Make Moobie’s death wish come true

Associated Press and Reuters photos

Egyptian protesters hang dictator Hosni Mubarak in effigy in Cairo today. To me these don’t look like people who want Mubarak to hang around for another several months.

Embattled Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak proclaims that he’s going to hold on to his post until elections in September, that he isn’t going anywhere, that he’s going to die on Egyptian soil.

While it’s their choice what to do — something that way too many Americans and Israel-firsters don’t or won’t get — I hope that the people of Egypt give Mubarak his wish to die on Eyptian soil sooner rather than later if he makes it necessary.

The Egyptian people have given Mubarak the opportunity — indeed, the mandate — to leave office. If he refuses, then the consequences of his refusal to follow the popular demand are on him. The people have offered him a bloodless solution, so if it comes to pass that there are bloody hands, they can only be Mubarak’s.

The people of Egypt are demanding Mubarak’s immediate departure — they have made their wishes clear. An opportunity for Mubarak to empower his cronies over the next several months to essentially extend his rule even past his eventual departure is not what the people of Egypt want. What they want is a fresh start, a new start — not a continuation of the past three decades of bogus emergency rule. 

And new rule: If you’re a Zionist/Israel-firster, or if you are a politician who takes big bucks from the Zionist/Israel-first lobby, you should shut the fuck up about Egypt because you can’t even begin to be anywhere near impartial where Egypt is concerned, since all the fuck that you care about is Israel, as though Israel were the whole fucking universe. It ain’t. So get the fuck over it.

If the majority of the people of Egypt want an Islamic government, that’s their fucking choice. Once we rid the U.S. government of its so-called Christians and the government of Israel is stripped of its Jews, then perhaps we can make the assertion that Egypt should have only a secular government. Otherwise, we’re just preferring our own religion over another and are being fucking Islamophobes.

Democracy is about the will of the majority of the people — it’s not democracy only when the majority of the people make the choice that we want them to make.

We Americans had better first learn what the fuck freedom and democracy actually are before we ever expect to export them to other nations.

McCarthyism redux is a best-seller

Wow. The jihadists and I are colluding and I didn’t even know it!

So I thank one Andrew C. McCarthy (a descendant of Joseph McCarthy, I wonder?) for bringing this fact to my attention.

McCarthy’s book, titled The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America, is at No. 34 on amazon.com’s top 100 best-selling books list as I type this sentence.

McCathy might argue that he’s not conflating fundamentalist Islamists with us members of the American left — I’ll probably never know his arguments, because I’ll never read his wingnutty book(s) — but clearly that’s what he has done.

But there is plenty about fundamentalist Islam that I, a rabid fucking moonbat, oppose.

For starters, I don’t even fucking believe in God.

When you talk about God, I have to ask you: Where, exactly, does God live? On Fantasy Lane right next to the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus?

I don’t care if you’re Muslim, Christian or Jewish, if you believe in a God as some sort of male entity that is omniscient and omnipotent and favors your team over all of the others, I think that it’s time for you to grow the fuck up and to start thinking for yourself.

Then there’s the fact that I’m gay, and that gay men are routinely killed and otherwise persecuted by fundamentalist Islamic extremists.

One of the many things that the fundamentalist Islamist extremists and the American right wing have in common, in fact, is their shared belief that non-heterosexuals should be persecuted — because that’s what the non-existent God wants.

What else? I disagree with patriarchy and misogyny, which, along with the persecution of non-heterosexuals, puts the American right wing a lot more in league with the fundamentalist Islamic extremists than it puts the American left wing.

I also vehemently oppose theocracy, and the fundamentalist Islamic extremists are all about theocracy — as are the American wingnuts, who, to give just a partial recitation of their theocratic wish list, want prayer in our public schools, want it taught in our public schools that evolution is just a “theory” and that bullshit creationism is at least equal to the “theory” of evolution, want abortion outlawed based upon their religious beliefs, and want same-sex marriage outlawed based upon their religious beliefs. 

McCarthy cites Muslims as “sabotaging America,” yet if the American right wing had their way, we’d be living in a theocracy just like the fucking Taliban, something that I and my fellow leftists vehemently oppose. 

About the only thing that I can think of that a jihadist and I would agree upon is that the Muslims and the Arabs of the world have been getting the shitty end of the stick at the hands of the Jews and self-proclaimed “Christians” for some time now.

But even then, to me it’s solely an issue of fairness and evenhandedness, whereas to your jihadist it’s an issue of his (or her) belief that Islam is the Only One True Religion of the World, as the Jews and the “Christians” believe their religions are.

So if McCarthy has insinuated that the American left and the jihadists are in league, as it strikes me that he has, that claim is easily fucking annihilated.

Perhaps what McCarthy is really getting at is that if you aren’t a “Christian” and if you aren’t a right-wing nutjob, then you aren’t a real American, and thus you are trying to “sabotage America.”

This bullshit sells, very apparently.

We have all of these dumbfuck white people all throughout the nation, but mostly in the red states, polluting the gene pool, worried that those who have (in no certain order) different religious beliefs, different political ideologies, different nationalities, different languages, different physical appearances and/or different sexual orientations or gender identities are ruining! the! nation! when, in fact, it’s the stupid white men — the George W. Bushes and the Dick Cheneys and the British Petroleum CEOs and the Glenn Becks — who are responsible for the fact that the American Empire is teetering on collapse.

I imagine all of these self-righteous white fucktards buying books like The Grand Jihad thinking that they’re actually accomplishing something by consuming wingnutty media that only already confirm their ignorant, whacked-out beliefs, when, in fact, all that they’re accomplishing is to make McCarthy and his ilk richer and the nation dumber.

Most of the best-selling political titles on amazon.com are wingnutty titles, and this used to be more distressing to me than it is now. Now, I tend to view it as evidence of the right wing’s death throes. They’re desperate. Things are changing and they can’t handle it. They’re faced with an increasing number of people in the United States of America who don’t look, act, speak and believe like they do, and they’re so fucking insecure that this drives them batty. The Great White Arizonan Freakout is just one example of this.

I sure hope that we on the left are a danger to the continued existence of the American right wing. But Muslims?

Estimates on the number of Muslim Americans range from 1.3 million to 7 million. That’s not a lot of people in a nation of more than 300 million. The 7 million estimate comes from the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which one might argue has a reason to inflate its figure of 7 million, since it’s a Muslim advocacy group. I tend to think that the actual number lies somewhere between the Pew Research Center’s estimated 2.5 million and the U.S. News & World Report’s estimated 5 million.

American Jews are estimated to be around 6.5 million, yet, as I have noted, they are overrepresented in both houses of Congress and elsewhere in Washington, such as on the U.S. Supreme Court.

Um, there is one (1) Muslim American in Congress, Rep. Keith Ellison of Minnesota, who in 2006 became the very first Muslim elected to Congress. 

So we hardly have an Islamo-Manchurian Congress or D.C., as amazon.com’s description of McCarthy’s sad and pathetic little book seems to suggest.

If we really want to be paranoid about a special interest group having a grip on Congress and D.C., we’d be better off pointing a finger at the Jews rather than at the Muslims. But the Zionist/Israel-first lobby busily slanders the Muslim and Arab communities and feigns victimhood (I guess that you can call it a perpetual Holocaust) in order to divert your attention from the fact that the Zionist/Israel-first lobby actually is quite powerful within the United States of America, even driving its foreign fucking policy, for fuck’s sake.

If Muslims drove the United State’s foreign policy, the American right wing would be up in arms, but they’re strangely quite perfectly OK with the Zionist/Israel-first lobby driving the nation’s foreign policy.

And as far as a dangerous left wing goes, Barack Obama is horribly disappointing to us on the left, and a series of news articles, such as this one, have been appearing on this subject lately.

Obama a “socialist”?

Oh, I fucking wish! He’s not even a Democrat — he’s a corporatocrat, a Repugnican Lite.

Obama’s party controls the White House and both houses of Congress and has for more than a year now, and what’s he doing right now? He’s practicing how to appear to be angry! And today he actually said, more than a month into the British Petroleum debacle, that he’s now researching “whose ass to kick.”

Oo!

Obama said he’s going to “kick” “ass”!

I’m so moist — not!

While I wish the president the best of luck with his Mr. Spock- or Data-like attempt to display human emotion, he has a long way to go to get my vote again in November 2012. If I could do it over again, I’d have voted for Ralph Nader instead of for Obama in November 2008.

Fact is, the greatest danger to the United States of America remains the American right wing, which has brought us such wonderful things as 9/11 (Osama bin Laden himself has stated that U.S. military intervention in the Middle East and U.S. support of Israel were major reasons why he masterminded the 2001 attacks [Google it]), the Vietraq War (which was sold to the nation by the unelected Bush regime as retaliation for 9/11, even though Iraq had had nothing whatsofuckingever to do with 9/11, which the Bush regime knew fully well) and the British Petroleum debacle, the latter two of which Dick Cheney’s Halliburton had a strong hand in. Oh, and Hurricane Katrina. And the largest federal budget deficit in the history of the nation (and Halliburton, with its no-bid war-profiteering contracts, had a hand in that, too — fuck, and even a hand in Hurricane Katrina, since Halliburton is a part of Big Oil, which contributes to global warming, which contributes to stronger hurricanes).

Fuck. The America-hating fundamentalist Islamic extremists only wish that they could inflict just a fraction of the damage on the United States of America that the American right wing has over the course of the past several years. The illegal, immoral, unprovoked, unjust and wholly unnecessary Vietraq War, to give just one example, not only has overextended our military and driven up our federal budget deficit, but it has resulted in the wholly unnecessary deaths of more than 4,400 of our troops since the treasonous Bush regime launched it in March 2003.

My guess is that Osama bin Laden is somewhere in a cave thinking: “Mission accomplished!”

Bin Laden: It’s all about Israel

In the past I’ve blogged that the U.S. government’s slavish support of Israel was a reason for the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and I’ve had morons tell me that I was full of it.

Hmmm. When the mastermind of 9/11 himself tells you that that was a — even the — reason, what is there to argue about?

This is from London-based Reuters, which is much more likely to report objectively on Israel than is the American-owned-and-operated Associated Press:

Dubai – Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden warned the American people over their government’s close ties with Israel in an apparently new audio tape posted on an Islamist website [today].

“The time has come for you to liberate yourselves from fear and the ideological terrorism of neo-conservatives and the Israeli lobby,” Bin Laden’s latest tape said.

“The reason for our dispute with you is your support for your ally Israel, occupying our land in Palestine.”

The message, titled “A statement to the American people,” was around 11 minutes long and was posted a few days after the eighth anniversary of the Sept 11, 2001 attacks.

Reuters was not immediately able to verify its authenticity but the website often is used by supporters of al Qaeda.

In the tape, the al Qaeda leader said there had been no real change in American policy because U.S. President Barack Obama had retained people like U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates from the administration of former President George W. Bush.

“If you think about your situation well, you will know that the White House is occupied by pressure groups,” Bin Laden said.

“Rather than fighting to liberate Iraq — as Bush claimed — it (the White House) should have been liberated.”

Analysts who study al Qaeda say the organization is under pressure from followers to strike at Israel following criticism from many Arab commentators that it has never succeeded in launching a direct attack on the Jewish state.

Increasingly frequent and belligerent mentions of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute in al Qaeda statements is an attempt to deflect such criticism, they say….

As much as I believe that the U.S. government has treated Israel, the No. 1 recipient of U.S. foreign aid, like a spoiled brat, I don’t advocate that the U.S. cut Israel off overnight.

However, for all of the American taxpayers’ dollars that flow to Israel, Israel needs to take marching orders from the United States and not vice-versa. This means that Israel doesn’t get to indiscriminately slaughter Palestinians or Lebanese or anyone else the way that the Nazis indiscriminately slaughtered the Jews.

Slaughter is slaughter, no matter who is committing it. Unfortunately, the right-wing Israelis seem to regard Arabs as animals in the same way that the Nazis regarded Jews as animals.

The Zionist grip on U.S. foreign policy has weakened at least somewhat now that the unelected Bush regime no longer is in the White House, but Bin Laden is correct that the Zionists, who contribute millions and millions of dollars to U.S. politicians, still have way too much influence in the White House and the Pentagon.

Besides Bush regime holdover Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, there is Secretary of State Billary Clinton, a huge fan of the Israel-first lobby who rakes in the Zionists’ campaign contributions.

I’ll be called anti-Semitic, but this isn’t about Judaism or the Jewish people; this is about fairness and the abuse of power by a relatively tiny group of people.

Fewer than 3 percent of Americans are Jewish, but they hold political power that is crazily disproportionate to their actual numbers, such as the fact that we have 15 U.S. senators who are Jewish and two Jewish U.S. Supreme Court justices.

Assorted Middle-East-related shit

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced today that Israel is perfectly fine with a Palestinian state — as long as the Palestinians have no military (and make other major concessions to Israel).

That’s like telling your neighbors with whom you long have been feuding that you get to keep your fucking home arsenal but that your neighbors may not possess a single firearm.

The persnickety Palestinians for some reason are rejecting Israel’s generous offer of unilateral disarmament.

Those Palestinian ingrates!

I’m thinking that we can get some good of this, however, a new word: Whenever someone wants to bend you over and fuck you in the ass but acts like he’s giving you a screamin’ deal, you can call him a “Netanyahu.”

… 

The caption for this Associated Press photo reads: “An Ultra-Orthodox Jewish man walks past posters, hung by an extremist right-wing group, depicting U.S. President Barack Obama wearing a traditional Arab headdress, in Jerusalem, Sunday, June 14, 2009.”

Israel remains the No. 1 recipient of U.S. foreign aid — billions of our tax dollars — yet Zionists call President Obama (whose first name they might want to learn how to spell) an “Anti-Semitic Jew-hater” (that’s straight from the Office of Redundancy Office).

Gee, Israel’s wingnuts seem to be about as good with the English language as are the United States’ wingnuts…

Anyway, how about we yank the billions of our tax dollars that we give to Israel and use them here at home, where we could sorely use them? Then at least Obama could have earned the title of “Anti-Semitic Jew-hater.”

…

Speaking of Zionist wingnuts, Connecticut Sen. Joseph Benedict Arnold Lieberman, whose No. 1 constituent always has been Israel, had this to say about Iran’s presidential election fracas (from Politico):

“[T]hrough intimidation, violence, manipulation, and outright fraud, the Iranian regime has once again made a mockery of democracy, and confirmed its repressive and dictatorial character…. I would hope that President Obama and members of both parties in Congress will speak out, loudly and clearly, about what is happening in Iran right now, and unambiguously express their solidarity with the brave Iranians who went to the polls in the hope of change, and who are now looking to the outside world for strength and support.”

Gee, had Lieberman only been a fraction as outraged over stolen presidential elections when he was Democrat Al Gore’s running mate in 2000… But this is Israel we’re talking about, and Lieberman and his Zionist ilk always put Israel first.

Lieberman, who defected from the Democratic Party when Connecticut voters selected someone else over him in the Democratic primary, might want to start his own party, the American Zionist Party.

…

Not that I’m for stolen presidential elections anywhere, including Iran, but clearly Lieberman’s concern is for his Zionist paymasters, not for the people of Iran.

It seems to me that Iran, being a rather totalitarian theocracy, is one tough nut to crack. How to bring true democracy to Iran without a fuck of a lot of bloodshed I have no idea. One thing I do know is that you don’t bomb a nation into democracy, a la the Vietraq War; democracy has to develop from within, not from without.

In any case, I’m happy to see support for fair elections in Iran throughout the world, including here in the United States. These news photos were taken today in Los Angeles:

 

Associated Press photos

And this one today in Washington, D.C.:

Reuters photo

I’m lovin’ the green theme and still wondering if any connection to the international Green Party was intended. I think that we’re long overdue for a progressive international party, since national parties aren’t cutting it.

…

Here are some news photos that would make great wallpaper for your computer. Just right-click on the image of your choice and select “Set as Background.”

AFP photos

Reuters photos

Associated Press photo

More on the Nouveau Victimes*

Associated Press and AFP photos

Meet the new “victims”: Stupid-white-male supporters Sarah Palin-Quayle and Carrie Prejean, who this past week was fired as Miss California, are now “victims,” as are all stupid white men in the United States of Amnesia. Sexy brainiac blogger Glenn Greenwald recently penetratingly wrote of these Nouveau Victimes, “the only victims they ever see are themselves, the only unfairness they recognize is to their own group, the only perspective they are capable of understanding is the tribalistic ones drummed into their heads from birth.”

My broad definition of the word “politics” is “the use of power.”

When power is abused, as it so often is in politics (as in life in general), I get pretty fucking pissed off. (Yes, eight long years of the unrelenting abuse of power by the Bush regime, which began with the stolen presidential election of 2000, had me fairly perpetually pissed off for years on end. See, I’d actually bought all of the bullshit that I had been taught as a budding Gen-Xer, such as that we actually have democracy and fairness and the rule of law here in the United States of America.)

Perhaps nothing pisses me off like the claims of groups that historically have wielded a disproportionate amount of power that they now somehow are “victims.”

Jews and Zionists (and again, Zionists are Jews but not all Jews are Zionists, I recognize) are perhaps the best at this — screaming “victim” when, in fact, they are ridiculously politically powerful.

I have written about this at some length recently (here and here), so I won’t repeat myself, but I will quote sexy gay brainiac blogger Glenn Greenwald (who, from his surname, I gather, is Jewish), who recently took up the topic of faux victimization in a post he titled “Tribalistic Self-Absorption” (the links are Greenwald’s):

The most predominant mentality in right-wing discourse finds expression in this form: “I am part of/was born into Group X, and Group X — my group — is better than all others yet treated so very unfairly.” This claim persists — indeed, is often intensified —  even when Group X is clearly the strongest, most privileged and most favored group.

So intense is their need for self-victimization — so inebriating is their self-absorption and so lacking are they in any capacity for empathy — that, for all the noise and rhetoric, the arguments they make virtually always have this tribalistic self-absorption at its core.

Last week, Charles Krauthammer accused President Obama of treating every country in the world so well — except for one, the one for which Krauthammer bears great love and affection and with which he was taught from childhood to identify:

President Obama repeatedly insists that American foreign policy be conducted with modesty and humility. Above all, there will be no more “dictating” to other countries…. An admirable sentiment. It applies to everyone — Iran, Russia, Cuba, Syria, even Venezuela. Except Israel. Israel is ordered to freeze all settlement activity.

The U.S. transfers tens of billions of dollars to Israel — more than any other country in the world. We demand that no country in the Middle East have nuclear weapons — except Israel. We fuel Israel’s wars with weapons transfers, ensure it is the most militarily powerful country in its region, and loyally protect it from U.N. sanctions using our veto power.

It’s virtually impossible to imagine one country that is more favorably treated by another than the various forms of largesse Israel receives from the U.S. But no matter. In Krauthammer’s eyes, the opposite is true: the U.S. treats every country fairly except Israel. That’s the country that, to him, is singled out for unfavorable treatment by the U.S….

I don’t know how much these “victims” truly believe that they are victims and how much they knowingly are misrepresenting themselves as victims, with the aim of at least maintaining the disproportionate amount of political power that they’ve already had, if not gaining even more.

Perhaps more ridiculous than the Zionists’ claims of victimhood are the claims of the stupid white men that they are “victims.”

Stupid white men (presumably heterosexual, “Christian” and overwhelmingly Repugnican) have controlled this nation thoroughly up until very recently. As do the “victimized” Zionists and Jews, stupid white men still have far more power than is proportionate to their actual numbers.

And Barack Obama, although he is the first half-white and half-black president, hardly is going to usher in the anti-whitey revolution that so many of the NRA-card-carrying talk-radio listeners seem to have believed is coming.

Indeed, if Obama didn’t act even whiter than the typical white guy, he never would have made it to the White House. The White House. He is an acceptable black guy, you see; he is “articulate” and “clean,” as Vice President Joe Biden infamously called him before Biden became vice president.

The “victimization” of stupid white men most recently has come in the form of Sonia Sotomayor, candidate for U.S. Supreme Court justice.

During her judicial career Sotomayor has made comments like this one: “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would, more often than not, reach a better [judicial] conclusion [than would a white male judge, presumably].”

The likes of baby-boomer blowhard Rush Limbaugh, whom the largest number of people in a recent national Gallup poll identified as the apparent leader of the Repugnican Party, immediately jumped upon Sotomayor as a “racist” for such comments of hers as the one above.

Now, for more than two centuries in the United States of Amnesia, stupid white men never had to talk about their race or their possession of penises, because it was just a fucking given that if you were going to hold high political office in the nation, such as U.S. senator or U.S. Supreme Court justice, you had to be a white man. It was well understood and therefore there was no need to talk about it, that’s how entrenched white-male power was (and still is, although to a lessening extent, thank Goddess).

For Sotomayor, who presumably does not possess a penis and who is not white, life in the United States of America no doubt has been different than it has for the stupid white man. It does not make Sotomayor “racist” for talking about her minority experience as an American.

An I agree with Sotomayor 200 percent that the United States of America, which is teetering on the brink of collapse after the stupid white men have run it into the fucking ground, sure could use the wisdom and the perspective of other groups, such as women, non-whites and non-heterosexuals, to recover from the mess in which the stupid white men have mired it.

Stupid white men and their supporters, drunk and blind with power, aren’t fit to be behind the wheel, being drunk and blind. The sober vision of others is what the nation sorely needs now.

But the Zionists and the stupid white men aren’t the only “victims.”

Heterosexuals also are victims, too.

Carrie Prejean, who has a promising career in porn ahead of her, this past week was dumped as Miss California because, according to the Miss California USA organization, she was violating her contractual agreements by making unauthorized appearances (such as to deliver her anti-gay sentiments) and by refusing to make requested appearances.

But no, Prejean has blamed her overdue ousting on gays, whom her Taliban-style “Christianity” has taught her to hate.

Reminds me of how the Nazis blamed all of Germany’s problems on the Jews. (And the Nazis persecuted and murdered gays, too.)

That was one of the actual “arguments” that I saw as the wingnuts were arguing for the anti-gay Proposition 8 here in California: that allowing legalized same-sex marriage actually violates their rights.

The “argument” is that if I believe that an historically oppressed minority group should be kept down — if that is my “Christian” belief — then it is a violation of my religious freedom if the oppressed groups that I believe should continue to be oppressed no longer are oppressed.

Yes, before the November vote I saw pro-Prop 8 signs that actually asserted that to allow same-sex marriage violates the First-Amendment rights (including freedom of speech and freedom of religion) of those who oppose it. There is no more fundamental American right than the right to hate and to feel superior to another group, right?

No, it’s quite simple: If your religious beliefs preclude same-sex marriage, then do not marry someone of your own sex. But keep your fucking backasswards, Taliban-like religious beliefs to yourfuckingself. Keep your toxic spiritual sludge off of the rest of us, who have the right to be free from your toxic waste.

I suppose that those white-supremacist “Christians” who believe that mixed-race marriage is wrong, according to the Old Testament, are having their First-Amendment rights violated because the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1967 that no state can outlaw mixed-race marriage. So let’s outlaw mixed-race marriage again in order to placate the members of the American Taliban!

Yes, let’s turn the United States of America into a Taliban-like theocracy, shall we? That’s exactly what the wingnut “Christians” want.

Speaking of whom, there also is Repugnican presidential wannabe Sarah Palin-Quayle out there constantly claiming victimhood, because apparently the way to show strength is to claim perpetually that you are a victim.

Palin-Quayle’s latest “victimization” is at the hand of late-night television talk-show host David Letterman, who, Palin-Quayle asserts, should apologize to all women because Letterman made some joke about one of her daughters.

No, the one who should apologize to all of the women of the United States of America — and of the world — is Palin-Quayle, who has set the women’s movement back by at least decades by supporting the stupid white male system that oppresses women. 

Palin-Quayle’s backasswards “Christo”fascist ideology threatens the typical American woman far more than does a joke by a late-night TV talk-show host. Further, Palin-Quayle and her ilk are a threat to freedom and democracy — to real freedom and democracy, not “freedom” and “democracy” as they define it, such as by stolen presidential elections, illegally spying on American citizens, illegally detaining — and torturing and even killing — individuals, and launching bogus wars for war profiteers (such as Dick Cheney’s Halliburton) and for the Israel-first lobby.

You know, if these historical oppressors truly want to be the victims now, how about those of us who have been historically oppressed by them — we women, non-whites, non-heterosexuals, non-Christians, et. al. — not make them into fucking liars and start really victimizing them?

*With apologies to those who actually speak French. I think that I have that correct, but I am not sure…

The Rev. Wright is right (again)

From The Associated Press today:

Hampton, Va. – President Barack Obama‘s controversial former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, is blaming “them Jews” for keeping him from speaking to the president.

Wright, the former pastor of Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ, said he hasn’t spoken to Obama since he became president.

“Them Jews ain’t going to let him talk to me. I told my baby daughter that he’ll talk to me in five years when he’s a lame duck, or in eight years when he’s out of office,” Wright told the Daily Press of Newport News following a Tuesday night sermon at the 95th annual Hampton University Ministers’ Conference.

“They will not let him to talk to somebody who calls a spade what it is…. I said from the beginning: He’s a politician; I’m a pastor. He’s got to do what politicians do.”

Obama was a longtime member of the church but resigned from it and cut ties with Wright after videos surfaced during the presidential campaign showing Wright’s sometimes provocative sermons. Wright’s incendiary comment included shouting “God damn America” and accusing the government of creating AIDS.

In the interview Tuesday, Wright also criticized Obama for not sending a U.S. delegation to the World Conference on Racism held recently in Geneva, Switzerland, saying Obama chose not to for fear of offending Jews and Israel.

“Ethnic cleansing is going on in Gaza. Ethnic cleansing (by) the Zionist is a sin and a crime against humanity, and they don’t want Barack talking like that because that’s anti-Israel,” Wright said.

The White House declined to comment to the Associated Press [today] on Wright’s remarks. A phone message left by the AP at Wright’s home wasn’t immediately returned.

Politico follows up, reporting that Wright has clarified, “I’m not talking about all Jews, all people of the Jewish faith, I’m talking about Zionists. I’m talking about facts, historical facts. I’m not talking about emotionally charged words.”

My sentiments exactly. To criticize even the genocide of the Palestinians at the hands of the “victimized” Israelis is to be called an anti-Semite, and this bullshit has to stop.

So does the unchecked power that the Zionists have in Washington. As I noted earlier today:

A total of 14 U.S. senators, or 14 percent of the U.S. Senate, are Jewish; there will be 15 Jewish U.S. senators once Minnesota’s U.S. Senate race is finally decided, as both Democrat Al Franken and Repugnican Norm Coleman are Jewish. Jews comprise no more than 2 percent to 2.5 percent of the American population, yet they are wildly overrepresented in high political office. Two of the nine U.S. Supreme Court justices, almost a quarter of them, are Jewish. But nooo, American Jews are such powerless victims!

Not all powerful American Jews in Washington are Zionists, of course, but I wholeheartedly agree with Wright’s assessment that the Israel-first lobby has such a grip on Washington and on the White House that yes, indeed, President Obama skipped the World Conference on Racism in order not to piss off the Jews and Zionists who are so powerful in Washington.

(Wright’s assertion that “them Jews” — er, Zionists — are preventing his meeting with President Obama I am not nearly as sure of, but I don’t dismiss his assertion out of hand; I’d need to know more before I could decide one way or the other.)

No one who wants to be elected president of the United States would dare to piss off the Israel-first lobby, represented most prominently by the powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee, whose logo shows how much in bed the Zionists are with the power elite in Washington:

Yes, that’s the Star of David, which is on Israel’s flag, mashed up with the red, white and blue of the American flag, symbolizing that the United States and Israel are one and the same. “Fucking presumptuous” would be to put it mildly.

The problem that the likes of Wright and I — who don’t have a problem standing up to the Zionists — have is not a matter of one’s religious affiliation or ethnic background. It’s not about the crazy neo-Nazi belief that Jews are inferior to any other group of people, like the majority of the Israelis seem to believe that the Palestinians are inferior to them.

It’s about THE ABUSE OF POWER IN A SO-CALLED DEMOCRACY.

When fewer than 3 percent of Americans are Jewish but Jews and Zionists hold as much power as they do in the United States, it’s time to examine how it came to be this way, what it means for the future of the American democracy that such a small group of people have gained so much power, and what, if anything, should be done about it.

Sick Israeli T-shirt ‘jokes’ about killing pregnant Palestinians and their unborn

Associated Press photo

Israeli soldiers have worn this T-shirt depicting a pregnant, presumably Palestinian woman and her unborn in the cross-hairs of a rifle. (According to The Associated Press, the Hebrew on the T-shirt reads “Sniper platoon.”) Because the Israelis are so morally superior, you know.

I’ve noted before that the Zionists are so quick to remind all of us of the Holocaust at every opportunity yet think that it’s perfectly OK to regard Palestinians and other Arabs as animals — just as the Nazis regarded the Jews during the Holocaust.

But this takes the cake (from The Associated Press today):

Jerusalem – Israel’s military condemned soldiers for wearing T-shirts of a pregnant woman in a rifle’s cross-hairs with the slogan “1 Shot 2 Kills,” and another of a gun-toting child with the words, “The smaller they are, the harder it is.”

The T-shirts were worn by some Israeli Defense Force soldiers to mark the end of basic training and other military courses, the newspaper Haaretz said.

The appearance of the T-shirts followed allegations of misconduct by Israeli troops during the three-week Gaza war. Palestinian officials say about 1,400 Palestinians were killed, most of them civilians. Thirteen Israelis died, three of them civilians.

The army said it would not tolerate the T-shirts and would take disciplinary action against the soldiers involved, although it was not clear how many wore the shirts or how widely they were distributed.

The military sought to portray the T-shirts as “tasteless” humor and condemned the soldiers involved, saying in a statement that the shirts “are not in accordance with IDF values.”

They were not manufactured or sanctioned by the military.

The shirts’ existence was first reported Friday by Haaretz and later on broadcasts by Israeli radio and television.

Haaretz showed pictures of five shirts and said they were made at the unit level — indicating that they were made for small numbers of troops, perhaps several dozen at a time. It said they were worn by an unknown number of enlisted men in different units. The Tel Aviv factory that made many of the shirts, Adiv, refused to comment.

Few in the Palestinian territories appeared to be aware of the T-shirts. In Gaza, Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum said it “reflects the brutal mentality among the Zionist soldiers and the Zionist society.”

Hamas-controlled media consistently glorify attacks on Israelis, and cartoons in Palestinian newspapers frequently use anti-Semitic images of Jews as hook-nosed, black-hatted characters.

Hamas also mocked Israeli suffering, staging a play about its capture of an Israeli soldier in which it makes fun of the serviceman crying for his mother and father.

Israel’s military has come under increasing scrutiny after soldiers alleged that some troops opened fire hastily and killed Palestinian civilians during the Gaza war, including children, possibly because they believed they would not be held accountable under relaxed open-fire regulations. The military has ordered a criminal inquiry into soldiers’ accounts published in a military institute’s newsletter….

The Gaza offensive, launched to end years of rocket fire at Israeli towns, ended Jan. 18.

Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups fire rockets from heavily populated areas, and Israel says Hamas is to blame for the civilian deaths because it leaves the military no choice but to attack them there.

United Nations human rights experts said [today] that Israeli soldiers used an 11-year-old Palestinian as a human shield during the Gaza offensive. The military ordered the boy on Jan. 15 to walk in front of soldiers being fired on in a Gaza neighborhood and enter buildings before them, said Radhika Coomaraswamy, the UN secretary-general’s envoy for protecting children in armed conflict.

Israeli army spokesman Capt. Elie Isaacson denied the military used human shields, saying “morals and high ethical standards are paramount” in the army.

Uzi Dayan, a former Israeli deputy chief of staff, said he was “shocked but not surprised” by the T-shirts.

“I spent many years in the army and I know that if you don’t pay attention all the time, these things can happen. These are very young people in a combat situation, so you need to have a finger on the pulse,” he said.

You can’t make the “few bad apples” argument on this one. The Israeli soldiers don’t exist in a vacuum but are the product of their environment.

Americans should know what is being done by Israel, since Middle Easterners equate Israel with the United States, which keeps Israel afloat.

Ralph Nader’s 300:1 ratio holding up

Associated Press and Reuters photos

These Palestinians are those of at least 298 slaughtered by the Israelis thus far. We Americans are supposed to be sympathetic with the Israelis — who are perpetual “victims” — even though the Israelis kill far more Palestinians than vice-versa, and even though our government gives Israel billions of our tax dollars with which to slaughter Arabs.

The Associated Press reports that thus far at least 298 Palestinians have been killed in Israel’s latest aggression — and that thus far only one Israeli has been killed.

That’s right in line with Ralph Nader’s criticism of Zionist-ass-licking President-elect Barack Obama: “He doesn’t have any sympathy for a civilian death ratio of about 300-to-1, 300 Palestinians to one Israeli.”

One Israeli columnist has called Israel’s latest aggression “shock and awe.” Gee, sound familiar?

The AP puts the number of dead Palestinian children at at least 20 (including at least one baby) and the number of wounded Palestinians at more than 800.

For all of the talk of “rogue” nations and “terrorism,” it is the United States and Israel — long-time partners in war crimes and crimes against humanity — that consistently give the middle finger to the United Nations and to the world community and do whatever the fuck they want.

Will the rest of the world finally stand up to the United States and Israel before they start the next world war?

It’s never terrorism when Israel does it

AFP and Associated Press photos

Smoke rises from Israel’s latest slaughter of Palestinians. It’s rather interesting how the victims of the Holocaust have become the victimizers, isn’t it? And how it’s always “terrorism” when an Arab or a Muslim kills someone, but never when an Israeli or an American kills someone?

The Associated Press reports that “Israeli warplanes rained more than 100 tons of bombs on security sites in Hamas-ruled Gaza Saturday and early Sunday, killing at least 230 people in one of the Mideast conflict‘s bloodiest assaults in decades.” More than 400 people are reported to have been wounded.

Do I get to point out that killing and wounding that many people is a bad thing or does that make me a Holocaust-denying (or Holocaust-loving) anti-Semite?

Well, OK, since I’m already a Holocaust-loving anti-Semite for having a problem with Israel’s latest slaughter of Arabs, let me say that the United States’ supplying of Israel with the bombs and other means to slaughter Arabs is one of the reasons that the United States was struck on Sept. 11, 2001. (That’s not just my conjecture; Osama bin Laden said so himself.) Of course, Americans never connect the fucking dots and they maintain that shit like 9/11 just happens in a vacuum.

The Bush regime, which just couldn’t kill enough innocent Arab and Muslim civilians in Iraq, already is defending Israel’s latest bloodbath on the Palestinians. 

The United States’ continued support of Israel in its continued occupation of Palestine is a huge liability for the United States and always will be.

Maybe the Israelis just figured that they’d slaughter more Palestinians while they still had the blessing of the mass-murderous Bush regime.

But I certainly don’t count on Barack Obama to do the right thing once he takes office and to stop taking foreign-policy marching orders from Israel and the Zionists in the United States who put Israel’s interests first and who give big buck$ to American politicians to make sure that Israel’s interests come first.

It’s time to play ‘Who’s a Terrorist?’

I read an Associated Press news article that begins like this — 

DALLAS – A Muslim charity and five of its former leaders were convicted [today] of funneling millions of dollars to the Palestinian militant group Hamas, finally handing the government a signature victory in its fight against terrorism funding.

U.S. District Judge Jorge A. Solis announced the guilty verdicts on all 108 counts on the eighth day of deliberations in the retrial of the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, once the nation’s largest Muslim charity. It was the biggest terrorism financing case since the attacks of Sept. 11.

“Money is the lifeblood of terrorists, plain and simple,” U.S. Attorney Richard Roper said. “The jury’s decision attacks terrorism at its core.”

— and the thought struck me: Who gets to decide what is and what is not “terrorism” and who is and who is not a “terrorist”?

Whoever is the more militarily mighty gets to decide that, apparently; the AP notes that “The U.S. designated Hamas a terrorist organization in 1995 and again in 1997, making contributions to the group illegal.”

According to BBC News, from the end of September 2000 to mid-January 2005, more than three times as many Palestinians were killed by Israelis than vice-versa. And this body count was done by an Israeli human rights group.

Jesus. Fucking. Christ.

Yet Americans who give money to Israel aren’t charged with supporting terrorism — although, it seems to me, they are doing just that, if you use my dictionary’s rather broad definition of terrorism, which is “the systematic use of terror, especially as a means of coercion.” My own personal definition of “terrorism” has always been something along the lines of “the use of fear and intimidation for political gain.”

You know, under the/my broad definition of terrorism, certainly those who give any money to Israel that is used in Israel’s terrorist campaign against the Palestinians can be said to be supporting terrorists. But we Americans don’t prosecute those terrorist sponsors. No, we Americans love to kiss Zionist ass, and it’s Israel that dictates our policy in the Middle East. And although the Israelis slaughter far more Muslims than vice-versa, we never call the Israelis “terrorists.” They’re our allies, for Christ’s sake!

Shit, since the intention of Proposition 8 was to intimidate gay men and lesbians for political gain, and since Proposition 8 was funded mostly by the Mormon cult and the Catholic church, I might just consider them to be terrorist organizations, which means, of course, that anyone who has given money to the Mormon cult or the Catholic church has given money to a terrorist organization, and anyone who gave to the pro-Prop 8 campaign is a sponsor of terrorism, of course.

After all: “Money is the lifeblood of terrorists, plain and simple.”

Gee, getting to define who is and who isn’t a “terrorist” or a “sponsor of terrorism” sure is fun!