-868-5545;
Erik Leaver: 202-787-5240
With General Petraeus claiming significant progress in Iraq,
United for Peace and Justice, the largest national coalition of
peace organizations with some 1,400 member groups, deplores his
misleading and cynical report to Congress. The "surge" of U.S.
forces in Iraq has not led to security, stability or peace. In
fact, this past summer was the deadliest since the war began in
2003. General Petraeus' recommendation to withdraw one Marine
unit this month and a bridge combat team sometime in December
comes nowhere near ending the U.S. military engagement in Iraq.
United for Peace and Justice has produced an assessment of the
situation on the ground in Iraq that contrasts sharply with the
comments from General Petraeus, which barely mention the impact
the U.S. war and occupation has on the lives of the people of Iraq.
Leslie Cagan, National Coordinator of UFPJ, says, "We feel it is
essential to provide a true picture of what the shattered lives
of the 25 million Iraqis look like today. For four years now we
have been hearing the same false claims that the U.S. is making
important gains, but they have never been true. Prepared by
Phyllis Bennis and Erik Leaver, researchers at the Institute for
Policy Studies, /*Iraq: The People's Report*/, takes an honest
look at what this war has cost the people in Iraq and our
communities here in the U.S."
*/Iraq: The People's Report/* notes that:
* Two million Iraqis have fled the war to seek hard-to-find
refuge in neighboring countries, and an additional two
million Iraqis have been forced by war fueled violence to
flee their homes and remain displaced and homeless inside
Iraq.
* Most Iraqis have electricity for only about five hours a
day, clean water remains scarce for most and unobtainable
for many, and Iraq's oil production remains a fraction of
what it was before war.
* Occupation, war and violence have so decimated the Iraqi
economy that unemployment has reached up to 40% and higher
and underemployment an additional 10% or more.
In spite of the appalling conditions that most Iraqis now find
themselves living in, General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker
are trying to convince Congress that the situation is improving.
"We hope that Congress will remember that these small
improvements in a horrific situation have cost U.S. taxpayers
over $480 billion so far, with no end in sight," remarked Sue
Udry, Legislative Coordinator of United for Peace and Justice.
"That is $480 billion that we could not spend here at home to
rebuild the Gulf Coast, improve education or healthcare and more."
The People's Report also notes that:
/The failure of the Iraq War has also meant a huge cost to our
democracy at home. We have paid an enormous price: in the deaths
and shattered minds and bodies of our young soldiers; in the
threats to an economy ravaged by billion-dollar bills to pay for
an illegal war; in the destruction of so much of our
infrastructure, security and social fabric because of human and
financial resources diverted to Iraq; and in the shredding of
our Constitution and civil rights as fear becomes a weapon in
the hands of the Bush administration aimed at Congress, the
courts and the people of this country. /
United for Peace and Justice has been working throughout the
summer to pressure members of Congress to take a firm stand
against the White House. "General Petraeus' testimony today
illustrates once again the urgency of congressional action,"
observed Leslie Cagan, UFPJ's National Coordinator. "Congress
has the constitutional right and moral obligation to use the
power of the purse to force a complete withdrawal from Iraq. The
people of this country are looking to them to take leadership in
this effort."
Sue Udry, UFPJ's Legislative Coordinator, said, "In the weeks
ahead, the pressure on Congress to rein in the White House will
accelerate. The public knows this policy is a failure and wants
a rapid change of course."
The full report from United for Peace and Justice is available
for download in two formats:
http://www.unitedforpeace.org/downloads/peoplesreport.pdf
http://www.unitedforpeace.org/downloads/people_s_report_11by17.pdf
Imploding housing and financial mess,fed pumping in liquid to keep fears
at bay,Bush with little time in office left.Con agenda,last page.
Cheney Orders Media To Sell Attack On Iran
Fox News, Wall Street Journal instructed to launch PR blitz for upcoming
military strike
Paul Joseph Watson
Tuesday, September 4, 2007
Dick Cheney has ordered top Neo-Con media outlets, including Fox News
and the Wall Street Journal, to unleash a PR blitz to sell a war with
Iran from today, according to Barnett Rubin, the highly respected
Afghanistan expert at New York University.
The New Yorker magazine reports that Rubin had a conversation with a
member of a top neoconservative institution in Washington, who told him
that "instructions" had been passed on from the Office of the
Vice-President to roll out a campaign for war with Iran in the week
after Labor Day.
"It will be coordinated with the American Enterprise Institute, the Wall
Street Journal, the Weekly Standard, Commentary, Fox, and the usual
suspects, writes Rubin, "It will be heavy sustained assault on the
airwaves, designed to knock public sentiment into a position from which
a war can be maintained. Evidently they don?t think they?ll ever get
majority support for this?they want something like 35-40 percent
support, which in their book is ?plenty.?
Rubin subsequently confirmed with a second source that the propaganda
coup had been launched and the individual, another top Neo-Con at a
major think tank, had this to say about it: ?I am a Republican. I am a
conservative. But I?m not a raging lunatic. This is lunatic.?
(Article continues below)
An organized mass media campaign to propagandize for a military strike
on Iran mirrors exactly what happened in late 2002 in preparation for
the invasion of Iraq and would be seen as par for the course in
anticipation of an attack that presidential candidate Ron Paul amongst
other expert observers fear will take place within 12 months.
President Bush met directly with talk radio idealogues at the White
House last year to push the Neo-Con agenda. Sean Hannity, Laura
Ingraham, Neal Boortz and Michael Medved (pictured below) amongst others
all attended and received their talking points straight from the
President's mouth.
Considering the history of the sordid "fake news" scandal, where
millions of dollars were used to create pre-packaged government press
releases disguised as news, along with the Armstrong Williams farce, it
should surprise no one that such "instructions" are now being handed out
to prepare the public for another military invasion.
The issuance of orders for Neo-Con mass media arms to push for an
assault on Iran also puts the U.S. on red alert for a terror attack,
whether real or manufactured, which Dick Cheney has already promised
will immediately be blamed on Iran no matter who the real culprits are.
On August 1st, 2005 the American Conservative reported that Cheney had
tasked the United States Strategic Command (STRATCOM) with drawing up a
contingency plan to be employed in response to another 9/11-type
terrorist attack on the United States. The plan involved a massive air
strike on Iran which included the use of nuclear weapons.
The publication reported that, "The response is not conditional on Iran
actually being involved in the act of terrorism directed against the
United States," meaning that any such attack will immediately be blamed
on Iran and any evidence to the contrary will be buried.
The London Times reported on Sunday that the Pentagon had finalized
plans for a 3 day blitz designed to annihilate 1,200 targets in Iran and
destroy the country's military capability.
Alexis Debat, director of terrorism and national security at the Nixon
Center, said last week that US military planners were not preparing for
?pinprick strikes? against Iran?s nuclear facilities. ?They?re about
taking out the entire Iranian military,? he said.
Debat was speaking at a meeting organised by The National Interest, a
conservative foreign policy journal. He told The Sunday Times that the
US military had concluded: ?Whether you go for pinprick strikes or
all-out military action, the reaction from the Iranians will be the
same.? It was, he added, a ?very legitimate strategic calculus?.
Rhetoric regarding a potential military attack on Iran has heated again
over the past week, with President Bush having warned of the risk of a
"nuclear holocaust" if the country was allowed to acquire nuclear
capability.
In a speech last Monday, French President Nicolas Sarkozy said that a
diplomatic push by the world's powers to rein in Tehran's nuclear
program was the only alternative to "an Iranian bomb or the bombing of
Iran."
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad subsequently stated that a U.S.
attack on Iran was "impossible" due to U.S. troops being tied down in
Afghanistan and Iraq. Yesterday, he claimed to have proof that the U.S.
were not planning to attack, bizarrely citing his mathematical skills as
an engineer and faith in God.
A January poll by Ipsos found that 40% of Americans thought it likely
that Iran would be attacked by the end of the year. The U.S. has
stationed three aircraft carriers in the Persian Gulf, the Nimitz, a
nuclear-powered carrier, John C. Stennis Strike Group, and Dwight D.
Eisenhower, a relief carrier.
The U.S. government is openly funding and supporting the activities of
Jundullah, a Sunni Al-Qaeda terrorist group formerly headed by the
alleged mastermind of 9/11, to carry out bombings in Iran and
destabilize Ahmadinejad's power base.
The Iranian Revolutionary Guard military was recently declared to be a
terrorist organization by the White House, another ominous sign that an
attack is being readied.
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